The Devil Sends Callers

I knew two people living in a city who decided to meet together for prayer on as many mornings as possible before beginning their daily visitation program, and this is what they told me: “We rarely have gotten far in prayer but someone will come knocking at the door of the house, asking us to go here or there, or can we do this or that, and sometimes they enter upon a long rigmarole from which it is often difficult to break away. Really it is very noticeable; and though we have prayed that we might have quiet, it still goes on.”

“Well, do you not know,” I asked, “that the devil has agencies by which he can influence people to call at your house at the wrong time and even flood you with callers whom God does not intend to come at all?

“It may be,” I said, “that the exposure of the cause will end it, for many things are allowed of God to educate us. But if it does not cease, I would declare that in the name of the Lord you resist it and the powers of evil at the back of it. Do that until you are assured of God that you have touched the real cause and dealt with it.”

Sometime after that, these workers told me that they had put into operation the suggestion to pray against the devil’s engineering interruptions through people and circumstances, and these interruptions had fallen off considerably.

It must not be supposed, however, that I attribute every difficulty in prayer to the devil. There is man’s carnal nature to contend with. We can be lazy and sluggish, or manifest a spirit of indifference or independence, thinking that we can do this or that, whether we pray or not. We can come under the dictum of the world and believe that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is not true. God helps those who trust Him, and in the long run nothing else will succeed, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”* (Mark 8:36-37)

The areas covered by prayer are much wider than what we are dealing with in this discussion. I merely point out here the relationship of prayer to the unseen world (around this planet), invaded as we know it to be by countless spirits of evil, whose one aim is to be the adversaries of God and man, and as such to hate the praying soul and oppose him on every spiritual issue.