Whenever I am about to speak I ask the audience to bow their heads in silent prayer. In that silence I always repeat my verse. "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you." The stilling of the mind by the repetition of that verse makes it receptive. I am living in the passive voice. Preaching then is not eager straining, it is receptivity ending in release. The speaker is no longer a reservoir with just so much to give; he is a channel attached to unlimited resources.
The stilling of the mind reminds you not of your pitiful little store, but of the fact that you are now harnessing yourself to God's illimitable fullness.
Prayer is like the fastening of the cup to the wounded side of a pine tree to allow the resin to pour into it. You are now nestling up into the side of God -- the wounded side, if you will -- and you allow his grace to fill your cup. You are taking in the very life of God.
"Be still and know," and you will be full. Be unstill and you will not know; you will remain empty.
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E. Stanley Jones (1884 - 1973)
Was a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.His work became interdenominational and world-wide. He helped to re-establish the Indian “Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and women together for days at a time to study in depth their own spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered individuals. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on the cross. He made Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all people. This opening up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework marked a new approach in missions called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”