Elder Matthew Cowley, I had never heard the name of this Apostle before I started studying the Conference Report Archives. But I have fallen in love with him. Few apostles have shared more powerful witnesses of the Lord, first-hand stories of miracles, and the principles of the gospel in action as Elder Matthew Cowley shared. With that introduction, I want to share with you his final conference talk, he died a mere two months after giving this eloquent and powerful sermon on the efficacy of prayer:
The Efficacy of Prayer by Elder Matthew Cowley
I trust, my brothers and sisters and friends, that I may be able to round out my thoughts in a fluency of expression that will carry conviction to all of you who are listening. To enable me to do that, I must plead for an interest in your faith and prayers. I believe it was William Jennings Bryan who once said that true eloquence is from the heart to the heart, and not from the mouth to the ear. By that standard of eloquence, if there is any eloquence in what I may say, I assure you that it will be the eloquence of the heart and not the eloquence of the properly chosen phrase or the well modulated voice.
I believe implicitly in the efficacy of prayer. Even as I stand before you I believe in the power of God to instill within my heart those thoughts which may be for your benefit, or for at least the benefit of some of you who may be praying to hear something which you need.
When President Richards was speaking so eloquently, especially about the sanctity of the home and the solidarity of the family, my mind raced back to my early childhood to a home which to me was sacred always, and to a family, the solidarity of which was preserved mostly by the family prayers. I thank God that in my infancy I knelt in a circle, in a humble home, night and morning with my parents, my brothers and sisters, and each in his turn invoked the blessings of God upon the family. I am grateful that I learned to pray in my infancy because I had only passed from infancy when I was called as a missionary to the uttermost bounds of the earth; I had just turned seventeen. I was called to faraway New Zealand, and in that mission I was assigned, without a companion, to one of the most humble places I have ever seen in all my life, one of the most poverty-stricken places, and in that little village, I had to pray. I was there but a few days when a woman came rushing to my room, and I have a picture of that room—no floor, just the ground with a woven mat and a blanket or two. She came rushing to that room and asked me to arise from my bed and hurry to her little hut, and when I arrived there, I found her companion lying on the ground, being consumed by the fire of typhoid fever. All I could do was pray; and I knelt beside that suffering native and I prayed to God, and opened up my heart to him; and I believe the channel was open; and then I placed my hands upon that good brother; and with the authority of the priesthood which I as a young boy held, I blessed him to be restored to health. The next morning the wife came again to my room and said, “If you have anywhere you desire to go, you are now free to go; my husband is up.”
I remember that on another occasion I rode horseback all day long and far into the night to arrive at a native village on the seacoast of New Zealand and when I arrived at a bay dividing the place where I had to stop and that little village, I made a fire so that the people across in the village would send a rowboat to get me, and when that boat arrived, I was taken across the bay, and I walked through that village, and in every home there were cases of typhoid fever. But I walked fearlessly, with my head erect, impelled by the priesthood of God which I held, and in each of those homes I left the blessings of heaven, and I laid my hands upon the sick. And then I had to go across the bay again and get on my horse and ride all night long to arrive at another native village where there was sickness.
Brothers and sisters, we are at our greatest, not only in the sight of God, but also in our own sight when we are upon our knees. We have heard tributes paid here to the leaders of this Church, these great men who stand before you every six months and manifest to you their great leadership, but never have they been raised to greater heights of leadership than when I have knelt with them in the temple of God and listened to each one open up his heart and appeal to God for his sustaining influence and power to enable Him to carry on as your servant in His divine ministry. How high, brothers and sisters, these men are raised when they are on their knees in a circle, claiming sanctuary from the outside world in God’s holy temple.
President Richards mentioned about servicemen being missionaries. It brought to mind that statement which we have heard, that an army marches upon its stomach. I feel that the day is not far off when our armies will have to arise from their stomachs and march upon their knees. No iron curtain can ever be drawn between heaven and earth when the armies of men will march upon their knees. The great marches of this nation, the great marches of progress in the history of this country have been marches behind the leadership of men who went to their knees. Never was George Washington as great, in all of his majestic power as a soldier, as when he was upon his knees at Valley Forge. Never was the great emancipator so great as when he was driven to his knees before Gettysburg. And the greatness of this nation, my brothers and sisters, has been because men who have been elected to high office in this country have never been too proud to go to their knees and invoke the power of heaven to sustain them in their great jobs and callings of leadership.
A prayer comes to my mind, and no more beautiful prayers were ever uttered than those uttered by our mothers. I recall the prayer of Hannah 1 Sam. 1:9-18 You remember Hannah who wanted a child and she went to the sanctuary to pray, but her prayer was not audible. Her lips moved, but she said nothing that could be heard, and Eli thought that she was intoxicated, and he reprimanded her, but then she convinced him that that which she was doing was not because of intoxication, but it was a prayer from her heart to God that she might bear a child. And how earnest she was in that prayer, so earnest, so sincere, that she said, “If God will give me this child, I will lend him to the Lord for this life” (see 1 Sam. 1:11 How well the mothers know that life is eternal. How well she knew that in lending this child to the Lord for this life, that beyond and down through the ages of eternity, he would be her child, and she would be his mother. The Bible is full of great prayers and the stories of great prayers.
The prophets have all been close to God when they have been upon their knees; and that which they have said in all of their greatness and power as they stood upon their feet was because they first had gone to their knees, and then when they arose, God spoke through them. From Gethsemane to Calvary, Christ was a living prayer. He groaned within himself; he pleaded with his God; he had a wish that the cup might pass from him, but then he uttered those words which should attend every prayer offered up to heaven, “. . . not my will, but thine, be done” Luke 22:42 And then on Calvary, as he was hanging upon the cross, he uttered that prayer of prayers, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” Luke 23:34
We have heard the prayer of the Prophet referred to this morning. Here was a young lad who believed in a promise that if any man lacked wisdom and would ask of God, it would be given to him JS—H 1:11-13 and in response to that injunction he took himself out into that grove, away from the superficial structures of men, and he didn’t stand looking into heaven; he bowed upon the bended knees of his body, and he offered up his prayer to God his Father to bring clearness of vision to his mind to divest from his mind the confusion which existed there pertaining to religion. How can people doubt that God heard that prayer? Anyone who would question that God heard the prayer of that boy must believe that the Father in heaven is cruel and shuts himself away from his children when they seek him. But he did hear that prayer, and as Elder Morris has mentioned, the light burst from heaven; down through that channel of light came the Father and the Son. Young people, if you prayed for your father to come in your hour of need, would he hide from you? Of course not. Neither will our Father who is in heaven hide from us who seek him out.
God grant that we may always have the spirit of prayer in our hearts.
I love to sit among these great men, men who have a profound knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I will never have the knowledge of the principles of the gospel as profound as they have because I can’t get myself past the first principles. But I know how to pray and I tell you no man knows himself until he has broken his heart before God on his knees and pleaded for his forgiveness. How I enjoy my friends who belong to Alcoholics Anonymous, men who have descended so low in degeneracy that as one of them has said, they have to look up to see the bottom of the gutter. But then they discover that there is a power beyond that can bring them help. In their meetings they always offer this prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” But each one testifies that he has opened his heart to God, and that deep down in the recesses of that heart, which has almost been blackened by lives thrown away with reckless abandon, he has found a spark of divinity, and that divine within has reached up for the divine beyond, and then there has come a regeneration of his life, and he is led back to sobriety. But he continues to pray. That he must never cease doing. And I was talking to one of them recently who was a neighbor of mine during my childhood days right over here across the block, and he said to me, “You know, if I hadn’t had the fortification of the prayers of my mother when I was a boy in that home, I am sure that even now my own prayers would not be heard. But I was fortified by that mother’s prayers, and down through the years as I went astray, I could never divest from my mind the image of my mother upon her knees, with her children, and asking God to bless us. Now I have turned my life back to God,” and he said, “I hope to live to see the day when I can be worthy to go where my mother is.”
Some people think it is a sign of weakness to get upon one’s knees and pray to our heavenly Father. It’s the greatest sign of strength that exists. No men are greater than when they are upon their knees in communion with God and having a sacred interview with him. God does not always answer our prayers the way we want them answered, but if the channel is open, I testify to you that he answers them the way they should be answered, and those answers are for our best good and have an eternal and everlasting value.
My brethren in whose council I sit, I know you are men of God. I think of the Master when he said to his disciples, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you and set you apart.” I thank you for your humility because in that humility you have been magnified. You have been called from the profession of the law; you have been called from the great field of education; you have been called from industry. You did not choose him, but he has chosen you John 15:16 and is sending you forth, and as you go forth to the stakes of Zion and the wards of the Church, you carry with you the power of the apostleship, the power of the priesthood of God our Father.
In humility I thank God for this association I have with you. God bless you, and bless us all, as we minister to the people, under the inspiration of God our Father, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Matthew Cowley, Conference Report, October 1953, pp. 106-109
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