It was Easter 1695, and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) gathered the money that was left in the church collection boxes. He counted seven guldens, the equivalent of $2.80. He said to himself, “I will build a school for the poor with it.” He dedicated a room in his home as a classroom for poor children and eventually built a large orphanage in Halle, Germany. By the time of his death, two thousand children had been taught and cared for by his orphanage. What was the secret of his success? An inscription on a monument dedicated to his honor at the orphanage provides a clue: “He trusted in God.”
August Francke lived during a time of low spiritual interest among German Christians. Religious formalism and dead orthodoxy had taken its toll on churches in the early 1700s. As a young, aspiring twenty-five-year-old Lutheran pastor, August was preparing a sermon on the verse, “These things are written that you may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20.31.) It dawned on him that while he had not neglected the forms of religion, the gospel message had not penetrated his heart. “Only my head, but not my heart, was affected,” he wrote. He opened his heart to Christ, and faith came alive. As a great change came over him and prayer became vital to his spiritual well-being.
August’s writings have much to commend on the practice of prayer. He wrote that eloquent words are superfluous to prayer, “It requires no special art and skill to pray acceptably to God; for we are to speak to him as children to a loving father.” He urged readers to spread their sorrows and complaints before the Lord. Do not hold back. Tell God the true condition of your souls. Pour out your hearts to the Lord (Ps. 62.8). His writings are steeped in prayer. I draw upon sentence prayers from his meditations to lead us into prayer: