Helps: Personal Prayer
TTrE all need helps in our Christian life. Of course, all the help we need we can find in God. His is the almighty arm on which wo should ever lean in our weakness; his is the infinite life from whose fullness we should ever draw for the refilling of our own exhausted life-pitchers; his is the light that should ever shine upon our darkness for cheer, for comfort, for guidance, for joy. God is all we need.
But we cannot see God with these mortal eyes; we cannot feel his bosom when we need to lean upon it; we cannot hear his voice when we listen for the word he may have to speak; we cannot carry our empty pitchers up to heaven, where God dwells, to have them refilled. We are like vines torn off the trellis and trailing on the ground amid the dust and the weeds, and we cannot lift ourselves up to twine about the unseen supports which God’s grace provides. We need something to help our dull senses — something we can see or hear or touch; something to interpret to our souls and bring near to them the spiritual things of divine love; something to which the tendrils of our lives can cling, and which will lift them up and fasten them on the invisible realities of the spiritual world. And in loving mercy, and in condescension to our weakness and spiritual dullness, God has provided for us such helps as we need. He comes to us and brings us his blessings in ways that are adapted to our earthly state and capacity. He puts the rich supplies of his heavenly grace in cups from which we can drink, and sets them low down where we can reach them.
One of the helps which God has provided is prayer. Without prayer no Christian life can exist. There are other spiritual helps from the want of which we may suffer, but without which we may still live near to God; but to give up prayer is to die.
Why should we pray? Because God is our Father and we are his children. It would l)e a most undutiful, unfilial, ungrateful child thai should live in a good and beautiful home, enjoying its comforts, blessed by its love, and that should never have anything to say to the father whose heart and hand make the home, and who provides its comforts and pleasures.
We should pray, also, because we need things which we can get only by prayer. Some things we can pick up with our hands in this good world of our Father’s, or buy with our money, or receive through our friends; but there are things which we can get only directly from God himself, and only by asking him for them. He alone can forgive our sins; and unless we are forgiven, life is not worth living. He alone can give us new hearts; and unless we have new hearts, we can never enter heaven. He alone can give us grace to live a good and holy life and keep us from sinking back into sin. He alone can show us how to live out the divine purpose of our existence. He alone can help us to fight life’s battles and come out victorious at the end. He alone can lead us through Death’s valley to glory. Indeed, we can do nothing without God. The leaf quivering on the bough is not more dependent upon the tree for its greenness and life than are we dependent upon God for our very existence and for all blessings. We must pray or perish.
But may we pray? Is there any one to hear? We look up, and we see no face in the heavens, no eye gazing down — nothing but sky and clouds or stars. We speak and then listen, but no answer comes to us: all is silence about us. Is there really any one to hear? Or if there is, iiyill he hear? There are a great many millions of people on the earth, and there are millions of other worlds besides this. Astronomers tell us that our globe, if it were suddenly destroyed, would not be more missed in God’s vast universe than one leaf which you might pluck off a wayside bush would be missed from all the leaves on all the trees and forests of the earth. It may be that, like our planet, all these other countless worlds have their millions of inhabitants. Will God hear the cry of one persan among so many? Does he take notice of individuals? Does he have particular thought and care for each one? The Bible plainly answers these questions. It tells us that God is our Father; that he loves us, not merely as a race, but as individuals — loves us each one with a peculiar personal afifwtion, as a human father loves each one of his children though he have many; that he thinks of us, giving to the smallest, humblest of us particular thought and care, watching over us, listening for our cry, ready always at any moment to give the help we need and seek.
A little child fancied that when she began to pray, God asked all the angels to stop singing and playing on their harps while he listened to her prayer until she said “Amen!’’ She was not far wrong in her fancy. God does not need to hush the angels’ songs to hear a child’s prayer, but he hears it, nevertheless, amid all the noises of this great universe, just as truly and clearly as if every other voice were hushed. One of the Psalms represents God as inclining his ear to the suppliant on the earth to hear his cry, as a man bends down so as to bring his ear close to one who speaks, that he may catch every word. In another psalm are these remarkable words: “He hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary: from heaven did the Lord behold the earth; to hear the groaning of the prisoner.” The Bible is full of just such representations of God’s interest in his children on the earth, and of his losing attention when they cry to him. We may pray, therefore: there is One to hear us.
How shall we pray so as to be heard and to receive help? For one thing, there must be a real desire in our hearts. Forms of words do not make prayer: we must want something, and must realize our dependence upon God for it. Then we must come to him as his children. It was Christ himself who taught us to pray to “our Father who art in heaven.” If we have the true child-spirit which the using of this invocation implies, we shall make our requests with confidence, believing that our Father loves us and will deny us nothing that is for our good.
Of course, we must remember that he knows better than we do what is best for us, and we must be willing, even when our desires are strongest and most impetuous, to say,” Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.’^ We must let our Father decide whether the thing we ask is the thing we need. A father would not give his child a cup of poison though the child pleaded most earnestly for it, thinking it a cup of sweetness. The thing we want might be poison to our life; if so, God will not give it to us, but, instead, will give us grace to do without it, which is an answer to our desire, and a far better answer than the thing we sought.
Prayer should also be earnest and importunate. Our Lord gave many lessons on praying, but there was no other point which he pressed so strongly as the necessity for importunity. Two of his parables were spoken to impress this duty. The poor widow got her plea, not because the unjust judge cared for the injustice she was suffering or wanted to do the right thing, but simply because she would not cease to plead with him. If an unjust man could be so moved by importunity, how much more will the loving heart of the heavenly Father yield to repeated supplication! The man at whose door at midnight the friend knocked gave the loaves, not because it was his friend who asked them, but because the friend would not go away without them. God is never moved by such low motives, but the parable is meant to show the power of persevering importunity in prayer. God wants to see his children in earnest. Languid, indolent praying does not please him: he loves to hear from suppliants the burning words which tell of intense desire. One fervent, impassioned” I will not let thee go except thou bless me’’ has more power with God than whole years of cold, heartless, formal prayer.
Of course, importunity must not become rebelliousness: in the greatest intensity of our praying we must ever be ready to acquiesce in God’s will. Importunity has its limits. It may at length become evident that God does not want to give us what we desire; then we should cease to plead, with submissive faith accepting our Father’s refusal. Thus our Lord himself in the garden was importunate, but from first to last he deferred all tojiis Father’s will; and after having prayed three times he ceased to plead, taking the cup held out to him. Paul was importunate in pleading for the removal of the thorn which so troubled him, but, like his Master, he also was acquiescent; and after pleading three times he too ceased to urge his plea.
There is little danger that we ever too earnestly or importunately press our desires for spiritual good, either for ourselves or for others. AYe know it is always God’s will to give us more grace, to make us holier and purer, to bring out in us more clearly the features of the divine image, to give us more of his Holy Spirit: these are always blessings; but when the desire refers to Bome physical trouble, or to the life of a friend, or to money, or to any of the interests of this earth, we need to watch lest the glory of God be forgotten in the intensity of our own shortsighted and worldly-biased wishes. In all prayer for temporal things it is far safer and wiser to ask humbly and with great diffidence, laying our desires at God’s feet without anxious pressure, without too much urgency, and trustfully submitting all to his unerring wisdom. The true aim in living is not to grow rich in money, not to be clothed in worldly honor, not to have mere worldly happiness and freedom from suffering and loss, but rather to grow rich in spiritual graces, to be made more and more like Christ and to live out God’s purpose and plan for our life. By far the noblest thing for us always is God’s will. That means perfect beauty and perfect good. Anything else is marring and blemish.
When shall we pray? The young Christian is in danger of forming his religious habits too much by rules. Where the spirit of prayer is in the heart, there is little need to say just how or when prayer should be offered. Still, there must be habits. Our human nature needs them to hold it faithful. Merely to trust to the feeling or desire, and to have no fixed time for devotion, praying only when the heart prompts, is not safe. The end would be a prayer less life. The lamps in the temple burned continually, but they were trimmed and refilled each morning and evening. The flame of devotion in a Christian heart should never go out, but this lamp too should be replenished at least each morning and evening. Certainly, there should be a season of secret prayer at the opening, and again at the close, of every day.” In the morning it seems a hem and border to each day’s life, and in the evening it brings down the dew on the spirit, to wash oif the stain and dust, and to feed and refresh. ‘^ In the morning the day lies before us with its unforeseen and untried experiences. It may bring painful duty, or sore struggle, or hard task, or keen suffering, or sharp temptation, or perhaps death. How can we go out into the opening day which may have such experiences for us without seeking the guidance and help of God? In the evening we bring the day’s history for review. There are sins to be forgiven; there is work to be blessed; there are thanks to be spoken for mercies; there is weariness to be refreshed; there is hunger to be fed. Then, as we go into the darkness and defencelessness of the night, there is protection to be invoked, and new life for a new day.
We need to watch always that our prayers are real, fresh from our hearts, and that they never degenerate into mere formalities, words without desires, petitions without wishes and without faith. True prayer is talking to God as one talks to a friend; mere words are empty mockeries. We pray best in secret when we tell out our souls’ deepest wants in the simylest phrases. As we grow in Christian life prayer becomes more and more real to us. Dr. Phelps says,” Three stages of growth are commonly discernible respecting prayer in the Christian consciousness. They are, prayer as a resource in emergencies, prayer as a habit at appointed times, and prayer as a state in which a believer lives at all times.’’ In this last and highest development stated times of prayer are not abandoned, but the heart does not limit itself to these in communing with God. The spirit of devotion overflows the fixed hours of prayer and continuously holds fellowship with God
Even the busiest hours of work are brightened by many a moment of heavenly communion. This is what is meant by men walking with God. They talk to him while at their work in ejaculations of prayer. Thomas a Kempis says, “God alone is a thousand companions; he alone is a world of friends. That man never knew what it was to be familiar with God who complains of the want of friends while God is with him.” It is this state of constant and unbroken communion with God toward which we should all strive. Let the life of the closet flow out into all the busy hours of the busiest days. It will be a defence for us amid temptations. It will give us power in Christian service. It will hallow all our influence. It will make holy and pure every nook and cranny of our lives. It will give us great peace in the midst of dangers. It will hold us apart from the world and near to God wherever we go. Like the beloved disciple, our habitual place will then be on the bosom of Jesus, and our earthly spirits will then become filled with the brightness and the sweetness of his love.
Thus prayer is indeed the Christian’s very vital breath. To cease to pray is to cease to live. And the gate of prayer is never shut. We should keep the path to it well trodden. We can there find help in all weakness, light in all darkness, comfort in all sorrow, companionship in all loneliness, friendship in all heart-hunger. If we know how to get help in prayer, we need never fail at any point in life; for then all God’s might of love is ever back of our weakness, as the great ocean is back of the little bay.
yii.