My Silent Prayers

Ou will perhaps remember that we had a meditation the other Sabbath even¬ ing on what David calls his bed-prayers. And now I propose another meditation with you this evening on what he calls his silent prayers. For, again and again, the Psalmist employs that remarkable expression about certain of his prayers in certain circumstances of his life. Though, somewhat un¬ accountably, our translators have always relegated that striking expression of the Psalmist’s to the margins of his Psalms. And therefore I propose to rescue those so suggestive words from that illdeserved and unfortunate obscurity, and to take them for my text this evening. ‘ Be silent to the Lord,’ he says first to himself and then to us; ‘ Be silent, sometimes, to the Lord.’

One thing that had made David to be very far from silent to the Lord in the past, was the great prosperity and the unbroken success of bad men and bad causes, and, on the other hand, the constant defeat and the constant adversity that attended good men and good causes. David confesses again and again that he had fretted him¬ self far too much — it is his own ‘word — over that dark dispensation in the past. Again and again, in many Psalms, he admits that, and he regrets that. And even yet he is far from being so silent in that matter as he ought to be. But he is at last learning silence in that matter. And that gives the most living interest and the most impressive teaching to every successive verse of this so self-accusing Psalm. The thirty-seventh Psalm would have been a tremendous indictment of the unrighteous government of God, were it not that all through this so powerful piece the Psalmist is all the time directing his passionate argument in upon his own heart, in order to teach himself the most absolute submission and the most complete silence among the many mysteries and perplexities of divine providence. And our own lesson out of all that is this: As David’s painfully discontented Psalms were not rejected of God, and were not shut out of Holy Scripture, no more will our most embittered and most rebellious prayers be set down against us if we are coming at last, through them, to learn to be silent about the darkest providences of God in our own lives; to learn silence, and to practise it, as David at last came to do.

But the silence of submission and resignation is to be learned and is to be observed among many more matters than the perplexities and the crosses of our daily providences. A godly man’s past sins will sometimes so come back upon him as to shut his mouth even from prayer for the good things that would have been his but for his former sins. Moses is the great instance of that. Moses would have had the great honour and the great happiness of seeing the children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan but for his great sins against God and the people in the day of his provocation and his temptation in the wilderness. But, great friend of God and great servant of God as Moses was, he was most peremptorily told to hold his peace from prayer in the matter of his greatly desired entrance into the promised land. ‘ Speak no more to Me about that matter,’ said God to His servant, in some anger at him for his so importunate and so persistent prayer. And He who was Moses’ God, and who is our God, He will sometimes say much the same thing to some of ourselves, on some such occasions. ‘ No! ’ He says, ‘ it is not to be! Speak no more to Me about that matter! You are not to get it! There is that in your past life which will not indeed cast you out of your heavenly inheritance, but you must learn to be silent about that earthly thing that would certainly have been yours but for your great trespass.’ Still, even so, silenced as you are in that way about that matter, your mouth is not shut in all respects even about it. You can open your mouth about that matter with Jeremiah, if not with Moses. For this was the way that Jeremiah took all his sore chastisements for his past transgressions. ‘ Wherefore doth a living man complain,’ he nobly reasons with himself, ‘ a sinner for the punishment of his sins? Let us search, and try our ways, and turn to the Lord. The crown has fallen from our head; woe unto us that we have so sinned! For this our heart is faint, and for these things our eyes are dim. Turn Thou us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days with Thee as of old.’ Go you to God with that prayer and it will never be said to you: ‘ Speak no more to Me about that matter.’ No, never; if you go with Jeremiah and make his confession and his supplication.

Then there is the kind of silence that fell even upon Paul himself sometimes in his life of prayer. A silence that he describes to us in these neverto-be-forgotten words: ‘ We know not,’ he says, ‘ what we should pray for as we ought.’ Often when the apostle was on his knees a great silence would take possession of his mind and his heart, till he would remain dumb before God for hours at a time. Before he began to pray he thought he had so much to ask both for himself and for others; and he thought he had such arguments that he would move both the mind and the heart and the hand of God with the urgency of his appeals. But when he knelt down a thousand things rushed in on his mind, a thousand things that quite paralysed his utterance. His ignorance of what was really, in the long-run, best both for himself and for his friends: his recognition of the height, and the depth, and the labyrinthine intricacy of divine things: the felt impetuosity and the over¬ heated state of his own heart, and so on: all these things so rose before the apostle’s mind that his hour of prayer often ended with a succession of groanings that could not be uttered; dumb groanings rather than articulate petitions and requests.

And we are often exactly like that ourselves, are we not.? We find ourselves struck dumb on our knees, sometimes, when a great perplexity, and a great fear, and a great reverence take hold of our hearts. And when, as Paul has it, we know not what, exactly, we should pray for in this matter, as we ought. Groans are neither audible prayers, nor are they perfect silence. But, at the same time, they partake of both. And it is a very blessed thing to think that when we can utter nothing but groans about ourselves, that God both interprets our groans to Himself and accepts them and accepts ourselves along with them. According to this so consoling and so reassuring scripture: ‘ Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.’ That is to say, our groanings in prayer are really not our own. They are rather the groanings of the very Spirit of God Himself, making such divine intercession, both within us, and for us. How wonderful, my brethren! How amazing! And, above all, how gracious! That we should have one Divine Intercessor in our hearts, and another Divine-human Intercessor for us in heaven! How blessed are we!

Then, again, there is the silence of a full and a sure expectation. This will have happened more than once to some of you who are praying people. After you have importuned and implored God for something for years and years: first in pleading and pressing on Him all His promises that you could lay hold of: and then after a time of groan¬ ing that you could not utter you will sometimes have come to this. Some day, some night, some midnight, when you are on your knees before God, you will all at once feel your tempest-tossed heart to be strangely quieted, and strangely calmed, and strangely strengthened. You have not got your answer indeed. And your need of that answer is as great and as pressing as ever it was. But all the importunity, and all the impetuosity, and all the impatience are, somehow, clean gone out of your heart: so has the peace of God been shed abroad in your heart. Like David you are now silent to God in that whole matter. In describing himself in his 25th Psalm, David exactly describes you as you now are. He knows that his prayer is now with God. He knows that his case is being fully considered by God. And that has relieved his heart of all undue solicitude and of all un¬ becoming urgency. So much so, that from a life of the most importunate and painful prayer he gives himself wholly up henceforth to a life of silent expectation. It is David’s own remarkable word, ‘ expectation.’ Be like David, my brethren. He tells you his story because he knows that you are like himself and that you will be willing to learn his lesson. Always, then, like him, after you have spent a lifetime of prayer that God alone fully knows, take this way of it: be silent, and leave yourselves, absolutely, in God’s hands. And, instead of your former loud and importunate and peremptory prayer, rather sing than pray hence¬ forth. And let your song be these golden lines of David to his psaltery: —

‘ For Thou art God that dost
To me salvation send;

And I upon Thee all the day
Expecting do attend.’

Yes: so sing. For there is no more blessed state of mind on this side heaven itself than just this: ‘ I expecting do attend.’ And, then, when the actual answer comes, there will be no happiness in all the world like yours, when you are able to look at your undoubted answer, and to say concerning it: ‘ Lo! this is my God! I have waited for Him, and He has heard me, and has come for my salvation.’

Writing to a correspondent of his, of whom Andrew Bonar says that he must have been a man of thought and education, Samuel Rutherford winds up a letter about prayer with this some¬ what scholarly sentence: ‘ Words,’ he says, ‘ are but the accidents of prayer.’ The reader often comes on abstruse-looking sentences like that in Rutherford. And they recall us to the whole truth about that so remarkable man. Rutherford was not only the sweetest letter-writer of his day, or indeed of any day, but he was also one of the best classical scholars of his day, and one of the most powerful reasoners and logicians of any day. And he had among his correspondents both men and women who quite well understood his most learned utterances and allusions. Now if you have a son or a nephew or any young friend at the logic class, you might start an excellent Sabbath conversation at table to-night just by asking him what the great Covenanter means when he says that words are but the accidents of prayer. And your scholar will explain to you that in logic an ‘ accident ’ means something that is not of the essence of a thing. An ‘accident’ he will explain, means something that is usually found closely connected with a thing, but, all the time, it is not necessary to the complete existence of the thing. A thing can quite well exist without any of its ‘ accidents.’ As here; words are not of the essence of prayer; no, not even the words that the Holy Ghost teaches. You can offer the most perfect and the most prevailing prayer without any words at all. Words are necessary where the whole mind prays. But the whole heart can pray without a single word being uttered. The heart is the seat of faith and of love and of trust and of desire and of hope and of expectation. And all these graces of prayer may be in the liveliest exercise without a single word being found in your mouth. You will sometimes have a prayer in your heart for which you can find no words, either in David, or in Paul, or in the English Prayer Book, or in John Knox’s Liturgy, or in Bishop Andrewes’ Private Devotions. And when that is the case, just lift up your silent and speechless heart. Just lift up your believing. loving, trusting, hoping, expecting heart. Just lift up your hand, just lift up your eye, and you have in that prayed to perfection. ‘ Yes,’ said the great evangelical and devotional casuist to his perplexed correspondent; ‘ Yes, we usually employ the words which the Holy Ghost teaches; but, after all, even His words are but the accidents of prayer; they are not of its very essence.’ For

‘Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire.

Uttered or unexpressed;

The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.

Prayer is the burden of a sigh,

The falling of a tear.

The upward glancing of an eye
When none hut God is near.

Prayer is the simplest form of speech
That infant lips can try;

Prayer the sublimest strains that reach
The Majesty on high.

O thou by whom we come to God,

The Life, the Truth, the Way,

The path of prayer Thyself has trod;

Lord, teach us how to pray!

Amen.’