Quiet Talks on How to Pray

Prayer is as simple as a-b-c. And it is as profound as the deepest metaphysical problem. And yet, deep though it is in its philosophy, it still is simple in its workings.

A child can pray. And the rarest saint, with the greatest brain, and the finest mental discipline, and the ripest experience in prayer, finds ground lying beyond untouched as yet.

Prayer is like life; it is a school. You can begin with the eradle roll, or the kindergarten. And you may go on, course after course, and always the final post-graduate course is still ahead. of you.

And prayer does make a difference, too big for words to tell. It changes the man who prays, if he lets it. And it makes changes outside, in events, and circumstances, and character, and life.

At heart prayer is partnership. It means a man and God, our Lord Jesus, working together for the one thing. Yes, it is deeper and more tender than that. It is friendship. These same two, knit together in the strong tie of personal affection, absorbed in the same intense driving objective.

Failure Doesn’t Disturb Principles.

EVERYBODY prays, sometime, somehow. Need pulls a man to his knees, either actual knees or what amounts to that. There is something inside every man that makes him lift up his inner heart to some One unseen when the sore pinch comes. Use whatever words you please the fact of prayer is as widespread as man.

Religion is the longing within man’s heart after God. It is in every man, everywhere. It is really the pull-back toward God within every man’s spirit. Sin is the pull-away. Religion is really the inner pull-back.

Religions are the attempts, faulty, ignorant, superstition-blinded, dust-blurred, swampfogged, attempts to get back in touch with God.

The Gospel of Christ is God’s own answer to that longing in man’s inner heart. It is not a religion merely; it is the religion; the one true religion.

It is the one true full telling of how things actually stand between us men and God, and of how they may be changed back to the first original true relation.

Prayer is the natural expression of that longing in every man’s heart. In various parts of the earth, under the various religions taught, it takes on the faults and ignorances, the superstitions of all these religions.

The Gospel of Christ makes simple and clear just what real prayer is, cleared of these bad growths, and what its true natural place is.

The Bible, this solitary old Book of God, pictures these three things, namely, the tense inner longing for touch with God, the faulty attempts, everywhere and always, to get in touch, and the one true way to get in touch through Jesus Christ.

God answers prayer. This is the fact of prayer. This is the one only satisfactory statement about prayer.

A little child kneels at the mother’s knees, and asks for something needed. And some One unseen bends down over the child, and does as the child asks, because the child asks.

A woman, busy about her tasks, feels an inner pull-away to her knees about some need pressing sore in her life. And the Man unseen stoops gently over, listens with deep concern, and does as the woman asks, because she asks.

A man in the thick of the day’s work, maybe in the jostle of traffic, feels a strong inner pull within his spirit to prayer because of some tense need crowding in on him. He can’t go off alone just then. Soa prayer goes up, within, ‘‘on the fly,’’ brief, intense, very real.

And again that some One unseen by outer eyes draws closer, listens intently, feels deeply, and does what the man asks, because the man asks.

This is the great simple fact of prayer. It gets things done that otherwise wouldn’t be done, It changes things that need changing, and that otherwise would go unchanged, to somebody’s damage.

It does us good to pray. That’s true enough, blessedly true. Everybody that thinks at all about the thing agrees to that much. Men that won’t go further will go this far.

But that is the smaller part of prayer. It isn’t small. It’s never small. Yet when the other side, the outside part, is weighed and counted and foot-ruled it is seen that this inside part is distinctly smaller, the less part, in count and weight and measure.

Prayer actually gets things done. The things need doing. People are helped decidedly by their being done. They can’t be done in any other way. They haven’t been. For it takes power to get them done.

That power isn’t at hand in any other way. Prayer swings into action, down in the circumstances of our lives, the power that actually gets these things done.

This is the fact of prayer, the simple, undeniable fact of prayer. The results actually gotten cannot be denied. Hard hearts soften, stubborn wills bend, problems solve, questions are answered, a roadway opens up before your eyes where there was none, sickness gives way to health, money loosens out that had been fast locked up. This is the simple fact of prayer.

Of course, countless prayers go up that bring nothing down. But that doesn’t affect the principle of prayer, not by as much as the half-batting of your eyelid.

Your clock stops and refuses to start up again, with all your tinkering. But its failure doesn’t affect the principle of the clock. You still run your day pretty much by the clock on the mantel or in your pocket. You haven’t lost faith in clocks to tell the time of day and night.

The telephone fails to connect. The radio blurs up because of something in the air they call ‘‘static.’? But these things still play a pretty big part in our every-day life, do they not?

Any failure to fit into the principle of the clock, or of the telephone, or of the radio, or of prayer, will bring failure to get the immediate results desired. It’s some loose screw on the human side of things that holds up train, and steamer, and automobile. We simply go at finding what; and fixing it.

Does the train ever fail to get you in on time? Or the steamer? Or the automobile balk and stop and refuse to go for you? But these things still play a big place in your daily life.

And it will be found always that the same principle precisely controls in the far higher realm of prayer. There is a screw loose somewhere. There’s some failure to fit in, or some opposition trying to balk the effective working.

How To Begin.

Just now we want to talk together a little about the simple principles that underlie prayer. And they are so simple that any one may get in line and make use of this great power if he will; simply that, if he will.

For these qualities that prayer calls for are all qualities of the heart or will. It’s really a matter of choosing to have it so. The power is tingling now at your finger tips. You can reach out and have it, if you will.

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