The Difficulties, and the Necessity, of Secret Prayer

I invite my reader’s thoughts in the following pages to the subject of SECRET PRAYER, or rather to some particular aspects of that holy and happy subject; to its necessity and blessing, its difficulties and their remedies, its methods and helps, its constituent elements, and the power in which the work is to be done.

. By the words SecreT PRAYER understand, for the present purpose, our deliberate approaches to God in

Matt. vi. the chamber when the doors are shut. We might of course include much more under the words. We might consider the whole action of the Christian believer’s soul in secret divine communion; his ejaculations of heart at common moments, his quick glances anywhere and everywhere into his Master’s face, in adoration, confession, request, reliance, alike in the crowd and when he is physically alone. And before we quite close we shall have something to say on all this. But in the main I limit our view on purpose to Secret Prayer in its more stated and regular aspect.

Only let me say, for this thought must go with us all along, that there is a deep, tender, and most vital connexion between the Secret Prayer of set times and that of all times. Below the surface they are, they must be, one and ofa piece. They must, they will, feed and animate each other. The devout, diligent, practice of regular and unhurried Secret Prayer is needed if only to protect and develope the freedom and the truth of habitual secret communion with God. And the momentary acts, anywhere and everywhere, of inmost heart intercourse with the ever present Lord are needed if only to keep burning the soul’s altar-fire, that it may glow both more promptly and more brightly when we shut ourselves in with Him at the stated hour.

Surely it is not well with the man if it is otherwise. Are our regular times our practically only times of Secret Prayer, our only conscious daily steps in the path of internal communion? God forbid it. The stated prayer-time will sorely suffer if it is so. Either it will sink into that lamentable thing, an act of perfunctory devotion, a mere counterfeit. Or half the precious occasion may have to be given to efforts after a preparedness, and recollection, and realization, which should have been delightfully ready in the soul.

But now we turn altogether to consider the secret season of deliberate approach to God. And in this first chapter we will think particularly of some of its DIFFICULTIES, and of its holy NEcEssITy, be the difficulties what they may.

May He be with our spirits, by His Spirit, who trode the path of Secret Prayer before us. In this as in all things He left us an example that we should follow His dear and worshipped steps. By His own practice of Secret Prayer He told us, once and for ever, that that practice is a vital necessity for the disciple, a necessity which nothing can annul, not the life most occupied for Him, not the life most consecrated to Him. ’

i. What then are the DIFFICULTIES of Secret Prayer, or some of them? Among these we might of course include the difficulties which for us sinners beset all prayer. We might speak of the difficulties of the mind. We might dwell on those minor but real difficulties, the obstinate volatility and vagrancy of thought, which in the very act of adoration can fly to the ends of the earth, even after triviality or folly; or on those severer difficulties, the mind’s struggles over the mystery of prayer, over the ow and the’ why of its power with God, over the revealed fact that prayer is so very much more than a mere exercise of the soul on itself, a mere calming and attuning of itself before the Eternal; that it really asks, for others as well as for the man’s self, asks in order to receive answers and gifts from Him who indeed is “not ourselves.”* And we might speak too of the spiritual difficulties of prayer in general. We might talk of the believer’s too often faint realization of the Presence, yes sometimes of the very Existence, of the unseen Friend, Master, and King; of our inadequate sense of the sinfulness of sin, in the very act of confession; and of our depth of need, in the act of petition; and of our Lord’s blessed zlory, in the act of praise. But here again I only touch the subject and

* The writer ventures to refer to a simple discussion of his own on some of these subjects, forming an Introduction to Zhe Christian’s Own Calendar.

pass on for the present, just remarking meanwhile that for all these difficulties we Christians have a divine antidote laid up in the fulness of our glorious Head. Let us draw on Him for deliverance in the strength of quite simple faith, and we shall find daily in our praying the bright surprise of a rest and power not our own; for both mind and spirit.

What are we to think of then as the special difficulties of Secre¢ Prayer?

I would say first, the peculiar temptation to laxity and indolence in the practice, just because it is secret. In the case of public prayer, and social prayer, the fact of association brings of course a certain aid in this direction. We are constrained by it to keep time with others, at least to some degree, and to behave ourselves as men under the eyes of others. But we may shorten our time of Secret Prayer, we may thrust it into a corner, we may lie late in the morning, or sit up comfortably late at night, and we are seen by no eye that we can see, and we have no congregation to be offended by our absence, lateness, or carelessness. I am sure my reader knows, or has known, the reality of at least some such temptations. The warm bed when we wake, the bright fire in the late evening, the allurements of book, or conversation, or whatever it is that must give way if we are to set ourselves to seek the King’s face before we sleep, the specious excuses and palliations of the heart — these things are real, and they are peculiar hindrances to the full exercise of regular Secret Prayer.

We intend to be up betimes, to meet God before we meet man. But perhaps our first meeting with man will be at family worship in the home, or at the chapel service in the college; and something whispers that this will do duty instead of the “morning watch” alone. J¢ wll not do so. We shall see more later of the reasons why it will not do so. But alas it is very easy to think that it will.

Then for some doubtless there is a difficulty in the way of honest weariness. You work hard all day in one labour or another. You feel it in the morning; you feel it at night ; — a very different thing from the indolent liking for mere unearned comfort. You hardly trust yourself to pray, sometimes. Your head is bent, and almost at once you sleep, to wake doubly weary you know not when.

In another direction, agai, lies the difficulty, greater for some than for others doubtless, but felt by most, how

ca to use with true economy the precious secret season, as a time of deeply reverent yet truly free and personal outpouring of heart before the Lord. The very essence and speciality of Secret Prayer, so it seems to me, is that it should express most freely, whatever else it deals with, the movements of the individual spirit; confessing inmost personal sins, giving praise for personally received mercies, both of providence and grace, worshipping in view of personal insights into the Lord’s great glory, supplicating regarding the deepest needs, and the simplest needs, of the individual man, and interceding for individuals in the freest detail and name by name. All this brings with it the question how best to combine and adjust it all in some such reverent order as that in our unwatched secrecy there shall be no mere idle waste of thought and word.

Akin to this is the question how to secure in that unwatched secrecy the deepest and most recollected reverence of address and even of attitude towards the Holy One who there, as much as anywhere, is Master and King as well as Friend.

How to meet this last difficulty will be our special enquiry in a later chapter. For the present, with regard to all these matters, I would only say that it is well worth while thus to reckon them up, and to look steadily at them, and then on the other hand to remember that for them all a gracious guidance and a loving remedy is to be found in Him who heareth prayer. And whatever they are, they leave untouched the fact that regular and real Secret Prayer is an absolute, a vital, necessity for the believer’s life and walk.

ii. We come to our second point. Secret Prayer is for us a NECESSITY. It may seem a mere truism to say So. But things which seem so are often the very things which need in practice a new and earnest emphasis of thought and purpose. So it certainly is in the case of Secret Prayer, Secret Prayer reverent, regular, unhurried, detailed, confiding, and expectant.

What I have to say in this connexion will be said very briefly.

In two directions, if I am not mistaken, there is always a risk that the earnest Christian may forget the vital necessity of such Secret Prayer. There is arisk in the direction of Christian work. There is a risk in the direction of public Christian worship.

. The disciple is busy, as he humbly believes, with the will of God in active work, Either in direct religious enterprise and effort, or in secular duty done in the remembrance that he is in all things the bondservant of Christ, he spends his full and occupied hours. And something whispers to him those familiar maxims, which indeed have their deep truth, but which yet are most unhappily mistakable, and too often mistaken, Zaborare est orare, [le prayeth best who loveth best. And the man allows himself to abbreviate and to attenuate his deliberate secret exercises of prayer.

Or again, the disciple dearly loves the habitation of God’s house, the place where His honour dwelleth, the holy convocation, the liturgical sacrifice of united praise and prayer, the divine Supper with its kneeling throng and God-given seals of finished re-Psal.

xxvi. 8 demption and abiding union with the Lord. And something suggests to him that these sacred things may largely exonerate him from the efforts, mertal and physical, of diligent, unstinted, Secret Prayer.

Or again, he greatly delights in the social meeting for non-liturgical prayer and praise. He is often with devoted and loving friends, thus gathered in the prayer-meeting, in the consecration-meeting, before God. And good it is to be there, while the presence of the holy and beloved Master, King of Love, but always King, is remembered, and self forgotten. And the insinuation presents itself that such exercises, so spiritual, so unconventional, may take in some degree the place of the solitary prayer within the shut doors,

But indeed, indeed, such hints and whispers are not from above. Not one of these good things, holy work, persistent doing of duty, public worship, sacramental blessing, private or informal fellowship, can at all ¢ake the place of Secret Prayer. They leave Secret Prayer still a vital necessity. And why? Why specially and above all? Because it is the occasion of all others for cultivating a deep individual insight into yourself and your personal needs, and into the Lord Jesus Christ, into God in Christ, in all His glory and grace for you. It is not the only occasion for this, but it is the special occasion. Other means of grace, very largely, give you the materials which are to be thoroughly worked out, and worked in, in the hour alone with God. Put “labouring” into the place of such “praying,” and you will surely find, if you wil

Joh, xvi.
8.

1 Cor. i. 30. look, a degeneracy in the spiritual quality of your labouring. It will surely shew somehow that you are in less full and sensitive contact with your Saviour and Master, for your own soul’s blessing, than you were. Put public, or social, worship in the place of Secret Prayer, and you will find, I venture to say, that your individual insight into sin, and righteousness, and judgment, on the one hand, and into Christ your rightequsness,. and sanctification, and redemption, on the other, is waning, and growing dim, and as it were generalizing itself away into mist and cold. You will find in short that you as an individual sinner, an individual believer, cannot minimize your solitary, secret, individual seasons of confession, petition, and praise, without the results that are to be expected. Your spiritual life-pulse will be feebler. Your whole renewed nature and its work will suffer from the centre.

So shall it not be with us, by the grace of God.

Abba Tather, my Father which seest in secret, Thy face will I there seek, and Thou shalt reward me openly, in the gift of Thy peace in my busy life, always and everywhere; in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

‘¢ Oh, the pure delight of a single hour That before Thy throne I spend, When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God, T commune as friend with Friend!”

2’Tim. ii.
aI.