Prayer Without Ceasing

Tue phrase which heads this our closing chapter is derived, as the reader will remember, from 1 Thess. v. 17, where it stands as one bright link in that chain of precious precepts with which St Paul closes his earliest Epistle.’ AdiaAetrras mpooedxeobe: “Without intermission, pray.”

In less precise forms, the precept and the idea appear largely elsewhere:

Luke “Men ought always to pray, and not Ron, to faint”; “Continue in prayers Coliv.2. “Pray always with all prayer.”

Fph. vi What does it mean?

The minimum of its meaning is manifest, and all-important: Pray very often. Make it a habit, the result of very many acts, to pray. In your praying, pass far beyond any limits of stated times, even of frequent stated times. So set the Lord before you, Psa xvi so remember that He is at your right * hand, that it shall be impossible to lay a limit upon your heart intercourse with Him. ‘The companions hear thy voice,” O favoured bride of the heavenly Bridegroom; cies Him Cantic. to hear it.” “The companions,” your Maes earthly friends and associates, hear your utterances of thought, will, and affection, your consultations, and thanks, and requests, and words of love, not by rule and formula, not in the way of mechanism and routine, but freely, overflowingly, as ‘the thousand: occasions of life bring the call. Even thus, with only the difference caused by remembering the glory of your unseen Friend, a glory which only enhances every thought of His personal reality, His attention, His tenderness, “cause Him to hear.” Pray to Him, converse with Him, confessing, praising, requesting, ‘‘ at all times, and in all places”; without intermission or interval in idea.

In this, which I venture to call the minimum of the message of our subject in this chapter, have we not a call, an offer, a privilege, a blessing, to which we Christians give, as a rule, far too slight attention? Is it not sorrowfully possible for the truly regenerate and believing soul to pass through a whole long day, from the morning watch to the evening, and practically, as regards secret communion with the Lord, to keep silence? Yes, it is possible; and possible even when our day’s occupation, our work of pastorate, perhaps, or study, may have had a close external connexion with Him. But what proves to be thus unhappily possible through a whole day ought to be impossible to the believer for a single hour. For such is intended to be our living and loving contact of heart and mind with God, and such is the provision for us in Christ in order to our bringing the blessed ideal into reality, that every incident of life may afford a natural occasion for some spiritual converse with Him who heareth.

Let me take an instance from a very humbling quarter; from the region of self-discovery, of conviction of sin. The disciple is made aware through the conscience, by the Spirit, that he has sinned, that he has transgressed the blessed will of God, that

K he has been at variance with the Lord of love, truth, and holiness, He is made aware, perhaps, (for we will suppose a case of what the world may call trivial faults, but they are dark sins in the light of God,) of a moment’s impulse to impatience, or of a silent swelling up of self-exaltation, or of a movement of self-assertion, or of a deviation from the rule of absolute truthfulness of word and act, or of a tacit avoidance of some little call to self-sacrifice and loving help. He has spoken an unkind word about the absent. He has caught himself passing on, wethout real need, an unfavourable judgment, a clever sarcasm, a discréditable story. He has surptised himself wasting the irrevocable talent — time. What shall he do? Shall he content himself with a regret? Or with a strong word of inward self-Prayer without Ceaszng. 131

condemnation, and virtuous resolve? He is to do something very much better. If only an almost momentary act of internal prayer is possible, he is to turn straight to his God, definitely owning the sin before Him, and laying it on his Saviour’s head as to its guilt and beneath His feet as to its power. The virtue of the propitiatory blood is present, then and there; let him in that secret moment humbly claim, and receive, itscleansing. The indwelling, renewing, Spirit is there, by whom the man is one with his Head; let him humbly and at once remember, and derive, and use, and rise up again to walk in obedience and in liberty.

It is open to every Christian to learn the blessed habit of such secret dealings with his God in moments of selfdetection, dealings instantaneous indeed but the very opposite of careless

k 2

1 Joh. i.

75 We Saez
x Thess,
Ware

Joh. iii. 21 or presumptuous. Let not the idea of the process be mistaken. ‘The thing I mean is no easy and convenient prescription and direction how to trip lightly over an inconsistent day, making selfindulgent arrangements with the holiness of God. The persons I have in mind are precisely those who thirst and long “to walk and to please God,” and to “abound more and more” in so doing, throughout the details of life; not only doing right but doing it rightly, because doing it “in God.” And to them I do. say, as earnestly as I can, pray thus habitually, keep yourself in the habit, daily and hourly, of these prompt, deliberate, decisive, turnings to the Lord and contacts with Him, not least on the smallest occasions of self-discovery.

Such “prayer without intermission,” without really prayerless interval, will tend directly and powerfully both to holy tenderness of conscience and to the intended liberty and strength of the soul in Christ.

I have dwelt upon this particular case of unintermittent Secret Prayer, the case connected with secret instantaneous confession of sin. But the principle, and the practice, is to be carried out along the whole round of our experience. We are meant by the Gospel to converse with the Lord about everything. We are to confide to Him, secretly and habitually, the particulars of sorrow and of joy; the inmost things dealt with by affections, and by understanding. We are to look up to Him in spiritual simplicity as each occasion of conversation, or reading, or memory, or anticipation, ’ brings its problem. We are to talk to Him with whom we walk, about the temptation, mental or moral, about the bliss of home, about the cross of solitude, about the snares of success, about the would-be stings of neglect, or slander, or disappointment. We have seen above how Duncan prayed when he lost a paper in his study, and. how the aged disciple at Oxford prayed when he opened his letters. Their habits may be ours. Their principle is meant to be ours, beyond a doubt.

Such ways and their results, it would be folly to deny it, do not come without holy discipline and pains. We must zizxk over the need, aye, and we must think over the possibilities and the supplies which meet it. We must Jabour in secret, with more deliberate exercises of surrender and of faith, and with more exploration of the Word of God, which is alone our solid warrant for faith, if we would live in public the hidden life of divine contact, that blessed life which the Psalmist, in the Spirit, tells us is “laid up,” and is also p..y, “wrought,” prepared for present use, 2** 1% for those who “trust in Him before the

sons of men.” Yes, we must “labour” Heb. iv. in one respect that in another respect *”

we may both “enter into” and abide

in “His rest.” In the state of the

Fall it has become a sad instinct of the human heart to shun cose and habitual conversation with the True God, ever

since Primal Man hid among the trees

from the approaching holy Voice. Grace, that is to say the living Lord working in us to will and to do, can Phil. ii wonderfully counteract the gravitation 3

of that Fall. But we must seek that grace, in its blessed developments;

“Tet us have grace,” in the sense of Heb. xii. “possessing our possessions.” For Ohad myself, I would venture to ayow, it

Heb. xi.
27.

sent. vi. needs often a very distinct effort, during a solitary walk, for instance, whether in field or street, to summon home the idle thoughts, if thoughts they deserve to be called, and not rather dreams and wanderings of the mind, and to get them to settle upon the presence, the personality, the attentiveness, the love, the faithfulness, of Him that is invisible, or rather upon Him present, listening, loving, indwelling, faithful. But oh, is not that effort worth the making? It must, it shall be made, in the simplicity of obedience and of faith resting on His Word. It is infinitely well worth the while to be speaking personally to God in Christ, in the secret of the soul, very often indeed, “when we sit in the house, and when we walk by the way.”

Not for a moment do I mean that such direct intercourse with God must be the only secret action of our spirits. The Christian, like other men, has to devote articulate thought at various times to many various interests. But all the while it is possible, in Jesus Christ, to leaven and qualify with secret divine intercourse all our other internal work and experience.

There is a word of David’s which I love to regard as a watchword for this maintained secret intercourse, this faithfully kept secret understanding of the servant with his Lord: ‘“Thou, O Lord God, knowest Thy servant.” It isa word said from the soul in a moment; it is just a look into the MASTER’S face. Let us often with that word meet the little things of life, as well as the greater ones, when in any way whatever they tempt us to forget whose we are, and who is ours. A life thus kept in secret contact, in

2 Sam.
Vil. 20.

secret understanding, with Jesus Cirist will be a “hidden life before the sons of men”; hidden as to its secret, as to its experience, but not hidden in its influence. It will diffuse a happy atmosphere of rest and purity. Its secret will be a secret not to baffle but to attract; and others, finding the fruit, will seek and find the root for themselves with joy.

I spoke of the minimum of the message of those words, “Pray without ceasing.” What is its maximum? How shall I attempt to express what it seems tome to be? To use words which I well know to be elastic and in some respects indefinite — this precept to pray without intermission points towards the inmost depth of the believer’s life of union with his Lord by the Holy Ghost. It indicates a life penetrated in its whole material and

— — — texture by the gracious power of “Him who dwells within.” It points to a “srowth into Him 7 all things,” the Eph. iv. work of the Spirit of God, so that ee below and between all our articulate prayers, however frequent, there shall be suffused, as it were, a living recollection that for the soul, for the life, so united to its true Head, God is in all things and all things are in God. Such

a recollection will not annul (see above,

p. 62), will not supersede, articulate prayers; but it will go beyond them, it

is more than they. It will be to them as the fruitful underlying soil out of which articulate actions in the life of prayer will spring continually.

How shall I venture to speak of it P It is as if the soul had seen this fair land in glimpses through the clouds, or touched the edges of it on the deep. But one true glimpse, or touch, is

Psal.

cxxi, I.

Gal. ii. enough to certify to ourselves its divine reality. There is such a thing as this habitual life of prayer, hidden with Christ in God. Shall we not find it, or, having found it, shall we not explore?

So our course of thought and enquiry on Secret Prayer draws to its close. Fragmentary and “in part” it has been indeed, even within its own limits. But at least we have been reminding ourselves ‘ whence cometh our help” amidst the difficulties of that “life in the flesh” in which, whatever are its difficulties, we are invited, and in Christ enabled, to walk and to please God. Whatever the result of our special study has been, let us rise up from our gaze upon the Supject, each for himself, before and with and in the Lord, to live the life

Prayer without Ceasing. 1A1

and to do the work of men of SECRET Prayer, “in the name of the Lord 1 Cor. vi. Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” a

Pray, always pray! The Holy Spirit pleads Within thee all thy daily, hourly needs.

Pray, always pray! Beneath sin’s heaviest load

Prayer sees the blood from Jesu’s side that flowed.

Pray, always pray, though weary, faint, and lone!

Prayer nestles by the Father’s sheltering throne,

Pray, always pray! Amid the world’s turmoil

Prayer keeps the heart at rest, and nerves for toil.

Pray, always pray! If joys thy pathway throng

Prayer strikes the harp and sings the angels’ song,

Pray, always pray! If loved ones pass the vail,

Prayer drinks with them of springs that cannot fail.

All earthly things with earth shall pass away; Prayer grasps eternity; pray, always pray.

Bishop E. H, BICKERSTETH.

PRAYER makes the darken’d cloud withdraw, Prayer climbs the ladder Jacob saw,

Gives exercise to faith and love,

Brings every blessing from above.

Restraining prayer, we cease to fight; Prayer makes the Christian’s armour bright; And Satan trembles when he sees

The weakest saint upon his knees.

Cowper,

BEHOLD the throne of grace 3
The promise calls me near;
There Jesus shows a smiling face
And waits to answer prayer.

That dear atoning blood
Which sprinkled round I see
Provides for those who come to God
An all-prevailing plea,

My soul, ask what thou wilt,
Thou canst not be too bold;

Since His own blood for thee He spilt What else will He withhold?

Thine image, Lord, bestow,
Thy presence and Thy love

I ask to serve Thee here below
And reign with Thee above.

Teach me to live by faith,
Conform my will to Thine,
Let me victorious be in death,
And then in glory shine.
NEWTON.