19.
Deliberation Necessary to
Largest Results from
Prayer
This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if
not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been
allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as
private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc.
Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an
hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence
have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the
experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due
measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be
done through prayer -- almighty prayer, I am ready to say -- and why
not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination
of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!
-- William
Wilberforce
Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their
essence.
Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their
essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to
our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere
unseemly and damaging, is
so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God.
Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength,
are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual
vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight the
root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of
backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive,
blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.
It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the
praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy
wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers
Moses records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fasting and
mighty crying forty days and nights.
"There shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my
word." -Elijah (to Ahab)
The statement of Elijah's praying may be condensed to a few brief
paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when "praying he
prayed," spent many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse
with God before he could, with assured boldness, say to Ahab,
"There shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my
word." The verbal brief of Paul's prayers is short, but Paul
"prayed night and day exceedingly." The "Lord's
Prayer" is a divine epitome for infant lips, but the man Christ
Jesus prayed many an all-night ere his work was done; and his all-night
and long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and perfection,
and to his character the fullness and glory of its divinity.
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying,
true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which
flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fiber
that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well
in the market.
It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit.
We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until
it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form and quiets
conscience -- the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our praying, and
not realize the peril till the foundations are gone. Hurried devotions
make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety. To be little
with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the
whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly, and slovenly.
It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short
devotions cut the pipe of God's full flow. It takes time in the secret
places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the
picture.
"The shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and
faint." -William Wilberforce
Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional reading
and shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced
much strangeness between God and his soul." He judged that he had
dedicated too much time to public ministrations and too little to
private communion with God. He was much impressed to set apart times for
fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer. Resulting from this he
records: "Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours."
Said William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: "I must secure more
time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me.
The shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and
faint. I have been keeping too late hours." Of a failure in
Parliament he says: "Let me record my grief and shame, and all,
probably, from private devotions having been contracted, and so God let
me stumble." More solitude and earlier hours was his remedy.
"Shall not God avenge
his own elect which cry day and night unto him?" -Jesus Christ
More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive
and invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours
for prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be so
rare or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short and
hurried. A Christly temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance would
not be so alien and hopeless a heritage if our closet stay were
lengthened and intensified. We live shabbily because we pray meanly.
Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow and fatness to
our lives.
Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures our
ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are
deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are
losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in the
closet instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest
victories are often the results of great waiting -- waiting till words
and plans are exhausted, and silent and patient waiting gains the crown.
Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis, "Shall not God avenge
his own elect which cry day and night unto him?"
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must
be calmness, time, and deliberation...
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must
be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the
littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for
good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real
praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the
worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing which
it takes more time to learn. And if we would learn the wondrous art, we
must not give a fragment here and there -- "A little talk with
Jesus," as the tiny saintlets sing -- but we must demand and hold
with iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there
will be no praying worth the name.
This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are who pray.
Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and
bustle, of electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray.
Preachers there are who "say prayers" as a part of their
programme, on regular or state occasions; but who "stirs himself up
to take hold upon God?" Who prays as Jacob prayed -- till he is
crowned as a prevailing, princely intercessor? Who prays as Elijah
prayed -- till all the locked-up forces of nature were unsealed and a
famine-stricken land bloomed as the garden of God?
...the greatest
benefactor this age could have is the man who will bring the preachers
and the Church back to prayer.
E.
M.
Bounds:
Power
Through
Prayer
