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.
The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to our intercourse
with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming 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 fastings and mighty cryings forty days
and nights.
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.
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.
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.
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; 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? Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed as out upon the mountain he "continued
all night in prayer to God?" The apostles "gave themselves to
prayer" -- the most difficult thing to get men or even the preachers
to do. Laymen there are who will give their money -- some of them in rich
abundance -- but they will not "give themselves" to prayer, without
which their money is but a curse. There are plenty of preachers who will
preach and deliver great and eloquent addresses on the need of revival and
the spread of the kingdom of God, but not many there are who will do that
without which all preaching and organizing are worse than vain -- pray.
It is out of date, almost a lost art, and the greatest benefactor this age
could have is the man who will bring the preachers and the Church back to
prayer. |