August 16

Watch ye, and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. - Mark 14:38.

“WHAT God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” In vain do we pray if we are careless and unwatchful, if we expose ourselves needlessly in dangerous places and company, if we leave without a sentinel our senses, appetites, and passions, and use not the means of preservation which are placed within bur reach. Prayer without watchfulness is hypocrisy; watching without prayer is presumption. Our strength is in God alone. We should always manifest a lively concern for our spiritual preservation. Our prayer should ever be, “Uphold my goings in thy ways,” and, “Let not any iniquity have dominion over me.” “Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.” Whatever be our weakness, if he upholds us he will keep us from falling. Whatever be our inability and danger, if he holds us up we are safe.

Now, this preservation, about which we are to be thus prayerfully solicitous, includes not only eventual security as to eternity, but stability and constancy as to time, our being steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. And the very exercise of prayer will tend to secure us. And God has promised to hear and answer the prayers of his people. He will “strengthen us with might by his Spirit in our inner man.” And though Christians know God has engaged to keep the feet of his saints, they also know that their safety consists in watching and praying; they know there is no perseverance without persevering; they know the certainty of the end includes the certainty of the means.

A Christian hates sin, and believes it to be, as the apostle says, “exceeding sinful.” He not only hates it, but desires to depart from it. He loves heart-purity, and, feeling sin to be his abhorrence, he will not, cannot, bear his heavenly Father should plead in vain, “Oh, do not the abominable thing which I hate.” Therefore he sees enough in the nature of sin, and in the accusations of conscience, to induce him to cry, “Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.”