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Discussion Forum : Articles and Sermons : LORD, TEACH US To Pray By ALEXANDER WHYTE

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pastorfrin
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 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XIX

XIX. CONCENTRATION IN PRAYER
“Lord, teach us to pray.”—Luke xi. 1.

“When thou hast shut thy door.”—Matt. vi. 6.

We shut our door when we wish to be alone. We shut our door when we have some special work to do that must to-day be done, some piece of work that has been far too long put off and postponed. “I have some time to myself to-day,” we say to our household. “Tell those who ask for me to-day that I am so occupied that my time is not my own. Tell them to leave their message, or to write to me. Tell them that I hope to be free, and at their service, any time to-morrow.” We are deep in our accounts; or our every thought is drunk up in some business so serious that we cannot think of anything else. We have put off and put off that imperative duty,—that so distressing entanglement,—till we can put it off not one hour longer. And then it is that we shut our door, and turn the key, and lock ourselves in and all other men and all other matters out, till this pressing matter, this importunate business, is finished and off our hands. 229 And then, as soon as it is finished and off our hands, we rise up and open our door. Our hands are free now. Our heart is lightened, and we are the best of company for the rest of the day.

Nothing could be plainer, and more impressive, than our Lord’s words to us in the text. Just as you do every day,—He says to us,—in your household and business life, so do, exactly, in your religious life. Fix on times; set apart times. He does not say how often, or how long. He leaves all that to each man to find out for himself; only He says, When you have, and as often as you have, real business on hand with heaven; when the concerns of another life and another world are pressing you hard; when neglect and postponement will do no longer; then, set about the things of God in a serious, resolved, instant, business-like way. “Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.”

Our Lord does not mean that our Father is not in the synagogue, or even in the corners of the streets where the hypocrites of His day were wont to pray—less that He is not present with us why our families meet together morning and evening for prayer. There is no family altar, and no prayer-meeting, and no church and no street corner even, where God is not to be found of them that diligently seek Him. But God is present to 230 His children in a special and in a peculiar way when they enter their closet and shut their door. The shortest, the surest, the safest way to seek God is to seek Him “in secret.” It is not that God is any more really in secret than He is in public: but we are. God is wherever we are. And God is whatever we are, in street, in synagogue, at the family altar, in the closet. It is not that Gcd is one thing on one side of a door of wood, and another thing on the other side of that door: it is that we differ so much according to which side of that door we are on. We all feel it the instant we turn the key, and go to our knees. In that instant we are already new creatures. We feel that this is our proper, and.true, and best place. We say, “This is the house of God: this is the gate of heaven.” And if you keep the door shut, and give things time to work, very soon your Father and you will be the whole world to one another. And if you pursue that; if you lay out your life to be a man of prayer; you will make continual discoveries of practices and expedients of secret devotion; such as will carry you up to heights of heavenly-mindedness that, at one time, would have been neither believable by you, nor desirable to you. You will find out ways that will suit you, and that could not suit anyone else—ways of impressing your own heart with the Being, the Greatness; the Grandeur, the Grace, the Condescension, the Nearness; and then 231 the Inwardness of God. Your imagination, when you are on your secret knees, will sweep through heaven and earth; not so much seeking God as seeing Him and finding Him in all His works. You will drop down Bible history from Adam to yourself, seeing God’s shining footsteps all down the way. You will see Jesus Christ also; and will speak with Him with an intimacy and a confidence and an experience not second to the intimacy and the confidence and the experience of the disciples themselves. You will positively people your place, of prayer with Jesus Christ and with His Father: and out of your place of prayer you will people your whole life, public and private, in a way, and to a degree, that would make your nearest friend to think that you had gone beside yourself, if you began to tell Him what God has done for your soul.

If we were to go over our accounts, and to arrange our disordered papers, and to write our most private letters in as short time as we give to our secret devotions, we should not need to shut our door. But our affairs are in such disorder, and in such arrears, that we must allot some time to set them right. And our Loud assumes in the text that the accounts and the correspondence connected with our religious life will need some time, and will take some trouble. We do not need to go farther than our own consciences for the proof of that. There is perhaps no man in this house who would not be 232 put to shame if it were told what time in the day, or in the week, he gives to secret and inward prayer. Godly men go no further than their own closets for the proof of their depravity, and misery, and stupidity. Their restraint of secret prayer; their distaste for secret prayer and a shut door; and with that, their treatment of their Maker, of their children, of their best friends, and of their own souls,—all horrify them when they come to themselves, and think of themselves in this matter of secret prayer.

And, even after we have taken all that to heart, and have begun to shut our door, we do not keep it long enough shut. It is quite true that secret prayer is the most purely spiritual of all human employments. That is quite true. Secret prayer is the last thing to be shut up to places and bound down to times. At the same time we men, as Butler says, are what we are. And it is just the extreme spirituality of secret prayer that makes time, as well as seclusion, absolutely indispensable for its proper performance and for its full fruit. If we rush through a few verses of a familiar psalm, or a few petitions of the Lord’s prayer, and then up and out of our door as we should not be allowed to do in the presence-chamber of our sovereign, then we had as well,—nay, we had better,—not have gone to our knees at all. But if we enter our closet with half the fear, with half the wonder and awe, 233 with half the anxiety to be recognised and addressed with which we would enter the palace of a prince on earth, then, so willing is God to be approached that He will immediately meet with us and will bless us. Hurry, then, in our secret devotions, is impossible. If you are in such a desperate hurry, go and do the thing that so hurries you, and God will wait. He is in ho hurry: He will tarry your leisure. No! Let there be no hurry here. God is God; and man is man. Let all men, then, take time and thought when they would appear before God.

And then, it sometimes takes a long time even to get the door shut; and to get the key to turn in the rusty lock. Last week44(Preached after a holiday at Bronskeid) I became very miserable as I saw my time slipping away, and my vow not performed. I therefore one afternoon stole into my coat and hat; and took my staff, and slipped out of the house in secret. For two hours, for an hour and three-quarters, I walked alone and prayed: but pray as I would, I got not one step nearer God all these seven or eight cold miles. My guilty conscience mocked me to my face, and said to me: Is it any wonder that God has cast off a minister and a father like thee? For two hours I struggled on, forsaken of God, and met neither God nor man all that chill afternoon. When, at last, standing still, and looking at Schiehallion clothed in white from top to bottom, this of David 234 shot up into my heart: “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” In a moment I was with God. Or, rather, God, as I believe, was with me. Till I walked home under the rising moon with my head waters and with my heart in a flame of prayer; naming and describing, first my own children to God, and then yours. Two hours is a long time to steal away from one’s books and companions to swing one’s walking-stick, and to utter unavailing ejaculations to one’s self in a wintry glen: but then; my two hours look to me now—as they tasted to me then—the best strength and the best sweetness of all my Christmas holiday.

And then, when secret, mental, and long-accumulated intercession is once begun, it is like the letting out of waters,—there is no end to it. Why, my children almost made me forget you and your children. And then, our friends! how bad we all are to our friends! how short-sighted, how cruel, how thoughtless, how inconsiderate! We send them gifts. Our children cover their Christmas tree with Christmas presents to our friends. Our friends cost us a great deal of thought and trouble and money , from time to time. We send them sheaves of cards with all manner of affectionate devices and verses. We take time and we write our old friends, at home and abroad, letters full of news and of affection on Christmas Day and on New Year’s Day. But we never pray for them! 235 Or, at best we pray for them in a moment of time, and in a great hurry. Why do we do everything for our friends but the best thing? How few of us shut our door during all the leisure of the last fortnight, and deliberately and particularly, and with discrimination, and with importunity prayed for our dearest and best friends! We discriminated in our purchases for our friends, lest we should slight or offend our friends: but not in our prayers. Who in the family, who in the congregation, who in the city, who abroad, will be surprised with some blessing this year? Surprised—with some uexpected providence, some despaired-of deliverance, some cross lifted off, or left and richly blessed, some thorn taken out of their flesh, some salvation they had not themselves had faith to ask for? And all because we asked, and importuned, and “shut our door” upon God and ourselves in their behalf. A friend of any kind, and to any extent and degree, is something to have in this cold and lonely world. But to have a friend who has the ear of God, and who fills God’s ear from time to time with our name and our case,—Oh, where shall I find such a friend? Oh, who shall find such a friend henceforth in me? When a minister, going out for a long walk, takes his sick-list in his pocket; or his visiting-book; or his long roll of young comunicants, no longer young; or when an elder or a deacon thinks of the people of his district; or a Sabbath school teacher 236 his class, and the fathers and mothers of his class; or a mistress her servants; or a father his children; or a friend his friends; or an enemy his enemies;—many a knock will come to his door before he is done, many a mile will he have walked before he is done. Our Lord took all night up in a mountain over the names of His twelve disciples. And since the day of His ascension nearly nineteen hundred years ago He has been in continual intercession in heaven for all those who have been in intercession for themselves and for other men on earth. Day and night;—He slumbers not nor sleeps: keeping Israel by His unceasing, particular, discriminating, importunate intercession.

Secret prayer is such an essentially spiritual duty that the Bible nowhere lays down laws and rules as to times or as to places for such prayer. The Bible treats us as men, and not as children. The Bible is at pains to tell us how this saint of God did in his day; and then, that other saint in his day and in his circumstances: how Abraham did, and Jacob, and David, and Daniel, and Jesus Christ, and His disciples and apostles. The Bible is bold to open the shut door of all these secret saints of God, and to let us see them and hear them on their knees. Abraham for Sodom: Jacob at the Jabbok: Daniel with his open window: Jesus on the mountain all night, and in the garden at midnight. Peter on the housetop: and Paul, in the prison and in 237 the workshop, for his hearers and for his readers. And then, we are left free to choose our own times and places,—few or many, open or secret, vocal or mental, just as we need just as we like, and just as suits us. Only,—surely nature itself, common sense itself, old habit from childhood itself, must teach and constrain us to keep our door shut for a moment or two in the morning: a moment or two alone and apart with Him Who is about our path and about our bed. And if we once taste the strength, and the liberty, and the courage, and the light of God’s countenance that always streams down on him who is found of God on his secret knees early in the morning, then that will be a sweet and a happy day that does not send us back to our knees more than once before it is over.

And then at night,—what an indecency it is, what folly! How we shall gnash our teeth at ourselves one day to remember how a dinner-party, or music in our neighbour’s house or in our own; a friend in at supper; a late talk; a storybook to finish before we sleep;—how such things as these should have been let rob us of our nightly self-examination, of nightly washing from the past day’s sin, and of our nightly renewed peace with God! What do the angels, and the saints think of our folly? If our fathers and mothers are let look down to see what their children are doing would anything darken heaven to them like seeing 238 the things that serve their children for an excuse to go to sleep without self-examination, confession of sin, and prayer? Whether they see us or no, there is One who says over us many a graceless and prayerless night: -” Oh! if thou hadst known! even thou in this thy day!” Let us begin this very Sabbath night. Let us shut our door tonight. We are in no hurry of business or of pleasure to-night. Let us go back upon the morning, upon the forenoon, upon the whole day, upon the week, upon the year. Let us recollect for whom, and for what, we prayed in secret this morning,—or did not pray. Let us recall what we read, what we heard, and with what feelings: with whom we conversed, about what: all the things that tried us, tempted us, vexed us, or helped, comforted, and strengthened us. Let us do that to-night, and we shall not want matter for repentance and prayer to-night: nor for prayer, and purpose, and a plan of life for to-morrow. “You are not to content yourself,” says a Queen’s Physician to us concerning the soul, “you are not to content yourself with a hasty general review of the day, but you must enter upon it with deliberation. Begin with the first action of the day; and proceed, step by step; and let no time, place, or action be overlooked. An examination,” this expert says, “so managed, will, in a little time, make you as different from yourself as a wise man is different from an 239 idiot. It will give you such a newness of mind, such a spirit of wisdom, and such a desire of perfection, as you were an entire stranger to before.”

“And thy Father, Which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.” There is nothing that more humiliates us; there is nothing that more makes us blush for shame than the way our Lord sometimes speaks about rewarding us for what we do. His words about our wages and our rewards shock us and pain us exceedingly. We know well,—we shall never forget,—that, after we have done all, we are still the most unprofitable of servants, and the most deep of debtors. At the same time,—there it stands: “Thy Father shall reward thee openly.” Where? When? How shall He reward us openly? Perhaps in our children,—perhaps in our children’s salvation; their eternal salvation, to which they might never have attained but for our secret, unceasing, mental prayer. That would be a reward we could not refuse! Nor feel any humiliation for, other than a most sweet and everlasting humiliation! On the other hand, what would a kingdom be to us if anything had gone wrong with our children? What would heaven itself be to us, if our children were not there with us? And what a reward, what wages, if they are all there!

Or perhaps this may be it,—that when all shut doors are opened, and all secrets told out, we may be let see what we owe to one another’s intercession 240 It may be part of the first joyful surprise of heaven to see what we did for other men and what they did for us. “Pray for them that despitefully use you,” our Lord advises us. Well, what a surprise it will be to you and to him if some one is brought up and introduced to you whose secret prayers for you have been your salvation all the time you were thinking he was your enemy, as you were his.

But who shall tell all that is in our Lord’s mind and intention when He says, “Thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly”? And when He goes on to say, “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed: neither hid that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”
241

Continued:

 2008/1/8 0:07Profile
crsschk
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Joined: 2003/6/11
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Santa Clara, CA

 Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XIX

Quote:
Who in the family, who in the congregation, who in the city, who abroad, will be surprised with some blessing this year? Surprised—with some uexpected providence, some despaired-of deliverance, some cross lifted off, or left and richly blessed, some thorn taken out of their flesh, some salvation they had not themselves had faith to ask for? And all because we asked, and importuned, and “shut our door” upon God and ourselves in their behalf. A friend of any kind, and to any extent and degree, is something to have in this cold and lonely world. But to have a friend who has the ear of God, and who fills God’s ear from time to time with our name and our case,—Oh, where shall I find such a friend? Oh, who shall find such a friend henceforth in me? When a minister, going out for a long walk, takes his sick-list in his pocket; or his visiting-book; or his long roll of young comunicants, no longer young; or when an elder or a deacon thinks of the people of his district; or a Sabbath school teacher 236 his class, and the fathers and mothers of his class; or a mistress her servants; or a father his children; or a friend his friends; or an enemy his enemies;—many a knock will come to his door before he is done, many a mile will he have walked before he is done. Our Lord took all night up in a mountain over the names of His twelve disciples. And since the day of His ascension nearly nineteen hundred years ago He has been in continual intercession in heaven for all those who have been in intercession for themselves and for other men on earth. Day and night;—He slumbers not nor sleeps: keeping Israel by His unceasing, particular, discriminating, importunate intercession.



This is such a treasure, am eagerly awaiting it to arrive any day now, the book that is ... but that is not all.


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Mike Balog

 2008/1/8 9:40Profile
pastorfrin
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Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XX

XX. IMAGINATION IN PRAYER
“Lord, teach us to pray.”—Luke xi. i.

“Full of eyes.”—Rev. iv. 8.


I NEVER see, or hear, or speak, or write the word “imagination” without being arrested and recalled to what Pascal and Butler and Edwards have all said, with such power and with such passion, on the subject of imagination. Pascal—himself all compact of imagination as he is—Pascal sets forth again and again a tremendous indictment against the “deceits” and “deceptions” of the imagination. Butler also, in few but always weighty words, stigmatises the imagination as “that forward and delusive faculty.” While Jonathan Edwards, in his own masterful way, would almost seem to have given the death-blow to the use of the imagination in all matters of personal and experimental religion. But as to Butler,—that great author’s latest and best editor, in two paragraphs of really fine criticism, has clearly brought out that what Butler calls “the errors of the imagination” are not errors of the imagination at all, but are the errors of unbridled fancy and caprice, and of an unbalanced 242 and ill-regulated judgment. “It seems probable,” so sums up Butler’s venerable editor, “that this is one of the rare instances in which Butler, relaxing the firmness of his hold, forgets himself, and assumes a licence in the use of words.” And then, the editor turns the tables on his admired author by going on to say that, in felicity of imaginative illustration, Butler is the equal of Macaulay himself; while, in some other of the exercises of the imagination, Butler is even above Burke.

What, then, you will ask,—with all that,—what exactly, and in itself, and at its best, is the imagination? Well, come back for a moment to the very beginning of all things, if you would have the best answer to that question. And, then, I will answer that question by asking and answering another question. “How did God create man?”—“God created man,” I am answered, “male and female, after His own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.” Our understanding, then, our mind and our memory, are both so many images to us of the Divine Mind. Our conscience, again, is an inward voice to us, impressing upon us an imprint of the Divine Righteousness, and the Divine Law. Our will, also, and the Divine Will, are of the same Divine Substance. And as for our heart—it is “a copy, Lord, of Thine.” And then, in his imagination, man possesses, and exercises in himself, a certain, and 243 that a not very far-off likeness of the Divine Omnipresence, and the Divine Omniscience. For, by his imagination, a man can look behind, and before, and around, and within, and above. By his imagination a man can go back to the beginning ere ever the earth was. One man has done it. Moses has done it. And what Moses has done to this earth, that one day will not be remembered nor come into mind,—all that John, Moses’ fellow in imagination, has done to the new heaven and the new earth. The imagination, then, whatever else it is, is not that “forward, ever-intruding and delusive faculty”: it is not that “author of all error,” as Butler, so unlike himself, so confuses and miscalls it. Nor is it what Pascal so lashes to death with his splendid invective. Nor is it imagination at all, as we have to do with it to-day, that Edwards so denounces in his Religious Affections.

Imagination, as God in His goodness gave it at first to man,—imagination is nothing less than the noblest intellectual attribute of the human mind. And his imagination is far more to every spiritually-minded man than a merely intellectual attribute of his mind. I shall not need to go beyond Pascal himself,—so splendidly endowed with this splendid gift. “Imagination,” says Pascal, “creates all the beauty, and all the justice, and all the happiness that is in the heart of man.” The imagination, then, must not be made to bear the blame that 244 really belongs to those men who have prostituted it, and have filled its great inward eyes full of visions of folly and sin: when they should have set the Lord always before their inward eyes, with all His works in nature, and in grace, and in glory. Because there is only one of a city, and two of a family, who ever employ their inward eyes aright,—are the inward eyes of those men to be plucked out who have on their inward eyes an unction from the Holy One? No. A thousand times, No! “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law. I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.”

If, then, you would learn to pray to perfection,—that is to say, to pray with all that is within you,—never fail, never neglect, to do this. Never once shut your bodily eyes and bow your knees to begin to pray, without, at the same moment, opening the eyes of your imagination. It is but a bodily service to shut our outward eyes, and not at the same moment open the eyes of our inner man. Do things like this, then, when you would be in the full spirit of prayer. Things, more or less, like this. “I speak as a child.” Let your imagination sweep up through the whole visible heavens, up to the heaven of heavens. Let her sweep and soar on her shining wing, up past sun, moon, and stars. Let her leave Orion and the Pleiades far behind her. And let her heart swell and beat as she says 245 such things as these to herself: “He made all these things. He, Whom I now seek. That is His Sun. My Father made them all. My Mediator made them all to the glory of His Father. And He is the heir of all things. Oh, to be at peace with the Almighty! Oh, never again for one moment to forget or disobey, or displease Him! Oh, to be an heir of God, and a joint heir with Jesus Christ! Oh, to be found among the sons and the daughters of God Almighty!”

At another time, as you kneel down, flash, in a moment,—I still speak as a child,—the eyes of your heart back to Adam in his garden, and with the image of God still in all its glory upon him: and to Abraham over Sodom; and to Moses in the cleft of the rock; and to David in the nightwatches; and to Jesus Christ all night on the mountain top—and your time will not be lost. For, by such a flash of your imagination, at such a moment, the spirit of grace and supplications will be put in complete possession of your whole soul. Never open your eyes any morning without, that moment, seeing God and saying, “I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.” And never lie down without saying, “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for Thou, Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety.” Never set out on a journey till you have said to God and to your own soul, “The Lord shall preserve thy going 246 out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.” And never so much as say grace at table, however short time you have to say it in, without seeing Him: in the twinkling of an eye, be for one moment, if no more, with Him who spreads your table, and makes your cup to run over. In short, be sure to get a true sight and a true hold of God, in some way or other, before you begin either prayer or praise. There is nothing in this world so difficult. The time it takes, sometimes, and the toil, and the devices, and the instrumentalities—you would not believe: because no word in all the Bible better describes us when we are at prayer, and at praise, and at table than this: “Without God”; and this: “Their hearts are far from Me.” Be sure, then—with all the help that heaven and earth, that God and man can give you—be sure you get your eyes and your hands on God in your prayer. You may begin and end your prayer without that—if you are in a hurry; and if you have no time or taste to give to Him Who will be honoured, and waited on, and well pleased with you. But, if so, you need not begin. It is not prayer at all. In your audience of an earthly sovereign, you would not grudge or count up the time and the pains and the schooling beforehand. You would not begin to speak to him while yet you were in the street, or on the stair, and out among the common crowd. You would keep your cause in your heart till you 247 were in his presence: and then, when you saw him sitting on his throne high up above you, you would then fall down before him, and would fill your mouth with arguments.

Never say any of your idle words to Almighty God. Say your idle words to your equals. Say them to your sovereigns. But, never, as you shall answer for it,—never, all your days,—to God. Set the Lord always before you. Direct your prayer to Him, and look up. Better be somewhat too bold and somewhat unseemly than altogether to neglect and forget Almighty God. Better say that so bold saying,—“I will not let Thee go,” than pray with such laziness and sleepiness and stupidity as we now pray. Look for God, and look at God: till you can honestly say to Him, with Dr. Newman, a great genius and a great saint, that there are now, to you, two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings in the whole universe, yourself and your Creator. And, when once you begin to pray in that way, you will know it. Every prayer of yours like that will, ever after, leave its lasting mark upon you. You will not long remain the same man. Praying, with the imagination all awake, and all employed—such praying will soon drink up your whole soul into itself. You will then “pray always.” It will be to you by far the noblest and the most blessed of all your employments in this present world. You will pray 248 “without ceasing.” We shall have to drag you out of your closet by main force. You will then be prayerful “over much.” “Whether in the body I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.” Such will you all become when you accustom your inward eyes to see and to brood continually on the power, and on the greatness, and on the goodness, and on the grace and on the glory of God.

Yes, but all the time, what about this?—you will ask: what about this—that “no man hath seen God at any time”? Well,—that is true, and well remembered, and opportunely and appropriately brought forward. Whatever else is true or false, that is true. That, all the time, abides the deepest and the surest of truths. And thus it was that the Invisible Father sent His Son to take our “opaque and palpable” flesh, and, in it, to reveal the Father. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” And it is this being “made flesh” of the Son of God that has enabled us to see God. It is the birth and the whole life, and the words, and the works, and the death, and the resurrection, and the ascension, and the revelation from heaven again of Jesus Christ—it is all this that has for ever opened up such new and boundless worlds which the Christian imagination may visit, and in which she may expatiate and regale herself continually.

249The absolute and pure Godhead is utterly and absolutely out of all reach even of the highest flights of the imagination of man. The pure and unincarnated Godhead dwells in light which no man’s imagination has ever seen even afar off, or ever can see. But then, hear this. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” Well, if that is true, come now! Awake up, O my baffled and beaten-back imagination! Awake, and look at last upon thy God! Awake, and feast thyself for ever on thy God! Bathe, and sun, and satiate thyself to all eternity, in the sweetness and in the beauty and in the light, and in the glory of thy God! There is nothing, in earth or in heaven, to our imagination now like the Word made flesh. We cannot waste any more, so much as one beat of her wing, or one glance of her eye, or one heave of her heart on any one else, in heaven or earth, but the Word made flesh. “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” There is a cold and heartless proverb among men to this effect: “Out of sight, out of mind.” And this cold and heartless proverb would be wholly true—even of believing men—if it were not for the divine offices and the splendid services of the Christian imagination. But the truly Christian imagination never lets Jesus Christ out of her sight. And she keeps Him in her sight and ever before her inward eyes in this way. You 250 open your New Testament—which is her peculiar and most delightful field,—you open that Book of books, say, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. And, by your imagination, that moment you are one of Christ’s disciples on the spot, and are at His feet. And all that Sermon you never once lift your eyes off the Great Preacher. You hear nothing else, and you see nothing else, till He shuts the Book and says: “Great was the fall of the house,”—and so ends His sermon. All through His sermon you have seen the working of His face. In every word of His sermon, you have felt the beating of His heart. Your eye has met His eye, again and again, till you are in chains of grace and truth to Him ever after. And then, no sooner has He risen up, and come down the hill, than a leper, who dared not go up the hill, falls down at His feet, and says, “Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean!” And all your days, ever since that Sermon, you are that leper. All that day you have been more and more like that leper, till now, as that day closes, you are like him nigh unto death. You worship Christ like the leper. He is beside you. He stands over you. You feel, as never before, the leprosy of sin. It fills full your polluted heart. The diseased flesh of that poor leper is the flesh of a little child compared with you and with your heart. Till in a more than leper-like loathing at yourself, and a more than leper-like despair of 251 yourself, you bury your face before His feet, and cry to Him: “But, Lord, if Thou only wilt, Thou canst make me clean!”

And so on—as often as, with your imagination anointed with holy oil, you again open your New Testament. At one time, you are the publican: at another time, you are the prodigal: at another time, you are Lazarus, in his grave, beside whose dead body it was not safe or fit for a living man to come: at another time, you are Mary Magdalene: at another time, Peter in the porch: and then at another time, Judas with the money of the chief priest in his hand, and afterwards with his halter round his neck. Till your whole New Testament is all over autobiographic of you. And till you can say to Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and to John himself: Now I believe; and not for your sayings so much; for I have seen Him myself, and have myself been healed of Him, and know that this is indeed the Christ of God, and the Saviour of the World. Never, then, I implore you, I demand of you—never, now, all the days and nights that are left to you—never open your New Testament till you have offered this prayer to God the Holy Ghost: ”Open Thou mine eyes!“ And then, as you read, stop and ponder: stop and open your eyes: stop and imagine: stop till you actually see Jesus Christ in the same room with you. “Lo! I am with you alway!” Ask Him, if He hides 252 Himself from you, ask Him aloud,—yes, aloud,—whether these are, indeed, His words to you, or no. Expect Him. Rise up, and open to Him. Salute Him. Put down your book. Put down your light, and then say such things as these—say: “Jesus Christ! Son of David! Son of Mary! Carpenter’s Son! Son of God! Saviour of Sinners, of whom I am chief!” Speak it out. Do not be afraid that both men and devils hear thee speaking to thy Saviour. What about them all when thou art alone with the Son of God? And, besides, all men are asleep. “Art thou, in very truth, here, O Christ? Dost Thou see me? Dost Thou hear me? Yes! Thou art here! I am sure of it. I feel it. O blessed One! O Son of the Highest! I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof. But Thou art here! Here, of all the houses in the whole city! And, here, with me—O my Saviour: with me of all men in the whole city!” Fall at His feet, kiss His feet. Kiss His feet till thy lips come upon an iron nail in them: and, after that, thou wilt know, of a truth, Who He is, that is with thee in the night-watches!

But your absolutely highest, and absolutely best, and absolutely boldest use of your imagination has yet to be told, if you are able to bear it, and are willing to receive it. It is a very high and a very fruitful employment of your imagination to go back and to put yourself by means of it into the place of 253 Adam, and Abraham, and Moses, and Job, and Peter, and Judas, and the Magdalene, and the thief on the cross. But, to put out this magnificent talent to its very best usury, you musttake the highest boldness in all the world, and put yourself in the place of CHRIST HIMSELF. Put yourself and all thatis within you into the Hand of the Holy Ghost, and He will help you, most willingly and most successfully, to imagine yourself to be Jesus Christ. Imagine yourself, then, to be back in Nazareth, where He was brought up. Imagine yourself,—and show to your son and your Sunday school scholar the way to imagine himself,—sitting beside Joseph and Mary every Sabbath day in that little synagogue. Imagine yourself to be the carpenter’s son, as He was. Imagine yourself at Jordan at John’s great awakening of the dry bones, and then at John’s Baptism. Imagine yourself fighting the devil in the wilderness with nothing but fasting and praying and the Word of God for weapons. Imagine yourself without where to lay your head. Imagine all your disciples turning against you and forsaking you. Imagine the upper room, and the garden, and the arrest and the Cross, and the darkness, and “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Did you ever imagine yourself to be crucified? Paul did. And the imagination made him the matchless apostle of the Cross that he was. And then, imagine 254 yourself Christ risen, and in glory, and looking down on your heart, and on your life, and on your closet, and on your bed. Imagine Him seeing you,—your mind, your heart, your inspiration, your motives, your intentions, your thoughts:—all you think, and all you say, and all you do. And then,—I challenge you to imagine what HE must be thinking and feeling, and making up His mind to-day as to what He is to say, and to do, to you; and when! What would you say about yourself, if you were in His place,—if you had died on the tree for such sins as yours, and then saw yourself what, all this time, you are, having no wish and no intention ever to be otherwise? I think you would throw down your office. I feel sure you would wash your hands of yourself. You would say, “Let him alone!” You would say “Cut it down! Why cumbereth it the ground?” I will tell you literally and exactly what you would say. From God’s word I will tell you what any honest and earnest and wearied-out and insulted man would say, and what may this moment, for anything you know, be said over you from the great white throne of God. “Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out My hand, and no man regarded.... I will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind....For that they hated knowledge, and did not 255 choose the fear of the Lord.” Imagine the Lamb in His wrath saying that! And imagine yourself dying, and not knowing at threescore and ten how to pray! Imagine yourself at the river, and no one there to meet you—and no one to say to you, “I will be with thee”! Imagine the Judge in His hot anger saying it;—and shutting the door—“I never knew you”! And then, imagine with all your might of imagination—imagine that, by an unparalleled act of God’s grace, you are sent back again to this world, just for one more year, just for one more week, just for one more Sabbath day or Sabbath night! O prayer-neglecting sinner! O equally prayer-neglecting child of God! One more Sabbath day of the Mercy-seat, and the Mediator at God’s right hand, and the Blood of Christ that speaketh peace!

“I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now, mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
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 2008/1/11 7:31Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XXI

XXI. THE FORGIVING SPIRIT IN PRAYER
“Lord, teach us to pray.”—Luke xi. 1.

“When ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any.”—Mark xi. 25.

PRAYER is a world by itself, a whole world, and a great world too. There is a science of prayer, and there is an art of prayer. There are more arts than one that rise out of a life of prayer, and that go to make up a life of prayer. Prayer is an education and a discipline: it is a great undertaking and a great achievement. And, like every other art, education, discipline, attainment and achievement, prayer has its own means and its own methods, its own instruments, and its own aids and appliances whereby to attain, and whereby to secure its ends.

There is a whole literature of prayer also. There are some, not small, libraries into which there is nothing else collected but the classics of prayer. There is even a bibliography of prayer. And there are bookworms who can direct you to all that has ever been written or printed about prayer; but who never come to any eminence, or success, in prayer themselves. While, on the other hand, 257 there are men who are recognised adepts and experts in prayer, proficient and past masters in prayer. There is nothing in which we need to take so many lessons as in prayer. There is nothing of which we are so utterly ignorant when we first begin; there is nothing in which we are so helpless. And there is nothing else that we are so bad at all our days. We have an inborn, a constitutional, a habitual, and, indeed, an hereditary dislike of prayer, and of everything of the nature of prayer. We are not only ignorant here, and incapable: we are incorrigibly and unconquerably unwilling to learn. And when we begin to learn we need a lesson every day, almost every hour. A lesson to-day, and a lesson to-morrow; a lesson in the morning, and a lesson at night. We need to have old lessons gone over again, revised and repeated incessantly. We need, as the schoolboys say, to go over the rudiments again and again, till we have all the axioms, and elementary rules and paradigms, and first principles of prayer made part and parcel of ourselves. Such axioms and such first principles as these: “He that cometh to God must believe that He is.” “Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.” “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.” “When ye stand praying, forgive”—these axioms and elements, and such-like.

We have had some lessons in prayer given us of late in this house; and here is another. And, 258 like all our Lord’s lessons, it is impossible to misunderstand it, or to forget it. No,—I must not say that, for such is the depravity and the deceitfulness of our hearts that there is nothing that we will not misunderstand and despise and cast behind our back. Only, prayer—prayer sufficiently persevered in—will at last overmaster even our deep depravity; and, O my brethren, what a blessed overmastery that will be! Speak, then, Lord! Speak once again to us what Thou wilt have us to hear about prayer, and we will attend this time and will obey!

1. I do not think that there is anything that our Lord returns on so often as the forgiveness of injuries. And the reason of that may very will be because our lives are so full of injuries, both real and supposed, and both given and received. As also because the thoughts and the feelings, the words and the deeds, that injury awakens towards one another in our hearts, are so opposed to His mind and His spirit. It is remarkable, and we cannot forget it, that the only petition in the prayer that our Lord taught His disciples,—the only petition that He repeats and underscores, as we say,—is the fifth petition: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” No sooner has He said Amen than He takes His disciples back again to their “trespasses,” and warns them in these solemnising and arresting 259 words: “For, if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” As much as to say that the forgiveness of injuries will be the very hardest of all the holy tempers that I shall ever have to ask of you. The motions of spite and ill-will are the most difficult of all its sinful motions to subdue in the human heart. At the same time, He adds, as long as those so wicked and detestable tempers hold possession of your hearts, your prayers and everything else will be an abomination before God.

2. It is not told us in so many words, but I think I see how it came to pass that we have the text. Our Lord saw His disciples every day employing the prayer He had taught them: He heard them saying night and morning, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” with all their bad passions all the time in a blaze at one another. They were disputing every day who was to be the greatest. The ten “had indignation” at the two brethren because their foolish mother had asked of Christ the two chief seats in His Kingdom for her two sons. They were all trespassing every day against one another, just like ourselves, till their Master stopped them one day in the very middle of their Lord’s Prayer, and said, Stand still! stop! say no more till you have forgiven your offending brother: and then, go on, and finish 260 your prayer with assurance, and with a good conscience. He laid His hand on Peter’s mouth that day, and would not let Peter finish till he had, from his heart, forgiven the two ambitious brethren. And it was that arrest and interdict that his Master put upon Peter’s prayer that made Peter expostulate, and say, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” And his Master said to Peter, “I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.” Yes, Peter, said his Master to Peter that day,—once your conscience is fully awake, and once your heart is fully broken, you will never once be able to say, Forgive me my debts, till you have already forgiven some great debtor of yours. You will always do on the spot what you ask God to do to you. And it will be by so doing that you will be a child of your Father which is in Heaven; Who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.

Do you ever feel that same hand stopping your mouth, my brethren? Is your prayer ever cut in two and suspended, till your heart is searched out, and made quiet, and clean, and sweet to some of these, your offending brethren? Or, better still: has Jesus Christ so penetrated and inspired your heart, and your conscience, and your imagination with His grace and His truth that you never,—either in the church or at home, either among 261 your children or alone on your own knees,—never once say the Lord’s Prayer, without naming in the middle of it, and at the fifth petition of it, some of us who vex you, or offend you, or trespass in some way against you? some one of us towards whom you have an antipathy, or a distaste, or a secret grudge, or some inveterate ill-will? Standing, or sitting, or kneeling, or lying on your face in prayer—is God your Witness, and your Hearer, and your Judge, that you forgive us, as often as you remember that you have ought against us? Do you do that? Well, I am sure if we, not to speak of God, knew that, and could believe it about you, you would not soon have occasion to forgive us again! God bless you, all the same, and hear your prayer!

3. You would, as I think, find this to be helpful when you “stand praying,” and are as yet unable to forgive. Try this the next time. Say this to yourself. Say something like this. “What, exactly, is it that I have against that man?” Put it in words. Put it to yourself as you would put it to a third person. Calm reflection, and a little frank and honest self-examination, is a kind of third person, and will suffice you for his office. And so stated, so looked at, that mortal offence turns out to be not half so bad as it has up till now been felt to be. Our pride, and our self-importance, often blow up a small matter into a mortal injury. Many of our insults and injuries are far more imaginary 262 than real: though our sin and our misery on account of them are real enough. Look at the offender. Look closely at him. Do not avoid him. Do not refuse to have a talk with him. If possible, eat a meal now and then with him. Make a great and noble effort, and put yourself in his place in all this unhappy business. For once be honest, and just, and generous. See yourself as he has seen you. Allow and admit his side of it for a moment. Allow and admit that yon differ from him, as Butler has it, quite as much as he differs from you. Let a little daylight, as Bacon has it, fall on this case that is between him and you. Let a little of the light of love, and humility, and goodwill fall on him, and on yourself—and, already, your prayer is heard! You may go on and finish your prayer now. Your trespasses are already as good as forgiven. They are: since you are all but ready to admit that a great part of your hurt and pain and anger and resentment is due to yourself, and not to your neighbour at all. And once your neighbour has come to your assistance in that way in your prayer, he will come again, and will come often, till you and he, meeting so often in amity before God, will only wait for God’s promised opportunity to be the closest and the best of friends again, not only before God, but before men also. For, “He is our peace; Who hath abolished the enmity, so making peace.”

2634. You will find this to be helpful also in some extreme cases. When there is some one who is trespassing against you “seven times a day”; some one whose tongue works continually against you like a sharp razor; some one whose words are as a sword in your bones; some one who despitefully uses you, and persecutes you; some one who returns you only evil for all the good you have done to him and his,—and so on. There have been such extreme cases. Your own case, in short. Well. What do you wish to have done to him? There are prayers for all kinds of cases in the Bible. And here is one for you. “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg .... Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out ... As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.” When you stand praying, put up that prayer. Say that: and then say, “For Christ’s sake, Amen!” And, then, out of the same psalm, add this for your so suffering soul: “But do Thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy name’s sake: because Thy mercy is good, deliver Thou me.” I have known men to be cured of malice and ill-will by offering that prayer morning and night, and at the Lord’s Table. I have known groanings, that could not be uttered 264 before, find utterance in the words of that devoting psalm. Try it on your enemy in the extremity of your injury and ill-will. And it will, by God’s blessing, do for you and for your heart what it has done by God’s blessing for far worse hearts than yours.

How horrible, and how hell-like, is a revengeful heart! While how beautiful, and how like heaven itself, is a humble, a meek, a patient, and a Christ-like heart! I have been refreshing and enlarging and ennobling my heart among Plutarch’s noble Grecians and Romans in my spare hours this past winter,—when you give Plutarch in a present let it be in Thomas North’s Bible English,—and at this point Plutarch’s Pericles comes to my mind. “For he grew not only to have a great mind and an eloquent tongue, without any affectation, or gross country terms; but to a certain modest countenance that scantly smiled: very sober in his gait: having a kind of sound in his voice that he never lost nor altered: and was of very honest behaviour: never troubled in his talk for anything that crossed him: and, many such like things, as all that saw them in him, and considered him, could but wonder at him. But for proof hereof, the report goeth, there was a naughty busy fellow on a time, that a whole day together did nothing but rail upon Pericles in the market-place, and revile him to his face, with all the villainous 265 words he could use. But Pericles put all up quietly, and gave him not a word again, dispatching in the meantime matters of importance he had in hand, till night came, that he went softly to his home, showing no alteration nor semblance of trouble at all, though this lewd varlet followed at his heels with all the villainous words he could use. But Pericles put all up quietly and gave him not a word again. And as he was at his own door, being dark night, he commanded one of his men to take a torch and take that man back to his own house.” An apple of gold in a picture of silver!

But, both in patience and in forgiveness of injuries, as in all else, behold, a Greater than Pericles is here! He Who gave Pericles that noble heart is here teaching us and training us by doctrine, and by example, and by opportunity, to a nobler heart than any of Plutarch’s noblest Greeks or Romans. I know nothing outside of the New Testament nobler in this noble matter than the Ethics, and the Morals, and the Parallel Lives: but I read neither in Aristotle, nor in Plato, nor in Plutarch anything like this: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven.” Our Master, you see, actually congratulates us on our enemies, and backbiters, and false friends. He lifts us out of all our bitterness 266 and gloom, and despondency, and resentment, up into the sunshine of His own humble, loving, forgiving heart. And as if His heavenly teaching was not enough, He leaves us His example so that we may follow in His steps. And He leaves it—it is beautiful to see—first to Peter, who hands it down, after he is done with it, to us. Hold up, then, your hurt and proud and revengeful hearts, O all ye disciples of Christ, and let Peter, by the Holy Ghost, write this on the hard and cruel tables of your hearts. This: “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps. Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not. . . . Who, His own self, bare our sins on His own body on the tree: . . . by whose stripes ye were healed.” Come, then, my brethren, with all your wrongs and all your injuries, real and supposed, great and small; greatly exaggerated, and impossible to be exaggerated. And when you stand praying, spread them all out before God. Name them, and describe them to Him. And He will hear you, and He will help you till you are able, under the last and the greatest of them, to say, “Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.”
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Continued:

 2008/1/13 17:12Profile
crsschk
Member



Joined: 2003/6/11
Posts: 9192
Santa Clara, CA

  Lord Teach Us To Pray

This is all so incredibly rich!

Now have the book in hand and my profound thanks pastorfrin, once again. Fully expect to be reading through it time and time again.

This section threw me a bit;

Quote:
2634. You will find this to be helpful also in some extreme cases. When there is some one who is trespassing against you “seven times a day”; some one whose tongue works continually against you like a sharp razor; some one whose words are as a sword in your bones; some one who despitefully uses you, and persecutes you; some one who returns you only evil for all the good you have done to him and his,—and so on. There have been such extreme cases. Your own case, in short. Well. What do you wish to have done to him? There are prayers for all kinds of cases in the Bible. And here is one for you. “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg .... Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out ... As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.” When you stand praying, put up that prayer. Say that: and then say, “For Christ’s sake, Amen!” And, then, out of the same psalm, add this for your so suffering soul: “But do Thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy name’s sake: because Thy mercy is good, deliver Thou me.” I have known men to be cured of malice and ill-will by offering that prayer morning and night, and at the Lord’s Table. I have known groanings, that could not be uttered 264 before, find utterance in the words of that devoting psalm. Try it on your enemy in the extremity of your injury and ill-will. And it will, by God’s blessing, do for you and for your heart what it has done by God’s blessing for far worse hearts than yours.



I believe I am following as it sandwiches between all that came before and all afterward, but do you believe the attempt here is to smite oneself, and perhaps force the conscience to recognize just what it is really asking? Somehow there is a sort of brain lock here for some reason ...


_________________
Mike Balog

 2008/1/13 19:07Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray

Quote:

crsschk wrote:
This is all so incredibly rich!

Now have the book in hand and my profound thanks pastorfrin, once again. Fully expect to be reading through it time and time again.

This section threw me a bit;

Quote:
2634. You will find this to be helpful also in some extreme cases. When there is some one who is trespassing against you “seven times a day”; some one whose tongue works continually against you like a sharp razor; some one whose words are as a sword in your bones; some one who despitefully uses you, and persecutes you; some one who returns you only evil for all the good you have done to him and his,—and so on. There have been such extreme cases. Your own case, in short. Well. What do you wish to have done to him? There are prayers for all kinds of cases in the Bible. And here is one for you. “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg .... Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out ... As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.” When you stand praying, put up that prayer. Say that: and then say, “For Christ’s sake, Amen!” And, then, out of the same psalm, add this for your so suffering soul: “But do Thou for me, O God the Lord, for Thy name’s sake: because Thy mercy is good, deliver Thou me.” I have known men to be cured of malice and ill-will by offering that prayer morning and night, and at the Lord’s Table. I have known groanings, that could not be uttered 264 before, find utterance in the words of that devoting psalm. Try it on your enemy in the extremity of your injury and ill-will. And it will, by God’s blessing, do for you and for your heart what it has done by God’s blessing for far worse hearts than yours.



I believe I am following as it sandwiches between all that came before and all afterward, but do you believe the attempt here is to smite oneself, and perhaps force the conscience to recognize just what it is really asking? Somehow there is a sort of brain lock here for some reason ...



Hi Brother,
Sorry it has taken so long to respond, have been pretty ill.

Glad to hear you received the book, it is one of the treasures in my library.
Yes, when you first read this you go wait a minute, and as you put it all together you see where he is coming from. He gives the clue here:
Quote:
Try it on your enemy in the extremity of your injury and ill-will. And it will, by God’s blessing, do for you and for your heart what it has done by God’s blessing for far worse hearts than yours.



That God will show you your evil heart and cause you to see the evil prayer you are praying as he shows in the very next paragraph.

Quote:
"How horrible, and how hell-like, is a revengeful heart! While how beautiful, and how like heaven itself, is a humble, a meek, a patient, and a Christ-like heart!"

Only after we are able to see the wickedness in our own heart are we able to over come evil with good.

So much in these sermons, I believe a lifetime of study would not be sufficient to absorb all.

In His Love
pastorfrin

 2008/1/17 18:53Profile
pastorfrin
Member



Joined: 2006/1/19
Posts: 1406


 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XXII

XXII. THE SECRET BURDEN
“Lord, teach us to pray.”—Luke xi. 1.

“Apart. . .”—Zech. xii. 12.

Down to Gehenna, and up to the throne, He travels the fastest, who travels alone
THAT is to say, secret sin, and secret prayer, have this in common; that they both make a man travel his fastest. Secret sin makes him who commits it travel his fastest down to Gehenna,—that is to say, down into “the fire that is not quenched.” Whereas secret prayer makes him who so prays travel his very fastest up to the throne of God, and up to his own throne in heaven.

Down to Gehenna, and up to the throne, He travels the fastest, who travels alone.
“Apart! Apart! Apart!” proclaims this prophet, ten times, in the text. If he could only get “the house of David, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” to pray, and to pray apart—the Fountain for sin and for uncleanness would soon be opened; and the Kingdom of God would soon come. “Apart! Apart! Apart!” he cries “Every family apart, and their wives apart!”

268This truly evangelical prophet is very importunate with the people to whom he preaches, to get them to take the fullest and the most universal advantage of this apartness in prayer. Apartness in prayer has immense and incomparable advantages over all other kinds and practices of prayer: and this prophet urges it on his people with all his authority and with all possible earnestness. He would have all ranks, and all classes, and all occupations, and all ages, and both sexes, to begin, and to continue, to pray apart. Indeed, he as good as proclaims to them, with all his prophetic power and passion, that the man who does not pray apart does not properly pray at all. And our Lord supports this prophet and says the same thing in one of His well-known utterances about prayer. Thou, He says, when thou prayest, go apart first. Go away to some retreat of thine, where thou art sure that no eye sees thee, and no ear hears thee, and where no man so much as suspects where thou art, and what thou art doing. Enter thy closet; and, with thy door shut on thee, and on thy Father with thee,— then pray.

There it is—written all over our open Bible so that he who runs may read it,—the sure and certain blessedness of prayer apart, the immediate and the immense advantage and privilege of private prayer. But not only is all that written all over both the Old Testament and the New, it is illustrated and 269 enforced on us out of our own experience every day. Let us just take ourselves here as so many proofs and pictures of the advantage and superiority and privilege of private prayer over public prayer. And take just your minister and then yourselves in proof and in illustration of this. As soon as the church bells stop ringing on the Sabbath morning, your ministers must immediately begin to pray openly and before men—whether they are prepared or no; whether they are in the proper spirit or no; and whether they have recovered their lost sight and lost hold of God that morning or no. It is expected of them that, as soon as the opening psalm is sung, the pulpit should begin to pray.

And you get,—more or less,—every Sabbath morning from the pulpit what you pay your seat for, and demand of us in return. You get a few well-repeated liturgical passages. You get a few well-selected texts taken out of the Psalms. And then a promise or two taken out of the prophets and the apostles,—all artistically wound up with a few words of doxology. But all that, four or five times every Sabbath day, is not prayer. All that is a certain open and public acknowledgment and tribute to the House of Prayer, and to the Day of Prayer; but nobody with an atom of sense or spirit ever supposes that that is prayer. And then we have to stop our Sabbath morning prayer before we have well begun it. You allow, and measure 270 out to us by your watches, our limit. We must say our pulpit prayers before you at the proper moment, in the proper tones, and to the proper length,—on the pain of losing your countenance and patronage. And on the other hand, though our hearts are breaking, we must begin at the advertised hour. And we must not by a sigh, or a sob, or a tear, or by one utterance of reality and sincerity, annoy or startle or upset you. We must please you with a pleasant voice. Our very pronunciation and accent must be the same as yours,—else you will not have it. We may let out our passions in everything else, as much as we like,—but not on Sabbath, and, above all, not in pulpit prayer. These are some of the inconveniences and disadvantages and dangers of public prayer to your ministers. But out of the pulpit, and sufficiently away and apart from you,—we can do what we like. We have no longer to please you to your edification. We can wait as long as we like in our closet, before we attempt to pray. The day is over now, and the duties of the day: we are in no hurry now: we are under no rule of use and wont now. We can watch a whole hour now, if we are not too tired and sleepy. We can sit down and read, and muse, and meditate, and make images of things to ourselves out of our Bible, or out of our Andrewes, till the fire begins to burn! That was what David did. “My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire 271 burned: then spake I with my tongue.” And the minutes toward midnight may run on to hours; and the midnight hours to morning watches; and yet we will run no danger of wearying out Him who slumbers not nor sleeps: He still waits to be gracious. What we ministers, of all men, would do without prayer apart,—I cannot imagine what would become of us! But, with his closet, and with the key of his closet continually in his hand, no minister need despair, even though he is a great orator, with a great gift of public prayer. “Apart! Apart! Apart!” this great prophet keeps ringing in every minister’s ears. “Apart! Apart! Apart! Every minister—of all men,—apart!”

And the very same thing holds true of yourselves, my praying brethren. You have the very same out-gate and retreat in private prayer that we have. You can escape apart from us, and from all our pulpit prayers. God help you if you do not! If all your praying is performed here,—and if it is all performed by your minister for you,—may God pity you, and teach you Himself to pray! But if you are living a life of secret prayer, then you are not dependent on us; and we are not so ruinously responsible for you. And indeed, if you pray much apart, you are already beyond our depth. You are wiser than all your teachers. You could teach us. I sometimes see you, and see what you are thinking about, when you are not aware. You listen to us 272 in our public prayers. And you smile to yourself as you see us attempting a thing in public that—you see quite well—we know next to nothing about in private. We have our reward of others, but not of you: you say nothing. You sit out the public worship and then you rise up, and go home. It is with you as when a hungry man dreameth and; behold, he eateth ; but he awaketh and his soul is empty. Till you get home, and the house is asleep. And then, could we but act the eavesdropper that night! Could we but get our ear close to your keyhole, we should learn a lesson in prayer that we should not forget. You must surely see what I am driving at in all this, do you not? I am labouring, and risking something, to prove this to you, and to print it on your hearts,—the immense privilege and the immense and incomparable opportunity and advantage of private prayer, of prayer apart.

And then, for a further illustration of this argument, take the confession of sin, in public and in private prayer. The feeling of sin is the most personal, and poignant, and overpowering part of your daily and hourly prayer. And, if you will think about it for one moment, you will see how absolutely impossible it is for you to discover, and to lay bare and to put the proper words and feelings upon yourself and upon your sin, in public prayer. You cannot do it. You dare not do it. And when 273 you do do it, under some unbearable load of guilt, or under some overpowering pain of heart,—you do yourself no good, and you do all who hear you real evil. You offend them. You tempt them to think and to speak about you and your prayers, which is a most mischievous thing: you terrify, like Thomas Boston, the godly. And, after all; after all that injurious truthfulness and plain-spokenness of yours in prayer,—with all that, you cannot in public prayer go out sufficiently into particulars and instances, and times, and places, and people. Particularity, and taking instances, is the very lifeblood of all true and prevailing prayer. But you dare not do that: you dare not take an outstanding instance of your daily sinfulness and utter corruption of heart in public or in family prayer. It would be insufferable and unpardonable. It is never done. And you must not under any temptation of conscience, or of heart, ever do it. When your door is shut, and when all public propriety, and all formality, and insincerity is shut out, then you can say and do anything to which the spirit moves you. You can pray all night on your face, if you like, like your Lord in Gethsemane. When you are so full of sin that you are beside yourself with the leprosy of it and with the shame and the pain of it,—they would carry you to the madhouse, if you let yourself say and do in public what all God’s greatest saints, beginning with God’s Son, have continually done in 274 private. But your soul may sweat great drops of blood in secret, and no human being is any wiser. And as for those who watch you and see it all,—“there is joy in heaven” over you from that night. Not one in ten of you have ever done it, possibly not one in a hundred: but when you begin really to look on Him whom you have pierced, as this great prophet has it, then you will begin to understand what it is to be in bitterness, and to mourn apart, as one is in bitterness for his first-born. Then, no pulpit confession, and no family altar, will relieve your heart. For then, there will be a life-long mourning in your heart as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon. “Oh,” you will cry, “oh, that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the Son of God whom I have slain by my sin! Oh, that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people, and go from them to weep for my sin against my God and my Saviour!” And God will provide such a place apart for you, and for Himself with you,—till one day, when your head is, as never before, “waters,” He will say; “It is enough, go in peace. Weep no more.” And He will wipe all tears from your eyes.

And the very same thing holds true of all intercessory prayer. It would be an impertinence and an impudence; it would be an ostentation and a 275 presumption to pray for other men in public, as you are permitted and enabled and commanded to pray for them in private. It would be resented, and never forgiven. In intercessory prayer in public, particulars and instances, and actual persons, and special and peculiar cases, are absolutely impracticable and impossible. You simply dare not pray, in public, for other men,—any more than for yourself,—as they need to be prayed for. You would be arrested and imprisoned under the law of libel if you did it. Were you to see these men and women around you as they are; and were you to describe them, and to plead with God to redeem and renew, and restore, and save them,—the judge would shut your mouth. But in private, neither your friend nor your enemy will ever know, or even guess, till the last day, what they owe to you, and to your closet. You will never incur either blame or resentment or retaliation by the way you speak about them and their needs in the ear of God. The things that are notoriously and irrecoverably destroying the character and the usefulness of your fellow-worshipper—you may not so much as whisper them to your best friend, or to his. But you can, and you must, bear him by name, and all his sins and vices, all that is deplorable, and all that is contemptible about him, before God. And if you do so; and if you persist and persevere in doing so,—though you would not believe it,—you will 276 come out of your closet to love, and to honour, and to put up with, and to protect, and to defend your client the more,—the more you see what is wrong with him, and the more you importune God in his behalf. Intercessory prayer, in the pulpit, usually begins with the Sovereign, and the Royal Family, and the Prime Minister, and the Parliament, and so on. You all know the monotonous and meaningless rubric. But nobody is any better, Sovereign nor Parliament, because nobody is in earnest. We pray for the Sovereign, in order to be seen and heard and approved of men. But in secret,—it is another matter. If you ever—before God and in faith and love—prayed for your Sovereign, or for any great personage sincerely, and with importunity, you then began to feel toward them in a new way; and you began to have your answer returned into your own bosom, if not yet into theirs, in the shape of real honour, and real love, and real good-will, and real good wishes, and more and better prayer, for those you so pray for. “I exhort therefore that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.... For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.... I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.”

277And, then,—to conclude this great argument,—take thanksgiving, which is, by far, the best and the most blessed part of both public and private prayer. You cannot thank God with all your heart in public. You cannot tell in public—even to them that fear God—all that God has done for your soul. Even David himself could not do it. He tried it, again and again: but he had to give up the attempt. In public, that is, and before the great congregation, he could not do it. You see him attempting it, again and again; but the great congregation is not able to bear it. Here is the best specimen of a true thanksgiving I have ever met with. But then, it is not a public, but a private devotion,—as its title-page bears.

“O God,” this man of prayer said in secret to God once every week, taking a whole night to it: going out into particulars, and giving instances, and names, and dates.

“O God, I thank Thee for my existence: for my life, and for my reason. For all Thy gifts to me of grace, nature, fortune”—(enumerating and naming them, and taking time to do it)—“for all Thy forbearance, long-suffering, long long-suffering to me-ward, up to this night. For all good things I have received of Thy hand”—(naming some of them)—“for my parents honest and good” (recollecting them, and recollecting instances and occasions of their honesty and goodness)—“and 278 for benefactors, never to be forgotten” (naming them). “For religious, and literary, and social intimates, so congenial, and so helpful. For all who have helped me by their writings,—(and at that he rises off his knees, and walks round his library, and passes his eye along its so helpful shelves).—“For all who have saved my soul also by their sermons, and their prayers” (and at this he recalls great preachers of the soul, some dead, and some still alive and open to his acknowledgments). “For all whose rebukes and remonstrances have arrested and reformed me. For those even who have, some intentionally, and some unintentionally, insulted and injured me,—but I have got good out of it all,”—and so on. You could not offer a sacrifice of praise like that before everybody. You could not do it with propriety before anybody! And it would be still more impossible to go on, and to give instances and particulars like this: and, without instances and particulars, you might as well be in your bed. “Thou holdest my soul in life, and sufferest not my feet to be moved. Thou rescuest me every day from dangers, and from sicknesses of body and soul; from public shame, and from the strife of tongues. Thou continuest to work in me, by Thy special grace to me, some timeous remembrance of my latter end; and some true recollection and shame, and horror, and grief of heart for my past sins. 279 Glory be to thee, O God, for Thine unspeakable, and unimaginable goodness to me,—of all sinners the most unworthy, the most provoking, and the most unthankful!” You could not say things like that in the pulpit, no, nor at your own most intimate family altar. And, yet, they must be said. There are men among you whose hearts would absolutely burst, if they were not let say such things: aye, and say them, not once a week, like this great saint, but every day and every night. And it is to them—few, or many among us, God alone knows,—it is to them that this Scripture is selected and sent this morning,—this Scripture: And I will pour out upon them the spirit of grace and of supplications, the spirit of repentance and confession, the spirit of intercession and prayer for all men: and the still more blessed spirit of praise and thankfulness: and they shall pray and praise apart, till their Father which seeth, and heareth, apart and in secret, shall reward them openly.

Down to Gehenna, and up to the throne, He travels the fastest, who travels alone.
280

Continued:

 2008/1/19 23:08Profile
pastorfrin
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 Re: Lord Teach Us To Pray Pt. XXIII

XXIII. THE ENDLESS QUEST
“Lord, teach us to pray.”—Luke xi. i.

“He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him (lit. that seek Him out).”—Heb. xi. 6.

I MUST not set myself up as a man able to mend, and to make improvements upon, the English translation of the Greek Testament. At the same time, it seems to me to be beyond dispute that the English of the text falls far short of the exact point and the full expressiveness of the original. Remacu:—touching the text with the point of needle, Bengel exclaims: “A grand compound!” And it is a “grand compound.” The verb in the text is not simply to seek. It is not simply to seek diligently. It is to seek out: it is to seek and search out to the very end. A Greek particle, of the greatest possible emphasis and expressiveness, is prefixed to the simple verb: and those two letters are letters of such strength and intensity they make the commonplace word to which they are prefixed to shine out with a great grandeur to Bengel’s so keen, so scholarly and so spiritual eyes.

281Ever feeling after God, if haply I may find Him, in a moment I saw the working out of my own salvation in a new light; and, at the same moment, I saw written out before me my present sermon, as soon as I stumbled on the Apostle’s “grand compound.” “But without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him out” to the end; of them that seek Him out saying, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!” That seek Him out saying, “Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.” That seek Him out with their whole heart. That seek Him with originality, with invention, with initiation, with enterprise, with boldness, with all possible urgency, and with all possible intensity and strenuousness. As also, to the end of a whole life of the strictest obedience, and the most absolute and unshaken faith, and hope, and love. “A grand compound!”

As we go on in life, as we more and more come to be men and leave off speaking as children, and understanding as children and thinking as children, we come to see with more and more clearness what it is to us,—what it must be to us,—to arise and return to God, to seek God, to come to God, and to walk with God. At one time we had the most unworthy and impossible thoughts of God, and of our seeking Him, and finding Him. We had the most 282 materialistic, and limited, and local, and external ideas about God. But, as we became men, we were led,—all too slowly, and all too unwillingly,—yet we were led to see that God is an Infinite and an Omnipresent Spirit: and that they that would seek God must seek Him in the spiritual world, that is, in that great spiritual world of things into which our own hearts within us are the true, and the only, door. “Thou hast set the world in their hearts,” says the Preacher in a very profound passage. The spiritual world, that is; the world of God, and of all who are seeking God out till they are rewarded of Him. “We do not come to God upon our feet,” says Augustine, “but upon our affections.” And thus it is that we, who are so materialistically minded and so unspiritually minded men, find it so distasteful, and so difficult, and so impossible to seek out God till we find Him. Were He to be found in any temple made with hands; were He to be found in Samaria or in Jerusalem, between the Cherubim on earth, or on a throne in heaven,—then, we should soon find Him. But because He has set the spiritual world, and Himself as the God and King of the spiritual world, in our own hearts,—we both mistake the only way to find Him, and miss our promised reward of Him.

How can I go away from Him,—and how can I come back to Him, Who is everywhere present? “Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither 283 shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.” A question, a chain of questions like that, put continually, put imaginatively, put day and night and in dead earnest to a man’s self, will be the beginning of a new life to any man among us. Questions, problems, psalms and prayers, like that,—raised, reasoned out, understood, and accepted,—will open our eyes. A man has no sooner stated these things to himself than, from that moment, he begins to see as never before, something of the greatness and the glory of God; something of the Divine and Holy Spirituality of God; and, consequently, something of the pure spirituality of all his intercourse with God. I see then, that it is not God who has turned away and removed Himself from me in His omnipresence and omniscience: but that I have gone away and removed myself far from Him in all my thoughts and words and deeds. I have gone away from God in my heart. And, as my going away from God was, so must my coming back to Him be. And thus we are told of the prodigal son that his coming to himself was his first step back to his father. And his whole return began, and was carried out, by recollection, and by repentance, and by confidence in his father’s forgiveness, and by a resolution, at once acted on, to return to his father’s house. The whole parable took place in 284 his own heart. The far country was all in that prodigal son’s own heart. The mighty famine was all in his own heart. The swine and their husks were all in his own heart. The best robe and the ring and the shoes were all in his own heart. And the mirth and the music and the dancing were all also in his own heart. “He hath set the whole world,” says the wise man, “in their heart.”

Take then, as the first illustration of this law of our text, take the truly studious, or, as I shall call him, the truly philosophic seeker after truth, if not yet to say after GOD. Let that student be, at present, a total stranger to God. Nay, I am bold to say, let him be at secret enmity with God. Only, let him be an honest, earnest, hard-working, still-persevering, and everyway-genuine student of nature and of man. Let him never be content with what he has as yet attained, but let him love, and follow, and seek out, the whole truth to the end. Now such a true student as that will not work at his studies with one part of his mind only; but in the measure of his depth, and strength, and wisdom, he will bring all that is within him, as the Psalmist says, to his studies. He will bring his heart as well as his head: his imagination as well as his understanding: his conscience even, and his will, as well as his powers of recollection and reasoning. And as he works on, all the seriousness, all the reverence, all the humility, all the patience and 285 all the love with which he studies nature, will more and more be drawn out as he ponders and asks,—who, or what, is the real root, and source, and great original of nature and man? Who made all these things? And for why? And by this time, that true student has come, all unawares to himself, under the sure operation of that great Divine law, which is enunciated with such certitude in this splendid text. For he that cometh seeking God, whether in nature or in grace; whether in God’s works, or in God’s Son, or in God’s word: if he still comes with teachableness, and with patience, and with humility, and with faith, and with hope, and with love to the end,—all of which are the qualities and the characters of a true student,—that man, by this time, is not far from God. Till the very vastness, and order, and beauty, and law-abidingness, and loyalty, and serviceableness of nature; will all more and more pierce his conscience, and more and more move, and humble, and break his heart. And God will, to a certainty, reward that man, that serious, and honest, and humble-minded man, by putting this psalm in his mouth, till he will join his fellow-worshippers here in singing it: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handywork.” But it is the law of the Lord that is perfect, converting the soul: it is the testimony of the Lord that is pure, enlightening the eyes. “It is true that a little 286 philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism: but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion: for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further: but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe the highest link of nature’s chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter’s chair.”

We speak in that large and general way about what we call great students and great thinkers and great philosophers, as they feel after, and find out God; and we do not speak amiss or out of place. But there is no student in all the world like the student of his own heart. There is no thinker so deep and difficult as he who thinks about himself. And out of all the philosophies that have been from the beginning, there is none of them all like that of a personal, a practical, an experimental religion, and an out-and-out obedience to all God’s commandments. That is science. That is philosophy. As the Book of Revelation has it: “Here is wisdom”: and “Here is the mind which hath wisdom.” The mind, that is, which seeks God in all things, and at all times, and that seeks Him out till it finds Him. And till God says to that man also, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward.”

287Is there any man here then, this day, who is saying: “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! That I might come even to His seat”? What is the matter with you, man? What is it that has so banished your soul away from God? What was it that so carried you away into that captivity? And what is the name of the chain that holds you so fast there? Do you ask honestly and in earnest,—“What must I do to be saved from this far country, this hell-upon-earth into which I have fallen?” O man! You are very easily answered. Your case is very easily treated. You are not a great thinker: you are simply a great sinner. It is not speculation that has led you astray, but disobedience, and a bad heart. You must not expect to be flattered and fondled, and sympathised and condoled with, as if there was some deep and awful mystery about you. Oh no! there is nothing mysterious or awful abut you. You are a quite commonplace, everyday, vulgar transgressor. There are plenty like you. “Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? . . . Or, Who shall descend into the deep? . . . But what saith it? The word is nigh thee,” That is the word of repentance, and return to God, and a better life, and a broken heart, which we preach to ourselves and to you. Do you not understand? Do you not know what it is in you, and about you, that lands you in such nakedness and famine and shame and 288 pain and death? You know quite well. It is sin. It is nothing but sin. It is the sins and the faults of your heart and your life. Now, this is wisdom. This is the mind that hath wisdom. To put your finger on yourself and say: It is in this, and in this, and in this, that I always go away from God. It is in the indulgence of this appetite. It is in this wicked temper. It is in this secret envy and ill-will. It is in this sour and sullen heart. It is in this secret but deep dislike and evil mind at that man who so innocently trusts me, and who so unsuspiciously thinks me his friend. It is in this scandalous neglect of prayer; this shameful, this suicidal neglect of all kinds of personal religion in the sight of God. Believe the worst about yourself. Fix on the constantly sinful state of your own heart, and an the secret springs of sinful thought and feeling within you: seek yourself out, as the text says, and you are thus seeking out God. And the more evil you seek out of yourself,—and put it away,—the nearer and the surer you will come to God. Fight every day against no one else but yourself; and against nothing else but every secret motion of pride, and anger, and malice, and love of evil, and dislike of good. Every blow you deal to these deadly things of which your heart is full is another safe and sure step back to God. At every such stroke at yourself, and at your own sin God will by all that cane back to you; till, at last, 289 He will fill your whole soul with himself. That was the way, and it was in no other way, that Enoch “walked with God” in the verse just before the text. And you too will walk with God, and God with you, just in the measure in which you put on humility, and put off pride; and fill your hot heart full of the meekness and lowly-mindedness of the Son of God; and, beside it, with the contrition, and the penitence, and the watchfulness, and the constant prayerfulness of one of His true disciples. To hold your peace when you are reproved,—that is a sure step toward God. To let a slight, a contempt, an affront, an insult, a scoff, a sneer, fall on your head like an excellent oil, and on your heart like your true desert—“with that man will I dwell,” says the God of Israel and the God and Father of our Lord Jeans Christ. Every step you take out of an angry and wrathful heart, and out of a sour, sullen, and morose heart, and into a meek and peace-making heart; out of envy and uneasiness, and into admiration and honour: on the spot your heavenly Father will acknowledge and will reward you. Seek Him out: and see if He will not!

And, then,—remaining always at your true post, within yourself,—come out continually in that mind, and seek out God in all outward things also. For, be sure, He is in all outward things as well: and He is in them all for you to seek Him out till you are rewarded of Him. In every ordinance of his grace 290 and truth He is to be sought out by you. On every new Sabbath, and in every psalm, and prayer, and scripture, and silent and secret hour of that Sabbath. In every week-day providence also. He is in every providence of His for many more beside you: but He is there for you, just as much as if He were there for no one but you. In public providences, in domestic providences, as well as in all those more secret and personal providences that have been so many perfect miracles in your life. And in every change and alteration in your circumstances. God, all-wise, does not make a change in your circumstances just for the love of change. It is all for His love to you, and to make you seek out a fresh proof of that love, as well as to draw out some new, and warm, and wondering love out of your renewed heart to Him. After you have appropriated to yourself all the reward He had prepared for you in one age and stage of your life, He leads you on to another age and another stage; and He hides Himself and His grace there for you again to seek Him out. And this goes on, all through your life, till He teaches you to say, “One thing do I desire, and that will I seek after, and that is God, my God, my Life, my Joy, my Blessedness.”

Men and women! What are you living for? What is your life yielding you? If you are not finding God in all parts of your life—what a fatal 291 mistake you are making! And what a magnificent reward you are for ever missing!

But, when all is said, it is not to be wondered at that so few of us seek, and seek out, God. For His greatness passes all comprehension, and imagination, and searching out, of men and angels. His holiness also makes Him a “consuming fire” to such sinners as we are. And then, His awful spirituality, omnipresence, and inwardness,—we would go mad, if we once saw Him as He is, and at the same time saw ourselves as we are. “And He said, There shall no man see Me, and live.” We must grow like God before we can both see Him and live. And thus it is that it is only His very choicest and chiefest saints who do seek Him out to the end either in His Son, or in the Scriptures, or in their own hearts, or in Providence, or in nature, or in unceasing prayer. It is only one here, and another there, who ever get the length of crying out with Job, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him.” And with Isaiah, “Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.” And with Paul, “Dwelling in light which no man can approach unto: Whom no man hath seen, or can see.”

But, just in the depth and adoration of their cry; and just as their sight and sense is of the greatness and the glory of God,—just in that kind, and just in that degree, will their reward be, when He shall reveal Himself at last, and shall Himself 292 become their exceeding great and everlasting Reward. And though we are not worthy to stoop down and unloose the latchet of the shoes of such great, and such greatly rewarded, saints of God: yet, if we also seek God, and seek Him out to the end of our life,—feeble as our faith is, and smoking flax as our love is,—yet by His grace, after all our partial discoveries of God, and all our occasional experiences of Him, we also in our measure shall receive, and shall for ever possess, and enjoy very God Almighty Himself for our own Reward for ever.

“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! . . . For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things.” “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.” “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth: . . . my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. . . . They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.”

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 2008/1/21 16:45Profile
crsschk
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Joined: 2003/6/11
Posts: 9192
Santa Clara, CA

 Teach us to pray

[i]“My uncle,” says Coleridge’s nephew, “when I was sitting by his bedside, very solemnly declared to me his conviction on this subject. ‘Prayer,’ he said, ‘is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable’: prayer, that is, with the total concentration of all the faculties. And the great mass of worldly men, and learned men, he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer. ‘To pray,’ he said, ‘to pray as God would have us pray,—it is this that makes me to turn cold in my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart, and strength, that is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian’s warfare on this earth. Lord, teach us to pray!’ And with that he burst into a flood of tears and besought me to pray for him! Oh, what a light was there!”[/i]

pastorfrin, missed your reply earlier somehow. Thank you for the confirmation and pray you are in far better health.

The section above ...


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Mike Balog

 2008/2/9 23:33Profile
crsschk
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Joined: 2003/6/11
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Santa Clara, CA

 Re: Teach us to pray ~ Elijah

"[i]You have not Elijah’s prophetical office, not James’s apostolical inspiration, not Dr. Candlish’s oratorical power: but you have plenty of passion if you would but make the right use of it.

You are all vicious or virtuous men, prayerful or prayerless men; and, then, you are effectual or unavailing men in your prayers—just as your passions are. You have all quite sufficient variety and amount of passion to make you mighty men with God and with men, if only your passions found their proper vent in your prayers.

You have all passion enough—far too much—in other things. What an ocean of all kinds of passion your heart is! What depths of self-love are in your heart! And what a master-passion is your self-love! Like Aaron’s serpent, your passion of self-love swallows all the rest of the serpents, of which your heart is full. What hate, again, you have in your heart, at the persons and the things you do so hate! What hope also for the things you so passionately hope for! Oh, if only you had that passionate hope in your heart, which maketh not ashamed! “Yea, what clearing of yourselves” there is in your hearts! “Yea, what indignation! Yea, what fear! Yea, what vehement desire! Yea, what zeal! Yea, what revenge!” Yes: you have passions enough to make you a saint in heaven, or a devil in hell: and they are every day making you either the one or the other.

We have all plenty of passion, and to spare: only, it is all missing the mark. It is all sound and fury, a tale told, a life laid out and lived, by an idiot. Our passions, all given us for our blessedness, are all making us and other people miserable. Our passions, and their proper objects, were all committed to us of God to satisfy, and to delight, and to regale, and to glorify us. But we have taken our passions and have made them the instruments and the occasions of our self-destruction. We are self-blinded, and self-besotted men: and it is the prostitution of our passions that has done it.

Does the thought of God ever make your heart swell and beat with holy passion? Does the Name of Jesus Christ ever make you sing in the night? Do His words hide in your heart like the words of your bridegroom? Do you tremble to offend Him? Do you number the days till you are to be for ever with Him? And so on—through all your passions of all kinds in your heart? No, oh no! Your daily life among these men and women is full of passion: but your heart in your religion is as dead as a stone. And you are not alone to blame for that. Your father and your mother, your tutor and your governor, taught you many branches of learning and perfected you in many accomplishments, as they are called: but they could not teach you to keep this passion in your heart, for they did not know the way. You never heard them say so much as the word “passion” in connection with prayer. And your ministers have not mended matters. They did not study the passions at college: at least, never in this light. They graduated in mental philosophy; but it was falsely so called. Their first-class honours puffed them up: but they edified them not. And ever since; their own passions are all in disorder and death, and how then could they correct or instruct you? Their own passions are not aflame within them with God, and with their Saviour Jesus Christ, and with His Cross, and with His throne of judgment, and with heaven; and with hell.[/i]"


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Mike Balog

 2008/2/10 17:36Profile





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