03.07. Trained In Prayer
Trained in Prayer Prayer touches infinite extremes.
It is so simple that a little child can pray, and it is so profound that none but a child-heart can pray.
Montgomery’s hymn has immortalized its profound simplicity:
Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed, The motion of a hidden fire That trembles in the breast.
Prayer is the simplest form of speech That infant lips can try;
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach The Majesty on high. That is gloriously true. A cry brings God. A cry is mightier than the polished phrase. The Pharisee prayed within himself. His prayers revolved on ruts of vanity in his own mind and heart. The publican cried and was heard. It is not of emergency exits of the soul we are thinking, but the sustained habit and experience of the man of prayer. Such prayer comes by training, and there is no discipline so exacting.
Coleridge says of such praying that it is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable, and it calls for the total concentration of all the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and learned men he pronounced incapable of prayer. To pray as God would have us pray is the greatest achievement on earth.
Such a life of prayer costs. It takes time. Hurried prayers and muttered litanies can never produce souls mighty in prayer. To become skilled in art and mechanism, learners give hours regularly every day that they may become proficient. Our Lord rose before daybreak that He might pray, and not infrequently He spent all night in prayer. All praying saints have spent hours every day in prayer. One is afraid to quote examples. In these days there is no time to pray; but without time, and a lot of it, we shall never learn to pray. It ought to be possible to give God one hour out of twenty-four all to Himself.
Anyway, let us make a start in the discipline of training in prayer by setting apart a fixed time every day for the exercise of prayer. We must seriously set our hearts to learn how to pray. "To pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon -- this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian’s warfare upon earth."
Teach us to pray, O Lord, we beseech thee. The Praying Spirit breathe, The watching power impart, From all entanglements beneath, Call off my anxious heart. My feeble mind sustain, By worldly thoughts oppressed, Appear, and bid me turn again To my eternal rest. When you feel the strain of discipline remember these words:
Thou art oft most present, Lord, In weak, distracted prayer; A sinner out of heart with self, Most often finds thee there. For prayer that humbles, sets the soul From all delusions free, And teaches it how utterly Dear Lord, it hangs on thee.