June 20

"Oh that I had wings like a dove!"—Psalms 55:6.

WHEN the soul is in sore straits, there is no solace and no cure comparable to prayer. Let me take the wings of a dove, and fly away, and be at rest—not in neglect of my appointed tasks, but in communion with my all-sufficient Lord. "Up, my drowsing eyes! Up, my sinking heart! Up to Jesus Christ!"

Prayer recalls the great and precious promises, and dwells on their wealth of meaning, and appropriates them as a personal possession. Prayer deepens and intensifies the sense of dependence, so that, instead of planning and toiling and fighting for itself, the soul clings and trusts and cleaves to Him who is its Lover and its Beloved. Prayer brings the remembrance that there is One—my King, my Father—who is wiser, mightier, immeasurably more prevailing, than all my adversaries. Prayer puts the strength of heaven itself to the test. There are a thousand valid reasons why I should pray and should not faint.

And the centuries behind me, since the old days when storm-driven psalmists sent their supplications up to their Lord, are filled with God's answers to prayer. His seasonable mercies and deliverances sparkle bright through all these dim bygone years, like the stars which illumine the midnight sky. I am compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses, and they cry with one voice: Ask, and thou shalt receive. Seek, and thou shalt find.

So, in the windy storm, I will give myself to prayer. So I will make Samuel Rutherford's creed my own. "I shall not believe," said he, "that Christ will put His Amen and Ring upon an imagination."