_This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if
not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been
allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as
private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc.
Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an
hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence
have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself. Surely the
experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a
due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may
be done through prayer--almighty prayer, I am ready to say--and why
not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination
of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!_--WILLIAM
WILBERFORCE.
Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their
essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to
our intercourse with God. Hurry, everywhere unseeming and damaging, is
so to an alarming extent in the great business of communion with God.
Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength,
are never the companions of hurry. Short devotions deplete spiritual
vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations, blight
the root and bloom of spiritual life. They are the prolific source of
backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive,
blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil.
It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the
praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy
wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers
Moses records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and
mighty cryings forty days and nights.
The statement of Elijah’s praying may be condensed to a few brief
paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when “praying he prayed,” spent
many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he
could, with assured boldness, say to Ahab, “There shall not be dew
nor rain these years, but according to my word.” The verbal brief of
Paul’s prayers is short, but Paul “prayed night and day exceedingly.”
The “Lord’s Prayer” is a divine epitome for infant lips, but the man
Christ Jesus prayed many an all-night ere his work was done; and his
all-night and long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and
perfection, and to his character the fullness and glory of its divinity.
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying,
true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which
flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong
fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass
as well in the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly
praying until it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form
and quiets conscience--the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our
praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are gone.
Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable
piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the
praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, niggardly,
and slovenly.
It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short
devotions cut the pipe of God’s full flow. It takes time in the secret
places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the
picture.
Henry Martyn laments that “want of private devotional reading and
shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much
strangeness between God and his soul.” He judged that he had dedicated
too much time to _public_ ministrations and too little to _private_
communion with God. He was much impressed to set apart times for
fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer. Resulting from this
he records: “Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours.” Said
William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: “I must secure more time for
private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The
shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and
faint. I have been keeping too late hours.” Of a failure in Parliament
he says: “Let me record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from
private devotions having been contracted, and so God let me stumble.”
More solitude and earlier hours was his remedy.
More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive and
invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours
for prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be
so rare or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short
and hurried. A Christly temper in its sweet and passionless fragrance
would not be so alien and hopeless a heritage if our closet stay were
lengthened and intensified. We live shabbily because we pray meanly.
Plenty of time to feast in our closets will bring marrow and fatness
to our lives. Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures our
ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are
deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are
losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in
the closet instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest
victories are often the results of great waiting--waiting till words
and plans are exhausted, and silent and patient waiting gains the
crown. Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis, “Shall not God
avenge his own elect which cry day and night unto him?”
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must
be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the
littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results
for good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real
praying; we cannot do too little of the sham. We must learn anew the
worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer. There is nothing
which it takes more time to learn. And if we would learn the wondrous
art, we must not give a fragment here and there--“A little talk with
Jesus,” as the tiny saintlets sing--but we must demand and hold with
iron grasp the best hours of the day for God and prayer, or there will
be no praying worth the name.
This, however, is not a day of prayer. Few men there are who pray.
Prayer is defamed by preacher and priest. In these days of hurry and
bustle, of electricity and steam, men will not take time to pray.
Preachers there are who “say prayers” as a part of their programme,
on regular or state occasions; but who “stirs himself up to take
hold upon God?” Who prays as Jacob prayed--till he is crowned as a
prevailing, princely intercessor? Who prays as Elijah prayed--till all
the locked-up forces of nature were unsealed and a famine-stricken
land bloomed as the garden of God? Who prayed as Jesus Christ prayed
as out upon the mountain he “continued all night in prayer to God?”
The apostles “gave themselves to prayer”--the most difficult thing to
get men or even the preachers to do. Laymen there are who will give
their money--some of them in rich abundance--but they will not “give
themselves” to prayer, without which their money is but a curse. There
are plenty of preachers who will preach and deliver great and eloquent
addresses on the need of revival and the spread of the kingdom of God,
but not many there are who will do that without which all preaching and
organizing are worse than vain--pray. It is out of date, almost a lost
art, and the greatest benefactor this age could have is the man who
will bring the preachers and the Church back to prayer.