XVI
THE COSTLINESS OF PRAYER
"Lord, teach us to pray."--Luke xi. 1.
"And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search
for Me with all your heart."--Jer. xxix. 13.
IN his fine book on Benefits, Seneca says that nothing
is so costly to us as that is which we purchase by
prayer. When we come on that hard-to-be-understood
saying of his for the first time, we set it down
as another of the well-known paradoxes of the
Stoics. For He who is far more to us than all the
Stoics taken together has said to us on the subject
of prayer,--"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek,
and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened
unto you." Now what could possibly be cheaper
than just asking? And what could cost us less
than just to knock at God's door? And yet, when
we see such stern and self-denying souls as Dante
and Teresa setting their seals to Seneca's startling
words, that makes us stop and think whether
there may not be much more in the Stoic's paradoxical
words about the cost of prayer than lies
on the surface. And when we do stop and think
on the whole subject of prayer, and especially
on the costliness of prayer, such things as these
begin to be impressed upon us.
1. To begin with: Our habits of prayer come to
cost us no little time. We usually divide our day
of twenty-four hours in this way,--eight hours for
work; eight hours for meals, and rest, and recreation;
and eight hours for sleep. You will observe
that it is not said where reading, and meditation,
and prayer come in. And the reason of that is
because, with most men, these things do not come
in at all. But, in revenge, when reading and
meditation and prayer do once begin to come in
on a man, they make great inroads both upon his
hours of work, and his hours of recreation, and
even upon his hours of sleep. It is not that the
Hearer of prayer has any need of our hours: He
has no pleasure in taxing our time, either during
the day, or during the night. The truth is,--time
does not enter into His side of this matter at all.
He has always plenty of time. He inhabits eternity.
He is always waiting to be gracious. It is we who
need time to prepare our hearts to seek God. And
it takes some men a long, and a retired, and an
uninterrupted time to get their minds and their
hearts into the true frame for prayer and for the
presence of God. And it is this that makes the
night-time so suitable to some men for sacred
reading, for devout meditation, and for secret
prayer. Our time is now our own. Our day's
work is now done. Our door is now shut. And no
one will intrude upon us, or will in any way interfere
with us, at this time of night. Till from such
experiences as these, as life goes on, we come to
discover that time, pure time, is as indispensable
and as important an element in all true prayer as
is repentance, or faith, or reformation itself.
Indeed, without a liberal allowance of time, no man
has ever attained to a real life of prayer at all. So
much is that the case, that Seneca might quite
safely have descended into particulars, and might
very well have said that prayer costs so much time
that, instead of a few stolen moments now and
then, it takes from some men all that remains of
their time on this earth. Now that cannot, surely,
be said to be bought cheaply, which despoils us of
so much of the most precious thing we possess;
and a thing, moreover, which is so fast running
short with so many of us.
2. Time and Thought. I do not say that a man
must bring immense and commanding powers of
thought to prayer before he can succeed in it. But
I do say that those who do possess immense and
commanding powers of thought must bring all
their power of thought to bear upon their prayers,
if they would be accepted and answered. Almighty
God is infinitely the greatest and grandest subject
of thought and imagination in all the Universe:
and yet there is nothing in all the universe to which
most men give less thought and less imagination
than to Almighty God. Joseph Butler told Dr.
Samuel Clarke that the Being and the Nature of
God had been his incessant study ever since he
began to think at all. And, further on in life, he
said that, to his mind, Divinity was, of all our
studies, the most suitable for a reasonable nature.
Now, not philosophers, and theologians, and
moralists like Bishop Butler only, but all God's
people, must cultivate Butler's habits of thought,
if they have any ambition to please God greatly,
and to make real progress in the life of prayer.
Take any man of prayer you like, and you will see
Butler's noble habit of mind exhibited and illustrated
in that man. Take the Psalmists,--what
wealth of devotional thought there is in the Psalms!
Take the 17th of John,--what heights and depths of
heavenly thought there are in that single chapter!
Take Paul's intercessory prayers for the Ephesians
and the Colossians,--and what majesty and
Christological thought is there also! Take
Augustine and Andrewes, and see how they will
exercise not your powers of thought only but all
that is within you. To come back to Paul--that
man of time and thought in prayer, if ever there
was one: "Now unto the King Eternal, Immortal,
Invisible, the Only Wise God." And again: "The
Blessed and Only Potentate, the King of kings,
and Lord of lords. Who only hath immortality,
dwelling in the light which no man can approach
unto: Whom no man hath seen, nor can see."
What mortal man has powers of thought at all
equal to such doxologies as these? No man, no
angel: no, not the Incarnate Son Himself. And
what schoolmaster, in Sabbath school, or day
school, can himself grasp all this answer to his own
question--"God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and
Unchangeable, in Hs Being, Wisdom, Power,
Holiness, Justice, Goodness and Truth"? Try
your own compass and grasp of thought on such
matters as these; and say if Seneca was not wholly
in the right when he said that nothing is so severe
upon a man's powers of thought and imagination
and heart as just to approach God, and to abide for
a sufficient time before God, in prayer. No wonder
that we often fall asleep through sheer exhaustion
of body and mind, when we begin to give something
like adequate time and thought to meditation,
adoration, prayer and praise.
3. But both time and thought are easy, pleasant
and costless compared with this,--Thy will be done.
To say "Thy will be done," when we enter our
Gethsemane,--that throws us on our faces on the
earth: that brings the blood to our brows. And
yet at no less cost than that was God's own Son
"heard in that He feared." When some one, far
dearer to us than our own souls, is laid down on
his death-bed, to say "Not my will, but Thine be
done,"--at what a cost is that said in such an hour!
What a heart-racking price has to be paid for that
prayer! And yet, pay that price we must: pour
out our hearts into that prayer we must, if we are,
like our Lord, to be made perfect by suffering.
And not at death-beds only, but at times that are
worse than death,--times upon which I will not
trust myself to put words. Times also, when a
great cloud of disappointment and darkness gathers
over our life: when some great hope is for ever
blasted: when some great opportunity and expectation
is for ever gone, and never to return.
To lie down before God's feet and say, "Not my
will, but Thine be done," at such times--at what
a cost is that said and done! And to say it without
bitterness, or gloom, or envy, or ill-will at any
one: and to go on to the end of our lonely and
desolate life, full of love and service to God and
man,--at such a sight as that, God says, "This
is My Beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased!
Come up hither. Inherit the kingdom prepared for
thee before the foundation of the world!"
4. And, then, as to how we have to pay down all
our transgressions and secret sins before our
prayers will be heard,--let one speak who has
gone deeper into that matter than any one else I
know. "Now," she says, "I saw that there would
be no answer to me till I had entire purity of
conscience, and no longer regarded any iniquity
whatsoever in my heart. I saw that there were
some secret affections still left in me that were
spoiling all. I passed nearly twenty years of my
life on this stormy sea, constantly tossed with the
tempests of my own heart, and never nearing the
harbour. I had no sweetness in God, and certainly
no sweetness in sin. All my tears did not hold me
back from sin when the opportunity returned; till
I came to look on my tears as little short of a
delusion. And yet they were not a delusion. It was
the goodness of the Lord to give me such
compunction, even when it was not, as yet,
acompanied with complete reformation. But the whole
root of my evil lay in my not thoroughly avoiding
all occasions and opportunities of sin. I spent
eighteen years in that miserable attempt to
reconcile God and my life of sin. Now, out of all
that, I will say to you,"--she continues,--"never
cease from prayer, be your life ever so bad. Prayer
is the only way to amend your life: and, without
prayer, it will never be mended. I ought to have
utterly and thoroughly distrusted, and suspected,
and detested myself. I sought for help. I sometimes
took great pains to get help. But I did not
understand of how little use all that is unless we
utterly root out all confidence in ourselves, and
place our confidence at once, and for ever, and
absolutely, in God. Those were eighteen most
miserable years with me." But we do not need to
go beyond our own Bibles for all that. For we have
in our own Bibles these well-known words of David:
"If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will
not hear me. But, verily, God hath heard me: He
hath attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed
be God which bath not turned away my prayer,
nor his mercy from me."
5. And, not to go the length of gross sins,
either secret, or open, or long-continued, prayer
when you once take it in dead earnest, and as for
your immortal soul,--such prayer will cost you all
your soft, and easy, and slothful, and
self-indulgent habits. I will not go on to name any of
your soft, and easy, and slothful, and self-indulgent
habits. But you know them yourselves and your
conscience will not be slow in naming them to you,
if you will let her speak out. Seneca is always telling
young Lucilius to make up his mind. To make
up his mind whether he is to be one of God's
athletes or no. To make up his mind as the athletes
of the arena do. They make up their mind to deny
themselves in eating and drinking: in lounging all
day in the Campus Martius and in soaking themselves
all night in taverns: and on the day of the
arena they have their reward. You have the same
thing in the Epistle to the Hebrews: "Wherefore,
seeing we also are compassed about with so great a
cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight,
and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let
us run with patience the race that is set before us."
And again in Corinthians: "Know ye not that
they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth
the prize? And every man that striveth for the
mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do
it to obtain a corruptible crown: but we an incorruptible.
But I keep under my body, and
bring it into subjection: lest that by any means,
when I have preached to others, I myself should be
a castaway." "Do I pray," demands Andrewes
of himself, "do I pray--if not seven times a day,
as David, yet at least three times a day as Daniel?
If not, as Solomon, at length, yet shortly, as the
publican? If not like Christ, the whole night, at
least for one hour? If not on the ground and in
ashes, at least not in my bed? If not in sackcloth,
at least not in purple and fine linen? If not altogether
freed from all other desires, at least freed from
all immoderate, unclean and unholy desires?" O true and self-denying saints of God,--shall we ever
be found worthy to touch so much as your shoe-latchet?
In short, on this whole subject, and to sum up on
it,--prayer, in all its exacting costliness, is like
nothing so much as it is like faith and love. It is
like Paul's faith, which made him suffer the loss of
all things, and made him count all his best things
but as so much dung, that he might win Christ, and be found in Him.
Prayer is like love also,--that
most vehement and most all-consuming of all the
passions of the human heart. Prayer is like the
love of the bride in the song: "Set me as a seal
upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for
love is strong as death: jealousy is cruel as the
grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which
hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot
quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a
man would give all the substance of his house for
love, it would utterly be contemned." And so it is
with prayer. And even with all that, the half of
the price of prayer has not been told. For, after we
have paid down all that immense price for prayer,
and for the things that come to us by prayer, the
things we paid so much for are not to be called our
own after all. We have still to hold them, and enjoy
them, in a life of prayer and praise. Even as
we got those good things by prayer at first, so we
have to hold them by prayer to the end. It is as
Samuel Rutherford has it in his rare classic entitled
Christ Dying. "It is better," says that eminent
saint, "to hold your lands by prayer than by your
own industry, or by conquest, or by inheritance, or
by right of redemption. Have you wife, child,
houses, lands, wisdom, honour, learning, parts,
grace, godliness? See to it how you got them.
For, if you got them not by prayer at the first, you
do not hold them either righteously, or safely, or
with the true enjoyment of them. See that you
get a new charter to them all by continual and
believing prayer. Hold and enjoy all your possessions
by continual and believing prayer and
praise."
Stand forth, then, all you who are men of much prayer.
Stand forth, and say whether or no the
wise Stoic was right when he said that nothing
is so costly, so exorbitant, so extortionate, as that
is which is bought by prayer. While, on the other
hand, nothing is so truly and everlastingly enriching
as that is which is gotten and held by prayer,
and by prayer alone.
Lord, teach us to pray. Lord! Lord!
