Adoration

Secret Prayer before the Lord is an exercise in Godly fear, too often neglected, or minimized, by believers. It is all too possible, and too common, to spend our season of Secret Prayer almost wholly in petitions for ourselves, or in petitions for other persons, perhaps with some admixture of confession and of thanksgiving on the side. All too often the Christians are without any real aim and effort to look off altogether to the Holy One Himself, to our blessed God and Father in Christ Jesus, in holy adoration and humility. But if this is so, we are missing one of the great purposes of Secret Prayer and losing one of its great blessings.

In approaching the subject of such adoration, with a view to resolve and take action in the matter, let us first briefly remember what adoration is; then consider some preparations for it; and lastly recount some of its manifold blessings which follow in its wake.

1. What is true adoration?

It is an action of the soul towards God, implying its contemplation of Him and, if I may use the word, its admiration of Him. But it is properly far more than contemplation, far more than admiration. It is abasement, it is prostration, it is submission, it is ascription. It is the kneeling down of our innermost spirit in deepest awe and solemn loyalty before the Eternal and Holy One, conscious to some degree of the unspeakable difference between our creaturehood and His Creatorship, our darkness and His light, our sin and His purity, our lost estate in nature and His wonderful redeeming mercy; in one word, between our nothing and His all. Something of this sense of contrast underlies all true adoration, though it is not the first and leading consciousness in it. That leading consciousness is the sight, in some measure, of what He is. But that must always actually bear some relation, in Christian adoration, to the consciousness of what we are.

Adoration looks with joy, yes, with true joy, to the Holy One; but it never forgets that it looks up. It ascribes, it praises, in a sense it loses itself in God; but never as if the adorer were not related to the Adored One in bonds of unspeakable lessness, dependence, and obligation. It rejoices in God for the sake of “His great glory”; but its joy is penetrated with the blessed consciousness of surrender: “I have said unto the Lord, Thou art my Lord.” Ps. 16:2.

2. Then we come to think of some preparations for adoration. Here of course I must press the duty, the unspeakable privilege, of the preparation which consists in holy contemplation of God as self-revealed, above all as He has revealed Himself in His written Word. Here, as we have seen before, is a work vitally connected with secret worship, the work of secret Bible study, as we seek “in all the Scriptures,” Luke 24:27, in the spirit of adoration, for their inexhaustible materials for adoration. Where shall we begin, where end, in such research? Shall we dwell sometimes on the absolute Creatorship of God as revealed in His Word, (Rev. 4:11) that great foundation truth so far more distinctive of Scripture than many Christians remember? Shall we dwell upon His revealed sovereignty in grace and providence? Ephesians 1:11. On His unsearchable and awful while most blissful and blessed Holiness? Rev. 4:8. On His essential Love, on Himself as Love? 1 John 4:8-16. Shall we look with the gaze of faith upon the revealed certainties that on the one hand God loved the world, with such a love that He gave His Son, John 3:16, on the other hand that the sheep of the Son, given Him by the Father, shall never perish, John 10:28? Shall we weigh, in their written fulness, the promises of eternal mercy to the penitent, awakened and “flying for refuge,” to the backslidden disciple returning to his Lord, Jer. 3:14, to the faint and tired believer looking up to Him for deliverance from sin and for power to serve and to suffer, Ps. 25:15, Isa. 31:31. Shall we look full upon “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” 2 Cor. 4:6, on God revealed, reconciled, united to believing man, imparted to believing man, in His dear Son, by His blessed Spirit? In every direction, and oh in this last direction indeed, the materials for adoration will be inexhaustible. And we shall find, as we thus really search the Scriptures, that the work is not only a preparative to adoration but is always and in its very nature passing up into it.

To look upwards towards Him is also to veil the eyes of the adoring soul with its very wings, and to begin at once the song of heavenly adoration, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Isa. 6:3, Rev. 4:8.

I enter no further into details; there can be little need. The Scriptures are charged throughout with occasions and aids for the exercise of adoration, just because their centre is God; their profound theme is His glory; they bless man not by praising man but by revealing to him God in Christ.

I plead with my whole heart for the great general duty and precious gain of such Bible study, such study of God in His Word as shall always feed a direct and humble adoration. For this, as for other elements of secret worship, we must give ourselves time, if we would “take root downward and bear fruit upward” Isa. 37:31. We must do our utmost to renounce hurrying; we must renounce the spirit of hurry altogether.

And as regards the special place of adoration in Secret Prayer, I need not spend words on showing how large that place should be. Secret Prayer is that part of worship in which we can be most deliberate, and most full, in the particulars of thought and supplication. And thus, it is the occasion on which we may best hope, by the grace of God, to develop and enjoy the distinctively heavenly exercise of adoration.

3. Of the manifold blessings of secret adoration, I only point to some few.

First, this holy practice, diligently followed, will both chasten and wonderfully warm and animate our whole experience, from the centre outwards. Does not the experience of true Christians, at the present day, in many and very various directions, greatly need either chastening, or uplifting, or both together? I believe that the neglect of the duty of tender secret adoration lies very near the root of that need.

Again, this work of the soul in secret, just because it will lead directly to a deeper acquaintance with the Lord Himself, will be a powerful secret means to our growth in the peace of the Gospel, peace with God and peace in God, and so to that quiet power, that happy serviceableness and influence, which comes with and through such peace. The regenerate and believing soul, as it worships in hallowed secrecy its revealed and blessed God and Saviour, learns lessons not otherwise to be learned of its nearness to Him, its rest under His shadow, its safety in His covenant sealed with blood, its present and eternal life in the risen Redeemer’s life, its prospect of a heaven whose bliss shall be to glorify God in glory and to enjoy Him fully forever. And such close approaches to Him, far from being out of relation to the wear and tear of the common day, are the truest preparation for it, and the surest safeguard in it. He who has seen, and sees, God is he who can face men. He who has indeed worshipped is he who is indeed ready to serve.

Lastly, the exercise of secret adoration will afford a precious antidote to that distortion of the dear and glorious truths of abundant pardon, of free salvation, of present and full acceptance in Christ Jesus through faith, which would centre and terminate thought and emotion upon our own benefit. It will tend to keep that blessed benefit, for which His Name be praised, always in its relation to the glory of the Giver, and therefore always in relation to the needs and blessing of others. The true worshipper of the true God cannot live unto himself. I close this part of our subject by the quotation of a few sentences from the remains of a great servant of God; the duty and exercise of adoration was always a beloved theme. “There are but two objects that I have ever desired these forty years to behold; the one is my own vileness; the other is the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; and I have always thought that they should be viewed together. . . . Our praise should pervade our whole worship I consider the religion of the day as materially defective in this point. I do not see, as much as I could wish, a holy reverential awe of God.” Years before his death, a death of such adoring peace and joy, he wrote again: “I have often wished there were more of holy reverence in religious people when speaking of God, and of the things which He has wrought for their salvation. I see not an instance in Scripture of any remarkable manifestation of God to man which did not instantly generate in his heart and produce in his act a lowly reverence and self-abasement. I would have the whole of my experience one continued sense, first, of my nothingness, and dependence upon God, secondly of my guiltiness and desert before Him, thirdly of my obligations to redeeming love, as utterly overwhelming me with its incomprehensibl breadth, height, length and depth.” Such be our experience, living and dying. And to it let us practice, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, as this servant of the Lord did, late and early, the holy duty and blessed privilege of secret adoration.