A Life of Prayer

A Life of Prayer

As the soul is filling with the longing for the manifestation of God’s glory to us and in us, through us and around us, and with the confidence that He hears the prayers of His children, the inmost life of the soul is continually rising upward in dependence and faith, in longing desire and trustful expectation.

It will not be difficult to say what is needed to live such a life of prayer. The first thing is undoubtedly the entire sacrifice of the life to God’s kingdom and glory. He who seeks to pray without ceasing because he wants to be very pious and good, will never attain to it. It is the forgetting ourselves and yielding to live for God and His honour that enlarges the heart, that teaches us to regard everything in the light of God and His will, and that instinctively recognizes in everything around us the need of God’s help and blessing, an opportunity for His glory. Because everything is weighed and tested by the one thing that fills the heart—the glory of God, and because the soul has learned that only what is of God can really be to Him and His glory, the whole life becomes a looking up, a crying from the inmost heart, for God to prove His power and love, and so show forth His glory. The believer awakes to the consciousness that he is one of the watchmen on Zion’s walls, one of the Lord’s remembrancers, whose call does really touch and move the King in heaven to do what would otherwise not be done. To forget oneself, to live for God and His kingdom among men, is the way to learn to pray without ceasing.

Jesus has said, “Ask and you shall receive;” count confidently on an answer, is with Him the beginning and the end of His teaching. In proportion as this assurance masters us, and it becomes a settled thing that our prayers do tell and that God does what we ask, we dare not neglect the use of this wonderful power: the soul turns wholly to God, and our life becomes prayer. We see that the Lord needs and takes time, because we and all around us are the creatures of time, under the law of growth. But knowing that not one single prayer of faith can possibly be lost, that there is sometimes a need for storing up and accumulating prayer, that persevering prayer is irresistible, prayer becomes the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God. Oh, do not let us any longer, by our reasonings, limit and enfeeble such free and sure promises of the living God, robbing them of their power, and ourselves of the wonderful confidence they are meant to inspire. Not in God, not in His secret will, not in the limitations of His promises, but in us, in ourselves is the hindrance; we are not what we should be to obtain the promise. Let us open our whole heart to God’s words of promise in all their simplicity and truth; they will search us and humble us; they will lift us up and make us glad and strong. And to the faith that knows it gets what it asks, prayer is not a work or a burden, but a joy and a triumph; it becomes a necessity and second nature.

This union of strong desire and firm confidence again is nothing but the life of the Holy Spirit within us. The Holy Spirit dwells in us, hides Himself in the depths of our being, and stirs the desire after the Unseen and the Divine, after God Himself. Where the child of God really lives and walks in the Spirit, where he is not content to remain carnal, but seeks to be spiritual, in everything a fit organ for the Divine Spirit to reveal the life of Christ and Christ Himself, there the never-ceasing intercession-life of the Blessed Son cannot but reveal and repeat itself in our experience. Because it is the Spirit of Christ who prays in us our prayer must be heard; because it is we who pray in the Spirit, there is need of time, and patience, and continual renewing of the prayer until every obstacle be conquered, and the harmony between God’s Spirit and ours is perfect.

Christ teaches to pray by showing how He does it, by doing it in us, by leading us to do it in Him and like Him. Christ is all, the life, and the strength too for a never ceasing prayer-life. It is the sight of this, the sight of the ever-praying Christ as our life, that enables us to pray without ceasing. Because His priesthood is the power of an endless life, that resurrection-life that never fades and never fails, and because His life is our life, praying without ceasing can become to us nothing less than the life joy of heaven.

The union between the Vine and the branch is indeed a prayer union. The highest conformity to Christ, the most blessed participation in the glory of His heavenly life, is that we take part in His work of intercession: He and we live always to pray. In the experience of our union with Him, praying without ceasing becomes a possibility, a reality, the holiest and most blessed part of our holy and blessed fellowship with God. We have our abode within the veil, in the presence of the Father. Praying without ceasing is the earthly manifestation of heaven come down to us, the foretaste of the life where they do not rest, day or night in the song of worship and adoration.

“Lord, teach us to pray!”