| The Golden Gate of Prayer |
Chapter 1 |
Page 6 |
It would be well if we should sit down always before beginning to pray, and think carefully over our wants. What are our deepest needs, the things we should ask God to give us or do for us just now, to-day? What are our heart’s actual desires for others, for our close friends, for our neighbors, for the unsaved, the tempted, the suffering? If we could get a clear and definite answer to these questions before we begin our supplications and intercessions, it would make our prayers more real. It would make them shorter than their wont, no doubt, but one sentence burdened with a heart’s cry is dearer to God than an hour’s memoriter rehearsing of words and phrases, with no deep yearnings and longings in them.
Indeed we have but a narrow and unworthy conception of prayer if our only thought of it is, making requests of God. In human friendship it would be very strange if there were never fellowship save when there were favors to ask, the one of the other. Love’s sweetest hours are those in which two hearts commune on themes dear to both, but in which neither has any request to make. The truest, loftiest prayer is one of communion, when we speak to God and he speaks to us. The deepest answer we can have to our praying is not God’s gifts, however precious these may be, but God himself, his love, his grace. The prayer that rises highest and is divinest is that in which we lose ourself in God, when God himself is all about us, filling us, inspiring our dull life with his own infinite blessedness.
“Close-present God! To me
It seems I could not have a wish
That was not shared by thee;
It seems I cannot be afraid
To speak my longings out,
So tenderly thy gathering love
Enfolds me round about.”
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