Prayer as Christian freedom, and prayer as
Christian life--these are two points I would now expand.
I. First, as to the moral freedom involved and
achieved in prayer.
Prayer has been described as religion in action.
But that as it stands is not a sufficient definition of the prayer which lives
on the Cross. The same thing might be said about the choicest forms of
Christian service to humanity. It is true enough, and it may carry us far; but
only if we become somewhat clear about the nature of the religion at work.
Prayer is certainly not the action of a religion mainly subjective. It is the
effective work of a religion which hangs upon the living God, of a soul surer
of God than of itself, and living not its own life, but the life of the Son of
God. To say prayer is faith in action would be better; for the word "faith"
carries a more objective reference than the word "religion." Faith is faith in
another. In prayer we do not so much work as interwork. We are fellow workers
with God in a reciprocity. And as God is the freest Being in existence, such
co-operant prayer is the freest things that man can do. It we were free in
sinning, how much more free in the praying which undoes sin! If we were free to
break God's will, how much more free to turn it or to accept it! Petitionary
prayer is man's cooperation in kind with God amidst a world He freely made for
freedom. The world was made by a freedom which not only left room for the
kindred freedom of prayer, but which so ordered all things in its own interest
that in their deepest depths they conspire to produce prayer. To pray in faith
is to answer God's freedom in its own great note. It means we are taken up into
the fundamental movement of the world. It is to realize that for which the
whole world, the world as a whole, was made. It is an earnest of the world's
consummation. We are doing what the whole world was created to do. We overleap
in the spirit all between now and then, as in the return to Jesus we overleap
the two thousand years that intervene. The object the Father's loving purpose
had in appointing the whole providential order was intercourse with man's soul.
That order of the world is, therefore, no rigid fixture, nor is it even a fated
evolution. It is elastic, adjustable, flexible, with margins for freedom, for
free modification in God and man; always keeping in view that final goal of
communion, and growing into it be a spiritual interplay in which the whole of
Nature is involved. The goal of the whole cosmic order is the "manifestation of
the sons of God," the realization of complete sonship, its powers and its
confidences.
Thus we rise to say that our prayer is the
momentary function of the Eternal Son's communion and intercession with the
Eternal Father. We are integrated in advance into the final Christ, for whom,
and to whom, all creation moves. Our prayer is more than the acceptance by us
of God's will; it is its assertion in us. The will of God is that men should
pray everywhere. He wills to be entreated. Prayer is that will of God's making
itself good. When we entreat we give effect to His dearest will. And in His
will is our eternal liberty. In this will of His our finds itself, and is at
home. It ranges the liberties of the Father's house. But here prayer must draw
from the Cross, which is the frontal act of our emancipation as well as the
central revelation of God's own freedom in grace. The action of the Atonement
and of its release of us is in the nature of prayer. It is the free return of
the Holy upon the Holy in the Great Reconciliation.
II. Then, secondly, as to prayer being the
expression of the perennial new life of faith in the Cross. The Christian life
is prayer without ceasing.
When we are told to pray without ceasing, it
seems to many tastes to-day to be somewhat extravagant language. And no doubt
that is true. Why should we be concerned to deny it? Measured language and the
elegant mean is not the note of the New Testament at least. Mhoen zyan, said the Greek--too much of nothing. But can
we love or trust God too much? Christian faith is one that overcomes and
commands the world in a passion rather than balances it. It triumphs in a
conclusive bliss, it does not play off one part against another. The grace of
Christ is not but graciousness of nature, and He does not rule His Church by
social act. The peace of God is not the calm of culture, it is not the charm of
breeding. Every great forward movement in Christianity is associated with much
that seems academically extravagant. Erasmus is always shocked with Luther. It
is only an outlet of that essential extravagance which makes the paradox of the
Cross, and keeps it as the irritant, no less than the life of the
world--perhaps because it is the life of the world. There is nothing so
abnormal, so unworldly, so supernatural, in human life as prayer, nothing that
is more of an instinct, it is true, but also nothing that is less rational
among all the things that keep above the level of the silly. The whole
Christian life in so far as it is lived from the Cross and by the Cross is
rationally an extravagance. For the Cross is the paradox of all things; and the
action of the Spirit is the greatest miracle in the world; and yet it is the
principle of the world. Paradox is but the expression of that dualism which is
the moral foundation of a Christian world. I live who die daily. I live
another's life.
To pray without ceasing is not, of course, to
engage in prayer without break. That is an impossible literalism. True, "They
rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who wert,
and art, and art to come." But it is mere poverty of soul to think of this as
the iteration of a doxology. It is deep calling unto deep, eternity greeting
eternity. The only answer to God's eternity is an eternal attitude of
prayer.
Nor does the phrase mean that the Church shall
use careful means that the stream and sound of prayer shall never cease to flow
at some spots of the earth, as the altar lamp goes not out. It does not mean
the continuous murmur of the mass following the sun round the world, incessant
relays of adoring priests, and functions going on day and night.
But it means the constant bent and drift of the
soul--as the Word which was from the beginning (John i. 1) was hroe ton Qesn. All the current of its being set towards
Him. It means being "in Christ," being in such a moving, returning
Christ--reposing in this godward, and not merely godlike life. The note of
prayer becomes the habit of the heart, the tone and tension of its new nature;
in such a way that when we are released from the grasp of our occupations the
soul rebounds to its true bent, quest, and even pressure upon God. It is the
soul's habitual appetite and habitual food. A growing child of God is always
hungry. Prayer is not identical with the occasional act of praying. Like the
act of faith, it is a whole life thought of as action. It is the life of faith
in its purity, in its vital action. Eating and speaking are necessary to life,
but they are not living. And how hidden prayer may be--beneath even gaiety! If
you look down on Portland Race you see but a shining sea; only the pilot knows
the tremendous current that pervades the smiling calm.
So far this "pray without ceasing" from being
absurd because extravagant that every man's life is in some sense a continual
state of prayer. For what is his life's prayer but its ruling passion? All
energies, ambitions and passions are but expressions of a standing nisus in
life, of a hunger, a draft, a practical demand upon the future, upon the
unattained and the unseen. Every life is a draft upon the unseen. If you are
not praying towards God you are towards something else. You pray as your face
is set--towards Jerusalem or Babylon. The very egotism of craving life is
prayer. The great difference is the object of it. To whom, for what, do we
pray? The man whose passion is habitualy set upon pleasure, knowledge, wealth,
honour, or power is in a state of prayer to these things or for them. He prays
without ceasing. These are his real gods, on whom he waits day and night. He
may from time to time go on his knees in church, and use words of Christian
address and petition. He may even feel a momentary unction in so doing. But it
is a flicker; the other devotion is his steady flame. His real God is the
ruling passion and steady pursuit of his life taken as a whole. He certainly
does not pray in the name of Christ. And what he worships in spirit and in
truth is another God than he addresses at religious times. He prays to an
unknown God for a selfish boon. Still, in a sense, he prays. The set and drift
of his nature prays. It is the prayer of instinct, not of faith. It is prayer
that needs total conversion. But he cannot stop praying either to God or to
God's rival--to self, society, world, flesh, or even devil. Every life that is
not totally inert in praying either to God or God's adversary.
What do we really mean, whom do we mean, when we
say, "My God"? In what sense mine? May our God not be but an idol we exploit,
and in due course our doom?
There is a fearful and wonderful passage in
Kierkegaard's Entweder-Oder which, if we transfer it to this connection,
stirs thoughts deeper than its own tragedy. The seduced, heart-broken, writes
to the seducer.
"John! I do not say my John. That I now see you
never were. I am heavily punished for ever letting such an idea be my joy.
Yet--yet, mine you are--my seducer, my deceiver, my enemy, my murderer, the
spring of my calamity, the grave of my joy, the abyss of my misery. I call you
mine, and I am yours--your curse for ever. Oh, do not think I will slay you and
put a dagger into you. But flee where you will, I am yours, to the earth's end
yours. Love a hundred others but I am yours. I am yours in your last hour, I am
yours, yours, yours--your curse."
Beware lest the whole trend of the soul fix on a
diety that turns a doom. There is the prayer which makes God our judgment as
well as one which makes Him our joy.
Prayer is the nature of our hell as well as our
heaven.
Our hell is ceaseless, passionate, fruitless,
hopeless, gnawing prayer. It is the heart churning, churning grinding itself
out in misery. It is life's passion and struggle surging back on itself like a
barren, salt, corroding sea. It is the heart's blood rising like a fountain
only to fall back on us in red rain. It is prayer which we cannot stop,
addressed to nothing, and obtaining nothing. It calls into space and night. Or
it is addressed to self, and it aggravates the wearing action of self on self.
Our double being revolves on itself, like two millstones with nothing to
grind.
And prayer is our heaven. It goes home to God,
and attains there, and rests there. We are "in Christ," whose whole existence
is prayer, who is wholly prsz tsn Qesn for us. He is
there to extinguish our hell and make our heaven--far more to quench our wrath
and our seething than God's.
To cultivate the ceaseless spirit of prayer, use
more frequent acts of prayer. To learn to pray with freedom, force yourself to
pray. The great liberty begins in necessity.
Do not say, "I cannot pray, I am not in the
spirit." Pray till you are in the spirit. Think of analogies from lower levels.
Sometimes when you need rest most you are too restless to lie down and take it.
Then compel yourself to lie down, and to lie still. Often in ten minutes the
compulsion fades into consent, and you sleep, and rise a new man.
Again, it is often hard enough to take up the
task which in half an hour you enjoy. It is often against the grain to turn out
of an evening to meet the friends you promised. But once you are in their midst
you are in your element.
Sometimes, again, you say, "I will not go to
church. I do not feel that way." That is where the habit of an ordered
religious life comes in aid. Religion is the last region for chance desires. Do
it as a duty, and it may open out as a blessing. Omit it, and you may miss the
one thing that would have made an eternal difference. You stroll instead, and
return with nothing but appetite--when you might have come back with an
inspiration. Compel yourself to meet your God as you would meet your promises,
your obligations, your fellow men.
So if you are averse to pray, pray the more. Do
not call it lip-service. That is not the lip-service God disowns. It is His
Spirit acting in your self-coercive will, only not yet in your heart. What is
unwelcome to God is lip-service which is untroubled at not being more. As
appetite comes with eating, so prayer with praying. Our hearts learn the
language of the lips.
Compel yourself often to shape on your lips the
detailed needs of your soul. It is not needful to inform God, but to deepen
you, to inform yourself before God, to enrich that intimacy with ourself which
is so necessary to answer the intimacy of God. To common sense the fact that
God knows all we need, and wills us all good, the fact of His infinite
Fatherhood, is a reason for not praying. Why tell Him what He knows? Why ask
what He is more than willing to give? But to Christian faith and to spiritual
reason it is just the other way. Asking is polar cooperation. Jesus turned the
fact to a use exactly the contrary of its deistic sense. He made the
all-knowing Fatherhood the ground of true prayer. We do not ask as beggars but
as children. Petition is not mere receptivity, nor is it mere pressure; it is
filial reciprocity. Love loves to be told what it knows already. Every lover
knows that. It wants to be asked for what it longs to give. And that is the
principle of prayer to the all-knowing Love. As God knows all, you may reckon
that your brief and humble prayer will be understood (Matt. vi. 8). It will be
taken up into the intercession of the Spirit stripped of its dross, its
inadequacy made good, and presented as prayer should be. That is praying in the
Holy Ghost. Where should you carry your burden but to the Father, where Christ
took the burden of all the world? We tell God, the heart searcher, our heavy
thoughts to escape from brooding over them. "When my spirit was overwhelmed
within me, Thou knewest my path." (Ps. cxlii. 3). So Paul says the Spirit
intercedes for us and gives our broken prayer divine effect (Rom. viii. 26). To
be sure of God's sympathy is to be inspired to prayer, where His mere knowledge
would crush it. There is no father who would be satisfied that his son should
take everything and ask for nothing. It would be thankless. To cease asking is
to cease to be grateful. And what kills petition kills praise.
Go into your chamber, shut the door, and
cultivate the habit of praying audibly. Write prayers and burn them. Formulate
your soul. Pay no attention to literary form, only to spiritual reality. Read a
passage of Scripture and then sit down and turn it into prayer, written or
spoken. Learn to be particular, specific, and detailed in your prayer so long
as you are not trivial. General prayers, literary prayers, and stately phrases
are, for private prayer, traps and sops to the soul. To formulate your soul is
one valuable means to escape formalizing it. This is the best, the wholesome,
kind of self-examination. Speaking with God discovers us safely to ourselves We
"find" ourselves, come to ourselves, in the Spirit. Face your special
weaknesses and sins before God. Force yourself to say to God exactly where you
are wrong. When anything goes wrong, do not ask to have it set right, without
asking in prayer what is was in you that made it go wrong. It is somewhat
fruitless to ask for a general grace to help specific flaws, sins, trials, and
griefs. Let prayer be concrete, actual, a direct product of life's real
experiences. Pray as your actual self, not as some fancied saint. Let it be
closely relevant to your real situation. Pray without ceasing in this sense.
Pray without a break between your prayer and your life. Pray so that there is a
real continuity between your prayer and your whole actual life. But I will bear
round upon this point again immediately.
Meantime, let me say this. Do not allow your
practice in prayer to be arrested by scientific or philosophic considerations
as to how answer is possible. That is a valuable subject for discussion, but it
is not entitled to control our practice. Faith is at least as essential to the
soul as science, and it has a foundation more independent. And prayer is not
only a necessity of faith, it is faith itself in action.
Criticism of prayer dissolves in the experience
of it. When the soul is at close quarters with God it becomes enlarged enough
to hold together in harmony things that oppose, and to have room for harmonious
contraries. For instance: God, of course, is always working for His Will and
Kingdom. But man is bound to pray for its coming, while it is coming all the
time. Christ laid stress on prayer as a necessary means of bringing the Kingdom
to pass. And it cannot come without our praying. Why? Because its coming is the
prayerful frame of soul. So again with God's freedom. It is absolute. But it
reckons on ours. Our prayer does not force His hand; it answers His freedom in
kind. We are never so active and free as in prayer to an absolutely free God.
We share His freedom when we are "in Christ."
If I must choose between Christ, who bids me pray
for everything, and the servant, who tells me certain answers are physically
and rationally impossible, must I not choose Christ? Because, while the savant
knows much about nature and its action (and much more than Christ did), Christ
knew everything about the God of nature and His reality. He knew more of what
is possible to God than anybody has ever known about what is possible in
nature. On such a subject as prayer, anyone is a greater authority who wholly
knows the will of God than he who only knows God's methods, and knows them but
in part. Prayer is not an act of knowledge but of faith. It is not a matter of
calculation but of confidence--"that our faith should not stand in the wisdom
of men, but in the power of God." Which means that in this region we are not to
be regulated by science, but by God's self-revelation. Do not be so timid about
praying wrongly if you pray humbly. If God is really the Father that Christ
revealed, then the principle is--take everything to Him that exercises you.
Apart from frivolity, such as praying to find the stud you lost, or the knife,
or the umbrella, there is really no limitation in the New Testament on the
contents of petition. Any regulation is as to the spirit of the prayer, the
faith it springs from. In all distress which mars your peace, petition must be
the form your faith takes--petition for rescue. Keep close to the New Testament
Christ, and then ask for anything you desire in that contact. Ask for
everything you can ask in Christ's name, i.e. everything desirable by a man who
is in Christ's kingdom of God, by a man who lives for it at heart, everything
in tune with the purpose and work of the kingdom in Christ. If you are in that
kingdom, then pray freely for whatever you need or wish to keep you active and
effective for it, from daily bread upwards and outwards. In all things make
your requests known. At least you have laid them on God's heart; and faith
means confidences between you and not only favours. And there is not confidence
if you keep back what is hot or heavy on your heart. If prayer is not a play of
the religious fantasy, or a routine task, it must be the application of faith
to a concrete actual and urgent situation. Only remember that prayer does not
work by magic, and that stormy desire is not fervent, effectual prayer. You may
be but exploiting a mighty power; whereas you must be in real contact with the
real God. It is the man that most really has God that most really seeks God.
I said a little while ago that to pray without
ceasing also meant to pray without a breach with your actual life and the whole
situation in which you are. This is the point at which to dwell on that. If you
may not come to God with the occasions of your private life and affairs, then
there is some unreality in the relation between you and Him. If some private
crisis absorbs you, some business or family anxiety of little moment to others
but of much to you, and if you may not bring that to God in prayer, then one of
two things. Either it is not you, in your actual reality, that came to God, but
it is you in a pose--you in some role which you are trying with poor success to
play before Him. You are trying to pray as another person than you are,--a
better person, perhaps, as some great apostle, who should have on his
worshipping mind nothing but the grand affairs of the Church and Kingdom, and
not be worried by common cares. You are praying in court-dress. You are trying
to pray as you imagine one should pray to God, i.e. as another person than you
are, and in other circumstances. You are creating a self and a situation to
place before God. Either that or you are not praying to a God who loves, helps,
and delivers you in every pinch of life, but only to one who uses you as a pawn
for the victory of His great kingdom. You are not praying to Christ's God. You
are praying to a God who cares only for the great actions in His kingdom, for
the heroic people who cherish nothing but the grand style, or for the calm
people who do not deeply feel life's trials. The reality of prayer is bound up
with the reality and intimacy of life.
And its great object is to get home as we are to
God as He is, and to win response even when we get no compliance. The prayer of
faith does not mean a prayer absolutely sure that it will receive what it asks.
That is not faith. Faith is that attitude of soul and self to God which is the
root and reservoir of prayer apart from all answer. It is what turns need into
request. It is what moves your need to need God. It is what makes you sure your
prayer is heard and stored, whether granted or not. "He putteth all my tears in
His bottle." God has old prayers of yours long maturing by Him. What wine you
will drink with Him in His kingdom! Faith is sure that God refuses with a
smile; that He says No in the spirit of Yes, and He gives or refuses always in
Christ, our Great Amen. And better prayers are stirred by the presence of the
Deliverer than even by the need of deliverance.
It is not sufficiently remembered that before
prayer can expect an answer it must be itself an answer. That is what is meant
by prayer in the name of Christ. It is prayer which answers God's gift in
Christ, with Whom are already given us all things. And that is why we must pray
without ceasing, because in Christ God speaks without ceasing. Natural or
instinctive prayer is one thing; supernatural prayer is another; it is the
prayer not of instinct but of faith. It is our word answering God's. It is more
the prayer of fullness even than of need, of strength than of weakness--though
it be "a strength girt round with weakness." Prayer which arises from mere need
is flung out to a power which is only remembered, or surmised, or unknown. It
is flung into darkness and uncertainty. But in Christian prayer we ask for what
we need because we are full of faith in God's power and word, because need
becomes petition at the touch of His word. (I always feel that in the order of
our public worship prayer should immediately follow the lesson, without the
intrusion on an anthem. And for the reason I name--that Christian prayer is our
word answering God's). We pray, therefore, in Christ's name, or for His sake,
because we pray as answering the gift in Christ. Our prayer is the note the
tremulous soul utters when its chords are smitten by Him. We then answer above
all things God's prayer to us in His cross that we would be reconciled. God so
beseeches us in Christ. So that, if we put it strongly, we may say that our
prayer to God in Christ is our answer to God's prayer to us there. "The best
thing in prayer is faith," says Luther.
And the spirit of prayer in Christ's name is the
true child-spirit. A certain type of religion is fond of dwelling on faith as
the spirit of divine childhood; and its affinities are all with the tender and
touching element in childhood. But one does not always get from the prophets of
such piety the impression of a life breathed in prayer. And the notion is not
the New Testament sense of being children of God. That is a manlier, a maturer
thing. It is being sons of God by faith, and by faith's energy of prayer. It is
not the sense of being as helpless as a child that clings, not the sense of
weakness, ignorance, gentleness, and all that side of things. But it is the
spirit of a prayer which is a great act of faith, and therefore a power. Faith
is not simply surrender, but adoring surrender, not a mere sense of dependence,
but an act of intelligent committal, and the confession of a holiness which is
able to save, keep, and bless for ever.
How is it that the experience of life is so often
barren of spiritual culture for religious people? They become stoic and
stalwart, but not humble; they have been sight, but no insight. Yet it is not
the stalwarts but the saints that judge the world, i.e. that ake the true
divine measure of the world and get to its subtle, silent, and final powers.
Whole sections of our Protestantism have lost the virtue of humility or the
understanding of it. It means for them no more than modesty or diffidence. It
is the humility of weakness, not of power. To many useful, and even strong,
people no experience seems to bring this subtle, spiritual intelligence, this
finer discipline of the moral man. No rebukes, no rebuffs, no humiliations, no
sorrows, seem to bring it to them. They have no spiritual history. Their
spiritual biography not even an angel could write. There is no romance in their
soul's story. At sixty they are, spiritually, much where they were at
twenty-six. To calamity, to discipline of any kind, they are simply resilient.
Their religion is simply elasticity. It is but lusty life. They rise up after
the smart is over, or the darkness fades away, as self-confident as if they
were but seasoned politicians beaten at one election, but sure of doing better
at the next. They are to the end just irrepressible, or persevering, or dogged.
And they are as juvenile in moral insight, as boyish in spiritual perception,
as ever.
Is it not because they have never really had
personal religion? That is, they have never really prayed with all their heart;
only, at most, with all their fervour, certainly not with strength and mind.
They have neer "spread out" their whole soul and situation to a god who knows.
They have never opened the petals of their soul in the warm sympathy of His
knowledge. They have not become particular enough in their prayer, faithful
with themselves, or relevant to their complete situation. They do not face
themselves, only what happens to them. They pray with their heart and not with
their conscience. They pity themselves, perhaps they spare themselves, they
shrink from hurting themselves more than misfortune hurts them. They say, "If
you knew all you could not help pitying me." They do not say, "God knows all,
and how can He spare me?" For themselves, or for their fellows, it is the
prayer of pity, not of repentance. We need the prayer of self-judgment more
than the prayer of fine insight.
We are not humble in God's sight, partly because
in our prayer there is a point at which we cease to pray, where we do not turn
everything out into God's light. It is because there is a chamber or two in our
souls where we do not enter in and take God with us. We hurry Him by the door
as we take Him along the corridors of our life to see our tidy places or our
public rooms. We ask from our prayers too exclusively comfort, strength,
enjoyment, or tenderness and graciousness, and not often enough humiliation and
its fine strength. We want beautiful prayers, touching prayers, simple prayers,
thoughtful prayers; prayers with a quaver or a tear in them, or prayers with
delicacy and dignity in them. But searching prayer, humbling prayer, which is
the prayer of the conscience, and not merely of the heart or taste; prayer
which is bent on reality, and to win the new joy goes through new misery if
need by--are such prayers as welcome and common as they should be? Too much of
our prayer is apt to leave us with the self-complacency of the sympathetically
incorrigible, of the benevolent and irremediable, of the breezy octogenarian,
all of whose yesterdays look backward with a cheery and exasperating smile.
It is an art--this great and creative
prayer--this intimate conversation with God. "Magna ars est conversari cum
Deo," says Thomas a Kempis. It has to be learned. In social life we learn
that conversation is not mere talk. There is an art in it, if we are not to
have a table of gabblers. How much more is it so in the conversation of heaven!
We must learn that art by practice, and by keeping the best society in that
kind. Associate much with the great masters in this kind; especially with the
Bible; and chiefly with Christ. Cultivate His Holy Spirit. He is the grand
master of God's art and mystery in communing with man. And there is no other
teacher, at least, of man's art of communion with God.