Your ShelfYour Projects

Do You Pray?

25%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 4, 1915

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 92, No. 11.

Read the full edition

Do You Pray?

WE desire to make this a personal question to each reader of the REVIEW. There are prayers and prayers; indifferent, thoughtless prayers, and earnest, appealing, serious prayers. To which class do your prayers belong? Do you have a time each day for secret devotions, when, alone with God, you open your heart to the influences of his Holy Spirit, allowing its searching gaze to reveal to you your true and hidden motives and purposes, and to plead with you to cast aside every sin and obtain cleansing through the Lord Jesus Christ? This personal communion is the very soul of the prayer life, yea, of the Christian life, because no disciple can be a true child of God without this personal touch with his Saviour.
If you are a parent, do you maintain in your home the family altar? Each day, as the priest of your household, do you assemble the members of your family and offer to God the sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving? If you are not doing this, you are losing a precious privilege. At the family altar you can present the members of your flock to the care of the infinite Father, and you can pray freely for each by name. You can present individual needs, and you can seek for special blessing in times of trial and pressure. Dear brother, maintain in your home the family altar. If it has fallen down and been neglected, resolve by God's help that you will immediately erect it and maintain it henceforward.
Do you pray with your sick neighbors? with those seeking for light? Is your voice heard in the house of God in prayer and praise? These are precious privileges which God affords to his children. Do not neglect them. As you enter into these exercises, you will experience deepening joy. Your example, your prayers, even though offered falteringly, will be blessed of God to the strengthening and upbuilding of your brethren and sisters. There is great power in prayer. Let us maintain a continual connection with Heaven through this agency.