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PRAYER

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 12, 1901

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 78, No. 11.

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PRAYER

Secret Prayer

THE “hour of prayer” must have a place on the schedule of the most crowded life if that life is not doomed to make a spiritual failure. I speak to busy women and busy men. Sometimes we feel that we owe so much to our immediate duties and surroundings, that we must curtail the hour of prayer. Friends, it is a failure.
We shall pay in sadness and weakness for all that we cut off from the hour of prayer; and when we have once come to realize what the hour of prayer can do for us, how it can lift us from weakness into strength, who that hath known the full power of that hour would give it up at any price? It is the hour of growth, the hour of vision; it is the hour of trust, of happiness, of peace. It is the hour of refreshing and the renewing of powers and faculties taxed and exhausted by the drive of our work. Most marvelously, it is the hour of renewing.
“Lord, what a change within us One short hour spent in thy presence will avail to make! What burdens lighten, what temptations slake, What parched grounds refresh as with a shower! We kneel, and all around us seems to lower, We rise, and all the distant and the near Shines forth in sunny outline brave and clear. We kneel, how weak! We rise, how full of power! Why, then, should we do ourselves this wrong, And others, that we are not always strong? That we are ever overborne with care, That we should ever weak or faithless be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer; And strength and joy and courage are with Thee.”
As Paul says to us, in Philippians, “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” Take God into your closest friendship and fellowship. Make Him your confidant in everything; have no secrets from Him; tell Him every thought: and what then? “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
(To be continued.)