p. 39 | The Praying Teacher by Ralph Wells

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 16, 1872

The Praying Teacher.

By Ralph Wells

Let me take you to the house of one of my teachers. It is early Sabbath morning. The teacher, you know, rises an hour earlier than usual on the Lord’s day—not an hour later. I suppose it is your custom to rise earlier. (Broad smiling.) I went to the house of this teacher, and the girl told me he was not in his room, but would I walk up? I went to the third story, as directed. No one was there. My glance at the room was arrested by a little piece of paper pinned to a green window curtain. It so interested me that I could not resist the temptation to go nearer and see what it meant. (It was not a secret, you know, for secrets are put into drawers.) There was a little stool under the bit of paper. Casting my eyes at the paper I saw that it was blistered! Looking closer I found writing on it. It was the names of that teacher’s class, and penciled notes opposite each. During the last summer our school was a good deal broken up in its classes, and I heard some one say, “How wonderfully that brother’s class keeps together!” They were all converted. They are “mission” girls, and were of the hardest, most difficult kind to reach, and to hold. But not one of them drifts away. They stand. Do you see the secret? That blistered paper! It is the anchor which holds them fast, and which, by a strong faith and wrestling with God, enters within the veil, and lays hold on the eternal rocks of the promises.

Go with me a moment again, and see. That teacher saturates his lesson also with prayer. It is thus he makes the lesson go down into his scholars’ hearts. The scholars know that he has been praying over the lesson. They can see it in his eye. We must all pray more over the word we teach. We must pray freshly over it. Last Sabbath’s prayer will not do for this Sabbath’s lesson. We must pray at every point in it, for every special need that arises. Oh! we shall thus get help and relief, just as we need it, and with most clear and convincing proof that the answer is directly from the Lord.—Ralph Wells.