What Hinders Prayer by The Sunday School Times

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 20, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 21.

What Hinders Prayer.

By The Sunday School Times

We are hindered from prayer, not so much by intellectual skepticism as to the reality and efficacy of prayer as by our moral timidity and cowardice. We do not want to venture out upon God. We do not want the deeper potencies of life struck open in us. We do not want to meet the moral challenge and test of prayer. Or our hearts are not really simple and trustful. They are proud and self-confident. They prefer to be at ease, and shrink from the exposing contact of God. If we were willing to pray, we should soon know of prayer whether it be a futility or a fellowship and a power.

What is all this but to say that life is living,—not offering excuses for not living, not speculating as to how to live, not lamenting that it is impossible ever to know how, but living. We must live. And there is only one way to live, and that is to live right. The fundamental question is the moral question. Faith is action. "Have faith in God," said Jesus, commanding faith, as is legitimate only if faith is action. And those who are of the truth hear His voice and respond.—The Sunday School Times.