p. 203 | PRAYER AND WORKS

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 13, 1860

PRAYER AND WORKS.

CHRISTIANS are often insincere in prayer. They ask for growth in grace, but make little effort to improve their type of piety. They do not struggle resolutely to attain the blessings for which they petition. The following extract from Dr. Phelps' admirable little work, "The Still Hour," is a good illustration:

A luxurious Christian prays, in the good set phrases of devotion, for a spirit of self-denial; that he may endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ; that he may take up the cross and follow Christ; that he may be ready to forsake all that he hath and be Christ's disciple; that he may not live unto himself; that he may imitate him who went about doing good—who became poor that we might be rich, and who wept over lost souls. In such a prayer there may be, consciously, no insincerity, but a pleasurable sympathy, rather, with the grand thoughts and the grander feeling which the language portrays. The heart is buoyant with its gaseous distension to the bounds of its great swelling words.

This lover of the pride of life does not discover his self-inflation, till conscience pricks him with such goads as these: "Are you living for the things you are praying for?" "What one thing are you doing for Christ which costs you self-denial?" "Are you seeking for opportunities to deny yourself, to save souls?" "Are you willing to be like him who had not where to lay his head?" "Can ye be baptized with the baptism that he is baptized with?" If then, this effeminate one is not aroused to a more Christ-like life by the uncovering of his hypocrisy, what a sickly murmuring of self-reproach fills his heart at the collapse of that prayer!