The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

We have been on our knees overwhelmed with sorrow, and we have risen up, and said, “Ah! I can meet it all now!”

      Now I can say my God is mine

      Now I can all my joys resign,

      Can tread the world beneath my feet,

      And all that earth calls good or great.

      Prayer itself sometimes gives the mercy.

      16. Take another case. You are in difficulty, you do not know which way to go, nor how to act. God has said that he will direct his people. You go forth in prayer, and pray to God to direct you. Are you aware that your very prayer will frequently of itself furnish you with the answer? For while the mind is absorbed in thinking over the matter, and in praying concerning the matter, it is just in the likeliest state to suggest to itself the course which is proper; for while in prayer I am spreading all the circumstances before God, I am like a warrior surveying the battlefield, and when I rise I know the state of affairs, and know how to act. Often, thus, you see, prayer gives the very thing we ask for in itself. Often when I have had a passage of Scripture that I cannot understand, I am in the habit of spreading the Bible before me; and if I have looked at all the commentators, and they do not seem to agree, I have spread the Bible on my chair, knelt down, put my finger upon the passage, and sought instruction from God. I have thought that when I have risen from my knees I understood it far better than before; I believe that the very exercise of prayer did of itself bring the answer, to a great degree; for the mind being occupied upon it, and the heart being exercised with it, the whole man was in the most excellent position for truly understanding it. John Bunyan says, “The truths that I know best I have learned on my knees”; and he says again, “I never know a thing well until it is burned into my heart by prayer.” Now that is in a great measure through the agency of God’s Holy Spirit; but I think that it may in some measure also be accounted for by the fact that prayer exercises the mind upon the thing, and then the mind is led by an insensible process to lay hold upon the right result. Prayer, then is a suitable prelude to the blessing, because often it carries the blessing in itself.

      17. 3. But again it seems only right, and just, and appropriate, that prayer should go before the blessing, because in prayer there is a sense of need. I cannot as a man distribute assistance to those who do not represent their case to me as being destitute and sick. I cannot suppose that the physician will trouble himself to leave his own house to go into the house of one that is ill, unless the need has been specified to him, and unless he has been informed that the case requires his assistance; nor can we expect from God, that he will wait upon his own people, unless his own people should first state their need to him, shall feel their need, and come before him crying for a blessing. A sense of need is a divine gift; prayer fosters it, and is therefore highly beneficial.

      18. 4. And yet again, prayer before the blessing serves to show us the value of it. If we had the blessings without asking for them, we would think them very common things; but prayer makes the common pebbles of God’s temporal bounties more precious then diamonds; and in spiritual prayer, cuts the diamond, and makes it glisten more. The thing was precious, but I did not know its preciousness until I had sought for it, and sought it long. After a long chase the hunter prizes the animal because he has set his heart upon it and is determined to have it; and yet more truly, after a long hunger he who eats finds more relish in his food. So prayer does sweeten the mercy. Prayer teaches us its preciousness. It is the reading over of the bill, the schedule, the account, before the estate and the properties are themselves transferred. We know the value of the purchase by reading over the will of it in prayer, and when we have groaned out our own expression of its peerless price, it is then that God bestows the benediction upon us. Prayer, therefore, goes before the blessing, because it shows us the value of it.

      19. But doubtless even reason itself suggests that it is only natural that God, the all-good, should give his favours to those who ask. It seems only right that he should expect from us, that we should first ask at his hands, and then he will bestow. It is goodness great enough that his hand is ready to open: surely it is only a little thing that he should say to his people, “For this thing will I be enquired of by the house of Israel to do it for them.”

      20. III. Let me close BY STIRRING YOU UP TO USE THE HOLY ARE OF PRAYER AS A MEANS OF OBTAINING THE BLESSING. Do you demand of me, and for what shall we pray? The answer is upon my tongue. Pray for yourselves, pray for your families, pray for the Churches, pray for the one great kingdom of our Lord on earth.

      21. Pray for yourselves. Surely you will never lack some subject for intercession. So broad are your needs, so deep are your necessities, that until you are in heaven you will always find room for prayer. Do you need nothing? Then I fear you do not know yourself. Have you no mercy to ask from God? Then I fear you have never had mercies from him, and are yet “in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.” If you are a child of God, your needs will be as numerous as your moments and you will need to have as many prayers as there are hours. Pray that you may be holy, humble, zealous, and patient; pray that you may have communion with Christ, and enter into the banqueting house of his love. Pray for yourself, that you may be an example to others, that you may honour God here, and inherit his kingdom hereafter.

      22. In the next place, pray for your families; for your children. If they are pious, you can still pray for them that their piety may be real, that they may be upheld in their profession. And if they are ungodly, you have a whole fountain of arguments for prayer. As long as you have a child unpardoned, pray for him; as long as you have a child alive who is saved, pray for him, that he may be kept. You have enough reason to pray for those that have proceeded from your own loins. But if you have no cause to do that, pray for your employees. Will you not stoop to that? Then surely you have not stooped to be saved; for he who is saved knows how to pray for everyone. Pray for your employees, that they may serve God, that their life in your business may be of use to them. That is a poor business where the employees are not prayed for. I would not like to be waited upon by one for whom I could not pray. Perhaps the day when this world shall perish will be the day not brightened by a prayer; and perhaps the day when a great misdeed was done by some man, was the day when his friends stopped praying for him. Pray for your households.

      23. And then pray for the Church. Let the minister have a place in your heart. Mention his name at your family altar, and in your closet. You expect him to come before you day after day, to teach you the things of the kingdom, and exhort and stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. If he is a true minister, there will be work to be done in this matter. He cannot write out his sermon and then read it to you; he does not believe Christ said, “Go and read the gospel to every creature.” Do you know the cares of a minister? Do you know the trouble he has with his own church — how the erring ones do grieve him, how even the right ones do vex his spirit by their infirmities — how, when the church is large, there will always be some great trouble in the hearts of some of his people? And he is the reservoir of all: they come to him with all their grief; he is to “weep with those who weep.” And in the pulpit what is his work? God is my witness, I scarcely ever prepare for my pulpit with pleasure: study for the pulpit is to me the most irksome work in the world. I have never come into this house that I know of with a smile upon mine heart; I may have sometimes gone out with one; but never have I had one when I entered. Preach, preach, twice a day I can and will do; but still there is a travailing in preparation for it, and even the utterance is not always accompanied with joy and gladness; and God knows that if it were not for the good that we trust is to be accomplished by the preaching of the Word, it is no happiness to a man’s life to be well known. It robs him of all comfort to be from morning to night hunted for labour, to have no rest for the sole of his foot or for his brain — to be a great religious hack — to bear every burden — to have people asking, as they do in the country, when they want to get into a cart, “Will it hold it?” — never thinking whether the horse can drag it; to have them asking, “Will you preach at such a place? you are preaching twice, could you not manage to get to such a place, and preach again?” Everyone else has a constitution; the minister has none, until he kills himself and is condemned