Ceaseless Prayer

Pray without ceasing.—1 Thessalonians 5:17.

It seems as if these words contained some exaggeration, as if they were more a figure of speech than a reality, as if they expressed more than the actual truth. We can hardly suppose that a man of active duties, requiring close attention, application and energy, could possibly be engaged all day long in prayer and acts of devotion. And we may suppose that the idea to be conveyed is rather that we are required to attend regularly to the duties of private devotion. If we interpret the text thus the grand truth which it contains is lost sight of, and the sublime spirituality which it enjoins is not realized. It is no mere rhetorical description, no figure, no exaggeration, but a simple actual fact. And when we are enjoined and commanded by the Apostle to “pray without ceasing,” to “continue instant in prayer,” to “pray always,” it naturally occurs to us to ask, If this is a literal duty, how is it to be complied with? How can we, amidst our ordinary employments and engrossing duties, fulfil this requirement?

Let us answer this question first of all; and then let us see what we can do to fulfil to the letter the Apostle’s injunction.

I

Prayer is a Spiritual Attitude

1. The chief, sometimes the one, idea we have of prayer is that it is petition, asking for certain things we want, some help we desire, or deliverance from the power of some evil. But this is just where we make a mistake. Prayer, the very highest, is where there is least petition, least asking of definite benefits, most of communion, reliance, trust in God. The higher our spirituality, the more full our confidence in God, the more complete our acquiescent surrender to His will, the less petition there will be. Prayer in its highest meaning is thus communion with, recognition of, and sympathy with God, continual desire of the soul after God as the one supreme object of its love, intercourse of our spirit with the Divine. It is the soul living and feeling as if it were always in the presence of God, holding converse with Him, not always by audible words, but with a constant sense of His presence, trusting, loving, following, and serving Him. In one word, the soul in a state of sympathy and love to God—that is prayer. As the needle, however the ship may swing, points ever to the pole, so the soul, in every place and in every circumstance of life, turns to God and sets and rules its life by Him.

It is impossible to doubt the spiritual intensity, the religious fervour, of passages such as these from the pages in Suggestions for Thought in which she describes “Communion with God”:—

“If it is said ‘we cannot love a law’—the mode in which God reveals Himself—the answer is, we can love the spirit which originates, which is manifested in, the law. It is not the material presence only that we love in our fellow-creatures. It is the spirit, which bespeaks the material presence, that we love. Shall we then not love the spirit of all that is lovable, which all material presence bespeaks to us?… What does ignorant finite man want? How great, how suffering, yet how sublime are his wants! Think of his wounded aching heart, as compared with the bird and beast! his longing eye, his speaking countenance, compared with these! they show something of such difference, but nothing, nothing compared with what is within, where no eye can read. What then, poor sufferer, dost thou want? I want a wise and loving counsellor, whose love and wisdom should come home to the whole of my nature. I would work, oh! how gladly, but I want direction how to work. I would suffer, oh! how willingly, but for a purpose.… God always speaks plain in His laws—His everlasting voice.… My poor child, He says, dost thou complain that I do not prematurely give thee food which thou couldst not digest? My son, I am always one with thee, though thou art not always one with me. That spirit racked or blighted by sin, my child, it is thy Father’s spirit. Whence comes it, why does it suffer, or why is it blighted, but that it is incipient love, and truth, and wisdom, tortured or suppressed? But Law (that is, the will of the Perfect) is now, was without beginning, and ever shall be, as the inducement and the means by which that blight or suffering which is God within man, shall become man one with God.”1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 489.]

2. If, then, we define prayer as the means whereby the fellowship of the soul with God, the oneness of our life with the life of God is realized, prayer will not necessarily be the saying of prayers. Words give definiteness to our thoughts, and there are those to whom words make concentration of mind possible; but the words in themselves are nothing. The real act of prayer is not in the words that are used, but in the attitude of the man towards his God when he is using them. God does not hear the words, but He is infinitely sensitive to the spiritual attitude. So prayer is much more than the “saying of prayers.” The utterance of thoughts in words may be true prayer; thinking may also be true prayer; work may be prayer; wrestling with a problem may be prayer; fighting for a noble cause may be prayer; private meditation may be prayer; there is such a way of doing the ordinary round and the daily task of life that this shall be true prayer; any act of our lives, whatsoever it may be, if we do it in such a way as consciously and concentratedly to cultivate a spiritual attitude of sympathy and fellowship with God, is prayer.

St. Anthony was once asked how we might know if we prayed properly. “By not knowing it at all,” he answered. He certainly prays well who is so taken up with God that he does not know he is praying. The traveller who is always counting his steps will not make much headway.

I am asked to explain that saying attributed to our Blessed Father St. Anthony, that he who prays ought to have his mind so fixed upon God as even to forget that he is praying. Here is the explanation in our Saint’s own words. He says: “The soul must be kept steadfastly in this path (that, namely, of love and confidence in God) without allowing it to waste its powers in continually trying to ascertain what precisely it is doing and whether its work is satisfactory. Alas! our satisfactions and consolations do not always satisfy God; they only feed that miserable love and care of ourselves which has to do neither with God nor with the thought of God. Certainly children whom our Lord has set before us as models of the perfection to be aimed at by us are, generally speaking, especially in the presence of their parents, quite untroubled about what is to happen. They cling to them without a thought of providing for themselves. The pleasures their parents procure them they accept in good faith and enjoy in simplicity, without any curiosity whatever as to their causes or effects. The love they feel for their parents and their reliance upon them is all they need. Those whose one desire is to please the Divine Lover have neither inclination nor leisure to turn back upon themselves, for their minds tend continually in the direction whither love carries them.”1 [Note: J. P. Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, 246.]

So far is this “pray without ceasing” from being absurd, because extravagant, that every man’s life is in some sense a continual state of prayer. For what is his life’s prayer but its ruling passion? All energies, ambitions and passions are but expressions of a standing nisus in life, of a hunger, a draft, a practical demand upon the future, upon the unattained and the unseen. Every life is a draft upon the unseen. If you are not praying toward God you are toward something else. You pray as your face is set, towards Jerusalem or Babylon. The very egotism of craving life is prayer; the great difference is the object of it. To whom, for what, do we pray? The man whose passion is habitually set upon pleasure, knowledge, wealth, honour or power is in a state of prayer to these things for them. He prays without ceasing. These are his real gods, on whom he waits day and night. He may from time to time go on his knees in church, and use words of Christian address and petition. He may even feel a momentary unction in so doing. But it is a flicker; the other devotion is his steady flame. His real God is the ruling passion and steady pursuit of his life taken as a whole. He certainly does not pray in the name of Christ. And what he worships in spirit and in truth is another God than he addresses at religious times. He prays to an unknown God for a selfish boon. Still he prays. The set and drift of his nature prays. It is the prayer of instinct not of faith. It is the prayer that needs total conversion. But he cannot stop praying either to God or to God’s rival—to self, society, world, flesh, or even devil. Every life that is not totally inert is praying either to God or God’s adversary.2 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, in Prayer, by Dora Greenwell and P. T. Forsyth.]

3. This attitude, this spiritual communion with God may be carried with us all day. It may pervade all we do, be a light and a joy, a principle and a motive in the midst of every duty, and in every position. In the case of husband or wife or child, parent or friend, or any one that we love sincerely, the love for them is not dropped at the threshold of the door. We cannot always be beside them to lavish endearments, or to whisper affection, but the thought of them goes with us, the sense of their presence comes unbidden to mould and inspire, to elevate and ennoble our whole life and acting. Carry something of that idea into our relations with God. We have hours of close fellowship and converse with God, times when we are alone with Him, when our heart goes out in deeper intensity, in more earnest consecration, times of whisperings and breathings of love and tenderness between our soul and God. But the love of God and the thought of God are not confined to such times. The thought of God goes with us all the day long. Let us make it the wish and endeavour of our life that every thought, word, and action shall be ruled as if we felt that we were constantly under the eye of Omniscience. Our desire is that all may be done to please Him, that there may be nothing to offend Him, or opposed to what we know to be His will and wish. To have our life full of the consciousness of God, as if we heard ever the voice of God bidding us, and the eye of God looking on us, and the hand of God leading us, to do everything so that He may be pleased with and approve of it, that He may be honoured and glorified—this is what makes the whole life one great connected beautiful prayer.

The greatest thing any one can do for God and for man is to pray. It is not the only thing. But it is the chief thing. A correct balancing of the possible powers one may exert puts it first. For if a man is to pray right, he must first be right in his motives and life. And if a man be right, and put the practice of praying in its right place, then his serving and giving and speaking will be fairly fragrant with the presence of God. The great people of the earth to-day are the people who pray. There are people that put prayer first, and group the other items in life’s schedule around and after prayer. These are the people to-day who are doing the most for God; in winning souls; in solving problems; in awakening churches; in supplying both men and money for mission posts; in keeping fresh and strong these lives far off in sacrificial service on the foreign field where the thickest fighting is going on; in keeping the old earth sweet awhile longer.1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Prayer, 12.]

II

How to Maintain the Spirit of Prayer

This spirit of devotion is itself the fruit of ceaseless prayer this strong consciousness of dependence on God becomes an ever-present and abiding thing only when in all our necessities we betake ourselves to Him. Occasions are never wanting, and will never be wanting, which call for the help of God; therefore, let us pray without ceasing. It is useless to say that the thing cannot be done, before the experiment has been made. There are few works that cannot be accompanied with prayer; there are few indeed that cannot be preceded by prayer; there are none at all that would not profit by prayer. Take the very first work to which we must set our mind and our hand, and we know it will be better done if, as we turn to it, we look up to God and ask His help to do it well and faithfully, as a Christian ought to do it for the Master above.

1. Thus the spirit of prayer is created and fostered by frequent and deliberate approaches to the Throne of Grace. This medical advice is given to students who sit much at their desks, contracting their chests by bending over their books: “Rise from time to time, throw back your head and shoulders, and draw a deep, full breath.” This is what we do when we definitely and consciously pray: we draw a deep, full breath. And it is a habit which it were well for us to acquire and practise. We need our still hours, our stated seasons of communion, morning by morning, evening by evening; but these are not enough. It would rid us of many a vexation and deliver us from many a temptation if, amid our toil and fret, we would ever and anon remember Jesus and tighten our grip upon Him, escaping for one refreshing moment from the noise and dust and getting our heads into Eternity.

I do not believe in silent adoration, if there is nothing but silence; and I do not believe in a man going through life with the conscious presence of God with him, unless, often, in the midst of the stress of daily life, he shoots little arrows of two-worded prayers up into the heavens, “Lord! be with me”; “Lord! help me”; “Lord! stand by me now”; and the like. “They cried to God in the battle,” when some people would have thought they would have been better occupied in trying to keep their heads with their swords. It was not a time for very elaborate supplications when the foemen’s arrows were whizzing round them, but “they cried to God in the battle, and he was intreated of them.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

While your hands are busy with the world, let your hearts still talk with God; not in twenty sentences at a time, for such an interval might be inconsistent with your calling, but in broken sentences and interjections. He who prays without ceasing uses many little darts and hand-grenades of godly desire, which he casts forth at every available interval.2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

2. Further, if we honestly try to obey this precept we shall more and more find out, the more earnestly we do so, that set seasons of prayer are indispensable to realizing it. There must be, away up amongst the hills, a dam cast across the valley that the water may be gathered behind it, if the great city is to be supplied with the pure fluid. Otherwise the pipes will be empty. And that is what will become of Christian professors in regard to their habitual consciousness of God’s presence, if they do not take care to have their hours of devotion sacred, never to be interfered with, be they long or short, as may have to be determined by family circumstances, domestic duties, daily avocations, and a thousand other causes. But, unless we pray at set seasons, there is little likelihood of our praying without ceasing. Unless we set apart each day certain times for private prayer, we should tend to neglect it altogether; we should be giving a terrible opportunity to the world to take advantage of a day of forgetfulness to encourage us to forget God altogether. If we said that this prayer without ceasing of which the Apostle is here speaking was the only kind we needed, that our aspirations always accompanied our actions, we should indeed be presumptuous, we should indeed be forgetting our real character; we should become day by day less definite in our efforts, because we should be omitting periodical self-judgment, and so through want of any regulation we should tend to relapse into carelessness or presumptuous fanaticism. Private prayer at definite periods reminds us of our aims, enables us to judge of our actions, brings back our life into God’s presence, from which it has too often strayed.

Every morning he renewed his touch with Christ so that he would not lose it through the busy hours. It was his habit to close every day by reporting to his Friend. Of this habit he said: “The disciples returned at evening and made a report to Christ of their work. Thus I tell Him of my life during the day, my dealings with persons who have come into it, and whatever has been attempted—in short, the whole day’s work: its efforts, failures, mistakes, sins and joys. That is my evening prayer.”1 [Note: J. T. Faris, The Life of Dr. J. R. Miller, 223.]

It will, I suppose, be admitted that there is no greater proof of complete religious sincerity than fervour in private prayer. If an individual, alone by the side of his bed, prolongs his intercessions, lingers wrestling with his Divine Companion, and will not leave off until he has what he believes to be evidence of a reply to his entreaties—then, no matter what the character of his public protestations, or what the frailty of his actions, it is absolutely certain that he believes in what he professes. My Father prayed in private in what I may almost call a spirit of violence. He entreated for spiritual guidance with nothing less than importunity. It might be said that he stormed the citadels of God’s grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them. My Father’s acts of supplication, as I used to witness them at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, were accompanied by stretchings out of the hands, by crackings of the joints of the fingers, by deep breathings, by numerous sounds which seemed just breaking out of silence, like Virgil’s bees out of the hive, “magnis clamoribus.” My Father fortified his religious life by prayer as an athlete does his physical life by lung-gymnastics and vigorous rubbings.2 [Note: Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 229.]

One of the surprises of my childhood was my father’s locked study. It is true that when his children knocked he would come to the door, and open to us, but there was first a little shuffling of feet, and then in a few moments he stood before us. Sometimes I thought there must be some one else in the room—for I heard my father’s voice; but on entering I saw him only. It was all mysterious to a child, but as the years passed on I learnt what it meant. For the locked study was the secret of the Open Heart. Because he dwelt every day in the kingdom of penitence and tears and submission, he found his city of mirth and laughter and sunshine.3 [Note: Love and Life: The Story of J. Denholm Brash, 65.]

3. Public prayer, too, is a necessary corrective to private prayer, which, if that were all, would tend to spiritual selfishness, would isolate the individual believer from the great company of his fellow-Christians, would limit his conception of his Christian duties by rendering him liable to think only of some and forget others, would, in fact, leave him one-sided in his religion, just as solitude makes a man one-sided in his social character.

We know how hard it is for most men, how hard, it may be, we ourselves continually find it, to keep the act of worship truly, purely spiritual; to be always lifting up our hearts to the Unseen, the Eternal, the Incomprehensible; always striving beyond the thoughts, the scenes of sense and time; always remembering that the ultimate reality of worship is in the light that no man can approach unto, and that our highest acts are but as hands stretched out, as avenues of access, towards the everlasting adoration and intercession that is on high, where Christ “ever liveth to make intercession for us”: where St. John saw “in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb standing as though It had been slain.” We know how our hearts are ever faltering away from the effort of faith, and wanting to stay at some resting-place amidst the things that are seen, amid the ways of that lower level which we think we can understand. That appeal to come up higher, to raise the venture of our hearts above all that is on earth, is made to us all; and to answer it rightly is the soul’s great task. It is a task from which men swerve in diverse ways; proffering in lieu of the uplifted venture, sometimes a moral life or activity in good works, sometimes a zeal for the cause of religion, sometimes the acceptance of a creed, sometimes the conviction that they are saved, and sometimes a worship that lingers unduly at the counterpart on earth of the supreme reality, the fount of all reality, in heaven. Out of the knowledge of our own weakness, let us learn the care we need to take lest others be weakened, lest others be allowed to halt where they should find the very spring and power for that ceaseless ascent to which God beckons all.1 [Note: Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 354.]

I build the palace of my Lord the King

Wherein Life makes her crimson offering,

With rite of consecration and long praise.

With weight of prayer and length of many days

She makes her sacrament of suffering.

The music of meet words and magical,

That rise as incense and as incense fall,

Fills all the palace of my Lord the King.

The House is dim with voices murmuring

The sacred burden of their ritual.

If, after many suns have come and gone,

The light of some apocalyptic Dawn

Shall flame with splendour in a crimson sky,

Grant, Dweller in the Shrine, that even I

May hear the Voice, and see Thy veil withdrawn!1 [Note: D. H. S. Nicholson, Poems, 69.]

Ceaseless Prayer

Literature

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