Psalm 65:2 O you that hear prayer, to you shall all flesh come. I. FROM ITS NATURE. 1. It is a spiritual thing; not any mere outward form, but the soul seeing the invisible, grasping the intangible and linking itself by sacred affinities with things eternal. 2. Consider also its dignity, it holds correspondence with the court of heaven. 3. And how important. For how unspeakably great is our need, and we can only gain supply for them as we seek it from God. II. FROM THE PLIGHTED FAITHFULNESS OF THE DIVINE CHARACTER TO HEAR AND ANSWER IT. How, in face of all God's promises to hear us, can we doubt the success of our prayers? Objections against prayer lie equally against all human endeavour. God will give good things to them that ask Him, but only He can say what things are good. They may be such as we deem anything but good. Many have been laid on beds of languishing to save them from a bed of everlasting burnings. And when the time for the blessings we. ask for may be, we cannot know, nor fix the rate of their progress towards us. III. THE SUGGESTING AND CONTROLLING INFLUENCE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE ACT OF DEVOTION. IV. THE CO-OPERATING INTERCESSIONS OF OUR ASCENDED SAVIOUR, and the security we have in the use of His all-prevailing name. Oh! could the recording angel give you back an exact copy even of this morning's prayers — a copy in which all the thoughts which passed through your mind while in the act of devotion should be translated into words, — how shocked would ye be at the intermixture of piety and profaneness, of reverent expressions and solemn trifling, with which ye insulted the majesty and provoked the patience of the holiest and best of beings. Wherefore was it, then, that ye were not consumed? Oh! it was that Jesus, "touched with a feeling of our infirmities," stood in the gap between us. V. THE REFLECTIVE BENEFIT WHICH, APART FROM DIRECT ANSWERS TO OUR PRAYERS, COMES TO OUR SOULS. If a man do not move God he is sure to move himself. (Daniel Moore, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come. |
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