Fasting and Prayer
Title:
Fasting and Prayer
Content:
Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional reading and shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much strangeness between God and his soul." He judged that he had dedicated too much time to public ministrations and too little to private communion with God. He was much impressed to set apart times for fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer.
Resulting from this he records: "Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours." Said William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: "I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours." Of a failure in Parliament he says: "Let me record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from private devotions having been contracted, and so God let me stumble." More solitude and earlier hours was his remedy.
To neglect my soul through want of prayer and earthly mortification of my flesh in fasting is just as grievous as to neglect the preaching of the word. I am to reach out first, in everything, to God; and only then will I be enabled to reach out to man. For it is from Christ alone that I draw out the treasures of God's grace. I refuse to go away empty every time I approach His throne. How or why should I? Would it not be of the Lord's good pleasure that I should wrestle in ptayer for an outpouring of His Spirit and that He should abundantly give it?
Fasting and Prayer
Content:
Henry Martyn laments that "want of private devotional reading and shortness of prayer through incessant sermon-making had produced much strangeness between God and his soul." He judged that he had dedicated too much time to public ministrations and too little to private communion with God. He was much impressed to set apart times for fasting and to devote times for solemn prayer.
Resulting from this he records: "Was assisted this morning to pray for two hours." Said William Wilberforce, the peer of kings: "I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of private devotions starves the soul; it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours." Of a failure in Parliament he says: "Let me record my grief and shame, and all, probably, from private devotions having been contracted, and so God let me stumble." More solitude and earlier hours was his remedy.
To neglect my soul through want of prayer and earthly mortification of my flesh in fasting is just as grievous as to neglect the preaching of the word. I am to reach out first, in everything, to God; and only then will I be enabled to reach out to man. For it is from Christ alone that I draw out the treasures of God's grace. I refuse to go away empty every time I approach His throne. How or why should I? Would it not be of the Lord's good pleasure that I should wrestle in ptayer for an outpouring of His Spirit and that He should abundantly give it?
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