With God in the World: A Series of Papers

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Brent Charles Henry. With God in the World: A Series of Papers

Preface

Chapter I. The Universal Art

Chapter II. Friendship with God – Looking

Chapter III. Friendship with God – Speaking

Chapter IV. Friendship with God – The Response

Chapter V. The Testing of Friendship

Chapter VI. Knitting Broken Friendship

Chapter VII. Friendship in God

Chapter VIII. Friendship in God (continued)

Chapter IX. The Church in Prayer

Chapter X. The Great Act of Worship

Chapter XI. Witnesses unto the Uttermost Part of the Earth

Chapter XII. The Inspiration of Responsibility

Appendix

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It is productive of much mischief to try to make people believe that the life of prayer is easy. In reality there is nothing quite so difficult as strong prayer, nothing so worthy of the attention and the exercise of all the fine parts of a great manhood. On the other hand there is no man who is not equal to the task. So splendid has this human nature of ours become through the Incarnation that it can bear any strain and meet any demand that God sees fit to put upon it. Some duties are individual and special, and there is exemption from them for the many, but there is never any absolution from a duty for which a man has a capacity. There is one universal society, the Church, for which all are eligible and with which all are bound to unite; there is one universal book, the Bible, which all can understand and which it is the duty of all to read; there is one universal art, prayer, in which all may become well skilled and to the acquirement of which all must bend their energies.

Active or dormant, the instinct of prayer abides, a faithful tenant, in every soul. The peasants who went to the Incarnate One and said "Lord, teach us to pray," were representative of a whole race, a race which feels stirring within its breast a capacity for prayer, but whose power to pray falls far short of the desire. The instinct to pray may be undeveloped, or paralyzed by violence, or it may lie bed-ridden in the soul through long neglect; but even so, no benumbed faculty is more readily roused to life and nerved to action than that of prayer. The faculty is there; no one is without it. Whether it expands, and how, is only a question of the will of the person concerned.

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It ought to be further added that every one who regularly uses set forms of prayer should habitually incorporate into his devotions at least some words of his own which, however poor and few, yet are fresh and new from his heart. Of course what has been said about forms of prayer applies exclusively to private devotions. When the great corporate life of the Church speaks in worship it must be with one clear voice unmixed with the idiosyncrasies of the individual and summing up the aspirations of the best. But of this later.

The world just now is sadly in need of better service, but before this can be rendered there must be better prayer. A low standard of prayer means a low standard of character and a low standard of service. Those alone labour effectively among men who impetuously fling themselves upward towards God. In view of this it is a comfort to feel that no earnest man, whatever be the stage of his spiritual development, can be satisfied with his present attainments in his life of prayer. Fortunately for us, here as well as in other departments of life the ideal is always pressing itself upon our notice and making the actual blush with shame for what it is. And it is just because this is so that there is hope of better things. The ideal beckons as well as condemns. What if long steeps of toil, strewn with the stones of difficulty, lie in between! God's home is far up on the hills, and nowhere is He so easily found as in a difficulty. As has been said, prayer is quite the most difficult task a man can undertake; but it has this gracious compensation that in no other duty does God lend such direct, face-to-face help. Man may speak wise words about prayer; the Church may bid to prayer; but God alone can unfold to souls the delicate secrets of prayer. The best help is for the hardest duty – the help that comes straight from the Lord.

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