PRAYER’S GOLDEN KEY
“Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
Jeremiah 33:3
Stones are broken only by an earnest use of the hammer, and the stone mason usually goes down on his knees. Use the hammer of diligence and let the knee of prayer be exercised. There is not a stony doctrine in Revelation that is profitable to you to understand that will not fly into pieces under the exercise of prayer and faith. “To have prayed well is to have studied well” was a wise sentence of Luther’s. You may force your way through anything with the leverage of prayers. Thoughts and reasonings may be like the steel wedges that may open a way into truth, but prayer is the lever that forces open the iron chest of sacred mystery. The kingdom of heaven still suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. If you take care that you work away with the mighty implement of prayer, nothing can stand against you.
The saint may expect to discover deeper experiences and to know more of the higher spiritual life by being much in prayer. Not all the developments of spiritual life are similarly easy to attain. There are the common frames of repentance and faith, but there is also an upper realm of rapture, communion, and conscious union with Christ. All believers see Christ, but not all believers put their fingers into the prints of the nails. Not all have the privilege of leaning upon Jesus’ bosom or being caught up into the third heaven.
Most Christians are only up to their ankles in the river of experience. Some have waded till the stream is up to their knees. A few find the water up to their shoulders. But a very few find it a river to swim in—the bottom of which they cannot touch. There are heights in experiential knowledge of the things of God the eagles eye of acumen and the philosophic thought has never seen. There are secret paths that the lion’s cub of reason and judgment has not as yet learned to travel. God alone can bring us there, but the chariot in which He takes us up and the fiery steeds with which that chariot is dragged are prevailing prayers.
Lord Jesus, draw me deeper into the stream of Your love that I might know and glorify you more. Amen
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