By The Very Rev. D. T. Owen, D.D., Dean of Niagara.
I would ask you to think with me as simply and directly as possible about one of the greatest things in the world. It is something that we can all do, for it requires no special learning; it is something which we can all do at once, for it requires, from one point of view, no special training; and it is something, which if we will do, will bring guidance, peace and power, into our own lives and into the lives of others. What is this thing which is so great, and yet so close to hand, which is so worth while doing, and which we can all do, and do at once? It is prayer. It is just saying our prayers. "Oh! how humdrum and commonplace!" we say, or "How difficult and discouraging I have found it; I know I should pray, and I make resolutions sometimes to that end, but somehow it gets either formal, or crowded out, or forgotten". Yes, while we all know about these difficulties and appreciate their strength, let us think this subject out again.
WHAT IS PRAYER.
In the first place let us set before us quite clearly this great fact. God, as He has been revealed to us by His Son, wishes us to pray to Him. Prayer—the privilege, the duty and the value of prayer—is part of the revelation of God. It goes with His nature, as that nature has been revealed to us. He is the God Who wishes us to speak to Him, and to take Him into our confidence,—in a word He is the God Who wishes us to treat Him as Father. What is prayer? There is God ready to hear us, ready to heal and guide, to give rest and peace, to give light and strength, to help carry our cares, to direct our feet into straight paths. And here are we with our great needs, our cares and perplexities. Prayer is the point of contact between ourselves and that great God. Indeed, we can say more than that, for when we pray we become our true selves. We are spirits of Eternity. For a time we live upon this earth having many duties to perform, and many important offices to fulfil,—but when we pray, when we praise God, we are performing our essential work as spirits. We have dropped for the moment the outer covering of our lives, and stand forth as being what we really are,—spirits who came from God, who are doing a certain work for God here, and are to return to God. The moment of prayer is a great moment, for then it is that "deep calleth to deep", and spirit calleth to the Father and Source of all spirits. And so it comes to pass that in the moment of prayer it is not merely that this man or woman, called by this name or that here on earth,—a workman, a business man, a housekeeper,—but an eternal spirit of God is calling upon the Author of all Spirits. Such is prayer. "Prayer is that act by which man, conscious alike of his weakness and his immortality, puts himself into real and effective communication with the Eternal, the Self-Existent and the Uplifted God."[[1]]
WHY SHOULD WE PRAY.
In trying to answer the question, "What is prayer?" we have, in part, answered this question also, but it is so important that it must have a section to itself.
In the first place, we should pray in order to make acknowledgment of the glory and the power of God. It is because of what God is Himself that we have need to fall down before Him in adoration and praise. We are inclined to think too much of our own needs in relation to prayer. Indeed when we mention the word prayer, we begin at once to think of our needs, of what we want, and of what other people want. These are important, but these are not first; and until we understand that they take the second place in prayer, and do not constitute its chief argument, we cannot realize the real reason for Christian Prayer. The real, the first reason for prayer from the Christian point of view is to glorify God,—to praise Him for what He is, and to fall down before the greatness of His power. We have a model prayer which teaches us about this. Among many other things it teaches us the chief reasons for prayer. It comes to us full of answers to our question, Why should we pray? "When ye pray, say, Our Father, Which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven." This surely means that God must be first in our prayers.[[2]] We are half way through the Lord's Prayer, we are more than half way through, before we begin to talk about our needs. Our Lord Jesus Christ has taught us that in prayer we are to think first of such things as the Father, Heaven, His Name, His Kingdom and His Will, before we say anything of the bread and our other needs. Yes, surely the great reason for praying is to honour God, to unite ourselves with His great purposes in heaven and earth.
Again, I would ask you to think of this from another point of view. One of the great objects of life is to know God. To know God! This sometimes seems a very mystical, far away subject, does it not? It belongs, surely, to those who have been specially endowed, or to those who have the mystical temperament! I do not think this is true. I think we grow to know God as we grow to know our friends. And how do we grow to know our friends? We speak to them, we take them into our confidence, we tell them of the things that make up our lives, and by so doing we grow into friendship. If we neglect this for long our friendship begins to wane. Now I think it is very much the same with our relations to our great Friend. We grow in our knowledge of Him and His ways, and in our understanding of His mind, just in proportion as it is our habit to go into His Presence and to take Him into our confidence about our lives. And this is what prayer is. By prayer we grow to know God. The highest prayer is "Thy Will be done", and we can only come to those heights of prayer by praying,—for it is by talking to God, looking at Him, taking Him into our confidence that we come to understand some of His ways and purposes, enter into the secret places of His dwelling, and thus learn to say, "Thy will be done!" Only they who have learnt in the School of Prayer to say, "Father ... Hallowed be Thy name" can go on to truly say, "Thy will be done". The object of prayer is not to bend His Will to ours but to so learn of him, and to so enter into His Friendship day by day that we can say, "Thy will be done".
But, of course, in prayer we are meant to ask for things for ourselves and for others. What has been said above by no means indicates the complete reason for praying. No, the Christian prays for things for himself and others. It cannot be too strongly stated "that prayer gets things done". "Ye have not," says St. James, "because ye ask not". It is the Will of the Father to give us things in response to prayer. Our Lord in the model prayer taught us to pray definitely for certain things in human life. His Father, so He teaches us, is interested in the whole of human life, all its needs, its cares, its joys, its perplexities, its strain,—all these can be made the subject of intercourse between the Father and the child. The Father cares about them so much that they must find their place in our prayers. Indeed, they are so important that they must have their own place. And their own place is second. So in all our praying let us remember it is God first, ourselves second. But we go further than that. It would seem as if we were not in a position to know our real needs sufficiently well to pray about them with intelligence, unless first of all we have allowed the light that comes from thinking about God, adoring His Name, and falling down before the majesty of His purpose and His will, to shine upon our life's needs. Yes, we are indeed to pray for our varied needs and those of others, but we cannot know our real needs unless God is first in our prayer, and we have prayed, "Our Father, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done".[[3]]