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‘It is written, My house is the house of prayer.’
Luk_19:46
Why is it that we fail so miserably to use our churches as the houses of prayer which God designed them to be? It is obvious to say that we are deficient in faith. But ‘faith’ is one of those words which we think we understand when we really do not.
I. What do we mean by faith?—Surely without entering into the depth of the meaning of this mysterious gift of God, it may mean for us, in this connection, the power of realising the unseen; and this is a thing which some people never attempt to do. If we only realised the difference there is between what we see and what we do not see in this church at the present moment we should be surprised. And yet any of us might find it, if we resolutely pressed up any of those paths which lie before us in prayer. If we tried to enter into them, to pass up through their overstrained language as it seems to us, until we found something to correspond with such words as ‘Almighty,’ ‘Everlasting,’ ‘King of kings,’ ‘Lord of lords, ‘the Fountain of all goodness,’ ‘the Creator and Preserver of all mankind,’ ‘Father of all mercies,’ ‘Mediator and Advocate,’ ‘Eternal,’ ‘Invisible,’ what a difference this would make to us. We are terribly blind to all the beauty that is around us. We are terribly deaf to the sounds which are challenging our attention and wonder.
II. Why do we fail to realise the unseen?—There are really two reasons.
(a) Have we blinded ourselves by a careless life? Have we soiled our face by deeds of shame? The sons of Eli saw no vision, heard no voice such as that which was revealed to the innocent child Samuel. We prepare for prayerless hours and dry services and empty forms by worldly lives, by deeds of ill, and thoughts of shame. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,’ carries with it a monitory clause, which speaks only of gloom and an empty void, which awaits the soul which has lost sight of God in the paths of a vicious life. Like the seraphs, we need to veil our feet in penitence if we would find God Whom we would fain worship.
(b) And prayer has no message for the spiritually ignorant. We are not going to saunter into God’s presence as we might into a concert room. The seraphs used two of their wings for energetic flight, to keep themselves poised in an attitude of adoration befitting the service of God. Go into some large counting-house, some place of business in the city, and then into some House of Prayer. Compare the different attitudes of those engaged, the one in business, the other in prayer. And yet it is Coleridge who says, ‘Of all mental exercises, earnest prayer is the most severe.’
Let Christ arouse us from our spiritual torpor, and lift us up to the sense of our privileges. Life, then, will have a new joy, religion will have a fresh charm to the man who has awakened himself to penetrate the secret of those Divine words: ‘My house is the House of Prayer.’
—
Rev. Canon Newbolt.