1. The cultivation of the habit of prayer will secure its expression on all suitable occasions.
(1) In times of need, in the first instance; almost every one will pray then. Moses stood on the shores of the Red Sea, surveying the panic into which the children of Israel were cast when they realized that the chariots of Pharaoh were thundering down upon them. “Wherefore criest thou unto me?” said the Lord. Nehemiah stood before King Artaxerxes. The monarch noted his inward grief, and said, “Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou art not sick? This is nothing else but sorrow of heart.” That question opened the door to admit the answer to three months’ praying; and the hot desire that had risen to God in those slow months gathered itself into one fervent ejaculation, “So I prayed to the God of heaven”.
(2) Again, one whose life is spent in fellowship with God will constantly seek and find opportunities for swift and frequently-recurring approaches to the throne of grace. The Apostles bring every duty under the cross; at the name of Jesus their loyal souls soar heavenward in adoration and in praise. The early Christians never met without invoking a benediction; they never parted without prayer. The saints of the Middle Ages allowed each passing incident to summon them to intercession—the shadow on the dial, the church bell, the flight of the swallows, the rising of the sun, the falling of a leaf.
The covenant which Sir Thomas Browne made with himself is well known, but one may venture to refer to it once more: “To pray in all places where quietness inviteth; in any house, highway, or street; and to know no street in this city that may not witness that I have not forgotten God and my Saviour in it; and that no parish or town where I have been may not say the like. To take occasion of praying upon the sight of any church which I see, or pass by, as I ride about. To pray daily, and particularly for my sick patients, and for all sick people under whose care soever. And at the entrance into the house of the sick to say, ‘The peace and the mercy of God be upon this house’. After a sermon to make a prayer and desire a blessing, and to pray for the minister.” [Note: D.M. McIntyre, The Hidden Life of Prayer, 35.]
2. There are many, to whom prolonged stated prayers on week days are impracticable, who might, nevertheless, in spite of overcrowded and overstrained lives, win real blessings, not for individuals only, but for the Church and for the world, by faithful and frequent prayer of this kind. Just as there are to the trained ear of a scientific investigator far more sounds in the world than most of us ever hear, so to a Christian trained to hold intercourse with God “the whole air is full of church bells ringing us to prayer”.
Stated seasons, stated rules, stated forms of words are as necessary to start us in the art of praying as are similar things in the case of any earthly art or science that we would acquire. For we learn to read from an alphabet, and to write from a copy, to draw from a model, and to play from a scale. Nor can we ever dispense with such forms—speaking of the individual, and not of public worship, where they have another justification—till they have created in us a habit of prayer: while most men who are in earnest will even then consider their continuance advisable, to sustain the habit when already formed, since our power of independent prayer is peculiarly liable to fluctuate with the accidents of our bodily and mental organization. But at the same time, the more real our formal prayer becomes, the less can it remain merely formal It inevitably develops into ejaculatory prayer: prayer darted upward arrow-like, at no stated time or season, in no stated form of words, but whenever our impulse moves us, or a joy or sorrow strikes us, or a crisis calls to action, or an interval to thought. And as this kind of informal prayer becomes increasingly habitual, the prayerful character is slowly formed, the character of which prayer is the real mainspring, the first necessity, without which it could no longer exist, and whose entire tone and temper is constituted by the fact.
“For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” But neither days, nor hours, nor seasons, did ever come amiss to faithful prayer. Short passes, quick ejections, concise forms and remembrances, holy breathings, prayers like little posies, may be sent forth without number on every occasion, and God will note them in His book. But all that have a care to walk with God fill their vessels more largely as soon as they rise, before they begin the work of the day, and before they lie down again at night: which is to observe what the Lord appointed in the Levitical ministry, a morning and an evening lamb to be laid upon the altar. So with them that are not stark irreligious, prayer is the key to open the day, and the bolt to shut in the night. [Note: Jeremy Taylor.]
The body may be sound, but the soul can never be sound and healthy that prefers temporal to eternal things. But where the love of eternal things exists, this kind of prayer is not only easy but delightful. We are told that the brethren in Egypt use frequent prayers that are brief and swiftly ejaculated. This they prefer to slower methods, that the vigilant and elevated attention so necessary in prayer may not be dulled or dissipated. In this they show that when attention cannot be sustained it ought not to be deadened, but that when it is sustained it should not be readily interrupted. [Note: St. Augustine, Epist., 130 ad Probam.]
3. Our fathers used to speak much of and practise this “ejaculatory” prayer. It would be a great gain to all of us if we could learn again the method and practise it. Notice one or two advantages which will follow from the cultivation of ejaculatory prayer.
(1) By the frequent entertainment of holy thoughts, the heart will be preserved from many forms of evil, and, as we say, from a good deal of worse company. There are times when the mind seems ready to give indiscriminate admission to all kinds of idle fancies—impossible things, that never can be, extravagant things, that are never likely to be, sinful things, that it is to be hoped never will be. Now, what a clear gain to character it is, if we can give to this restless activity of the inner man a sanctified direction, if we can manage to fill up the small gaps and crevices of unoccupied life with holy thoughts, redeeming the time which would otherwise be waste, or worse than waste, for God, and the soul, and heaven.
(2) Again, it will be a benefit of this holy habit, that it will spiritualize the experiences of common life. It must surely be a recommendation of ejaculatory prayer that it will hinder no business, consume no time, interfere with no prudent and needed preparations for ordinary duty. All it asks is to be allowed to interlace, with the rough, hard, deadening detail of daily engagement, a thread of elevating and purifying thought—to lead us, under the wear and worry of great trifles, always to take the Angel of the Divine presence with us—to make us write, even on the bells of the horses, “Holiness unto the Lord”. It is a great fault among us that we keep business and devotion too much apart. The duties belonging to them we seem to think must have separate times and separate places for their performance, —as if an altar could not be set up at the place of the receipt of custom, or as if the incense which ascends from the plough, or from the loom, would be regarded of God as coming from a strange fire. Old George Herbert, speaking of doing everything “for the Lord’s sake,” says:—
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and th’ action fine.
And the great Sir Matthew Hale, recommending short acts of devotion in the midst of business, observes, “This is the great art of Christian chemistry, and by means of it the whole course of this life becomes a service to Almighty God and an uninterrupted state of religion”.
(3) And then, lastly, it is an advantage of ejaculatory prayer that it tends to keep up the life and fervour of our more formal and lengthened exercises. They are the little showers that swell the grain, the frequent droppings that wear the stone, the oft-paid visits that bind two loving hearts. The believer who loves Christ thinks it too long a time to go from morning to night without a sight of Him, without a word with Him, without a look towards Him. Such long intermissions cause him, when he meets his Lord at night, to meet Him as a stranger. He remembers that plans, schemes, purposes, have been resolved on in the course of the day, and the best Friend has not been consulted. And he is conscious of a coldness. The heart comes dead to its work—cannot discharge itself of the day’s anxieties and cares. Now if, from time to time during the day, thoughts of Christ had been allowed to mingle with these anxieties, there would have been, in the evening meeting with Christ, no strangeness, and, on the face of the throne, no cloud. The passing from business to devotion would then be felt to be but the passing from God in the world to God in the closet. We have changed our place, but not our company. We have only to put fresh fuel on a fire which has never gone out. And thus there would be more freshness and life in our retired devotions, because, in the midst of all the hurry of our active duties, we had kept up that pious habit of Nehemiah—“So I prayed to the God of heaven”.
In company, on the street, in the railway train, in the bustle of business, amidst the solemn fervours of his preaching, and in the very torrent of his own quaint, racy, picturesque talk in social life—in short, everywhere and in all things, his faith went up to heaven in quick, pointed, battle-like cries. When others were preaching we have often heard him praying thus, “Help, Lord, help! Give the blessing, and save many!” [Note: J. Macpherson, Duncan Matheson, 39.]
It is a great word in the letter to the Hebrews which declares that we “may find grace to help us in time of need”. I have always felt that I should like to discover some idiom of my own language which would gather the thought of the Greek phrase, and I am not sure but that it is perfectly done by saying that the message declares we may find grace to help us “in the nick of time”. [Note: G. Campbell Morgan, The Practice of Prayer, 113.]
There is a little story of Samuel Rutherford which has been preserved for us by Robert Wodrow, the untiring chronicler of the sayings and doings of his Covenanting ancestors; and Wodrow got it from James Stirling, minister of the Barony Parish in Glasgow, and himself a contemporary of those valiant men who were out for years in the sleet and hail. Rutherford, Stirling said, had a particular liking for one of his brethren, James Guthrie, the fearless confessor who died a martyr’s death at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh in the June of 1661. Once he was staying for a short time in the manse of his friend; and on a certain morning, the door of his room having been left ajar, the maidservant saw him walking up and down within its walls, lost in meditation and prayer. She overheard three petitions, which he spoke out audibly and with much earnestness. They came from his lips, she remarked, with an interval between each of them, as though every one were too weighty and too pregnant to be hurried over. This was the first, Lord, make me believe in Thee! There was a pause. He sat down, and mused, and rose again; and now his cry was, Lord, make me love Thee! Again he waited for a minute or two; and by and by the entreaty came, Lord, make me keep all Thy commandments![Note: A. Smellie, The Daily Walk, 6.]
