Prayer

Almighty God, our heart's desire is to climb thy hill and find audience with thee in the heavens. Is there not an appointed way? Is not Jesus Christ, thy Son, a living way to the Father? We can enter only by him; other door there is none; this is a wide open door, and we enter into it with joy of heart. For every beam of light we bless thee; for every hope that makes us glad we give thee thanks. Thou knowest how much we are in the valley, and how often we pass through dark places. Suddenly thou dost shoot down upon us rays of light; they warm us and give us a new comfort of the soul, so that we look upwards and are made glad with heavenly pleasure. We have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, so that thy name is familiar unto us, but now would we know thee by the love of the heart, by the tender sympathy of the quickened soul, yea, we would enter into communion with the Father and with the Son and with the Holy Ghost. How much we have to overcome that we may do this thou knowest; but thou dost beat even mountains to pieces, and crush the rock before the feet of thy people; and as for the rivers and the seas which divide between us, thou dost utterly dry them up. Therefore we bow before thee with a new song in our mouth, with a new hope brightening our hearts, and for this we bless thee in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Thou hast brought us together not to inflict on us a disappointment. For this thou didst not cause the trumpet of convocation to be sounded. Thou hast called us together into one family and fellowship for the passing hour, that thou mayest reveal thyself to us in some new and unexpected beauty. Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. Let there be a shining from heaven of a great light, that shall chase every shadow away, and create a glory compared with which there is none beside. For all the blessings of the week how can we sing a song of gratitude sufficient? Hast thou not made a way for thyself in the darkness, and hast thou not turned the noonday itself into sevenfold brightness? Thou hast withheld no good thing from us; thou hast given unto us blessings with both hands, and the windows of heaven have been too small to enable thee to pour down upon us all the stores of thy grace.

Yet we have received thy blessings oftentimes with neglect, sometimes with utter forgetfulness, now and then almost with practical contempt. We have not seen thine image and superscription upon thy daily gifts. Thou hast been paying tribute unto us, and we have not repaid thee with our deep love. Yet wherein we have answered thee at all we bless thee for the reply we have given thee, forasmuch as the answer was inspired by thine own Spirit. If we have done anything aright, this also is the Lord's doing. If our thoughts have lifted themselves up above all clouds, and have fastened themselves with holy awe upon the subject of thine eternity and thy grace, behold this is the greatest of thy miracles. We are prone to search in the dust for our blessings; we hew unto ourselves cisterns, that we may drink at them and be sufficed, and behold, they are broken cisterns that can hold no water. The river of God is full of water. To that river we now repair; may we find in it healing and satisfaction, and see in it all the meaning of thine infinite grace. We are poor, but our poverty is not a hindrance in thy sight, but an attraction. Thou dost give to the poor and needy; thou dost shelter the homeless; thou art the Friend of those who have no friend, the Refuge of the penitent and the distressed, the Sanctuary of men who long to be free from sin. Thou art training us by thine own way and Spirit, and we cannot follow all the course of thy discipline, because we understand it not; but thy way is right; thou wilt justify thy way to us, and when thou hast tried us thou wilt bring us forth as gold. Let this assurance make our hearts quiet every day; may we rest in this holy doctrine, and be quieted with thine own peace. The Lord visit us every one according to our personal need, and where there is special praise for special blessing, the Lord receive the hymn of love, and grant reply still larger than before. Where there is mourning of heart because of loss, pain, bereavement, or anticipation of distress, the Lord grant the healing grace of heaven. We have heard of the balm that is in Gilead, and of the Physician that is there, and we now hasten towards thee that we may be healed. Grant unto us in all our life just what we need. If thou dost not answer our prayers as we expect, do thou grant unto our hearts a peace that holds within its depths all assurance of grace. The Lord's light come from the whole heavens and make the place glorious. The Lord pity us, and take away the cloud of fear; the Lord himself rejoice in his people redeemed with blood, and cause them to sing a new song of mercy and of judgment. May this hour be the most glorious and memorable in the recollection of the soul. Now we wait for thy reply; we pray in the name of the Saviour; we go by the way of the Cross; our prayers we offer to the presiding Priest that he may magnify them and cleanse them, ennobling all their meaning and purpose, and seeking for us the answer of thy peace. Let our sins fall away from us like a garment, never more to be taken up, and let thy grace possess itself of our hearts, and make them glad with the very joy of heaven. Amen.

Acts 3:1-11

1. Now Peter and John [it is to John that Peter turns for comfort after his fall] went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.

2. And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried [we may carry those we cannot heal], whom they laid daily at the gate [so massive that twenty men were required to open or shut it] of the temple which is called Beautiful [named only here], to ask alms of them that entered into the temple.

3. Who seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple asked an alms.

4. And Peter, fastening his eyes [a look which read character] upon him with John, said, Look on us.

5. And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something of them.

6. Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

7. And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength [literally, "were consolidated "].

8. And he leaping up [Isaiah 35:6] stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.

9. And all the people saw him walking and praising God.

10. And they knew that it was he which sat for alms at the Beautiful gate of the temple: and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which had happened unto him.

11. And as the lame man which was healed held Peter and John, all the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's [outside the temple, on the eastern side], greatly wondering.

The Lame Man Healed

YOU will not see the whole beauty of this paragraph unless you connect it with the chapter preceding. You remember the infinite excitement of that chapter: it is the chapter which tells us the marvellous history of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost had been poured out upon the waiting Church. "Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house" where the Church was sitting, "and there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." There had never been such a day in the Church before. The spirit of the day was a spirit of ecstasy; men saw visions and heard voices, and formed such noble purposes as had never before animated their breasts. It was a high day in the Church. The silver trumpet had sounded; the last shadow seemed to have fled away; and the family of God congregated there was filled with ineffable delight; so much so, indeed, that even the vexing property question fell quite out of sight. No man reckoned that anything he had was his own; all that believed were together like a family, and had all things common; they sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need. There was no suspicion of selfishness, for no life was bounded merely by its own interests. Life was raised up to a higher level than it had ever attained, and the people were praising God from morning till night; "they continued daily with one accord in the temple, breaking bread from house to house, and eating their meat with gladness and singleness of heart." Surely the millennium had come!

After this there will be no more commonplace: anything that can transpire after such a realization of the Divine presence will be of the nature of commonplace, and will be resented in high temper as unworthy to follow such a manifestation! Who would willingly come out of the blue heavens, to walk again on the common earth? Who would voluntarily abandon angelic society, to come down again to the common thoroughfares and pathways of ordinary life? You must enter into this excitement if you would understand the opening words of the third chapter. Probably there are no quieter words to be found anywhere than are these: "Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer." After the excitement of the second chapter, is not this of the nature of an anti-climax? What can come after the thunder, and the whirlwind, and the mighty revelations of the Divine presence? Two men—former partners in the fishing trade, often together, the complement of one another as to many mental and moral qualities—two men "went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer." Then see that the ecstatic hours of life ought to be succeeded by quiet worship, for that alone can sustain the heart with true nourishment. Men cannot live in ecstasy; God grants unto his Church times of refreshing, hours of enthusiasm, days when the whole horizon opens like an infinite door into the upper places of the universe; but after such peculiarly solemn manifestations of power and grace, he expects us to go up into the temple to pray, as he knows such visions make all other life ordinary and common. Whatever luxuries you may enjoy occasionally, you must have bread permanently; we do not live on luxuries, we live on bread. We cannot always live in the extraordinary, for by the very fact of its being always extraordinary it would cease to be other than usual. But were not the men inspired? Had not they seen great sights, and heard great voices, and had they not actually received into their hearts the Holy Ghost? To these inquiries an emphatic affirmation must be returned. Yet, notwithstanding all these special circumstances, the two men "went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer." The clock was not altered; the time-bill of heaven was not changed: the great Pentecostal storm had rushed across the heavens, and had left behind it showers of blessings. Still the quiet clock ticked and travelled on to the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, and Peter and John were not so transported by special ecstasies as to forget their daily and customary engagements with God. Suspect any inspiration that makes you contemptuous of ordinary religious duly. If any men had reason to suppose that they could dispense with ordinary worship, and customary routine, Peter and John were such. They might have said, "We have outlived all this; we are no longer mechanical worshippers, we take no note of time now; we have received the Holy Ghost into our hearts, and for us all Sabbath days, and sacrificial hours, and sacred places, are abolished—we live the higher life, we enjoy the ineffable consciousness." No such speech did they make.

Inspiration never lessens duty; true inspiration ennobles our conception of what is due from us to the Divine Being. Any supposed inspiration that has withdrawn men from the Temple and poisoned them with the delusion that they could sufficiently read the Bible at home, is an inspiration coming otherwhere than from Heaven. You cannot read the Bible at home in any exhaustive and final sense. You were not made to live at home always; you have in you instincts that can only be satisfied by great public associations. There is in you that which finds its completion in public fellowship, Christian communion, and general intercourse of mind with mind upon the sublime topics of Heavenly truth. It does a man good to "go up into the temple at the hour of prayer," that he may pray; it does every man good to be now and then in a crowd: public assembly has an educational and social influence upon the individual life. Standing alone, a man may seem to be very great, very important, and very self-complete; it is when he enters into a crowd that he realises his humanity, his littleness, and yet the very greatness that comes of that contraction of individuality. "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together." Peter and John did not, for immediately after the day of Pentecost, under the joyous realization of the newly-given Spirit, they went up into the Temple at the hour of prayer. Are we not wrong in supposing that prayer can ever be of the nature of commonplace? What is prayer? Is it not communion with God?

Our conception of prayer has fallen. Few men can pray all the day. We pray sometimes through the prayers of others, and this is the true interpretation of the priestly element in human nature. Perhaps you cannot sing vocally, but you may sing sympathetically with the great Vocalist.. So sympathetic may you be, that though you may find it impossible to express the sentiments which animate your hearts and give a nobility to your aspirations, yet when you hear those sentiments expressed by a gifted tongue they are made your prayers of by your cordial Amen. We should never give way to the blasphemous suggestion that prayer is or can be ordinary; there is nothing ordinary in any true prayer; to pray is to redeem any day from commonplace. To have one quick, flashing view of God makes common time sacred. If we pray mechanically or by rote, or if prayer be the mere repetition of words which have never passed through the heart, and been stained with its blood, then I wonder not that men have become weary of prayer, and should long for it to cease; but when we truly realise the nature and scope of prayer, and when the heart beats sympathetically through the whole compass of communion with God, there can be nothing commonplace in prayer, even if it immediately succeed the storms and shocks of Pentecost itself. But had the Apostles lost their inspiration? Verily, there was hardly time for any such loss to have taken place, for the narrative reads as if it were almost one, without break, and without any punctuation that would separate substantially the one part from the other. They had not lost their inspiration, as is evident by what they did. Look at the case! Here is a man lame from his mother's womb, who had never walked to the Temple, but was always carried by friends—carried there every day, and carried every day too to the most attractive spot in all the surroundings of the temple. No man had ever cured him; we are not aware that any man had ever attempted to heal him; but Peter, fastening his eyes upon him, with John, said, "Look on us!" That was the first time probably he had ever looked with all his soul. No such speech had ever thrilled him before. Only if we had heard the accents with which Peter said, "Look upon us," should we be able to understand the ardent gaze of the expectant beggar. Verily, these men then had not lost their inspiration, or they never would have taken this course with the suppliant at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. They could work this miracle. Let that be taken as a proof of the continuance of their inspiration; and yet we see that notwithstanding the continuance of their inspiration they are going up like ordinary humble worshippers to pray in the temple.

Young men, let me, as your friend and teacher, advise you to beware of any inspiration that leads you away from apostolic practice. Your ambition may be easily excited, and you may not require a very expert tempter of the human mind to say to you that perhaps you may be a genius, a man of a particularly refined and sensitive character. You need not submit to take upon you the yoke of religious custom; your place is the side of the purling brook, yours to watch the meandering stream, yours to hold converse with rising and setting suns. When such temptation seduces you give it the lie. You have not the ardour of holy Peter, you have not the mental crown and moral glow of the divine John, and it will be better for you to follow in the way of apostolic practice than to yield up your religious life at the bidding of an anonymous tempter. The law would seem to be that every miracle should be succeeded by prayer, and every great effort of human life should be followed by a religious exercise, every outgoing of the soul should have its compensatory movement in silent communion with God. After you have been striving arduously and valiantly in the fight, plunge into the bath, so to say, of divine meditation and heavenly communion, and therein leave your weakness and recover your strength. This incidental conversation with the poor lame beggar at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple gives us some particulars about the Apostles themselves, and those particulars are the more valuable because of the way in which they are introduced into the narrative. It is perfectly evident that having all things common had not enriched Peter and John. We wonder sometimes as to the meaning of the apostolic communion, and here is a sidelight upon it of a very striking kind. The men who belonged to the apostolic communion had neither silver nor gold. Apostolic communion was no priest's trick: it was no attempt to enrich the apostolate at the expense of the Christian public. Here are two of the most conspicuous of the apostolate saying, quite in an incidental manner as an explanatory basis of proposed action, "Silver and gold have we none."

So much the better for them! Woe unto the Apostle who spends one half of his life in getting silver and gold, and the other half in watching that they do not run away from him. "Silver and gold have I none;" what had they, then? They had divine energy, spiritual life, social sympathy, and hearts to bless those who needed benediction and assistance. The poverty of the Apostles was in material substance only; and therefore it was no poverty at all. He is the poor man who has nothing but money; there are no poorer men in all the range of civilization today than those men who are overweighted with property. He is rich who has high ideals and noble sympathies, and who lives in the presence of God and in the service of truth. He cannot be alone; there is no solitude for the truly intellectual and spiritual nature. Some men cannot understand silence; if you are nor for ever talking to them, they suppose that you are dull; if you do not walk out hour after hour during the day, and talk the whole time, they inquire considerately as to your spirits, and as to whether there is not something in your temperament that tends toward melancholy. If men have not upon their faces an eternal grin they are supposed to be unhappy. You have met with persons who say they never walk out alone. I thank God I can never walk out in company! Have your riches in your mind, in your heart, in your thoughts, in your purposes, in your beneficent plans, and the night will be as the day, and the day will be sevenfold in brightness. Then you shall not know what it is to feel the chill and pain of solitude. This action of the Apostles also shows how possible it is to be giving less than others, and at the same time to be giving more than they all. "Silver and gold have I none." "Then he could give nothing," would be the swift and shallow reasoning of those who read the surface only. "But such as I have give I thee." That is the giving that does not impoverish; the more given the more left. It is the giving of the sun.

The sun has been giving his light; he has shone for thousands of years, and yet he is as luminous as when he first looked out upon the darkness which he dispelled. Give mechanically, and you will weary of the exercise; but give spiritually, and you will increase your possessions by the very giving of your alms. I take this incident as representing our own Christian life today in some important aspects. Our Christian life has its Pentecost. There are rare days in our consciousness; there are times when we think we are almost going into the celestial company; there are hours of transport, of high, tender realization, in which we know that though we are separated from the heavenly host by time and space, we yet can almost take hold of hands. And are there not days upon which, when we open the Bible, the whole page gleams with a new light, and when the very rustling of the leaves is as the shaking of the tree of Life? Have we not all said—

But the practical lesson immediately succeeds. We are not to live in such ecstasy; we are to go into the ordinary routine, if you so please, of worship. Herein many hearers are hard upon those who preach; the preacher is relied upon for the undue and continual excitement of the intellectual and spiritual nature. We forget that we do not live in excitement, but in the ordinary patient, thankful enjoyment of customary service; and our religious life, like the life of the Apostles, has its work to do outside the Temple.

A man may pray none the less prayerfully because he has aided some poor creature before he entered the sacred place. We should have enjoyed the service many a time much more keenly if before coming to it we had made some sorrowful heart glad. That is the preparation for prayer. To have been with some lonely one; to have created an atmosphere of friendliness around the solitary traveller; to have lifted the burden of life for one short minute from a back too weak to bear it, would have been to have enjoyed in the most profound and satisfactory sense the service of the house of God. If you want to come up at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice with glowing, thankful hearts, ready to receive any communication God may make to them, spend the intervening hours in doing good to those who sit in solitary places. Visit the poor and the friendless; hear their dreary tales; and when you come to the house of God you will come, not in a spirit of criticism, but in a spirit of sympathy, and from the first note to the last there shall be a shining forth and revelation of the Divine presence. Then, finally, the Christianity of this day, like the Christianity of the Apostolic day, must prove its divinity by its beneficence. "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk."

Peter did not preach a sermon to the man. To the excited multitude he expounded the. Scriptures; he quoted the Psalms and the Prophets, and shewed what new interpretation God had given to His word; but when he came face to face with the man lame from his mother's womb, unable to help himself, he preached no sermon except as the mention of the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is always a sermon, but bade the helpless man rise up and walk. Here is the sphere in which Christian argument may yet secure its highest triumph. Words can be answered by words, phrases beget phrases, and the easy trick of recrimination is the favorite amusement of mere controversialists; but a Church seeking out the lowly, helping the helpless, healing the sick, teaching the ignorant, standing by the cause of righteousness, defying the oppressor, and suffering and working for the right, is a Church whose beneficence is its noblest attribute, and whose character is the only vindication it requires.