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If you "restrain prayer before God" —

1. You act in opposition to your sense and confession of what is right. You know that you ought to pray. How can you repel the charge of inconsistency, when prayer is excluded from your practical system?

2. By neglecting prayer, you resist the authority of God. God has commanded you to pray. Can you venture to treat His command with contempt, and yet hope to prosper? What title have you to expect that, in this particular more than in any other, you can disobey God with impunity?

3. Without prayer vain will be to you all the provisions that are made in the gospel for your deliverance and happiness. The gospel is a dispensation of Divine wisdom and goodness. It proposes to bestow on men the benefits of salvation. But it proposes to bestow them in a certain way, and according to a certain scheme. Do you know any ground for believing that these benefits can ever belong to those who do not pray for them? Lessons:(1) It becomes us to form and adopt the purpose of the Psalmist. His purpose was to pray; and that purpose should be ours. We have many motives and inducements to engage in this exercise.

(2) It should be with great earnestness that we pray to God. Not going about the duty in a cold, formal, or perfunctory manner.

(3) We are not to pray as if God were unwilling to hear us, and to bestow the blessings which we need. He has revealed Himself as the hearer of prayer.

(4) Do not forget that the God to whom you pray is a holy God. Observe that the Psalmist did not satisfy himself with private prayer; he also resolved to engage in the exercises of public worship. The resolution of the Psalmist should be ours.

(A. Thomson D. D.)

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KJV: Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: for unto thee will I pray.

WEB: Listen to the voice of my cry, my King and my God; for to you do I pray.