Daniel 9:3 And I set my face to the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes: The prophet Daniel became a great proficient both in penitential and in intercessory prayer as the years went on. And he came to that great proficiency just as a great proficiency is come to in any other science or art; that is to say, by constant, and unremitting, and enterprising practice. Lord teach us to pray, said a disciple on one occasion to our Lord. But not even our Lord, with all His willingness, and all His ability, can teach any of us to pray. Every man must teach himself this most personal, and most secret, and most experimental; this greatest and best of all the arts. Every man must find out the best ways of prayer for himself. There is no royal road; there is no short or easy road to proficiency in prayer. You must also have special and extraordinary seasons of prayer, as Daniel had, over and above his daily habit of prayer. Special and extraordinary; original and unparalleled seasons of prayer, when you literally do nothing else day nor night but pray. Now, it is plain that you cannot teach a lifetime of experiment and attainment like that to any chance man; and, especially, you cannot teach it to a man who still detests the very thought of such prayer. It was his yoke in his youth that first taught Daniel to pray. And Babylon taught Daniel and his three friends all to pray, and to pray together in their chambers as we read. To be arrested in their father's houses by Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers; to have Babylonian chains put on their hands and their feet; to see the towers of Zion for the last time: to be asked to sing some of the songs of Zion to amuse their masters as they toiled over the Assyrian sands — you would have been experts yourselves in a school of prayer like that Jeremiah, a great authority on why some men pray, and why other men never pray, has this about you in his book: "Moab hath been at his ease from his youth up; he hath settled on his lees; he hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel: neither hath he gone into captivity; and, therefore, his taste remaineth in him, and his scent is not changed." The ninth chapter of Daniel is dear to every old devotional hand. It is delightful with a delight that is not known to neophytes. It is positively delightful to see the old prophet allying in his chamber and spelling out the book of the prophet Jeremiah, the first copy of which has just been smuggled across the wilderness from Jerusalem to Babylon. We sit over and spell out old authors in literature and religion, if they are sufficiently old; but it would not pay to make a contraband trade of the authors and the preachers of to-day to the authors of to-day or to the preachers either. We exploit and plagiarise the great preachers of the great past, but we do not find much to repay us in the pulpit of our day. Only Daniel studied Jeremiah as much as if Jeremiah had been Moses himself, and more. And he not only studied a prophet whom we would call his contemporary, and his colleague, but, old prophet and old priest as he himself was, he took a new start in fasting, and in sackcloth, and in ashes, and in prayer of all kinds as he sat over Jeremiah's now book, and felt on the floor of his chamber holding the book to his heart. Had we been in Daniel's place, I will wager what we would have said as we read that seventy years' passage on the new parchment: "The Lord's ways — if this is indeed the Lord — His ways are not equal," we would have said. "Here am I getting on to old age in Babylon, and no intimation has come to me like this. Surely I was the man that needed it, and had earned it. Why Jeremiah? What has he done? And besides, has he not fallen sway to our oppressors?" I have a feeling that I would not have been in such a meek temper as Daniel was over that book the ink of which was still wet. O Daniel, a man greatly beloved! and who deserved to be! "Why," asks Pascal, "why has God established prayer?" And the first answer out of the three that Pascal gives to himself is this — "To communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality." And Daniel was of Pascal's deep, believing and original mind. For Daniel, just because he read and believed that deliverance was at the door, all the more see himself to pray as if his prayer was to be the alone and predestinated cause of the coming deliverance. Daniel put on sackcloth, and fasted, and prayed, and went back upon all his own and all his people's sins in a way that confounds us to our face. We cannot understand Daniel. We are not deep enough. He prayed, and fasted, and returned to an agony of prayer, as if he had never heard of the near deliverance; he prayed in its very presence as if he despaired of ever seeing it. He fasted and prayed as he had not done all these seventy fasting and praying years. Read, all you experts in prayer, read with all your mind, and with all your heart, and with all your experience, and with all your imagination this great causality chapter. It is written by a proficient for proficients. It is written by a great saint of God for all such. Read it and think. Read it with your Pascal open before you. Read it and sink down into the deep things of God and the soul. Read it and practise it till you know by experiment and experience that decree, and covenant, and prophecy, and promise, and all, however sure, and however near, are all only fulfilled in immediate and dependent answer to penitential and importunate prayer. Read it and pray as never before after the answer has actually begun. See the answer out to the last syllable before you begin to restrain penitence and prayer. And after the answer is all fulfilled, still read it and the still deeper chapters that follow it, till you learn new fasting, and new sackcloth, and new ashes, and new repentance, away out to your saintliest old age. Read Daniel's greatest prayer, and "Know thy dread power — a creature yet a cause." (Alex.Whyte, D.D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes: |
    |