This is the mainspring of everything. And yet we make excuses, and say we cannot find time. But the truth is, if we cannot find time for secret prayer, it matters little to the Lord whether we find time for public service or not.
We can find time to talk with our brethren; and the minutes fly past unheeded, until they become hours; and we do not feel it a burden. Yet, when we find we should be getting into our closet to be alone with God for a season, there are ever so many difficulties standing right in the way. "Ten thousand foes arise " to keep us from that hallowed spot, "thy closet." It would seem as if Satan cares not how we are employed, so being we seek not our Father's face; for well the great tempter knows if he can but snap the communications between us and our God he has us at his mercy. Yes, we can find time, it may be, even to preach the gospel and minister to the saints, while our own souls are barren and sapless for lack of secret prayer and communion with God!
When we go into our closet and shut the door, no one sees us, no one hears us, but God. It is not the place to make a fair show. No one is present before whom to make a little display of our devotion. No one is there but God.
Ah, it is a searching spot-alone in the presence of God ! It is the lack of spending time there that is the secret of so much of the lifelessness and the carnality that abounds. What we want to see is a great revolution in the praying habits of God's people. We cannot pray by proxy-that is, by another doing it for us any more than our bodies can thrive by der taking our food for us. There must be individual closet work.
prayer meeting will not suffice us, blessed privilege though it be. "Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet; and when thou hast shut the 'door, pray " (Matt. 6:6).How many there may be who have gradually left off secret prayer until communion with God has been effectively severed!
We do not speak at random. Any one who does a little in coming and going among souls will have discovered this by experience. The terrible downward current of these last days is carrying the many before it-yea, the many even of God's people; and the great enemy of souls could not have hit upon a more deadly device for making merchandise of the saints than by stopping the supplies at a throne of grace When closet prayer languisheth, the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint.
The lack of secret prayer betrays a lack of heavenly appetite. It implies a positive absence of desire for the presence of God. Those who are strangers to the closet fall an easy prey to temptation. Satan gets an advantage of them at every turn. Nothing comes right; everything happens in an untoward way, for
Thorny is the road
That leads my soul from God.
If a brother is not at the prayer meeting for a time or two, you can speak to him about it, and exhort him. His absence is a thing you can see. But if he is absenting himself from the closet, that is a thing beyond your observation. You only feel, when you come in contact with him, that something is sapping his spiritual life; and who shall estimate the eternal loss that follows the neglect of secret prayer!
How different it is with those who watch with jealous care that the Lord has always His portion, whoever may have to want theirs ! Their going out their coming in, their whole manner of life, declares that they have been where the heavenly dew has been falling. Their Father, who saw them in secret, is rewarding them openly. They carry about with them, although all unconscious of it, the serenity of the secret place, where they have been communing with God.
Let secret prayer be urged on God's people as one of the great essentials of spiritual life, without which our grandest service will be barren and fruitless in the eyes of Him who looketh on the heart. And let each one of us ask himself the question, "Am I delighting in the secret place-to plead with the Lord -to renew my strength-to have power with God and prevail ? "(Adapted.)