Purpose in PrayerBounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Religion
Purpose in Prayer
Bounds, Edward M. (Edward McKendree)
Prayer -- Christianity
In this way their whole being was saturated with the Divine, and they
became the reflectors of the heavenly fragrance and glory. Walking with
God down the avenues of prayer we acquire something of His likeness, and
unconsciously we become witnesses to others of His beauty and His grace.
Professor James, in his famous work, “Varieties of Religious
Experience,” tells of a man of forty-nine who said: “God is more real to
me than any thought or thing or person. I feel His presence positively,
and the more as I live in closer harmony with His laws as written in my
body and mind. I feel Him in the sunshine or rain; and all mingled with
a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to Him
as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful.
He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it
seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong
mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view
of Him and His love for me, and care for my safety.... That He is mine
and I am His never leaves me; it is an abiding joy. Without it life
would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.”
Equally notable is the testimony of Sir Thomas Browne, the beloved
physician who lived at Norwich in 1605, and was the author of a very
remarkable book of wide circulation, “Religio Medici.” In spite of the
fact that England was passing through a period of national convulsion
and political excitement, he found comfort and strength in prayer. “I
have resolved,” he wrote in a journal found among his private papers
after his death, “to pray more and pray always, to pray in all places
where quietness inviteth, in the house, on the highway and on the
street; and to know no street or passage in this city that may not
witness that I have not forgotten God.” And he adds: “I purpose to take
occasion of praying upon the sight of any church which I may pass, that
God may be worshipped there in spirit, and that souls may be saved
there; to pray daily for my sick patients and for the patients of other
physicians; at my entrance into any home to say, ‘May the peace of God
abide here’; after hearing a sermon, to pray for a blessing on God’s
truth, and upon the messenger; upon the sight of a beautiful person to
bless God for His creatures, to pray for the beauty of such an one’s
soul, that God may enrich her with inward graces, and that the outward
and inward may correspond; upon the sight of a deformed person, to pray
God to give them wholeness of soul, and by and by to give them the
beauty of the resurrection.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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