Prayer and fasting are in this word of His the symbol of all special exercises of the spirit, as it strives to get free from the burden of the flesh and to come nearer to God; and without such exercises, He presses it on us if we stand in need of such reminders, we cannot hope for any harvest of spiritual strength. And we can hardly have failed to notice how His own practice corresponds with His warnings and injunctions. Before He began His ministry we read of His forty days' fast in the wilderness; and at every turn, in the course of it, we read again and again incidentally of His constant withdrawals into privacy with God. His short life on earth was a life of spiritual ministry. All the common things of life were to Him so many illustrations of some spiritual lesson of the Father's love and care, or of man's dependence on Him. In every voice of the world there was the undertone of some spiritual suggestion. So that we might say--Surely His days were one unbroken course of spiritual work and communion, and He could need no special seasons or exercises; but His example teaches us a different lesson. As if to bring it home to us beyond all possibility of doubt or question, that the most devoted, the most active, and most powerful spiritual characters, will always be those whose communion with God in private prayer and exercise is most constant and intense, He Himself was continually withdrawing for such communion; and there are no more suggestive passages in the Gospels for our guidance than those incidental references which tell us, as if by chance, giving us passing glimpses into the unrecorded portions of His life, how on one occasion He retired into a mountain apart to pray, or how on another he spent the whole night apart in prayer, or how he was in a desert place apart in prayer. These withdrawals of Jesus into the solitude of the desert or the mountain, these hours in which He was alone with the Father, are but another name for those exercises of prayer, fasting, meditation, communion with God, without which, as He tells His followers in the text I have read to you, it is not possible to eradicate from the soul those influences of sin which destroy its harmony and undermine its strength. These withdrawals were His times of spiritual refreshment; and by His practice He declares to us His need of them. And if in His case they were necessary, much more are they necessary for you and me, entangled as we are amidst all the varied influences of our common life, and with natures prone to sin.