Prayer, with our Lord, was a refuge from the storm; almost every word He uttered during that last tremendous scene was prayer; prayer the most earnest, the most urgent, repeated, continued, proceeding from the recesses of the soul, private, solitary; prayer for deliverance, prayer for strength; above every thing prayer for resignation.
By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, good Lord, deliver us.
From coldness to Thy merits and death, from error and misunderstanding, from the loss of our glory in Thee, from the unhappy desire of becoming great, from self-complacency, from untimely projects, from needless perplexity, from the murmuring spirit and devices of Satan, from the influence of the spirit of this world, from hypocrisy and fanaticism, from the deceitfulness of sin—preserve us, gracious Lord!
We kneel, how weak; we rise, how full of power!
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong,
Or others—that we are not always strong,
That we are ever overborne with care,
That we should ever weak or heartless be,
Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer,
And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?
We shall all find, by and by, that the most natural thing in the world for all wisdom to do is to sit at the feet of Christ, and ask for that which nothing else than prayer can compass.
