Prayer and Communion
Let us watch and pray, particularly that we may have a conscience, not morbid indeed, but really awake. Above all let us cultivate communion with God; a hundred “cases of conscience” will solve themselves if we live near Him.
The devout, diligent practice of regular and unhurried secret prayer is needed if only to protect and develop the freedom and the truth of habitual secret communion with God.
We are bidden to pray with utmost simplicity as petitioners, making definite request. We are bidden to pray with love and loyalty as worshippers, giving our Father the adoring honour of supplication and praise. We are bidden to pray as friends, maintaining communion with our Father by our utterances to Him. And the “Spirit of grace and supplication” (Zech. 12:10) is promised to them that ask the Father that they may “pray in the Spirit.”
The Christian longing to be holy will set himself to pray. He will be a man of prayer. All the great sorts and departments of prayer will be precious to him. He will reverently prize public prayer, with its peculiar power to lift the spiritual worshipper into realizing communion with all the praying people of God.