it met with: "Return, ye backsliding
children, and I will heal your backslidings. Behold, we come unto Thee,
for Thou art the Lord our God." We must come with the personal prayer,
and the faith that there will be a personal answer. Shall we not even
now begin to claim it in regard to the lack of prayer, and believe that
God will help us: "Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed."

It is always of consequence to distinguish between the symptoms of a
disease and the disease itself. Feebleness and failure in prayer is a
sign of feebleness in the spiritual life. If a patient were to ask a
physician to give him something to stimulate his feeble pulse, he would
be told that this would do him little good. The pulse is the index of
the state of the heart and the whole system: the physician strives to
have health restored. What everyone who would fain pray more faithfully
and effectually must learn is this, that his whole spiritual life is in
a sickly state, and needs restoration. It is as he comes to look, not
only at his shortcomings in prayer, but at the lack in the life of
faith, of which this is the symptom, that he will become fully alive to
the serious nature of the disease. He will then see the need of a
radical change in his whole life and walk, if his prayer-life, which is
simply the pulse of the spiritual system, is to indicate health and
vigour. God has so created us that the exercise of every healthy
function causes joy. Prayer is meant to be as simple and natural as
breathing or working to a healthy man. The reluctance we feel, and the
failure we confess, are God's own voice calling us to acknowledge our
disease, and to come to Him for the healing He has promised.

And what is now the disease of which the lack of prayer is the symptom?
We cannot find a better answer than is pointed out in the words, "Ye
are not under the law, but under grace."

Here we have suggested the possibility of two types of Christian life.
There may be a life partly under the law and partly under grace; or, a
life entirely under grace, in the full liberty from self-effort, and the
full experience of the Divine strength which it can give. A true
believer may still be living partly under the law, in the power of
self-effort, striving to do what he cannot accomplish. The continued
failure in his Christian life to which he confesses is owing to this one
thing: he trusts in himself, and tries to do his best. He does, indeed,
pray and look to Go