s."

Beloved child of God! what think you, is it not possible that this has
been the want in your life, the cause of your failure in prayer? You
knew not how grace would enable you to pray, if once the whole life were
under its power. You sought by earnest effort to conquer your reluctance
or deadness in prayer, but failed. You strove by every motive of shame
or love you could think of to stir yourself to it, but it would not
help. Is it not worth while asking the Lord whether the message I bring
you as His servant may not be more true for you than you think? Your
lack of prayer is owing to a diseased state of life, and the disease is
nothing but this--you have not accepted, for daily life and every duty,
the full salvation which the word brings: "Ye are not under the law, but
under grace." As universal and deep-reaching as the demand of the law
and the reign of sin, yea, more exceeding abundant, is the provision of
grace and the power by which it makes us reign in life. (Note B.)

In the chapter that follows that in which Paul wrote, "Ye are not under
the law, but under grace," he gives us a picture of a believer's life
under law, with the bitter experience in which it ends: "O wretched man
that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" His answer
to the question, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord," shows that
there is deliverance from a life held captive under evil habits that
have been struggled against in vain. That deliverance is by the Holy
Spirit giving the full experience of what the life of Christ can work in
us: "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free
from the law of sin and death." The law of God could only deliver us
into the power of the law of sin and death. The grace of God can bring
us into, and keep us in, the liberty of the Spirit. We can be made free
from the sad life under the power that led us captive, so that we did
not what we would. The Spirit of life in Christ can free us from our
continual failure in prayer, and enable us in this, too, to walk worthy
of the Lord unto all well-pleasing.

Oh! be not hopeless, be not despondent; there is a balm in Gilead; there
is a Physician there; there is healing for our sickness. What is
impossible with man is possible with God. What you see no possibility of
doing, grace will do. Confess the disease; trust the Physician; claim
the healing; pray the prayer of faith, "Heal me, and I shall be healed."
You too ca