d you, that ye, always having all
sufficiency in all things, may abound to all good work." Do let us
believe that God's call to much prayer need not be a burden and cause of
continual self-condemnation. He means it to be a joy. He can make it an
inspiration, giving us strength for all our work, and bringing down His
power to work through us in our fellowmen. Let us not fear to admit to
the full the sin that shames us, and then to face it in the name of our
Mighty Redeemer. _The light that shows us our sin and condemns us for
it, will show us the way out of it, into the life of liberty that is
well-pleasing to God._ If we allow this one matter, unfaithfulness in
prayer, to convict us of the lack in our Christian life which lies at
the root of it, God will use the discovery to bring us not only the
power to pray that we long for, but the joy of a new and healthy life,
of which prayer is the spontaneous expression.

And what is now the way by which our sense of the lack of prayer can be
made the means of blessing, the entrance on a path in which the evil may
be conquered? How can our intercourse with the Father, in continual
prayer and intercession, become what it ought to be, if we and the world
around us are to be blessed? As it appears to me, we must begin by going
back to God's Word, to study what _the place is God means prayer to
have_ in the life of His child and His Church. A fresh sight of what
prayer is _according to the will of God_, of what our prayers can be,
_through the grace of God_, will free us from those feeble defective
views, in regard to the absolute necessity of continual prayer, which
lie at the root of our failure. As we get an insight into the
reasonableness and rightness of this divine appointment, and come under
the full conviction of how wonderfully it fits in with God's love and
our own happiness, we shall be freed from the false impression of its
being an arbitrary demand. We shall with our whole heart and soul
consent to it and rejoice in it, as the one only possible way for the
blessing of heaven to come to earth. All thought of task and burden, of
self-effort and strain, will pass away in the blessed faith that as
simple as breathing is in the healthy natural life, will praying be in
the Christian life that is led and filled by the Spirit of God.

As we occupy ourselves with and accept this teaching of God's Word on
prayer, we shall be led to see how our failure in the prayer-life was
owin