thing, consecrated unto the
Lord, and to come into His treasury. And Israel had broken this
consecration vow: it had not given God His due; it had robbed God.

It is this we need: God must discover to us how the lack of prayer is
the indication of unfaithfulness to our consecration vow, that God
should have all our heart and life. We must see that this restraining
prayer, with the excuses we make for it, is greater sin than we have
thought; for what does it mean? That we have little taste or relish for
fellowship with God; that our faith rests more on our own work and
efforts than on the power of God; that we have little sense of the
heavenly blessing God waits to shower down; that we are not ready to
sacrifice the ease and confidence of the flesh for persevering waiting
on God; that the spirituality of our life, and our abiding in Christ, is
altogether too feeble to make us prevail in prayer. When the pressure of
work for Christ is allowed to be the excuse for our not finding time to
seek and secure His own presence and power in it, as our chief need, it
surely proves that there is no right sense of our absolute dependence
upon God; no deep apprehension of the Divine and supernatural work of
God in which we are only His instruments, no true entrance into the
heavenly, altogether other-worldly, character of our mission and aims,
no full surrender to and delight in Christ Jesus Himself.

If we were to yield to God's Spirit to show us that all this is in very
deed the meaning of remissness in prayer, and of our allowing other
things to crowd it out, all our excuses would fall away, and we should
fall down and cry, "We have sinned! we have sinned!" Samuel once said,
"As for me, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to
pray for you." Ceasing from prayer is sin against God. May God discover
this to us. (Note A.)

5. _When God discovers sin, it must be confessed and cast out._--When
the defeat at Ai came, Joshua and Israel were ignorant of the cause. God
dealt with Israel as a nation, as one body, and the sin of one member
was visited on all. Israel as a whole was ignorant of the sin, and yet
suffered for it. The Church may be ignorant of the greatness of this sin
of restraining prayer, individual ministers or believers may never have
looked upon it as actual transgression, none the less does it bring its
punishment. But when the sin is no more hidden, when the Holy Spirit
begins to convince of it, then c