Lamentations 3:8

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"When I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer." Lam 3:8

God wants more than prayer from his creatures, when that prayer is limited to mere asking, or to the expression of a beggar's desires. Prayer may be but a religious form of selfishness. This notion of prayer must be driven out of our thought if ever we are to realise what is meant by prayer as it is used in New Testament speech and exemplified in New Testament suppliants. Asking must, of course, enter into prayer: every day brings its need; life indeed is one succession of necessities: all this is of course understood; but what is prayer in its widest and most enduring acceptation? It is communion with God, submission to the divine will, patient waiting for the incoming of heavenly influence, tender and affectionate expectation of deliverance to be effected, not in men's way, but in God's own method and at God's own time. When we omit the element of communion from prayer we degrade ourselves and our prayers to the level of selfishness. When our prayer is so degraded it is shut out from heaven; it does no good to the suppliant, it never reaches the skies, it never returns with a leaf or a bud from the tree of life. Sad beyond all imagination is the condition of the man to whom his prayers are returned. Think of the picture! The man supposed that he had sent; up his prayers to heaven, and he expected them to come back in the form of answers; and lo, he finds their, all lying dead around the very altar whence they started! There is no mystery in this. Let us always understand that we are accepted, not because of our formality, but because of our sincerity and earnestness and importunity. Good men in all ages have had experience of this exclusion of prayer from heaven, and sometimes they have misjudged it. Job exclaimed, "I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me not." What an entire misconception of the relation of the soul to God is presented in these words! Yet probably no other conception was then possible to Job's thought; the whole horizon was loaded with thunderclouds, and the whole sky of heaven gleamed with lightning: what else then could Job say? He seemed to be crying into emptiness, and not to be favoured even with the echo of his own voice; this was the very solitariness of solitude, the very loneliness of orphanhood. Again, the Psalmist used a similar expression when he said, "O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent." This is a most pathetic representation. It is as if the Psalmist had resolved to find God if he searched for him every hour in the twenty-four that make the little circle of the day: he cried in the morning, and there was no answer; he cried at noonday, and no reply was returned; he sought for God in the shadows of the twilight, but no figure of a friend appeared; at midnight he lifted up his voice in anguish, and yet the heavens were silent. It is well to have such experiences, terrible as they are at the moment of their realisation; they chasten the spirit, they are full of theological teaching, they drive us back to first principles, they constrain us to ask the most serious and penetrating questions. God will not allow such experiences to be unduly prolonged, for he knows that the extension of such trial would end in despair or madness. The Lord can take us very near to the brink, but he will not let us fall over; a sight of that awful abyss which lies beyond may be full of happy influence to us, if we rightly accept its teaching; let us realise that even whilst we walk along the precipice the Everlasting Arms are round about us, and none of our steps shall slide.