We all need helps in our Christian life. Of course, all the help we require we can find in God. His is the almighty arm on which we should ever lean in our weakness; his is the infinite life from whose fullness we should ever draw for the refilling of our own exhausted life pitchers; his is the light that should ever shine upon our darkness for cheer, for comfort, for guidance, for joy. God is all we need.
But we cannot see God with these mortal eyes; we cannot feel his bosom when we need to lean upon it; we cannot hear his voice when we listen for the word he may have to speak; we cannot carry our empty pitchers up to heaven, where God dwells, to have them refilled. We are life vines torn off the trellis and trailing on the ground amid the dust and the weeds, and we cannot lift ourselves up to twine about the unseen supports which God’s grace provides. We need something to help our dull senses – something we can see or hear or touch; something to interpret to our souls and bring near to them the spiritual things of divine love; something to which the tendrils of our life can cling, and which well lift them up and fasten them on the invisible realities of the spiritual world. And in loving mercy, in condescension to our weakness and spiritual dullness, God has provided for us such helps as we need. He brings us his blessings in ways that are adapted to our earthly state and capacity. He puts the rich supplies of his heavenly grace in cups from which we can drink, and sets them low down where we can reach them.
One of the helps which God has provided is prayer. Without prayer no Christian life can exist. There are other spiritual helps from the want of which we may suffer, but without which we may still live near to God; but to give up pray is to die.
Why should we pray? Because God is our Father and we are his children. It would be a most undutiful, unfilial, ungrateful child who should live in a good and beautiful home, enjoying its comforts, blessed by its love, and who should never have anything to say to the father whose heart and hand make the home, and who provides its comforts and pleasures.
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