15. The secret burden
15
The secret burden
‘Apart…’ (Zechariah 12:12)
…Secret sin, and secret prayer, have this in common, that they both make a man travel his fastest. Secret sin makes him who commits it travel his fastest down to Gehenna,—that is to say, down into “the fire that is not quenched.”1 Whereas secret prayer makes him who so prays travel his very fastest up to the throne of God, and up to his own throne in heaven.… “Apart! Apart! Apart!” proclaims the prophet [Zechariah], ten times, in the text. If he could only get “the house of David, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem” to pray, and to pray apart—the Fountain for sin and uncleanness would soon be opened;2 and the Kingdom of God would soon come.…
This truly evangelical prophet is very importunate with the people to whom he preaches, to get them to take the fullest and most universal advantage of this apartness in prayer. Apartness in prayer has immense and incomparable advantages over all other kinds and practices of prayer: and this prophet urges it on his people with all his authority and with all possible earnestness.… And our Lord supports this prophet and says the same thing in one of his well-known utterances about prayer. Thou, he says, when thou prayest, go apart first.… Enter thy closet; and with thy door shut on thee, and thy Father with thee,—then pray.3
There it is—written all over our open Bible so that he who runs may read it,—the sure and certain blessedness of prayer apart, the immediate and the immense advantage and privilege of private prayer. But not only is all that written all over both the Old Testament and the New, it is illustrated and enforced on us out of our own experience every day.
…Take thanksgiving, which is, by far, the best and the most blessed part of both public and private prayer. You cannot thank God with all your heart in public. You cannot tell in public—even to them that fear God—all that God has done for your soul.…
“O God,” this man of prayer said in secret to God once every week, taking a whole night of it: going into particulars, and giving instances, and names, and dates.
“O God, I thank thee for my existence: for my life, and for my reason. For all thy gifts to me of grace, nature, fortune”—(enumerating and naming them, and taking time to do it)—“for all thy forbearance, long-suffering, long long-suffering to me-ward, up to this night. For all good things I have received of thy hand”—(naming some of them)—“for my parents honest and good”—(recollecting them, and recollecting instances and occasions of their honesty and goodness)—“and for benefactors, never to be forgotten” (naming them). “For religious, and literary, and social intimates, so congenial, and so helpful. For all who have helped me by their writings,”—(and at that he rises off his knees, and walks round his library, and passes his eye along its so helpful shelves).—“For all who have saved my soul also by their sermons, and their prayers” (and at this he recalls great preachers of the soul, some dead, and some still alive and open to his acknowledgments). “For all whose rebukes and remonstrances have arrested and reformed me. For those who even have, some intentionally, and some unintentionally, insulted and injured me,—but I have got good out of it all,”—and so on.
You could not offer a sacrifice of praise like that before everybody. You could not do it with propriety before anybody! And it would be still more impossible to go on, and to give instances and particulars like this: and without instances and particulars, you might as well be in your bed.
“Thou holdest my soul in life, and sufferest not my feet to be moved. Thou rescuest me every day from dangers, and from sicknesses of body and soul; from public shame, and from the strife of tongues. Thou continuest to work in me, by thy special grace to me, some timeous4 remembrance of my latter end; and some true recollection and shame, and horror, and grief of heart for my past sins. Glory be to thee, O God, for thine unspeakable, and unimaginable goodness to me,—of all sinners the most unworthy, the most provoking, and the most unthankful!”
You could not say things like that in the pulpit, no, nor at your own most intimate family altar. And, yet, they must be said. There are men among you whose hearts would absolutely burst, if they were not let say such things: aye, and say them, not once a week, like this great saint, but every day and every night. And it is to them—few, or many among us, God alone knows—it is to them that this Scripture is selected and sent this morning—this Scripture: And I will pour out upon them the spirit of grace and of supplications,5 the spirit of repentance and confession, the spirit of intercession and prayer for all men: and the still more blessed spirit of praise and thankfulness: and they shall pray and praise apart, till their Father which seeth, and heareth, apart and in secret, shall reward them openly.
*From Lord, Teach Us to Pray. Sermons on Prayer (New York: George H. Doran Co., [1923]), 267, 268-69, 277-79.
1. See Mark 9:46, 48.
2. Zechariah 12:10; 13:1.
3. Matthew 6:6.
4. I.e. timely.
5. See Zechariah 12:10.