Spurgeon and Prayer

God has driven me again to the profoundness and simplicity of prayer.  And also to its absolute necessity.  It is, as Spurgeon says below, "our best resort".  I pray that we can all grow strong and adept "in the holy art of wresting with God in prayer."  SDG

"It may scarcely be needful to commend to you the sweet uses of private devotion, and yet I cannot forebear.  to you, as the ambassadors of God, the mercy-seat has a virtue beyond all estimate; the more familiar you are with the court of heaven the better shall you discharge your heavenly trust.  Among all the formative influences which go to make up a man honored of God, I know of none more mighty than his own familiarity with the mercy-seat. All the college course can do for a student is coarse and external compared with the spiritual and delicate refinement obtained by communion with God.  While the unformed person is revolving upon the wheel of preparation, prayer is the tool of the great potter by which He molds the vessel.  All our libraries and studies are mere emptiness compared with our closets. We grow, we wax mighty, we prevail in private-prayer."

"How much blessing we may have missed through remissness in supplication we can scarcely guess, and none of us can know how poor we are in comparison with what we might have been if we had lived habitually nearer to God in prayer.  We not only ought to pray more, but we must."

"When you are engaged in prayer, plead your strength, and you will get nothing; then plead your weakness, and you will prevail.  There is no better plea with Divine love than weakness and pain; nothing can so prevail with teh great heart of God as for your heart to fain and swoon. The man who rises in prayer to tears and agony, and feels all the while as if could not pray, and yet must pray--he is the man who will see the desire of his soul. Do no mothers always care for the tiniest child, or for that one which is most sick? Do we not spend the greatest care upon that one of our children which has the weakest limbs; and is it not true that our weakness holds God's strength, and leads Him to bow His omnipotence to our rescue?"