Prayer by John Baillie

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Luke 18:1 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint

"St. Luke tells us that the moral of this parable is that men ought always to pray and not to faint. The word faint will, however, come to many people today as a surprise. We are so apt to interpret the meaning of prayer as if Jesus had said that men ought always to pray and not to work. That, I believe, is precisely the mistake that most of us make in our thinking about prayer: we think of it as an alternative to effort. We often speak as if there were two contrasted ways of facing the evils of our mortal lot—we may either fold our hands and pray about them, or we may pull ourselves together and do what we can to mend them.

But it is quite plain that our Lord's way of looking at prayer is as different from this as the day is from the night. What He said was that men ought always to pray and not to faintor, as the modern versions have it, not to lose heart. That is to say, He regarded prayer, not as an alternative to effort, but as an accompaniment of effort and an alternative to despairing acquiescence and inaction. In His language, and indeed in the language of the whole New Testament, the opposite of praying about a thing is to do nothing about it at all, and the opposite of working for a cause is to stop praying about it. Prayer unaccompanied by hard work and work unaccompanied by urgent prayer are two things that Jesus Christ not only never preached but never even contemplated as a plausible possibility.

Jesus thought of it as an alternative to fainting, an alternative to losing heart in our labours and so failing to get anything effective done at all.

The whole sermon, which was really good, is here: http://www.luc.edu/faculty/pmoser/idolanon/BaillieChristianDevotion.html#ways

number 4, to pray and not faint.

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