Necessity of Daily Prayer and Connection with God

Greetings,

            We have been starting the Confirmation Classes and spending a lot of time talking about the necessity of daily prayer, including listening to God speak to us in the Holy Word, by the process of Reading & Writing, and our speaking to God through Thankfulness Prayer, and speaking our heart to God.  I am constantly reminded that this has been the method of spiritual growth for almost 2,000 years of Christian leaders and effective Christian witness by Christians in all areas of life. 

      The following is by Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), a famous preacher and church historian, whose histories of the Church are still in print.  These along with his other books about the Christian life, enabled him to become one of the first authors to make an income by his pen.  During the English Civil War (Cromwell versus the King) he was a moderate royalist.  The great stress and conflict of the era gave meaning to his writing about the effort to lead a Christian life in real terms.  He here writes of the necessity of Quotidian Prayer (a man after my own heart).

            Amongst other arguments enforcing the necessity of daily prayer, this not the least, that Christ enjoins us to petition for daily bread.  New bread we know is best; and in a spiritual sense out bread, though in itself as stale and mouldy as that of the Gibeonites, is every day new, because a new and hot blessing, as I might say, is daily begged, and bestowed of God upon it.

            Manna must daily be gathered, and not provisionally be hoarded up.  God expects that men every day address themselves unto Him, by petitioning Him for sustenance.

            How contrary is this to the common practice of many.  As camels in sandy countries are said to drink but once in seven days, and then in praesens, praeteritum, et futurum, for time past, present, and to come, so many fumble this, last, and next week’s devotions all in a prayer.  Yea, some defer all their praying till the last day.

            Constantine had a conceit that because baptism washed away all sins, he would not be baptized till his death-bed, that so his soul might never lose the purity thereof, but immediately mount to heaven.  But sudden death preventing him, he was not baptized at all, as some say, or only by an Arian bishop as others affirm.  If any erroneously, on the same supposition, put off their prayers to the last, let them take heed lest, long delayed, they prove either none at all or none in effect.

Yours & His,

DED