Truths About Prayer

Greetings,

      During Lent we are looking at improving our daily walk with Jesus.  The following meditation from George S. Stewart, in The Lower Levels of Prayer (1939), focuses us on the importance of each day.

      Begin the day by offering it and yourself to God.  Look at the day as an individual thing that begins and ends with completeness in itself; then take this thing, this day, and offer it to God to be a day for His use…The day at once becomes a unity and life becomes unified.  However many distracting details come into the day, both mind and emotion are dominated, not by them, but by the sense that you have only one thing to do—namely, to act in obedience to God with regard to them.

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      At the end of a common day’s life, with all care, and no deliberate handling of unclean things, our hands are soiled.  Life in this world is like that.  Even our bodies, clothed and covered from contact with the outside world, are soiled.  Living in the world we know inevitably brings defiling.  So it is with soul and spirit.  The day’s living, in contact with much that is stained with evil, in the common world we know, brings its own soiling and weakening.  At the close of the day, even where no deliberate sin appears, we ask for cleansing from the dust of the way, the soil of the day’s life with all its contacts.  And God gives it, with refreshing and renewal and rest in His gift.  Truly we need this.  It is no shame to a man to come home from his day’s work with soiled hands.  They have been soiled in the inevitable contact with soiling things, and are more honourable in their stain than hands that have kept their whiteness by withdrawal from the world’s life.  Yet they are soiled and unclean.  It is shame to him if he leaves them so, and eats and sleeps without the washing he should give.  Then he becomes truly a dirty person.  This is true of the spiritual life also.  It is no disgrace that the soiling of the day’s life affects our souls; it is disgrace if we suffer it to remain uncleansed and accept the defilement.  So we ask God for cleansing from “the dust of the way.”  How willingly Christ washed His disciples’ feet!

Yours & His,

DED