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your spiritual life, crowding out the daily and earnest study of the Word of God, so that you say, “I have not time for ah hour each day to study the Word of God, and I have not time for prayer?” To you Jesus says, “I am coming again. Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be bur dened down with surfeiting,' drunk enness, and the cares of this life ” I am not dwelling on this, because I am hurrying on to something else that may come closer to most of us nere tonight. 4. The Return of our Lord is used as a Motive to Holiness in a fourth respect. “But watch ye a t . every season, making supplication, that ye may pre vail to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand be fore the Son of man.” Here the return of our Lord is used as an incentive to prayer. In true Bible holiness,. prayerfulness, is a very large element. | A man or woman who is not a man or woman of much prayer is not a holy man or holy woman, according to, the Bible example and type of holiness. We have seen that our Lord Jesus was pre-eminently a Man of. Prayer; that in the very short account of His life which we have in the four Gps- pels, covering so very few pages, there were no less than twenty-five instances in which the words “pray” and “prayer” were used in connection with Him ; and that there were nu merous instances, mentioned of our Lord’s praying, where those words were not used. We saw that He would arise a great while before day, while His fellow workers were yet sleeping,. and go out into the moun tains to pray. We saw how on one oc casion after a hard day, when He had gone aside for rest, being very weary, instead of finding rest He found a great company of people;
how He went out and welcomed them and spent a whole day in most exhaust ing ministry; and how, when He was left alone at night, with an oppor tunity to sleep, He did not sleep, but spent the whole night in prayer to God. A man or woman who does not know what it means to spend hours alone with God in prayer is not a holy man or woman, after the Bible model. Prayerfulness is one of the most important elements of a really holy life. I think that more of us who are in the ministry fail to accom plish what God has in mind for us in our ministry through neglect of prayer than through any other one cause. One of the most effective pastors that America ever knew was the elder Stephen H. Tyng, who was one of the callers of the first pre- millennial Conference. It is reported that when he lay dying, with his friends gathered around his bed, he said to them, “I do not wish that I had preached more ; I do not wish that I had done better pastoral work ; but I do wish I had prayed more.” I believe when every one of us stands on yonder shore, and looks back on the life that we led here on earth, we will each of us, without exception, wish that we had prayed more. The motive to prayer, to that very essential element of holiriess, held out in the passage that I have read, is that the Lord is coming, and the only way to escape the things which are coming upon the world, is by watch ful, intense, constant prayer. “Watch ye at every season, making supplication, that ye may prevail to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before thè Son of man” : You and I will never escape them; you and I will never stand before the Son of man in that great and glorious day, unless we have watched unto prayer, and that not merely at
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