Required reading
Lectures to my students by Charles Spurgeon (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Chapter 3 (The preacher's private prayer).
My summary
Today Spurgeon teaches his students about what the preacher's private prayer life should look life.
Prayer is important for:
(i) while your discourses are yet upon the anvil;
(ii) assisting you in the delivery of your sermon;
(iii) after the sermon;
(iv) interceding for your people;
(v) special times.
What grabbed me
I liked Spurgeon's description of the minister's prayer life overall: 'I take it that as a minister he is always praying. Whenever his mind turns to his work, whether he is in it or out of it, he ejaculates a petition, sending up his holy desires as well-directed arrows to the skies. He is not always in the act of prayer, but he lives in the spirit of it. If his heart be in his work, he cannot eat or drink, or take recreation, or go to his bed, or rise in the morning, without evermore feeling a fervency of desire, a weight of anxiety, and a simplicity of dependence upon God; thus, in one form or other he continues in prayer. If there be any man under heaven, who is compelled to carry out the precept — “Pray without ceasing,” surely it is the Christian minister. He has peculiar temptations, special trials, singular difficulties, and remarkable duties, he has to deal with God in awful relationships, and with men in mysterious interests; he therefore needs much more grace than common men, and as he knows this, he is led constantly to cry to the strong for strength, and say, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”'
Oh that we would be more constant in prayer!
Next week's reading
Read Chapter 4 (Our public prayer).
Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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