Scripture: "Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;"--Ephesians 6:18
"Man has been sent into the world on no other errand but by prayer to rise out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity. For poor and miserable as this life is, we have all of us free access to all that is great, and good, and happy, and carry within ourselves a key to all the treasures that Heaven has to bestow upon us.
"God, the only good of all intelligent nature, is not an absent or distant God, but is more present in and to our souls than our bodies; and we are strangers to heaven and without God in the world, for this only reason, because we are void of that Spirit of prayer, which alone can, and never fails to unite us with the one only good, and to open heaven and the Kingdom of God within us. A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be, whose spirit aspires after all that, which God is ready and infinitely de¬sirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good communicates Himself to the soul that longs to partake of Him.
"We are all of us by birth the offspring of God, more nearly related to Him than we are to one another. For in Him we live and move and have our being. The first man that was brought forth from God had the breath and spirit of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost breathed into him, and so he became a living soul. He was the image and likeness of God, not with any regard to his outward shape or form, for no shape has any likeness to God ; but he was in the image and likeness to God because the Holy Trinity had breathed their own nature and spirit into Him. And as the Deity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are always in heaven, and make heaven to be every-where, so this spirit breathed by Them into man brought heaven into man along with it. And so man was in heaven as well as on earth, that is, in Paradise which signifies a heavenly state, or birth of life."
The lesson that we find here in regard to the sun is one of the deepest truths of God's Word. As willing as the sun is unceasingly to shine forth its light and warmth on the waiting earth, is the living God waiting unceasingly to work in the heart of His child. Or, rather, He is ever actually working within us, except as we hold Him back and hinder Him by our unbelief for our surrender to the spirit of the world. Oh, that we could learn to say every day: As sure as the sun shines on this earth, my God is sending forth His light and His love into my heart for me to receive and to rejoice in.
