The Prayer Life [Annotated, Updated]: Persevering in Prayer

by Andrew Murray

There cannot be a more important question than this: “How can I regain the lost tenderness of conscience and become prepared to really offer to God the sacrifice of a broken heart?” The Bible teaches us the way. Let the Christian remember what God thinks about sin – the hatred with which His holiness burns against it and the solemn sacrifice that He made to conquer sin and deliver us from it. Let him wait patiently in God’s presence until His holiness shines upon him and he cries out with Isaiah, Woe is me! for I am dead because I am a man of unclean lips. (Isaiah 6:5). Let him remember the cross and what the love of Christ had to endure there through the unspeakable pain that sin caused Him. Let him ask if this will not teach him to listen to the voice that says, Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate (Jeremiah 44:4). Let him take time, so that the blood and love of the cross may exercise their full influence on him, and let him think of sin as nothing less than giving his hand to Satan and to his power. Is not this a terrible result of our prayerlessness and of our short and hurried waiting before God – that the true knowledge of sin is almost lost?