Nothing would do more to cure us of a belief in our own wisdom than the granting of some of our eager prayers

A prayer is also a promise. Every true prayer carries with it a vow. If it do not, it is not in earnest. It is not of a piece with life. Can we pray in earnest if we do not in the act commit ourselves to do our best to bring about the answer? Can we escape some kind of hypocrisy? This especially so with intercession. What is the value of praying for the poor if all the rest of our time and interest is given only to becoming rich? Where is the honesty of praying for our country if in our most active hours we are chiefly occupied in making something out of it, if we are strange to sacrifice for it… To begin the day with prayer is but a formality unless it go on in prayer, unless for the rest of it we pray in deed what we began in word. One has said that while prayer is the day’s best beginning it must not be like the handsome title-page of a worthless book.

Prayer is the highest use to which speech can be put

Thus prayer is, for us, paradoxically, both a gift and a conquest, a grace a and a duty. But does that not mean, is it not a special case of the truth, that all duty is a gift, every call on us a blessing, and that the task we often find a burden is really a boon? When we look up from under it it is a load, but those who look down to it from God’s side see it as a blessing. It is like great wings — they increase the weight but also the flight. If we have no duty to do God has shut himself up from us. To be denied duty is to be denied God. No cross no Christ.

Prayer has its great end when it lifts us to be more conscious and more sure of the gift than the need, of the grace than the sin.