Especially praying for employment and immigration issues in this coming season.
C. H. Spurgeon on Prayer
The very act of prayer is a blessing. To pray is, as it were, to bathe in a cool, swirling stream and so to escape from the heat of earth’s summer sun. To pray is to mount on eagle’s wings above the clouds and get into the clear heaven where God dwells. To pray is to enter the treasure-house of God and to gather riches out of an inexhaustible storehouse. To pray is to grasp heaven in one’s arms, to embrace the Deity within one’s soul, and to feel one’s body made a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Friends, it is good to plead the past with God. Ah, you experienced people of God, you know how to do this. Here is David’s example of it:
Psalm 27
- Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me!
- You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.”
- Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!
- For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in.
Pleading – Psalm 70
- Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you;
let those who love your salvation
continually say, “God is great! ” - I am oppressed and needy;
hurry to me, God.
You are my help and my deliverer;
Lord, do not delay.
Do not think that you have prayed unless you have pleaded, for pleading is the very marrow of prayer. He who pleads well knows the secret of prevailing with God, especially if he pleads the blood of Jesus, for that unlocks the treasury of heaven. Many keys fit many locks, but the master key is the blood and the name of him who died but rose again and ever lives in heaven to save to the uttermost.
Psalm 71
- In you, O LORD, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame!
- In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me, and save me!
- Be to me a rock of refuge, to which I may continually come; you have given the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
- Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man.
- For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
- Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you.
- I have been as a portent to many, but you are my strong refuge.
- My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all the day.
- Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent.
- O God, be not far from me; O my God, make haste to help me!
- But I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more.
- My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge.
- O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
- So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.
- Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?
- You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.
- You will increase my greatness and comfort me again.
- I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God; I will sing praises to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel.
- My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed.
- And my tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long, for they have been put to shame and disappointed who sought to do me hurt.
