Genesis 4:26

Genesis 4:26

Prayer is speaking to God on any subject, with any object, in any place, and in any way.

I. Prayer so regarded is an instinct. It seems to be natural to man to look upwards and address himself to his God. Even in the depth of lost knowledge and depraved feeling, the instinct of prayer will assert itself. A nation going to war with another nation will call upon its God for success and victory; and an individual man, from the bedside of a dying wife or child, will invoke the aid of one supposed to be mighty, to stay the course of a disease which the earthly physician has pronounced incurable and mortal. Just as the instinct of nature brings the child in distress or hunger to a father's knee or to a mother's bosom, even so does created man turn in great misery to a faithful Creator, and throw himself upon His compassion and invoke His aid.

II. But prayer is a mystery too. The mysteriousness of prayer is an argument for its reasonableness. It is not a thing which common men would have thought of or gone after for themselves. The idea of holding a communication with a distant, an unseen, a spiritual being, is an idea too sublime, too ethereal for any but poets or philosophers to have dreamed of, had it not been made instinctive by the original Designer of our spiritual frame.

III. Prayer is also a revelation. Many things waited for the coming of Christ to reveal them, but prayer waited not. Piety without knowledge there might be; piety without prayer could not be. And so Christ had no need to teach as a novelty the duty or the privilege of prayer. He was able to assume that all pious men, however ignorant, prayed; and to say therefore only this, "When ye pray, say after this manner."

C. J. Vaughan, Voices of the Prophets,p. 139.

References: Genesis 4:26. Expositor,2nd series, vol. vii., p. 230; J. Van Oosterzee, The Year of Salvation,vol. ii., p. 331; B. Waugh, The Sunday Magazine(1887), p. 491; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 381.