| The Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 8 |
Page 4 |
There is another phase of the cost of praying. We ask for more holiness. We know that this is God’s will for us, and yet it may require a long time of struggle to bring our lives into true accord with our own desire. We pray to be made more humble, but it is probable that our longing can be answered only through many buffetings and defeats. We ask for patience, but the very word tells of suffering to be endured, and the quality of patience is one that can be gotten only through trail. We ask for more of Christ in our heart, and God is very willing to grant us this request. But perhaps our heart is so preoccupied that room for more of Christ can be made only by the casting out of many other things. Here is where the cost is experienced. The old nature in us will not yield to the new without a protest, nor until vanquished and put under foot.
It is never easy to grow better. You pray for a gentle temper. Does it come quietly and softly in answer to your prayer, as the dove came down out of the heavens to abide on Christ at his baptism? This certainly is not the usual history of the evolution of a sweet temper. It is a story rather of sore and long discipline, in which a turbulent and uncontrolled spirit is, by a slow process, tamed and trained into self-control, ofttimes only through long and sore struggle and many failures. When a man with an ungoverned temper begins to pray sincerely and earnestly that he
may learn to rule his own spirit and to grow into lovingness of disposition, he does not know what it will cost him to have his prayer answered. It is the same with all sincere requests for Christlikeness. We have the impression that a few petitions breathed up to God, asking him to make us pure, loving, and gentle, will bring the answer in some mysterious way, working the change in us without any effort or struggle of our own. But it is not thus that such prayers are answered.
Page 4