The Costliness of Prayer

Alexander Whyte on prayer:

“When reading and meditation and prayer do once begin to come in on a man, they make great inroads both upon his hours of work, and his hours of recreation, and even upon his hours of sleep. It is not that the Hearer of prayer has any need of our hours… He has always plenty of time. He inhabits eternity. He is always waiting to be gracious. It is we who need time to prepare our hearts to seek God. And it takes some men a long time, and a retired, and an uninterrupted time to get their minds and their hearts into the true frame for prayer and for the presence of God… As life goes on, we come to discover that time, pure time, is as indispensable and as important an element in all true prayer as is repentance, or faith, or reformation itself. Indeed, without a liberal allowance of time, no man has ever attained to a real life of prayer at all… Now that cannot, surely, be said to be bought cheaply, which despoils us of so much of the most precious thing we possess; and a thing moreover, which is so fast running short with so many of us.”

– Michael A. G. Haykin with George McGuinness A Consuming Fire: The Piety of Alexander Whyte of Free St. George’s (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), p. 18.