Faithful prayer always implies correlative exertion; and no man can ask honestly and hopefully to be delivered from temptation, unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.
Whatever we are directed to pray for, we are also exhorted to work for; we are not permitted to mock Jehovah, asking that of Him which we deem not worth our pains to acquire.
Prayer was never meant to be a substitute for labor—an easy way of throwing our responsibilities upon God. The old classic story of the teamster whose cart stuck in the mud, and who fell to crying to Hercules for help instead of using effort himself, and was told by the god he invoked to put his own shoulder to the wheel, shows that even a heathen mind could see that faith was never meant to exclude works.
When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayers should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man.
Sometimes a fog will settle over a vessel's deck and yet leave the topmast clear. Then a sailor goes up aloft and gets a lookout which the helmsman on deck cannot get. So prayer sends the soul aloft; lifts it above the clouds in which our selfishness and egotism befog us, and gives us a chance to see which way to steer.
Every praying Christian will find that there is no Gethsemane without its angel.
