Special Protracted Prayer
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Luke 6:12
And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.
If any man of woman born might bare lived without prayer it was surely the Lord Jesus. In some parts of prayer He could take no share, e.g., confession of sin. Then again, He had no need for self-examination each night, and no need to pray to be protected from sin each morning. Yet never was there a man more abundant in prayer.
1. Notice the place which Christ selected for prayer. The solitude of a mountain. Why?
(1) To prevent interruption.
(2) That He might be able to pray aloud.
(3) To avoid ostentation.
2. The time selected. The silent hours of night. To some of us, the night might be most inappropriate and unsuitable; if so, we must by no means select it, but must follow our Lord in the spirit rather than in the letter.
3. Again, our Lord sets us a good example in the matter of extraordinary seasons of devotion in the protracted character of His prayer. He continued all night in prayer. I do not think that we are bound to pray long as a general rule. Force is its standard rather than length. When the whole soul groans itself out in half a dozen sentences there may be more real devotion in them than in hours of mere wire drawing and word spinning. True prayer is the soul's mounting up to God, and if it can ride upon a cherub or the wings of the wind so much the better, yet in extraordinary seasons, when the soul is thoroughly wrought up to an eminent intensity of devotion, it is well to continue it for a protracted season. We know not that our Lord was vocally praying all the time, He may have paused to contemplate; He may have surveyed the whole compass of the field over which His prayer should extend, meditating upon the character of His God recapitulating the precious promises, remembering the wants of His people, and thus arming Himself with arguments with which to return to wrestle and prevail. How very few of us have ever spent a whole night in prayer, and yet what boons we might have had for such asking!
4. Jesus has further instructed us in the art of special devotion by the manner of His prayer. Notice, he continued all night in prayer to God — to God. How much of our prayer is not prayer to God at all! That gunner will do no service to the army who takes no aim, but is content so long as he does but fire; that vessel makes an unremunerative voyage which is not steered for a port, but is satisfied to sail hither and thither. We must direct our prayers to God, and maintain soul-fellowship with Him, or our devotion will become a nullity, a name for a thing which is not.
5. Once more, we may learn from Jesus our Lord the occasion for special devotion. At the time when our Master continued all night in prayer He had been upbraided by the Pharisees. He fulfilled the resolve of the man after God's own heart. "Let the proud be ashamed; for they dealt perversely with me without a cause: but I will meditate in Thy precepts." So David did, and so did David's Lord. The best answer to the slanders of the ungodly is to be more constant in communion with God:
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