ner disposition we may become
spiritually minded, and enabled to mortify the deeds of the body. The Holy
Spirit helps our infirmities. Prayer is the most necessary thing in the
spiritual life. Yet we do not know how to pray nor what to pray for as we
ought. The Spirit, Paul tells us, prays with groanings unutterable. And
again he tells us that we ourselves often do not know what the Spirit is
doing within us, but there is one, God, who searches the hearts. Words
often reveal my thought and my wishes, but not what is deep in my heart,
and God comes and searches my heart, and deep down, hidden, what I can not
see and what was to me an unutterable longing, God finds.

Powerful prayer! The confession of ignorance! Ah, friends, I am often
afraid for myself as a minister that I pray too easily. I have been praying
for these forty or fifty years and it becomes, as far as man is concerned,
an easy thing to pray. We all have been taught to pray, and when we are
called upon we can pray, but it gets far too easy, and I am afraid we think
we are praying often when there is little real prayer. Now if we are to
have the praying of the Holy Ghost in us one thing is needed; we must begin
by feeling, "I can not pray." When a man breaks down and can not pray, and
there is a fire burning in his heart, and a burden resting upon him, there
is something drawing him to God. "I know not what to pray,"--oh, blessed
ignorance! We are not ignorant enough. Abraham went out not knowing whither
he went; in that was an element of ignorance and also an element of faith.
Jesus said to His disciples when they came with their prayer for the throne,
"You know not what you ask." Paul says, "No man knoweth the things of God
but the Spirit of God." You say, "If I am not to pray the old prayers
I learned from my mother or from my professor in college or from my
experience yesterday and the day before, what am I to pray?" I answer, pray
new prayers, rise higher into the riches of God. You must begin to feel
your ignorance. You know what we think of a student who goes to college
fancying he knows everything. He will not learn much. Sir Isaac Newton
said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem
to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
When I see a man who can not p