ause of religion? or is it not rather because you feel that it makes
you unloveable to those around you, and inflicts pain on those who are
very dear to you, at the same time lessening your own dignity and
wounding your self-respect? These are all proper and allowable motives
of action while kept in their subordinate place; but if they become the
primary actuating principle, instead of a conscientious hatred of sin
because it is the abominable thing that God hates,[28] if pleasing man
be your chief object, you have no reason to complain that your prayers
are unanswered. The word of God has told you that it must be so. You
have asked "amiss." There is also a secondary sense in which we may "ask
amiss:" when we pray without corresponding effort. Some worthy people
think that prayer alone is to obtain for them all the benefits they can
desire, and that the influences of the Holy Spirit will, unassisted by
human effort, produce a transforming change in the temper and the
conduct. This they call magnifying the grace of God, as if it could be
supposed that his gracious help would ever be granted for the purpose of
slackening, instead of encouraging and exciting, our own exertions. Do
not the Scriptures abound in exhortations, warnings, and threatenings on
the subject of individual watchfulness, diligence, and unceasing
conflicts? "To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according
to this word, it is because there is no light in them."[29] Perhaps you
have prayed under the mental delusion I have above described; you have
expected the work should be done _for_ you, instead of _with_ you; that
the constraining love of Christ would constrain you necessarily to
abandon your sinful habits, while, in fact, its efficacy consists in
constraining you to carry on a perpetual struggle against them.

Look through the day that is past, or watch yourself through that which
is to come, and observe whether any violent conflict takes place in your
mind whenever you are tempted to sin. I fear, on the contrary, that you
expect the efficacy of your prayers to be displayed in preserving you
from any painful conflict whatever. It is strange, most strange, how
generally this perversion of mind appears practically to exist.
Notwithstanding all the opposing assertions of the Bible, people imagine
that the Christian's life, after conversion, is to be one of freedom
from temptation and from all internal struggles. The contrary fact is,
that th