prayer

The saint may expect to discover deeper experience and to know more of the higher spiritual life by being much in prayer. There are different translations of my text. One version renders it, “I will show you great and fortified things, which you do not know.” Another reads, “Great and reserved things, which you do not know.”

Now, all the developments of spiritual life are not alike easy of attainment. There are the common frames and feelings of repentance, and faith, and joy, and hope, which are enjoyed by the entire family; but there is an upper realm of rapture, of communion, and conscious union with Christ, which is far from being the common dwelling place of Believers.

All Believers see Christ, but all Believers do not put their fingers into the prints of the nails, nor thrust their hand into His side. We have not the high privilege of John to lean upon Jesus’ bosom, nor of Paul to be caught up into the Third Heaven. In the Ark of salvation we find a lower, second and third story; all are in the Ark, but all are not on the same story. Most Christians, as to the river of experience, are only up to their ankles; some others have waded till the stream is up to their knees; a fewfind it chest high; and but a few—oh, how few!—find it a river to swim in, the bottom of which they cannot touch. My Brothers and Sisters, there are heights in experimental knowledge of the things of God which the eagle’s eyes of acumen and philosophical thought have never seen; and there are secret paths which the lion’s whelp of reason and judgment have not as yet learned to travel. God alone can bear us there; but the chariot in which He takes us up, and the fiery steeds with which that chariot is dragged, are prevailing PRAYERS.

- Charles Spurgeon

http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols10-12/chs619.pdf