Pensees: A Puritan on Prayer

A Puritan on Prayer

One great point of our mortification lies in this: to have our wills melted into God’s. And it is a great token of spiritual growth when we are not only content but joyful to see our wills crossed that His may be done. When our wills are sacrifices of holy prayer, we many times receive choicer things than we ask expressly. It was a good saying, “God many times grants not what we would in our present prayers, that He may bestow what we would rather have, when we have the prayer more graciously answered than we petitioned.”

We know not what to pray as we ought, but the Spirit helps us out with groans that secretly hint a correction of our wills and spirits in prayer. In great anxieties and pinching troubles, nature dictates strong groans for relief. But sustaining grace and participation of divine holiness, mortification from earthy comforts, excitation of the soul to long for heaven, being gradually wearied from the wormwood breasts of their sublunary, transient and unsatisfying pleasures, and the timing of our heart for the seasons wherein God will time His deliverances — these are sweeter mercies than the immediate return of a prayer for an outward good.

What truly holy person would lose that light of God’s countenance, which he enjoyed by glimpses in a cloudy day, for a little corn and wine?

~ Samuel Lee (Puritan Pastor in the 1600’s).