Our Redeemer was in the Garden of Gethsemane. His hour was come. He knew that His agony was fast approaching Him, and He felt a longing for two or three of His disciples near Him. But even that slight support was to be denied our Saviour in that awful hour. His three chosen disciples were within a stone’s-cast of the scene of His agony; but they were all three fast asleep, that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with Me.”
Their Master did not arm the seventy and set them to defend the garden gate. He did not ask the eight, even, to do more than just to sit down and wait inside the gate, to see what the end of that midnight would be. And He only asks Peter and James and John that they shall stay within earshot of Him for “one hour,” and keep awake for His sake. No, if Peter alone would “watch” with Him, He will be satisfied. If He had returned, and found Peter on his knees when He Himself rose off His face in a sweat of blood, the sight of Peter, so employed, would have been more to Peter’s lonely Master than an angel from heaven strengthening Him. But as it was–when He came to Peter, He found that disciple three times fast asleep. Peter! who had protested at the table, only an hour before, that, as for him, he would die with his Master.
Are these things not written for our admonition “on whom the ends of the world are come”? And it is not for nothing that our Lord here lays such pointed stress on “one hour” of watching and praying, that night in Gethsemane. I do not think it is possible for any of His true disciples to read this solemn Scripture without having his conscience struck with that rebuking word–“one hour”–that night of our redemption.
Yes, you may depend on it–this remonstrance here addressed to Peter has been recorded not for his sake alone but for our instruction also. Peter needed that hour of prayer that night, and, neglecting it, and turning it into sleep, his temptations and his opportunities, all that night, and all next morning, descended upon him, and found him utterly unprepared to meet them.
Now you may be another Peter; and if you are, one hour alone with Christ, every day, will be the making of you. You will never come to your potential by keeping late hours with the men and women of the world. No, nor staying at home and reading, late at night, the books and papers of the world.
But on the other hand, if you are content to remain characterless and unrecognizable among the multitude; then you may, with the multitude, escape Gethsemane, and all its late and lonely hours of watching and prayer. Only, make up your mind, and count the cost. For, in that case, escaping the preparation, you must not expect to be found able ever to suffer much, or to do much, in any way, for Jesus Christ, and for His Church in this world.
Now a whole hour, it must be admitted, is a long time. But it is not so much the length of the time: it is rather this–that we really do not know what to do with ourselves for a whole hour. We are like Teresa. She made use of an hourglass; and she tells us, in her autobiography, how she used to glance at the glass to see if it was not nearly run down yet, so that she might escape her place of prayer with a good conscience. Now, like Teresa, we have it on our conscience that we ought to be alone with God for some decent length of time every night; but then, there is no hour of all the twenty-four that goes so slowly, and that hangs on our hands so heavily, as just the hour of secret prayer. So much is that the case that it is an immense service done to us when any author, or any preacher, directs us how to get that dreary and guilty hour filled up, so as to make it somewhat less of a task, less of a torture.
You might begin by cutting down the hour. If a whole “hour” is too long for you–take half an hour: or even to begin with, take a quarter. Christ is not a hard taskmaster. He will not bind you to a hard-and-fast bargain– if you are unwilling. And besides, you can get through a great deal in half an hour; or even in a quarter of an hour. You can name a great many forgotten people, and a great many forgotten things during that time. You can go over your past day, in a rough way, in much less than an hour.
Then again, there is this to lighten and alleviate the strain. You do not need to lay it on your conscience that you must be on your knees all the time. Not at all. Rise up. Walk about the room. Go out and look up at the stars. Say, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Come in again. Sit down. Lift up your hands. Lift up your eyes. Recite a promise. Sing a psalm. Say over an Olney or a Wesley hymn to yourself.
Prayer is the most elastic exercise possible. Communion with God has no hard-and-fast rules and regulations. And if, at the end of the half-hour, you are beginning to have some liberty, and possibly to feel some delight–go on. You have still another half-hour before you. Never mind the clock striking. Tell it to strike loud for those who should be home by this time and in their beds. Say to it as Teresa said afterwards: “Strike on, for by thy striking thou art but telling me that I am another hour nearer my Heavenly Bridegroom!”
There is your Bible to help you to fill up your hour. And once you have begun, really, to read your Bible–one hour each night will be far too short. You will forget hours and everything else many a night over your Bible–once you have begun to read it to yourself alone. The Psalms, for instance. The best of the autobiographic and experimental Psalms were written late at night, and when the Psalmists were alone with God. And as they were written, so they must be read.
Take your Bible, then, to help carry you through your hour of prayer. And as you sit down, say: “Come, my Lord: for I have an hour free tonight for Thee, and for my own soul.” And I will promise you that you also will soon have proved it true, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness: and my mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips, when I remember Thee upon my bed, and meditate on Thee in the night watches.”
Then again, there is this well-approved way of filling up the hour, and of giving an intense interest to it:
“Let not sleep come upon thy languid eyes,
Before each daily action thou hast scanned.
What done; what left undone; what done amiss,
From first to last examine all; and then,
Blame what is wrong; in what is right rejoice.”
Now if Pythagoras, a pagan philosopher, whose lot was cast by God’s providence five centuries before Christ, practiced that self-scrutiny for an hour every night, and taught the devout habit to all his disciples, what manner of person in that matter ought we to be? And Xenocrates also, Diogenes tells us, used to meditate with himself several times a day, and always allotted one hour of each night to silence.
There is one class of people among us who should have no difficulty in filling up their one hour every night of watching and prayer. “Hast thou considered my servant Job?”–the Hearer of prayer asks all fathers and mothers among us. For when Job’s sons and daughters were invited out to a supper, did Job go to sleep, do you suppose, at his usual hour, and with his usual repose of mind? Far from that. What do we find written concerning Job? As soon as Job’s children had started off in their high spirits, their old father that moment went out to his flock, and took a lamb according to the number of his sons and daughters, and offered sacrifice for them all to God. “For who knows,” he said, “what temptations my children may meet with before they return home?” And then he sprinkled the atoning blood in the direction of the house of feasting, and ceased not from his intercessions till he saw his children home.
And not on their nights of late hours only, but every night, as our children grow up around us, what a privilege, what an absolute necessity, it is for a father and a mother to have an hour set apart in which to reflect, and to plan, and to pray, concerning their children. You might do this, my friends, an hour every night. How many children has God given you to bring up for Him? You might take Susanna Wesley’s way. She read and prayed both “with and for” her whole family, an hour each night. When they were old enough, they shared their mother’s work among the younger children. You might begin to do something like that; and who can tell how God would pay you your wages?
The hour may hang heavy on other people’s hands. It cannot possibly hang heavy on a parent’s hands. Go over, towards God, the things in your children that are causing you anxiety. The things that, if they go on, will yet bring down your gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. As also, go over the things in yourself, that are destroying your influence with your children. “I will behave myself,” said the Psalmist, “wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt Thou come to me? And I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.”
Whoever you are–parent or child, old or young, sinner or saint–give yourself to prayer. Let no distaste for prayer turn you away from it. Let no want of practice, let no difficulty in it, make you give it up in despair. Let no greatness of sin, or frequency of sin, frighten you away from the Throne of Grace.
Begin tonight: and never, on any account, give it up. Whatever else you do, or do not do–in God’s name I beseech you to pray. Pray, and you will pray yourself into a life of pardon and holiness, till you pray yourself into heaven itself. Yes, begin tonight. Try one week of it, and then judge for yourselves.