_commanding_ us to pray, and _teaching us_ how to pray), that there is a
divine reality in prayer. Experience abundantly corroborates the
teaching.

Every truly converted man knows from this experience that God answers
prayer. He has verified the promise. "Call unto me, and I will answer
thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not."
(Jer. xxxiii., 8.) His life is a life of prayer, and grows more and more
to be a life of almost unconscious dependence upon God, as he becomes
fixed in the habit of prayer. This, and it is the purpose of God, is the
result secured by prayer. With this in view, it will not be so much what
we expect to get by praying, as a consciousness of coming into closer
relations to God, the giver of all, in our prayers, that will give us
true joy.

Often God's children are driven to the throne of grace by some desperate
need of help and definite supply of an absolute want, and, as they cry
to God and plead their case with tears before him, he so manifests his
presence to them and so fills them with a consciousness of his love and
power, that the burden is gone and _without the want being supplied_
that drove them to God, they rejoice in _God himself_ and care not for
the deprivation. This was Paul's experience when he went thus to God
about the thorn, and came away without the specific relief he had prayed
for, but with such a blessing as a result of his drawing near to God,
that he little cared whether the thorn remained or not--or, rather,
rejoiced that it was not removed; that it might be used to keep him near
to God, whose love so filled his soul.

A widow once told the writer of the turning point in her Christian life,
when God's love was so shed abroad in her heart that she had been