From John Bunyan on Prayer:
"Suppose there should come two men begging to your door; the one is a poor, lame, wounded, and almost starved creature, the other is a healthy strong person; these two use the same words in their begging; the one says he is almost starved, so does the other: but the man that is indeed the poor, lame, or maimed person, he speaks with more sense, feeling, and understanding of the misery that is mentioned in their begging, than the other can do; and it is discovered more by his manner of speaking, his bemoaning himself. his pain and poverty makes him speak more in a spirit of lamentation than the other, and he is pitied sooner than the other, by all those that have the least dram of natural affection or pity. Just thus it is with God: there are some who out of custom and formality go and pray; there are others who go in bitterness of their spirits: the one prays out of bare notion and naked knowledge; the other has his words forced from him by the anguish of his soul. Surely that is the man that God will look at, 'even to him that is poor, and of contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word' (Is. 66.2)."
So the question I ask: Is our praying merely a formality? Or is it out of a deep longing of the soul? Which man are you?
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