How to Pray | Dwight L. Moody
Let me refer you to a passage in the prophecies of Daniel. He was one of the men who knew how to pray; his prayer brought the blessing of heaven upon himself and upon his people.
He wrote, And I turned my face unto the Lord God, seeking him in prayer and supplication, in fasting and sackcloth, and ashes: and I prayed unto the Lord my God and made my confession and said, Now O Lord, thou great God who is worthy to be feared, who keeps the covenant and the mercy with those that love thee and keep thy commandments (Daniel 9:3-4).
The thought I want to call special attention to is conveyed in the words, O Lord, thou great God who is worthy to be feared.
Daniel took his right place before God – in the dust – and he also put God in his right place. Likewise, it was when Abraham was on his face, prostrate before God, that God spoke to him. Holiness belongs to God; sinfulness belongs to us.
Thomas Brooks, that grand old Puritan writer, said, “A person of real holiness is much affected and taken up in the admiration of the holiness of God. Unholy persons may be somewhat affected and taken with the other excellences of God; it is only holy souls that are taken and affected with his holiness.”
He said the more holy any person is, the more deeply he or she is affected by God’s holiness. “To the holy angels, the holiness of God is the sparkling diamond in the ring of glory. But unholy persons are affected and taken with anything rather than with this,” Brooks said.
“Nothing puts the sinner into a depression as much as a conversation on the holiness of God,” he said. “It is as the handwriting on the wall; nothing makes the head and heart of a sinner to ache like a sermon upon the Holy One; nothing galls and gripes, nothing stings and terrifies unsanctified ones, like a lively setting forth of the holiness of God.
But to holy souls there are no discourses that do more suit and satisfy them, that do more delight and content them, that do more please and profit them, than those that do most fully and powerfully discover God to be glorious in holiness.
