Our magnificent office

It's been a while since I've come across a writer any more able to convict me of a lackadaisical attitude toward prayer -- what the older writers called sloth -- than Alexander Whyte (1836-1921). For many years Whyte was considered the most eminent preacher in Scotland from his pulpit at Free St. Georges Church in Edinburgh. I've been reading his collection of sermons on prayer Lord Teach Us To Pray. I've been reading it slowly to let it sink in. This is devotional material of the highest order. Often sermons don't translate well to the page. Not so with Whyte's sermons. Reading them one can feel his tremendous passion and clearly see his ability to create pictures with words. Here is Whyte on the "magnificent office" of prayer:

Prayer is the magnificent office it is, because it is an office of such a magnificent kind. Magnificence is of many kinds, and magnificent things are more or less magnificent according to their kind. This great globe on which it strikes its roots and grows is magnificent in size when compared with that grain of mustard seed: but just because that grain of mustard seed is a seed and grows, that smallest of seeds is far greater than the great globe itself. A bird on its summer branch is far greater than the great sun in whose warmth he builds and sings, because that bird has life and love and song, which the sun, with all his immensity of size, and with all his light and heat, has not. A cup of cold water only, given to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple, is a far greater offering before God than thousands of rams, and ten thousands of rivers of oil; because there is charity in that cup of cold water. And an ejaculation, a sigh, a sob, a tear, a smile, a psalm, is far greater to God than all the oblations, and incense, and new moons, and Sabbaths, and calling of assemblies, and solemn meetings of Jerusalem, because repentance and faith and love and trust are in that sob and in that psalm. And the magnificence of all true prayer--its nobility, its royalty, its absolute divinity--all stand in this, that it is the greatest kind of act and office that man, or angel, can ever enter on and perform. Earth is at its very best; and heaven is at its very highest, when men and angels magnify their office of prayer and of praise before the throne of God.