I was kept at the express office ten minutes after Mr. Muller left.  Just as I started to hurry to the wharf a team drove up the street, and on top of a load just arrived from New York, was Mr. Muller’s chair!  It was sent at once to the tender and placed in my hands to take to Mr. Muller (the Lord having a lesson for me) just as the boat was leaving the dock.  I found Mr. and Mrs. Muller in a retired spot on one side of the tender and handed him the chair.  He took it with the happy, pleased expression of a child who has just received a kindness deeply appreciated, and reverently removing his hat and folding his hands over it, he thanked his Heavenly Father for sending the chair.  “In everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God.”  “Casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you.”

So the word of God teaches us as His children (inviting us to pray, 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 enabled to go on through all her trials rejoicingly conscious of God’s presence, and casting all her burdens upon Him.  She was driven to seek God by great need.  Her husband’s death left her destitute, with little children to provide for, and few friends