conscious of our ignorance, because we would then feel our dependence upon Him.  May God teach us our ignorance in prayer and our impotence, and may God bring us to say, “Lord, we can not pray; we do not know what prayer is.”  Of course some of us do know in a measure what prayer is, many of us, and we thank God for what he has been to us in answer to prayer, but oh, it is only a little beginning compared to what the Holy Spirit of God teaches.

There is the first thought:  our ignorance.  “We know not what we should pray for as we ought;” but “the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”  We often hear about the work of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost in working out and completing the great redemption, and we know that when God worked in the creation of the world, He was not weary, and yet we read that wonderful expression in the book of Exodus about the Sabbath day, “God rested and was refreshed.”  He was refreshed, the Sabbath day was a refreshment to Him.  God had to work and Christ had to work, and now the Holy Spirit works, and His secret working place, the place where all work must begin, is in the heart where He comes to teach a man how to pray.  When a man begins to get an insight into that which is needed and that which is promised and that which God waits to perform, he feels it to be beyond his conception; then is the time he will be ready to say, “I can not limit the holy one of Israel by my thoughts; I give myself up in the faith that the Holy Spirit can be praying for me with groanings, with longings, that can not be expressed.”  Apply that to your prayers.

There are different phases of prayer.  There is worship, when a man just bows down to adore the great God.  We do not take time to worship.  We need to worship in secret, just to get ourselves face to face with the everlasting God, that He may overshadow us and cover us and fill us with His love and His glory.  It is the Holy Spirit that can work in us such a yearning that we will give up our pleasures and even part of our business, that we may the oftener meet our God.

The next phase of prayer is fellowship.  In prayer there is not only the worship of a king, but fellowship as of a child with God.  Christians take far too little time in fellowship.  They think prayer is just coming with their petitions.  If Christ is to make me what I am to be, I must tarry in fellowship with God.  If God is to let his love enter in and shine and burn through my heart, I must take time to be with Him.  The smith puts his rod of iron into the fire.  If he leaves it there but a short time it does not become red hot.  He may take it out to do something with it and after a time put it back again for a few minutes, but this time it does not become red hot.  In the course of the day he may put the rod into the fire a great many times and leave it there two or three minutes each time, but it never becomes thoroughly heated.  If he