You say:  “It is a matter of $10,000 whether I see him or not.”  Oh, that men were as persistent in seeking for Christ!  Had you one half that persistence you would long ago have found Him who is the joy of the forgiven spirit.  We may pay our debts, we may attend church, we may relieve the poor, we may be public benefactors, and yet all our life disobey the text, never seek God, never gain heaven.  Oh, that the Spirit of God would help this morning while I try to show you, in carrying out the idea of my text, first, how to seek the Lord, and in the next place, when to seek Him.  “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found.”

I remark, in the first place, you are to seek the Lord through earnest and believing prayer.  God is not an autocrat or a despot seated on a throne, with His arms resting on brazen lions, and a sentinel pacing up and down at the foot of the throne.  God is a father seated in a bower, waiting for His children to come and climb on His knee, and get His kiss and His benediction.  Prayer is the cup with which we go to the “fountain of living water,” and dip up refreshment for our thirsty soul.  Grace does not come to the heart as we set a cask at the corner of the house to catch the rain in the shower.  It is a pulley fastened to the throne of God, which we pull, bringing the blessing.

I do not care so much what posture you take in prayer, nor how large an amount of voice you use.  You might get down on your face before God, if you did not pray right inwardly, and there would be no response.  You might cry at the top of your voice, and unless you had a believing spirit within, your cry would not go further up than the shout of a plow-boy to his oxen.  Prayer must be believing, earnest, loving.  You are in your house some summer day, and a shower comes up, and a bird, affrighted, darts into the window, and wheels about the room.  You seize it.  You smooth its ruffled plumage.  You feel its fluttering heart.  You say, “Poor thing, poor thing!” Now, a prayer goes out of the storm of this world into the window of God’s mercy, and He catches it, and He feels its fluttering pulse, and He puts it in His own bosom of affection and safety.  Prayer is a warm, ardent, pulsating exercise.  It is the electric battery which, touched, thrills to the throne of God!  It is the diving-bell in which we go down into the depths of God’s mercy and bring up “pearls of great price.”  There was an instance where prayer made the waves of the Gennesaret solid as Russ pavement.  Oh, how many wonderful things prayer has accomplished!  Have you ever tried it?  In the days when the Scotch Covenanters were persecuted, and the enemies were after them, one of the head men among the Covenanters prayed:  “Oh, Lord, we be as dead men unless Thou shalt help us!  Oh, Lord, throw the lap of Thy cloak over these poor things!” And instantly a Scotch mist enveloped and hid the persecuted from their persecutors—­the promise literally fulfilled:  “While they are yet speaking I will hear.”