Daily Devotional

March 05

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC Website

Prayer—the highest activity of the human soul

When a man is speaking to God, he is at his very acme. It is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man's true spiritual con­dition. There is nothing that tells the truth about us as Christian people so much as our prayer life.

Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer. It is not so difficult to give alms...; you can have a true spirit of philan­thropy in people who are not Christian at all.... The same applies also to the question of self-discipline--refraining from certain things and taking up particular duties and tasks. God knows it is very much easier to preach like this from the pulpit than it is to pray.


Prayer is undoubtedly the ultimate test because a man can speak to others with greater ease than he can speak to God. Ultimately, therefore, a man discovers the real condition of his spiritual life when he examines himself in private, when he is alone with God...; have we not all known what it is to find that, somehow, we have less to say to God when we are alone than when we are in the presence of others? It should not be so; but it often is. So that it is when we have left the realm of activities and outward dealings with other people, and are alone with God, that we really know where we stand in a spiritual sense. It is not only the highest activity of the soul; it is the ultimate test of our true spiritual condition.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, p. 46