The Application of the Heart

Pray without ceasing. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:17

A Short and Easy Method of Prayer begins without preamble. There is no history of prayer, no survey of the authorities, no warning about the difficulty of the subject. There is a definition, and then an invitation. The definition is this: “Prayer is nothing else but the application of the heart to God, and the interior exercise of love.” The invitation is to everyone.

It is worth pausing on the definition, because most of us carry another one around without knowing it. We tend to think of prayer as a kind of speech: words addressed to God, arranged well or badly, long or short, sincere or distracted. Madame Guyon does not deny that prayer uses words. But she puts the words in their place. Prayer is first the heart turned towards God, attending to Him and loving Him. The words are the heart’s servants. Where the heart is absent, the finest words are not yet prayer; where the heart is present, a sigh is.

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. JOHN 4:23

The heart, not the head

She makes the distinction sharply. The prayer she has in mind, she says, “is not mental, but of the heart.” By mental prayer she means the elaborate meditation taught in the manuals of her day: taking a subject, imagining its scene, reasoning upon it, drawing out resolutions. She does not despise meditation, and she will use it later as a doorway. But she observes, with some humour, that not everyone is fit for it. The mind of man, she says, is so limited that while it is occupied with one thing it cannot be thinking of another. A labourer at his work, a mother with a feverish child, a clerk at his accounts cannot meditate and work at the same time.

The heart is different. The heart can be turned towards God while the hands are busy and the mind is occupied with other things, as a person in love carries the beloved with them all day without thinking of anything in particular. That is why, for her, the command to pray without ceasing is not an impossible ideal. It would be impossible if prayer meant continual thinking about God. It is not impossible if prayer means a heart continually turned towards Him.

I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh. SONG OF SOLOMON 5:2

Nothing, she adds, can interrupt the prayer of the heart but unruly affections. That is a searching sentence. What stops us praying without ceasing is not our busyness; it is our loves. The heart that is fixed on something else — money, reputation, a grudge, a secret sin — cannot at the same time be applied to God. The trouble with our prayer is usually a trouble with our desires.

Come, all without exception

The second thing that strikes a reader of her opening chapter is its breadth. She quotes our Lord’s word to His disciples to watch and pray, and then His addition: what I say unto you I say unto all.

And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch. MARK 13:37

All, then, are capable of prayer, she argues, and it is the duty of all to engage in it. Then she breaks into a long, warm invitation, almost a sermon, calling in turn the thirsty, the hungry, the afflicted, the sick, the children, the wandering sheep and the sinners. Its climax is her most famous sentence: “Come, ignorant and foolish ones, who believe yourselves incapable of prayer; it is you who are the most fitted for it.”

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ISAIAH 55:1

She means it. The prayer she describes, she says, can be offered alike by princes and kings, by prelates and magistrates, by soldiers and children, by artisans and labourers, by women and the sick. In a church where the life of prayer was widely assumed to belong to monasteries and convents, and where women and the uneducated were expected to leave spiritual things to their betters, this was bold. It was one of the reasons she was feared. It is one of the reasons she has been loved.

Only one person is excluded: the one who has no heart. We must have a heart in order to love, she says. And then, gently: who is indeed without a heart? Come and give it to God, and learn in the place of prayer how to do it.

As easy as breathing

Her boldest claim is that this prayer is easy. God, she says, is more truly in us than we are in ourselves, and more anxious to give Himself to us than we are to possess Him. “Nothing is easier than to have God and to live upon Him.” The way to seek Him is so natural, she writes, that breathing itself is not more so.

For in him we live, and move, and have our being. ACTS 17:28

Is this true? In one sense, plainly not: many earnest Christians have found prayer the hardest thing they ever attempted. Madame Guyon herself spent years in labour and dryness. But she is not describing how prayer feels; she is describing where God is. If God were far off, prayer would be a long climb. If He is near, prayer is a turning. The difficulty is not in the distance but in our unwillingness to turn — and that, she insists, grace can overcome.

The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth. PSALM 145:18

Here the reader needs a word of care. When she says God is more truly in us than we are in ourselves, she is speaking the language of devotion, not defining doctrine, and she means a believer indwelt by the Spirit of Christ. She is not saying that every human heart is already united to God, or that turning inward is itself salvation. Elsewhere in the same book she speaks plainly of sin, of turning from it, and of the grace that must come from God. The nearness she celebrates is the nearness of the Saviour who has come to live in those who trust Him.

If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. JOHN 14:23

What this asks of us

The application of the heart to God is simple, but it is not cheap. It asks us to stop treating prayer as a performance to be judged by its fluency, and to treat it as the turning of the whole self towards a Person. It asks us to deal with the unruly affections that pull the heart away. And it asks us to believe that God wants to be found — that He is not a reluctant official to be persuaded, but a Father who has been waiting.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. MATTHEW 7:7

That is why she begins with invitation rather than instruction. Before she tells us how to pray, she wants us to believe that we can.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write your own definition of prayer before reading hers again. How does it differ from “the application of the heart to God”?

2. Name the unruly affection that most often pulls your heart away from God. Bring it to Him by name.

3. Choose one ordinary task this week — washing up, driving, walking — and practise turning your heart to God while you do it.

4. If you have ever thought prayer was for other, more spiritual people, tell God so, and accept His invitation.

5. Think of someone who believes they cannot pray. Encourage them with the simplest words you can find.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have made prayer a matter of words and methods, and left my heart elsewhere.

Here is my heart. It is divided and distracted, but it is the only one I have.

Turn it towards You, and keep it turned, in my work and my rest, in company and alone.

You have called the ignorant and the weak; I come as one of them, and I trust You to teach me. Amen.