A quiet place, a quiet hour, and a quiet heart...

A Christian cannot have a powerful prayer life unless he takes advantage of the    equipment for prayer the Lord offers to him.  In The Hidden Life of Prayer, David McIntyre says this equipment  “is simple, if not always easily secured. It consists particularly of a quiet place, a quiet hour, and a quiet heart.”

Let me quote what he says about each of these: 

A Quiet Place. “With regard to many of us, the first of these, a quiet place, is well within our reach. But there are tens of thousands of our fellow-believers who find it generally impossible to withdraw into the desired seculstion of the secret place. A house-mother in a crowded tenement, an apprentice in city lodgings, a ploughman in his living quarters, a soldier in barracks, a boy living at school, these and many more may not be able always to command quiet and solitude. But, ‘your Father knoweth.’” McIntrye goes on to show that Jesus himself grew up in a home with what may have been no less than nine people, and yet commanded private “closet” prayer.

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