Prayer Hint - Place of Prayer - William Law

I remember Sammy  Tippit's visit a couple of years (?) ago....He told an amazing story about a connection between him and his grandmother, a woman he had never met.

It seems Sammy has a special place for prayer -- his meeting place for daily prayer with God. For over 20 years, every morning before going to his office, he gets a cup of coffee, and goes to that place where he meets with God for his TAWG (Time Alone With God). He describes it:

To everyone else it is just an ordinary clump of trees. However, to me it is holy ground. I have shared my deepest sorrows and greatest joys with the One who created me in that place. For decades my meeting place has been under those trees.

Imagine his delight when he learned, in recent years, that his grandmother had a similar practice. He learned about it from a note from his aunt:

I think that mother felt she could talk to her Redeemer better in a garden near a peach tree than in other place on the farm. So many time she would steal away and pray under that peace tree.  When I heard her pray I knew there was a direct connection between her and God...

She often prayed for her son, Sammy's father, that he would receive salvation. Years after she died, Sammy received the Good News and men from his new church came to their home and led Sammy's father to salvation. She never saw the answer to her prayer for her son,  but it came -- a different route -- through her grandson. 


It appeared to her sister that she 'had a direct connection with God'...so did she, through her faith, know -- for certainty-- that someday her prayer would be answered?


A Place Apart...a place of prayer ... a sanctified and holy place.


Sometimes I have visited in homes of girlfriends from my church -- and often they show me the place where they or their husbands meet alone with God -- their TAWG place. Sometimes it is a special chair  with a good light and a small table to place their Bibles and prayer lists.



Sometimes it is in a small side room.  It is their "closet" as we are instructed in Matthew 6:6.



What makes it such a special place? I like this description from William Law:


Now if you could always pray in the same place, and reserve that place for devotion and not allow yourself to do anything common in it, and only be in the room yourself during times of devotion, that little room, or even some particular part of a room thus consecrated as a place consecrated as holy unto God, would have an effect upon your mind and heart and create in you faith and dispositions that would very much assist in your devotion.

For a sacred room, or a sacred place in your room, would in some spiritual measure resemble a chapel or a house of God.

This would inspire you to be always in the spirit of devotion when you are there, and fill you with wise and holy thoughts when you are there by yourself.

As time passed, using such a place would raise in your mind the kind of sentiments you have when you stand near a true altar of prayer in a sanctuary, and you would be concerned of thinking or doing anything that was foolish in that place, which would increasingly become your place of prayer and holy communion with God.

--William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, written in 1728.