Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3468
“Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: my eyes fail with looking upward. O Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me.” Isaiah 38:14.
HEZEKIAH finds fault with his prayers, but he did pray. God’s children cannot at all times speak distinctly, but they all cry. There is no true child of God that is possessed of a dumb spirit. “Behold he prays” may be said of each of the Divine family—and place them in what circumstances you will, you might sooner call a man, living, and prevent his breathing, than call a man, Christian, and prevent his praying! If he is living, he must breathe—if he is a Christian, he must pray! And observe further as Hezekiah, with all the faults that he finds with his prayers, did pray, so equally certain is it that he did prevail with those imperfect prayers! He may call those prayers chattering—I have no doubt he felt them to be so—but, after all, he has an answer to his prayers—he had 15 years added to his life and, therefore, his chatter were marvelously successful. From which I gather that those prayers we think the worst, may turn out to be the best. And those prayers which, judged by human judgments, might be considered unworthy of the name of prayer, may, nevertheless, be so acceptable to the Most High that they shall throughout life become the fountain of our praise!
I purpose this evening to speak to you, believing that many of you have passed through the same experience as Hezekiah with regard to your prayers. I shall speak to you about his estimation, his own estimation of his prayers. Then we shall turn to consider the real value of those prayers. And then, thirdly, we shall notice what there is that may afford us plentiful consolation if we find the same fault with our petitions as Hezekiah did with his. First, then, let us look at—
I. HEZEKIAH’S ESTIMATE OF HIS PRAYERS, for our estimate of our petitions has often been the same. He compares his prayers to the chattering of a swallow. If we had time to spare, we might go into the question of the exact meaning, but I am content with believing that this translation will do. You know the crane makes a harsh, unmelodious, discordant sound, and when cranes are flying by night in great companies in the air, the rustic cannot see them—does not know there are any birds there and he often hears the most extraordinary sounds which he cannot account for—and he goes home and fills the whole parish with a story of ghosts which he has seen and strange, unearthly sounds which he has heard! The crane makes a very unmusical, harsh, discordant, grating kind of noise, and the swallow makes a kind of chattering. You know the shrill, sharp shriek, piercing like sharp needles, which the swallows make when they are going over your head towards the end of summer—not a tune, nothing very musical, but just a sharp, shrill, piercing note. Now such, Hezekiah says, his prayers were, but, in addition, they were as mournful as the constant cooing of the dove. Turtledoves sometimes, if they are listened to long, are enough to make a man feel wretched to hear them—their sound is the very embodiment of the utterance of sorrow! “I did mourn,” he said, “like a dove,” and then he declares that his prayers were long, that he grew weary, that his prayers and his eyes failed with looking upwards for an answer.
Now let us put all these things together, and I gather from them that Hezekiah, first of all, in his sickness prayed often and much, but his prayers seemed to himself to be quite meaningless—as if they had no meaning to him and no meaning to God. You who have suffered from certain kinds of disorders will know how you tried to pray again and again, and again, but you cannot tell, yourself, what it is you were asking for, and when you look back in the evening at a day in which you have prayed a thousand times, perhaps, it seems to you as if you had not prayed at all! The thoughts are so tossed up and down, the mind is so incapable of its proper action, that although the prayer is genuine enough, yet to you, when you look back upon it, it seems to have no meaning in it whatever! Better to be compared to the involuntary cry of
a wounded beast or bird than to anything like a reasonable, intelligent utterance of a soul that is pleading with God! I do know—I speak from my inmost heart—what it is, day after day, to pray no better prayers than just that—not because I would not, but because I couldnot! When the head has been aching, when the bones seemed to be crushed with pain, then the soul turns to God in her bitterness and she feels as if she did not pray at all—the utterances seem to have no meaning to herself, and she fears they have no meaning to God. Meaningless, then, Hezekiah thought his prayers to be.
Next, he knew them to be disconnected. The cry of the crane is no continuous song. You cannot make anything of it—chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, and that is all. In the song of some birds there is a regular cadence, the note rises or falls, and you can almost commit it to paper. In fact, bird music can be committed to paper and imitated—but with the mere chattering of cranes and swallows there is no connection between one note and another, none whatever! And oh, how many of God’s people’s prayers are to themselves and, perhaps, really are, very disconnected, indeed! They need one mercy, but before they have definitely asked for that, their needs rush in so upon them that they ask not only for that, but another, and another, and hardly know what it is that they ask for! They seem to have so much distress, so much sorrow, so much need that their troubles come in troops. “Gad,” they say, “a troop comes,” and they know not how to order their prayer before the Lord, and set it out, item by item, and plead for this and that, and the next, and the next mercy as they did, perhaps, in brighter days when their mind was more at home and their thoughts more under their control. Hezekiah means his prayers were disconnected as well as meaningless.