Daily Reading for June 2 • The Martyrs of Lyons, 177
Prayer is the spiritual offering which has abolished the ancient sacrifices. . . . We learn from the gospel what God has asked for. ‘The hour will come,’ we are told, ‘when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. God is spirit, and so this is the kind of worshipper he wants.’ We are the true worshippers and the true priests: praying in spirit, we make our sacrifice of prayer in spirit, an offering which is God’s own and acceptable to him. . . . What will God deny to a prayer which proceeds from spirit and truth, seeing it is he who demands it?
How great are the proofs of its efficacy which we read and hear and believe. . . . It has no special grace to avert the experience of suffering, but it arms with endurance those who do suffer, who grieve, who are pained. It makes grace multiply in power, so that faith may know what it obtains from the Lord, while it understands what for God’s name’s sake it is suffering. . . .
It was Christ’s wish for it to work no evil: he has conferred upon it all power concerning good. And so its only knowledge is how to call back the souls of the deceased from the very highway of death, to straighten the feeble, to heal the sick, to cleanse the devil-possessed, to open the bars of the prison, to loose the bands of the innocent. It also absolves sins, drives back temptations, quenches persecutions, strengthens the weak-hearted, delights the high-minded, brings home wayfarers, stills the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, rules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports the unstable, upholds them that stand.
From On Prayer by Tertullian of Carthage (c. 160-c. 220).