For He received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice in Him from the excellent glory, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. - 2 Peter 1:17
Three of our Lord's disciples were with Him in the darkness of a summer night, high on the slopes of Mount Hermon. The Master was a little way apart, praying to His Father. The three disciples, who should have felt the urgent need of prayer, were soon sound asleep. Sometime in the night the sleepers were awakened by a strange brightness and glory, for their Master was transfigured before them.
Long afterward the aged disciple John remembered that night when "we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father." And Peter tells the church that the disciples "were eyewitnesses of His majesty," and heard the voice from heaven "when we were with Him in the holy mount."
The prelude to the Saviour's power and glory was prayer. Jesus longed for His followers to glimpse the divine help that might be theirs if they would only seek for it with their whole heart. His prayer was answered as the glory of heaven was manifest in the transfiguration.
Prayer is always a prelude to spiritual strength. Mary, Queen of Scots, said she feared the prayers of John Knox more than all the armies of Europe. Back of the blows that Martin Luther struck when he nailed his theses on the Wittenberg church door were many prayers. "In his prayer closet," says one church historian, "the Reformation was born." Men who have possessed the power of the Holy Spirit in their own hearts, men who have burned with a passion for lost souls, have always been men of prayer.
James Russell Lowell challenges us to seek God for power such as was known by the men of old. He says:
"God is not dumb, that He should speak no more!
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And findest not Sinai -- 'tis thy soul is poor!
There towers the mountain of the Voice no less,
Which whoso seeks shall find -- but he who bends
Intent on manna still and mortal ends,
Sees it not, -- neither hears its thundered lore."
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