A30158:140
I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also,…
I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also, or, A discourse touching prayer, from I Cor. 14.15 wherein is briefly discovered 1. What prayer is, 2. What it is to pray with the spirit, 3. What it is to pray with the spirit and with the understanding also / by John Bunyan.
London : Printed for the author, 1663
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
First, To pray with Understanding, is to pray as being instructed by the Spirit, in the understanding of the want of those things which the soul is to pray for.
Though a man be in never so much need of pardon of sin, and deliverance from wrath to come, yet if he understand not this, he will either not desire them at all, or else be so cold and lukewarm in his desires after them, that God will even loath their frame of spirit in asking for them. Thus it was with the Church of the Laodiceans, they wanted knowledge or spiritual understanding; They knew not that they were poor, wretched, blind and naked: The cause whereof, made them, and all their services, so loathsome to Christ, that he threatens to spue them out of his mouth, Rev. 3. 17.
Men without understanding, may say the same words in prayer as others do, but if there be an understanding in the one, and none in the other; there is, Oh there is a mighty difference in speaking the very same words! The ⟨p. 62⟩one speaking it from a spiritual understanding of those things, that he in words desires; and the other words it only, and there is all.