A30158:160
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.
These two use the same words in their begging, the one saith he is almost starved, so doth the other; but yet the man that is indeed the poor, lame, or maimed person, he speaks with more sense, feeling and understanding of the misery that is mentioned in their begging, than the other can do; and it is discovered more by his affectionate speaking, his bemoaning himself: His pain and poverty makes him speak more in a spirit of lamentation ⟨p. 67⟩than the other, and he shall be pitied sooner than the other, by all those that have the least dram of natural affection or pity.
These two use the same words in their begging, the one saith he is almost starved, so doth the other; but yet the man that is indeed the poor, lame, or maimed person, he speaks with more sence, feeling and understanding of the misery that is mentioned in their begging, than the other can do; and it is discovered more by his affectionate speaking, his bemoaning himself: His pain and poverty makes him speak more in a spirit of lamentation ⟨p. 67⟩than the other, and he shall be pittied sooner than the other, by all those that have the least dram of natural affection or pitty.
Just thus it is with God.
There are some who out of custom and formality, go and pray; there are others, who go in the bitterness of their spirit: The one he prays out of bare notion, and naked knowledge; the other hath his words forced from him by the anguish of his soul. Surely, that is the man that God will look at, even him that is of a humble and contrite spirit, and that trembleth at his word,