“If it be necessary to get a hearing, it is necessary to pray in Christ’s name. It may be many think it to be but an indifferent thing that we have been pressing, all the while that we have been speaking of Christ’s intercession. But indeed it is of more moment than our pressing you to any external duty, for the external duty of prayer, though it must needs be gone about, is yet but the carcass; this is the soul and life of prayer. And therefore let me exhort and obtest you, never to satisfy yourselves with a legal performance of the most spiritual duties in themselves, except you win to a Christian way of performing them. That is that they be done in Christ’s strength and that you rest on Him for the acceptance of them. It is as necessary to worship God in and by a mediator as it is to worship the only true God and not to worship a false or strange god. I make no question, but the most part of the hearers of the gospel do destroy themselves here, by resting on their legal performances and not making use of Christ.” James Durham, Sermon 72, 72 Sermons on Isaiah 53.
