A cry is the natural expression of sorrow—and when every other appeal has failed us, it is our last resort. But that cry must be directed to the Lord alone! To cry to man is to waste our breath upon the air.

Think about it: When we consider how ready the Lord is to hear, and how able he is to help, why would we direct our appeals anywhere else? It will be in vain to call to the rocks in the day of judgment, but our Rock attends to our cries.

"Be not silent to me." Mere formalists may be content without answers to their prayers, but genuine suppliants cannot! They are not satisfied with the results of prayer itself in calming the mind and subduing the will—they must go further and obtain actual replies from heaven, or they cannot rest. And those replies they long to receive at once. They dread even a little of God's silence.

God's voice is often so terrible that it shakes the wilderness. But his silence? To an eager suppliant, that silence is equally full of awe. When God seems to close his ear, we must not therefore close our mouths, but rather cry with more earnestness! For when our note grows shrill with eagerness and grief, he will not long deny us a hearing.

What a dreadful case we should be in if the Lord should become forever silent to our prayers! "If thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit." Deprived of the God who answers prayer, we should be in a more pitiable plight than the dead in the grave, and should soon sink to the same level as the lost in hell.

We must have answers to prayer—ours is an urgent case of dire necessity! Surely the Lord will speak peace to our agitated minds, for he never can find it in his heart to permit his own elect to perish.