A great way to begin 2010 on your knees

I currently live five miles away from the city of Chester where the great Bible commentator Matthew Henry (1662-1714) was a minister of the gospel. And I am very grateful for the labours of another minister of the gospel, Ligon Duncan, on the other side of the pond, for the provision of the online text of Matthew Henry book A Method For Prayer.

The book, newly re-released, published by Christian Focus and edited by Ligon, is available (with sample chapters) here.

However, this is so much more than another ebook to download and peruse. You need to take a good look at the site to see how helpfully this has been done. Just click here.

Ligon makes the folowing helpful comments about prayer, and how Matthew Henry's book can help us:

The aim of the online publication of this “old-made-new” monograph is to assist and encourage modern Christians in both public and private prayer. Surely we all recognize that the Church of our day, at least in the West, is weak in the way of prayer.

Few of us, perhaps, understand what prayer really is. We do not pray often. We do not pray with scriptural proportion, nor does our prayer much reflect the language and thought of the Bible. We do not pray fervently. Although we claim otherwise, maybe we really do not believe in prayer!

For those who are called upon to lead the Church in public prayer, or who simply desire to be more faithful and competent in their own private petitions, a scriptural manner of praying provides the order, proportion, and variety which should characterize all our prayers.

We have aimed to provide users with a number of helps to assist in achieving this end. The core of the website is the entire text of Matthew Henry’s A Method for Prayer. Reading and re-reading through it will train the Christian in the use of biblical truth and language in prayer.

You can even sign up for daily email updates of the book:

Work your way through Matthew Henry's "6 parts of prayer" and his elaboration of the Lord's Prayer by signing up to receive daily devotional emails. Each day you'll receive a self-contained unit of a particular chapter of Henry's book, about 1 to 1.5 book pages long.

Instead of moving you through the book consecutively, the emails will cycle you through the different parts of prayer nearly every week: Adoration, Confession, Petition, Thanksgiving, Intercession, and Conclusion (coupled with the chapter on the Lord's Prayer). These emails will take you through the heart of the book (Chapters 1-7) twice in a single year.

To do that go here.