Thirdly, the enemy’s special concern is to keep God’s people from increased spiritual knowledge; and that statement covers a great deal of ground. So often, when the Lord is purposing to impart to His children some particular spiritual knowledge, there comes over them a strange inertia: and that kind of inertia can sometimes be sinister. It is something more than mere tiredness or weariness; it seems to come over us suddenly, for no apparent reason. I have often, during a long experience, seen the children of God robbed of something vital through succumbing to that feeling of inertia and staying at home at such a time. 

   We need to weigh up our inclinations to stay at home, and judge them. There are times when it may be of the Lord that we remain quiet and alone at home, but let us be careful that we are not just being smothered by the enemy, in order that we may be robbed of something. Oh, the unwatchfulness of God’s people! What loss it leads to! Yes, the Devil will create inertia, or raise up some difficulty, some impediment, some circumstance, just to intercept—just to make sure that you are not there on some occasion; and then, like Thomas, when the Lord comes in you are absent. You know, that is a loss which is not easily recovered, and it may lead to some very real defeat in coming days. The very thing that you needed for a coming situation may have been there, provided by the Lord. Because you were not alive to the meaning of what was happening, and accepted the circumstance or the event at its face value, you missed some spiritual gain. How important this is! How very much alive we must be, ‘intelligent unto intelligence’! As Paul says, “with all prayer and supplication praying…and watching thereunto…” (Ephesians 6:18).

Prayer (The Works of T. Austin-Sparks) - T. Austin-Sparks