It is to be feared that some of us labor in prayer after that fashion. We do not bend our back to this work, toiling at it as the rural laborer toils in the fields, with his eye on the sun, looking till it dip over the horizon, and bid him go home to rest. Today there is a passion for athletics, and any one who cares may see how men put their whole soul into sport. Would that God's people were as earnest in prayer as the men of the world in sport were. Watch an athletic contest, and see how the men engaged in it bring to it not only the force of the body but of the mind.
Every faculty is bent on winning the prize.
That is how you and I are to pray. Agony in prayer means striving as the athlete in the arena. We are to labor in prayer as a soldier labors on the battlefield. I do not think we have any conception of the way a soldier labors on the battlefield. From reading the accounts of many campaigns, I have received the impression that there is hardly any labor that man ever does, so intense as the labor of the battlefield.