James Nisbet Commentary - John 16:23 - 16:23

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James Nisbet Commentary - John 16:23 - 16:23


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

‘
IN MY NAME’

‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My Name, He will give it you.’

Joh_16:23

I. The Church of God has reverently accepted the Lord’s own promise as to the efficacy of prayer.—And of prayer not merely for blessings described as spiritual, but for those which we speak of as temporal. More, perhaps, than we think is belief in efficacy of prayer weakened by distrust of which, perhaps, we are hardly conscious, due to influences scarcely known to many who yet feel them. But it is also true that many of the assaults made and ridicule cast upon the efficacy of prayer would have spent their force in vain, if Christian people had not fallen so miserably short of that intelligent, thoughtful belief to which their Lord looked forward when He said, ‘In that day ye shall ask Me no questions.’

(a) Notice that in this promise our Lord bids us ‘Ask the Father.’

(b) The Father cannot regard us, who alone of created beings here below are capable of rising up to communion with Himself, as too insignificant to be objects of His individual care.

(c) So it is that in the one sentence, ‘Ye shall ask the Father,’ we find the support of faith as we ask for temporal or for spiritual blessing.

II. But our Lord bids us ask, and assures us of an answer in His Name.—Even as He spoke, before the illumination of Pentecost, Apostles would have caught some glimpses of His meaning. To ask and to receive in the name of Christ is something far more than merely to close our prayers with the words, ‘Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ It is that, but it involves something beyond. Prayer is offered, and it is answered by the power of Christ; it is an appeal to His living intercession and advocacy which is the reason known to many why prayer at Holy Communion has an especial value; prayer is accepted only when those who offer it are still in living union with Him, and in sympathy with His will and character.

III. An answer to prayer depends upon a living union with Christ, and our Lord adds one other condition. ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’ It is through the character of Christ, reflected in Christians—acting, speaking, working, worshipping—that men come to learn that God is indeed the Father and they are His children.

IV. Only add to these three elements of Christian prayer its basis in the revelation of the Father, Whose Name the Son became Incarnate to declare; its offering in union with the Lord Jesus Christ, its end the Divine glory, the other characteristic of Pentecost to which the Saviour points us. In prayer, whatever be its particular specific form, be thoughtful.

Rev. Chancellor Worlledge.

Illustration

‘To pray for earthly blessings is not to ask God to disturb anything. In asking for such blessings, if it be His will, we also ask implicitly for the love, and power, and self-control which were in Christ, in order that we may be fitted to behold some glimpses of those higher laws which He revealed in His work of love and mercy here below. We must remember that in the working of His plan, prayer—the simplest and humblest—the reverent prayer of the Christian child as much as the deep supplication of the grown man, have already their rightful place, and that God has already taken them all, if we offer them, into account.’