The one principle, out-ranking all others, first and supreme, which governs prayer is God’s purpose. The petitioner is placed by the nature of the case where he must recognize the sovereignty of God. Every prayer must conform to the Divine will. We are living in God’s universe and are part of it. His we are by right of creation, preservation, and redemption; placed here not to interrupt His plans but, by co-operation with Him, to accomplish His purpose. Prayer, therefore, is not dictation, is not advice, but the request a child makes of its parent, trusting superior wisdom, reposing in undoubted love, and desiring success in no particular petition which may be inconsistent with general and permanent welfare.
Suppose, then, that two men, meek, lowly, righteous, agree to ask for rain, let us say, or for the recovery of some friend who is tossing to and fro under the grip of some dire disease, or for the patients in a hospital, or in all hospitals, or for the conversion of some sinner, or of all sinners—will their prayer, in its real essence and import, be answered? Will their desire, in its real intensity, be granted? Assuredly it will, if the exceeding great and precious promises which are written in the volume of the book be indeed “yea and amen”. Why, then, are any sinners unconverted? Why are any of the diseased unhealed? Why is there any distress at all? Why is there any anguish of nations, any inward commotions, or mutual antagonisms? Why are there any wars? Why any woes? Is it because the prayers of the righteous for the great masses of the world have been withheld? No; for Jesus prayed, and Paul prayed, and John prayed, and Elijah prayed. Is it then because their earnest energizing prayers have been unanswered? No; for the promises are “yea and amen”. What then? The whole difficulty takes flight when we notice that in a meek and lowly and holy soul there cannot be unconditional or absolute desires for any of the objects specified. All desires for such objects are desires with an underlying condition expressed or understood. They are petitions dependent on other elements of desire, which spread out wider and draw deeper. And these underlying desires are but partial aspects of one great element of desire which absorbs within itself all details of desire. Minute details of desire are never absolute, and never detached. They are all and always but partial aspects of one great desire. That great desire is this—that God should do, in every given case or conjuncture, what it would be wisest and best, all things considered, and all interests consulted, for Him to do—what would be most in harmony with our moral constitution and with His own moral government. In its ultimate and sublimest form it is this — “Thy will be done.”
1. The will of God gives us the due and necessary limit of prayer. There are many things for which we never think of asking, simply because they are not only not included in, but are clearly opposed to, His revealed will. There are other matters about which we are certain that they are according to His will, and as to these we plead His promises and continue praying, waiting, expecting the answer in God’s good time. Yet again, there are many things about which there is no revelation in the Word of God, and with reference to these we pray in submission to the will of God, and wait His way of revealing to us in daily circumstances and experience whether the prayer is in harmony with His purpose concerning us. This spirit of submissiveness is one of the primary conditions of prayer and one of the essential marks of a true spiritual life. Our Lord, in Gethsemane, prayed in this spirit, “Not my will, but thine, be done,” and when the soul is ready to trust God fully and rest on His perfect wisdom, the joyous experience is that of the Apostle when he said, “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us” (1Jn_5:14).
But is not the promise in Mar_2:24 an unqualified one? Yes, but within the limits that are well understood to exist between the two contracting parties. Here is a man with a well-defined plan for a house. He turns the work over to the contractor, with a promise to supply whatever he might want. Very soon there comes a request for an extra supply of material to erect a few towers which in the opinion of the contractor would very much beautify the building. Here is a father who has a plan for his boy’s future. He sends him to college, saying, “Send to me for whatever you want and you shall receive it”. In a few months the boy sends home for an extra supply of cash for certain side-issues of questionable propriety. Each of these requests are properly denied. And yet each of the petitioners might say that the promise was unqualified. [Note: W. E. Biederwolf, How can God Answer Prayer? 183.]
2. But how can we know if what we ask is in accordance with the will of God? Just this is the difficulty. More than one believer says: “I do not know if what I desire be according to the will of God. God’s will is the purpose of His infinite wisdom: it is impossible for me to know whether He may not count something else better for me than what I desire, or may not have some reasons for withholding what I ask.” Every one feels that with such thoughts the prayer of faith, of which Jesus said, “Whosoever shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith,” becomes an impossibility. There may be the prayer of submission, and of trust in God’s wisdom; there cannot be the prayer of faith. The great mistake here is that God’s children do not really believe that it is possible to know God’s will. Or if they believe this, they do not take the time and trouble to find it out. What we need is to see clearly in what way it is that the Father leads His waiting, teachable child to know that his petition is according to His will. It is (1) through God’s holy Word, taken up and kept in the heart, the life, the will; and (2) through God’s Holy Spirit, accepted in His indwelling and leading, that we shall learn to know that our petitions are according to His will.
(1.) Through the Word.—There is a secret will of God, with which we often fear that our prayers may be at variance. It is not with this will of God, but His will as revealed in His Word, that we have to do in prayer. Our notions of what the secret will may have decreed, and of how it might render the answers to our prayers impossible, are mostly very erroneous. Childlike faith as to what He is willing to do for His children simply keeps to the Father’s assurance that it is His will to hear prayer and to do what faith in His Word desires and accepts. In the Word the Father has revealed, in general promises, the great principles of His will with His people. The child has to take the promise and apply it to the special circumstances in His life to which it has reference. Whatever he asks within the limits of that revealed will, he can know to be according to the will of God, and he may confidently expect. In His Word, God has given us the revelation of His will and plans with us, with His people, and with the world, with the most precious promises of the grace and power with which through His people He will carry out His plans and do His work. As faith becomes strong and bold enough to claim the fulfilment of the general promise in the special case, we may have the assurance that our prayers are heard; they are according to God’s will. Take these words of John: “If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life”. Such is the general promise; and the believer who pleads on the ground of this promise prays according to the will of God, and John would give him boldness to know that he has the petition which he asks.
(2) Through, the Spirit.—The apprehension of God’s will is something spiritual, and must be spiritually discerned. It is not as a matter of logic that we can argue it out. God has said it; I must have it. Nor has every Christian the same gift or calling. While the general will revealed in the promise is the same for all, there is for each a special different will according to God’s purpose. And herein is the wisdom of the saints, to know this special will of God for each of us, according to the measure of grace given us, and so to ask in prayer just what God has prepared and made possible for each. It is to communicate this wisdom that the Holy Ghost dwells in us. The personal application of the general promises of the Word to our special personal needs—it is for this that the leading of the Holy Spirit is given us.
I count it one of the most precious lessons God wants to teach through the experience of George Muller, that He is willing to make known, of things of which His word says nothing directly, that they are His will for us, and that we may ask them. The teaching of the Spirit, not without or against the Word, but as something above and beyond it, in addition to it, without which we cannot see God’s will, is the heritage of every believer. It is through the Word, and the Word alone, that the Spirit teaches, applying the general principles or promises to our special need. And it is the Spirit, and the Spirit alone, who can really make the Word a light on our path, whether the path of duty in our daily walk or the path of faith in our approach to God. [Note: A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer, 263.]
3. Sincere prayer is answered although the will of God is not clearly seen. Even to the purest and most devoted souls, that will may for a time remain obscure and inscrutable. Paul prayed, not once, nor twice, but thrice, for the removal of the thorn; and Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with crying and tears that the terrible cup might pass from Him. In the strict sense, neither of these prayers was answered. The cup had to be drained to the dregs — “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” —and the flesh continued to be tormented by the thorn. Yet in the deepest sense these prayers were both answered. Overshadowing the prayer for the removal of the cup and the thorn was the prayer that the will of God be done, and that prayer was abundantly answered. By each of the sufferers that will was accepted, and in it they found strength and peace. Paul learned a more abundant experience of the Divine grace through the strength which he felt to possess him even in his weakness, so that the very rejection of his prayer became to him a gracious and brilliant answer. So it was with our Lord. He was heard, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us. The cup was not removed, but strength was given Him to drink it. From His knees He rose victorious; and in the strength that came upon Him after the agony of His prayer in the garden, He stepped quietly forth to face treachery and death.
Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him
When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
‘Twas on a tree they slew Him—last
When out of the woods He came. [Note: Sidney Lanier.]
4. Obedience to the will of God is not mere submission, mere resignation. It is not always acquiescence, even in prayer. We obey God as much when we urge our suit, and make a real petition of it, as when we accept His decision; as much when we try to change His will as when we bow to it. The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence. There is a very fine passage in Dante, Parad. xx. 94 (Longfellow’s trans.):—
Regnum coelorum suffereth violence
From fervent love, and from that living hope
That overcometh the Divine volition;
Not in the guise that man o’ercometh man,
But conquers it because it will be conquered,
And conquered conquers by benignity.
It is His will—His will of grace—that prayer should prevail with Him and extract blessings. And how we love the grace that so concedes them! The answer to prayer is not the complaisance of a playful power lightly yielding to the playful egoism of His favourites. “Our antagonist is our helper.” To struggle with Him is one way of doing His will. To resist is one way of saying “Thy will be done”. It was God’s will that Christ should deprecate the death God required. It pleased God as much as His submission to death. But could it have been pleasing to Him that Christ should pray so, if no prayer could ever possibly change God’s will? Could Christ have prayed so in that belief? Would faith ever inspire us to pray if the God of our faith must be unmoved by prayer? The prayer that goes to an inflexible God, however good He is, is prayer that rises more from human need than (where Christian prayer should rise) from God’s own revelation or from Christian faith. It is His will, then, that we should pray against what seems His will, and what, for the lower stage of our growth, is His will. And all this without any unreality whatever.
Let us beware of a pietish fatalism which thins the spiritual life, saps the vigour of character, makes humility mere acquiescence, and piety only feminine, by banishing the will from prayer as much as thought has been banished from it. “The curse of so much religion,” says Mr. Meredith, “is that men cling to God with their weakness rather than with their strength.” The popularity of much acquiescence is not because it is holier but because it is easier. And an easy gospel is the consumption that attacks Christianity. It is the phthisis of faith. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, in The London Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 21.]
Prayer is the voice of one who was created free, although he was born in chains; it is at once self-assertion and self surrender; it claims a will even in surrendering it, when it says, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” It is, perhaps, the greatest of all witnesses to the spiritual nature of man, as nothing so dignifies human nature, or so enhances the sense of its fixed relation with the Divine as does prayer, the true conception of which involves the idea of a certain power possessed by humanity over God. Neither is there any such other witness to man’s spiritual freedom as is wrapped up in prayer, man’s permitted, though submitted, wish and will and choice. When God gave man reason, says Milton, He gave him freedom to choose, for freedom is but choosing. Prayer is God’s acknowledgment, His indorsement of His own gift of freedom to man; it is His royal invitation (an invitation which has in it the nature and force of a command) to man to exert this privilege, to use this power. It is God the Almighty who says, and who says to man, “Ask me concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.” [Note: Dora Greenwell, Essays, 129.]
5. Prayer according to the will of God is not the annihilation of the human will, it is the annihilation of all that in the human will is selfish. In prayer the profoundest act of conscience and obedience is inwardly accomplished, for prayer is a laying hold and appropriation of God only in so far as it is likewise a sacrifice; and we can receive God into us only when we likewise give ourselves to Him. He who offers no sacrifice in his prayer, who does not sacrifice his self-will does not really pray. But this sacrifice of surrender and obedience is true and pure only when it is the sacrifice of free love, when under it the position of the servant is transformed into that of the child. By such a sacrifice, in which self-will dies, room is gained within for God the Lord, whose place within us is otherwise occupied by the selfish desires, the world and its images.
The launching of a selfish wish into the unseen world, in the dim hope that it will become operative through the good-nature of a Being who has infinite power to do as He will, is not in any sense prayer at all, for it is not offered to God as God;—it does not seriously profess to desire that God should be more and more in the universe, and selfish creatures less and less; it is not, in short, addressed to the perfect righteousness and perfect love, but only to the most potent of administrative agencies; it is directed, not to the infinite purity, but to a mighty Executive of the universe, and would be addressed to that mighty Executive much more hopefully if infinite good-nature instead of goodness were His essence. Now this is certainly not, in Christ’s sense, prayer at all. In His sense, it is of the very essence of prayer that it aims at the establishment of the Divine will, and the annihilation of all that is inconsistent with that will. It is not to God’s omnipotence primarily, but to His spiritual nature, that Christian prayer is addressed; the whole purport of it being that the unity of the Divine Kingdom may be asserted and its laws established. If this be not the first condition of any petition, then in the Christian sense that petition is not prayer at all. Prayer is not a short and easy cut to the thing next your heart; but the chief method by which the eager and short-sighted and imperfect mind gradually learns to purify itself in the flame of Divine love. [Note: R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, 246.]
