THERE are few things in the religious life so disquieting as the perplexities of prayer. We make our prayer, earnestly, deliberately; we are sure that what we ask is not plainly against God’s will. Sometimes there seems to be no answer at all. We pray and pray, and the heavens seem to be as brass. Sometimes the answer, if it comes, is long deferred. Sometimes, if circumstances that occur be the answer, they are strangely different from what we asked or expected.
1. Now, in entering even a very little way into the perplexed question of denials and delays in prayer, it seems well to touch upon a point too little taken into account in the general Christian mind, that question of the times and seasons which the Father hath left in His own hand, and which we cannot take into ours. “All things,” it has been said, “are not possible to all men at all times;” and for want of duly acknowledging this statute of limitation, many devotional books, and a great deal of religious teaching, tend only to bring strain and anguish upon the sincere mind, which feels that it cannot rise to the prescribed level until it is lifted there by God Himself. There come, alike to individuals and to churches, days of refreshing from the Lord, times of visitation which the strongest urgency of the human spirit cannot antedate, but which it is its highest wisdom to meet, so as to be found willing in the day of God’s power. If the whole year were one long harvest, where were then the sowing, the patient expectation, the ploughing in the cold? A vintage comes once in a year, a triumph perhaps once in a lifetime. So has the Christian life its seasons, its epochs, its days of benediction. There are times, probably, in the life of every faithful believer, when things long desired and sought after are dropped like golden gifts within his bosom. There are few tried Christians who have not known times when God, suddenly or gradually, has lifted a weight from off their lives, has brought a power within their souls, has so mitigated some afflictive dispensation as to make that endurable which was previously intolerable, has rendered some long desired and apparently unattainable temporal or spiritual aim possible, practicable, easy. How many blessings at such a season will God, by one sweep of His mighty arm, bring within the soul’s grasp! He will at once enlarge the soul’s border, and visibly defend the land He has made so broad and fruitful, giving it rest from all its enemies round about. Often in times of great tribulation the prophecy of such a season will be borne like a breath from heaven across the wasted and desolate spirit:—
A little hint to solace woe,
A hint, a murmur breathing low,
I may not speak of what I know.
2. We shall consider three situations separately—(1) no answer, (2) a deferred answer, (3) a different answer. But first of all let us remember that we are not by any means the best judges of what constitutes an answer to prayer. No doubt it must frequently happen that what seems a refusal is really the kindest and best of answers. Let us never forget that the most earnest and intense prayer ever offered in the history of the world was a prayer that seemed to meet with a refusal. Yet in that very prayer, offered in an agony of desire, a New Testament writer assures us that our Lord was heard for His filial piety and submission to His Father’s will. Of course, the Father heard those outpoured supplications, felt in His Divine sensibilities the full force of those strong cries and tears; and surely, in this case, as St. John teaches us in all similar cases, with Him to hear was to answer. Did He not answer? Surely the joy that must fill the heart of the Son of Man through ages of gratified benevolence (and this is the highest of all joys), in which He has been, and still is, entitled to carry on His mediatorial work, and prove Himself the Saviour of the lost, is a witness to the fact that, in denying Him what He asked, the Father answered the prayer of His Son much more fully than it would have been answered had that cup passed from His trembling hand. He asked that He might evade the dread ordeal that lay before Him, that He might escape the pain, the sorrow, the loneliness, the heart-breaking desolation; but He also asked that God’s will might be done. The answer came not in His being allowed to escape the sorrow, but in His finding through the sorrow a new and wonderful joy, compared with which even His passion was a “light affliction and but for a moment,” however far from being light it was in itself. How much the human Christ gained in His own experience from the fact that the answer came as His Father willed, and not as His own human will would have preferred that it should come!
In the prayers of very many of those who love God, slowly a change is wrought. We begin our life with eager and impatient hearts; and in the impatience and the eagerness our religion on all its sides is likely to share. Our plans and hopes stand clearly before our minds; when danger threatens them, our sense of the danger is acute and vivid. The imminence of the peril, the cruelty of the possible loss, the loveliness of that which seems about to be destroyed, the hopelessness of a future from which those fair forms are gone, or in which those carefully formed plans are to find no realization and have no place—with pitiless clearness all this is present to our minds, and we hasten to God with petitions most definite and most urgent. Just what God should do for us, just what He should do for His Kingdom in this difficult and critical time, we tell Him. And then we wait for the answer, sometimes divided between hope and fear, sometimes in that faith which is ready to think of God as under compulsion to reduce the whole system of nature to anarchy when our hearts are set upon something that we can have only through the shattering of the natural order, and we ask God for it with an undoubting belief that He is going to give it to us—a view of prayer pathetic were it not so splendid, pitiable were it not that it is often held in that simplicity of heart which is the root and beginning of every human excellence. But the God to whom we have prayed is greater than we. His love is a love for individuals; but He sees the part in the whole, and time as eternity. Nature He makes orderly; expressing in it His own rationality, and thereby making possible for us men the development of rational individuality in intelligence, in morals, in the deep affections of a life in which we must help one another as we can in the presence of vast and inexorable, but not unintelligible, forces. With eternal patience, with a wisdom beyond our earthly comprehension, He works out His vast designs; and into those designs He weaves our lives; so that sometimes the answer we had so eagerly prayed for comes, but sometimes does not come — does not come, because in its place comes something greater, something longer in its process and wider in its issues, leading us out through slow years into fields of life more sober in colour than those we had planned, but greater in labour and deeper in truth.
To her the “special Shewing” came as a gift, unearned, and unexpected: it came in an abundant answer to a prayer for other things needed by every soul. Julian’s desires for herself were for three “wounds” to be made more deep in her life: contrition (in sight of sin), compassion (in sight of sorrow), and longing after God: she prayed and sought diligently for these graces, comprehensive as she felt they were of the Christian life and meant for all; and with them she sought to have for herself, in particular regard to her own difficulties, a sight of such truth as it might “behove” her to know for the glory of God and the comfort of men. [Note: Grace Warrack, in Introduction to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, xxxvii.]
I asked for just a crumb of bread.
Within His banquet-hall He spread
A bounteous feast on every side—
My hungry soul was satisfied.
I asked for just a ray of light
To guide me through the gloomy night,
And lo, there shone along my way
The noon-tide glory of the day.
I asked for just a little aid,
As I stood trembling and afraid.
With strength I had not known before
He made me more than conqueror.
I asked for just a bit of love,
For love is sweet. From heaven above
The words came now with meaning new,
“Upon the Cross I died for you”. [Note: Faith Wells, in The Sunday School Times, 27th June, 1914.]
