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Jesus never taught His disciples how to preach, only how to pray. He did not speak much of what was needed to preach well, but much of praying well. To know how to speak to God is more than knowing how to speak to man. Not power with men, but power with God is the first thing. Jesus loves to teach us how to pray.
I must remember that none of the saints had in Scripture ever ventured to address God as their Father.
The word Holy is the central word of the Old Testament; the name Father of the New.
In this name of Love all the holiness and glory of God are now to be revealed.
Let us seek, not only just in our seasons of prayer, but at all times, to hold fast the joyful assurance: man’s prayer on earth and God’s answer in heaven are meant for each other.
The Lord would remind us that the prayer of a child owes its influence entirely to the relation in which he stands to the parent.
^1The Greek word for receiving and taking is the same. When Jesus said, Everyone that asks receives,’ He used the same verb as at the Supper, Take, eat,’ or on the resurrection morning, Receive,’ accept, take, the Holy Spirit.’ Receiving not only implies God’s bestowment, but our acceptance.
THE Lord frequently taught His disciples that they must pray, and how; but seldom what to pray.
He did so because He really believed that their prayer was needed, and would help.
And so He tells His disciples now to begin and pray, and, when they have taken over the work from Him on earth, to make this one of the chief petitions in their prayer: That the Lord of the harvest Himself would send forth labourers into His harvest.
How little Christians really feel and mourn the need of labourers in the fields of the world so white to the harvest.
So wonderful is the surrender of His work into the hands of His Church, so dependent has the Lord made Himself on them as His body, through whom alone His work can be done, so real is the power which the Lord gives His people to exercise in heaven and earth, that the number of the labourers and the measure of the harvest does actually depend upon their prayer.
The one is: We miss the compassion of Jesus, which gave rise to this request for prayer.
We thank You for all whom You art teaching to cry day and night for labourers to be sent forth. Lord, breathe Your own Spirit on all Your children, that they may learn to live for this one thing alone–the Kingdom and glory of their Lord–and become fully awake to the faith of what their prayer can accomplish. And let all our hearts in this, as in every petition, be filled with the assurance that prayer, offered in loving faith in the living God, will bring certain and abundant answer. Amen.
Our prayers must not be a vague appeal to His mercy, an indefinite cry for blessing, but the distinct expression of definite need.
It demands time, and thought, and self-scrutiny to find out what really is our greatest need.
The will rules the whole heart and life; if I really will to have anything that is within my reach, I do not rest till I have it.
It is often spiritual sloth that, under the appearance of humility, professes to have no will, because it fears the trouble of searching out the will of God, or, when found, the struggle of claiming it in faith.
Lord Jesus! teach me to pray with all my heart and strength, that there may be no doubt with You or with me as to what I have asked.
Ere we can believe we must find out and know what God’s will is’ believing is the exercise of a soul surrendered and given up to the influence of the Word and the Spirit; but when once we do believe nothing shall be impossible.
God forbid that we should try and bring down His ALL THINGS to the level of what we think possible.
When, whether in the greater interests of the Master’s work, or in the lesser concerns of our daily life, the soul is led to see how there is nothing that so honours the Father as the faith that is assured that He will do what He has said in giving us whatsoever we ask for, and takes its stand on the promise as brought home by the Spirit, it may know most certainly that it does receive exactly what it asks.
Not the feeling I call up, but the tone of my life during the day, is God’s criterion of what I really am and desire.
One of the mysteries of the Divine life is the harmony between the gradual and the sudden, immediate full possession, and slow imperfect appropriation.
THROUGH HIM we have access BY ONE SPIRIT unto THE FATHER.’
And although sin has for a time frustrated God’s plans, prayer still remains what it would have been if man had never fallen: the proof of man’s Godlikeness, the vehicle of his intercourse with the Infinite Unseen One, the power that is allowed to hold the hand that holds the destinies of the universe.
