Power in PrayerSample

Confidence in God

The verse before the text says, “If our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God. And whatever we ask we receive from Him.” He who has a clear conscience comes to God with confidence, and that confidence of faith ensures the answer of his prayer. Childlike confidence makes us pray as none else can. I have often felt that it needs more confidence in God to pray to Him about a little thing than about great things. We fancy that our great things are somewhat worthier of God’s regard, though in truth they are little enough to Him, and then we imagine that our little things must be so trifling that it would be almost an insult to bring them before Him. But we should know that what is very great to a child may be very little to his parent, and yet the parent measures the thing from the child’s point of view. God our Father is a good Father; He pities us as fathers pity their children and condescends to us. He tells the number of the stars and calls them by name, yet He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. If you have confidence in God, you will take your great things and your little things to Him, and He will never belie your confidence. Faith must succeed.

Love Must Succeed

But next, love must succeed too, since we have already seen that the man who loves in the Christian sense is in accord with God. If you confine your love to your own family, you must not expect God to do so, and prayers narrowed within that circle He will disregard. If a man loves his own little self and hopes everybody’s crop of wheat will fail, he certainly cannot expect the Lord to agree with such selfishness. If a man has heart enough to embrace all the creatures of God in his affection, while he yet prays especially for the household of faith, his prayers will be after the divine mind. His love and God’s goodness run side by side. Though God’s love is like a mighty rolling river, and his is like a trickling brooklet, they both run in the same direction and will come to the same end. God always hears the prayers of a loving man because those prayers are the shadows of His own decrees.

Again, God will hear the man of obedience because his obedient heart leads him to pray humbly and with submission, for his highest desire is that the Lord’s will be done. Hence his prayers are prophecies. Is he not one with God? Doth he not desire and ask for exactly what God intends? How can a prayer shot from such a bow ever fail to reach its target?

The difficulty is that we do not keep in rapport with God; but if we did, then we should strike the same note as God strikes—the note struck by prayer on earth would coincide with that which sounds forth from the decrees in heaven. Again, the man who lives in fellowship with God will assuredly begin praying, because if he dwells in God, and God dwells in him, he will desire what God desires.