Lesson 64: The Chief End of Prayer, part 2
It is not as if the believer does not at times desire to bring glory to God. But he has to mourn that he has so little reached his goal. And he knows the reason of his failure too. It was, because the separation between the spirit of daily life and the spirit of the hour of prayer was too wide. We begin to see that the desire for the glory of the Father is not something that we can awake and present to our Lord when we prepare ourselves to pray. No! it is only when the whole life, in all its parts, is given up to God’s glory, that we can really pray to His glory too. “Do all to the glory of God,” and, “Ask all to the glory of God,”—these twin commands are inseparable: obedience to the former is the secret of grace for the latter. A life to the glory of God is the condition of the prayers that Jesus can answer, “that the Father may be glorified.”
This demand regarding prevailing prayer—that it should be to the glory of God—is no more than right and natural. There is none glorious but the Lord: there is no glory but His, and what He lays on His creatures. Creation exists to show forth His glory; all that is not for His glory is sin, and darkness, and death: it is only in the glorifying of God that the creatures can find glory. What the Son of Man did, to give Himself wholly, His whole life, to glorify the Father, is nothing but the simple duty of every redeemed one.
And Christ’s reward will be his too. Because He gave Himself so entirely to the glory of the Father, the Father crowned Him with glory and honor, giving the kingdom into His hands, with the power to ask what He will, and, as Intercessor, to answer our prayers. And just as we become one with Christ in this, and as our prayer is part of a life completely surrendered to God’s glory, will the Savior be able to glorify the Father to us by the fulfilment of the promise: “Whatsoever you shall ask, I will do it.”
To such a life, with God’s glory our only aim, we cannot reach by any effort of our own. It is only in the man Christ Jesus that such a life is to be seen: in Him it is to be found for us. Yes, blessed be God! His life is our life; He gave Himself for us; He Himself is now our life. The discovery, and the confession, and the denial, of self, as grabbing the place of God, of self-seeking and self-trusting, is essential, and yet is what we cannot accomplish in our own strength. It is the incoming and indwelling, the Presence and the Rule in the heart, of our Lord Jesus who glorified the Father on earth, and is now glorified with Him, so He might glorify Him in us—it is Jesus Himself coming in, who can cast out all self-glorifying, and give us instead His own God-glorifying life and Spirit. It is Jesus, who longs to glorify the Father in hearing our prayers, who will teach us to live and to pray to the glory of God.
Prayer: Savior! To this end I yield myself to You again. I would be nothing. I have given self, as already crucified with You, to the death. Through the Spirit its workings are slain and made dead; Your life and Your love of the Father are taking possession of me. A new longing begins to fill my soul, that every day, every hour, that in every prayer the glory of the Father may be everything to me. O my Lord, I am in Your school to learn this: teach it me.