Lesson 65: The Chief End of Prayer, part 3
What motive, what power is there that can urge our lazy hearts to yield themselves to our Lord to work His glory in us? Surely nothing more is needed than a sight of how glorious, how the Father is alone worthy of glory. Let our faith learn in adoring worship to bow before Him, to assign to Him alone the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, to yield ourselves to dwell in His light as the ever-blessed, ever-loving One. Surely we shall be stirred to say, “To Him alone be glory.” And we shall look to our Lord Jesus with new intensity of desire for a life that refuses to see or seek anything but the glory of God. When there is but little prayer that can be answered, the Father is not glorified. It is a duty, for the glory of God, to live and pray so that our prayer can be answered. For the sake of God’s glory, let us learn to pray well.
What a humbling thought that so often there is earnest prayer for a child or a friend, for a work or a circle, in which the thought of our joy or our pleasure was far stronger than any desires for God’s glory. No wonder that there are so many unanswered prayers: here we have the secret. God would not be glorified when that glory was not our object. He that would pray the prayer of faith, will have to give himself to live literally so that the Father in all things may be glorified in him. This must be his aim: without this there cannot be the prayer of faith. “How can you believe,” said Jesus, “who receive glory from one another, and you do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” All seeking of our own glory with men makes faith impossible: it is the deep, intense self-sacrifice that gives up its own glory, and seeks the glory of God alone, that wakens in the soul that spiritual openness to the Divine, which is faith. The surrender to God to seek His glory, and the expectation that He will show His glory in hearing us, are one at the root. He who seeks God’s glory will see it in the answer to his prayer, and he alone.
And how, we ask again, shall we attain to it? Let us begin with confession. How little has the glory of God been an all-absorbing passion; how little our lives and our prayers have been full of it. How little have we lived in the likeness of the Son, and in sympathy with Him—for God and His glory alone. Let us take time, until the Holy Spirit shows it to us, and we see how lacking we have been in this. True knowledge and confession of sin are the sure path to deliverance.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, I confess I have not learned to pray only for Your glory. I give all my needs to You so Your glory will be displayed through Your great grace because of my weakness.