Lesson 93: Our Boldness in Prayer, part 3
It is the union of the teaching of the Word and Spirit that many do not understand, and so there is a twofold difficulty in knowing what God’s will may be. Some seek the will of God in an inner feeling or conviction, and would have the Spirit lead them without the Word. Others seek it in the Word, without the living leading of the Holy Spirit. The two must be united: only in the Word, only in the Spirit, but in these most surely, can we know the will of God, and learn to pray according to it. In the heart, the Word and the Spirit must meet: it is only by indwelling that we can experience their teaching. The Word must dwell, must abide in us: heart and life must day by day be under its influence. Not from without, but from within, comes the quickening of the Word by the Spirit. It is only he who yields himself entirely in his whole life to the supremacy of the Word and the will of God, who can expect in special cases to discern what that Word and will permit him boldly to ask. And even as with the word, just so with the Spirit: if I would have the leading of the Spirit in prayer to assure me what God’s will is, my whole life must be yielded to that leading; so only then can mind and heart become spiritual and capable of knowing God’s holy will. It is he who, through word and Spirit, lives in the will of God by doing it, who will know to pray according to that will in the confidence that He hears us.
Would that Christians might see what incalculable harm they do themselves by the thought that because possibly their prayer is not according to God’s will, they must be content without an answer. God’s word tells us that the great reason of unanswered prayer is that we do not pray aright: “You ask and receive not, because you ask wrongly.” In not granting an answer, the Father tells us that there is something wrong in our praying. He wants to teach us to find it out and confess it, and so to educate us to true believing and effective prayer. He can only attain His object when He brings us to see that we are to blame for the withholding of the answer; our aim, or our faith, or our life is not what it should be. But this purpose of God is frustrated if we are content to say: It is perhaps because my prayer is not according to His will that He does not hear me. Oh let us no longer throw the blame of our unanswered prayers on the secret will of God, but on our praying wrongly. Let that word, “You receive not because you ask wrongly,” be as the lantern of the Lord, searching heart and life to prove that we are indeed such as those to whom Christ gave His promises of certain answers. Let us believe that we can know if our prayer is according to God’s will. Let us yield our heart to have the word of the Father dwell richly there, to have Christ’s word abiding in us. Let us live day by day with the anointing which teaches us all things. Let us yield ourselves completely to the Holy Spirit as He teaches us to abide in Christ, to dwell in the Father’s presence, and we shall soon understand how the Father’s love longs that the child should know His will, and should, in the confidence that His will includes all that His power and love have promised to do, know too that He hears the petitions which we ask of Him. “This is the boldness which we have, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.”
Prayer: Blessed Savior, teach me to believe in the glory of this will. That will is the eternal love, which with Divine power works out its purpose in each human will that yields itself to it. Lord, teach me this. You can make me see how every promise and every command of the Word is indeed the will of God, and that its fulfilment is secured to me by God Himself. Let the will of God become to me the sure rock on which my prayer and my assurance of an answer ever rest.