With Christ in the School of Prayer

[Soldier4Christ]

  How well the Old Testament saints understood this connection between God’s
   words and ours, and how really prayer with them was the loving response to
   what they had heard God speak!  If the word were a promise, they counted on
   God to do as He had spoken.  ‘Do as Thou hast said;’ ‘For Thou, Lord, hast
   spoken it;’ ‘According to Thy promise;’ ‘According to Thy word;’ in such
   expressions they showed that what God spake in promise was the root and the
   life of what they spake in prayer.  If the word was a command, they simply
   did as the Lord had spoken:  ‘So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken.’
   Their life was fellowship with God, the interchange of word and thought.
   What God spoke they heard and did; what they spoke God heard and did.  In
   each word He speaks to us, the whole Christ gives Himself to fulfil it for
   us. For each word He asks no less that we give the whole man to keep that
   word, and to receive its fulfilment.

   ‘If my words abide in you;’ the condition is simple and clear.  In His words
   His will is revealed.  As the words abide in me, His will rules me; my will
   becomes the empty vessel which His will fills, the willing instrument which
   His will wields; He fills my inner being.  In the exercise of obedience and
   faith my will becomes ever stronger, and is brought into deeper inner
   harmony with Him.  He can fully trust it to will nothing but what He wills;
   He is not afraid to give the promise, ‘If my words abide in you, ask
   whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’  To all who believe it, and
   act upon it, He will make it literally true.

   Disciples of Christ!  is it not becoming more and more clear to us that
   while we have been excusing our unanswered prayers, our impotence in prayer,
   with a fancied submission to God’s wisdom and will, the real reason has been
   that our own feeble life has been the cause of our feeble prayers.  Nothing
   can make strong men but the word coming to us from God’s mouth:  by that we
   must live.  It is the word of Christ, loved, lived in, abiding in us,
   becoming through obedience and action part of our being, that makes us one
   with Christ, that fits us spiritually for touching, for taking hold of God.
   All that is of the world passeth away; he that doeth the will of God abideth
   for ever.  O let us yield heart and life to the words of Christ, the words
   in which He ever gives HIMSELF, the personal living Saviour, and His promise
   will be our rich experience:  ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you,
   ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’


   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY!’


   Blessed Lord!  Thy lesson this day has again discovered to me my folly.  I
   see how it is that my prayer has not been more believing and prevailing.  I
   was more occupied with my speaking to Thee than Thy speaking to me.  I did
   not understand that the secret of faith is this:  there can be only so much
   faith as there is of the Living Word dwelling in the soul.

   And Thy word had taught me so clearly:  Let every man be swift to hear, slow
   to speak; let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God.  Lord,
   teach me that it is only with Thy word taken up into my life that my words
   can be taken into Thy heart; that Thy word, if it be a living power within
   me, will be a living power with Thee; what Thy mouth hath spoken Thy hand
   will perform.

   Lord!   deliver me from the uncircumcised ear.  Give me the opened ear of
   the learner, wakened morning by morning to hear the Father’s voice.  Even as
   Thou didst only speak what Thou didst hear, may my speaking be the echo of
   Thy speaking to me.  ‘When Moses went into the tabernacle to speak with Him,
   he heard the voice of One speaking unto him from off the mercy-seat.’  Lord,
   may it be so with me too.  Let a life and character bearing the one mark,
   that Thy words abide and are seen in it, be the preparation for the full
   blessing:  ‘Ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’  Amen.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-THIRD LESSON

  ‘Bear fruit, that the Father may give what ye ask;’

  Or,          Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer.

   ‘Ye did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go
   and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide:  that whatsoever ye shall
   ask  the Father in my name, He may give it you.’—John xv. 16.

   ‘The fervent effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much.’—James. v.
   16.

   THE promise of the Father’s giving whatsoever we ask is here once again
   renewed, in such a connection as to show us to whom it is that such
   wonderful influence in the council chamber of the Most High is to be
   granted.  ‘I chose you,’ the Master says, ‘and appointed you that ye should
   go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide;’ and then He adds, to
   the end ‘that whatsoever ye,’ the fruit-bearing ones, ‘shall ask of the
   Father in my name, He may give it you.’  This is nothing but the fuller
   expression of what He had spoken in the words, ‘If ye abide in me.’  He had
   spoken of the object of this abiding as the bearing ‘fruit,’ ‘more fruit,’
   ‘much fruit;’ in this was God to be glorified, and the mark of discipleship
   seen.  No wonder that He now adds, that where the reality of the abiding is
   seen in fruit abounding and abiding, this would be the qualification for
   praying so as to obtain what we ask.  Entire consecration to the fulfilment
   of our calling is the condition of effectual prayer, is the key to the
   unlimited blessings of Christ’s wonderful prayer-promises.

   There are Christians who fear that such a statement is at variance with the
   doctrine of free grace.  But surely not of free grace rightly understood,
   nor with so many express statements of God’s blessed word.  Take the words
   of St. John (1 John iii. 22):  ‘Let us love in deed and truth; hereby shall
   we assure our heart before Him.  And whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him,
   because we keep His commandments, and do the things that are pleasing in His
   sight.’’ Or take the oft-quoted words of James: ‘The fervent effectual
   prayer of a righteous man availeth much;’ that is, of a man of whom,
   according to the definition of the Holy Spirit, it can be said, ‘He that
   doeth righteousness, is righteous even as He is righteous.’  Mark the spirit
   of so many of the Psalms, with their confident appeal to the integrity and
   righteousness of the supplicant.  In Ps. xviii, David says:  ‘The Lord
   rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my
   hands hath He recompensed me. . . . I was upright before Him, and I kept
   myself from mine iniquity: therefore hath the Lord recompensed me according
   to my righteousness.’  (Ps. xviii. 20-26.  See also Ps. vii. 3-5, xv. 1, 2,
   xviii. 3, 6, xxvi. 1-6, cxix. 121, 153.)  If we carefully consider such
   utterances in the light of the New Testament, we shall find them in perfect
   harmony with the explicit teaching of the Saviour’s parting words:  ‘If ye
   keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love;’ ‘Ye are my friends if ye
   do what I command you.’   The word is indeed meant literally:  ‘I appointed
   you that ye should go and bear fruit, that,’ then, ‘whatsoever ye shall ask
   of the Father in my name, He may give it you.’

   Let us seek to enter into the spirit of what the Saviour here teaches us.
   There is a danger in our evangelical religion of looking too much at what it
   offers from one side, as a certain experience to be obtained in prayer and
   faith.  There is another side which God’s word puts very strongly, that of
   obedience as the only path to blessing.  What we need is to realize that in
   our  relationship to the Infinite Being whom we call God who has created and
   redeemed us, the first sentiment that ought to animate us is that of
   subjection:  the surrender to His supremacy, His glory, His will, His
   pleasure, ought to be the first and uppermost thought of our life.  The
   question is not, how we are to obtain and enjoy His favour, for in this the
   main thing may still be self.  But what this Being in the very nature of
   things rightfully claims, and is infinitely and unspeakably worthy of, is
   that His glory and pleasure should be my one object.  Surrender to His
   perfect and blessed will, a life of service and obedience, is the beauty and
   the charm of heaven.  Service and obedience, these were the thoughts that
   were uppermost in the mind of the Son, when He dwelt upon earth.  Service
   and obedience, these must become with us the chief objects of desire and
   aim, more so than rest or light, or joy or strength:  in them we shall find
   the path to all the higher blessedness that awaits us.

    Just note what a prominent place the Master gives it, not only in the 15^th
   chapter, in connection with the abiding, but in the 14^th, where He speaks
   of the indwelling of the Three-One God.  In verse 15 we have it:  ‘If ye
   love me, keep my commandments, and the Spirit will be given you of the
   Father.  Then verse 21:  ‘He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he
   it is that loveth me;’ and he shall have the special love of my Father
   resting on him and the special manifestation of myself.  And then again,
   verse 23, one of the highest of all the exceeding great and precious
   promises:  ‘If a man love me he will keep my words, and the Father and I
   will come and take up our abode with him.’  Could words put it more clearly
   that obedience is the way to the indwelling of the Spirit, to His revealing
   the Son within us, and to His again preparing us to be the abode, the home
   of the Father?  The indwelling of the Three-One God is the heritage of them
   that obey.  Obedience and faith are but two aspects of one act,—surrender to
   God and His will.  As faith strengthens for obedience, it is in turn
   strengthened by it:  faith is made perfect by works.  It is to be feared
   that often our efforts to believe have been unavailing because we have not
   taken up the only position in which a large faith is legitimate or
   possible,—that of entire surrender to the honour and the will of God.  It is
   the man who is entirely consecrated to God and His will who will find the
   power come to claim everything that His God has promised to be for him.

   The application of this in the school of prayer is very simple, but very
   solemn.  ‘I chose you,’ the Master says, ‘and appointed you that ye should
   go and bear fruit,’ much fruit (verses 5, , ‘and that your fruit should
   abide,’ that your life might be one of abiding fruit and abiding
   fruitfulness, ‘that’ thus, as fruitful branches abiding in me, ‘whatsoever
   ye shall ask of the Father in my name, He may give it you.’  O how often we
   have sought to be able to pray the effectual prayer for much grace to bear
   fruit, and have wondered that the answer came not.  It was because we were
   reversing the Master’s order.  We wanted to have the comfort and the joy and
   the strength first, that we might do the work easily and without any feeling
   of difficulty or self-sacrifice.  And He wanted us in faith, without asking
   whether we felt weak or strong, whether the work was hard or easy, in the
   obedience of faith to do what He said:  the path of fruit-bearing would have
   led us to the place and the power of prevailing prayer.  Obedience is the
   only path that leads to the glory of God.  Not obedience instead of faith,
   nor obedience to supply the shortcomings of faith; no, but faith’s obedience
   gives access to all the blessings our God has for us.  The baptism of the
   Spirit (xiv. 16), the manifestation of the Son (xiv. 21), the indwelling of
   the Father (xiv. 23), the abiding in Christ’s love (xv. 10), the privilege
   of His holy friendship (xv. 14), and the power of all-prevailing prayer (xv.
   16),—all wait for the obedient.

   Let us take home the lessons.  Now we know the great reason why we have not
   had power in faith to pray prevailingly.  Our life was not as it should have
   been:  simple downright obedience, abiding fruitfulness, was not its chief
   mark.  And with our whole heart we approve of the Divine appointment:  men
   to whom God is to give such influence in the rule of the world, as at their
   request to do what otherwise would not have taken place, men whose will is
   to guide the path in which God’s will is to work, must be men who have
   themselves learned obedience, whose loyalty and submission to authority must
   be above all suspicion.  Our whole soul approves the law:  obedience and
   fruit-bearing, the path to prevailing prayer.   And with shame we
   acknowledge how little our lives have yet borne this stamp.

   Let us yield ourselves to take up the appointment the Saviour gives us.  Let
   us study His relation to us as Master.  Let us seek no more with each new
   day to think in the first place of comfort, or joy, or blessing.  Let the
   first thought be:  I belong to the Master.  Every moment and every movement
   I must act as His property, as a part of Himself, as one who only seeks to
   know and do His will.   A servant, a slave of Jesus Christ,—let this be the
   spirit that animates me.  If He says, ‘No longer do I call you servants, but
   I have called you friends,’ let us accept the place of friends:  ‘Ye are my
   friends if ye do the things which I command you.’

[Soldier4Christ]

   The one thing He commands us as His branches is to bear fruit.   Let us live
   to bless others, to testify of the life and the love there is in Jesus.  Let
   us in faith and obedience give our whole life to that which Jesus chose us
   for and appointed us to—fruit-bearing.  As we think of His electing us to
   this, and take up our appointment as coming from Him who always gives all He
   demands, we shall grow strong in the confidence that a life of
   fruit-bearing, abounding and abiding, is within our reach.  And we shall
   understand why this fruit-bearing alone can be the path to the place of all
   prevailing prayer.  It is the man who, in obedience to the Christ of God, is
   proving that he is doing what his Lord wills, for whom the Father will do
   whatsoever he will:  ‘Whatsoever we ask we receive, because we keep His
   commandments, and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.’

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

   ——0——

   Blessed Master!  teach me to apprehend fully what I only partly realize,
   that it is only through the will of God, accepted and acted out in obedience
   to His commands, that we obtain the power to grasp His will in His promises
   and fully to appropriate them in our prayers.  And teach me that it is in
   the path of fruit-bearing that the deeper growth of the branch into the Vine
   can be perfected, and we attain to the perfect oneness with Thyself in which
   we ask whatsoever we will.

   O Lord!  Reveal to us,  we pray Thee, how with all the hosts of heaven, and
   with Thyself the Son on earth, and with all the men of faith who have
   glorified Thee on earth, obedience to God is our highest privilege, because
   it gives access to oneness with Himself in that which is His highest
   glory—His all perfect will.  And reveal to us, we pray Thee, how in keeping
   Thy commandments and bearing fruit according to Thy will, our spiritual
   nature will grow up to the full stature of the perfect man, with power to
   ask and to receive whatsoever we will.

   O Lord Jesus!  Reveal Thyself to us, and the reality of Thy purpose and Thy
   power to make these Thy wonderful promises the daily experience of all who
   utterly yield themselves to Thee and Thy words.  Amen.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-FOURTH LESSON.

   ‘In my Name;’

  Or,    The All-prevailing Plea.

   ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.  If ye shall ask me
   anything in my Name, that will I do.  That whatsoever ye shall ask the
   Father in my Name, He may give it you.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, If
   ye shall ask anything of the Father, He will give it you in my Name.
   Hitherto ye have asked nothing in my Name:  ask, and ye shall receive.  In
   that day ye shall ask in my Name.’—John xiv. 13, 14, xv. 16, xvi. 23, 24,
   26.

   HITHERTO the disciples had not asked in the Name of Christ, nor had He
   Himself ever used the expression.  The nearest approach is, ‘met together in
   my Name.’  Here in His parting words, He repeats the word unceasingly in
   connection with those promises of unlimited meaning, ‘Whatsoever,’
   ‘Anything,’ ‘What ye will,’ to teach them and us that His Name is our only,
   but also our all-sufficient plea.  The power of prayer and the answer depend
   on the right use of the Name.

   What is a person’s name?  That word or expression in which the person is
   called up or represented to us.  When I mention or hear a name, it calls up
   before me the whole man, what I know of him, and also the impression he has
   made on me.  The name of a king includes his honour, his power, his
   kingdom.  His name is the symbol of his power.  And so each name of God
   embodies and represents some part of the glory of the Unseen One.  And the
   Name of Christ is the expression of all He has done and all He is and lives
   to do as our Mediator.

   And what is it to do a thing in the name of another?  It is to come with the
   power and authority of that other, as his representative and substitute.  We
   know how such a use of another’s name always supposes a community of
   interest.  No one would give another the free use of his name without first
   being assured that his honour and interest were as safe with that other as
   with himself.

   And what is it when Jesus gives us power over His Name, the free use of it,
   with the assurance that whatever we ask in it will be given to us?  The
   ordinary comparison of one person giving another, on some special occasion,
   the liberty to ask something in his name, comes altogether short here,—Jesus
   solemnly gives to all His disciples a general and unlimited power of the
   free use of His Name at  all  times for all they desire.  He could not do
   this if He did not know that He could trust us with His interests, that His
   honour would be safe in our hands.  The free use of the name of another is
   always the token of great confidence, of close union.  He who gives his name
   to another stands aside, to let that other act for him; he who takes the
   name of another, gives up his own as of no value.  When I go in the name of
   another, I deny myself, I take not only his name, but himself and what he
   is, instead of myself and what I am.

   Such a use of the name of a person may be in virtue of a legal union.  A
   merchant leaving his home and business, gives his chief clerk a general
   power, by which he can draw thousands of pounds in the merchant’s name.  The
   clerk does this, not for himself, but only in the interests of the
   business.  It is because the merchant knows and trusts him as wholly devoted
   to his interests and business, that he dares put his name and property at
   his command.  When the Lord Jesus went to heaven, He left His work, the
   management of His kingdom on earth, in the hands of His servants.  He could
   not do otherwise than also give them His Name to draw all the supplies they
   needed for the due conduct of His business.  And they have the spiritual
   power to avail themselves of the Name of Jesus just to the extent to which
   they yield themselves to live only for the interests and the work of the
   Master.  The use of the Name always supposes the surrender of our interests
   to Him whom we represent.

   Or such a use of the name may be in virtue of a life union.  In the case of
   the merchant and his clerk, the union is temporary.  But we know how oneness
   of life on earth gives oneness of name:  a child has the father’s name
   because he has his life.  And often the child of a good father has been
   honoured or helped by others for the sake of the name he bore.  But this
   would not last long if it were found that it was only a name, and that the
   father’s character was wanting.  The name and the character or spirit must
   be in harmony.  When such is the case, the child will have a double claim on
   the father’s friends:  the character secures and increases the love and
   esteem rendered first for the name’s sake.   So it is with Jesus and the
   believer:  we are one, we have one life, one Spirit with Him; for this
   reason we may come in His Name.  Our power in using that Name, whether with
   God, or men, or devils depends on the measure of our spiritual life-union.
   The use of the name rests on the unity of life; the Name and the Spirit of
   Jesus are one. [2]

   Or the union that empowers to the use of the Name may be the union of love.
   When a bride whose life has been one of poverty, becomes united to the
   bridegroom, she gives up her own name, to be called by his, and has now the
   full right to use it.  She purchases in his name, and that name is not
   refused.  And this is done because the bridegroom has chosen her for
   himself, counting on her to care for his interests:  they are now one.  And
   so the Heavenly Bridegroom could do nothing less; having loved us and made
   us one with Himself, what could He do but give those who bear His Name the
   right to present it before the Father, or to come with it to Himself for all
   they need.  And there is no one who gives himself really to live in the Name
   of Jesus, who does not receive in ever-increasing measure the spiritual
   capacity to ask and receive in that Name what he will.  The bearing of the
   name of another supposes my having given up my own, and with it my own
   independent life; but then, as surely, my possession of all there is in the
   name I have taken instead of my own.

   Such illustrations show us how defective the common view is of a messenger
   sent to ask in the name of another, or a guilty one appealing to the name of
   a surety.  No Jesus Himself is with the Father; it is not an absent one in
   whose name we come.  Even when we pray to Jesus Himself, it must be in His
   Name.  The name represents the person; to ask in the Name is to ask in full
   union of interest and life and love with Himself, as one who lives in and
   for Him.  Let the Name of Jesus only have undivided supremacy in my heart
   and life, my faith will grow to the assurance that what I ask in that Name
   cannot be refused.  The name and the power of asking go together:   when the
   Name of Jesus has become the power that rules my life, its power in prayer
   with God will be seen too.

[Soldier4Christ]

   We see thus that everything depends on our own relation to the Name:  the
   power it has on my life is the power it will have in my prayers.  There is
   more than one expression in Scripture which can make this clear to us.  When
   it says, ‘Do all in the Name of the Lord Jesus,’ we see how this is the
   counterpart of the other, ‘Ask all.’  To do all and to ask all in His Name,
   these go together.  When we read, ‘We shall walk in the Name of our God,’ we
   see how the power of the Name must rule in the whole life; only then will it
   have power in prayer.  It is not to the lips but to the life God looks to
   see what the Name is to us.  When Scripture speaks of ‘men who have given
   their lives for the Name of the Lord Jesus,’ or of one ‘ready to die for the
   Name of the Lord Jesus,’ we see what our relation to the Name must be:  when
   it is everything to me, it will obtain everything for me.  If I let it have
   all I have, it will let me have all it has.

   ‘WHATSOEVER ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.’  Jesus means the
   promise literally.  Christians have sought to limit it:  it looked too free;
   it was hardly safe to trust man so unconditionally.  We did not understand
   that the word ‘in my Name’ is its own safeguard.  It is a spiritual power
   which no one can use further than he obtains the capacity for, by his living
   and acting in that Name.  As we bear that Name before men, we have power to
   use it before God.  O let us plead for God’s Holy Spirit to show us what the
   Name means, and what the right use of it is.  It is through the Spirit that
   the Name, which is above every name in heaven, will take the place of
   supremacy in our heart and life too.

   Disciples of Jesus!  Let the lessons of this day enter deep into your
   hearts.  The Master says:  Only pray in my Name; whatsoever ye ask will be
   given.  Heaven is set open to you; the treasures and powers of the world of
   spirit are placed at your disposal on behalf of men around you.  O come, and
   let us learn to pray in the Name of Jesus.  As to the disciples, He says to
   us, ‘Hitherto ye have not asked in my Name:  ask, and ye shall receive.’
   Let each disciple of Jesus seek to avail himself of the rights of his royal
   priesthood, and use the power placed at his disposal for his circle and his
   work.  Let Christians awake and hear the message:  your prayer can obtain
   what otherwise will be withheld, can accomplish what otherwise remains
   undone.  O awake, and use the name of Jesus to open the treasures of heaven
   for this perishing world.  Learn as the servants of the King to use His
   Name:  ‘WHATSOEVER ye shall ask in my Name, THAT WILL I DO.’

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’


   Blessed Lord!  It is as if each lesson Thou givest me has such fulness and
   depths of meaning, that if I can only learn that one, I shall know how to
   pray aright.  This day I feel again as if I needed but one prayer every
   day:  Lord!  Teach me what it is to pray in Thy Name.  Teach me so to live
   and act, to walk and speak, so to do all in the Name of Jesus, that my
   prayer cannot be anything else but in that blessed Name too.

   And teach me, Lord!  to hold fast the precious promise that WHATSOEVER we
   ask in Thy Name, Thou wilt do, the Father will give.  Though I do not yet
   fully understand, and still less have fully attained, the wondrous union
   Thou meanest when Thou sayest, IN MY NAME, I would yet hold fast the promise
   until it fills my heart with the undoubting assurance:  Anything in the Name
   of Jesus.

   O my Lord!  let Thy Holy Spirit teach me this.  Thou didst say of Him, ‘The
   Comforter, whom the Father shall send IN MY NAME.’  He knows what it is to
   be sent from heaven in Thy Name, to reveal and to honour the power of that
   Name in Thy servants, to use that Name alone, and so to glorify Thee.  Lord
   Jesus!  let Thy Spirit dwell in me, and fill me.  I would, I do yield my
   whole being to His rule and leading.  Thy Name and Thy Spirit are one;
   through Him Thy Name will be the strength of my life and my prayer.  Then I
   shall be able for Thy Name’s sake to forsake all, in Thy Name to speak to
   men and to God, and to prove that this is indeed the Name above every name.

   Lord Jesus!  O teach me by Thy Holy Spirit to pray in Thy Name.  Amen.

   NOTE.

   ‘What is meant by praying in Christ’s name?  It cannot mean simply appearing
   before God with faith in the mediation of the Saviour.  When the disciples
   asked Jesus to teach them to pray, He supplied them with petitions.  And
   afterwards Jesus said to them, “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my
   Name.”  Until the Spirit came, the seven petitions of the Lord’s prayer lay
   as it were dormant within them.  When by the Holy Ghost Christ descended
   into their hearts, they desired the very blessings which Christ as our High
   Priest obtains for us by His prayer from the Father.  And such petitions are
   always answered.  The Father is always willing to give what Christ asks.
   The Spirit of Christ always teaches and influences us to offer the petitions
   which Christ ratifies and presents to the Father.  To pray in Christ’s name
   is therefore to be identified with Christ as to our righteousness, and to be
   identified with Christ in our desires by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
   To pray in the Spirit, to pray according to the will of the Father, to pray
   in Christ’s name, are identical expressions.  The Father Himself loveth us,
   and is willing to hear us:  two intercessors, Christ the Advocate above, and
   the Holy Ghost, the Advocate within, are the gifts of His love.

   ‘This view may appear at first less consoling than a more prevalent one,
   which refers prayer in Christ’s name chiefly to our trust in Christ’s
   merit.  The defect of this opinion is, that it does not combine the
   intercession of the Saviour with the will of the Father, and the indwelling
   Spirit’s aid in prayer.  Nor does it fully realize the mediation of Christ;
   for the mediation consists not merely in that for Christ’s sake the Holy
   Father is able to regard me and my prayer; but also, in that Christ Himself
   presents my petitions as His petitions, desired by Him for me, even as all
   blessings are purchased for me by His precious blood.

   ‘In all prayer, the one essential condition is that we are able to offer it
   in the name of Jesus, as according to His desire for us, according to the
   Father’s will, according to the Spirit’s teaching.  And thus praying in
   Christ’s name is impossible without self-examination, without reflection,
   without self-denial; in short, without the aid of the Spirit.’—Saphiv, The
   Lord’s Prayer, pp. 411, 142.
     _________________________________________________________________

   [2] ^‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name,’ that is, in my nature; for things
   with God are called according to their nature.  We ask in Christ’s Name, not
   when at the end of some request we say, ‘This I ask in the Name of Jesus
   Christ,’ but when we pray according to His nature, which is love, which
   seeketh not its own but only the will of God and the good of all
   creatures.   Such asking is the cry of His own Spirit in our
   hearts.—Jukes.   The New Man.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-FIFTH LESSON.

  ‘At that day;’

  Or,    The Holy Spirit and Prayer.

   ‘In that day ye shall ask me nothing.   Verily, verily, I say unto you,
   Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my Name, He will give it you.
   Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my Name:  ask, and ye shall receive, that
   your joy may be full.  At that day ye shall ask in my Name:   and I say not,
   that I will pray the Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth
   you.’—John xvi. 23-26.

   ‘Praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God.’—JUDE 20,
   21.

   THE words of John (I John ii. 12-14) to little children, to young men, and
   to fathers suggest the thought that there often are in the Christian life
   three great stages of experience.  The first, that of the new-born child,
   with the assurance and the joy of forgiveness.  The second, the transition
   stage of struggle and growth in knowledge and strength:  young men growing
   strong, God’s word doing its work in them and giving them victory over the
   Evil One.  And then the final stage of maturity and ripeness:  the Fathers,
   who have entered deeply into the knowledge and fellowship of the Eternal
   One.

   In Christ’s teaching on prayer there appear to be three stages in the
   prayer-life, somewhat analogous.  In the Sermon on the Mount we have the
   initial stage:  His teaching is all comprised in one word, Father.  Pray to
   your Father, your Father sees, hears, knows, and will reward:  how much more
   than any earthly father!  Only be childlike and trustful.  Then comes later
   on something like the transition stage of conflict and conquest, in words
   like these:  ‘This sort goeth not out but by fasting and prayer;’ ‘Shall not
   God avenge His own elect who cry day and night unto Him?’  And then we have
   in the parting words, a higher stage.  The children have become men:  they
   are now the Master’s friends, from whom He has no secrets, to whom He says,
   ‘All things that I heard from my Father I made known unto you;’ and to whom,
   in the oft-repeated ‘whatsoever ye will,’ He hands over the keys of the
   kingdom.  Now the time has come for the power of prayer in His Name to be
   proved.

   The contrast between this final stage and the previous preparatory ones our
   Saviour marks most distinctly in the words we are to meditate on:  ‘Hitherto
   ye have asked nothing in my Name;’ ‘At that day ye shall ask in my Name. ‘
   We know what ‘at that day’ means.  It is the day of the outpouring of the
   Holy Spirit.  The great work Christ was to do on the cross, the mighty power
   and the complete victory to be manifested in His resurrection and ascension,
   were to issue in the coming down from heaven, as never before, of the glory
   of God to dwell in men.  The Spirit of the glorified Jesus was to come and
   be the life of His disciples.  And one of the marks of that wonderful
   spirit-dispensation was to be a power in prayer hitherto unknown—prayer in
   the Name of Jesus, asking and obtaining whatsoever they would, is to be the
   manifestation of the reality of the Spirit’s indwelling.

   To understand how the coming of the Holy Spirit was indeed to commence a new
   epoch in the prayer-world, we must remember who He is, what His work, and
   what the significance of His not being given until Jesus was glorified.  It
   is in the Spirit that God exists, for He is Spirit.  It is in the Spirit
   that the Son was begotten of the Father:  it is in the fellowship of the
   Spirit that the Father and the Son are one.  The eternal never-ceasing
   giving to the Son which is the Father’s prerogative and the eternal asking
   and receiving which is the Son’s right and blessedness—it is through the
   Spirit that this communion of life and love is maintained.  It has been so
   from all eternity.  It is so specially now, when the Son as Mediator ever
   liveth to pray.  The great work which Jesus began on earth of reconciling in
   His own body God and man, He carries on in heaven.  To accomplish this He
   took up into His own person the conflict between God’s righteousness and our
   sin.  On the cross He once for all ended the struggle in His own body.  And
   then He ascended to heaven, that thence He might in each member of His body
   carry out the deliverance and manifest the victory He had obtained.  It is
   to do this that He ever liveth to pray; in His unceasing intercession He
   places Himself in living fellowship with the unceasing prayer of His
   redeemed ones.  Or rather, it is His unceasing intercession which shows
   itself in their prayers, and gives them a power they never had before.

   And He does this through the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of
   the glorified Jesus, was not (John vii. 39), could not be, until He had been
   glorified.  This gift of the Father was something distinctively new,
   entirely different from what Old Testament saints had known.  The work that
   the blood effected in heaven when Christ entered within the veil, was
   something so true and new, the redemption of our human nature into
   fellowship with His resurrection-power and His exaltation-glory was so
   intensely real, the taking up of our humanity in Christ into the life of the
   Three-One God was an event of such inconceivable significance, that the Holy
   Spirit, who had to come from Christ’s exalted humanity to testify in our
   hearts of what Christ had accomplished, was indeed no longer only what He
   had been in the Old Testament.  It was literally true ‘the Holy Spirit was
   not yet, for Christ was not yet glorified.’  He came now first as the Spirit
   of the glorified Jesus.  Even as the Son, who was from eternity God, had
   entered upon a new existence as man, and returned to heaven with what He had
   not before, so the Blessed Spirit, whom the Son, on His ascension, received
   from the Father (Acts ii. 33) into His glorified humanity, came to us with a
   new life, which He had not previously to communicate.  Under the Old
   Testament He was invoked as the Spirit of God:  at Pentecost He descended as
   the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, bringing down and communicating to us the
   full fruit and power of the accomplished redemption.

[Soldier4Christ]

  It is in the intercession of Christ that the continued efficacy and
   application of His redemption is maintained.  And it is through the Holy
   Spirit descending from Christ to us that we are drawn up into the great
   stream of His ever-ascending prayers.  The Spirit prays for us without
   words:  in the depths of a heart where even thoughts are at times formless,
   the Spirit takes us up into the wonderful flow of the life of the Three-One
   God.  Through the Spirit, Christ’s prayers become ours, and ours are made
   His:  we ask what we will, and it is given to us.  We then understand from
   experience, ‘Hitherto ye have not asked in my Name.  At that day ye shall
   ask in my Name.’

   Brother!  what we need to pray in the Name of Christ, to ask that we may
   receive that our joy may be full, is the baptism of this Holy Ghost.  This
   is more than the Spirit of God under  the Old Testament.  This is more than
   the Spirit of conversion and regeneration the disciples had before
   Pentecost.  This is more than the Spirit with a measure of His influence
   and working.  This is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the glorified Jesus in
   His exaltation-power, coming on us as the Spirit of the indwelling Jesus,
   revealing the Son and the Father within.  (John xiv. 16-23.)  It is when
   this Spirit is the Spirit not of our hours of prayer, but of our whole life
   and walk, when this Spirit glorifies Jesus in us by revealing the
   completeness of His work, and making us wholly one with Him and like Him,
   that we can pray in His Name, because we are in very deed one with Him.
   Then it is that we have that immediateness of access to the Father of which
   Jesus says, ‘I say not that I will pray the Father for you.’  Oh!  we need
   to understand and believe that to be filled with this, the Spirit of the
   glorified One, is the one need of God’s believing people.  Then shall we
   realize what it is, ‘with all prayer and supplication to be praying at all
   seasons in the Spirit,’ and what it is, ‘praying in the Holy Ghost, to keep
   ourselves in the love of God.’  ‘At that day ye shall ask in my Name.’

   And so once again the lesson comes:  What our prayer avails, depends upon
   what we are and what our life is.  It is living in the Name of Christ that
   is the secret of praying in the Name of Christ; living in the Spirit that
   fits for praying in the Spirit.  It is abiding in Christ that gives the
   right and power to ask what we will:  the extent of the abiding is the exact
   measure of the power in prayer.  It is the Spirit dwelling within us that
   prays, not in words and thoughts always, but in a breathing and a being
   deeper than utterance.  Just so much as there is of Christ’s Spirit in us,
   is there real prayer.  Our lives, our lives, O let our lives be full of
   Christ, and full of His Spirit, and the wonderfully unlimited promises to
   our prayer will no longer appear strange.  ‘Hitherto ye have asked nothing
   in my Name.  Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.  At that
   day ye shall ask in my Name.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye
   shall ask the father in my Name, He will give it you.’

   ‘LORD , TEACH US TO PRAY.’


   O my God!  in holy awe I bow before Thee, the Three in One.  Again I have
   seen how the mystery of prayer is the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  I adore
   the Father who ever hears, and the Son who ever lives to pray, and the Holy
   Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, to lift us up into the
   fellowship of that ever-blessed, never-ceasing asking and receiving.  I bow,
   my God, in adoring worship, before the infinite condescension that thus,
   through the Holy Spirit, takes us and our prayers into the Divine Life, and
   its fellowship of love.

   O my Blessed Lord Jesus!  Teach me to understand Thy lesson, that it is the
   indwelling Spirit, streaming from Thee, uniting to Thee, who is the Spirit
   of prayer.  Teach me what it is as an empty, wholly consecrated vessel, to
   yield myself to His being my life.  Teach me to honour and trust Him, as a
   living Person, to lead my life and my prayer.  Teach me specially in prayer
   to wait in holy silence, and give Him place to breathe within me His
   unutterable intercession.  And teach me that through Him it is possible to
   pray without ceasing, and to pray without failing, because He makes me
   partaker of the never-ceasing and never-failing intercession in which Thou,
   the Son, dost appear before the Father.  Yea, Lord, fulfil in me Thy
   promise, At that day ye shall ask in my Name.  Verily, verily, I say unto
   you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my Name, that will He give.’
   Amen.


   NOTE.

   Prayer has often been compared to breathing:  we have only to carry out the
   comparison fully to see how wonderful the place is which the Holy Spirit
   occupies.  With every breath we expel the impure air which would soon cause
   our death, and inhale again the fresh air to which we owe our life.  So we
   give out from us, in confession the sins, in prayer the needs and the
   desires of our heart.  And in drawing in our breath again, we inhale the
   fresh air of the promises, and the love, and the life of God in Christ.  We
   do this through the Holy Spirit, who is the breath of our life.

   And this He is because He is the breath of God.  The Father breathes Him
   into us, to unite Himself with our life.  And then just as on every
   expiration there follows again the inhaling or drawing in of the breath, so
   God draws in again His breath, and the Spirit returns to Him laden with the
   desires and needs of our hearts.  And thus the Holy Spirit is the breath of
   the life of God, and the breath of the new life in us.  As God breathes Him
   out, we receive Him in answer to prayer; as we breathe Him back again, He
   rises to God laden with our supplications.  As the Spirit of God, in whom
   the Father and the Son are one, and the intercession of the Son reaches the
   Father, He is to us the Spirit of prayer.  True prayer is the living
   experience of the truth of the Holy Trinity.  The Spirit’s breathing, the
   Son’s intercession, the Father’s will, these three become one in us.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-SIXTH LESSON.

  ‘I have prayed for thee;’

  Or,    Christ the Intercessor.

   ‘But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.’—Luke xxii. 32.

   ‘I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you.’—John xvi. 26.

   ‘He ever liveth to make intercession.’—Heb. vii. 25.

   ALL growth in the spiritual life is connected with the clearer insight into
   what Jesus is to us.  The more I realize that Christ must be all to me and
   in me, that all in Christ is indeed for me, the more I learn to live the
   real life of faith, which, dying to self, lives wholly in Christ.  The
   Christian life is no longer the vain struggle to live right, but the resting
   in Christ and finding strength in Him as our life, to fight the fight and
   gain the victory of faith.  This is specially true of the life of prayer.
   As it too comes under the law of faith alone, and is seen in the light of
   the fulness and completeness there is in Jesus, the believer understands
   that it need no longer be a matter of strain or anxious care, but an
   experience of what Christ will do for him and in him—a participation in that
   life of Christ which, as on earth, so in heaven, ever ascends to the Father
   as prayer.  And he begins to pray, not only trusting in the merits of Jesus,
   or in the intercession by which our unworthy prayers are made acceptable,
   but in that near and close union in virtue of which He prays in us and we in
   Him. [3] ^   The whole of salvation is Christ Himself:  He has given HIMSELF
   to us; He Himself lives in us.  Because He prays, we pray too.  As the
   disciples, when they saw Jesus pray, asked Him to make them partakers of
   what He knew of prayer, so we, now we see Him as intercessor on the throne,
   know that He makes us participate with Himself in the life of prayer.

   How clearly this comes out in the last night of His life.  In His
   high-priestly prayer (John xvii.), He shows us how and what He has to pray
   to the Father, and will pray when once ascended to heaven.  And yet He had
   in His parting address so repeatedly also connected His going to the Father
   with their new life of prayer.  The two would be ultimately connected:  His
   entrance on the work of His eternal intercession would be the commencement
   and the power of their new prayer-life in His Name.  It is the sight of
   Jesus in His intercession that gives us power to pray in His Name:  all
   right and power of prayer is Christ’s; He makes us share in His
   intercession.

   To understand this, think first of His intercession:  He ever liveth to make
   intercession.  The work of Christ on earth as Priest was but a beginning.
   It was as Aaron He shed His blood; it is as Melchizedek that He now lives
   within the veil to continue His work, after the power of the eternal life.
   As Melchizedek is more glorious than Aaron, so it is in the work of
   intercession that the atonement has its true power and glory.  ‘It is Christ
   that died:  yea more, who is even at the right hand of God, who maketh
   intercession for us.’  That intercession is an intense reality, a work that
   is absolutely necessary, and without which the continued application of
   redemption cannot take place.  In the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus
   the wondrous reconciliation took place, by which man became partaker of the
   Divine life and blessedness.  But the real personal appropriation of this
   reconciliation in each of His members here below cannot take place without
   the unceasing exercise of His Divine power by the head in heaven.  In all
   conversion and sanctification, in every victory over sin and the world,
   there is a real forth-putting of the power of Him who is mighty to save.
   And this exercise of His power only takes place through His prayer:  He asks
   of the Father, and receives from the Father.  ‘He is able to save to the
   uttermost, because He ever liveth to make intercession.’  There is not a
   need of His people but He receives in intercession what the Godhead has to
   give:  His mediation on the throne is as real and indispensable as on the
   cross.  Nothing takes place without His intercession:  it engages all His
   time and powers, is His unceasing occupation at the right hand of the
   Father.

   And we participate not only in the benefits of this His work, but in the
   work itself.  This because we are His body.  Body and members are one:  ‘The
   head cannot say to the feet, I have no need of thee.’  We share with Jesus
   in all He is and has:  ‘The glory which Thou gavest me, I have given
   them.’  We are partakers of His life, His righteousness, His work:  we share
   with Him in His intercession too; it is not a work He does without us.

   We do this because we are partakers of His life:  ‘Christ is our life;’  ‘No
   longer I, but Christ liveth in me.’  The life in Him and in us is identical,
   one and the same.  His life in us is an ever-praying life.  When it descends
   and takes possession of us, it does not lose its character; in us too it is
   the every-praying life—a life that without ceasing asks and receives from
   God.  And this not as if there were two separate currents of prayer rising
   upwards, one from Him, and one from His people.  No, but the substantial
   life-union is also prayer-union:  what He prays passes through us, what we
   pray passes through Him.  He is the angel with the golden censer:  ‘UNTO HIM
   there was given much incense,’ the secret of acceptable prayer, ‘that He
   should add it unto the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar.’  We
   live, we abide in Him, the Interceding One.

   The Only-begotten is the only one who has the right to pray:  to Him alone
   it was said,  ‘Ask, and it shall be given Thee.’  As in all other things the
   fulness dwells in Him, so the true prayer-fulness too; He alone has the
   power of prayer.  And just as the growth of the spiritual life consists in
   the clearer insight that all the treasures are in Him, and that we too are
   in Him, to receive each moment what we possess in Him, grace for grace, so
   with the prayer-life too.  Our faith in the intercession of Jesus must not
   only be that He prays in our stead, when we do not or cannot pray, but that,
   as the Author of our life and our faith, He draws us on to pray in unison
   with Himself.  Our prayer must be a work of faith in this sense too, that as
   we know that Jesus communicates His whole life in us, He also out of that
   prayerfulness which is His alone breathes into us our praying.

   To many a believer it was a new epoch in his spiritual life when it was
   revealed to him how truly and entirely Christ was his life, standing good as
   surety for his remaining faithful and obedient.  It was then first that he
   really began to life a faith-life.  No less blessed will be the discovery
   that Christ is surety for our prayer-life too, the centre and embodiment of
   all prayer, to be communicated by Him through the Holy Spirit to His
   people.  ‘He ever liveth to make intercession’ as the Head of the body, as
   the Leader in that new and living way which He hath opened up, as the Author
   and the Perfecter of our faith.  He provides in everything for the life of
   His redeemed ones by giving His own life in them:  He cares for their life
   of prayer, by taking them up into His heavenly prayer-life, by giving and
   maintaining His prayer-life within them.  ‘I have prayed for thee,’ not to
   render thy faith needless, but ‘that thy faith fail not:’ our faith and
   prayer of faith is rooted in His.  It is, ‘if ye abide in me,’ the
   ever-living Intercessor, and pray with me and in me:  ‘ask whatsoever ye
   will, and it shall be done unto you.’

   The thought of our fellowship in the intercession of Jesus reminds us of
   what He has taught us more than once before, how all these wonderful
   prayer-promises have as their aim and their justification, the glory of God
   in the manifestation of His kingdom and the salvation of sinners.  As long
   as we only or chiefly pray for ourselves, the promises of the last night
   must remain a sealed book to us.  It is to the fruit-bearing branches of the
   Vine; it is to disciples sent into the world as the Father sent Him, to live
   for perishing men; it is to His faithful servants and intimate friends who
   take up the work He leaves behind, who have like their Lord become as the
   seed-corn, losing its life to multiply it manifold;—it is to such that the
   promises are given.  Let us each find out what the work is, and who the
   souls are entrusted to our special prayers; let us make our intercession for
   them our life of fellowship with God, and we shall not only find the
   promises of power in prayer made true to us, but we shall then first begin
   to realize how our abiding in Christ and His abiding in us makes us share in
   His own joy of blessing and saving men.

[Soldier4Christ]

  O most wonderful intercession of our Blessed Lord Jesus, to which we not
   only owe everything, but in which we are taken up as active partners and
   fellow-workers!  Now we understand what it is to pray in the Name of Jesus,
   and why it has such power.  In His Name, in His Spirit, in Himself, in
   perfect union with Him.  O wondrous, ever active, and most efficacious
   intercession of the man Christ Jesus!  When shall we be wholly taken up into
   it and always pray in it?

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’


   Blessed Lord!  In lowly adoration I would again bow before Thee.  Thy whole
   redemption work has now passed into prayer; all that now occupies Thee in
   maintaining and dispensing what Thou didst purchase with Thy blood is only
   prayer.  Thou ever livest to pray.  And because we are and abide in Thee,
   the direct access to the Father is always open, our life can be one of
   unceasing prayer, and the answer to our prayer is sure.

   Blessed Lord!  Thou hast invited Thy people to be Thy fellow-workers in a
   life of prayer.  Thou hast united Thyself with Thy people and makest them as
   Thy body share with Thee in that ministry of intercession through which
   alone the world can be filled with the fruit of Thy redemption and the glory
   of the Father.  With more liberty than ever I come to Thee, my Lord, and
   beseech Thee:  Teach me to pray.  Thy life is prayer, Thy life is mine.
   Lord!  teach me to pray, in Thee, like Thee.

   And, O my Lord!  Give me specially to know, as Thou didst promise Thy
   disciples, that Thou art in the Father, and I in Thee, and Thou in me.  Let
   the uniting power of the Holy Spirit make my whole life an abiding in Thee
   and Thy intercession, so that my prayer may be its echo, and the Father hear
   me in Thee and Thee in me.  Lord Jesus!  let Thy mind in everything be in
   me, and my life in everything by in Thee.  So shall I be prepared to be the
   channel through which Thy intercession pours its blessing on the world.
   Amen.

   NOTE.

   ‘The new epoch of prayer in the Name of Jesus is pointed out by Christ as
   the time of the outpouring of the Spirit, in which the disciples enter upon
   a more enlightened apprehension of the economy of redemption, and become as
   clearly conscious of their oneness with Jesus as of His oneness with the
   Father.  Their prayer in the Name of Jesus is now directly to the Father
   Himself.  “I say not that I will pray  for you, for the Father Himself
   loveth you,”  Jesus says; while He had previously spoken of the time before
   the Spirit’s coming:  “I will pray the Father, and He will give you the
   Comforter.”  This prayer thus has as its central thought the insight into
   our being united to God in Christ as on both sides the living bond of union
   between God and us (John xvii. 23: “I in them and Thou in me”), so that in
   Jesus we behold the Father as united to us, and ourselves as united to the
   Father.  Jesus Christ must have been revealed to us, not only through the
   truth in the mind, but in our inmost personal consciousness as the living
   personal reconciliation, as He in whom God’s Fatherhood and Father-love have
   been perfectly united with human nature and it with God.  Not that with the
   immediate prayer to the Father, the mediatorship of Christ is set aside; but
   it is no longer looked at as something external, existing outside of us, but
   as a real living spiritual existence within us, so that the Christ for us,
   the Mediator, has really become Christ in us.

   ‘When the consciousness of this oneness between God in Christ and us in
   Christ still is wanting, or has been darkened by the sense of guilt, then
   the prayer of faith looks to our Lord as the Advocate, who pays the Father
   for us.  (Compare John xvi. 26 with John xiv. 16, 17; ix. 20; Luke xxi. 32;
   I John ii. 1.) To take Christ thus in prayer as Advocate, is according to
   John xvi. 26 not perfectly the same as the prayer in His Name. Christ’s
   advocacy is meant to lead us on to that inner self-standing life-union with
   Him, and with the Father in Him, in virtue of which Christ is He in whom God
   enters into immediate relation and unites Himself with us, and in whom we in
   all circumstances enter into immediate relation with God.  Even so the
   prayer in the Name of Jesus does not consist in our prayer at His command:
   the disciples had prayed thus ever since the Lord had given them His “Our
   Father,” and yet He says, “Hitherto ye have not prayed in my Name.”  Only
   when the mediation of Christ has become, through the indwelling of the Holy
   Spirit, life and power within us, and so His mind, as it found expression in
   His word and work, has taken possession of and filled our personal
   consciousness and will, so that in faith and love we have Jesus in us as the
   Reconciler who has actually made us one with God:  only then His Name, which
   included His nature and His work, is become truth and power in us (not only
   for us), and we have in the Name of Jesus the free, direct access to the
   Father which is sure of being heard.  Prayer in the Name of Jesus is the
   liberty of a son with the Father, just as Jesus had this as the
   First-begotten.  We pray in the place of Jesus, not as if we could put
   ourselves in His place, but in as far as we are in Him and He in us.   We go
   direct to the Father, but only as the Father is in Christ, not as if He were
   separate from Christ.  Wherever thus the inner man does not live in Christ
   and has Him not present as the Living One, where His word is not ruling in
   the heart in its Spirit-power, where His truth and life have not become the
   life of our soul, it is vain to think that a formula like “for the sake of
   Thy dear Son” will avail.’—Christliche Ethik, von Dr. I. T. Beck, Tubingen,
   iii. 39.
     _________________________________________________________________

   [3] See on the difference between having Christ as an Advocate or
   Intercessor who stands outside of us, and the having Him within us, we
   abiding in Him and He in us through the Holy Spirit perfecting our union
   with Him, so that we ourselves can come directly to the Father in His
   Name,—the note above from Beck of Tubingen.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-SEVENTH LESSON.

  ‘Father, I will;’

  Or,    Christ the High Priest

   ‘Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me may be with me where
   I am.’—John xvii. 24.

   IN His parting address, Jesus gives His disciples the full revelation of
   what the New Life was to be, when once the kingdom of God had come in
   power.  In the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, in union with Him the heavenly
   Vine, in their going forth to witness and to suffer for Him, they were to
   find their calling and their blessedness.  In between His setting forth of
   their future new life, the Lord had repeatedly given the most unlimited
   promises as to the power their prayers might have.  And now in closing, He
   Himself proceeds to pray.  To let His disciples have the joy of knowing what
   His intercession for them in heaven as their High Priest will be, He gives
   this precious legacy of His prayer to the Father.  He does this at the same
   time because they as priests are to share in His work of intercession, that
   they and we might know how to perform this holy work.  In the teaching of
   our Lord on this last night, we have learned to understand that these
   astonishing prayer-promises have not been given in our own behalf, but in
   the interest of the Lord and His kingdom:  it is from the Lord Himself alone
   that we can learn what the prayer in His Name is to be and to obtain.  We
   have understood that to pray in His Name is to pray in perfect unity with
   Himself:  the high-priestly prayer will teach all that the prayer in the
   Name of Jesus may ask and expect.

   This prayer is ordinarily divided into three parts.  Our Lord first prays
   for Himself (v. 1-5), then for His disciples (6-19), and last for all the
   believing people through all ages (20-26).  The follower of Jesus, who gives
   himself to the work of intercession, and would fain try how much of blessing
   he can pray down upon his circle in the Name of Jesus, will in all humility
   let himself be led of the Spirit to study this wonderful prayer as one of
   the most important lessons of the school of prayer.

   First of all, Jesus prays for Himself, for His being glorified, that so He
   may glorify the Father.  ‘Father! Glorify Thy Son.  And now, Father, glorify
   me.’  And He brings forward the grounds on which He thus prays.  A holy
   covenant had been concluded between the Father and the Son in heaven.  The
   Father had promised Him power over all flesh as the reward of His work:  He
   had done the work, He had glorified the Father, and His one purpose is now
   still further to glorify Him.  With the utmost boldness He asks that the
   Father may glorify Him, that He may now be and do for His people all He has
   undertaken.

   Disciple of Jesus!  here you have the first lesson in your work of priestly
   intercession, to be learned from the example of your great High Priest.  To
   pray in the Name of Jesus is to pray in unity, in sympathy with Him.  As the
   Son began His prayer by making clear His relation to the Father, pleading
   His work and obedience and His desire to see the Father glorified, do so
   too.  Draw near and appear before the Father in Christ.  Plead His finished
   work.  Say that you are one with it, that you trust on it, live in it.  Say
   that you too have given yourself to finish the work the Father has given you
   to do, and to live alone for His glory.  And ask then confidently that the
   Son may be glorified in you.  This is praying in the Name, in the very
   words, in the Spirit of Jesus, in union with Jesus Himself.  Such prayer has
   power.  If with Jesus you glorify the Father, the Father will glorify Jesus
   by doing what you ask in His Name.  It is only when your own personal
   relation on this point, like Christ’s, is clear with God, when you are
   glorifying Him, and seeking all for His glory, that like Christ, you will
   have power to intercede for those around you.

   Our Lord next prays for the circle of His disciples.  He speaks of them as
   those whom the Father has given Him.  Their chief mark is that they have
   received Christ’s word.  He says of them that He now sends them into the
   world in His place, just as the Father had sent Himself.  And He asks two
   things for them:  that the Father keep them from the evil one, and sanctify
   them through His Word, because He sanctifies Himself for them.

   Just like the Lord, each believing intercessor has his own immediate circle
   for whom he first prays.  Parents have their children, teachers their
   pupils, pastors their flocks, all workers their special charge, all
   believers those whose care lies upon their hearts.  It is of great
   consequence that intercession should be personal, pointed, and definite.
   And then our first prayer must always be that they may receive the word.
   But this prayer will not avail unless with our Lord we say, ‘I have given
   them Thy word:’ it is this gives us liberty and power in intercession for
   souls.  Not only pray for them, but speak to them.  And when they have
   received the word, let us pray much for their being kept from the evil one,
   for their being sanctified through that word.  Instead of being hopeless or
   judging or giving up those who fall, let us pray for our circle, ‘Father!
   Keep them in Thy Name;’ ‘Sanctify them through Thy truth.’  Prayer in the
   Name of Jesus availeth much:  ‘What ye will shall be done unto you.’

   And then follows our Lord’s prayer for a still wider circle.  ‘I pray not
   only for these, but for them who through their word shall believe.’  His
   priestly heart enlarges itself to embrace all places and all time, and He
   prays that all who belong to Him may everywhere be one, as God’s proof to
   the world of the divinity of His mission, and then that they may ever be
   with Him in His glory.  Until then ‘that the love wherewith Thou hast loved
   me may be in them, and I in them.’

   The disciple of Jesus, who has first in his own circle proved the power of
   prayer, cannot confine himself within its limits:   he prays for the Church
   universal and its different branches.  He prays specially for the unity of
   the Spirit and of love.  He prays for its being one in Christ, as a witness
   to the world that Christ, who hath wrought such a wonder as to make love
   triumph over selfishness and separation, is indeed the Son of God sent from
   heaven.  Every believer ought to pray much that the unity of the Church, not
   in external organizations, but in spirit and in truth, may be made manifest.

[Soldier4Christ]

   So much for the matter of the prayer.  Now for its mode.  Jesus says,
   ‘FATHER!  I WILL.’  On the ground of His right as Son, and the Father’s
   promise to Him, and His finished work, He might do so.  The Father had said
   to Him, ‘Ask of me, and I will give Thee.’  He simply availed Himself of the
   Father’s promise.  Jesus has given us a like promise:  ‘Whatsoever ye will
   shall be done unto you.’  He asks me in His Name to say what I will.
   Abiding in Him, in a living union with Him in which man is nothing and
   Christ all, the believer has the liberty to take up that word of His High
   Priest and, in answer to the question ‘What wilt thou?’ to say, ‘FATHER!  I
   WILLall that Thou hast promised.’  This is nothing but true faith; this is
   honouring God:  to be assured that such confidence in saying what I will is
   indeed acceptable to Him.  At first sight, our heart shrinks from the
   expression; we feel neither the liberty nor the power to speak thus.  It is
   a word for which alone in the most entire abnegation of our will grace will
   be given, but for which grace will most assuredly be given to each one who
   loses his will in his Lord’s.  He that loseth his will shall find it; he
   that gives up his will entirely shall find it again renewed and strengthened
   with a Divine Strength.  ‘FATHER!  I WILL:’  this is the keynote of the
   everlasting, ever-active, all-prevailing intercession of our Lord in
   heaven.  It is only in union with Him that our prayer avails; in union with
   Him it avails much.  If we but abide in Him, living, and walking, and doing
   all things in His Name; if we but come and bring each separate petition,
   tested and touched by His Word and Spirit, and cast it into the mighty
   stream of intercession that goes up from Him, to be borne upward and
   presented before the Father;—we shall have the full confidence that we
   receive the petitions we ask:  the ‘Father!  I will’ will be breathed into
   us by the Spirit Himself.  We shall lose ourselves in Him, and become
   nothing, to find that in our impotence we have power and prevail.

   Disciples of Jesus!  Called to be like your Lord in His priestly
   intercession, when, O when!  Shall we awaken to the glory, passing all
   conception, of this our destiny to plead and prevail with God for perishing
   men?  O when shall we shake off the sloth that clothes itself with the
   pretence of humility, and yield ourselves wholly to God’s Spirit, that He
   may fill our wills with light and with power, to know, and to take, and to
   possess all that our God is waiting to give to a will that lays hold on Him.

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

   ——0——

   O my Blessed High Priest!  who am I that Thou shouldest thus invite me to
   share with Thee in Thy power of prevailing intercession!  And why, O my
   Lord!  am I so slow of heart to understand and believe and exercise this
   wonderful privilege to which Thou hast redeemed Thy people.  O Lord!  give
   Thy grace that this may increasingly be my unceasing life-work—in praying
   without ceasing to draw down the blessing of heaven on all my surroundings
   on earth.

   Blessed Lord!  I come now to accept this my calling.  For this I would
   forsake all and follow Thee.  Into Thy hands I would believingly yield my
   whole being:  form, train, inspire me to be one of Thy prayer-legion,
   wrestlers who watch and strive in prayer, Israels, God’s princes, who have
   power and prevail.  Take possession of my heart, and fill it with the one
   desire for the glory of God in the ingathering, and sanctification, and
   union of those whom the Father hath given Thee.  Take my mind and let this
   be my study and my wisdom, to know when prayer can bring a blessing.  Take
   me wholly and fit me as a priest ever to stand before God and to bless in
   His Name.

   Blessed Lord!  Be it here, as through all the spiritual life:  Thou all, I
   nothing.  And be it here my experience too that he that has and seeks
   nothing for himself, receives all, even to the wonderful grace of sharing
   with Thee in Thine everlasting ministry of intercession.  Amen.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-EIGHTH LESSON.

  ‘Father!  Not what I will;’

  Or,    Christ the Sacrifice.

   ‘And He said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee; remove this
   cup from me:  howbeit not what I will, but what Thou wilt.’—Mark xiv. 36.

   WHAT a contrast within the space of a few hours!  What a transition from the
   quiet elevation of that, He lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, FATHER I
   WILL,’ to that falling on the ground and crying in agony. ‘My Father! Not
   what I will.’  In the one we see the High Priest within the veil in His
   all-prevailing intercession; in the other, the sacrifice on the altar
   opening the way through the rent veil.  The high-priestly ‘Father!  I
   will,’ in order of time precedes the sacrificial ‘Father!  Not what I
   will;’ but this was only by anticipation, to show what the intercession
   would be when once the sacrifice was brought.  In reality it was that prayer
   at the altar, ‘Father!  Not what I will,’ in which the prayer before the
   throne, ‘Father!  I will,’ had its origin and its power.  It is from the
   entire surrender of His will in Gethsemane that the High Priest on the
   throne has the power to ask what He will, has the right to make His people
   share in that power too, and ask what they will.

   For all who would learn to pray in the school of Jesus, this Gethsemane
   lesson is one of the most sacred and precious.  To a superficial scholar it
   may appear to take away the courage to pray in faith.  If even the earnest
   supplication of the Son was not heard, if even the Beloved had to say, ‘NOT
   WHAT I WILL!’ how much more do we need to speak so.  And thus it appears
   impossible that the promises which the Lord had given only a few hours
   previously, ‘WHATSOEVER YE SHALL ASK,’ ‘WHATSOEVER YE WILL,’ could have been
   meant literally.  A deeper insight into the meaning of Gethsemane would
   teach us that we have just here the sure ground and the open way to the
   assurance of an answer to our prayer.  Let us draw nigh in reverent and
   adoring wonder, to gaze on this great sight—God’s Son thus offering up
   prayer and supplications with strong crying and tears, and not obtaining
   what He asks.  He Himself is our Teacher, and will open up to us the mystery
   of His holy sacrifice, as revealed in this wondrous prayer.

   To understand the prayer, let us note the infinite difference between what
   our Lord prayed a little ago as a Royal High Priest, and what He here
   supplicates in His weakness.  There it was for the glorifying of the Father
   He prayed, and the glorifying of Himself and His people as the fulfilment of
   distinct promises that had been given Him.  He asked what He knew to be
   according to the word and the will of the Father; He might boldly say,
   ‘FATHER!  I WILL.’  Here He prays for something in regard to which the
   Father’s will is not yet clear to Him.  As far as He knows, it is the
   Father’s will that He should drink the cup.  He had told His disciples of
   the cup He must drink:  a little later He would again say, ‘The cup which my
   Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?’  It was for this He had come to
   this earth.  But when, in the unutterable agony of soul that burst upon him
   as the power of darkness came upon Him, and He began to taste the first
   drops of death as the wrath of God against sin, His human nature, as it
   shuddered in presence of the awful reality of being made a curse, gave
   utterance in this cry of anguish, to its desire that, if God’s purpose could
   be accomplished without it, He might be spared the awful cup:  ‘Let this cup
   pass from me.’  That desire was the evidence of the intense reality of His
   humanity.  The ‘Not as I will’ kept that desire from being sinful:  as He
   pleadingly cries, ‘All things are possible with Thee,’ and returns again to
   still more earnest prayer that the cup may be removed, it is His
   thrice-repeated ‘NOT WHAT I WILL’ that constitutes the very essence and
   worth of His sacrifice.  He had asked for something of which He could not
   say:  I know it is Thy will.  He had pleaded God’s power and love, and had
   then withdrawn it in His final, ‘THY WILL BE DONE.’  The prayer that the cup
   should pass away could not be answered; the prayer of submission that God’s
   will be done was heard, and gloriously answered in His victory first over
   the fear, and then over the power of death.

   It is in this denial of His will, this complete surrender of His will to the
   will of the Father, that Christ’s obedience reached its highest perfection.
   It is from the sacrifice of the will in Gethsemane that the sacrifice of the
   life on Calvary derives its value.  It is here, as Scripture saith, that He
   learned obedience, and became the author of everlasting salvation to all
   that obey Him.  It was because He there, in that prayer, became obedient
   unto death, even the death of the cross, that God hath highly exalted Him,
   and given Him the power to ask what He will.  It was in that ‘Father!  Not
   what I will,’ that He obtained the power for that other ‘FATHER!  I will.’
   It was by Christ’s submittal in Gethsemane to have not His will done, that
   He secured for His people the right to say to them, ‘Ask whatsoever ye
   will.’

   Let me look at them again, the deep mysteries that Gethsemane offers to my
   view.  There is the first:  the Father offers His Well-beloved the cup, the
   cup of wrath.  The second:  the Son, always so obedient, shrinks back, and
   implores that He may not have to drink it.  The third:  the Father does not
   grant the Son His request, but still gives the cup.  And then the last:  the
   Son yields His will, is content that His will be not done, and goes out to
   Calvary to drink the cup.  O Gethsemane!  in thee I see how my Lord could
   give me such unlimited assurance of an answer to my prayers.  As my surety
   He won it for me, by His consent to have His petition unanswered.

   This is in harmony with the whole scheme of redemption.  Our Lord always
   wins for us the opposite of what He suffered.  He was bound that we might go
   free.  He was made sin that we might become the righteousness of God.  He
   died that we might live.  He bore God’s curse that God’s blessing might be
   ours.  He endured the not answering of His prayer, that our prayers might
   find an answer.  Yea, He spake, ‘Not as I will,’ that He might say to us,
   ‘If ye abide in me, ask what ye will; it shall be done unto you.’

   Yes, ‘If ye abide in me;’ here in Gethsemane the word acquires new force and
   depth.  Christ is our Head, who as surety stands in our place, and bears
   what we must for ever have borne.  We had deserved that God should turn a
   deaf ear to us, and never listen to our cry.  Christ comes, and suffers this
   too for us:  He suffers what we had merited; for our sins He suffers beneath
   the burden of that unanswered prayer.  But now His suffering this avails for
   me:  what He has borne is taken away for me; His merit has won for me the
   answer to every prayer, if I abide in Him.

[Soldier4Christ]

   Yes, in Him, as He bows there in Gethsemane, I must abide.  As my Head, He
   not only once suffered for me, but ever lives in me, breathing and working
   His own disposition in me too.  The Eternal Spirit, through which He offered
   Himself unto God, is the Spirit that dwells in me too, and makes me partaker
   of the very same obedience, and the sacrifice of the will unto God.  That
   Spirit teaches me to yield my will entirely to the will of the Father, to
   give it up even unto the death, in Christ to be dead to it.  Whatever is my
   own mind and thought and will, even though it be not directly sinful, He
   teaches me to fear and flee.  He opens my ear to wait in great gentleness
   and teachableness of soul for what the Father has day by day to speak and to
   teach.  He discovers to me how union with God’s will in the love of it is
   union with God Himself; how entire surrender to God’s will is the Father’s
   claim, the Son’s example, and the true blessedness of the soul.  He leads my
   will into the fellowship of Christ’s death and resurrection, my will dies in
   Him, in Him to be made alive again.  He breathes into it, as a renewed and
   quickened will, a holy insight into God’s perfect will, a holy joy in
   yielding itself to be an instrument of that will, a holy liberty and power
   to lay hold of God’s will to answer prayer.  With my whole will I learn to
   live for the interests of God and His kingdom, to exercise the power of that
   will—crucified but risen again—in nature and in prayer, on earth and in
   heaven, with men and with God.  The more deeply I enter into the ‘FATHER!
   NOT WHAT I WILL’ of Gethsemane, and into Him who spake it, to abide in Him,
   the fuller is my spiritual access into the power of His ‘FATHER! I WILL.
   And the soul experiences that it is the will, which has become nothing that
   God’s will may be all, which now becomes inspired with a Divine strength to
   really will what God wills, and to claim what has been promised it in the
   name of Christ.

   O let us listen to Christ in Gethsemane, as He calls, ‘If ye abide in me,
   ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’  Being of one mind
   and spirit with Him in His giving up everything to God’s will, living like
   Him in obedience and surrender to the Father; this is abiding in Him; this
   is the secret of power in prayer.

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

   ——0——

   Blessed Lord Jesus!  Gethsemane was Thy school, where Thou didst learn to
   pray and to obey.  It is still Thy school, where Thou leadest all Thy
   disciples who would fain learn to obey and to pray even as Thou.  Lord!
   teach me there to pray, in the faith that Thou has atoned for and conquered
   our self-will, and canst indeed give us grace to pray like Thee.

   O Lamb of God!  I would follow Thee to Gethsemane, there to become one with
   Thee, and to abide in Thee as Thou dost unto the very death yield Thy will
   unto the Father.  With Thee, through Thee, in Thee, I do yield my will in
   absolute and entire surrender to the will of the Father.  Conscious of my
   own weakness, and the secret power with which self-will would assert itself
   and again take its place on the throne, I claim in faith the power of Thy
   victory.  Thou didst triumph over it and deliver me from it.  In Thy death I
   would daily live;  in Thy life I would daily die.  Abiding in Thee, let my
   will, through the power of Thine eternal Spirit, only be the tuned
   instrument which yields to every touch of the will of my God.  With my whole
   soul do I say with Thee and in Thee, ‘Father!  Not as I will, but as Thou
   wilt.’

   And then, Blessed Lord!  Open my heart and that of all Thy people, to take
   in fully the glory of the truth, that a will given up to God is a will
   accepted of God to be used in his service, to desire, and purpose, and
   determine, and will what is according to God’s will.  A will which, in the
   power of the Holy Spirit the indwelling God, is to exercise its royal
   prerogative in prayer, to loose and to bind in heaven and upon earth, to ask
   whatsoever it will, and to say it shall be done.

   O Lord Jesus!  teach me to pray.  Amen.

[Soldier4Christ]

TWENTY-NINTH LESSON.

  ‘If we ask according to His will;

  Or,    Our Boldness in Prayer.

   ‘And this is the boldness which we have toward Him, that, if we ask anything
   according to His will, He heareth us.  And if we know that He hear us,
   whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of
   Him.’—I John v. 14, 15.

   ONE of the greatest hindrances to believing prayer is with many undoubtedly
   this:  they know not if what they ask is according to the will of God.  As
   long as they are in doubt on this point, they cannot have the boldness to
   ask in the assurance that they certainly shall receive.  And they soon begin
   to think that, if once they have made known their requests, and receive no
   answer, it is best to leave it to God to do according to His good pleasure.
   The words of John, ‘If we ask anything according to His will, He heareth
   us,’ as they understand them, make certainty as to answer to prayer
   impossible, because they cannot be sure of what really may be the will of
   God.  They think of God’s will as His hidden counsel—how should man be able
   to fathom what really may be the purpose of the all-wise God.

   This is the very opposite of what John aimed at in writing thus.  He wished
   to rouse us to boldness, to confidence, to full assurance of faith in
   prayer.  He says, ‘This is the boldness which we have toward Him,’ that we
   can say:  Father!  Thou knowest and I know that I ask according to Thy
   will:  I know Thou hearest me.  ‘This is the boldness, that if we ask
   anything according to His will, He heareth us.’  On this account He adds at
   once:  ‘If we know that He heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know,’ through
   this faith, that we have,’ that we now while we pray receive ‘the
   petition,’ the special things, ‘we have asked of Him.’  John supposes that
   when we pray, we first find out if our prayers are according to the will of
   God.  They may be according to God’s will, and yet not come at once, or
   without the persevering prayer of faith.  It is to give us courage thus to
   persevere and to be strong in faith, that He tells us:  This gives us
   boldness or confidence in prayer, if we ask anything according to His will,
   He heareth us.  It is evident that if it be a matter of uncertainty to us
   whether our petitions be according to His will, we cannot have the comfort
   of what he says, ‘We know that we have the petitions which we have asked of
   Him.’

   But just this is the difficulty.  More than one believer says:  ‘I do not
   know if what I desire be according to the will of God.  God’s will is the
   purpose of His infinite wisdom:  it is impossible for me to know whether He
   may not count something else better for me than what I desire, or may not
   have some reasons for withholding what I ask.’  Every one feels how with
   such thoughts the prayer of faith, of which Jesus said, ‘Whosoever shall
   believe that these things which he saith shall come to pass, he shall have
   whatsoever he saith,’ becomes an impossibility.  There may be the prayer of
   submission, and of trust in God’s wisdom; there cannot be the prayer of
   faith.  The great mistake here is that God’s children do not really believe
   that it is possible to know God’s will.  Or if they believe this, they do
   not take the time and trouble to find it out.  What we need is to see
   clearly in what way it is that the Father leads His waiting, teachable child
   to know that his petition is according to His will.^1  It is through God’s
   holy word, taken up and kept in the heart, the life, the will; and through
   God’s Holy Spirit, accepted in His indwelling and leading, that we shall
   learn to know that our petitions are according to His will.

   Through the word.  There is a secret will of God, with which we often fear
   that our prayers may be at variance.  It is not with this will of God, but
   His will as revealed in His word, that we have to do in prayer.  Our notions
   of what the secret will may have decreed, and of how it might render the
   answers to our prayers impossible, are mostly very erroneous.  Childlike
   faith as to what He is willing to do for His children, simply keeps to the
   Father’s assurance, that it is His will to hear prayer and to do what faith
   in His word desires and accepts.  In the word the Father has revealed in
   general promises the great principles of His will with His people.  The
   child has to take the promise and apply it to the special circumstances in
   His life to which it has reference.  Whatever he asks within the limits of
   that revealed will, he can know to be according to the will of God, and he
   may confidently expect.  In His word, God has given us the revelation of His
   will and plans with us, with His people, and with the world, with the most
   precious promises of the grace and power with which through His people He
   will carry out His plans and do His work.  As faith becomes strong and bold
   enough to claim the fulfilment of the general promise in the special case,
   we may have the assurance that our prayers are heard:  they are according to
   God’s will.  Take the words of John in the verse following our text as an
   illustration:  ‘If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he
   shall ask and God will give him life.’  Such is the general promise; and the
   believer who pleads on the ground of this promise, prays according to the
   will of God, and John would give him boldness to know that he has the
   petition which he asks.

   But this apprehension of God’s will is something spiritual, and must be
   spiritually discerned.  It is not as a matter of logic that we can argue it
   out:  God has said it; I must have it.  Nor has every Christian the same
   gift or calling.  While the general will revealed in the promise is the same
   for all, there is for each one a special different will according to God’s
   purpose.  And herein is the wisdom of the saints, to know this special will
   of God for each of us, according to the measure of grace given us, and so to
   ask in prayer just what God has prepared and made possible for each.  It is
   to communicate this wisdom that the Holy Ghost dwells in us.  The personal
   application of the general promises of the word to our special personal
   needs—it is for this that the leading of the Holy Spirit is given us.

   It is this 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 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.

[Soldier4Christ]

   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:  ‘Ye ask
   and receive not, because ye ask amiss.’  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 prevailing 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 as long as we are content to say:  It is perhaps
   because my prayer is not according to His will that He does not hear me.  O
   let us no longer throw the blame of our unanswered prayers on the secret
   will of God, but on our praying amiss.  Let that word, ‘Ye receive not
   because ye ask amiss,’ 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
   be 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 teacheth us all things.  Let us yield
   ourselves unreservedly 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 that 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 heareth us.’

   ‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

   ——0——

   Blessed Master!  With my whole heart I thank Thee for this blessed lesson,
   that the path to a life full of answers to prayer is through the will of
   God.  Lord!  Teach me to know this blessed will by living it, loving it, and
   always doing it.  So shall I learn to offer prayers according to that will,
   and to find in their harmony with God’s blessed will, my boldness in prayer
   and my confidence in accepting the answer.

   Father!  it is Thy will that Thy child should enjoy Thy presence and
   blessing.  It is Thy will that everything in the life of Thy child should be
   in accordance with Thy will, and that the Holy Spirit should work this in
   Him.  It is Thy will that Thy child should live in the daily experience of
   distinct answers to prayer, so as to enjoy living and direct fellowship with
   Thyself.  It is Thy will that Thy Name should be glorified in and through
   Thy children, and that it will be in those who trust Thee.   O my Father!
   let this Thy will be my confidence in all I ask.

   Blessed Saviour!  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.  Thou canst 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 thus the
   will of God become to me the sure rock on which my prayer and my assurance
   of an answer ever rest.  Amen.

   NOTE.

   There is often great confusion as to the will of God.  People think that
   what God wills must inevitably take place.  This is by no means the case.
   God wills a great deal of blessing to His people, which never comes to
   them.  He wills it most earnestly, but they do not will it, and it cannot
   come to them.  This is the great mystery of man’s creation with a free will,
   and also of the renewal of his will in redemption, that God has made the
   execution of His will, in many things, dependent on the will of man.  Of
   God’s will revealed in His promises, so much will be fulfilled as our faith
   accepts.  Prayer is the power by which that comes to pass which otherwise
   would not take place.  And faith, the power by which it is decided how much
   of God’s will shall be done in us.  When once God reveals to a soul what He
   is willing to do for it, the responsibility for the execution of that will
   rests with us.

   Some are afraid that this is putting too much power into the hands of man.
   But all power is put into the hands of man in Christ Jesus.  The key of all
   prayer and all power is His, and when we learn to understand that He is just
   as much with us as with the Father, and that we are also just as much one
   with Him as He with the Father, we shall see how natural and right and safe
   it is that to those who abide in Him as He in the Father, such power should
   be given.   It is Christ the Son who has the right to ask what He will:  it
   is through the abiding in Him and His abiding in us (in a Divine reality of
   which we have too little apprehension) that His Spirit breathes in us what
   He wants to ask and obtain through us.  We pray in His Name:  the prayers
   are really ours and as really His.

   Others again fear that to believe that prayer has such power is limiting the
   liberty and the love of God.  O if we only knew how we are limiting His
   liberty and His love by not allowing Him to act in the only way in which He
   chooses to act, now that He has taken us up into fellowship with
   himself—through our prayers and our faith.  A brother in the ministry once
   asked, as we were speaking on this subject, whether there was not a danger
   of our thinking that our love to souls and our willingness to see them
   blessed were to move God’s love and God’s willingness to bless them.  We
   were just passing some large water-pipes, by which water was being carried
   over hill and dale from a large mountain stream to a town at some distance.
   Just look at these pipes, was the answer; they did not make the water
   willing to flow downwards from the hills, nor did they give it its power of
   blessing and refreshment:  this is its very nature.  All that they could do
   is to decide its direction:  by it the inhabitants of the town said they
   want the blessing there.  And just so, it is the very nature of God to love
   and to bless.  Downward and ever downward His love longs to come with its
   quickening and refreshing streams.  But He has left it to prayer to say
   where the blessing is to come.  He has committed it to His believing people
   to bring the living water to the desert places:  the will of God to bless is
   dependent upon the will of man to say where the blessing must descend.
   ‘Such honour have His saints.’  ‘And this is the boldness which we have
   toward him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.
   And if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the
   petitions which we have asked of Him.’

   1See this illustrated in the extracts from George Muller at the end of this
   volume.