With Christ in the School of Prayer

The Lord gave the wonderful promise of the free use of His Name with the Father in conjunction with doing His works. The disciple who lives only for Jesus' work and Kingdom, for His will and honor, will be given the power to appropriate the promise. Anyone grasping the promise only when he wants something very special for himself will be disappointed, because he is making Jesus the servant of his own comfort. But whoever wants to pray the effective prayer of faith because he needs it for the work of the Master will learn it, because he has made himself the servant of his Lord's interests.

Our forgiving love toward men is the evidence of God's forgiving love in us. It is a necessary condition of the prayer of faith.

Prayer [is] the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God.

It is not the law, and not the book, not the knowledge of what is right, that works obedience, but the personal influence of God and His living fellowship. And even so it is not the knowledge of what God has promised, but the presence of God Himself as the Promiser, that awakens faith and trust in prayer.

Prayer not only teaches and strengthens one for work, work teaches and strengthens one for prayer.

Precious lessons that Jesus has to teach us this day. We seek God's gifts: God wants to give us HIMSELF first. We think of prayer as the power to draw down good gifts from heaven; Jesus as the means to draw ourselves up to God.

The entrance His words find with me, will be the measure of the power of any words with Him.

If I bear the name of another, I have given up my own name and my own independent life.

Prayer is not monologue but dialogue; God's voice in response to mine is its most essential part.

Patient, persevering, believing prayer that is offered up to God in the name of the Lord Jesus has always brought the blessing sooner or later.

Christ teaches us to pray not only by example, by instruction, by command, by promises, but by showing us HIMSELF, the ever-living Intercessor, as our Life. It is when we believe this, and go and abide in Him for our prayer-life too, that our fears of not being able to pray aright will vanish, and we shall joyfully and triumphantly trust our Lord to teach us to pray, to be Himself the life and the power of our prayer.

Thy kingdom come.' The Father is a King and has a kingdom. The son and heir of a king has no higher ambition than the glory of his father's kingdom. In time of war or danger this becomes his passion; he can think of nothing else. The children of the Father are here in the enemy's territory, where the kingdom, which is in heaven, is not yet fully manifested. What more natural than that, when they learn to hallow the Father-name, they should long and cry with deep enthusiasm: `Thy kingdom come.

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.

Let nothing less than these--the desire, the decision to live only for the glory of the Father, even as Christ did; the acceptance of Him with His life and strength working it in us; the joyful assurance that we can live to the glory of God, because Christ lives in us;--let this be the spirit of our daily life.

The pipes did not make the water willing to flow down from the hills, nor did they give it its power of blessing and refreshment. That is the water's very nature. All the pipes could do was to decide its direction.' 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 go. 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 ask for the blessing to descend.

People think that what God wills must inevitably take place. This is by no means the case. God wills a great deal of blessing for His people that 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 but also of the renewal of his will in redemption, that God has made the execution of His will dependent on the will of man in many things.

In not granting an answer, the Father tells us that there is something wrong in our praying. He wants to teach us to discover it and confess it; He wants to educate us about true believing and prevailing prayer. He will only attain His objective 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.

The Word must dwell and abide in us; the heart and life must be under its influence day by day. Not from without, but from within, comes the quickening of the Word by the Spirit. Only he who yields himself entirely in his whole life to the supremacy of the Word and the will of God can expect in special cases to discern what that Word and will permit him to ask boldly.

Many do not understand this union of the teaching of the Word and the Spirit, 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 leading of the Holy Spirit. The two must be united - the Word and the Spirit - because only in these can we know for sure 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 such indwelling that we can experience their teaching.

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 discover it. What we need is to see clearly how the Father leads His waiting, teachable child to know that his petition is according to His will. It is through God's Holy Word, taken up and kept in the heart, the life, and 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.

In Your death I would live daily; in Your life I would die daily.

As my guarantee, He won it for me by His consent to have His petition unanswered.

It is from the sacrifice of the will in Gethsemane that the sacrifice of the life on Calvary derives its value.

Let us each find our what our work is and which souls are entrusted to our special prayers.

What our prayer accomplishes depends upon what we are and what our life is. Living in the name of Christ is the secret of praying in the name of Christ; living in the Spirit fits us for praying in the Spirit. Abiding in Christ gives us the right and power to ask what we will. The extent of the abiding is the exact measure of the power in prayer. The Spirit who dwells within us prays - not always in words and thoughts but in a breathing that is deeper than utterance. As much as there is of the Holy Spirit in us is there real prayer.

Two intercessors, Christ the Advocate above and the Holy Spirit the Advocate within, are the gifts of His love.

Let's yield ourselves to take up the appointment the Savior gives us. Let's concentrate on His relationship to us as Master and no longer start each new day with thoughts of comfort, or joy, or blessing. Let the first thought be: I belong to the Master.

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, faith's obedience gives access to all the blessings our God has for us.

Oh, how often we have sought to be able to pray the effectual prayer for much grace to bear fruit and have wondered why the answer didn't come. It was because we were reversing the Master's order. We wanted to have the comfort and the joy and the strength first, so that we might do the work easily and without any feeling of difficulty or self-sacrifice. He wanted us to come in faith without asking whether we felt weak or strong, or whether the work was hard or easy, in obedience to do what He said. The path of fruit-bearing would have led us to the place and the power of prevailing prayer.

As faith strengthens us for obedience, it is in turn strengthened by it. Faith is made perfect by works.