Thoughts on Our Training

for the

Ministry of Intercession

BY

REV. ANDREW MURRAY

Lord, teach us to pray.

NEW YORKCHICAGOTORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

Publishers of Evangelical Literature.

17 - Seventeenth Lesson. 'I know that Thou hearest me always;' Or, Prayer in Harmony with the Being of God

Andrew Murray

SEVENTEENTH LESSON.

‘I know that Thou hearest me always;’

Or          Prayer in Harmony with the Being of God.

‘Father, I thank Thee that Thou heardest me.  And I knew that Thou hearest me always.’—John xi. 41, 42.

‘Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee.  Ask of me, and I shall give Thee.’—Ps. ii. 7, 8.

129

IN the New Testament we find a distinction made between faith and knowledge.  ‘To one is given, through the Spirit, the word of  wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit; to another faith, in the same Spirit.’  In a child or a simple-minded Christian there may be much faith with little knowledge.  Childlike simplicity accepts the truth without difficulty, and often cares little to give itself or others any reason for its faith but this:  God has said.  But it is the will of God that we should love and serve Him, not only with all the heart but also with all the mind; that we should grow up into an insight into the Divine wisdom and beauty of all His ways and words and works.  It is only thus that the believer will be able fully to 130approach and rightly to adore the glory of God’s grace; and only thus that our heart can intelligently apprehend the treasures of wisdom and knowledge there are in redemption, and be prepared to enter fully into the highest note of the song that rises before the throne:  ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!’

In our prayer life this truth has its full application.  While prayer and faith are so simple that the new-born convert can pray with power, true Christian science finds in the doctrine of prayer some of its deepest problems.  In how far is the power of prayer a reality?  If so, how God can grant to prayer such mighty power?  How can the action of prayer be harmonized with the will and the decrees of God?  How can God’s sovereignty and our will, God’s liberty and ours, be reconciled?—these and other like questions are fit subjects for Christian meditation and inquiry.  The more earnestly and reverently we approach such mysteries, the more shall we in adoring wonder fall down to praise Him who hath in prayer given such power to man.

One of the secret difficulties with regard to prayer,—one which, though not expressed, does often really hinder prayer,—is derived from the perfection of God, in His absolute independence of all that is outside of Himself.  Is He not the Infinite Being, who owes what He is to Himself alone, who determines Himself, and whose wise and holy will has 131determined all that is to be?  How can prayer influence Him, or He be moved by prayer to do what otherwise would not be done?  Is not the promise of an answer to prayer simply a condescension to our weakness?  Is what is said of the power—the much-availing power—of prayer anything more than an accommodation to our mode of thought, because the Deity never can be dependent on any action from without for its doings?  And is not the blessing of prayer simply the influence it exercises upon ourselves?

In seeking an answer to such questions, we find the key in the very being of God, in the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  If God was only one Person, shut up within Himself, there could be no thought of nearness to Him or influence on Him.  But in God there are three Persons.  In God we have Father and Son, who have in the Holy Spirit their living bond of unity and fellowship.  When eternal Love begat the Son, and the Father gave the Son as the Second Person a place next Himself as His Equal and His Counsellor, there was a way opened for prayer and its influence in the very inmost life of Deity itself.  Just as on earth, so in heaven the whole relation between Father and Son is that of giving and taking.  And if that taking is to be as voluntary and self-determined as the giving, there must be on the part of the Son an asking and receiving.  In the holy fellowship of the Divine Persons, this asking of the Son was one of the great operations of the Thrice Blessed Life of God.  Hence we have it132in Psalm ii.:  ‘This day I have begotten Thee:  ask of me and I will give Thee.’  The Father gave the Son the place and the power to act upon Him.  The asking of the Son was no mere show or shadow, but one of those life-movements in which the love of the Father and the Son met and completed each other.  The Father had determined that He should not be alone in His counsels:  there was a Son on whose asking and accepting their fulfilment should depend.  And so there was in the very Being and Life of God an asking of which prayer on earth was to be the reflection and the outflow.  It was not without including this that Jesus said, “I knew that Thou always hearest me.’  Just as the Sonship of Jesus on earth may not be separated from His Sonship in heaven, even so with His prayer on earth, it is the continuation and the counterpart of His asking in heaven.  The prayer of the man Christ Jesus is the link between the eternal asking of the only-begotten Son in the bosom of the Father and the prayer of men upon earth.  Prayer has its rise and its deepest source in the very Being of God.  In the bosom of Deity nothing is ever done without prayer—the asking of the Son and the giving of the Father.1

This may help us somewhat to understand how the prayer of man, coming through the Son, can have effect upon God.  The decrees of God are not decisions made by Him without reference to the Son, or His petition, or the petition 133to be sent up through Him.  By no means.  The Lord Jesus is the first-begotten, the Head and Heir of all things:  all things were created through Him and unto Him, and all things consist in Him.  In the counsels of the Father, the Son, as Representative of all creation, had always a voice; in the decrees of the eternal purpose there was always room left for the liberty of the Son as Mediator and Intercessor, and so for the petitions of all who draw nigh to the Father in the Son.

And if the thought come that this liberty and power of the Son to act upon the Father is at variance with the immutability of the Divine decrees, let us not forget that there is not with God as with man, a past by which He is irrevocably bound.  God does not live in time with its past and future; the distinctions of time have no reference to Him who inhabits Eternity.  And Eternity is an ever-present Now, in which the past is never past, and the future always present.  To meet our human weakness, Scripture must speak of past decrees, and a coming future.  In reality, the immutability of God’s counsel is ever still in perfect 134harmony with His liberty to do whatsoever He will.  Not so were the prayers of the Son and His people taken up into the eternal decrees that their effect should only be an apparent one; but so, that the Father-heart holds itself open and free to listen to every prayer that rises through the Son, and that God does indeed allow Himself to be decided by prayer to do what He otherwise would not have done.

This perfect harmony and union of Divine Sovereignty and human liberty is to us an unfathomable mystery, because God as THE ETERNAL ONE transcends all our thoughts.  But let it be our comfort and strength to be assured that in the eternal fellowship of the Father and the Son, the power of prayer has its origin and certainty, and that through our union with the Son, our prayer is taken up and can have its influence in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.  God’s decrees are no iron framework against which man’s liberty would vainly seek to struggle.  No.  God Himself is the Living Love, who in His Son as man has entered into the tenderest relation with all that is human, who through the Holy Spirit takes up all that is human into the Divine life of love, and keeps Himself free to give every human prayer its place in His government of the world.

It is in the daybreak light of such thoughts that the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity no longer is an abstract speculation, but the living manifestation of the way in which it were possible for man to be taken up into the fellowship of God, and his prayer to become a real factor in God’s rule of this earth.  And we can, as in the distance, catch glimpses of the light that from the eternal world shines out on words such as these:  ‘THROUGH HIM we have access BY ONE SPIRIT unto THE FATHER.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

Everlasting God!  135the Three-One and Thrice Holy!  in deep reverence would I with veiled face worship before the holy mystery of Thy Divine Being.  And if it please Thee, O most glorious God, to unveil aught of that mystery, I would bow with fear and trembling, lest I sin against Thee, as I meditate on Thy glory.

Father!  I thank Thee that Thou bearest this name not only as the Father of Thy children here on earth, but as having from eternity subsisted as the Father with Thine only-begotten Son.  I thank Thee that as Father Thou canst hear our prayer, because Thou hast from eternity given a place in Thy counsels to the asking of Thy Son.  I thank Thee that we have seen in Him on earth, what the blessed intercourse was He had with Thee in heaven; and how from eternity in all Thy counsels and decrees there had been room left for His prayer and their answers.  And I thank Thee above all that through His true human nature on Thy throne above, and through Thy Holy Spirit in our human nature here below, a way has been opened up by which every human cry of need can be taken up into and touch the Life and the Love of God, and receive in answer whatsoever it shall ask.

Blessed Jesus!  in whom as the Son the path of prayer has been opened up, and who givest us assurance of the answer, we beseech Thee, teach Thy people to pray.  O let this each day be the sign of our sonship, that, like Thee, we know that the Father heareth us always.  Amen.

NOTE.

‘”God hears prayer.”  This 136simplest view of prayer is taken throughout Scripture.  It dwells not on the reflex influence of prayer on our heart and life, although it abundantly shows the connection between prayer as an act, and prayer as a state.  It rather fixes with great definiteness the objective or real purposes of prayer, to obtain blessing, gifts, deliverances from God.  ‘Ask and it shall be given,” Jesus says.

‘However true and valuable the reflection may be, that God, foreseeing and foreordaining all things, has also foreseen and foreordained our prayers as links in the chain of events, of cause and effect, as a real power, yet we feel convinced that this is not the light in which the mind can find peace in this great subject, nor do we think that here is the attractive power to draw us in prayer.  We feel rather that such a reflection diverts the attention from the Object whence comes the impulse, life, and strength of prayer.  The living God, cotemporary and not merely eternal,1 the living, merciful, holy One, God manifesting Himself to the soul, God saying, “Seek my face;” this is the magnet that draws us, this alone can open heart and lips. . .

‘In Jesus Christ the Son of God we have the full solution of the difficulty.  He prayed on earth, and that not merely as man, but as the Son of God incarnate.  His prayer on earth is only the manifestation of His prayer from all eternity, when in the Divine counsel He was set up as the Christ. . . . The Son was appointed to be heir of all things.  From all eternity the Son of God was the Way, the Mediator.  He was, to use our imperfect language, from eternity speaking unto the Father on behalf of the world.’—SAPHIR, The Hidden Life, chap. vi.  See also The Lord’s Prayer, p. 12.

1 Should it not rather be cotemporary, because eternal, in the proper meaning of this latter word?

18 - Eighteenth Lesson. 'Whose is this image?' Or, Prayer in Harmony with the Destiny of Man

Andrew Murray

EIGHTEENTH LESSON

‘Whose is this image?’

Or,          Prayer in Harmony with the Destiny of Man.

‘He saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?—Matt. xxi. 20.

‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’—Gen. i. 26.

137

‘WHOSE is this image?’  It was by this question that Jesus foiled His enemies, when they thought to take Him, and settled the matter of duty in regard to the tribute.  The question and the principle it involves are of universal application.  Nowhere more truly than in man himself.  The image he bears decides his destiny.  Bearing God’s image, he belongs to God:  prayer to God is what he was created for.  Prayer is part of the wondrous likeness he bears to His Divine original; of the deep mystery of the fellowship of love in which the Three-One has His blessedness, prayer is the earthly image and likeness.

The more we meditate on what prayer is, and the wonderful power with God which it has, the more we feel constrained to 138ask who and what man is, that such a place in God’s counsels should have been allotted to him.  Sin has so degraded him, that from what he is now we can form no conception of what he was meant to be.  We must turn back to God’s own record of man’s creation to discover there what God’s purpose was, and what the capacities with which man was endowed for the fulfilment of that purpose.

Man’s destiny appears clearly from God’s language at creation.  It was to fill, to subdue, to have dominion over the earth and all in it.  All the three expressions show us that man was meant, as God’s representative, to hold rule here on earth.  As God’s viceroy he was to fill God’s place:  himself subject to God, he was to keep all else in subjection to Him.  It was the will of God that all that was to be done on earth should be done through him:  the history of the earth was to be entirely in his hands.

In accordance with such a destiny was the position he was to occupy, and the power at his disposal.  When an earthly sovereign sends a viceroy to a distant province, it is understood that he advises as to the policy to be adopted, and that that advice is acted on:  that he is at liberty to apply for troops and the other means needed for carrying out the policy or maintaining the dignity of the empire.  If his policy be not approved of, he is recalled to make way for some one who better understands his sovereign’s desires’ as long as he is trusted, his advice is 139carried out.  As God’s representative man was to have ruled; all was to have been done under his will and rule; on his advice and at his request heaven was to have bestowed its blessing on earth.  His prayer was to have been the wonderful, though simple and most natural channel, in which the intercourse between the King in heaven and His faithful servant man, as lord of this world, was to have been maintained.  The destinies of the world were given into the power of the wishes, the will, the prayer of man.

With sin all this underwent a terrible change—man’s fall brought all creation under the curse.  With redemption the beginning was seen of a glorious restoration.  No sooner had God begun in Abraham to form for Himself a people from whom kings, yea the Great King, should come forth, than we see what power the prayer of God’s faithful servant has to decide the destinies of those who come into contact with him.  In Abraham we see how prayer is not only, or even chiefly, the means of obtaining blessing for ourselves, but is the exercise of his royal prerogative to influence the destinies of men, and the will of God which rules them.  We do not once find Abraham praying for himself.  His prayer for Sodom and Lot, for Abimelech, for Ishmael, prove what power a man, who is God’s friend, has to make the history of those around him.

This had been man’s destiny from the first.  Scripture not only tells us this, but also teaches us how it was that God 140could entrust man with such a high calling.  It was because He had created him in His own image and likeness.  The external rule was not committed to him without the inner fitness:  the bearing God’s image in having dominion, in being lord of all, had its root in the inner likeness, in his nature.  There was an inner agreement and harmony between God and man, and incipient Godlikeness, which gave man a real fitness for being the mediator between God and His world, for he was to be prophet, priest, and king, to interpret God’s will, to represent nature’s needs, to receive and dispense God’s bounty.  It was in bearing God’s image that he could bear God’s rule; he was indeed so like God, so capable of entering into God’s purposes, and carrying out His plans, that God could trust him with the wonderful privilege of asking and obtaining what the world might need.  And although sin has for a time frustrated God’s plans, prayer still remains what it would have been if man had never fallen:  the proof of man’s Godlikeness, the vehicle of his intercourse with the Infinite Unseen One, the power that is allowed to hold the hand that holds the destinies of the universe.  Prayer is not merely the cry of the suppliant for mercy; it is the highest forth-putting of his will by man, knowing himself to be of Divine origin, created for and capable of being, in king-like liberty, the executor of the counsels of the Eternal.

What sin destroyed, grace has restored.  What the first Adam lost, 141the second has won back.  In Christ man regains his original position, and the Church, abiding in Christ, inherits the promise:  ‘Ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’  Such a promise does by no means, in the first place, refer to the grace or blessing we need for ourselves.  It has reference to our position as the fruit-bearing branches of the Heavenly Vine, who, like Him, only live for the work and glory of the Father.  It is for those who abide in Him, who have forsaken self to take up their abode in Him with His life of obedience and self-sacrifice, who have lost their life and found it in Him, who are now entirely given up to the interests of the Father and His kingdom.  These are they who understand how their new creation has brought them back to their original destiny, has restored God’s image and likeness, and with it the power to have dominion.  Such have indeed the power, each in their own circle, to obtain and dispense the powers of heaven here on earth.  With holy boldness they may make known what they will:  they live as priests in God’s presence; as kings the powers of the world to come begin to be at their disposal. 1   They enter upon the fulfilment of the promise:  ‘Ask whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’

Church of the 142living God!  thy calling is higher and holier than thou knowest.  Through thy members, as kings, and priests unto God, would God rule the world; their prayers bestow and withhold the blessing of heaven.  In His elect who are not just content to be themselves saved, but yield themselves wholly, that through them, even as through the Son, the Father may fulfil all His glorious counsel, in these His elect, who cry day and night unto Him, God would prove how wonderful man’s original destiny was.  As the image-bearer of God on earth, the earth was indeed given into his hand.  When he fell, all fell with him:  the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.  But now he is redeemed; the restoration of the original dignity has begun.  It is in very deed God’s purpose that the fulfilment of His eternal purpose, and the coming of His kingdom, should depend on those of His people who, abiding in Christ, are ready to take up their position in Him their Head, the great Priest-King, and in their prayers are bold enough to say what they will that their God should do.  As image-bearer and representative of God on earth, redeemed man has by his prayers to determine the history of this earth.  Man was 143created, and has now again been redeemed, to pray, and by his prayer to have dominion.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

Lord!  what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?  and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?  for Thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.  Thou madest him to have dominion over the work of Thy hands:  Thou hast put all things under his feet.  O Lord our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!

Lord God!  how low has sin made man to sink.  And how terribly has it darkened his mind, that he does not even know his Divine destiny, to be Thy servant and representative.  Alas!  that even Thy people, when their eyes are opened, are so little ready to accept their calling and to seek to have power with God, that they may have power with men too to bless them.

Lord Jesus!  it is in Thee the Father hath again crowned man with glory and honour, and opened the way for us to be what He would have us.  O Lord, have mercy on Thy people, and visit Thine heritage!  Work mightily in Thy Church, and teach Thy believing disciples to go forth in their royal priesthood, and in the power of prayer, to which Thou hast given such wonderful promises, to serve Thy kingdom, to have rule over the nations, and make the name of God glorious in the earth.  Amen.

19 - Ninteenth Lesson. 'I go unto the Father!' Or, Power for Praying and Working

Andrew Murray

NINTEENTH LESSON.

‘I go unto the Father!’

Or,          Power for Praying and Working.

‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.  And whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.’—John xiv. 12, 13.

144

AS the Saviour opened His public ministry with His disciples by the Sermon on the Mount, so He closes it by the Parting Address preserved to us by John.  In both He speaks more than once of prayer.  But with a difference.  In the Sermon on the Mount it is as to disciples who have only just entered His school, who scarcely know that God is their Father, and whose prayer chiefly has reference to their personal needs.  In His closing address He speaks to disciples whose training time is now come to an end, and who are ready as His messengers to take His place and His work.  In the former the chief lesson is:  Be childlike, pray believingly, and trust the Father that He will give you all good gifts.  Here He points to something higher:  They are now His friends 145to whom He has made known all that He has heard of the Father; His messengers, who have entered into His plans, and into whose hands the care of His work and kingdom on earth is to be entrusted.  They are now to go out and do His works, and in the power of His approaching exaltation, even greater works:  prayer is now to be the channel through which that power is to be received for their work.  With Christ’s ascension to the Father a new epoch commences for their working and praying both.

See how clearly this connection comes out in our text.  As His body here on earth, as those who are one with Him in heaven, they are now to do greater works than He had done; their success and their victories are to be greater than His.  He mentions two reasons for this.  The one, because He was to go to the Father, to receive all power; the other, because they might now ask and expect all in His Name.  ‘Because I go to the Father, and—notice this and—and, whatsoever ye shall ask, I will do.’  His going to the Father would thus bring the double blessing:  they would ask and receive all in His Name, and as a consequence, would do the greater works.  This first mention of prayer in our Saviour’s parting words thus teaches us two most important lessons.  He that would do the works of Jesus must pray in His Name.  He that would pray in His Name must work in His Name.

He who would work must pray:  it is in prayer that the power for work is obtained.  He that in faith would do the 146works that Jesus did, must pray in His Name.  As long as Jesus was here on earth, He Himself did the greatest works:  devils the disciples could not cast out, fled at His word.  When He went to the Father, He was no longer here in the body to work directly.  The disciples were now His body:  all His work from the throne in heaven here on earth must and could be done through them.  One might have thought that now He was leaving the scene Himself, and could only work through commissioners, the works might be fewer and weaker.  He assures us of the contrary:  Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and he shall do greater works.’  His approaching death was to be such a real breaking down and making an end of the power of sin; with the resurrection the powers of the Eternal Life were so truly to take possession of the human body and to obtain supremacy over human life; with His ascension He was to receive the power to communicate the Holy Spirit so fully to His own; the union, the oneness between Himself on the throne and them on earth, was to be so intensely and divinely perfect, that He meant it as the literal truth:  ‘Greater works than these shall he do, because I go to the Father.’  And the issue proved how true it was.  While Jesus, during three years of personal labour on earth, gathered little more than five hundred disciples, and the most of them so feeble that they were but little credit to His cause, it was given to men like Peter 147and Paul manifestly to do greater things than He had done.  From the throne He could do through them what He Himself in His humiliation could not yet do.

But there is one condition:  ‘He that believeth on me, he shall do greater works, because I go to the Father; and whatsover ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.’  His going to the Father would give Him a new power to hear prayer.  For the doing of the greater works, two things were needed:  His going to the Father to receive all power, our prayer in His Name to receive all power from Him again.  As He asks the Father, He receives and bestows on us the power of the new dispensation for the greater works; as we believe, and ask in His Name, the power comes and takes possession of us to do the greater works.

Alas!  how much working there is in the work of God, in which there is little or nothing to be seen of the power to do anything like Christ’s works, not to speak of greater works.  There can be but one reason:  the believing on Him, the believing prayer in His Name, this is so much wanting.  O that every labourer and leader in church, or school, in the work of home philanthropy or foreign missions might learn the lesson:  Prayer in the Name of Jesus is the way to share in the mighty power which Jesus has received of the Father for His people, and it is in this power alone that he that believeth can do the greater works.  To every complaint as to weakness or unfitness, as to difficulties or want of success, Jesus 148gives this one answer:  ‘He that believeth on me shall do greater works, because I go to the Father, and whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do.’  We must understand that the first and chief thing for everyone who would do the work of Jesus, is to believe, and so to get linked to Him, the Almighty One, and then to pray the prayer of faith in His Name.  Without this our work is but human and carnal; it may have some use in restraining sin, or preparing the way for blessing, but the real power is wanting.  Effectual working needs first effectual prayer.

And now the second lesson:  He who would pray must work.  It is for power to work that prayer has such great promises:  it is in working that the power for the effectual prayer of faith will be gained.  In these parting words of our blessed Lord we find that He no less than six times (John xiv. 13, 14, xv. 7, 16, xvi. 23, 24) repeats those unlimited prayer-promises which have so often awakened our anxious questionings as to their real meaning:  ‘whatsoever,’ ‘anything,’ ‘what ye will,’ ‘ask and ye shall receive.’  How many a believer has read these over with joy and hope, and in deep earnestness of soul has sought to plead them for his own need.  And he has come out disappointed.  The simple reason was this:  he had rent away the promise from its surrounding.  The Lord gave the wonderful promise of the free use of His Name with the Father in connection with the doing of His works.  It is the disciple who gives himself wholly to live for Jesus’ work 149and kingdom, for His will and honour, to whom the power will come to appropriate the promise.  He that would fain grasp the promise when he wants something very special for himself, will be disappointed, because he would make Jesus the servant of his own comfort.  But to him who seeks to pray the effectual prayer of faith, because he needs it for the work of the Master, to him it will be given to learn it; because he has made himself the servant of his Lord’s interests.  Prayer not only teaches and strengthens to work:  work teaches and strengthens to pray.

This is in perfect harmony with what holds good both in the natural and the spiritual world.  Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; or, He that is faithful in a little, is faithful also in much.  Let us with the small measure of grace already received, give ourselves to the Master for His work:  work will be to us a real school of prayer.  It was when Moses had to take full charge of a rebellious people that he felt the need, but also the courage, to speak boldly to God and to ask great things of Him (Ex. xxxiii. 12, 15, 18).  As you give yourself entirely to God for His work, you will feel that nothing less than these great promises are what you need, that nothing less is what you may most confidently expect.

Believer in Jesus!  You are called, you are appointed, to do the works of Jesus, and even greater works, because He has gone to the Father to receive the power to do them in and through you.

Whatsoever ye shall 150ask in my Name, that will I do.  Give yourself, and live, to do the works of Christ and you will learn to pray so as to obtain wonderful answers to prayer.  Give yourself, and live, to pray and you will learn to do the works He did, and greater works.  With disciples full of faith in Himself, and bold in prayer to ask great things, Christ can conquer the world.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

O my Lord!  I have this day again heard words from Thee which pass my comprehension.  And yet I cannot do aught but in simple childlike faith take and keep them as Thy gift to me too.  Thou hast said that in virtue of Thy going to the Father, he that believeth on Thee will do the works which Thou hast done, and greater works.  Lord!  I worship Thee as the Glorified One, and look for the fulfilment of Thy promise.  May my whole life just be one of continued believing in Thee.  So purify and sanctify my heart, make it so tenderly susceptible of Thyself and Thy love, that believing on Thee may be the very life it breathes.

And Thou hast said that in virtue of Thy going to the Father, whatsoever we ask, Thou wilt do.  From Thy throne of power Thou wouldest make Thy people share the power given Thee, and work through them as the members of Thy body, in response to their believing prayers in Thy Name.  Power in prayer with Thee, and power in work with men, is what Thou has 151promised Thy people and me too.

Blessed Lord!  Forgive us all that we have so little believed Thee and Thy promise, and so little proved Thy faithfulness in fulfilling it.  O forgive us that we have so little honoured Thy all-prevailing Name in heaven or upon earth.

Lord!  Teach me to pray so that I may prove that Thy Name is indeed all-prevailing with God and men and devils.  Yea, teach me so to work and so to pray that Thou canst glorify Thyself in me as the Omnipotent One, and do Thy great work through me too.  Amen.

20 - Twentieth Lesson. 'That the Father may be glorified;' Or, The Chief End of Prayer

Andrew Murray

TWENTIETH LESSON.

‘That the Father may be glorified;’

Or,    The Chief End of Prayer.

I go unto the Father.  And whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’—John xiv. 13.

152

THAT the Father may be glorified in the Son: it is to this end that Jesus on His throne in glory will do all we ask in His Name.  Every answer to prayer He gives will have this as its object:  when there is no prospect of this object being obtained, He will not answer.   It follows as a matter of course that this must be with us, as with Jesus, the essential element in our petitions:  the glory of the Father must be the aim and end, the very soul and life of our prayer.

It was so with Jesus when He was 153on earth.  ‘I seek not mine own honour:  I seek the honour of Him that sent me;’ in such words we have the keynote of His life.  In the first words of the high-priestly prayer He gives utterance to it:  Father! Glorify Thy son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee.  ‘I have glorified Thee on earth; glorify me with Thyself.’  The ground on which He asks to be taken up into the glory He had with the Father, is the twofold one:  He has glorified Him on earth; He will still glorify Him in heaven.   What He asks is only to enable Him to glorify the Father more.  It is as we enter into sympathy with Jesus on this point, and gratify Him by making the Father’s glory our chief object in prayer too, that our prayer cannot fail of an answer.  There is nothing of which the Beloved Son has said more distinctly that it will glorify the Father than this, His doing what we ask; He will not, therefore, let any opportunity slip of securing this object.  Let us make His aim ours:  let the glory of the Father be the link between our asking and His doing:  such prayer must prevail.1

This word of Jesus comes indeed as a sharp two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.  Jesus in His prayers on earth, in His intercession in heaven, in His promise of an answer to our prayers from there, makes this His first object—the glory of His Father.  Is it so with us too?  Or are not, in large measure, self-interest and self-will the strongest motives urging us to pray?  Or, if we cannot see that this is the case, have we not to acknowledge that the distinct, conscious longing for the glory of the Father is 154not what animates our prayers?  And yet it must be so.

Not as if the believer does not at times desire it.   But he has to mourn that he has so little attained.  And he knows the reason of his failure too.  It was, because the separation between the spirit of daily life and the spirit of the hour of prayer was too wide.  We begin to see that the desire for the glory of the Father is not something that we can awake and present to our Lord when we prepare ourselves to pray.  No! it is only when the whole life, in all its parts, is given up to God’s glory, that we can really pray to His glory too.  ‘Do all to the glory of God,’ and, ‘Ask all to the glory of God,’—these twin commands are inseparable:  obedience to the former is the secret of grace for the latter.   A life to the glory of God is the condition of the prayers that Jesus can answer, ‘that the Father may be glorified.’

This demand in connection with prevailing prayer—that it should be to the glory of God—is no more than right and natural.  There is none glorious but the Lord:  there is no glory but His, and what He layeth on His creatures.  Creation exists to show forth His glory; all that is not for His glory is sin, and darkness, and death:  it is only in the glorifying of God that the creatures can find glory.  What the Son of Man did, to give Himself wholly, His whole life, to glorify the Father, is nothing but the simple duty of every redeemed one.  And Christ’s reward will be his too.  Because He gave Himself so 155entirely to the glory of the Father, the Father crowned Him with glory and honour, giving the kingdom into His hands, with the power to ask what He will, and, as Intercessor, to answer our prayers.  And just as we become one with Christ in this, and as our prayer is part of a life utterly surrendered to God’s glory, will the Saviour be able to glorify the Father to us by the fulfilment of the promise:  ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask, I will do it.’

To such a life, with God’s glory our only aim, we cannot attain by any effort of our own.  It is only in the man Christ Jesus that such a life is to be seen:  in Him it is to be found for us.  Yes blessed be God!  His life is our life; He gave Himself for us; He Himself is now our life.  The discovery, and the confession, and the denial, of self, as usurping the place of God, of self-seeking and self-trusting, is essential, and yet is what we cannot accomplish in our own strength.  It is the incoming and indwelling, the Presence and the Rule in the heart, of our Lord Jesus who glorified the Father on earth, and is now glorified with Him, that thence He might glorify Him in us;—it is Jesus Himselfcoming in, who can cast out all self-glorifying, and give us instead His own God-glorifying life and Spirit.  It is Jesus, who longs to glorify the Father in hearing our prayers, who will teach us to live and to pray to the glory of God.

And what motive, what power is there that can urge our slothful hearts to yield themselves to our Lord to work this in us?  Surely nothing more is needed than 156a sight of how glorious, how alone worthy of glory the Father is.  Let our faith learn in adoring worship to bow before Him, to ascribe to Him alone the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, to yield ourselves to dwell in His light as the ever-blessed, ever-loving One.  Surely we shall be stirred to say, ‘To Him alone be glory.’  And we shall look to our Lord Jesus with new intensity of desire for a life that refuses to see or seek ought but the glory of God.  When there is but little prayer that can be answered, the Father is not glorified.  It is a duty, for the glory of God, to live and pray so that our prayer can be answered.  For the sake of God’s glory, let us learn to pray well.

What a humbling thought that so often there is earnest prayer for a child or a friend, for a work or a circle, in which the thought of our joy or our pleasure was far stronger than any yearnings for God’s glory.  No wonder that there are so many unanswered prayers:  here we have the secret.  God would not be glorified when that glory was not our object.  He that would pray the prayer of faith, will have to give himself to live literally so that the Father in all things may be glorified in him.  This must be his aim:  without this there cannot be the prayer of faith.  ‘How can ye believe,’ said Jesus, ‘which receive glory of one another, and the glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not?’  All seeking of our own glory with men makes faith impossible:  it is the deep, intense self-sacrifice that gives up its own glory, and seeks the glory of God alone, that wakens in the 157soul that spiritual susceptibility of the Divine, which is faith.  The surrender to God to seek His glory, and the expectation that He will show His glory in hearing us, are one at root:   He that seeks God’s glory will see it in the answer to his prayer, and he alone.

And how, we ask again, shall we attain to it?  Let us begin with confession.  How little has the glory of God been an all-absorbing passion; how little our lives and our prayers have been full of it.  How little have we lived in the likeness of the Son, and in sympathy with Him—for God and His glory alone.  Let us take time, until the Holy Spirit discover it to us, and we see how wanting we have been in this.  True knowledge and confession of sin are the sure path to deliverance.

And then let us look to Jesus.  In Him we can see by what death we can glorify God.  In death He glorified Him; through death He was glorified with Him.  It is by dying, being dead to self and living to God, that we can glorify Him.  And this—this death to self, this life to the glory of God—is what Jesus gives and lives in each one who can trust Him for it.  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.   Jesus stands surety for our living thus; the Holy 158Spirit is given, and waiting to make it our experience, if we will only trust and let Him; O let us not hold back through unbelief, but confidently take as our watchword—All to the glory of God!  The Father accepts the will, the sacrifice is well-pleasing; the Holy Spirit will seal us within with the consciousness, we are living for God and His glory.

And then what quiet peace and power there will be in our prayers, as we know ourselves through His grace, in perfect harmony with Him who says to us, when He promises to do what we ask:  ‘That the Father may be glorified in the Son.’  With our whole being consciously yielded to the inspiration of the Word and Spirit, our desires will be no longer ours but His; their chief end the glory of God.  With increasing liberty we shall be able in prayer to say:  Father!  Thou knowest, we ask it only for Thy glory.  And the condition of prayer-answers, instead of being as a mountain we cannot climb, will only give us the greater confidence that we shall be heard, because we have seen that prayer has no higher beauty or blessedness than this, that it glorifies the Father.  And the precious privilege of prayer will become doubly precious because it brings us into perfect unison with the Beloved Son in the wonderful partnership He proposes:  ‘You ask, and I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

Blessed Lord Jesus!  I come again 159to Thee.  Every lesson Thou givest me convinces me more deeply how little I know to pray aright.  But every lesson also inspires me with hope that Thou art going to teach me, that Thou art teaching me not only to know what prayer should be, but actually to pray as I ought.  O my Lord!  I look with courage to Thee, the Great Intercessor, who didst pray and dost hear prayer, only that the Father may be glorified, to teach me too to live and to pray to the glory of God.

Saviour!  To this end I yield myself to Thee again.  I would be nothing.  I have given self, as already crucified with Thee, to the death.  Through the Spirit its workings are mortified and made dead; Thy life and Thy love of the Father are taking possession of me.  A new longing begins to fill my soul, that every day, every hour, that in every prayer the glory of the Father may be everything to me.  O my Lord!  I am in Thy school to learn this:  teach Thou it me.

And do Thou, the God of glory, the Father of glory, my God and my Father, accept the desire of a child who has seen that Thy glory is indeed alone worth living for.   O Lord!  Show me Thy glory.  Let it overshadow me.  Let it fill the temple of my heart.  Let me dwell in it as revealed in Christ.  And do Thou Thyself fulfil in me Thine own good pleasure, that Thy child should find his glory in seeking the glory of his Father.  Amen.

1See in the note on George Muller, at the close of this volume, how he was led to make God’s glory his first object.

21 - Twenty-First Lesson. 'If ye abide in me;' Or, The All-Inclusive Condition

Andrew Murray

TWENTY-FIRST LESSON.

‘If ye abide in me;’

Or     The All-Inclusive Condition.

‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’—John xv. 7.

160

IN all God’s intercourse with us, the promise and its conditions are inseparable.  If we fulfil the conditions, He fulfils the promise.  What He is to be to us depends upon what we are willing to be to Him.  ‘Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.’  And so in prayer the unlimited promise, Ask whatsoever ye will, has its one simple and natural condition, if ye abide in me.  It is Christ whom the Father always hears; God is in Christ, and can only be reached by being in Him; to be IN HIM is the way to have our prayer heard; fully and wholly ABIDING IN HIM, we have the right to ask whatsoever we will, and the promise that it shall be done unto us.

When we compare this promise with the experiences of most believers, we are startled by a terrible discrepancy.  Who can 161number up the countless prayers that rise and bring no answer?  The cause must be either that we do not fulfil the condition, or God does not fulfil the promise.  Believers are not willing to admit either, and therefore have devised a way of escape from the dilemma.  They put into the promise the qualifying clause our Saviour did not put there—if it be God’s will; and so maintain both God’s integrity and their own.  O if they did but accept it and hold it fast as it stands, trusting to Christ to vindicate His truth, how God’s Spirit would lead them to see the Divine propriety of such a promise to those who really abide in Christ in the sense in which He means it, and to confess that the failure in the fulfilling the condition is the one sufficient explanation of unanswered prayer.  And how the Holy Spirit would then make our feebleness in prayer one of the mightiest motives to urge us on to discover the secret, and obtain the blessing, of full abiding in Christ.

‘If ye abide in me.’  As a Christian grows in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, he is often surprised to find how the words of God grow too, in the new and deeper meaning with which they come to him.  He can look back to the day when some word of God was opened up to him and he rejoiced in the blessing he had found in it.  After a time some deeper experience gave it a new meaning, and it was as if he never had seen what it contained.  And yet once again, as he advanced in the Christian life, the same word stood before him again as a great mystery, 162until anew the Holy Spirit led him still deeper into its Divine fulness.  One of these ever-growing, never-exhausted words, opening up to us step by step the fulness of the Divine life, is the Master’s precious ‘Abide in me.’  As the union of the branch with the vine is one of growth, never-ceasing growth and increase, so our abiding in Christ is a life process in which the Divine life takes ever fuller and more complete possession of us.  The young and feeble believer may be really abiding in Christ up to the measure of his light; it is he who reaches onward to the full abiding in the sense in which the Master understood the words, who inherits all the promises connected with it.

In the growing life of abiding in Christ, the first stage is that of faith.  As the believer sees that, with all his feebleness, the command is really meant for him, his great aim is simply to believe that, as he knows he is in Christ, so now, notwithstanding unfaithfulness and failure, abiding in Christ is his immediate duty, and a blessing within his reach.  He is specially occupied with the love, and power, and faithfulness of the Saviour:  he feels his one need to be believing.

It is not long before he sees something more is needed.  Obedience and faith must go together.  Not as if to the faith he has the obedience must be added, but faith must be made manifest in obedience.  Faith is obedience at home and looking to the Master:  obedience is faith going out to do His will.  He sees how he has163been more occupied with the privilege and the blessings of this abiding than with its duties and its fruit.  There has been much of self and of self-will that has been unnoticed or tolerated:  the peace which, as a young and feeble disciple, he could enjoy in believing goes from him; it is in practical obedience that the abiding must be maintained:  ‘If ye keep my commands, ye shall abide in my love.’  As before his great aim was through the mind, and the truth it took hold of, to let the heart rest on Christ and His promises; so now, in this stage, he chief effort is to get his will united with the will of his Lord, and the heart and the life brought entirely under His rule.

And yet it is as if there is something wanting.  The will and the heart are on Christ’s side; he obeys and he loves his Lord.  But still, why is it that the fleshly nature has yet so much power, that the spontaneous motions and emotions of the inmost being are not what they should be?  The will does not approve or allow, but here is a region beyond control of the will.  And why also, even when there is not so much of positive commission to condemn, why so much of omission, the deficiency of that beauty of holiness, that zeal of love, that conformity to Jesus and His death, in which the life of self is lost, and which is surely implied in the abiding, as the Master meant it?  There must surely be something in our abiding in Christ and Christ in us, which he has not yet experienced.

It is so.  Faith and obedience are but the pathway of blessing.  Before 164giving us the parable of the vine and the branches, Jesus had very distinctly told what the full blessing is to which faith and obedience are to lead.  Three times over He had said, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments,’ and spoken of the threefold blessing with which He would crown such obedient love.  The Holy Spirit would come from the Father; the Son would manifest Himself; the Father and the Son would come and make their abode.  It is as our faith grows into obedience, and in obedience and love our whole being goes out and clings itself to Christ, that our inner life becomes opened up, and the capacity is formed within of receiving the life, the spirit, of the glorified Jesus, as a distinct and conscious union with Christ and with the Father.  The word is fulfilled in us:  ‘In that day ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me, and I in you.’  We understand how, just as Christ is in God, and God in Christ, one together not only in will and in love, but in identity of nature and life, because they exist in each other, so we are in Christ and Christ in us, in union not only of will and love, but of life and nature too.

It was after Jesus had spoken of our thus through the Holy Spirit knowing that He is in the Father, and even so we in Him and He in us, that He said, ‘Abide in me, and I in you.  Accept, consent to receive that Divine life of union with myself, in virtue of which, as you abide in me, I also abide in you, even as I abide in the Father.  So that your 165life is mine and mine is yours.’  This is the true abiding, the occupying of the position in which Christ can come and abide; so abiding in Him that the soul has come away from self to find that He has taken the place and become our life.  It is the becoming as little children who have no care, and find their happiness in trusting and obeying the love that has done all for them.

To those who thus abide, the promise comes as their rightful heritage:  Ask whatsoever ye will.  It cannot be otherwise.  Christ has got full possession of them.  Christ dwells in their love, their will, their life.  Not only has their will been given up; Christ has entered it, and dwells and breathes in it by His Spirit.  He whom the Father always hears, prays in them; they pray in Him:  what they ask shall be done unto them.

Beloved fellow-believer!  let us confess that it is because we do not abide in Christ as He would have us, that the Church is so impotent in presence of the infidelity and worldliness and heathendom, in the midst of which the Lord is able to make her more than conqueror.  Let us believe that He means what He promises, and accept the condemnation the confession implies.

But let us not be discouraged.  The abiding of the branch in the Vine is a life of never-ceasing growth.  The abiding, as the Master meant it, is within our reach, for He lives to give it us.  Let us but be ready to count all things loss, and to say, ‘Not as though I had already attained; I follow after, if that I166 may apprehend that for which I also am apprehended of Christ Jesus.’  Let us not be so much occupied with the abiding, as with Him to whom the abiding links us, and His fulness.  Let it be Him, the whole Christ, in His obedience and humiliation, in His exaltation and power, in whom our soul moves and acts; He Himself will fulfil His promise in us.

And then as we abide, and grow evermore into the full abiding, let us exercise our right, the will to enter into all God’s will.  Obeying what that will commands, let us claim what it promises.  Let us yield to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, to show each of us, according to his growth and measure, what the will of God is which we may claim in prayer.  And let us rest content with nothing less than the personal experience of what Jesus gave when He said, ‘If ye abide in me, ask whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY!’

——0——

Beloved Lord!  do teach me to take this promise anew in all its simplicity, and to be sure that the only measure of Thy holy giving is our holy willing.  Lord!  Let each word of this Thy promise be anew made quick and powerful in my soul.

Thou sayest:  Abide in me!  O my Master, my Life, my All, I do abide in Thee.  Give Thou me to grow up into all Thy fulness.  It is not the effort of faith, seeking to cling to Thee, nor even the rest of faith, trusting Thee 167to keep me; it is not the obedience of the will, nor the keeping the commandments; but it is Thyself living in me and in the Father, that alone can satisfy me.  It is Thy self, my Lord, no longer before me and above me, but one with me, and abiding in me; it is this I need, it is this I seek.  It is this I trust Thee for.

Thou sayest:  Ask whatsoever ye will!  Lord!  I know that the life of full, deep abiding will so renew and sanctify and strengthen the will that I shall have the light and the liberty to ask great things.  Lord!  let my will, dead in Thy death, living in Thy life, be bold and large in its petitions.

Thou sayest:  It shall be done.  O Thou who art the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, give me in Thyself the joyous confidence that Thou wilt make this word yet more wonderfully true to me than ever, because it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what God hath prepared for them that love Him.  Amen.

NOTE

On a thoughtful comparison of what we mostly find in books or sermons on prayer, and the teaching of the Master, we shall find one great difference:  the importance assigned to the answer to prayer is by no means the same.  In the former we find a great deal on the blessing of prayer as a spiritual exercise even if there be no answer, and on the reasons why we should be content without it.  God’s fellowship 168ought to be more to us than the gift we ask; God’s wisdom only knows what is best; God may bestow something better than what He withholds.  Though this teaching looks very high and spiritual, it is remarkable that we find nothing of it with our Lord.  The more carefully we gather together all He spoke on prayer, the clearer it becomes that He wished us to think of prayer simply as the means to an end, and that the answer was to be the proof that we and our prayer are acceptable to the Father in heaven. It is not that Christ would have us count the gifts of higher value than the fellowship and favour of the Father.  By no means.  But the Father means the answer to be the token of His favour and of the reality of our fellowship with Him.  ‘To-day thy servant knoweth that I have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king hath fulfilled the request of his servant.’

A life marked by daily answer to prayer is the proof of our spiritual maturity; that we have indeed attained to the true abiding in Christ; that our will is truly at one with God’s will; that our faith has grown strong to see and take what God has prepared for us; that the Name of Christ and His nature have taken full possession of us; and that we have been found fit to take a place among those whom God admits to His counsels, and according to whose prayer He rules the world.  These are they in whom something of man’s original dignity hath been restored, in whom, as they abide in Christ, His power as the all-prevailing Intercessor can manifest itself, in whom the glory of His Name is shown forth.   Prayer is very blessed; the answer is more blessed still, as the response from the Father that our prayer, our faith, our will are indeed as He would wish them to be.

I make these remarks with the one desire of leading my readers themselves to put together all that Christ has said on prayer, and to yield themselves to the full impression of the 169truth that when prayer is what it should be, or rather when we are what we should be, abiding in Christ, the answer must be expected.  It will bring us out from those refuges where we have comforted ourselves with unanswered prayer.  It will discover to us the place of power to which Christ has appointed His Church, and which it so little occupies.  It will reveal the terrible feebleness of our spiritual life as the cause of our not knowing to pray boldly in Christ’s Name.  It will urge us mightily to rise to a life in the full union with Christ, and in the fulness of the Spirit, as the secret of effectual prayer.  And it will so lead us on to realize our destiny:  ‘At that day:  Verily, verily, I say unto you, If ye shall ask anything of the Father, He will give it you in my Name:  ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be fulfilled.’  Prayer that is really, spiritually, in union with Jesus, is always answered.

22 - Twenty-Second Lesson. 'My words in you;' Or, The Word and Prayer

Andrew Murray

TWENTY-SECOND LESSON.

‘My words in you.’

Or,    The Word and Prayer.

‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’—John xv. 7.

170

THE vital connection between the word and prayer is one of the simplest and earliest lessons of the Christian life.  As that newly-converted heathen put it:  I pray—I speak to my father; I read—my Father speaks to me.  Before prayer, it is God’s word that prepares me for it by revealing what the Father has bid me ask.  In prayer, it is God’s word strengthens me by giving my faith its warrant and its plea.  And after prayer, it is God’s word that brings me the answer when I have prayed, for in it the Spirit gives me to hear the Father’s voice.  Prayer is not monologue but dialogue; God’s voice in response to mine in its most essential part.  Listening to God’s voice is the secret of the assurance that He will listen to mine.  ‘Incline thine ear, and hear;’ ‘Give ear to me;’ Hearken to my voice;’ are 171words which God speaks to man as well as man to God.  His hearkening will depend on ours; the entrance His words find with me, will be the measure of the power of my words with Him.   What God’s words are to me, is the test of what He Himself is to me, and so of the uprightness of my desire after Him in prayer.

It is this connection between His word and our prayer that Jesus points to when He says, ‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’  The deep importance of this truth becomes clear if we notice the other expression of which this one has taken the place.  More than once Jesus had said, “Abide in me and I in you.’  His abiding in us was the complement and the crown of our abiding in Him. But here, instead of ‘Ye in me and I in you,’ He says, ‘Ye in me and my words in you.’  His words abiding are the equivalent of Himself abiding.

What a view is here opened up to us of the place the words of God in Christ are to have in our spiritual life, and especially in our prayer.  In a man’s words he reveals himself.  In his promises he gives himself away, he binds himself to the one who receives his promise.  In his commands he sets forth his will, seeks to make himself master of him whose obedience he claims, to guide and use him as if he were part of himself.  It is through our words that spirit holds fellowship with spirit, that the spirit of 172one man passes over and transfers itself into another.  It is through the words of a man, heard and accepted, and held fast and obeyed, that he can impart himself to another.  But all this in a very relative and limited sense.

But when God, the infinite Being, in whom everything is life and power, spirit and truth, in the very deepest meaning of the words,—when God speaks forth Himself in His words, He does indeed give HIMSELF, His Love and His Life, His Will and His Power, to those who receive these words, in a reality passing comprehension.  In every promise He puts Himself in our power to lay hold of and possess; in every command He puts Himself in our power for us to share with Him His Will, His Holiness, His Perfection.  In God’s Word God gives us HIMSELF; His Word is nothing less than the Eternal Son, Christ Jesus.  And so all Christ’s words are God’s words, full of a Divine quickening life and power.  ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.’

Those who have made the deaf and dumb their study, tell us how much the power of speaking depends on that of hearing, and how the loss of hearing in children is followed by that of speaking too.  This is true in a wider sense:  as we hear, so we speak.  This is true in the highest sense of our intercourse with God.  To offer a prayer—to give utterance to certain wishes and to appeal to certain promises—is an easy thing, and can be learned of man by human wisdom.  But to pray in the Spirit, to speak words 173that reach and touch God, that affect and influence the powers of the unseen world,—such praying, such speaking, depends entirely upon our hearing God’s voice.  Just as far as we listen to the voice and language that God speaks, and in the words of God receive His thoughts, His mind, His life, into our heart, we shall learn to speak in the voice and the language that God hears.  It is the ear of the learner, wakened morning by morning, that prepares for the tongue of the learned, to speak to God as well as men, as should be (Isa. l. 4).

This hearing the voice of God is something more than the thoughtful study of the Word.  There may be a study and knowledge of the Word, in which there is but little real fellowship with the living God.  But there is also a reading of the Word, in the very presence of the Father, and under the leading of the Spirit, in which the Word comes to us in living power from God Himself; it is to us the very voice of the Father, a real personal fellowship with Himself.  It is the living voice of God that enters the heart, that brings blessing and strength, and awakens the response of a living faith that reaches the heart of God again.

It is on this hearing the voice, that the power both to obey and believe depends.  The chief thing is, not to know what God has said we must do, but that God Himself says it to us.  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 174living 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.  It is only in the full presence of God that disobedience and unbelief become impossible.

‘If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, it shall be done unto you.’  We see what this means.  In the words the Saviour gives Himself.  We must have the words in us, taken up into our will and life, reproduced in our disposition and conduct.  We must have them abiding in us:  our whole life one continued exposition of the words that are within, and filling us; the words revealing Christ within, and our life revealing Him without.  It is as the words of Christ enter our very heart, become our life and influence it, that our words will enter His heart and influence Him.  My prayer will depend on my life; what God’s words are to me and in me, my words will be to God and in God.  If I do what God says, God will do what I say.

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 175life 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 176make 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!’

——0———

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 177living 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.

23 - Twenty-Third Lesson. 'Bear fruit, that the Father may give what ye ask;' Or, Obedience the Path to Power in Prayer

Andrew Murray

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.

178

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 this179was 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 to180 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 ourrelationship 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 181will, 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 15th chapter, in connection with the abiding, but in the 14th, 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 182in 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, 8), ‘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 183instead 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 movement184 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.’

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 185we 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.

24 - Twenty-Fourth Lesson. 'In my Name;' Or, The All-prevailing Plea

Andrew Murray

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.

186

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 187I 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 allHis 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 188another 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 189good 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 190now 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.

We see thus that everything depends on our own relation to the Name:  the 191power 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 192of 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.’

——0——

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 193walk 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 194meant 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,195desired 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.

25 - Twenty-Fifth Lesson. 'At that day;' Or, The Holy Spirit and Prayer

Andrew Murray

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.

196

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 197on 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 198glorified 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 199to 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 200had 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.

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 underthe 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 influenceand 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 201within.  (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 202longer 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.’

——0——

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, 203because 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.

———0——-

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.

26 - Twenty-Sixth Lesson. 'I have prayed for thee;' Or, Christ the Intercessor

Andrew Murray

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.

204

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 205care, 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 206power 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 207liveth 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 208given 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 209Head 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 210for 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.

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.’

——0——

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 211united 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 212before 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, 213as 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.

27 - Twenty-Seventh Lesson. 'Father, I will;' Or, Christ the High Priest

Andrew Murray

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.

214

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 215perform 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 216He 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 217them 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 218be 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.

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 that219Thou 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, 220passing 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 221let 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.

28 - Twenty-Eighth Lesson. 'Father! Not what I will;' Or, Christ the Sacrifice

Andrew Murray

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.

222

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 the223 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 224had 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 pass225away 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 Lord226 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.

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 227in 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 in228 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 229own 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.

29 - Twenty-Ninth Lesson. 'According to His will;' Or, Our Boldness in Prayer

Andrew Murray

TWENTY-NINTH LESSON.

‘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.

230

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 231fathom 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 infinite232wisdom:  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.1It 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 233faith 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 234must 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 235expect 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.

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 the236 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 237child 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 238with 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 239dale 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.

30 - Thirtieth Lesson. 'An holy priesthood;' Or, The Ministry of Intercession

Andrew Murray

THIRTIETH LESSON.

‘An holy priesthood;’

Or,    The Ministry of Intercession.

‘An holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.’—I Peter ii. 5.

‘Ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord.’—Isaiah lxi. 6.

240

THE Spirit of the Lord God is upon me:  because the Lord hath anointed me.’  These are the words of Jesus in Isaiah.  As the fruit of His work all redeemed ones are priests, fellow-partakers with Him of His anointing with the Spirit as High Priest.  ‘Like the precious ointment upon the beard of Aaron, that went down to the skirts of his garments.’  As every son of Aaron, so every member of Jesus’ body has a right to the priesthood.  But not every one exercises it:  many are still entirely ignorant of it.  And yet it is the highest privilege of a child of God, the mark of greatest nearness and likeness to Him, ‘who ever liveth to pray.’  Do you doubt if this really be so?  Think of what constitutes priesthood.  There is, first, the work of the priesthood.   This has 241two sides, one Godward, the other manward.  ‘Every priest is ordained for men in things pertaining to God’ (Heb. v. 1); or, as it is said by Moses (Deut. x. 8, see also xxi. 5, xxxiii. 10; Mal. ii. 6):  ‘The Lord separated the tribe of Levi,  to stand before the Lord to minister unto Him, and to bless His Name.’  On the one hand, the priest had the power to draw nigh to God, to dwell with Him in His house, and to present before Him the blood of the sacrifice or the burning incense.  This work he did not do, however, on his own behalf, but for the sake of the people whose representative he was.  This is the other side of his work.  He received from the people their sacrifices, presented them before God, and then came out to bless in His Name, to give the assurance of His favour and to teach them His law.

A priest is thus a man who does not at all live for himself.  He lives with God and for God.  His work is as God’s servant to care for His house, His honour, and His worship, to make known to men His love and His will.  He lives with men and for men (Heb. v. 2).  His work is to find out their sin and need, and to bring it before God, to offer sacrifice and incense in their name, to obtain forgiveness and blessing for them, and then to come out and bless them in His Name.  This is the high calling of every believer.  ‘Such honour have all His saints.’  They have been redeemed with the one purpose to be in the midst of the perishing 242millions around them, God’s priests, who in conformity to Jesus, the Great High Priest, are to be the ministers and stewards of the grace of God to all around them.

And then there is the walk of the priesthood, in harmony with its work.  As God is holy, so the priest was to be especially holy.  This means not only separated from everything unclean, but holy unto God, being set apart and given up to God for His disposal.  The separation from the world and setting apart unto God was indicated in many ways.

It was seen in the clothing:  the holy garments, made after God’s own order, marked them as His (Ex. xxviii.).  It was seen in the command as to their special purity and freedom from all contact from death and defilement (Lev. xi. 22).  Much that was allowed to an ordinary Israelite was forbidden to them.  It was seen in the injunction that the priest must have no bodily defect or blemish; bodily perfection was to be the type of wholeness and holiness in God’s service.  And it was seen in the arrangement by which the priestly tribes were to have no inheritance with the other tribes; God was to be their inheritance.  Their life was to be one of faith:  set apart unto God, they were to live on Him as well as for Him.

All this is the emblem of what the character of the New Testament priest is to be.  Our priestly power with God depends on our personal life and walk.  We must be of them of whose walk on earth Jesus says, ‘They have not defiled their garments.’

243

In the surrender of what may appear lawful to others in our separation from the world, we must prove that our consecration to be holy to the Lord is whole-hearted and entire.  The bodily perfection of the priest must have its counterpart in our too being ‘without spot or blemish;’ ‘the man of God perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works,’ ‘perfect and entire, wanting nothing’ (Lev. xxi. 17-21; Eph. v. 27; 2 Tim. ii. 7; Jas. i. 4).  And above all, we consent to give up all inheritance on earth; to forsake all, and like Christ to have only God as our portion:  to possess as not possessing, and hold all for God alone: it is this marks the true priest, the man who only lives for God and his fellow-men.

And now the way to the priesthood.  In Aaron God had chosen all his sons to be priests:  each of them was a priest by birth.  And yet he could not enter upon his work without a special act of ordinance—his consecration.  Every child of God is priest in light of his birth, his blood relationship to the Great High Priest; but this is not enough:  he will exercise his power only as he accepts and realizes his consecration.

With Aaron and his sons it took place thus (Ex. xxix.):  After being washed and clothed, they were anointed with the holy oil.  Sacrifices were then offered, and with the blood the right ear, the right hand, and the right foot were touched.  And then they and their garments 244were once again sprinkled with the blood and the oil together.  And so it is as the child of God enters more fully into what THE BLOOD and THE SPIRIT of which he already is partaker, are to him, that the power of the Holy Priesthood will work in him.  The blood will take away all sense of unworthiness; the Spirit, all sense of unfitness.

Let us notice what there was new in the application of the blood to the priest.  If ever he had as a penitent brought a sacrifice for his sin, seeking forgiveness, the blood was sprinkled on the altar, but not on his person.  But now, for priestly consecration, there was to be closer contact with the blood; ear and hand and foot were by a special act brought under its power, and the whole being taken possession of and sanctified for God.  And so, when the believer, who had been content to think chiefly of the blood sprinkled on the mercy-seat as what he needs for pardon, is led to seek full priestly access to God, he feels the need of a fuller and more abiding experience of the power of the blood, as really sprinkling and cleansing the heart from an evil conscience, so that he has ‘no more conscience of sin’ (Heb. x. 2) as cleansing from all sin.  And it is as he gets to enjoy this, that the consciousness is awakened of his wonderful right of most intimate access to God, and of the full assurance that his intercessions are acceptable.

And as the blood gives the right, the Spirit gives the power, and fits for believing intercession.  He breathes into us the 245priestly spirit—burning love for God’s honour and the saving of souls.  He makes us so one with Jesus that prayer in His Name is a reality.  He strengthens us to believing, importunate prayer.  The more the Christian is truly filled with the Spirit of Christ, the more spontaneous will be his giving himself up to the life of priestly intercession.  Beloved fellow-Christians!  God needs, greatly needs, priests who can draw near to Him, who live in His presence, and by their intercession draw down the blessings of His grace on others.  And the world needs, greatly needs, priests who will bear the burden of the perishing ones, and intercede on their behalf. 

Are you willing to offer yourself for this holy work?  You know the surrender it demands—nothing less than the Christ-like giving up of all, that the saving purposes of God’s love may be accomplished among men.  Oh, be no longer of those who are content if they have salvation, and just do work enough to keep themselves warm and lively.  O let nothing keep you back from giving yourselves to be wholly and only priests—nothing else, nothing less than the priests of the Most High God.  The thought of unworthiness, of unfitness, need not keep you back.  In the Blood, the objective power of the perfect redemption works in you:  in  the Spirit its full subjective personal experience as a divine life is secured.  The Blood provides an infinite worthiness to make your prayers most acceptable:  The Spirit provides a Divine fitness, teaching you to pray just 246according to the will of God.  Every priest knew that when he presented a sacrifice according to the law of the sanctuary, it was accepted: under the covering of the Blood and Spirit you have the assurance that all the wonderful promises to prayer in the Name of Jesus will be fulfilled in you.  Abiding in union with the Great High Priest, ‘you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you.’  You will have power to pray the effectual prayer of the righteous man that availeth much.  You will not only join in the general prayer of the Church for the world, but be able in your own sphere to take up your special work in prayer—as priests, to transact it with God, to receive and know the answer, and so to bless in His Name.  Come, brother, come, and be a priest, only priest, all priest.  Seek now to walk before the Lord in the full consciousness that you have been set apart for the holy Ministry of Intercession.  This is the true blessedness of conformity to the image of God’s Son.

‘LORD TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

O Thou my blessed High Priest, accept the consecration in which my soul now would respond to Thy message.

I believe in the HOLY PRIESTHOOD OF THY SAINTS, and that I too am a priest, with power to appear before the Father, and in the prayer that avails much247bring down blessing on the perishing around me.

I believe in the POWER OF THY PRECIOUS BLOOD to cleanse from all sin, to give me perfect confidence toward God, and bring me near in the full assurance of faith that my intercession will be heard.

I believe in the ANOINTING OF THE SPIRIT, coming down daily from Thee, my Great High Priest, to sanctify me, to fill me with the consciousness of my priestly calling, and with love to souls, to teach me what is according to God’s will, and how to pray the prayer of faith.

I believe that, as Thou my Lord Jesus art Thyself in all things my life, so Thou, too, art THE SURETY FOR MY PRAYER-LIFE, and wilt Thyself draw me up into the fellowship of Thy wondrous work of intercession.

In this faith I yield myself this day to my God, as one of His anointed priests, to stand before His face to intercede in behalf of sinners, and to come out and bless in His Name.

Holy Lord Jesus!  accept and seal my consecration.  Yea, Lord, do Thou lay Thy hands on me, and Thyself consecrate me to this Thy holy work.  And let me walk among men with the consciousness and the character of a priest of the Most High God.

Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins IN HIS OWN BLOOD, AND HATH MADE US kings and priests unto God and His Father; TO HIM be glory and dominion forever and ever.  Amen

31 - Thirty-First Lesson. 'Pray without ceasing;' Or, A Life of Prayer

Andrew Murray

THIRTY-FIRST LESSON.

‘Pray without ceasing;’

Or,    A Life of Prayer.

‘Rejoice evermore.  Pray without ceasing.  In everything give thanks.—I Thess. v. 16, 17, 18.

248

OUR Lord spake the parable of the widow and the unjust judge to teach us that men ought to pray always and not faint.  As the widow persevered in seeking one definite thing, the parable appears to have reference to persevering prayer for some one blessing, when God delays or appears to refuse.  The words in the Epistles, which speak of continuing instant in prayer, continuing in prayer and watching in the same, of praying always in the Spirit, appear more to refer to the whole life being one of prayer.  As the soul is filling with the longing for the manifestation of God’s glory to us and in us, through us and around us, and with the confidence that He hears the prayers of His children; the inmost life of the soul is continually rising upward in dependence and faith, in longing desire and trustful expectation.

249

At the close of our meditations it will not be difficult to say what is needed to live such a life of prayer.  The first thing is undoubtedly the entire sacrifice of the life to God’s kingdom and glory.  He who seeks to pray without ceasing because he wants to be very pious and good, will never attain to it.  It is the forgetting of self and yielding ourselves to live for God and His honour that enlarges the heart, that teaches us to regard everything in the light of God and His will, and that instinctively recognises in everything around us the need of God’s help and blessing, an opportunity for His being glorified.  Because everything is weighed and tested by the one thing that fills the heart—the glory of God, and because the soul has learnt that only what is of God can really be to Him and His glory, the whole life becomes a looking up, a crying from the inmost heart, for God to prove His power and love and so show forth His glory.  The believer awakes to the consciousness that he is one of the watchmen on Zion’s walls, one of the Lord’s remembrancers, whose call does really touch and move the King in heaven to do what would otherwise not be done.  He understands how real Paul’s exhortation was, ‘praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit for all the saints and for me,’ and ‘continue in prayer, withal praying also for us.’  To forget oneself, to live for God and His kingdom among men, is the way to learn to pray without ceasing.

This life devoted to God must be accompanied by the deep confidence that our prayer is effectual.  We 250have seen how our Blessed Lord insisted upon nothing so much in His prayer-lessons as faith in the Father as a God who most certainly does what we ask.  ‘Ask and ye shall receive;’ count confidently on an answer, is with Him the beginning and the end of His teaching (compare Matt. vii. 8 and John xvi. 24).  In proportion as this assurance masters us, and it becomes a settled thing that our prayers do tell and that God does what we ask, we dare not neglect the use of this wonderful power:  the soul turns wholly to God, and our life becomes prayer.  We see that the Lord needs and takes time, because we and all around us are the creatures of time, under the law of growth; but knowing that not one single prayer of faith can possibly be lost that there is sometimes a needs-be for the storing up and accumulating of prayer, that persevering pray is irresistible, prayer becomes the quiet, persistent living of our life of desire and faith in the presence of our God.  O do not let us any longer by our reasonings limit and enfeeble such free and sure promises of the living God, robbing them of their power, and ourselves of the wonderful confidence they are meant to inspire.  Not in God, not in His secret will, not in the limitations of His promises, but in us, in ourselves is the hindrance; we are not what we should be to obtain the promise.  Let us open our whole heart to God’s words of promise in all their simplicity and truth:  they will search us and humble us; they will lift us up and make us glad and strong.  And to the faith that knows it gets what it asks, 251prayer is not a work or a burden, but a joy and a triumph; it becomes a necessity and a second nature.

This union of strong desire and firm confidence again is nothing but the life of the Holy Spirit within us.  The Holy Spirit dwells in us, hides Himself in the depths of our being, and stirs the desire after the Unseen and the Divine, after God Himself.  Now in groanings that cannot be uttered, then in clear and conscious assurance; now in special distinct petitions for the deeper revelation of Christ to ourselves, then in pleadings for a soul, a work, the Church or the world, it is always and alone the Holy Spirit who draws out the heart to thirst for God, to long for His being made known and glorified.  Where the child of God really lives and walks in the Spirit, where he is not content to remain carnal, but seeks to be spiritual, in everything a fit organ for the Divine Spirit to reveal the life of Christ and Christ Himself, there the never-ceasing intercession-life of the Blessed Son cannot but reveal and repeat itself in our experience.  Because it is the Spirit of Christ who prays in us, our prayer must be heard; because it is we who pray in the Spirit, there is need of time, and patience, and continual renewing of the prayer, until every obstacle be conquered, and the harmony between God’s Spirit and ours is perfect.

But the chief thing we need for such a life of unceasing prayer is, to know that Jesus teaches us to pray.  We have begun to understand a little what His teaching is.  Not the 252communication of new thoughts or views, not the discovery of failure or error, not the stirring up of desire and faith, of however much importance all this be, but the taking us up into the fellowship of His own prayer-life before the Father—this it is by which Jesus really teaches.  It was the sight of the praying Jesus that made the disciples long and ask to be taught to pray.  It is the faith of the ever-praying Jesus, whose alone is the power to pray, that teaches us truly to pray.  We know why:  He who prays is our Head and our Life.  All He has is ours and is given to us when we give ourselves all to Him.  By His blood He leads us into the immediate presence of God.  The inner sanctuary is our home, we dwell there.  And He that lives so near God, and knows that He has been brought near to bless those who are far, cannot but pray.  Christ makes us partakers with Himself of His prayer-power and prayer-life.  We understand then that our true aim must not be to work much and have prayer enough to keep the work right, but to pray much and then to work enough for the power and blessing obtained in prayer to find its way through us to men.  It is Christ who ever lives to pray, who saves and reigns.  He communicates His prayer-life to us:  He maintains it in us if we trust Him.  He is surety for our praying without ceasing.  Yes, Christ teaches to pray by showing how He does it, by doing it in us, by leading us to do it in Him and like Him.  Christ is all, the life and the strength too for a never-ceasing prayer-life. 

It is the253 sight of this, the sight of the ever-praying Christ as our life, that enables us to pray without ceasing.  Because His priesthood is the power of an endless life, that resurrection-life that never fades and never fails, andbecause His life is our life, praying without ceasing can become to us nothing less than the life-joy of heaven.  So the Apostle says:  ‘Rejoice evermore; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks.’  Borne up between the never-ceasing joy and the never-ceasing praise, never-ceasing prayer is the manifestation of the power of the eternal life, where Jesus always prays.  The union between the Vine and the branch is in very deed a prayer-union.  The highest conformity to Christ, the most blessed participation in the glory of His heavenly life, is that we take part in His work of intercession:  He and we live ever to pray.  In the experience of our union with Him, praying without ceasing becomes a possibility, a reality, the holiest and most blessed part of our holy and blessed fellowship with God.  We have our abode within the veil, in the presence of the Father.  What the Father says, we do; what the Son says, the Father does.  Praying without ceasing is the earthly manifestation of heaven come down to us, the foretaste of the life where they rest not day or night in the song of worship and adoration.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

O my Father, with 254my whole heart do I praise Thee for this wondrous life of never-ceasing prayer, never-ceasing fellowship, never-ceasing answers, and never-ceasing experience of my oneness with Him who ever lives to pray.  O my God!  keep me ever so dwelling and walking in the presence of Thy glory, that prayer may be the spontaneous expression of my life with Thee.

Blessed Saviour!  with my whole heart I praise Thee that Thou didst come from heaven to share with me in my needs and cries, that I might share with Thee in Thy all-prevailing intercession.  And I thank Thee that Thou hast taken me into the school of prayer, to teach the blessedness and the power of a life that is all prayer.  And most of all, that Thou hast taken me up into the fellowship of Thy life of intercession, that through me too Thy blessings may be dispensed to those around me.

Holy Spirit!  with deep reverence I thank Thee for Thy work in me.  It is through Thee I am lifted up into a share in the intercourse between the Son and the Father, and enter so into the fellowship of the life and love of the Holy Trinity Spirit of God!  perfect Thy work in me; bring me into perfect union with Christ my Intercessor.  Let Thine unceasing indwelling make my life one of unceasing intercession.  And let so my life become one that is unceasingly to the glory of the Father and to the blessing of those around me.  Amen.

32 - George Muller, and the Secret of his Power in Prayer

Andrew Murray

GEORGE MULLER, AND THE SECRET OF HIS

POWER IN PRAYER

255

WHEN God wishes anew to teach His Church a truth that is not being understood or practised, He mostly does so by raising some man to be in word and deed a living witness to its blessedness.  And so God has raised up in this nineteenth century, among others, George Muller to be His witness that He is indeed the Hearer of prayer.   I know of no way in which the principal truths of God’s word in regard to prayer can be more effectually illustrated and established than a short review of his life and of what he tells of his prayer-experiences.

He was born in Prussia on 25th September 1805, and is thus now eighty years of age.  His early life, even after having entered the University of Halle as a theological student, was wicked in the extreme.  Led by a friend one evening, when just twenty years of age, to a prayer meeting, he was deeply impressed, and soon after brought to know the Saviour.  Not long after he began reading missionary papers, and in course of time offered himself to the London Society for promoting Christianity to the Jews.  He was accepted as a student, but soon found that he could not in all things submit to the rules of the Society, as leaving too little liberty for the leading of the Holy Spirit.  The connection was dissolved in 1830 by mutual consent, and he became the pastor of a small congregation at Teignmouth.  In 1832 he was led to 256Bristol, and it was as pastor of Bethesda Chapel that he was led to the Orphan Home and other work, in connection with which God has so remarkably led him to trust His word and to experience how God fulfils that word.

A few extracts in regard to his spiritual life will prepare the way for what we specially wish to quote of his experiences in reference to prayer.

‘In connection with this I would mention, that the Lord very graciously gave me, from the very commencement of my divine life, a measure of simplicity and of childlike disposition in spiritual things, so that whilst I was exceedingly ignorant of the Scriptures, and was still from time to time overcome even by outward sins, yet I was enabled to carry most minute matters to the Lord in prayer.  And I have found “godliness profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”  Though very weak and ignorant, yet I had now, by the grace of God, some desire to benefit others, and he who so faithfully had once served Satan, sought now to win souls for Christ.’

It was at Teignmouth that he was led to know how to use God’s word , and to trust the Holy Spirit as the Teacher given by God to make that word clear.  He writes:—

‘God then began to show me that the word of God alone is our standard of judgment in spiritual things; that it can be explained only by the Holy Spirit; and that in our day, as well as in former times.  He is the Teacher of His people.  The office of the Holy Spirit I had not experimentally understood before that time.

‘It was my beginning to understand this latter point in particular, which had a great effect on me; for the Lord enabled me to put it to the test of experience, by laying aside commentaries, and almost every other book and simply reading the wordof God and studying it.

‘The result of this was, that the first evening that I shut myself into my257 room, to give myself to prayer and meditation over the Scriptures, I learned more in a few hours than I had done during a period of several months previously.

‘But the particular difference was that I received real strength for my soul in so doing.  I now began to try by the test of the Scriptures the things which I had learned and seen, and found that only those principles which stood the test were of real value.’

Of obedience to the word of God, he writes as follows, in connection with his being baptized:—

‘It had pleased God, in His abundant mercy, to bring my mind into such a state, that I was willing to carry out into my life whatever I should find in the Scriptures.  I could say, “I will do His will,” and it was on that account, I believe, that I saw which “doctrine is of God.”—And I would observe here, by the way, that the passage to which I have just alluded (John vii. 17) has been a most remarkable comment to me on many doctrines and precepts of our most holy faith.  For instance:  “Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.  And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.  Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away.  Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matt. v. 39-44).  “Sell that ye have, and give alms”(Luke xii. 33).  “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another”(Rom. xii. 8).  It may be said, “Surely these passages cannot be taken literally, for how then would the people of God be able to pass through the world?”  The state of mind enjoined in John vii. 17 will cause such objections to vanish.  WHOSOEVER IS WILLING TO ACT OUT these commandments of the Lord LITERALLY, will, I believe, be led with me to see that to take 258them LITERALLY is the will of God.—Those who do sotake them will doubtless often be brought into difficulties, hard to the flesh to bear, but these will have a tendency to make them constantly feel that they are strangers and pilgrims here, that this world is not their home, and thus to throw them more upon God, who will assuredly help us through any difficulty into which we may be brought by seeking to act in obedience to His word.’

This implicit surrender to God’s word led him to certain views and conduct in regard to money, which mightily influenced his future life.  They had their root in the conviction that money was a Divine stewardship, and that all money had therefore to be received and dispensed in direct fellowship with God Himself.  This led him to the adoption of the following four great rules:  1.  Not to receive any fixed salary, both because in the collecting of it there was often much that was at variance with the freewill offering with which God’s service is to be maintained, and in the receiving of it a danger of placing more dependence on human sources of income than in the living God Himself.  2.  Never to ask any human being for help, however great the need might be, but to make his wants known to the God who has promised to care for His servants and to hear their prayer.  3.  To take this command (Luke xii. 33) literally, ‘Sell that thou hast and give alms,’ and never to save up money, but to spend all God entrusted to him on God’s poor, on the work of His kingdom.  4.  Also to take Rom. xiii. 8, ‘Owe no man anything,’ literally, and never to buy on credit, or be in debt for anything, but to trust God to provide.

This mode of living was not easy at first.  But Muller testifies it was most blessed in bringing the soul to rest in God, and drawing it into closer union with Himself when inclined to backslide.  ‘For it will not do, it is not possible, to live in sin, and at the same time, by communion with God, to draw down from heaven everything one needs for the life that now is.’

Not long after his259 settlement at Bristol, ‘THE SCRIPTURAL KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTION FOR HOME AND ABROAD’ was established for aiding in Day, Sunday School, Mission and Bible work.  Of this Institution the Orphan Home work, by which Mr. Muller is best known, became a branch.  It was in 1834 that his heart was touched by the case of an orphan brought to Christ in one of the schools, but who had to go to a poorhouse where its spiritual wants would not be cared for.  Meeting shortly after with a life of Franke, he writes (Nov, 20, 1835):  ‘Today I have had it very much laid on my heart no longer merely to think about the establishment of an Orphan Home, but actually to set about it, and I have been very much in prayer respecting it, in order to ascertain the Lord’s mind.  May God make it plain.’  And again, Nov. 25:  ‘I have been again much in prayer yesterday and today about the Orphan Home, and am more and more convinced that it is of God.  May He in mercy guide me.  The three chief reasons are—1.  That God may be glorified, should He be pleased to furnish me with the means, in its being seen that it is not a vain thing to trust Him; and that thus the faith of His children may be strengthened.  2.  The spiritual welfare of fatherless and motherless children.  3.  Their temporal welfare.’

After some months of prayer and waiting on God, a house was rented, with room for thirty children , and in course of time three more, containing in all 120 children.  The work was carried on it this way for ten years, the supplies for the needs of the orphans being asked and received of God alone.  It was often a time of sore need and much prayer, but a trial of faith more precious than of gold was found unto praise and honour and glory of God.  The Lord was preparing His servant for greater things.  By His providence and His Holy Spirit, Mr. Muller was led to desire, and to wait upon God till he received from Him, the sure promise of £15,000 for a Home to contain 300 children.  This first Home was opened in 2601849.  In 1858, a second and third Home, for 950 more orphans, was opened, costing £35,000.  And in 1869 and 1870, a fourth and a fifth Home, for 850 more, at an expense of £50,000, making the total number of the orphans 2100.

In addition to this work, God has given him almost as much as for the building of the Orphan Homes, and the maintenance of the orphans, for other work, the support of schools and missions, Bible and tract circulation.  In all he has received from God, to be spent in His work, during these fifty years, more than one million pounds sterling.  How little he knew, let us carefully notice, that when he gave up his little salary of £35 a year in obedience to the leading of God’s word and the Holy Spirit, what God was preparing to give him as the reward of obedience and faith; and how wonderfully the word was to be fulfilled to him:  ‘Thou hast been faithful over few things; I will set thee over many things.’

And these things have happened for an ensample to us.  God calls us to be followers of George Muller, even as he is of Christ.  His God is our God; the same promises are for us; the same service of love and faith in which he laboured is calling for us on every side.  Let us in connection with our lessons in the school of prayer study the way in which God gave George Muller such power as a man of prayer:  we shall find in it the most remarkable illustration of some of the lessons which we have been studying with the blessed Master in the word.  We shall specially have impressed upon us His first great lesson, that if we will come to Him in the way He has pointed out, with definite petitions, made known to us by the Spirit through the word as being according to the will of God, we may most confidently believe that whatsoever we ask it shall be done.

261

PRAYER AND THE WORD OF GOD.

We have more than once seen that God’s listening to our voice depends upon our listening to His voice.  (See Lessons 22 and 23.)  We must not only have a special promise to plead, when we make a special request, but our whole life must be under the supremacy of the word:  the word must be dwelling in us.  The testimony of George Muller on this point is most instructive.  He tells us how the discovery of the true place of the word of God, and the teaching of the Spirit with it, was the commencement of a new era in his spiritual life.  Of it he writes:—

‘Now the scriptural way of reasoning would have been:  God Himself has condescended to become an author, and I am ignorant about that precious book which His Holy Spirit has caused to be written through the instrumentality of His servants, and it contains that which I ought to know, and the knowledge of which will lead me to true happiness; therefore I ought to read again and again this most precious book, this book of books, most earnestly, most prayerfully, and with much meditation; and in this practice I ought to continue all the days of my life.  For I was aware, though I read it but little, that I knew scarcely anything of it.  But instead of acting thus and being led by my ignorance of the word of God to study it more, my difficulty in understanding it, and the little enjoyment I had in it, made me careless of reading it (for much prayerful reading of the word gives not merely more knowledge, but increases the delight we have in reading it); and thus, like many believers, I practically preferred, for the first four years of my divine life, the works of uninspired men to the oracles of the living God.  The consequence was that I remained a babe, both in knowledge and grace.  In knowledge, I say; for all true knowledge must be derived, by the Spirit, from the word.  And as262 I neglected the word, I was for nearly four years so ignorant, that I did not clearly know even the fundamental points of our holy faith.  And this lack of knowledge most sadly kept me back from walking steadily in the ways of God.  For when it pleased the Lord in August 1829 to bring me really to the Scriptures, my life and walk became very different.  And though ever since that I have very much fallen short of what I might and ought to be, yet by the grace of God I have been enabled to live much nearer to Him than before.  If any believers read this who practically prefer other books to the Holy Scriptures, and who enjoy the writings of men much more than the word of God, may they be warned by my loss.  I shall consider this book to have been the means of doing much good, should it please the Lord, through its instrumentality, to lead some of His people no longer to neglect the Holy Scriptures, but to give them that preference which they have hitherto bestowed on the writings of men.

‘Before I leave this subject, I would only add:  If the reader understands very little of the word of God, he ought to read it very much; for the Spirit explains the word by the word.  And if he enjoys the reading of the word little, that is just the reason why he should read it much; for the frequent reading of the Scriptures creates a delight in them, so that the more we read them, the more we desire to do so.

‘Above all, he should seek to have it settled in his own mind that God alone by His Spirit can teach him, and that therefore, as God will be inquired of for blessings, it becomes him to seek God’s blessing previous to reading, and also whilst reading.

‘He should have it, moreover, settled in his mind that although the Holy Spirit is the best and sufficient Teacher, yet that this Teacher does not always teach immediately when we desire it, and that therefore we may have to entreat Him again and again for the explanation of certain passages; but that He will surely teach us at last, if indeed we 263are seeking for light prayerfully, patiently, and with a view to the glory of God.’ 4

 We find in his journal frequent mention made of his spending two and three hours in prayer over the word for the feeding of his spiritual life.  As the fruit of this, when he had need of strength and encouragement in prayer, the individual promises were not to him so many arguments from a book to be used with God, but living words which he had heard the Father’s living voice speak to him, and which he could now bring to the Father in living faith.

PRAYER AND THE WILL OF GOD.

One of the greatest difficulties with young believers is to know how they can find out whether what they desire is according to God’s will.  I count it one of the most precious lessons God wants to teach through the experience of George Muller, that He is willing to make known, of things of which His word says nothing directly, that they are His will for us, and that we may ask them.  The teaching of the Spirit, not without or against the word, but as something above and beyond it, in addition to it, without which we cannot see God’s will, is the heritage of every believer.  It is through THE WORD, AND THE WORD ALONE, that the Spirit teaches, applying the general principles or promises to our special need.  And it is THE SPIRIT, AND THE SPIRIT ALONE, who can really make the word a light on our path, whether the path of duty in our daily walk, or the path of faith in our approach to God.  Let us try and notice in what childlike simplicity and teachableness it was that the discovery of God’s will was so surely and so clearly made known to His servant.

With regard to the building of the first Home and the assurance he had of its being God’s will, he writes in May 1850, just after 264it had been opened, speaking of the great difficulties there were, and how little likely it appeared to nature that they would be removed:  ‘But while the prospect before me would have been overwhelming had I looked at it naturally, I was never even for once permitted to question how it would end.  For as from the beginning I was sure it was the will of Godthat I should go to the work of building for Him this large Orphan Home, so also from the beginning I was as certain that the whole would be finished as if the Home had been already filled.’

The way in which he found out what was God’s will, comes out with special clearness in his account of the building of the second Home; and I ask the reader to study with care the lesson the narrative conveys:—

‘Dec. 5, 1850.—Under these circumstances I can only pray that the Lord in His tender mercy would not allow Satan to gain an advantage over me.  By the grace of God my heart says:  Lord, if I could be sure that it is Thy will that I should go forward in this matter, I would do so cheerfully; and, on the other hand, if I could be sure that these are vain, foolish, proud thoughts, that they are not from Thee, I would, by Thy grace, hate them, and entirely put them aside.

‘My hope is in God:  He will help and teach me.  Judging, however, from His former dealings with me, it would not be a strange thing to me, nor surprising, if He called me to labour yet still more largely in this way.

‘The thoughts about enlarging the Orphan work have not yet arisen on account of an abundance of money having lately come in; for I have had of late to wait for about seven weeks upon God, whilst little, very little comparatively, came in, i.e. about four times as much was going out as came in; and, had not the Lord previously sent me large sums, we should have been distressed indeed.

‘Lord!  how can Thy servant know Thy will in this matter?  Wilt Thou be pleased to teach him!

December 11.—During the 265last six days, since writing the above, I have been, day after day, waiting upon God concerning this matter.  It has generally been more or less all the day on my heart.  When I have been awake at night, it has not been far from my thoughts.  Yet all this without the least excitement.  I am perfectly calm and quiet respecting it.  My soul would be rejoiced to go forward in this service, could I be sure that the Lord would have me to do so; for then, notwithstanding the numberless difficulties, all would be well; and His Name would be magnified.

‘On the other hand, were I assured that the Lord would have me to be satisfied with my present sphere of service, and that I should not pray about enlarging the work, by His grace I could, without an effort, cheerfully yield to it; for He has brought me into such a state of heart, that I only desire to please Him in this matter.  Moreover, hitherto I have not spoken about this thing even to my beloved wife, the sharer of my joys, sorrows, and labours for more than twenty years; nor is it likely that I shall do so for some time to come:  for I prefer quietly to wait on the Lord, without conversing on this subject, in order that thus I may be kept the more easily, by His blessing, from being influenced by things from without.  The burden of my prayer concerning this matter is, that the Lord would not allow me to make a mistake, and that He would teach me to do His will.

‘December 26.—Fifteen days have elapsed since I wrote the preceding paragraph.  Every day since then I have continued to pray about this matter, and that with a goodly measure of earnestness, by the help of God.  There has passed scarcely an hour during these days, in which, whilst awake, this matter has not been more or less before me.  But all without even a shadow of excitement.  I converse with no one about it.  Hitherto have I not even done so with my dear wife.  For this I refrain still, and deal with God alone about the matter, in order that no 266outward influence and no outward excitement may keep me from attaining unto a clear discovery of His will.  I have the fullest and most peaceful assurance that He will clearly show me His will.  This evening I have had again an especial solemn season for prayer, to seek to know the will of God.  But whilst I continue to entreat and beseech the Lord, that He would not allow me to be deluded in this business, I may say I have scarcely any doubt remaining on my mind as to what will be the issue, even that I should go forward in this matter.  As this, however, is one of the most momentous steps that I have ever taken, I judge that I cannot go about this matter with too much caution, prayerfulness, and deliberation.  I am in no hurry about it.  I could wait for years, by God’s grace, were this His will, before even taking one single step toward this thing, or even speaking to anyone about it; and, on the other hand, I would set to work tomorrow, were the Lord to bid me do so.  This calmness of mind, this having no will of my own in the matter, this only wishing to please my Heavenly Father in it, this only seeking His and not my honour in it; this state of heart, I say, is the fullest assurance to me that my heart is not under a fleshly excitement, and that, if I am helped thus to go on, I shall know the will of God to the full.  But, while I write this, I cannot but add at the same time, that I do crave the honour and the glorious privilege to be more and more used by the Lord.

‘I desire to be allowed to provide scriptural instruction for a thousand orphans, instead of doing so for 300.  I desire to expound the Holy Scriptures regularly to a thousand orphans, instead of doing so to 300.  I desire that it may be yet more abundantly manifest that God is still the Hearer and Answerer of prayer, and that He is the living God now as He ever was and ever will be, when He shall simply, in answer to prayer, have condescended to provide me with a house for 700 orphans and with means to support them.  This last consideration is the 267most important point in my mind.  The Lord’s honour is the principal point with me in this whole matter; and just because this is the case, if He would be more glorified by not going forward in this business, I should by His grace be perfectly content to give up all thoughts about another Orphan House.  Surely in such a state of mind, obtained by the Holy Spirit, Thou, O my Heavenly Father, wilt not suffer Thy child to be mistaken, much less deluded.  By the help of God I shall continue further day by day to wait upon Him in prayer, concerning this thing, till He shall bid me act.

‘Jan. 2, 1851.—A week ago I wrote the preceding paragraph.  During this week I have still been helped day by day, and more than once every day, to seek the guidance of the Lord about another Orphan House.  The burden of my prayer has still been, that He in His great mercy would keep me from making a mistake.  During the last week the book of Proverbs has come in the course of my Scripture reading, and my heart has been refreshed in reference to this subject by the following passages:  “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths”  (Prov. iii. 5, 6).  By the grace of God I do acknowledge the Lord in all my ways, and in this thing in particular; I have therefore the comfortable assurance that He will direct my paths concerning this part of my service, as to whether I shall be occupied in it our not.  Further:  “The integrity of the upright shall preserve them”  (Prov. xi. 3).  By the grace of God I am upright in this business.  My honest purpose is to get glory to God.  Therefore I expect to be guided aright.  Further:  “Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established”  (Prov. xvi. 3).   I do commit my works unto the Lord, and therefore expect that my thoughts will be established.  My heart is more and more coming to a calm, quiet, and settled assurance, that the Lord will condescend to use2 me 268still further in the orphan work.  Here Lord is Thy servant.’

When later he decided to build two additional houses, Nos. 4 and 5, he writes thus again:—

‘Twelve days have passed away since I wrote the last paragraph.  I have still day by day been enabled to wait upon the Lord with reference to enlarging the Orphan work, and have been during the whole of this period also in perfect peace, which is the result of seeking in this thing only the Lord’s honour and the temporal and spiritual benefit of my fellow-men.  Without an effort could I by His grace put aside all thoughts about this whole affair, if only assured that it is the will of God that I should do so; and, on the other hand, would at once go forward, if He would have it be so.  I have still kept this matter entirely to myself.  Though it be now about seven weeks, since day by day, more or less, my mind has been exercised about it, and since I have been daily praying about it, yet not one human being knows of it.  As yet I have not even mentioned it to my dear wife in order that thus, by quietly waiting upon God, I might not be influenced by what might be said to me on the subject.  This evening has been particularly set apart for prayer, beseeching the Lord once more not to allow me to be mistaken in this thing, and much less to be deluded by the devil.  I have also sought to let all the reasons against building another Orphan House, and all the reasons for doing so pass before my mind:  and now for the clearness and definiteness, write them down. . . .

‘Much, however, as the nine previous reasons weigh with me, yet they would not decide me were there not one more.  It is this.  After having for months pondered the matter, and having looked at it in all its bearings and with all its difficulties, and then having been finally led, after much prayer, to decide on this enlargement, my mind is at peace.  The child who has again and again besought His Heavenly Father not to allow him to be 269deluded, nor even to make a mistake, is at peace, perfectly at peace concerning this decision; and has thus the assurance that the decision come to, after much prayer during weeks and months, is the leading of the Holy Spirit; and therefore purposes to go forward, assuredly believing that he will not be confounded, for he trusts in God.  Many and great may be his difficulties; thousands and ten thousands of prayers may have ascended to God, before the full answer may be obtained; much exercise of faith and patience may be required; but in the end it will again be seen, that His servant, who trusts in Him, has not been confounded.’

PRAYER AND THE GLORY OF GOD.

We have sought more than once to enforce the truth, that while we ordinarily seek the reasons of our prayers not being heard in the thing we ask not being according to the will of God, Scripture warns us to find the cause in ourselves, in our not being in the right state or not asking in the right spirit.  The thing may be in full accordance with His will, but the asking, the spirit of the supplicant, not; then we are not heard.  As the great root of all sin is self and self-seeking, so there is nothing that even in our more spiritual desires so effectually hinders God in answering as this:  we pray for our own pleasure or glory.  Prayer to have power and prevail must ask for the glory of God; and he can only do this as he is living for God’s glory.

In George Muller we have one of the most remarkable instances on record of God’s Holy Spirit leading a man deliberately and systematically, at the outset of a course of prayer, to make the glorifying of God his first and only object.  Let us ponder well what he says, and learn the lesson God would teach us through him:—

‘I had constantly cases brought before me, which proved that one of the especial things which the children of God 270needed in our day, was to have their faith strengthened.

‘I longed, therefore, to have something to point my brethren to, as a visible proof that our God and Father is the same faithful God as ever He was; as willing as ever to PROVE Himself to be the LIVING GOD in our day as formerly, to all who put their trust in Him.

‘My spirit longed to be instrumental in strengthening their faith, by giving them not only instances from the word of God, of His willingness and ability to help all who rely upon Him, but to show them by proofs that He is the same in our day.  I knew that the word of God ought to be enough, and it was by grace enough for me; but still I considered I ought to lend a helping hand to my brethren.

‘I therefore judged myself bound to be the servant of the Church of Christ, in the particular point in which I had obtained mercy; namely, in being able to take God at His word and rely upon it.  The first object of the work was, and is still:  that God might be magnified by the fact that the orphans under my care are provided with all they need, only by prayer and faith, without any one being asked; thereby it may be seen that God is FAITHFUL STILL, AND HEARS PRAYER STILL.

‘I have again these last days prayed much about the Orphan House, and have frequently examined my heart; that if it were at all my desire to establish it for the sake of gratifying myself, I might find it out.  For as I desire only the Lord’s glory, I shall be glad to be instructed by the instrumentality of my brother, if the matter be not of Him.

‘When I began the Orphan work in 1835, my chief object was the glory of God, by giving a practical demonstration as to what could be accomplished simply through the instrumentality of prayer and faith, in order thus to benefit the Church at large, and to lead a careless world to see the reality of the things of God, by showing them in this work, that the living God is still, as 4000 years 271ago, the living God.  This my aim has been abundantly honoured.  Multitudes of sinners have been thus converted, multitudes of the children of God in all parts of the world have been benefited by this work, even as I had anticipated.  But the larger the work as grown, the greater has been the blessing, bestowed in the very way in which I looked for blessing:  for the attention of hundreds of thousands has been drawn to the work; and many tens of thousands have come to see it.  All this leads me to desire further and further to labour on in this way, in order to bring yet greater glory to the Name of the Lord.  That He may be looked at, magnified, admired, trusted in, relied on at all times, is my aim in this service; and so particularly in this intended enlargement.  That it may be seen how much one poor man, simply by trusting in God, can bring about by prayer; and that thus other children of God may be led to carry on the work of God in dependence upon Him; and that children of God may be led increasingly to trust in Him in their individual positions and circumstances, therefore I am led to this further enlargement.’

PRAYER AND TRUST IN GOD.

There are other points on which I would be glad to point out what is to be found in Mr. Muller’s narrative, but one more must suffice.  It is the lesson of firm and unwavering trust in God’s promise as the secret of persevering prayer.  If once we have, in submission to the teaching of the Spirit in the word, taken hold of God’s promise, and believed that the Father has heard us, we must not allow ourselves by any delay or unfavourable appearances be shaken in our faith.

‘The full answer to my daily prayers was far from being realized; yet there was abundant encouragement granted by the Lord, to continue in prayer.  But suppose, even, that far less had come in than was received, still, after having come to the conclusion, 272upon scriptural grounds, after much prayer and self-examination, I ought to have gone on without wavering, in the exercise of faith and patience concerning this object; and thus all the children of God, when once satisfied that anything which they bring before God in prayer, is according to His will, ought to continue in believing, expecting, persevering prayer until the blessing is granted.  Thus am I myself now waiting upon God for certain blessings, for which I have daily besought Him for ten years and six months without one day’s intermission.  Still the fullanswer is not yet given concerning the conversion of certain individuals, though in the meantime I have received many thousands of answers to prayer.  I have also prayed daily without intermission for the conversion of other individuals about ten years, for others six or seven years, for others from three or two years; and still the answer is not yet granted concerning those persons, while in the meantime many thousands of my prayers have been answered, and also souls converted, for whom I had been praying.  I lay particular stress on this for the benefit of those who may suppose that I need only to ask of God, and receive at once; or that I might pray concerning anything, and the answer would surely come.  One can only expect to obtain answers to prayers which are according to the mind of God; and even then, patience and faith may be exercised for many years, even as mine are exercised, in the matter to which I have referred; and yet am I daily continuing in prayer, and expecting the answer, and so surely expecting the answer, that I have often thanked God that He will surely give it, though now for nineteen years faith and patience have thus been exercised.  Be encouraged, dear Christians, with fresh earnestness to give yourselves to prayer, if you can only be sure that you ask things which are for the glory of God.

‘But the most remarkable point is this, that£6, 6s. 6d. from Scotland supplied me, as far as can be known now, with all 273the means necessary for fitting up and promoting the New Orphan Houses.  Six years and eight months I have been day by day, and generally several times daily, asking the Lord to give me the needed means for this enlargement of the Orphan work, which, according to calculations made in the spring of 1861, appeared to be about fifty thousand pounds:  the total of this amount I had now received.  I praise and magnify the Lord for putting this enlargement of the work into my heart, and for giving me courage and faith for it; and above all, for sustaining my faith day by day without wavering.  When the last portion of the money was received, I was no more assured concerning the whole, that I was at the time I had not received one single donation towards this large sum.  I was at the beginning, after once having ascertained His mind, through most patient and heart-searching waiting upon God, as fully assured that He would bring it about, as if the two houses, with their hundreds of orphans occupying them, had been already before me.  I make a few remarks here for the sake of young believers in connection with this subject:  1.  Be slow to take new steps in the Lord’s service, or in your business, or in your families:  weigh everything well; weigh all in the light of the Holy Scriptures and in the fear of God.  2.  Seek to have no will of your own, in order to ascertain the mind of God, regarding any steps you propose taking, so that you can honestly say you are willing to do the will of God, if He will only please to instruct you.  3.  But when you have found out what the will of God is, seek for His help, and seek it earnestly, perseveringly, patiently, believingly, expectantly; and you will surely in His own time and way obtain it.

‘To suppose that we have difficulty about money only would be a mistake:  there occur hundreds of other wants and of other difficulties.  It is a rare thing that a day occurs 274without some difficulty or some want; but often there are many difficulties and many wants to be met and overcome the same day.  All these are met by prayer and faith, our universal remedy; and we have never been confounded.  Patient, persevering, believing prayer, offered up to God, in the Name of the Lord Jesus, has always, sooner or later, brought the blessing.  I do not despair, by God’s grace, of obtaining any blessing, provided I can be sure it would be for any real good, and for the glory of God.

END