With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray, 29

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

According to this teaching of the Master, prayer consists of two parts, has two sides, a human and a Divine.  The human is the asking, the Divine is the giving.  Or, to look at both from the human side, there is the asking and the receiving—the two halves that make up a whole.  It is as if He would tell us that we are not to rest without an answer, because it is the will of God, the rule in the Father’s family:  every childlike believing petition is granted.  If no answer comes, we are not to sit down in the sloth that calls itself resignation, and suppose that it is not God’s will to give an answer.  No; there must be something in the prayer that is not as God would have it, childlike and believing; we must seek for grace to pray so that the answer may come.  It is far easier to the flesh to submit without the answer than to yield itself to be searched and purified by the Spirit, until it has learnt to pray the prayer of faith.

It is one of the terrible marks of the diseased state of Christian life in these days, that there are so many who rest content without the distinct experience of answer to prayer. They pray daily, they ask many things, and trust that some of them will be heard, but knowlittle of direct definite answer to prayer as the rule of daily life.  And it is this the Father wills:  He seeks daily intercourse with His children in listening to and granting their petitions. He wills that I should come to Him day by day with distinct requests; He wills day by day to do for me what I ask.  It was in His answer to prayer that the saints of old learned to know God as the Living One, and were stirred to praise and love (Ps. xxxiv., lxvi. 19, cxvi. 1).  Our Teacher waits to imprint this upon our minds:  prayer and its answer, the child asking and the father giving, belong to each other.