With Christ in the school of prayer, by Andrew Murray, 65

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.

But, it may be asked, is it not best to make our wishes known to God, and then to leave it to Him to decide what is best, without seeking to assert our will? By no means. This is the very essence of the prayer of faith, to which Jesus sought to train His disciples, that it does not only make known its desire and then leave the decision to God. That would be the prayer of submission, for cases in which we cannot know God’s will. But the prayer of faith, finding God’s will in some promise of the Word, pleads for that till it come. In Matthew (ix. 28) we read Jesus said to the blind man: ‘Believe ye that I can do this?’ Here, in Mark, He says: ‘What wilt thou that I should do?’ In both cases He said that faith had saved them. And so He said to the Syrophenician woman, too: ‘Great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.’ Faith is nothing but the purpose of the will resting on God’s word, and saying: I must have it. 

To believe truly is to will firmly. But is not such a will at variance with our dependence on God and our submission to Him? By no means; it is much rather the true submission that honours God. It is only when the child has yielded his own will in entire surrender to the Father, that he receives from the Father liberty and power to will what he would have. But, when once the believer has accepted the will of God, as revealed through the Word and Spirit, as his will, too, then it is the will of God that His child should use this renewed will in His service. The will is the highest power in the soul; grace wants above everything to sanctify and restore this will, one of the chief traits of God’s image, to full and free exercise. As a son, who only lives for his father’s interests, who seeks not his own but his father’s will is trusted by the father with his business, so God speaks to His child in all truth, ‘What wilt thou?’ It is often spiritual sloth that, under the appearance of humility, professes to have no will, because it fears the trouble of searching out the will of God, or, when found, the struggle of claiming it in faith. True humility is ever in company with strong faith, which only seeks to know what is according to the will of God, and then boldly claims the fulfilment of the promise: ‘Ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’