The passage: People ought always to pray.
Because we cannot do what we would as we would, we are driven to look for help, and that gives us a new starting point. Every difficulty points to something our theory of life has not yet taken in, and checks our tendency to leave the narrow path. But there is a reality of being in which everything is easy and plain: oneness with the Lord of Life. To pray for that is the first thing, and every difficulty hedges us toward it. If I set out the reasonableness of prayer, remember it is for action, not speculation: prayer is a thing to be done, and it matters nothing whether you agree with me if you do not pray. I want to help someone pray, not to explain how a man might pray and still be a reasonable soul.
First, the parable. It is one of many in which the Lord takes a story about a very common or bad person to argue, from the lesser to the greater, about the way of the All-righteous. Did the unrighteous judge, to save himself annoyance, punish a man who had not offended him for the sake of a woman he cared nothing about? And shall not the living Justice avenge his praying friends, while he bears patiently with their enemies over the injuries done them? That is how I take the phrase the Revision rightly renders “and he is long-suffering over them.” He will avenge them speedily; yet “when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”
Here is a word of the Lord about prayer, and it is a comfort that he recognizes the difficulty: we need encouragement to go on praying, it looks as if we were not heard, and no wonder we are ready to faint. In his parable the suppliant must go again and again to the one who can help her, and wins only at last. Yet he allows no actual delay on God’s part, so he plainly knows how things must look to those he wants to keep praying. He teaches us to go not by the look of things but by the reality behind it; one necessity of God’s own willed nature outweighs a whole army of appearances. It looks as if he does not hear you: never mind; he does, he must; go on as the woman did, and you too will be heard. She is heard at last because of her much going; God hears at once and will avenge speedily. The judge cared nothing for the woman; those who cry to God are his chosen, as their very crying shows. He made them to cry, and they cry: will he not hear them? They exist to pray, that there may be communion between them and him. A gulf of indifference lay between the woman and the judge; God and those who seek him are closer than hands clasped in love. This is bold, given the delay the parable admits. Why then does he seem to check himself with a sigh: “Howbeit when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” After all he had said and done, and time given for the holy leaven to work, would he find men trusting the Father? Would they be beyond the tyranny of appearances, children enough to believe that God was hearing and working for them, though his ways are so wide and his goal for them so high that they could detect no movement toward it? The sigh never meant that God might do more than he was doing, but that the Father would have a dreary wait before his children would trust him; it recognizes man’s slowly yielded part in faith, and his blame for not trusting.
He seems here to refer to his second coming. About its time he refused information; about its manner he said it would be unexpected; about our duty he insisted that we be ready, faithful and at our work. Those who say “Lo here, lo there” about the signs of his coming think to be too keen for him; told to watch lest he find them neglecting their work, they stare about, watching lest he succeed in coming like a thief! If we gave ourselves to obedience instead of speculation, what a difference would soon be seen in the world! To the multitude of so-called religious questions the Lord would answer, “Strive to enter in at the strait gate”! Many eat and drink and talk and teach in his presence; few do what he says. Obedience is the one key of life.
I would meet difficulties, not answer objections: remove stumbling-blocks from the path of the man who would pray, and help him pray. If we live not by our own will but another’s, there is reason in prayer, and only then. To the man who refuses that other will I have nothing to say; the hour may come when he wishes there were someone to pray to, but now I cannot help him.
If there is a God and I am his creature, some communication between us may be, should be, must be open. If someone allows a God not good enough to care for his creatures, I grant it would be foolish to pray to him. But the notion that, with all the good impulses in us, we are the offspring of a cold-hearted devil is so horribly inconsistent that I would ask that man what cold-hearted disregard for truth makes him capable of supposing it. God’s terrors, or if not his terrors then his sorrows, will yet speak to such a man; the divine something in him will love, and the love be left moaning.
Suppose I find myself like one away from home, even in a kind of prison. I can rule neither the world I live in nor my own thoughts and desires. I cannot quiet my passions, order my likings, determine my ends, will my growth, control my memory, or love or hate where I would; I am no king over myself. I cannot supply my own needs, nor always tell which of my seeming needs are impostors. My being is too much for me: I can neither understand it, be satisfied with it, nor better it. May that not well give me pause, the pause that ends in prayer? I cannot account for my existence, had no hand in it, and cannot end it. I can do nothing to make up to those I love, or those I hate, for the evils I have done them. In my worst moments I disbelieve in my best, and in my best I loathe my worst; there is in me no wholeness; life is no good to me, for I scorn myself. Can it be strange, then, that I think there ought to be somewhere a being who accounts for himself and for me, and makes the round of my existence just; one whose presence in my being is imperative, not merely to supplement it but to make my existence a good to me? A life not rounded in itself, but dependent on what it cannot know, cannot be a known good to itself; it longs for a logos to be the interpreting soul of its cosmos, a logos it cannot have. To know God present, where he is the essential life, must be absolutely necessary to that life. He who is made in God’s image must know him or be desolate: the child must have the Father! My soul’s desolation without him bears witness. It cannot act from itself except in God; what seems acting from itself without him is only yielding to impulse, and all within is disorder and spasm. A cry behind me and a voice before tell me I must rise above my present self, perhaps above all my possible self, and I do not see how. I am an unknown I shut up in a world of consciousness, itself unknown; surely this world of my unwilled, compelled existence cannot be unknown or impenetrable to him from whom I am! Is it not his thinking in which I think, his consciousness by which I am conscious? What passes in me must be known to him far more thoroughly than to me. Though I flew toward the dawn or settled at the farthest sea, his hand would lead and hold me. If I speak to him, however low, or only think to him, surely he, my original, in whose life and will alone I think of him, hears and knows and acknowledges! Shall I not tell him, then, that he has troubled me by making me, that I am unfit to be what I am, that my being is not yet a good to me, that I need a law to account for it in righteousness and show me how to be a good and not an evil? Shall I not cry to him to comfort me, to move his breath on the waters of the Chaos he has made, to be my rest and strength, to deliver me from my sins and make me clean and glad? Such a cry is of the child to the Father; if there is a Father, he will hear, and let the child know he hears. Every need of God that lifts up the heart is a seeking of God, a begging for himself, the profoundest prayer, and the root and inspirer of all other prayer.
If it is reasonable for me to cry thus, God cannot but hear; a being who could not hear or would not answer prayer could not be God.
“But granting all this, is what you call a necessary truth an existing fact? You say, ‘It must be so’; I say, ‘What if there is no God?’ Convince me that prayer is heard, and I shall know. We know the wind blows; why should we not know that God answers prayer? Why should the question need reasoning about at all?”
I reply: what if God does not care to have you know it at second hand? There is some testimony, and might be more were such things not so personal and delicate to talk about. But no testimony can be conclusive, since like a reported miracle it can always be put aside, and the conviction so gained is of little value.
Proof is scarcely possible for inward experience, and the better part of the evidence is of that kind: the testifier may be truthful yet utterly self-deceived. Take King David: old poetry, in the most indefinite language in the world! Many psalms are a cry as true as ever came from depth of pain or height of deliverance; yet it may all have been only the waves of the psychical aether! I lay nothing on testimony now, not valuing the bare assent of the intellect. The only assurance worth having, though the most incontestable evidence came from a thousand quarters, is that gained by personal experience, which a man can least readily receive from another or pass on as evidence. Even the evidence of Jesus Christ could not take its place. A truth matters enormously for the life, that is, the heart, conscience, and will; little as a fact for the understanding. God may hear every prayer ever offered, and a man may believe he does, and be none the better, so long as he has no prayers to be heard and no answers to receive. Reader, if you are in trouble, try whether God will not help you; if you are in no need, why ask about prayer? He knows little of himself who does not know he is wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked; but until he suspects a need, how can he pray? For one who does not want to pray I would not lift a straw to defeat him in the argument whether God hears; let him think what he will; it matters nothing in heaven or on earth, and whether in hell I do not know.
I am almost ashamed to mention the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the results of simultaneous petition; science itself should show it absurd. A God who could be moved one way or another like that is not worth believing in, nor is he the God Jesus Christ believed in, who said he knew. I cannot believe in a God who would fail to hear a single prayer, even the feeblest or worst; but a God who would grant every request of every man or company of men would be an evil God, no God but a demon. A God who hangs in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till enough men combine to send up prayer with force to turn his arms, is absurd. God waits to be gracious, not to be tempted. A man who proposes such a test has no worthy idea of a God and might well disbelieve in any; better that than believe in an unworthy one.
“But I want to believe in God. I want to know there is a God who answers prayer. There was a time when I believed. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since.”
How do you know that he did not hear you?
“He did not give me what I asked, though the welfare of my soul hung on it.”
In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.
“I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had heard me.”
Until the next desire came that he would not grant, and then you would have turned your God away. A desirable believer! A fine brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less than his all! You would accept no decision against your desire; that ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one. This only I will say: God has not to consider his children only at the moment of their prayer. If a man is not ready for love’s severity, he may be given what he wishes so that he comes to wish he had not been; but to give a child what he wants merely because he wants it, with no further purpose for his good, would be the cruelty of a devil. Yet every prayer is heard, and the real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it not be granted in the form requested.
“To have a thing in another shape might be equivalent to not having it at all.”
If you knew God, you would leave that to him. He is not mocked, and he will not mock. He knows you better than you know yourself, and deals with you as the child of eternal ages, not of a day. You shall be satisfied if you will let him have his way with the creature he has made; the question is between your will and his. He is not one of those who give readiest what they prize least; he gives only his best, or what prepares for it. Not many years may pass before you confess, “You are a God who hears prayer and gives a better answer.” You may see that the desire of your deepest heart would have been frustrated by getting what then seemed its embodiment. That God should listen as a loving father and deal with the request with perfect tenderness is enough for me; it is little that I go without what I pray for. If any answer not coming from love, and not for the final satisfaction of the one who prayed, would be unworthy of God, and love and knowledge watch over the wayward, ignorant child, then the trouble of seemingly unanswered prayer begins to abate, and a lovely hope takes its place. To hear is not necessarily to grant, God forbid! but it is necessarily to attend to, and sometimes to refuse.
Paul says he besought the Lord three times to remove a certain thing, and was told that Christ’s grace was enough for him, for power is made perfect in weakness. God had something better for Paul than granting his prayer: he would make him strong, so that the power of Christ would descend and remain on him, stronger than his suffering, a sharer in the energy of God. If we have God, we can do without the answer to any prayer.
“But if God is so good, and knows all we need far better than we do, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?”
What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object of prayer in God’s idea is to supply our endless need of himself, and our smaller needs are good because they drive us to him? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the soul’s one need beyond all others; prayer begins it, and some need is the motive of the prayer. If gratitude and love followed at once on the supply of our needs, and God our Saviour were the one thought of our hearts, it might be unnecessary to ask. But we take our supplies as a matter of course, as if they came from nothing, or the earth, or our own thoughts, not from a heart of love and a will which alone is force. So we must be made to feel some of our wants, that we may seek him who supplies them all and find his every gift a window to his heart of truth. So begins a communion with God, which is the sole end of prayer and of existence itself. We must ask that we may receive; but God’s end in making us pray is not that we should receive what we ask for our lower needs, for he could give us everything without that. To bring his child to his knee, God withholds, that man may ask.
For the high necessities of our nature, God requires us to ask, by shutting us up to prayer, in order that he may be able to give. For how can he give to the soul what it cannot receive? The ripeness for receiving is the asking; the blossom-cup of the soul, ready to be filled with heavenly dews, is its prayer. When the soul’s hunger for light and truth has waked its higher energies and roused the will to action, its only fitness for receiving the things of God, that action is prayer. Then God can give, and be toward the man as he would be; for the glory of God is to give himself. We thank you, Lord Christ, for it is by your pain alone that we rise toward knowing this glory of your Father and our Father.
Even for lower things: what might be unfit to do for a man who does not recognize the source of his life may be fit in the highest sense to grant when he comes to that source to ask; and even with an individual desire of one who mostly recognizes the Father, it may be well to give to him asking what would not benefit him unasked. For the real good of any gift, the giver must be in the gift, as God always is, for he is love; and the receiver must know and receive the giver in it. Every gift of God is a harbinger of his greatest and only sufficing gift, himself. No gift unrecognized as from God is at its own best; so many things God would gladly give us, even things we need because we are, must wait until we ask, that we may know where they come from. When in all gifts we find him, in him we shall find all things.
Sometimes one praying feels: “Were it not better to abstain? If this thing is good, will he not give it? Would he not be better pleased if I left it all to him?” I think it comes of a lack of faith and childlikeness, perhaps as a fear that, asking for what was not good, the prayer might be granted. Paul has no such thought; he says to cast all our care on God, who cares for us, and in everything to make our requests known to him. It may even come of ambition for spiritual distinction. In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low accompaniment, “Thy will be done”; but making any request brings us near to him, into communion with our Life, and helps us to think of him in all our affairs and give thanks in everything. Anything large enough for a wish to light on is large enough to hang a prayer on, and the thought of him to whom it goes will purify the desire; to say “Father, I should like this or that” would at once show us a bad wish and make us turn from it. So the Lord carried himself toward his Father when he said, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” But there was something he cared for more than his own fear, his Father’s will: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” He has no fear that God will be displeased at his saying what he would like, nor does he regard his Father’s plans as so fixed that his prayer could not alter them. The true son-faith comes with boldness, fearless that the Father will do anything but what is right fatherly and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to please him by any asceticism, even of the spirit; we must speak straight out to him. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will be enough for the child.
There could be no riches but for need. God himself is made rich by man’s necessity: by that he is rich to give, and through it we are rich by receiving.
Prevailing by entreaty over an unwilling God is a heathen notion, held by those who think him a hard master, or like the unjust judge. Nothing so quenches prayer as the notion of unwillingness in the ear that hears; when prayer is dull, nothing makes it flow like the thought that God wants to give us everything. We are told to come boldly to the throne of grace, to obtain mercy and find help in time of need. We shall be refused if that is better; but what is good our Father will give with divine good will. The Lord spoke his parable “to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint.”