When we pray, we speak to God; when we read the Scriptures, God speaks to us.
God is pleased with us when we pray much. When we do, we have less time to murmur and find fault with others.
What is important for us to understand is that the efficacy (the ability to produce a desired or intended result) of prayer is not because of its power to change the mind of the Most High, but because of prayer’s effect upon the petitioner in preparing him to receive.
When we pray for things suitable to our real wants, it requires no statement of our urgent necessities to cause the Lord to incline toward our supplication. He desires to bestow such blessings on us.
The object of prayer is not, by any means, to create such a purpose in the mind of the Lord.
The truth is, the hinderance is not on the Lord's part at all; rather, the difficulty lies in ourselves.
Prayer, humiliation, self-abasement, wrestling, and agonizing are all in place, all part of the divine plan.
Let no one suppose that these are undervalued or that we may, by any means, dispense with them. No, by no means.
But where lies the hindrance? It is wholly in ourselves.
The object of deep self-abasement is to prepare ourselves to receive the blessing of God.
Nothing is more certain than that when signal deliverance is needed, that deliverance has to be delayed because the people of God cannot bear it. Were it to be granted, they would be lifted up to their own ruin.
So the Lord suffers them to be brought into a great strait that they may, by the deepest humiliation and self-abasement, become prepared to bear the signal deliverance which He earnestly desired to grant.
The earnest prayer and deep prostration of the soul before God are not for the purpose of extorting favor from One who is really averse to granting it and has to be worn out by importunity and induced to do that which he was at heart unwilling to do. By no means.
The delay is only that we may be brought into the place where God can approve and where He can, in safety to ourselves, grant us his favor in the blessings that we ask for.
The hinderance is always with ourselves.
The first question to be determined in prayer is whether the petition is a proper one to present before the Lord.
Then we must seek to ascertain and put away from ourselves everything that stands in the way of that petition being granted.
When this work is really accomplished, the answer to prayer will be immediate.
Based on an article by J.N. Andrews published in RH 1870, adapted.
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