01.03. What May We Pray For
Chapter III. What may we Pray for?
PRAYER is pleasing to God, that is, the prayer which is undertaken in the proper manner. He therefore that desires to be heard should pray wisely, fervently, humbly, faithfully, perseveringly, confidently. Let him pray wisely, by which I mean, let him pray for those things which minister to the divine glory and the salvation of his neighbours. God is all-powerful, therefore do not in your prayers prescribe how He shall act; He is all-wise therefore do not determine when. Do not let your prayers break forth heedlessly, but let them follow the guidance of faith, remembering that faith has steady regard to the divine word. Those things, therefore, which God promises absolutely in His word, those pray for absolutely. Those which He promises conditionally for example, temporal things those on the same principle pray for conditionally.
Those things which He does not promise at all, those also you will not pray for at all. God often grants in His anger what His goodness would deny. Therefore, follow Christ, who fully conforms His will to the will of God. So wrote the Lutheran Gerhard in his Holy Meditations. His advice follows exactly the lines along which our previous considerations have led us. Prayer, we saw, is a form of intelligent correspondence with the revealed will of God. This is the thought we are to continually have in mind when we attempt to answer the often repeated question what ought we to pray for?
Confining ourselves first of all to the practical aspect of the subject, we may put our answer under four heads.
1. The main object of our prayers must be spiritual things. If we are to pray in the name of Christ, we must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. That is the lesson of the Lord’s Prayer. Nor can we omit to notice, that if in one Gospel it is said that our Father in heaven will give, good things to them that ask him, the good things are described in another Gospel as the Holy Spirit. 1 For so far as we are Christians in heart, it is upon the possession of the Spirit, with all that that implies, that our desires are concentrated for ourselves and others. For this we can pray with certainty, with the certainty that our persevering prayers for ourselves and others will be heard and answered in proportion to our faith. I say 1 Matthew 7:11 compared with Luke 11:13.
What may we Pray for f answered for ourselves and others: not that God will force the wills of others any more than our own, but that our prayers can secure for them at least the offers of the divine love. This is the region in which our Lord’s promise is specially true, Verily, I say unto you, whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass; he shall have it. 1 Our Lord spoke in a figure, but it was a figure familiar to Jewish hearers. The mountain is the mountain of the world power which hinders the spiritual spread of the kingdom of God in our own hearts and in the world. This is the moral obstacle which the prayer of the Church, in proportion to its reality and to the unity with which it is offered, shall be able to remove.
What art thou, great mountain? the prophet Zechariah had said of old, before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain. 2
It is then for spiritual things, for the manifestation of spiritual power in the hearts of men, that we are chiefly and primarily to pray. Nor is it easy to over rate the importance of this right direction of our prayers. True it may be (to take the converse of our Lord’s illustration) that even if we ask our Father for a stone He will still give us bread, or for a scorpion, He 1 Mark 11:23. Zechariah 4:7. will give us fish, 1 but we cannot expect this to be the case where we have the opportunities of better know ledge; rather, if we pray amiss, let us fear the judgment God gave them their desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls. 2 Nor must we omit to notice, that in controversies raised by materialists about the efficacy of prayer, this characteristic of Christian prayer has generally been left out of sight. It has been proposed that we should have experiments to test the efficacy of prayer in regard to the long life of kings, or the recovery of the sick. But nothing can be more certain than this, that prayer is meant to be an exercise of faith which cannot be subjected in our present life to external testing. And that chiefly because it is in the region of character, in the region where results only fully appear in the eternal world, that prayer is to find its most assured and definite answer.
2. But not all spiritual boons can be asked for.
What is asked for must be in accordance with the divine will. Thus, to ask (as many people do) that they may escape sin, when they will not take reasonable precautions to avoid the occasions of temptation; or to pray for our children, without taking any proper pains in regard to their education; or to pray for spiritual graces, while we refuse the means which the divine will has appointed for their reception; or to pray
1 Matthew 6:29 2 Psalms 106:15. for forgiveness for ourselves, when we will neither for give others nor accept the punishment of our own sins these are all examples of the way in which we may pray for spiritual things lawlessly, or without reference to the will of God.
3. But it cannot be doubted that we may pray also for physical things. They must hold the subordinate place that is given them in the Lord’s Prayer, but that place they must hold a lesser place than was given them in the Old Testament, but still a place. A certain supply of physical things, our daily bread, is necessary to enable us and others to do the work of God in the world; thus Give us, we pray, our daily bread. And that petition can be taken to cover prayers for health of body, and bettering of social conditions, and favourable weather. Only we can never pray for these physical blessings with the same security or absoluteness as for spiritual. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. Everything that is included in daily bread He finally denied to His own Son. To Him He finally gave no physical deliverance in this life, but left Him in the extremest sense without physical support. This is the profound lesson which we learn about prayer from the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. So clearly supreme are spiritual over physical things as objects of prayer, that physical things can only be prayed for conditionally Father, if it be possible; and may be denied even to the wellbeloved, even as the cup did not pass from Christ without His drinking it. Still, granted this, there are a great number of physical things which, as far as the Christian in this world can see, it would be good for him or others to have, such as health, supply of food, weather, and so on. In regard to these we should put up real petitions, which, if accompanied with a willingness to see them not granted, or prefaced by Not my will, but thine be done/ should still be prayers which expect an answer from the divine love. It is the great function of the spiritual man to see to it, that within that region where the human will has its exercise, spiritual motives and forces shall have their full sway in determining events; and for all we know the divine government of the world may, for the testing of our faith, have left a real function for prayer to fulfil in reinforcing the springs of vitality in sick men, and even in ordering, within certain limits, the character of the weather.
4. I say, for all we know/ and I am looking at the matter now practically, not metaphysically. How do we know the divine will? We know it from the revelation in conscience and through Christ. We know it also in the order of the physical world. Science has recently been disclosing increasingly what the order of the physical world is, what its laws are. Like the revealed laws of the spiritual kingdom, the known physical laws are limits to prayer. No doubt from time to time prophets and righteous men have been specially inspired to pray for miracles. With such exceptional inspirations we are not now concerned.
Ordinarily, a known law of the physical world is a declaration of the will of God. So far, therefore, as the physical laws of the world are known, so far as scientific men can prophesy what will happen in accordance with these laws, to pray against them would be to pray against God. But there is a region into which human prescience cannot penetrate. We know indeed that it belongs to the fixed order of nature that we should not have tropical weather in a temperate climate, but within limits there is no fixed order in the sequence of different kinds of weather which is known to us. It is certainly true that men, by planting or destroying trees, can in lapse of time modify weather. Nor can it be said to be certain, from a scientific point of view, that the action of free will by means of prayer may not have a similar power within similar limits to modify the weather conceivably through the mediation of invisible spiritual forces or persons, as to which we know nothing. We doubt very much whether those scientific men who will be most peremptory in denying this, will be prepared to admit that there is such a thing at all as a real freedom within certain restricted limits, assigned to human wills in ordering the course of physical events; or that we can, by the exercise of our free wills, make the course of events different from what it otherwise would have been. Granted there is this freedom, for example, to modify weather by planting trees or accumulating waters, there can be no scientific demonstration that prayer may not have a similar restricted but real influence.
Christians will certainly go on trustfully commending their wishes about the weather to their heavenly Father’s attention, as well as the health of their friends, until science has got a power, altogether different from what it now wields, of predicting future events in these districts of experience. For only such power of prediction would make it apparent that in these, as in the vaster physical movements, events are simply determined in accordance with physical laws, without any reference to moral or spiritual causes. And if this seems already certain to men of physical science, on the other hand, the spiritual experience of men of prayer has in all ages given them great encouragement in praying for the recovery of their friends and for seasonable weather. In this paper I have trespassed very slightly on the speculative ground, and my main object was to give a practical answer to the question, what are the proper objects of prayer? To deal at length with the philosophic or scientific problem would require more space than is at present at my command, and more knowledge. But the broad position of the Christian is this, and in occupying it he stands on the strongest ground It is the business of the spiritual man to assert, within certain limits, the mastery of the human spirit in accordance with the divine will over its material surroundings. It does this mainly through the strengthening of character. It does it in part through altering external conditions. How far the power allowed to the human spirit extends into the material world cannot be certainly said, but limits can only be assigned to it with certainty at that point where science can prove the importance of human freedom by predictions of the course of events on a basis purely physical; and the power of prayer may be commensurate with the power of the human spirit. If we can alter circumstances by willing and working, we may alter them also by willing and praying. But we must not conclude this discussion without repeating that the main objects of Christian prayer are spiritual things. Only in regard to these can prayer rise with the confident expectation of being answered.