01.B 03. The Influence of Prayer on God

III THE INFLUENCE OF PRAYER ON GOD “ The prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” — James 5:16.

“Ask what I shall give thee.” — 1 Kings 3:5. In the foregoing section we have seen some of what may be reasonably considered the reflex or subjective effects of prayer; that is, what prayer means indirectly to the one who prays. But we have already said that prayer means primarily petition, and unless it can be shown that the world’s uncounted supplicants are consciously practicing a species of trickery upon themselves with a view to their moral edification by offering up desires to God without any expectation of having them answered, or, on the other hand, be clearly proven that God is indisposed or unable to heed the cry of the human heart, may we not reasonably expect that prayer has also an objective or direct efficacy, that it has, in other words, an influence on God Himself and leads Him to do for us what otherwise He would have no occasion to do?

What is the ground of this expectation? The argument from instinct is not without weight. The belief that prayer is heard and answered is as universal as is the impulse itself to pray. The one is an instinct as well as the other. Never has beast or bird been led astray by their God given instinct, and do you think that God would plant an instinct so holy in the human soul which either His indifference or His impotence would lead Him to disappoint? The imprisoned vine struggles away toward the cellar window and finds the light the unconscious impulse of its nature impels it to seek. The robin flies away before the winter’s chill and finds the genial clime to which its inborn sense urged it on. Man’s physical nature also has its God-given adaptability and appetency for just what is needed in order to its life. With these things God is lavish. The ear has but to listen; the world is full of sound. The eye has but to open; there is sunlight all around. The lungs have but to expand; the exhaustless air will fill them. The heart has but to unlock its fleshy door; the veins are at its threshold with blood. But what about man’s spiritual nature? Must it alone be doomed to disappointment? Must the soul struggle on towards God and its eyes be left in darkness because heaven has no light to give? Must it soar up on wings of faith and hope and find no atmosphere in which to breathe and live? Must it strain its ears and catch no sound of heaven’s voice or music?

Must it breathe out its prayer to God and then suffocate for want of heaven’s sweet elixir? Must it open its heart and wait for God to fill it and go away empty because God has no favors to bestow?

2. There is argument from the very nature of God, if so be that He is a personal, kind-hearted, potent Being who can consistently grant the petition we desire of Him.

(a) That there is a God we will not even stop to argue. We hope none of us are atheists.

(b) That He is a personal Being is not worth the while to argue in these days of advanced thought, even if He were not so revealed in Scripture. Of course He is personal. Reason will not be satisfied with a God who is merely an unseen, unthinking, unfeeling force in the universe. Prayer to such a God would of course be fruitless.

(c) That He is kindhearted: who for a moment could doubt it? Shall we, the creatures of His hand, be kind and considerate of each other, and He who planted such feelings in our breasts be Himself without them? Man’s deepest feeling tells him God is good; the providence we experience proclaims it, and how tenderly is it revealed in Jesus and in His teachings about the Fatherhood of God; and shall an earthly parent know how to love his children and bestow good gifts upon them and the Divine Father be a stranger to an instinct of which He is the author in His offspring?

(d) That He is potent: how could He be otherwise and be the God of the universe? Shall He who made the elements not control them? Shall He “who made the universe by His power” be shut outside His own creation, a helpless spectator impotent to use the very laws of which He is the author?

(e) That He can consistently answer petition we shall see further on. But we have something better than argument for our belief in this matter. We have the sure Word of the Lord.

3. We are commanded thus to pray and given specific promise of the answer.

If prayer was intended for nothing more than its reflexive influence on the supplicant, what did the Lord mean by saying, “All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”? (Matthew 21:22.)

What did the Master mean by saying, “If ye then being evil know how to give gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him”? (Matthew 7:11.) How any human being, with all his prejudice and all his preconceived ideas, can, in the face of such Scripture and a Bible full of other Scripture just like it — how he can honestly affirm that it is not God’s plan to bestow His favors for the right kind of asking, is the hard thing after all for the simple, believing spirit to understand. For those who teach that the efficacy of prayer ceases with its reflexive influence there are some good words in Patton’s remarkable volume on *’ Prayer and Its Answers.” After quoting several passages from F. W. Robertson in which prayer is resolved into mere submission, and we are advised to “pray until prayer makes us cease to pray”; and after a passage from a letter of a ministerial friend who says,

“The true value of prayer is that it stops people from wanting what they can’t eet,” Dr. Patton goes on to apply this theory to some of the Master’s teaching about prayer. We are told to ask, to seek, and to knock.

“Imagine,” he says, “a child asking for some favor, or for the relief of some want, and standing hour after hour, repeating his requests, and being told by the father, *Go on asking, my child; it does you much good to ask. The longer you ask the more good it will do you. Do not expect to receive anything, however, as the principal benefit of asking is that, by and by, you will not want anything, and will cease to make any request.’ Imagine a mother seeking a lost child. She looks through the house and along the streets, then searches the fields and woods and examines the river banks. A wise neighbor meets her and says: ’seek on; look everywhere; search every accessible place.

You will not find, indeed, but then seeking is a good thing. It puts the mind on the stretch; it fixes the attention; it aids observation; it makes the idea of the child very real. And then, after a while, you will cease to want your child.’ Imagine a man knocking at the door of a house, long and loud. After he has done this for an hour, a window opens and the occupant of the house puts out his head and says, ’ That is right, my friend; I shall not open the door, but then, keep on knocking. It is excellent exercise, and you will be the healthier for it. Knock away till sundown, and then come and knock all day to-morrow. After some days thus spent you will attain to a state of mind in which you will no longer care to come in.’ Is this what Jesus intended us to understand when He said, ’Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you/ No doubt,” says the author we have quoted, “one would thus soon cease to ask, to seek, and to knock; but would it not be from disgust?”

If prayer does not, cannot obtain, its very name and act is a mockery; and the injunction thus to pray a cruel deceit on the part of God.

4. But, again, we have occurring all about us the practical demonstration that God does answer prayer. The Bible is full of recorded instances and human history is packed with others. In this respect all saints have shared alike. When Hannah came to God with definite request and earnestly prayed, God’s priest bade her go in peace; in peace she went away and later came again, and to the priest she said, “ Lord, my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the Lord. For this child I prayed and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him.” And this has been the experience of millions who have prayed the prayer of faith..

Prayer does influence God’s actions in our favor. Prayer does “move the arm that moves the world.” Prayer does have practically demonstrated. a direct as well as an indirect effect; and the influence it thus exerts with God se-cures for us blessings both of a spiritual and a physical nature.

Think just a moment of the spiritual benefit: The direct impartation of spiritual power by which the soul is strengthened and invigorated for the life that God would have us live.

We recall just here the difficulty Hercules found in overcoming the giant Antaeus. He could slay the lion or any other shape of beast or man, but in Antaeus he met more than his match, until at length he discovered the source of his strength and cutting the connection he slew his fierce antagonist. As long as Antaeus was in contact with the earth he was enriched with a power that made him victor over all who came against him. He was defeated by being lifted from the earth and crushed while in the air. So with him who puts himself in connection with God in prayer. Just how we cannot tell — we need not — but God does lend His strength to such a soul. “My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness,” was His word to Paul, and Paul is not alone in such experience, for who that has kept in prayerful touch with God has not been able to look back upon some time of special need and know that heaven’s grace was given to preserve and keep the soul. The affections are purified; the mind is quickened; the will is energized and the whole man made strong. God makes Himself over to us, so to speak; He bids us receive Himself in all His illimitable fullness, and such receiving means a life of beauty, a life of peace and a life of power. It means the heroic life, and all God’s heroes are men of prayer.

There are some who would limit the direct efficacy of prayer to spiritual blessing. But recently such a position was taken by the occupant of a certain supposedly orthodox pulpit. Prayer for material blessing he characterized as ignorance, cowardice and superstition. In commenting; on the sermon one of the leading dailies said that, “Probably no superstitious heathen idea has so long persisted in the ideas and practices of Christianity as that of the direct personal response of the Supreme Being to the petitions of individuals for purely material things.” But this is not the word of Scripture. It is not the testimony of experience. The will of Almighty God rules in the material as well as in the spiritual universe, and if He has told us to pray we may be sure that somehow He has made room in His plan of government for prayer as a determining factor in the course of events. But what intellectual short-sightedness to admit such efficacy in the spiritual realm and deny it in the material! Does not God’s government extend over the mind and heart and will, and are there no laws in the spiritual world? Unless these questions are answered in the negative, and in the negative no sane man will think of answering them, it does not take very close thinking to see that whatever objection may be brought against the answering of prayer in the material world, if they be true, are equally true for the spiritual world.

Here is something good from Austin Phelps; it fits admirably just here;

“In the mind of God, we may be assured, the conception of prayer is no fiction, whatever man may think of it. It has, and God has determined that it should have, a positive and an appreciable influence in directing the course of a human life.

It is, and God has proposed that it should be, a link of connection between the human mind and the divine mind, by which, through His infinite condescension, we may actually move His will.

“It is, and God has decreed that it should be, a power in the universe, as distinct, as real, as natural, as uniform, as the power of gravitation or of light or of electricity.

“ A man may use it as trustingly and as soberly as he would use either of these. It is as truly the dictate of good sense that a man should expect to achieve something by praying as it is that he should expect to achieve something by a telescope or the mariner’s compass or the electric telegraph.”