01.D 02. The Life that Prays
II THE LIFE THAT PRAYS
“If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ask what ye will and it shall he done unto you.” — John 15:7. But the last word about the Spirit’s help in prayer has not been said. What has been said encourages us, but surely this does not exhaust Paul’s meaning when he says, *’The Spirit also helpeth our infirmity”; surely this does not make up all that is contained in His thought when he tells us to do our “praying in the Holy Spirit.”
If it did we might well despair of ever praying acceptably to God; for when we search the Scriptures we find that His promises to answer prayer all depend upon the fulfillment of certain conditions by those to whom they are made. And these conditions, who could fulfill them if left to himself! But as the Holy Spirit is the source of all our spiritual excellency, surely we can make no mistake if we seek through Him, and through Him solely, the ability to pray after the manner prescribed by God.
Many a child of God is complaining of unanswered prayer, and who can number the prayers that have fallen from human lips to which no response has come from Him for whose ear they were intended?
Yet who was it that said, “Ask and ye shall receive”? Surely there must be something wrong somewhere; we need only to remember that with God’s promise to answer prayer is linked always an inseparable condition, and if prayer is not answered, then either God is unfaithful or we have fallen short in what is required of us to make our prayers availing, and as the first alternative is not for one second to be entertained, it becomes us to consider very carefully what are the conditions which if fulfilled place God Himself under obligation to answer the prayers of His children.
These conditions of acceptable prayer, let us study them now. They are, of course, to some extent mutually inclusive.
They might, indeed, all be gathered up in one. I have seen mention of no less than a score of them, and since it is, after all, as some one has said, *’the life that prays,” these as well as all other elements of Christian character may with no impropriety be called conditions of acceptable prayer.
Humility and sincerity and reverence and such like must all enter into the disposition of the praying soul if God is to have respect to the offered petition. All this is very plain; there is no difficulty about it. But there are other requirements, and if we may not say they are more essential, they are indeed not only absolutely indispensable but they are the very ones which necessarily involve these which we have just mentioned and others like them.
These are the conditions which sometimes the children of God say are not easy to fulfill. Certainly not! apart from the aid of that Divine One who “also helpeth our infirmity,” but, oh, if we did but accept God’s word concerning what He would have the Holy Spirit accomplish in us and then trust Him to verify His truth in these lives of ours surrendered to His purpose, how mighty we would become even in prayer because His strength will have been made perfect in our weakness.
There are four of these conditions mentioned in Scripture. The first all-inclusive one you will find in John 15:7, “If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.” We often hear it said of Martin Luther, as though it were a remarkable thing, that he could have whatever he would from God; but what more remarkable that than what is here said to be possible for every child of God to have?
God has no favorites in this matter, and the conditions were alike for Luther as they are for us and all others.
“If we abide in Him and His words abide in us.” His promise is one of unlimited power in prayer. But what does it mean to abide in Him and to have His words abide in us? Evidently it has to do with the life we live, for the Master who made the statement had just finished speaking of Himself as the Vine in whom as branches believers are to abide. It is, after all, the life that prays; the prayer of a righteous man is like music to the ear of God, and in sending back the appropriate answer God Himself takes infinite delight.
Now, it is here said that if we would have power to pray aright we must abide in Christ as the branch abides in the vine.
Certainly our relationship with Christ is in a sense and in a degree mystical, but there ought to be no such mystical interpretation of any Scripture as leaves the thought to an ordinary mind utterly unintelligible. For instance, Christ said, “Abide in Me and I in you,” and as an explanation of the meaning involved it is not unfrequent to hear reference made to a piece of iron brought to a white heat in the furnace; thus the iron is in the heat and the heat is in the iron; but to my mind, so far as concerns my relationship to Christ, such an illustration conveys no appreciable conception whatsoever. What Christ said is really not so difficult to understand. It is the branch life, said He, that gives to prayer its potency. What now does it mean for a branch to abide in a vine? It means simply that it is to be in such close touch, such living union with the vine that the life of the vine may flow unhindered through it on its fruit-bearing mission. The branch is utterly dependent upon the vine for its existence; it has no life of its own; unless the sap from the vine flows into the branch, the branch must wither and be fit only to be cut away and be burned. It has no purpose of its own; it is there simply and solely to be at the disposal of the vine in receiving sap and carrying it up into ripened fruit.
This, and precisely this, is what is meant when it is said that the believer is likewise to abide in Christ. He is to keep in such close and vital touch with Christ that there may be and will be a constant inflow of Christ’s own life. It means to so utterly renounce the self -life as to have no other life, spiritually speaking, save as it comes from Him. It means to renounce all self-dependence and to so abandon ourselves to Christ that He may fill us with His thoughts, and fire us with His emotions and incite us with His purposes so that our desires are really no longer our own but His, and since His life is His Spirit the prayer we now offer is really not our own but the prayer of Christ’s Spirit within us. Thus do we pray in the Spirit. To abide in Christ! Why, child of God, this is something possible for us all; it means simply to so love Him, to so continually think such sweet thoughts about Him, to so trust Him and so devote ourselves to Him that our lives will be absolutely at His disposal to work out His purpose concerning us and the world about us. Is not this plain and simple? It means to be a branch and this, in short, means to live solely and exclusively for the Vine. It is the branch life that is privileged to lay claim to the unlimited whatsoever in prayer. But Christ also said that His words must abide in us. This condition is really involved in the other; it in fact precedes the other as a means to it. I know of no other way to abide in Christ save as His words abide in me.
Christ’s words are in a most vital sense equivalent to Himself, because in His words He reveals Himself to us and through our acceptance of them He imparts Himself to us with all His power for what He wishes us to become. His promises, when believingly accepted, bind Christ Himself over us to bring to pass the thing He hath spoken; His commands when gladly received, carry with them the guarantee of Himself with His power to make us strong to do His will. But plainer still it will doubtless be to say that His words abide in us when we believingly receive them into our hearts and then feed upon them and ponder over them in deep study and then, best of all, gladly and constantly obey them in our lives. If Christ’s words abide in us we can say with the Psalmist, “Thy word have I hid in my heart,” and like him we will find in them our chief delight, and not only will we “meditate therein day and night,” but our whole life will be one continued exposition of that for which they stand.
Thus again it becomes plain that it is the life that prays. The prayer which James says “availeth much” is the prayer of a righteous man. Therefore is it that we read in John, “Whatsoever we ask we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight” (1 John 3:21; 1 John 3:22). If Jesus could say, “I know that Thou hearest me always,” it was because the Father could say, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” When God is pleased with the life, when we so abide in Him and His words so abide in us as to make our life what it ought to be, we can begin to pray with an assurance of being heard and God will give us what we ask. A feeble prayer always points to a feeble life. If prayer is not effective, it is evident from the condition set forth in the parable of the vine that the life must be defective. To live aright is to pray aright.
How plain it is that this is the all-inclusive condition, and how evident the need of the Holy Spirit before we can even begin to fulfill it. Look at it as we will, it all depends upon Him. Is my life to be an abiding one.^ How can it be except the Holy Spirit, the sap of the Heavenly Vine, flow richly into it to sustain it and make it healthy and vigorous. Are His words to abide in me? How can they except the Holy Spirit apply them to my heart and work them out in my life? Apart from Him Paul tells us we can neither know the things of God nor do the things that are pleasing to God. To pray with these conditions fulfilled is to “pray in the Spirit.” If I am abiding in the Vine, the constant inflow of the Spirit, which is the life of the Vine, brings into my spiritual being the very desires and purposes of the Spirit, and so the prayer that is formed is not so much my own, though I make it so, as it is the Holy Spirit’s, and so God is safe in His promise of the unlimited whatsoever.
If Christ’s words are abiding in me, it is because they have been the instrument through which the Holy Spirit has worked in me the mind of Christ. The Word is indeed the sword of the Spirit, and as we ponder carefully the words given to us of God, trusting the Spirit to enlighten the mind as we study, the prayer that has been possibly long in our heart will begin to shape itself anew under the direction of the Spirit. Thus the Spirit is the real author of the prayer, and we can trust God to give us whatsoever we ask, because we are thus kept from asking amiss. How evident it becomes that to neglect the Word is to rob oneself of the sweet privilege of praying in the Spirit, which in short is to be denied the privilege of praying at all. Disciple of Christ, are you abiding in Him? Is His word abiding in you?