The Threshold Grace eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 56 pages of information about The Threshold Grace.

The Threshold Grace eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 56 pages of information about The Threshold Grace.
ourselves by our very importunity.  Maybe we are vociferous when God is but waiting for a silence to fall in His earthly temples that He may have speech with His children.  We talk about ‘prevailing prayer,’ and there is a great truth in the phrase.  All prayer does not prevail.  There is that among men which passes for prayer but has no spiritual grip, no assurance, no masterful patience, no fine desperation.  There is a place for all these things, and a need for them, in the life of prayer.  We need the courage of a great faith and the earnestness that is born of necessity.  We need to be able to lift up our faces toward heaven in the swelling joys and the startling perils of these mortal hours and cry, ‘Hear me,’ knowing that God does hear us and that the outcrying of every praying heart rings clear and strong in the courts of the Heavenly King.  But we need something more; we need a very great deal more than this, if we are to enter into the true meaning of prevailing prayer.  The final triumph of prayer is not ours; it is God’s.  When we are upon our knees before Him, it is He, and not we, that must prevail.  This is the true victory of faith and prayer, when the Father writes His purpose more clearly in our minds, lays His commandment more inwardly upon our hearts.  We do not get one faint glimpse into the meaning of that mysterious conflict at Peniel until we see that the necessity for the conflict lay in the heart of Jacob and not in the heart of God.  The man who wrestled with the Angel and prevailed passes before us in the glow of the sunrise weary and halt, with a changed name and a changed heart.  So must it be with us; so shall it be, if ever we know what it is to prevail in prayer.  Importunity must not become a blind and uninspired clamouring for the thing we desire.  Such an attitude may easily set us beyond the possibility of receiving that which God knows we need.  We must not forget that our poor little plea for help and blessing does not exhaust the possibilities of prayer.  Our words go upward to God’s throne twisted by our imperfect thinking, narrowed by our outlook, sterilized by the doubts of our hearts, and we do not know what is good for us.  His word comes downward into our lives laden with the quiet certainty of the Eternal, wide as the vision of Him who seeth all, deep as the wisdom of Him who knoweth all.

So, however much it may be to say ‘Hear me,’ it is vastly more to say ‘Cause me to hear.’  However much I have to tell Him, He has more to tell me.  This view of prayer will help to clear up for us some of the difficulties that have troubled many minds.  We hear people speak of unanswered prayer; but there is no such thing, and in the nature of things there cannot be.  I do not mean by that, that to every prayer there will come a response some day.  To every prayer there is a response now.  In our confused and mechanical conception of the God to whom we pray, we separate between His hearing and His answering.  We identify the answer to prayer

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The Threshold Grace from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.