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