Another man feels that if the people of New York City can be given good reading they can thereby best be helped in life.  And so he volunteers money for a number of libraries throughout that city.  And thousands who yearn to increase their knowledge come into sympathy with him in that one point through his gift.  In all such cases the giver’s thought is to accomplish certain results in those whose purpose in certain directions is sympathetic with his own.

Any human illustration of God must seem crude.  Yet of these three sorts of givers there is one and only one that begins to suggest how God gives.  It may seem like a very sweeping statement to make, yet I am more and more disposed to believe it true that most persons have unthinkingly thought of God’s answering prayer as the first of these three men give.  Many others have had in mind some such thought as the second suggests.  Yet to state the case even thus definitely is to make it plain that neither of these ways in any manner illustrate God’s giving.  The third comes the nearest to picturing the God who hears and answers prayer.  Our God has a great heart yearning after His poor prodigal world, and after each one in it.  He longs to have the effects of sin removed, and the original image restored.  He takes the initiative.  Yet everything that is done for man must of necessity be through man’s will; by his free and glad consent.  The obstacles in the way are not numberless nor insurmountable, but they are many and they are stubborn.  There is a keen, cunning pretender-prince who is a past-master in the fine art of handling men.  There are wills warped and weakened; consciences blurred; minds the opposite of keen, sensibilities whose edge has been dulled beyond ordinary hope of being ever made keen again.  Sin has not only stained the life, but warped the judgment, sapped the will, and blurred the mental vision.  And God has a hard time just because every change must of necessity be through that sapped and warped will.

Yet the difficulty though great is never complex but very simple.  And so the statement of His purpose is ever exquisitely simple.  Listen again:  “Call unto Me, and I will answer thee and shew thee great things and difficult which thou knowest not.”  If a man call he has already turned his face towards God.  His will has acted, and acted doubly; away from the opposite, and towards God, a simple step but a tremendous one.  The calling is the point of sympathetic contact with God where their purposes become the same.  The caller is beset by difficulties and longs for freedom.  The God who speaks to him saw the difficulties long ago and eagerly longed to remove them.  Now they have come to agreement.  And through this willing will God eagerly works out His purpose.

A Very Old Question.