Wow,
After reading so much by Bonar about Grace, and entering into the Holy of Holies, it is a blessing to realize that these are foundations for our communion with God.
Confidence, what a word. It means, "the quality or state of being certain; a relation of trust or intimacy."
Are you as excited as I am, that God hears our prayers? Oh, Jesus, teach us by your Holy Spirit how to pray.
~Al
And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us:
And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him. 1Jn 5:14-15
Confidence in Him
Faith towards God in Jesus Christ is the essential activity of the Christian religion. Salvation begins where faith begins. When man opens his hand to receive, God opens His to give. Again, prayer is the essential function of faith—its natural activity. Prayer comes from faith, from the confidence we have in Him. Let us see, then, what is the confidence on which prayer is founded.
I. That if we ask anything, he heareth us—that it is possible to make known our thoughts, feelings, and desires to God. I cannot believe that He who built the cells of hearing is Himself deaf; nor that amid the myriad eyes His hands fashioned, and in the blaze of all the suns kindled by His power, God alone is blind! No, it is infinitely more consonant to right reason to believe with John that He heareth us.
II. Yes, no doubt He can; but will He? Will He pay any attention to the woes and the wants of so insignificant a creature as man is? Well, shifting the emphasis one word on, I say, "This is the confidence that we have in Him, that He heareth us"—men and women with nothing special about them except their mere humanity. God Himself, by His love, has proved the greatness and value of man.
III. "That if we ask anything according to his will, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him." I said that without faith in God's being and intellect prayer would be impossible; and now I say that without this saving clause—without the confidence that God only grants petitions which accord with His own will—prayer would be dangerous. What could be more fatal than for the power of God to be at the disposal of human caprice[1]? But, thank God, He will not yield. God is inexorable[2]. Love always is inexorable. The doctor's child wishes to have the run of the surgery, that he may play with the keen blades and taste of every colored powder and potion; and the servant may yield to his importunities, simply because her love is weak; but the father is inexorable, deaf, unyielding. Why? Because he loves his child intensely. I can venture to draw near to God; it is safe, because I have this confidence in God that He will not yield to me against His own wisdom and will. He is inexorable for my highest good. But God's refusal of one thing always means a grant of something better. "According to His will." Why so? Because nothing that is not on a level with that will is good enough for thee. (J. M. Gibbon.)
Life and prayer
Very naturally, very opportunely, does the doctrine of prayer follow that of eternal life. For the new life brings with it new needs. Every higher grade of life brings with it a sense of need undreamt of in the lower grades of life. Buddha, for instance, preached a very noble doctrine and lived a very noble life. He preached salvation by self-control and love. He set up in India a sublime ideal of character, and dying, left behind him the memory of a singularly pathetic and beautiful career. And by his life and teaching he raised India to something like a higher life. But he forgot the main thing. He forgot that the soul of man pants for the living God; that it must have God. It cannot live on words however true, nor on an example however noble. It can only rest in God. Mahomet, too, woke in his people the sense of a new life to be lived by them. To a people that had worshipped gods he proclaimed God. "God is one, and God is great. Bow down before Him in all things." A noble message surely as far as it went. But it did not go far enough. It did not bring God near enough. Man wants something human, something tender, something near and dear in God. And the fierce followers of Mahomet were driven by the love hunger in them to half deify the Prophet, and to invent a system of saint worship, a ladder of sympathetic human souls by which they hoped to come a little nearer to God. The vision of a higher life had awakened new needs within them. "Necessity," says the proverb, "is the mother of invention," and man's religious inventions bear startling witness to the great religious necessity, the imperative God hunger that is in him. "Let us take the precepts of Christ and follow the example of Christ, leaving all the doctrinal and redemptive parts behind." No! The life without the love will crush you. The law of God without the grace of God will bear you down. Dr. Martineau says that since Christ lived a profound sense of sin has filled the whole air with a plaint of penitence. He who despises the blood of Christ as Savior has not yet seen the life of Christ as his example. But eternal life, while it brings new seeds, brings also a new boldness in prayer. "We know that He heareth us." Love does not exhaust itself by what it gives. We kneel securely when we kneel on Calvary. The Cross is the inspiration and justification of prayer. We can ask anything there. There no prayer seems too great, no petition too daring. (J. M. Gibbon.)
Prayer
I. Regenerate humanity as the subject of continual necessity. Man is a suppliant. There is no moment in his immortality in which he can declare absolute independence of a Superior Power. Our salvation has not lessened our dependence on the Divine bounty. We feel necessities now of which in our natural state we are totally unconscious.
1. There is our want of a world conquering faith. Without faith man is the mere sport of swelling waves or changeful winds—faith gives him majesty by ensuring for all his energies an immovable consolidation!
2. There is our need of infallible wisdom. The realities of life rebuke our self-sufficiency. The countless errors for whose existence we are unhappily responsible are teaching us that our unaided powers are unequal to the right solution of life's problems.
3. There is our need of renewing and protective grace. All who know the subtlety of sin feel their danger of being undermined by its insidious influence. Without the "daily bread" of heaven we must inevitably perish. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)
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