Prayer
The great importance of prayer is not that you may get your request, but that you may have the sense that God is attending to your affairs. You have a sense of what it is to go to Him and be heard. I have taken the whole of the contents of my heart and poured them out before Him. I say, I know He has them; I need not tell Him about them again. We often spend our time saying a great many words to relieve our consciences and not asking for what we really need. When I ask anything according to His will, I know that He hears me and that I have the petition that I desired of Him.
The first great parable about praying is in Luke 11. The man would not go away without his friend giving him the loaves, because he wanted them and had no other way of getting them. Do not go to God if you have any back door; do not have any plan of your own if you are going to pray to Him. That is the principle of real prayer. What makes people so often not gain in prayer is that they have some plan in the background. They go to some place for their health and pray about it, but all the time they are thinking that if this place does not cure them, they will go somewhere else and try another.
An Audience With God
Well, how can you know when you have had an audience — when you have gained God’s ear? You can know because you will have the peace of God. Have we any troubles at this present time? We have. And why are we troubled with them? Because we do not go to God with them. When I go to God with my troubles and get an audience with Him, He gives me His own peace about them. I am in the state that God is in. What a wonderful thing! Here is a man who was troubled this morning; he has gone to God and got an audience. And has he got his prayer answered? Perhaps not. But he has come out in the state of God.
Circumstances are not to wear you down. We all fret and worry until we can go to God with it and say to Him (without irreverence), “Settle it as You like,” and then we can go out with the peace of God. The effect of it is, first, to bring us into a calm from a state of perturbation, and, next, into the peace of God.
Joy and Peace
Now, if your own state is not right, you cannot rejoice. Your own state, which you find in Philippians 3, must come first. You must have Christ as the one object of your heart to replace everything else. Then as to the things around that tend to afflict you, if you tell them all to God, you get rid of them. The point is, Have you had an audience? What a blessed sense it imparts! A man can go about in the world saying, I know I have the ear of God! And thus this most wonderful favor that ever God conferred on a man on earth is his. It is the most wonderful favor, because God might have given me all the world and not have given me peace.
And “the peace which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Amen.
Food for the Flock, 1:27