Lecture XLI

ETERNAL LIFE CONNECTED WITH CONFIDENCE IN PRAYER

THIS would seem to be the beginning of the end of the epistle. Whether the “these things” which “I have written unto you” are simply the things contained in the immediately preceding context, or must be held to reach further back, is not material. John is evidently summing up; he is pointing his discourse or argument to its close. And he points it very clearly and cogently. He puts very strongly the final end he has in view. It is that you may “know” certain things. Over and over again he uses that word “know;” not less than six or seven times in the course of about as many verses. The knowledge meant is evidently of a high order, in a spiritual point of view; not speculative and intellectual merely, but experimental and practical. It is not simply faith, although it is connected with faith, as flowing from it, and involved in it. Still it is something more than faith. It is, if one may say so, faith realised; faith proved inwardly or subjectively, by being acted out and acted upon outwardly or objectively; the believer ascertaining, by actual trial and experience, the truth and trustworthiness of his belief. It is not now with us—we think, we are persuaded, we hope; but “we know.”

Now one thing which you are thus believingly to know is “that you have eternal life.” And you are to know this, not in the way of a mere reflex ascertaining of it, but in the way of a direct acting of it out; for “this is the boldness that we have in him, that, if we ask anything 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.” It is thus, in the actual use of it, that you are to know your having eternal life. In plain terms, the outgoing or forthcoming of our boldness, as having eternal life, is in prayer. Prayer is the exercise or expression of it; as it has been said before to be: “Whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight” (3:22).

I. There is, however, as it might seem, a qualification here which is not there; “according to his will.” What that means it is important to see. It cannot well mean that before asking anything we must know certainly that what we ask is according to his will. This would really preclude us, in ordinary circumstances, from asking anything, or at least from asking anything definite and precise. I say in ordinary circumstances. For we may be situated as Daniel was, when, upon an interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy, he was infallibly led by inspiration to the conclusion that the period of the Babylonian captivity was expired, or expiring, and that Israel’s restoration was certainly due. Without claiming, or having any right to claim, inspiration or infallibility, men have considered themselves entitled, on some extraordinary occasions, to ask certain things to be done by God in his providence, in the full assurance that they were according to his will. That there may be such instances of confidence in asking, upon a clear and certain conviction beforehand that what is asked is according to God’s will, confidence, not given by fresh inspiration, but reached by faith in exercise upon inspiration previously recorded, may be admitted. But these exceptionable cases can scarcely be held to meet the apostle’s broad and general statement as to the efficacy of all believing prayer. Nor will it do to make this seeming qualification, “according to his will,” a mere tag or appendix to all prayer and every prayer; as meaning simply that whatever we ask, we are to ask with this proviso, expressed or understood, “if it be according to thy will.” No doubt, when we pray for anything which implies that God should order his providence one way rather than another, thus and not otherwise;—and we can hardly pray for anything specific or definite which does not imply that;—we must, if we would not be guilty of presumption or impiety, virtually attach always the reservation which that formula implies. But this is so evidently indispensable, as a condition of all genuine and reverential prayer, that it could hardly be needful for John to state it. He must surely be pointing to some higher function of the prayer of faith.

“If we ask anything according to his will,”—may not this mean, “If we ask anything as we believe that he wills it”? We ask it as he wills it. In asking it, we put ourselves in the same position with him in willing it. He and we look at it from the same point of view. We who ask identify ourselves with him who wills. Whatever we ask, we ask as from within the circle of his will; we being one in our asking with him in his willing.

This may seem too high a position for us to occupy or aim at; too divine a standpoint; that we in asking, and God in willing, should be at one. And yet is it not the only fair, the only possible, alternative or antithesis to what is the only notion of prayer which the natural man can take in, the notion of bending God’s will to his? For that, unquestionably, is what, when he prays, the natural man desires.

The priests of Baal, when, in answer to Elijah’s challenge, “they cried aloud and cut themselves after their manner,” sought by their fierce and bloody importunity to bend the object of their mad worship to their purpose, and make him subservient to their pleasure. The sailors in the ship with Jonah, when they called every man upon his god, simply thought that they might be “heard for their much speaking.” The instinct of physical pain in acute disease, or of natural affection in an anxious crisis, or of blank despair in sudden peril, may wring from unaccustomed lips a defiant or an abject appeal to the Ruler over all. It is an unknown God who is invoked, on the mere chance that he may be got to do their bidding. The heathen view of prayer, like the heathen view of sacrifice, proceeds upon that notion of subjecting God’s determination to men’s desire; the prayer and the sacrifice being both alike intended to work upon the divine mind so as to change it into accordance with that of the worshipper. The idea is that God needs to be appeased, and that he may be persuaded; that he needs to be appeased by sacrifice, so that wrath may give place to pity; and that he may be persuaded by prayer to act otherwise than his inner nature might prompt, in compliance with solicitations, or in deference to pressure, from without.

But a right spiritual apprehension of God, as “having in himself eternal life,” and “giving us that eternal life in his Son,” places both sacrifice and prayer in an entirely different light. Eternal life must necessarily, in its nature as well as in its duration, be independent of time, and consequently also of time’s changes and contingencies, its influences and motives. As it is in God himself, it is self-moved, self-originated, self-inspired. He has within himself the grounds and reasons of all his proceedings. In so far as it is communicable to us through his Son and in his Son, it must possess substantially the same character of self-containedness, if I may use such a term, or independence of things without. Only, in our case, this life of ours is “hid with Christ in God.” It is his life in us.

How then does God himself, having life, this eternal life, in himself, stand related to prayer, or to sacrifice and prayer together? Both must be from within himself. They are alike and equally means of his own appointment or ordination. Sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice of his Son for us, is his own way of opening up communication between himself and us. Prayer, our prayer to him in his Son’s name, is his own way of carrying on and carrying out the communication. He, having eternal life in himself, moved from within himself, gives to us this eternal life in his Son. And all the fruit or benefit of it he is pleased to give through prayer. For the eternal life which is now, in a sense, common to him and us, comes out in prayer. We meet in prayer, he and we together. And we meet, be it said with reverence, on the footing of our joint possession, in a measure, of the same eternal life; life in ourselves; he and we thus meet together.

Thus prayer, as it is here introduced, becomes a very solemn, because a very confidential, dealing with God. It is asking. But it is asking upon the ground of a very close union and thorough identity between God and us, as regards the life to which the asking has respect, and of which it is the acting out. In plain terms, it is our asking as one in interest, in sympathy, in character, in end and aim—one, in short, in life or manner of living, with him whom we ask; through his giving us eternal life; that life being in his Son, and being indeed the very life itself of his Son.

This is not, however, to be regarded as of the essence of prayer, so that none may appeal to the throne of grace without it. God forbid that I should restrict the efficacy of prayer, however and whenever it is offered, out of a smitten conscience and broken heart. Not merely as a sinner out of Christ, but as a believer in Christ, I find my need, daily and hourly, of that liberty of access, as it were from without, to my God and Father, which I have in and with him who has taught me so to approach him.

But it is a somewhat different attitude that I am here called to assume; different, and yet after all the same. I pray as having eternal life; the very eternal life which God gives, and which is in his Son Jesus Christ. What sort of prayer does that mean? Are we not, in offering it, brought into the position of offering the prayer from the very same standpoint, if one may say so, on which God himself stands, when he answers the prayer? We offer our prayer as having eternal life; God’s own eternal life, made over to us as ours in his Son. And that is the ground of the confidence which we have, “that if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us.”

II. Hence we are to “know that we have eternal life” through our thus asking, in this confidence; for “if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” We are to know our privilege in the using of it; we are to know our position by taking advantage of it. We receive, in the Son, as the Father’s gift, a new life. In its nature and manner of acting, it is analogous to the Father’s own life, and indeed, in some sense, identical with it. The identity manifests itself in this confidence of prayer. In so far as my prayer is the working out of that identity, it must be confident, confiding, free, and bold. It must be real and actual conversation with God within his own holy place; in his own inmost chamber; upon the matter, whatever it is, that is the subject of my prayer. I get in now within the veil. I am a dweller in the secret place of the Most High. I am, as it were, behind the scenes of his great providential drama, his great economy of grace and judgment. I am with him; one with him; one with him in sympathy of mind and heart as to the eternal principles and laws upon which the whole plan of his moral administration proceeds. From that point of view I consider the question at issue; the question to which my prayer relates; and my prayer regarding it is framed accordingly. It is a setting forth of the matter, as, in all its aspects, it presents itself to me. It is a spreading of it out before God, as it appears to me;—to me, however, as having God’s gift to me of eternal life in his Son. For the case is now under my eye, not as it might present itself to me, judging after the flesh, looking at things in the light of merely natural predilections and opinions;—but as it presents itself to me, judging spiritually; looking at things in the light of the eternal life which God gives me in his Son. Whatever I so ask must be according to his will; and therefore I may have absolute confidence that I have it.

I may possibly see my way, upon this footing, to ask altogether unconditionally. I may so realise God’s giving me eternal life in his Son,—and so clearly and unmistakably and assuredly perceive how, in the view of that eternal life, the event at issue might best be ordered,—as to have the utmost boldness in preferring a specific request, absolutely and without qualification. Eminent saints of God have felt themselves entitled, and have warrantably felt themselves entitled, especially in critical emergencies, to be thus precise and peremptory; all the more if a brotherhood of them conferred and consulted together, under the guidance of God’s word, as applied by the Spirit’s help to his providence. All of them being led by the Spirit to the same conclusion, finding that the case presented itself to them all in the same aspect, and being of one mind as to what would best subserve the ends of the eternal life which they all have in common as God’s gift in his Son;—they may have considered themselves at liberty to condescend with great assurance upon the particular step which they would have God to take. And therefore they might unhesitatingly ask him to take it, and fearlessly reckon on his taking it. I suppose that this is partly the Lord’s meaning in that remarkable promise: “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”

Even in such a case, however, the prayer is not mere importunate solicitation, as from without; it partakes more of the nature of confidential conversation, within the circle of God’s house and family. To adopt a homely phrase, it is as if, using the liberty of trusted children, we were telling our Father how the case under consideration strikes us; how it strikes us when we are looking at it, or trying to look at it, from his point of view; looking at it in the light of that “eternal life which he gives us in his Son.”

And what does it really matter, in such intercourse as this, on such a footing as this, with the only wise God, if we should ordinarily count it safer and more becoming to ask conditionally; under the reservation and with the qualification of deference and submission to his better judgment? Our asking anything thus conditionally, if only we ask in the spirit of the eternal life which we have in his Son, is very eminently “according to his will.” He cannot but approve of it. Nor does it in the least detract from our confidence in asking.

There is room indeed here for different degrees, not of our confidence in asking, but of the conditionality or unconditionality, if I may say so, with which we ask. Our confidence in asking is the same; the only difference is as to our making up our mind what to ask. As to that, we may well have some hesitation for the most part in being very definite and positive. Even when we honestly and truly ask as having eternal life given to us by God in his Son, we may be at a loss. Nay, the more we so ask, the more may we be at a loss. We try to look at the matter at issue as God looks at it; not under the influence of things without, and the considerations which they might suggest; but under the rule, and in the light, of that higher life which he has in himself. We seek to judge as God judges; in the view, not of temporal interests merely, but of eternal issues. Well may we pause and be very cautious; well may there be a certain reserve in any judgment we form, and a certain reservation in any prayer we frame upon that judgment; well may there be some dubiety, not as to our having what we ask, but as to what we are to ask; what we would have God to do.

But what then? Is this confidence in prayer a delusion, a sort of juggle? I am told that in virtue of the eternal life which God gives me in his Son, I may have whatever I choose to ask. And in the same breath I am told that this very eternal life, which I thus have, may hinder me, for the most part, from ever asking almost anything definitely and positively. Is this not a kind of double-dealing? Is it not putting me off as with the Barmecide’s empty feast, or the visionary mirage of the desert? Nay, it is far otherwise.

Let us consider practically our real position; let us take a specific instance.

Our brother Lazarus is sick; and the sickness seems to be unto death. What are we to ask? What is to be our petition, and what our request? If we have respect simply to life temporal; if we take account merely of such considerations as this present earthly scene suggests; we cannot hesitate a moment. Looking at the case from a human standpoint, we need no time for deliberation. The instinct of natural affection will prompt, and many reasons of Christian expediency will occur to enforce, the loud wailing cry to the Lord to spare so precious and useful a life. But we feel that, as admitted to a participation with the Son in the eternal life of God, we have a higher standing and a weightier responsibility in this matter of prayer. We are lifted up to the very footstool on which the throne of the hearer of prayer itself rests; and from thence we look at the question, as he looks at it. Finding ourselves thus placed, our first impulse may be to shrink and hang back altogether. We refuse even to attempt to form a judgment, and to frame the judgment into a prayer, however guarded. But that is not his will; nor on second thoughts is it our wish. It is indeed a singularly high and holy position, in respect of insight and sympathy, that we are called to occupy in fellowship with God. But we are to occupy it boldly, and with all confidence. And now from that position we apply our mind, as it were, along with him, to the determination of what is best to be done; and we express our mind freely to him all along as we do so. We talk the whole affair over with him; conversing about it without reserve. We reason, we expostulate, we plead. We spread out before him all the views and considerations, of whatever sort, that seem to us to have any bearing on the case; not excluding those suggested by warm natural affection and urgent earthly interests, but not limiting our regard to these. We say whatever occurs to us, whatever it is in our heart to say.

What though in all this close and confidential dealing with God we should not be able to say positively what is best? Is it not a blessed intercourse notwithstanding? We may be reduced to utter straits: “Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?” In our anguish of spirit, distracted between conflicting motives; altogether at a loss to decide what we would have God to do; driven out of reasoning and speech; we may be reduced to groaning and weeping; to “strong crying and tears.” What then? Is our confidence in prayer gone? Nay, it was when Jesus “in the days of his flesh made supplication with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death,” that he had the most complete assurance of his being “heard in that he feared.” And it is when “we know not what to pray for as we ought, that the Spirit, helping our infirmities, maketh intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.” Our unutterable groanings the blessed Spirit takes as his own, turning them into prayers; prayers very specially acceptable to the hearer of prayer. For “he who searcheth the heart knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit when he” thus “maketh intercession for the saints.” His doing so is “according to the will of God.”

Let us look then at the light which John’s teaching in these verses casts on the privilege and duty of prayer.

1. In the first place, let us consider what prayer is, as thus viewed, in all the fulness and variety of its confident assurance. It is not simply petitioning; it is not monotonous reiteration; the incessant sending up to heaven again and again of the same appeal, the same demand for some specific deliverance, some precise and definite benefit, that may seem to us indispensable, that we feel as if we could not do without. It is a far more confidential dealing with God than that. It is our becoming “the men of his secret.” It is our getting into the inmost chamber of his house, and consulting with him there; seeking to know his mind; ready to make his mind ours. I say it is consulting with God. And the consultation may and must be full and free. It will embrace as its topics whatever can be of interest to him or to us; to him primarily, to us as under him. Hence everywhere and always, and with reference to everything, we must be thus consulting with God; not only upon cases of difficulty or distress, but upon all sorts of cases; common cases, everyday cases; little cases, as well as cases of rare and grave emergency.

Prayer of this kind may be short, like the Lord’s strong cry of agony in the garden; it may be silent, like his groaning and weeping at Bethany. But it may be long, ever so long, without falling under the Lord’s censure of the long prayers of the Pharisees. In such prayer he himself often spent the whole long night. He was at home then and there with his Father; consulting with him about many things; about all things bearing on his Father’s glory and his own work; laying his own views and feelings and wishes unreservedly before his Father; and reverently learning his.

Brethren, pray thus without ceasing. “In everything, by such prayer and supplication, make your requests known to God.” Carry everything; literally everything; everything that befalls you, or seems likely to befall you; every choice you have to make; whatever you have to say or do; every care, every duty, every trial, every glad relief; carry everything to God. Converse with God about it. Turn it over, as between God and you, in every possible way. Look at it from every possible point of view. Do not be in haste to make up your mind as to what is best; as to what you should definitely ask. Rather prolong the blessed interview. The very suspending of your judgment, as the consultation goes on, may make the interview more blessed. And the issue will be the clear, calm “peace of God keeping your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ your Lord;” “the single eye, making the whole body full of light.”

2. Then, secondly, let us consider how close and intimate is the connection between life and prayer; between God’s giving us eternal life in his Son, and our asking thus confidently and confidentially. The two are really one; the eternal life is realised and acted out in this asking. The life is prayer; and prayer is the life. It is as partakers of the life which the Father has in himself, and which, by his gift, the Son also has in himself, that we ask and pray. The essential characteristic of that life is its self-containedness, if I may repeat the phrase; its independence of things without; its drawing from within itself the motives of all its voluntary determinations. So the Father lives; not moved by impulses and influences of a temporal sort from without; but purposing and decreeing, willing and acting, always from himself and for himself. So the Son also lives, not as God merely, but as “the man Christ Jesus;” being, as to his manhood as well as his Godhead, in an intimate sense one with the Father; one in purpose and decree, in will and action; one in mind and heart. So also in a measure we, having the Son, live. Our real life is apart from the contingencies and accidents of time, being “hid with Christ in God.” It is as so living, living that hidden life, that we ask and pray.

What harmony, what concord and agreement, what entire oneness, between God and us, does this imply! It is oneness of opinion, sentiment, feeling, desire; first, on the great fundamental question, What is life?—life worthy of the name,—life worth the living; and then, in subordination to that, upon every question which can touch that life. We form the same idea of life that God has, and that Christ has; the same idea of what it is worth while to live for. And it is under that idea, fixed and fastened deep in our inmost spirit, that we ask and pray. We settle in the Spirit with ourselves,—as well as with Christ and with God,—what is the only true, the only perfect, the only desirable life, for beings possessed of a divine faculty of intelligence, and destined to a divine immortality. Having that life, we commune with the living One, as our Father in Christ, upon all the great eternal aims and hopes which it contains, and all the small temporal casualties by which, for a season, these aims and hopes may be environed and beset. Such communing about eternity, and about time as related to eternity, is prayer; the prayer which acts out “the eternal life which we have as God’s gift in his Son.”

3. In the third place, let us consider how very holy this life is, and how very holy therefore must be the prayer which acts it out. It is indeed our being “partakers of God’s holiness.” For such living fellowship and communion as is implied in the life and the prayer, sensitively shrinks from all unholy handling. Sense may not mar it; sin may not pollute it; the touch of earth’s vanity or man’s corruption breaks its sacred spell, and dissolves its peaceful charm. For the charm of this life of prayer is peace; the peace of God; the peace of conscious sympathy with the God of peace. But all earthliness, worldliness, and selfishness,—all diversity of judgment or feeling on any point between us and him whose eternal life we share,—in a word, all unholiness,—disturbs that peace. No unsanctified bosom can be its dwelling-place on earth, for its dwelling-place in heaven is the holy bosom of God. Therefore, “as he who hath called us is holy, let us also be holy.”

4. For, in the fourth place, this faculty of praying as having eternal life, is itself to be sought by prayer. The life is God’s gift in Christ, to be appropriated by faith; the Spirit shutting us up into Christ, and making us one with Christ. The prayer is in the Spirit and of the Spirit. It is the Spirit making intercession for us, with us, in us. It is the Spirit of his Son sent forth by God into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. But the Spirit is given in answer to prayer. Therefore let us ask, seek, knock, that we may receive the Spirit; that he may dwell in us; that he may move us, as having eternal life in the Son, to pray, as the Son himself was wont to pray, in the Spirit. So moved, we may be praying confidently, as the Son prayed, in all sorts of ways; not only in prolonged midnight meditations, but in brief ejaculations as occasion calls; in hasty utterances; or when utterance fails, in sighs and tears and groans. For we have all boldness to be ever praying, after whatever sort of prayer may suit the times and seasons of our praying. Let us pray that we may receive the Spirit thus to embolden us always to pray;—to “ask according to his will,” even as the Spirit “maketh intercession for the saints, according to the will of God.”