Reasons Why Prayer Is Not Answered

“Ash, and it shall be given you.”

James IV. 3. “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ash amiss.”

Suppose that a man takes up his pen and a piece of parchment, and writes on the top of it, “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, the humble petition of So and so,” but there he stops. He sits with the pen in Ins hand for half an hour, but does not add another word; then rises and goes his way. And he repeats this process day after day — beginning a hundred sheets of paper, but putting into them no express request; sometimes” perhaps, scrawling down a few sentences which nobody can read, not even himself, but never plainly and deliberately setting down what it is that he desires. Can he wonder that his blank petitions and scribbled parchments have no sensible effect on himself nor on any one besides? And has he any right to say, “I wonder what can be the matter. Other people get answers to their petitions, but I am not aware that the slightest notice has ever been taken of one of mine. I am not conscious of having got a single favour, nor do I feel a whit the better for all that I have written.” Could you expect it? When did you ever finish a petition? W hen did you ever despatch and forward one to the feet of majesty?

And so, my friends, there are many persons who pass their days inditing blank petitions — or rather petitionless forms of prayer. Every morning they bend their knee, and continue a few moments in the devotional attitude. They address themselves to the Heavenly Majesty. They call on the “great and dreadful name” of God, and they go over a few words and sentences, but such incoherent and unfelt sentences as the child who cannot write would scrawl upon a piece of paper. Or perhaps they say nothing. They leave it a perfect blank. And after this form of worship they go their way, and wonder why their prayers are not heard. Other people get answers, but they are not conscious that any prayer of theirs has ever produced the least effect.

Now, of this we are very certain, that there is no prayer but something comes of it. Leaving out of view those vain and rambling repetitions — those empty words which constitute the entire devotions of some formalists — we are warranted by the word of God to aver that there is no real prayer which is not somehow disposed of — no request presented at the mercy-seat, which is not, in Bible language, “considered,” and either refused or granted. Many appear to fancy that prayers are like a flight of promiscuous missiles, of which a few find the mark, but the greater number alight no where, and bring back nothing. This infidel and irrational view gets no countenance from the word of God. There we learn, that if it be a prayer at all — a sincere desire offered to the living God in his appointed way — it obtains an answer — whether that answer be a full or partial compliance, or an entire refusal. And it therefore becomes a question of the utmost practical moment to know what those

M 2 conditions are that mar the efficacy, or impede the return of prayers.

1. It is competent to the sovereign to fix the channel through which he desires that his subjects should transmit their petitions. Owing to their elevated rank, some have a right to request an immediate audience of majesty and present their applications in proper person and in their own name; but usually there is some fixed medium through which the suits of common subjects must come — a particular minister through whom all memorials and supplications must be transmitted. Now there is a celestial peerage who come before the King of kings in their own right. The sons of God — some orders of the heavenly host — need no mediator in drawing near to God. They come with veiled faces and low reverence, but still they come in virtue of their birth-right — they come direct. It is not so, however, with our world’s population. Not so much on account of our lowlier rank, as of our personal demerit, there is no immediate entrance for any son of Adam into the presence of the heavenly Majesty. But there is a day’s-man appointed; and, so to speak, it is a standing order in the court of heaven, that each petition from earth shall he transmitted tli rough “the minister of the new covenant” — through that Divine person on whose shoulder is devolved the government of this our far-off colony. Now, what say you? Suppose that any one should try to overleap this standing order — suppose that any one should either in his proud stuhbornness scorn it, or in his carelessness forget it, and try to forward his petition in his own name — can he wonder if an omission so flagrant should insure its rejection? The petition may be very earnest, and its object may be perfectly right, but the mode of its transmission is wrong. And this is no matter of mere etiquette, like some of the court-arrangements of earth, but a matter of high import, and meant to fulfil exalted ends. It is designed in honour of the Prince of Peace, to whose memorable interposition it is owing that there is any loyalty in this revolted world, and to whose administration the entire of its affairs is now intrusted, and to whose name it is but seemly that every knee should bow. Whosoever would present an acceptable petition and secure a return

ji 3 to his prayer, must remember that saying of the Lord Jesus himself, “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father, in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”*

2. But, secondly, besides asking in a self-righteous spirit, a person may actually ask wrong things. A child who has never seen a serpent before, and who looks at it through the glass-frame, may think it very beautiful. As it curls and glides about in its folds of green and gold, and its ruby eyes sparkle in the sun, it looks far prettier than more familiar objects, and the child may long to grasp it: “But what man is there among you who is a father, if his son ask a serpent, will he give him the serpent?” And supposing that the fretful child should weep because he is not allowed to fondle the asp, could worse befall him than just to be allowed to smash the case and clutch the envenomed reptile? The Lord has sometimes permitted his imperious and wayward children thus to punish themselves; but more frequently and more merci-

John xiv. 13.

fully, he refuses their hearts’ deceitful lust. One sets his eye on the golden serpent, and prays that God would make him rich. But the Lord still keeps the shining serpent beyond his reach; for should he have succeeded in hugging it to his bosom, it might have stung him with many sorrows, or even plunged him in perdition. Another sets his eye on the fiery flying - serpent of fame, and wonders after it, and wishes that he too could fix his reputation to it, and see his own name flickering as part of its meteor-train in its flight through the firmament. But this wish is also refused — and instead of a dizzy and dangerous renown, he is appointed to a safe obscurity. And sometimes requests, right or religiouslooking, are refused. When the mother of Zebedee’s children came and said, “Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left, when thou comest in thy kingdom,” — there was a plausibility and a cei’tain faith in the petition. It assumed that Christ had indeed a kingdom, and was yet to come gloriously, and it said that the highest honour she could seek for James and John was the highest office there. But the request was ambitious. It was wrong, and was refused.

3. And this leads us to remark that a person may ask right things with a wrong motive. When Simon Magus besought the Apostles that he might receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, he asked a good thing — emphatically the best thing; but he asked it with a bad motive, that he might make it a source of personal gain; and instead of a blessing his prayer was answered with a curse. “Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.”* Even spiritual mercies are refused to you, because you would employ them on carnal ends.

4. Such a sin may be cherished in the heart as makes prayer unavailing. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.“f To keep a sin in the heart whilst there is a prayer on the lips, is like going into the monarch’s presence arm in arm with a rebel, or getting some noted enemy of his to countersign our petition.” It is, as it were, courting a refusal. It is effectually

* James iv. 3. i Tsalm lxvi. 18 saying to God, ‘Thy greatest blessing I am content to want. Holiness, deliverance from sin, I am willing to do without; but this particular boon, as it is thine to bestow, so I am reluctantly constrained to ask it from thee.’“* It is as if the one hand held out a plea for God’s favour, and the other a plea for God’s frown. In truth, it is the more honest part of the man contradicting the other; the sinner shouting the Nay to the Amen of the hypocrite, and drowning in his louder voice the feeble muttering of the feigned lips. You have all heard of Augustine’s prayer. In the days of his licentiousness he had too much conscience to live without prayer, and too much love of sin to pray without a secret reservation; and so his prayer ran, “Lord! convert me — oh, convert me — but not to-day, Lord! not to-day.” And the same is the translated purport of many a prayer. One prays, “Lead me not into temptation,” when he has already in his possession the play-house ticket which he means to use that evening; or when he has already made an engagement

* Foster, MS.

with some of his ungodly friends, and is looking forward with eagerness to their society. Another prays, “And forgive me my trespasses,” when he has in his heart a scheme of revenge, and is already in imagination glorying over his humbled rival or defeated adversary. And a third prays, “Lord, let me die the death of the righteous,” when he has already made all the arrangements for some nefarious transaction, and when the very next act of self-denial which he is called to exercise will be the triumph of sensuality or self-indulgence. And a fourth cries, “As I to others mercy show, I mercy beg from heaven;” and at that moment he is allowing some necessitous kinsman to languish in neglected misery, or with an ample fortune is contributing nothing to the diffusion of that Gospel, which is the only means of rescuing men from eternal ruin.

5. Some prayers are not heard because men do not believe that God will grant them. Were you writing a note to a friend, and saying, “I would be much the better for such a thing” — naming it. “You can easily spare it; but I have little expectation that you will do me such a favour;” would this be a likely way to compass his object? Though he had wished to foil, could he have worded his application otherwise? And so, when a man gets down on his knees and prays for pardon of his sins, or for the teaching of the Holy Spirit, or for assurance of salvation, but prays for them as if the Lord would grudge to give them, can he wonder that he is not heard? Whatsoever the Lord has promised, that he is willing to bestow, and “whatsoever things we ask in prayer, believing that we have them, Ave receive them.”

6. Some prayers are not answered because, though earnest at the time, the petitioner has grown indifferent afterwards.

7. Some prayers are answered, but the answer is a long time arrived before the petitioner adverts to it. Like a man who despatches for the physician one express after another, and at last he arrives, and is actually in the house; but, unapprized of his presence, the sick man sends off another messenger to hasten his approach. Or as you may have sent for some book or other object which you were anxious to possess, but as it is long of making its appearance, your anxiety to see it begins to abate, and by-and-by you have almost forgotten it; when some day you take up a parcel that has long lain unopened in a corner of the room, and find that it is the very thing you were once so impatient to get. “And when did this arrive?” Oh! months ago. “How strange, then, that I should never have noticed it till now!” In extreme agony Jacob vowed a vow, and prayed a prayer: “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone which I have set up for a pillar shall be God’s house.” It was an earnest and importunate prayer. It was answered. Every petition was fulfilled. All that he asked, Jacob obtained. He got bread to eat; he got raiment to put on. He was delivered from Esau his brother. He came back to his father’s house in peace and in unimagined prosperity. But it never occurred to Jacob that his prayer was answered till the Lord himself reminded him. He might have seen the answer in his peaceful tent, in his grazing flocks and herds, in his large and powerful family, and in himself — the fugitive lad come home a prince and a patriarch. But it was not till the Lord appeared and said, “Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there; and make there an altar unto God that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from Esau thy brother;” it was not till then that Jacob recollected the vow or detected the answer; and had the Lord not reminded him, Bethel and its pillar might have faded for ever from Jacob’s memory. And so, parents in the days of their children’s infancy often pray for their children’s conversion, and when they see their wayward freaks and wicked tempers, the tear starts in their eye, and they are ready to give up hope. But one by one the Lord brings them to himself. The prayer is partly or wholly answered, and ere they are gathered to their fathers, these parents find themselves surrounded by a godly seed. But it never strikes them that here is an answer to prayer. Or a company of Christians pray for a revival of religion, and they fix their eye on a particular spot of the horizon, nothing doubting but that it is there the cloud must appear.

LECTURE VII.

And whilst they kneel and pray and mourn that the sky continues brass, they never notice that in the opposite* quarter the heavens are melting, and there is an abundance of rain. Though not in the form nor in the direction which they first desired, still the blessing is come; and perhaps in measure it surpasses their fondest expectation and their largest prayer.