Law and Prayer.
To think that nothing can be too good for their children is an amiable weakness few mothers can resist. Salome had heard Christ discourse of a kingdom which He was about to establish. There would be places and preferments at His disposal, and who so lit to possess them as her own sons? A little forwardness in asking might secure a prize, and so she said to Jesus, "Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on Thy right hand, the other on the left, in Thy kingdom." Our Lord answers, "To sit on My right hand and on My left is not Mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father." In other words, our Lord says, "It is Mine to give to these, but it is not Mine to give without regard to the will of My Father; not Mine to give to any who may ask for it, but who have not the proper preparation."
I. From these words of our Lord we get a principle, which the students of physical phenomena are perpetually asserting as though it were their peculiar discovery, that the Almighty has chosen to proceed in His dealings with His creatures according to a regular and uniform order; that He does not break this order, or interfere with this method, or give up His will, simply because a frail foolish mortal may ask Him to do so. The text reveals to us a law or regular method of Divine action, and by consequence that there are things which do not belong to the region of prayer.
II. The question is not of God's omnipotence, but of His will. The existence of God being granted, every man, whether he be a Christian or not, makes no doubt that God can do whatsoever pleaseth Him. In our ignorance we often make the mistake which was made by Salome, and ask for that which may not be ours. If our ignorance be our misfortune and not our fault, He who looks "with larger, other eyes than ours," to make allowance for us all, will not treat us sternly because we have made a child's blunder. But when, by one way or another, from the Bible, or from the world around us, we have discovered God's purpose and will, then we do not ask Him to change it, but to help us to bear or to fulfil it. Until we clearly and distinctly know what God's good pleasure is concerning us, it remains our soothing and hopeful privilege to tell Him everything, our secret wishes and desires, the things we so much long for.
III. Prayer is not a mere piece of mental machinery for obtaining some temporal advantage for which material appliances are insufficient. The kingdom of heaven is not a mere union-house, from which the idle and the improvident, and indeed all comers, may get a passing relief. Prayer is the communion of the soul with God, its repose upon infinite love. In a new joy as well as in a blinding reverse, in the weariness and rustiness of too often repeated pleasures, in the gnawing dissatisfaction of conscious failure, and on the high places of success, to poor humble people as well as the solitary great ones of earth, there comes the need of prayer and the crying for God: "O God, Thou art my God: early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee: in a barren and dry land, where no water is."
W. Page Roberts, Law and God,p. 14.