These words are said to us as God's children. This is the one condition of our asking and having. "Ask," our good Lord would say, "your Father as His children, believing in Him, trusting in Him, hoping in Him, trusting yourselves with Him."
I. It is not, then, said to those who will not live as God's children. He who will not live as God's child makes himself wiser than God. He chooses what God chooses not; he frames to himself a world of his own, and makes its laws for himself. He contradicts or disbelieves the goodness of God, in that he chooses what God refuses, refuses what God chooses.
II. It is not said as to things which we cannot ask as God's children. To covet passionately the things of this life, even without actual sin; to long to be above those around us; to desire to be admired, thought of; to have a smooth easy course, to be without trial, this is not the temper of God's children. To gain these things might be to lose the soul.
III. We are not children of our heavenly Father if we forgive not from our hearts each other their trespasses; and therefore any secret grudge, any mislike of another, any rankling memory of injury, hinders our prayer being heard.
IV. If we ask not earnestly, we either do not really want what we ask for, or we mistrust that God will give it, and do not really look to Him as our Father.
V. There are many degrees of asking, many degrees of obtaining. God willeth to win thee to ask of Him. He will often give us things more than we could look for, that we may remember how He heareth prayers, and ask Him for what He is yet more ready to give, because it is more precious for our eternal good. He draws us on as earthly parents do their children to trust Him in a more simple, childlike way. Pray, and thou shalt know that God will hear thy prayers. Pray as thou canst, and pray that thou mayest pray better. The gates of heaven are ever open that thou mayest go in and out at thy will. He Himself, to whom thou prayest, prayeth for thee, by His voice, by His love, by His blood. How can we fail to be heard, when, if we wish, God the Holy Spirit will pray in us, and He to whom we pray is more ready to give than we to ask?
E. B. Pusey, Sermons for the Church's Seasons,p. 372.
The Miracles of Prayer.
Can man change the mind of God? Will God, on the prayer of man, change any part of that wondrous order which He has impressed on His fair, visible creation?
I. God does through man's acts become other to him than He was before. The returned soul knows that not only is its whole self changed towards God, but that the relations and actions of God towards it are also changed. And this change has often been wrought by Jesus through the prayers of others. Which are greatest, the miracles of nature or the miracles of grace? Which is the greatest interference (to use men's word) to change passive, unresisting nature, or man's strong, energetic, resisting will, which God Himself so respects that He will not force the will which He has endowed with freedom, that it might have the bliss freely to choose Himself? And yet these stupendous spiritual miracles are daily renewed. The love of the Church, of the pastor, the mother, the combined prayers of those whom God has inspired with the love of souls, draw down on the prodigal soul many a wasted or half-wasted grace, until at last God in His providence has laid the soul open to the influence of His grace, and the soul, obstructing no more the access to Divine grace, is converted to God and lives.
II. Whether the whole sequence of natural phenomena follow a fixed order of Divine law impressed once for all upon his creation by the almighty fiat of God, or whether the proximate causes of which we are cognizant are the result of the ever-present action of the Divine will, independently of any such system these are but the ways of acting of the Omniscient. The difficulty lies in the Omniscience itself, which knew all things which were not as though they were. Who doubts but that God knew beforehand that awful winter which cut off half a million of the flower of French chivalry? But whether that winter, which stood alone in the history of Russian climate, came only in the natural sequel of some fixed laws, or whether it was owing to the immediate fiat of God, the adaptation of these natural phenomena to the chastisement of that suffering host was alike exact, the free agency of its leader was alike unimpaired.
III. Once more, the availableness of prayer has been contrasted with the availableness of human remedies; its unavailableness has been insisted upon, if combined with human sloth. Who bade separate trust in God from the exertions of duty? Certainly not He who, even in His highest concerns, the salvation of our souls, bade us work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in us, to will and to do of His good pleasure.
IV. One soul there is for which thy prayers are absolutely infallible thine own. Before thou hast uttered the prayer, so soon as through the grace of God thou hast conceived it in thy heart and embraced it in thy will, it has ascended to the Eternal throne. Already it has been presented to Him who in all eternity loved thee and formed thee for His love. It has been presented by Him, Man with thee, who, as Man, died for thee, who, in His precious death, prayed for thee, Man with thee, but also God with God. How should it fail? Thy prayer cannot fail, if thou, through thine own will, fail not thy prayer.
E. B. Pusey, Selected Occasional Sermons,p. 295.
References: Matthew 21:22. E. B. Pusey, Parochial and Cathedral Sermons,p. 273; J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 69.