| The Golden Gate of Prayer |
Chapter 1 |
Page 4 |
The Lord’s Prayer tells us what we could pray for. It is very brief, but its petitions are most comprehensive. We should study them in order to learn what we may bring to God in our prayer. We do not know what to pray for as we ought. In nothing else do we need the help of Christ more than in making our requests of God. Ofttimes the things we think we need most sorely are not by any means our deepest, most real needs. A man was brought to Jesus to have his paralysis cured. That was the prayer which he and his friends made in coming; it was for this that the four men who carried their helpless burden manifested such earnestness, overcoming so many obstacles and hindrances; they thought that this was the man’s most pressing need. Jesus looked into the man’s life and saw that he had another need greater than this, and first forgave his sins, afterwards curing has paralysis. Forgiveness is always a sorer need than the healing of any sickness. We come to God continually with cries for the taking away of some trial or the supplying of some want. God looks at us and says, “My child, that is not what you need most to have done.” He then gives us, not what we have asked, but what he sees we ought to have asked.
We are apt, in our praying, to give more thought to the things that concern our physical life than to those which concern our higher, spiritual interests. We tell God of our sicknesses, and ask him to heal them. We pray to him for our friends who are ill, and implore him to restore them. We bring to him the matter of our daily bread, especially if our food-supply is short or precarious. It is well that we should take everything to God. Nothing that concerns us is too small to be put into a prayer. God hears even the sparrows when they cry for food. But these temporal thing should not have the first place in our asking.
Whatever use our Lord meant us to make of the Lord’s Prayer as a form of prayer, the order of its petitions is certainly intended to guide us in our approaches to our Father, telling us what to put first. Thus we are taught what are the most important things. The first three requests are for things that concern the honor of God — the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will. We are half-way to the end before there is a word about ourself and our personal wants. Then only one of the three petitions which refer to our own needs applies to bodily wants, the other two being for forgiveness of sins and deliverance in temptation. We are taught thus that the things of God should come first in our praying, not our own wants; and that among our personal needs the most serious are not things for our body but the taking away of our sins and our delivering from evil.
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