DARING PRAYING

Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it to you – John 16:23

“How tame and insipid is much modern praying – a respectable asking for a minimum expenditure and exhibition of divine power. Seldom do our petitions rise above the level of natural thought of previous experience. Do we ever dare to pray for the unprecedented? The whole atmosphere of the age tends to make us minimize what we can expect of God, and yet His Word reveals that the extent of legitimate expectation is literally without limits.

As though to anticipate our reluctance to ask audaciously, God employs every universal term in our language in His promises to the praying soul. Here they are: Whatsoever, wheresoever, whensoever, whosoever, all, any, every. Take one such promise. “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it you” (John 16:23). Trace the other words in their relation to prayer and note how they encourage large petitions. It has been said that God’s only limitation and condition of prayer is found in the character of the one who prays – “According to your faith be it unto you.”

God delights to respond to daring prayer. How quickly He responded to the audacity of the Syrophenician woman though her prayer had no right to claim. He encourages us to ask as freely for the impossible as for the possible, since to Him all difficulties are the same size – less than Himself. Because this was so Jesus said, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence…and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matt. 17:20). In the parallel passage, it is a tree and not a mighty mountain. But audacious prayer is no more dismayed by a mountain than a tree, since:

“All things are possible to him that believeth.”