October 3

“Such prayer God delights to answer. When with earnestness and intensity we breathe a prayer in the name of Christ, there is in that very intensity a pledge from God that He is about to answer our prayer "exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think." Eph. 3:20.”

          Christ’s Object Lessons p.147

           Such prayer? We saw yesterday that our prayers should not just be in the name of Christ but also be uttered by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

          This now adds a further task – our prayer should be earnest and intense. Might I leave you to ponder how you express earnestness and intensity while I look at the source of those qualities?

          I love to pull a sentence apart and then put it back together again. Unless the writer, Ellen White in this case, is simply having a joke with us words are carefully crafted to have meaning. They are used to make sense of a situation.

          As we read the words of the gospels we can start to picture a scene. Our current chapter, ‘Asking to give’, is an examination of a passage in the Gospels where a man goes to a house to plead for bread so that help might be offered a visitor. We are not meant just to read words, we are meant to imagine the scene and put flesh to simple words.

          A good writer uses words to help us not only imagine where we might be in story but also helps us to work out how and why the events happen.

          In our passage the words are used in such a way to tell us that the earnestness and the intensity come to us because of the presence of God in our lives. We don’t have to fake earnestness, we don’t have to manufacture intensity. They are present because God is present.

          Why are our prayers answered? Because God is a part of us. Might I then suggest a way in which we can be assured that every single prayer that we ask is answered in the way that we want? We only ask for what God wants us to have.

          How do we only ask for what God wants us to have? We need to know God so intimately that He is a real part of us. Is this really possible? What does Paul say?

“for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.”

     1 Corinthians 2:16

     There can only be one source for this and that this happens as we continue to invite God’s presence into our lives as we continue to ask for the Holy Spirit to enter our lives.

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