Week #11 – Petition

Invocation:
Lord, teach me to pray, with a faith in your goodness that believes for the answers; with a love for your will that cleanses my askings. Amen.

Weekly Scripture Reading: Psalm 5

Daily Scripture Reading:

Monday 2 Thessalonians 1:1-12
Tuesday Colossians 1:1-13
Wednesday Matthew 7:7-12
Thursday James 5:13-20
Friday Genesis 18:16-33
Saturday John 14:1-14
Sunday 1 John 5:13-21

Selections for Meditation:

Personal Meditation:

Prayer:
Jesus reminded us to bring our needs to the Father, bread for today, forgiveness for past trespasses, guidance and deliverance for the days that are ahead. Bring those needs, for yourself and others, to Him this week. Remember also to pray for your requests to grow out of a deep desire to be in His will.

Hymn: “My Faith Looks Up to Thee”

My faith looks up to Thee,
Thou Lamb of Calvary,
Savior divine;
Now hear me while I pray,
Take all my sin away,
O let me from this day,
Be wholly Thine!

May Thy rich grace impart,
Strength to my fainting heart,
My zeal impart;
As Thou hast died for me,
O may my love for Thee,
Pure, warm and spotless be,
— a living fire!

While life’s dark maze I tread,
And griefs around me spread,
Be Thou my Guide;
Bid darkness turn to day,
Wipe sorrow’s tears away,
Nor let me ever stray,
From Thee aside.
-Ray Palmer-

Benediction:
Grant me, O Lord, heavenly wisdom, that I may learn to seek You above all things, and to understand all other things as they are according to the order of Your wisdom. Amen.

Selections for Meditation:

* True, the New Testament says, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” That surely does not mean that anything we desire, we may have. There is a limitation in the passage itself which is usually overlooked. There are many things we naturally desire when we are on a holiday, or are worried with our work, or are walking the streets, or are just daydreaming. But those same desires disappear when we begin to pray. They and prayer just do not seem to go together. The moment we begin to talk to God, we begin to be ashamed to talk about them. And when talking to God becomes talking with God, we forget those desires altogether. As one man said to me once: “I remember something I very much wanted. It seemed the answer to a long-felt and almost intolerable hunger. Every time I thought about it, and that was often, my heart was on fire and my pulse raced. So I tried to pray for it. But I couldn’t. The words choked me. My God-directed thought could not tolerate it.”
Another word of Jesus is often mis-interpreted: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done to you.” That seems at first an unlimited guarantee of an affirmative answer to any desire. But it is not what anybody wills, that is assured of the answer. It is what is willed by a particular person, one who is abiding in Christ. When someone truly abides in Christ, there are many, many things he never wills to ask because he does not want them. And if Christ’s words are abiding in someone — all of Christ’s words — you can be sure they will not ask for a whole category of events. When Christ’s words are in the soul, a wish that the secular heart grasps after is no longer even interesting! When we truly abide in Christ, when our union with Him is complete, then His desires and our are one. Having no will but His, it is right that that will should find expression in our prayers. Here is where the difficulty arises. Most of us are far from such unity with Him. We still will things which God must veto. Therefore, our desires should always be suspect — our preferences should not become petitions. Jesus’ counsel, “Ask and you shall receive,” should always be understood to mean the asking sanctioned in another of the Master’s words, “But seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things will be added unto you.” So petition is now for the unfolding of His will, guidance, and power for its fulfillment.
-From An Autobiography of Prayer by
-Albert E. Day-

* There can be no doubt that petition is a dominant part of prayer. How dominant it ought to be, and what petitions ought to be offered, are questions calling for further examination.
In many discussions of prayer, petition, if not ruled out, is placed on the lower rounds of the ladder. I have many times heard and read that the true end of prayer is to cultivate fellowship with God, seeking not to have anything from his hand but only to be in his presence. As has earlier been suggested, this seems to me to rest on a false antithesis.
Certainly to be in fellowship with God and in right relationship with him is a higher aspiration than to possess anything else we may desire. But does this discredit the prayer of petition? On the contrary, it calls for discrimination in petitioning. All prayer springs from a sense of need. What is required is not to eliminate petition, which would eliminate the expression of desire, but to purge and redirect desire until we pray for the right things.
-From Prayer and the Common Life
by Georgia Harkness-

* For several months, I’d been attempting to absorb the truth of this Scripture: Seek God First. Why do we tend to seek other things first, and want God to be added later?
We seek success . . .
and want God to endorse our goals.
We seek acceptance . . .
and want God to be the cheering section.
We seek income . . .
and want God to be the bonus.
We seek vindication . . .
and want God to take our side.
We seek happiness . . .
and want God’s smile of approval.
We seek health . . .
and want God to dispense an instant cure.

As we mature in our relationship with the Lord, our goals change. But we don’t realize that our pattern often remains the same!

We seek to be useful . . .
and want God to bless our busy activities.
We seek to be helpful to others . . .
and want God to tag along.
We seek to be spiritual . . .
and want God to applaud.

We tend to use God instead of seek Him. We want God to do our bidding more than we want Him.
What percentage of our prayers are for our own comfort? To fulfill our fantasies? Where do we ask for God’s will? Isn’t it usually at the end of the prayer, as a closing benediction, sometimes almost as an afterthought?
I wonder how this all-wise God do ours feels about being brought in at the conclusion and asked to bless the plan? What a waste to rely on our wisdom, when God’s wisdom is available!
-From When the Pieces Don’t Fit
by Glaphre Gilliland-

* Another element in Jesus’ prayers was petition. We have seen already that asking for God’s gifts was certainly not the whole or even the main part of the Master’s prayer life, but we must be careful not to go to the other extreme and imagine that such petitionary prayers found no place at all. It is particularly necessary at the present time to emphasize this, for there is a dangerous tendency today, even among good Christian people, to speak disparagingly of petitionary prayers and to say that asking for definite things from God is prayer of such a rudimentary and childish form that it ought to have no place in the religion of the mature and fully developed believer. This we must quite definitely deny. The idea that it is expedient to outgrow petitionary prayer goes to pieces on one clear fact — Jesus never outgrew it.
-From The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ
by James Stewart-

* Somehow I feel sure that the most direct route to religious experience is to ask for the grace to give, to share, to console another, to bandage a hurting wound, to lift a fallen human spirit, to mend a quarrel, to search out a forgotten friend, to dismiss a suspicion and replace it with trust, to encourage someone who has lost faith, to let someone who feels helpless do a favor for me, to keep a promise, to bury an old grudge, to reduce my demands on others, to fight for a principle, to express gratitude, to overcome a fear, to appreciate the beauty of nature, to tell someone I love him and then to tell him again.
There is a haunting possibility that I have not heard the voice of God speaking to me in all circumstances and persons in my life because I have been asking the wrong questions, making the wrong requests. I have been too busy speaking to listen. The Psalmist prays: “Create in me, O God, a loving and listening heart!” Maybe I should pray for such a heart.
-From A Reason to Live! A Reason to Die!
by John Powell-

* The prayer of faith, like some plant rooted in a fruitful soil, draws its virtue from a disposition which has been brought into conformity with the mind of Christ.
1.) It is subject to Divine will.(1 John 5:14).
2.) It is restrained within the interest of Christ. (John 14:13).
3.) It is instructed in the truth. (John 15:7)
4.) It is energized by the Spirit.
(Ephesians 3:20)
5.) It is interwoven with love and mercy.
(Mark 11:25)
6.) It is accompanied with obedience.
(1 John 3:22)
7.) It is so earnest that it will not accept denial.
(Luke 11:9)
8.) It goes out to look for, and to hasten its answer. (James 5:16)

-From The Hidden Life by D.M. M’Intyre-