03.01. The Sign of Prayer

The Sign of Prayer All religions pray.

God and prayer are inseparable.

Belief in God and belief in prayer are elemental and intuitive. The ideas may be crude and cruel in primitive and pagan peoples, but they belong to the universal intuitions of the human race. The teaching of the Old Testament is full of the subject of prayer. Everywhere there are commands and inducements to pray, and the great stories of deliverance and victory, experience and vision, are all examples of prevailing prayer.

All the crises in the life of our Lord were linked with special seasons of prayer, and His teaching set forth wonderful assurances to those who pray. He laid down the laws of prayer, though He never sought to explain its mystery.

Prayer was not a problem to Him. The two parables He spake about prayer are not very acceptable to those who pray. There is something alien to the spirit of prayer in likening God to a heartless judge or a churlish friend. God is neither. The parables were not spoken as representative of God, but to illustrate the reward of importunity. The basis of prayer is sonship. Prayer is possible and reasonable because it is filial. It is natural for a child to ask of its father, and it is reasonable for the father to listen to the request of his child. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matthew 7:11; 1 Thessalonians 2:11).

There are many problems about prayer, but they lie outside the fact and experience of prayer, and apart from praying there is no solution of them. Prayer is a fact of experience, and through all the ages the testimony of those who prayed has been that God hears and answers the prayers of His children.

He enters heaven with prayer.