Christian Prayer and Fasting

The New Testament contains embarrassing promises that what we pray for with faith we shall receive.  Mark 11:24 is the most staggering.  Whatever we ask for, believing that we’ll get it, we’ll get.  . . .

How is this astonishing promise to be reconciled (a) with the observed facts? and (b) with the prayer at Gethsemane, and (as a result of that prayer) the universally accepted view that we should ask everything with a reservation (”if it be Thy will”)?

As regards (a), no evasion is possible.  Every war, every famine or plague, almost every deathbed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted. . . .

But (b), though much less often mentioned, is surely an equal difficulty.  How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith - an untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (1:6) - that you will get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance for possible refusal?  If you envisage a refusal as possible, how can you have simultaneously a perfect confidence that what you ask will not be refused?  If you have that confidence, how can you take refusal into account at all?

It is easy to see why so much more is written about worship and contemplation than about “crudely” or “naively” petitionary prayer.  They may be - I think they are - nobler forms of prayer.  But they are also a good deal easier to write about. . . .

It seems to me we must conclude that such promises about prayer with faith refer to a degree or kind of faith which most believers never experience.  A far inferior degree is, I hope, acceptable to God.  Even the kind that says “Help Thou my unbelief” may make way for a miracle.  Again, the absence of such faith as insures the granting of the prayer is not even necessarily a sin; for Our Lord had no such assurance when He prayed in Gethsemane.

This post has been quoted from “The Joyful Christian”, pages 95-96.

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