Prayer Itself a Gift of God, Not Only Prayer's Answer

We are so egotistically engrossed about God’s giving of the answer that we forget His gift of the prayer itself. But it is not a question simply of willing to pray, but of accepting and using as God’s will the gift and the power to pray. In every act of prayer we have already begun to do God’s will, for which above all things we pray. The prayer within all prayer is “Thy will be done.” And has that petition not a special significance here? “My prayer is Thy Will. Thou didst create it in me. It is Thine more than mine. Perfect Thine own will”—all that is the paraphrase, from this viewpoint, of “Hear my prayer.” “The will to pray,” we say, “is Thy will. Let that be done both in my petition and in Thy perfecting of it.” The petition is half God’s will. It is God’s will inchoate. “Thy will” (in my prayer) “be done (in Thy answer). It is Thine both to will and to do. Thy will be done in heaven—in the answer, as it is done upon earth—in the asking.”

Prayer has its great end when it lifts us to be more conscious and more sure of the gift than the need, of the grace than the sin. As petition rises out of need or sin, in our first prayer it comes first; but it may fall into a subordinate place when, at the end and height of our worship, we are filled with the fullness of God. “In that day ye shall ask Me nothing.” Inward sorrow is fulfilled in the prayer of peti-ion; inward joy in the prayer of thanksgiving. And this thought helps to deal with the question as to the hearing of prayer, and especially its answer. Or rather as to the place and kind of answer. We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God’s great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer. Our soul is fulfilled if our petition is not.

from "The Soul Of Prayer", by Peter Taylor Forsyth, NCPI: Blackwood 1916, 1949, 1999, pp. 13-14