11. Thai we give Utterance to it.
1. The desire of the heart must become the expression of the lips. Our Lord more than once asked those who cried to Him for mercy, " What wilt thou ? " He wanted them to
1 1 say what they desired. To speak it out roused their whole I being into action, brought them into contact with Him, and wakened their expectation. To pray is to enter into God's presence, to claim and secure His attention, to have distinct dealing with Him in regard to some request, to commit our need to His faithfulness and to leave it there ; it is in so doing that we become fully conscious of what we are seeking.
^ It may help to give definiteness to our thought, if we take a definite request in regard to which we would fain learn to pray believingly. Why should we not take as the object of desire and supplication the " grace of supplication," and say, I want to ask and receive in faith the power to pray just as, and as much as, my God expects of me ? ^
2. This is the second fact that we noticed in the story of the ten lepers. They ashed for cleansing — *' They lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." Would they have been cleansed if they had not asked for it ? At any rate, Jesus lays down the rule : " Ask, and ye shall receive." And when Bartimseus was brought before Him, He insisted upon the. blind man expressing his need, although it was perfectly evident what he needed. "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee ? The blind man said unto him, Eabboni, that I may receive my sight."
I fjAs God feeds "the birds of the heaven" (Matt. vi. 26), not ( by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimu- I lating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for His
^ Andrew Murray. ' Ibid.
ST. MARK 283
rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense, and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a Divine suggestion (1 John iv, 1) : " Believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God." The test is the revealed word of God (Isa, viii. 20) : " To the law and to the testimony ! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them." ^
^ I kindle a fire in my grate. I only intervene to produce and combine together the different agents whose natural action behooves to produce the effect I have need of ; but the first step once taken, all the phenomena constituting combustion engender each other, conformably to their laws, without a new intervention of the agent ; so that an observer who should study the series of these phenomena, without perceiving the first hand that had prepared all, could not seize that hand in any especial act, and yet there is a preconceived plan and combination.*
IL
We are to believe that God has answered our prayer. This belief rests on three things : (1) Faith in God as a fountain of good ; (2) the harmony of our request with His will ; (3) His freedom in the use of ways and means.
i. Faith in God as the Source of all that is Good.
1. In the first place we know that God is an ocean of boundless resources. And then we also know that prater is Sis chosen channel for the application of those resources. This is everywhere the teaching of the New Testament, and it has been corroborated in the experience of the prayerful of every generation since. Lord Tennyson never had a truer thought given him from " the heavenlies " than this : " Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels ; when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide."*
• Isaac Taylor, Natural History of EnthvMasm,
• P. Janet, Final Gauses.
• Lord Tennyson : A Memoir, i.
284 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
^ The summer before last I happened to be spending a part of my vacation in Scotland, and found my way up into the Highlands. At one point in the journey I came across a lovely little Highland loch, the name of which at this moment I forget. I noticed that some engineering works had been erected at the narrower end of the loch, so I inferred that the water was being made use of in some way, as indeed it was. My companion in- formed me that it had now become the drinking supply of a lowland town some distance away, and that the work had had to be done suddenly. It appears that during a season of severe drought there had been some danger of a water famine in the district referred to. All the weUs ran dry. Neither the people in the houses nor the cattle in the fields could live without water, so it actually had to be carted from other districts at great ex- pense. Then some one thought of the highland loch, many miles away. All difficulties were got over, and a tiny supply pipe was run the whole distance from the loch to the thirsty township. Later on, this temporary expedient for preventing disaster was replaced by works of a more efficient and costly character. But the interesting point about the matter is this : here was a whole population suffering for lack of something that was only waiting to be drawn upon, and had been in existence thousands of years before the township itself. Long before there was any thirst, the water was there to quench it. All that was required was the vision of the man who first conceived the project of bringing the water to the valley. After the vision came the labour — not to create but to distribute the life-giving element which flowed downward in obedience to its own law. Is not this a fairly apt figure of the dealings of God with His children ? " Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him." But we have to ask before the gift can be part of ourselves.^