Faith makes Prayer Strong

Tip! If you do not know the Lord Jesus Christ and want to know for sure that you are a child of God, then I would like to invite you to earnestly pray and ask Jesus to come into your heart.

Faith makes prayer strong, and gives it patience to wait on God. Faith believes that God is a rewarder. No truth is more clearly revealed in the Scriptures than this, while none is more encouraging as well. Even the prayer closet has its promised reward, "He that sees in secret, shall reward you openly," while the most insignificant service provided to a disciple in the name of our Lord, well surely receive its reward. And to this precious truth faith gives its energetic consent.

Yet we must narrow down our faith to one particular thing -- it does not believe that God will reward everybody, or that He is not a rewarder of all who pray, but that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Our faith rests its care on diligence in prayer, and gives assurance and encouragement to us who are diligent seekers after God, for it is us, alone, who are richly rewarded when we pray.

We need constantly to be reminded that faith is the one inseparable condition of successful praying. There are other considerations to remember when we enter into the exercise of prayer, but faith is the final, the one indispensable condition of true praying. Remember it is written in a familiar and in an important passage of Scripture: "Without faith, it is impossible to please Him."

James puts this truth very plainly.

"If any of you lack wisdom," he says, "let him ask of God, that gives to all men liberally, and upbraided not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavers (or doubts) is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord."

Tip! In (Phil. 4:6) we have these words about prayer: Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.

Doubting is always put under the ban, because it stands as a foe to faith and hinders effectual praying. In the First Epistle to Timothy Paul gives us an invaluable truth relative to the conditions of successful praying, which he thus lays down: "I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting."

When we are praying, all questioning must be watched against and avoided. Fear and uncertainty have no place in true praying. Our faith must declare itself and require that these enemies of prayer disappear.

Also we must remember that too much authority cannot be attributed to faith; however prayer is the scepter by which it signalizes its power. See the spiritual wisdom there is in the following advice written by a distinguished old delightful man of God.

"Would you be freed from the bondage to corruption?" he asks. "Would you grow in grace in general and grow in grace in particular? If you would, your way is plain. Ask of God more faith. Beg of Him morning, and noon and night, while you walk by the way, while you sit in the house, when you lie down and when you rise up; beg of Him simply to impress Divine things more deeply on your heart, to give you more and more of the substance of things hoped for and of the evidence of things not seen."

Tip! An effective prayer life can have a huge impact on not only our own individual life, but on the lives of those around us. Through prayer we can have an impact on our local community, our country and the world.

Great incentives to pray are furnished in Holy Scriptures, and our Lord closes His teaching about prayer, with the assurance and promise of heaven. The presence of Jesus Christ in heaven, the preparation for His saints which He is making there, and the assurance that He will come again to receive them -- how all this helps the weariness of praying, strengthens its conflicts, sweetens its arduous toil!

These things are the star of hope to prayer, the wiping away of its tears, and the putting of the odor of heaven into the bitterness of its cry. The spirit of a pilgrim greatly helps praying. An earth-bound, earth-satisfied spirit cannot pray. In such a heart, the flame of spiritual desire is either gone out or is smoldering in faintest glow. The wings of its faith are clipped, its eyes are filmed, its tongue silenced.

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But we, who in unswerving faith and unceasing prayer, wait continually upon the Lord, do renew our strength, do mount up with wings as eagles, do run, and we are not weary, do walk, and not faint.