A Study in Prayer and Trust - Part 1

Tip! It opens the door for salvations. (Act 2:42) "And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers".

PRAYER does not stand alone. It is not an isolated duty or an independent principle. It lives in association with other Christian duties, prayer is married to other principles, and it is a partner with other graces. But to faith, prayer is indissolubly joined. Faith gives prayer its color and tone, shapes its character, and secures its results.

Trust is when our faith becomes unreserved, ratified and completed. There is, when all is said and done, a sort of endeavor in faith and its exercise. But trust is firm belief; it is faith in full flower. Trust is a conscious act, a fact of which we are sensible. According to the Scriptural concept trust is the eye of the new-born soul, and the ear of the renewed soul. It is the feeling of the soul, the spiritual eye, the ear, the taste, the feeling -- these one and all have to do with trust.

How brilliant, how distinct, how conscious, how powerful, and more than all, how Scriptural is such a trust! How different from many forms of modern belief, so feeble, dry, and cold! These new phases of belief bring no consciousness of their presence, no "Joy unspeakable and full of glory" results from their exercise. They are, for the most part, adventures in the peradventures of the soul. There is no safe, sure trust in anything. The whole transaction takes place in the realm of "maybe and perhaps".

Tip! A person's character is always demonstrated in their behavior. The Savior again said,"A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good ..." -- Luke 6:45

Trust like life, is feeling, though much more than feeling. An unfelt life is a contradiction; an unfelt trust is a misnomer, a delusion, a contradiction. Trust is the most felt of all attributes. It is all feeling, and it works only by love. An unfelt love is as impossible as an unfelt trust. The trust of which we are now speaking is a conviction: An unfelt conviction? How absurd!

Tip! The Master will not expect more from anyone than a person is capable of doing for Him. Jesus wants us to understand that each person will be rewarded according to their faithfulness in doing their given task.

Trust sees God doing things here and now. Yes, and more. It rises to a lofty eminence, and looking into the invisible and the eternal, realizes that God has done things, and regards them as being already done. Trust brings eternity into the annals and happenings of time, transmutes the substance of hope into the reality of fruition, and changes promise into present possession. We know when we trust just as we know when we see, just as we are conscious of our sense of touch. Trust sees, receives, and holds. Trust is its own witness.

Yet, quite often, faith is too weak to obtain God's greatest good, immediately; so it has to wait in loving, strong, prayerful, pressing obedience, until it grows in strength, and is able to bring down the eternal, into the realms of experience and time.

To this point, trust masses all its forces. Here it holds. And in the struggle, trust's grasp becomes mightier, and grasps, for itself, all that God has done for it in His eternal wisdom and plenitude of grace.