“Watch and pray” (Matt. xxvi. 41).
We need to watch for prayers as well as for the answers to our prayers. It
needs as much wisdom to pray rightly as it does faith to receive the
answers to our prayers.
We met a friend the other day, who had been in years of darkness because
God had failed to answer certain prayers, and the result had been a state
bordering on infidelity.
A very few moments were sufficient to convince this friend that these
prayers had been entirely unauthorized, and that God had never promised to
answer such prayers, and they were for things which this friend should
have accomplished himself, in the exercise of ordinary wisdom.
The result was deliverance from a cloud of unbelief which was almost
wrecking a Christian life. There are some things about which we do not
need to pray, as much as to take the light which God has already given.
Many persons are asking God to give them peculiar signs, tokens and
supernatural intimations of His will. Our business is to use the light He
has given, and then He will give whatever more we need.