There is also the objection that too hard things have been said here about
the turning to God under pressure of anxiety, and the expression in prayer
of the natural desire for safety. After all, as a Jesuit fellow-padre
reminded me at the front, Our Lord at His hour of trial, when "exceeding
sorrowful even unto death," prayed in agony. And further it is plain that
prayer to Him, and as He would have it be to others, was far more than a
trustful harmony of self with the will of the Father. He urged men to take
their _requests_ to God. "Ask and ye shall receive." I can imagine that
the conception of prayer at times of emergency, as suggested in earlier
pages, might be so full of resignation as to be reduced to the fatalism
extraordinarily prevalent at the front--"If it 'its yer, it 'its yer," as
the men say. Are we not to ask not to be hit?
It is nearly enough to recall the Lord's Prayer in regard to this
objection. As I have said, men on service widely associate prayer with the
expression of need or anxiety. To restrict prayer thus is to begin the
Lord's Prayer half-way through, at "Give us this day our daily bread." It
is a question of order and emphasis. Christian prayer begins with God. It
turns away from self to the glory of God. It begins with praise and
acclamation--the glad acknowledgment of what God is and is doing. It is
only in the second place and because of what God is--because He is our
Father and is at work to bring in His kingdom and has a will for us and
for all--that the prayer which expresses our need comes in aright.
Therefore I would say to a man going into battle--"Pray now if never
before. Set God before you as you see Him, as you can clearly apprehend
Him, in Christ. He is your Father, you are His son, however unworthy. Lift
up your heart to Him Who, in and through all the turmoil around you,
presses onward with the business of His kingdom and the fulfilment of His
heart's desire. And commit all to Him. In trustful intimacy give utterance
to your longing to be brought through the perilous hour for service in His
kingdom to the glory of His Name. Commit all to Him, asking forgiveness.
He knows what you have need of in life or in death--and let the rest go!"
For such prayer in the Name of Christ--that is, prayer in accordance with
His mind and founded on the character of God as made known in Him--there
awaits undiscovered and unexhausted resources of power. So Jesus told men.
So Christian experience testifies. We have to pray truly Christ-wise, not
asking for stones to be made bread, not seeking to be hidden from life's
storms, but to be brought through them in faithful endurance.[4]
We have to pray as Christ prayed in Gethsemane in fellowship with His
sufferings. But we have also to pray as knowing the power of His
Resurrection. We have to rise in faith to claim the supernatural power
which neither He used nor we may use merely for self-preservation, which
yet is to be set free in the service of the kingdom.
Prayer in the Name of Christ is not only the prayer of resignation, based
on the self-committal of Jesus our Brother into the hands of the Father.
Such would ever tend, as uttered by our trembling faith, towards fatalism.
But it is also prayer in the Name of Him "Who was declared to be the Son
of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, even Jesus Christ our
Lord." It is the prayer of power--that power which was at Jesus' command,
and was therefore the subject of His temptation, and was drawn upon by the
faith of sufferers and yet was unused by Jesus to save Himself. This power
is the power of God. It is "the exceeding greatness of His power,
according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in
Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His right
hand in the heavenly places."
Here are heights where the air is charged with potentiality of new life,
hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are
heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies
deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the
turning of our captivity such as shall fill all our mouths with laughter.
A few know that these words are not rhetorical. They know, with St. Paul,
the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints. Such was
Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary in West Africa, the leaves of whose
biography I happened to turn over as I was writing these pages. She had
frequently to take journeys through forests with leopards swarming around
her. She wrote: "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the
lions' den until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I
knew it was true and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I
walked along praying 'O God of Daniel, shut their mouths,' and He
did."[5]
This is the prayer of faith. It is the prayer which asks "not to be hit."
It is more than resignation, it is the prayer of power. It believes that
there are hardly-tapped powers and possibilities in God for those who seek
first His kingdom and righteousness. We do not know much about such prayer
in our present spiritual sickness. But it is there, a weapon to be wielded
by dauntless, simple faith. There is an inheritance to be claimed by
little-loving sons, who yet are sons--"heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him."