i. 15. When ye make many prayers, I will not hear.
God has characterised Himself as “the Hearer of prayer;” and it is the great consolation of His people that they cannot seek His face in vain. But here He declares that He will not hear the prayers of Israel, however many. This solemn and momentous declaration may well lead us to inquire why prayer is, in many instances, rejected. Prayer, to be heard, must be both right and real. If it possess neither of these characteristics, or only one of them—if it is neither right nor real, or is right without being real, or real without being right—it cannot fail to be rejected.
I. A man may pray rightly, either because he has been taught the principles of orthodoxy, or knows what language is conformable to those principles, or because he uses prayers composed by spiritual men, or, finally, because he used the very word prescribed or sanctioned by God Himself. But in all these cases, while his prayer may be right, it may be altogether unreal. He may neither know the meaning of the requests it contains, nor desire their fulfilment.[1] Thus do many men pray for a free pardon for Christ’s sake, for entire sanctification, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. There is nothing in the heart corresponding to what is expressed by the lips; nay, the heart and the mouth are often completely at variance with each other.
II. Prayer may be real without being right. A man may really acknowledge mercies received, and petition for more; and yet neither the acknowledgement nor the petition may be regarded by God. The acknowledgement and the petition have reference to mere earthly desires already gratified or yet to be gratified. He thanks God that the “lusts have had the food which they craved;” he prays that they may never want it. Pride, vanity, the love of ease, pleasures, and worldly respectability are “lusts” on which he has hitherto “consumed,” and on which he intends still to “consume,” the good things which God has given, or may yet give him. The secret soul of all his supplications is not any zeal for the glory of God, but selfishness. His prayers are of the earth, earthy. The spiritual blessings which God holds out in His right hand he passes by in contemptuous neglect, and clamours for the natural blessings which are in God’s left hand.
III. Both the faults of prayer above referred to are often found in one and the same individual, and the guilt of both accumulated on one and the same head.
Let it not be inferred from what has been said that we lay an interdict on natural blessings, and forbid the seeking of them in prayer. Our Saviour has given us authority to ask for daily bread, and this fully warrants the conclusion that natural blessings, as well as spiritual, may and ought to form a subject of prayer. We ought to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” and then ask Him to fulfil His promise of “adding unto us all other things.”—R. Nesbit, Discourses, pp. 308–319.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Will men’s prayers be answered? Not if they pray as boys whittle sticks—silently, hardly knowing or caring what they are about. I have known men begin to pray about Adam, and go on from him to the present time, whittling their stick clear to a point, with about as much feeling, and doing about as much good as the boy does.—Beecher.
I often say my prayers,
But do I ever pray,
And do the wishes of my heart
Go with the words I say:
I may as well kneel down
And worship gods of stone.
As offer to the living God
a prayer of words alone,
For words without the heart
The Lord will never hear;
Nor will He to those lips attend
Whose prayers are not sincere.—John Burton.