THE CONDITIONS OF POWER IN PRAYER
We have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.
1 John 3:21-22
Childlike confidence makes us pray as none else can. It causes a man to pray for great things that he would never have asked for if he had not learned this confidence. It also causes him to pray for little things that many people are afraid to ask for, because they have not yet felt toward God the confidence of children. I have often felt that it requires more confidence in God to pray to Him about a little thing than about great things. We imagine that our great things are somehow worthy of God’s attention, though in truth they are little enough to Him. And then we think that our little things must be so insignificant that it is an insult to bring them before Him.
We need to realize that what is very important to a child may be very small to his parent, and yet the parent measures the thing not from his own point of view but from the child’s. You heard your little boy the other day crying bitterly. The cause of the pain was a splinter in his finger. While you did not call in three surgeons to extract it, the splinter was a great thing to that little sufferer. Standing there with eyes all wet through tears of anguish, it never occurred to that boy that his pain was too small a thing for you to care about. What were mothers and fathers made for but to look after the small concerns of little children?
And God our Father is a good father who pities us as fathers pity their children. He counts the stars and calls them by name, yet He heals the broken in heart and binds up their wounds. If you put your confidence in God, you will take your great things and little things to Him, knowing He will never belie your confidence.
Father, I come as a child to thank You that I know Your heart toward me. I love You. Amen.
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