And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him (1 John 5:14-15, ESV). |
| Tufted Titmouse |
"I have been thinking to-day of the kind of prayer that sooner or later we must learn to pray for one another. We must learn to pray far more for spiritual victory than for protection from battle-wounds, relief from their havoc, rest from their pain. We must reach the place where we bend all our prayers that way, or (for I do want to be honest) our chief prayers. Love cannot be without longing to shield and to relieve, and love is of God, so we may be at rest about this inseparable instinct and quality of love, for Love understands.
"Looking back, I know that I have often put the lesser first in my prayers for my beloveds. I see now that we cannot enter into the fulness of the confidence of 1 John 5:14,15 and say without any shade of mental reservation, 'We know that we have', unless our prayer is for God's greatest gift—spiritual triumph. This triumph is not deliverance from, but victory in, trial, and that not intermittent but perpetual."
~Amy Carmichael, Edges of His Ways, 92 (punctuation and spelling hers)
