hsemane. It is as if we
had something to learn from the unanswered prayers of our Master.
Certainly the content of the Gospel for us would have been poorer if
they had been answered in our sense of the word; and this fact,
taken with his own teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the
Father's will, may help us over some of our difficulties. But Jesus
had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered. "Ask, and it shall
be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened
unto you" (Luke 11:9)--are not ambiguous statements in the least;
and they come from one "who based himself on experience." It is
worth thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his
recommendation of prayer. All his clear-eyed knowledge of God speaks
in these plain sentences.

"As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, as John also
taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). It looks as if at times his
disciples caught him at prayer or even overheard him, and felt that
here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of
prayer. There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it they who
asked Jesus to teach them over again? There may have been some of
them who had learnt the Pharisee's way in prayer, and some who stuck
to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood. In each case
the old ways were outgrown.

We can put together what he taught them. In the first place, the
thing must be real and individual--the first requirement always with
Jesus. The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it
is nothing. Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his
intercourse with his Father. The real prayer is to the Father in
secret--His affair. And it will be earnest beyond what most of us
think. We are so familiar with Gospel and parable that we do not
take in the strenuousness of Jesus' way in prayer. The importunate
widow (Luke 18:2) and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5) are his
types of insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, pray
with anything like their determination to be heard? The knock at the
door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted--in
each case by a reluctant giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus
says, though God, too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke
18:7). It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen
(Matt. 6:7)--not at all, that is not the business of praying; but
the steady earnest concentration on the purpose,