g heart to a
sympathising Lord--then everything that fills our hearts would be seen
to be a fitting object of prayer. If anything is large enough to
interest me, it is not too small to be spoken about to Him.

So the question, which is often settled upon very abstract and deep
grounds that have little to do with the matter--the question as to
whether prayer for outward blessings is permissible--falls away of
itself. If I am to talk to Jesus Christ about everything that concerns
me, am I to keep my thumb upon all that great department and be silent
about it? One reason why our prayers are often so unreal is, because
they do not fit our real wants, nor correspond to the thoughts that are
busy in our minds at the moment of praying. Our hearts are full of some
small matter of daily interest, and when we kneel down not a word about
it comes to our lips. Can that be right?

The difference between the different objects of prayer is not to be
found in the rejection of all temporal and external, but in remembering
that there are two sets of things to be prayed about, and over one set
must ever be written 'If it be Thy will,' and over the other it need not
be written, because we are sure that the granting of our wishes _is_ His
will. We know about the one that 'if we ask anything according to His
will, He heareth us.' That may seem to be a very poor and shrunken kind
of hope to give a man, that if his prayer is in conformity with the
previous determination of the divine will, it will be answered. But it
availed for the joyful confidence of that Apostle who saw deepest into
the conditions and the blessedness of the harmony of the will of God and
of man. But about the other set we can only say, 'Not my will, but
Thine be done.' With that sentence, not as a formula upon our lips but
deep in our hearts, let us take everything into His presence--thorns and
stakes, pinpricks and wounds out of which the life-blood is ebbing--let
us take them all to Him, and be sure that we shall take none of them in
vain.

So then we have the Person to whom the prayer is addressed, the subjects
with which it is occupied, and the purpose to which it is directed.
'Take away the burden' was the Apostle's petition; but it was a mistaken
petition and, therefore, unanswered.

II. That brings me to the second of the windings, as I have ventured to
call them, of this stream--viz. the insight into the source of strength
for, and the purpose of, the thorn tha