The Prayer-hearing God

How highly we are privileged in that we have the Most High God revealed to us, who is a God that heareth prayer. The greater part of mankind are destitute of this privilege; they are ignorant of this God. The gods whom they worship are not prayer-hearing gods. Whatever their necessities are, whatever calamities or sorrows they are the subjects of, if they meet with grievous and heavy afilictions wherein they cannot help themselves and man is unable to help them, they have no prayer-hearing God to whom they may go. If they go to the gods whom they worship and cry to them ever so earnestly, it will be in vain. They worship either lifeless things that can neither help them nor know that they need help; or wicked, cruel spirits who are their enemies and wish nothing but their misery. Instead of helping them, they are from day to day working their ruin, watching over them as a hungry lion watches over his prey.

How are we distinguished from them in that we have the true God made known to us, a God of infinite grace and mercy, a God full of compassion to the miserable! He is a God who is ready to pity us under all our troubles and sorrows, to hear our cries, and to give us all that relief which we need. He is a God who delights in mercy and is rich to all that call upon Him!

How highly privileged are we in that we have the holy Word of this same God, to direct us how to come to Him and seek mercy of Him. Whatever difficulties or distress we are in, we may go with confidence and great encouragement to Him with all our difficulties and complaints. What a comfort may this be to us! What reason have we to rejoice in our own privileges, highly to prize them, and to bless God that He has been so merciful to us as to give us His Word and reveal Himself to us; and that He has not left us to cry for help to stocks, and stones, and devils, as He has left many thousands of others!

Some may object, saying, “I have often prayed to God for these and those mercies, and God has not heard my prayers.” To this I shall answer several things:

1. It is no argument that God is not a prayer-hearing God if He give not to men what they ask of Him, to consume them upon their lusts. Oftentimes, when men pray for temporal good things, they desire them chiefly to gratify their lusts. They desire them for no good end, but only to gratify their pride or sensuality. They pray for worldly good things chiefly from a worldly spirit; it is because they make too much of an idol of the world. If so, it is no wonder that God does not hear their prayers. “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts” (James 4:3).

It is no argument that God is not a prayer-hearing God that He will not grant your request when you ask Him to give you something of which you will make an idol and set it up in opposition to Him; or that He will not hear you when you ask of Him things to use as weapons of warfare against Him or as instruments to serve His enemies. No wonder that God will not hear you when you pray for silver, or gold, or wool, or flax to offer them to Baal. If God should hear such prayers, He would act as His own enemy, inasmuch as He would bestow on His enemies the things which they desire out of enmity against Him, to use against Him as His enemies, and to serve His enemies.

2. It is no argument that God is not a prayer-hearing God that He hears not insincere and unbelieving prayers. How can we expect that God should have any respect to that which has no sincerity in it? God looks not at words, but at the heart; and it is fit that He should do so. If men's prayers be not hearty, if they pray only in words and not in heart, what are their prayers good for? Why should that God who searches the heart and tries the reins have any respect to them?

Sometimes men do nothing but dissemble in their prayers. When they do so, it is no argument that God is ever the less a prayer-hearing God that He does not hear such prayers, for it is no argument of want of mercy. Sometimes men pray for that in words which they really desire not in their hearts. Sometimes men pray to God that He would purge them from sin, when at the same time they show by their practice that they do not desire to be purged from sin, but love sin and choose it, and are utterly averse to parting with it. Likewise they will pray for other spiritual blessings, of which they have no real desire.

In like manner they often dissemble in the pretence and show which they make in their prayers of a dependence on God for mercies and of a sense of His sufficiency to supply them. In our coming to God and praying to Him for such and such things, there is a show that we are sensible that we are dependent on Him for them and that He is sufficient to give them to us. But men sometimes seem to pray, who are not sensible of their dependence on God, nor do they think Him to be sufficient to supply them. For some things that they go to God for, they all the while trust in themselves, and for other things they have no confidence in God.

Another way men often dissemble is in seeming to pray and to be supplicants in words, when in heart they pray not, but challenge and demand. They show in words as though they were beggars, but in heart they come as creditors and look on God as their debtor. In words then they seem to ask these and those things as the fruit of free grace, but in heart they account it would be hard, unjust, and cruel if God should deny them. In words they seem humble and submissive, but in heart they are proud and contentious; there is no prayer but in their words.

It does not render God at all the less a prayer-hearing God that He distinguishes, as an all-seeing God, between real prayers and pretended ones. Such prayers as those which I have just now been mentioning are not worthy of the name of prayers, and they are so accounted in the eyes of Him who searches the heart and sees things as they are. Nor would men account such things to be prayers any more than the talk of a parrot that knows not what it says, were it not that they judge by the outward appearance.

All prayer that is not the prayer of faith is insincere, for prayer is a show or manifestation of dependence on God and a trust in His sufficiency and mercy. Therefore, where this trust or faith is wanting, there is no prayer in the sight of God. However, God is sometimes pleased to grant the requests of those who have no faith, yet He has not obliged Himself to do so, nor is it an argument of His not being a prayer-hearing God when He hears them not.

3. It is no argument that God is not a prayer-hearing God that He exercises His own wisdom as to the time and manner of answering prayers. Some of God's people are sometimes ready to think that God does not hear their prayers because He does not answer them at the times when they expected, when indeed God does hear them and will answer them in the time and way to which His own wisdom directs.

The business of prayer is not to direct God, who is infinitely wise and needs not any of our directions, who knows what is best for us ten thousand times better than we, and knows what time and what way are best. It is fit that God should answer prayer as an infinitely wise God, in the exercise of His own wisdom, and not ours. God will deal as a father with us in answering our requests. But a child is not to expect that the father's wisdom will be subject to his; nor ought he to desire it, but should esteem it a privilege that the parent who takes care of him and provides for him is wiser than he and will provide for him according to his own wisdom.

As to particular temporal blessings for which we pray, it is no argument that God is not a prayer-hearing God that He bestows them not upon us, for it may be that God sees the things for which we pray are not to be best for us. If so, it would be no mercy in Him to bestow them upon us, but a judgment. Such things, therefore, ought always to be asked with submission to the divine will.

But God can answer prayer though He bestow not the very thing for which we pray. He can sometimes better answer the lawful desires and good end we have in prayer in another way. If our end be our own good and happiness, God can perhaps better answer that end in bestowing something else than in the bestowment of the very thing which we ask. If the main good we aim at in our prayer be attained, our prayer is answered, even though not in the bestowment of the individual thing which we ask.

So that may still be true which was asserted, namely, that God always hears the prayer of faith. God never once failed of hearing a sincere and believing prayer, and those promises forever hold good, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).

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