Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
...why should my love be powerless to help another? If in God we live and move and have our being; if the very possibility of loving lies in this, that we exist in and by God himself, we must then be nearer to each other, we must by prayer come closer to each other, than by any bodily proximity or interchange of help. Surely, in the Eternal, hearts are never parted!
If we believe that God knows every man’s needs, and will, for love’s sake, not spare one pang that may serve to purify the soul of one of his children, then how can we think he will in any sort alter his way with one because another prays for him? The prayer would arise from nothing in the person prayed for—why should it influence God?
No man is so tied by divine law that he can nowise modify his work: shall God not modify his? Law is the slave of Life. If you say, he has made things to go, set them going, and left them—then I say, If his machine interfered with his answering the prayer of a single child, he would sweep it from him—not to bring back chaos, but to make room for his child.
“But if God is so good, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?” I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of himself?
If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be treated with love’s severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give a man what he wants because he wants it, and without further purpose of his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his own hands.
