Amy Carmichael spent her life as a missionary, living in South India from 1895 until her death in 1951. I am often inspired by her words of faith published in Edges of His Ways: Selections for Daily Reading. Yesterday it was this:
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 want to be honest) our chief prayers.
We are so eager to pray for a specific, tangible outcome, often a physical cure or personal material gain. But we can’t all be healed, we can’t all win the game; for someone to win, the other must lose. It is oh so human to pray this way, but that’s not the path God asks us to follow. To even assume that I know what God wants sets me far from God.
I do know, however that God wants a spiritual victory for everyone I pray for, and for me, too. Perhaps my best prayer is to lift up my concerns to God, pray thy will be done, and then get out of God’s way. Anything more is hindrance or at the least superfluous.
And yet, today I am praying for physical healing for three people. Yes, I’m definitely asking God that they get better so they can go on with their lives. If I don’t plead with God in this way, I lose compassion. So thank God for today’s comment by Carmichael:
Yet He has told us to ask for what our hearts desire and so it is right to ask, and to ask earnestly, only with this :if” in the depths of our hearts, ‘If it be Thy blessed will, if it be for Thy glory.”
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 want to be honest) our chief prayers.
We are so eager to pray for a specific, tangible outcome, often a physical cure or personal material gain. But we can’t all be healed, we can’t all win the game; for someone to win, the other must lose. It is oh so human to pray this way, but that’s not the path God asks us to follow. To even assume that I know what God wants sets me far from God.
I do know, however that God wants a spiritual victory for everyone I pray for, and for me, too. Perhaps my best prayer is to lift up my concerns to God, pray thy will be done, and then get out of God’s way. Anything more is hindrance or at the least superfluous.
And yet, today I am praying for physical healing for three people. Yes, I’m definitely asking God that they get better so they can go on with their lives. If I don’t plead with God in this way, I lose compassion. So thank God for today’s comment by Carmichael:
Yet He has told us to ask for what our hearts desire and so it is right to ask, and to ask earnestly, only with this :if” in the depths of our hearts, ‘If it be Thy blessed will, if it be for Thy glory.”
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