MacDonald on prayer: Windmills, hungry children, and communion

I find George MacDonald’s “Word of Jesus on Prayer,” from Unspoken Sermons, very encouraging. The text he’s starting from is the parable of the persistent widow. Here are a few morsels:

If, instead of speculation, we gave ourselves to obedience, what a difference would soon be seen in the world! Oh, the multitude of so-called religious questions which the Lord would answer with, ’strive to enter at the strait gate’! Many eat and drink and talk and eat in his presence; few do the things he says to them! Obedience is the one key of life.

So easy to talk about things that are difficult. So much easier to go read a book about prayer than to pray. But MacDonald is interested in practical obedience:

I would meet difficulties, not answer objections; I would remove stumbling blocks from the path of him who would pray; I would help him pray.

I like what MacDonald has to say about the idea that if we just get enough people to petition God for a particular thing, he’ll have to grant it. I remember a church I once attended that developed a “strategic prayer” ministry, and it bothered me because it implied that we could somehow direct God’s energies to our own ends through “strategy.” So these sentences are music to my ears:

A God that should fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or the worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of every man or every company of men, would be an evil God — that is no God, but a demon. That God should hang in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd. God waits to be gracious not tempted. A man capable of proposing such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy.

God as a windmill waiting for us to send some wind! Such a picture.

But I think my favorite theme in this sermon is the idea that we pray not out of our need for things, but out of our need for God:

But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than 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? What if the good of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to drive us to God? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer.

There’s more to it, but these were some highpoints for me — food for thought and, better yet from MacDonald’s perspective, inspiration to “enter at the strait gate.”

Old Woman at Prayer (Nicholas Maes, 1656)