So Will You Have Power in Prayer. By Andrew Murray
"If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you." John 15:7 nkjv
Prayer is both one of the means and one of the fruits of our union with Christ. As a means it is of great importance.
All the things of faith, all the pleadings of desire, all the yearnings after a fuller surrender, all the confessions of shortcoming and of sin, all the exercises in which the soul gives up self and clings to Christ, find their utterance in prayer.
But it is not so much a means as it is a fruit of abiding that the Savior mentions it in the parable of the Vine. He does not think of prayer as we too often do—exclusively as a means of getting blessing for ourselves.
Rather, He sees prayer as one of the primary channels of influence by which, through us as workers together with God, the blessings of Christ’s redemption are dispensed to the world.
Ours will be the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man, availing much, like Elijah’s prayer for ungodly Israel (James 5:16–18). Such prayer will be the fruit of our abiding in Him as well as the means of bearing much fruit.
In promising to answer prayer (John 14:13), Christ’s single thought is this: “that the Son may bring glory to the Father.” In His intercession on earth (John 17), this was His sole desire and plea; as He intercedes in heaven, it is still His chief object.
As the believer abides in Christ, the Savior breathes the same desire into him. The thought only for the glory of God becomes more and more the keynote of the life hidden in Christ.
At first, it subdues, quiets, and makes the soul almost hesitant to entertain a wish, lest it should not be to the Father’s glory.
But when His glory has finally become the goal, and everything is yielded to it, it comes with mighty power to enlarge the heart and open it to the vast possibilities afforded it.
