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Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,
Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace
Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace
An all-time Christian Classic on prayer which is a foundational study on prayer that anyone interested in Prayer should read. So, I decided to summarize it chapter by chapter. With Christ in the School of Prayer is a classroom on the Power of Prayer in your Life.
With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray,
Chapter 20, “The Chief End of Prayer:”
“The essential element in our petitions in prayer:
the glory of the Father
must be the aim and end,
the very soul and life of our prayer.
Father! Glorify Thy son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee. ‘I have glorified Thee on earth; glorify me with Thyself.’
It’s twofold : He has glorified Him on earth; He will still glorify Him in heaven. What He asks is only to enable Him to glorify the Father more.
There is nothing of which the Beloved Son has said more distinctly that it will glorify the Father than this, His doing what we ask; He will not, therefore, let any opportunity slip of securing this object. Let us make His aim ours: let the glory of the Father be the link between our asking and His doing: such prayer must prevail to Glory God.
Is it so with us too? Or are not, in large measure, self-interest and self-will the strongest motives urging us to pray? Or, if we cannot see that this is the case, have we not to acknowledge that the distinct, conscious longing for the glory of the Father is not what animates our prayers? And yet it must be so.
The separation between the spirit of daily life and the spirit of the hour of prayer was too wide. We can really pray to His glory too.
‘DO all to the glory of God,’ and,
‘Ask all to the glory of God,’
—these twin commands are inseparable: obedience to the former is the secret of grace for the latter. A life to the glory of God is the condition of the prayers that Jesus can answer, ‘that the Father may be glorified.’
Creation exists to show forth His glory; all that is not for His glory is sin, and darkness, and death: it is only in the glorifying of God that the creatures can find glory.
The discovery, and the confession, and the denial, of self, as usurping the place of God, of self-seeking and self-trusting, is essential, and yet is what we cannot accomplish in our own strength. It is Jesus Himself coming in, who can cast out all self-glorifying, and give us instead His own God-glorifying life and Spirit. It is Jesus, who longs to glorify the Father in hearing our prayers, who will teach us to live and to pray to the glory of God.
No wonder that there are so many unanswered prayers: here we have the secret. God would not be glorified when that glory was not our object. He that would pray the prayer of faith,
to live literally so that the Father in all things may be glorified in him.
This must be his aim:
without this there cannot be the prayer of faith.
With increasing liberty we ask it only for your glory.
We have seen that prayer has no higher beauty or blessedness than this,
that it glorifies the Father.
It brings us into perfect unison with the Beloved Son in the wonderful partnership
He proposes: ‘You ask, and I do,
that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’ "
More on the Chief End of Prayer:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many classic works on prayer and living a Spirit-filled life.
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