The Hidden Life of Prayer, Chapters 7 and 8

The week we finished off The Hidden Life of Prayer by David McIntyre, reading the last two chapters. Chapter 7 concerned the personal and private benefits that come from prayer, what McIntyre calls “the hidden riches of the secret place,” especially a growing holiness and increased intimacy with Christ. Chapter 8 discusses the direct answers to the petitions we make in prayer.  

Here’s what McIntyre writes about the petitions we should make:

[W]e Christians may ask our Father for all that we need. Only, let our desires be restrained, and our prayers be unselfish. The personal petitions contained in the Lord’s Prayer are very modest—daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance from sin’s power. Yet these comprise all things that pertain to life and godliness.

Bread and water, and a place of shelter amont the munitions of rocks, are assured to us… . But we are not often reduced to such simplicity of supply: God is so much better than His word. He feeds us with food convenient; and if ever He should suffer us to hunger, it is only that our spiritual nature may be enriched.

But man does not live by bread alone. Health and comfort, the joys of home, and the pleasures of knowledge, are blessings which we may rightfully ask, and they will not be withheld unless our Father judges it best that we should be deprived of them. But if He should bar our repeated requiest, and refuse to receive our prayer, we must then reply with the First-born among many brethren, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto Thee; howbeit, not what I will, but what Thou wilt. When we reach the end of ourjourney if not before, we shall be able to say, “There hath not failed one word of all His good promise, which He promised.”