Insights from Andrew Murray

I was reading Andrew Murray's classic work, "With Christ in the School of Prayer," this morning when I came across something rather interesting. The chapter I was reading dealt with prayer and forgiveness. Seemingly an odd pair, but Jesus often put the two together in His sermons. For instance, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' insistence that we forgive others is in the prayer section of the sermon, as though there is some innate connection between forgiveness and prayer.

Murray offers the idea that many of our prayers may go unanswered because we are not living in a state of forgiveness. Our lives are not according to God's will, and neither are our prayers. Offering advice on how to fight our unforgiving attitudes, Murray states, "In the little annoyances of daily life, never excuse a hasty temper, a sharp word, or a quick judgment with the thought that we mean no harm, or that it is too much to expect feeble human nature to really forgive the way God and Christ do." Perhaps our real problem is that we do not take God's call as serious as we ought. We down play his commands and try to generalize their meanings to allow more elbow room for our unforgiving hearts.

Later in the chapter, applying this to prayer for the lost, Murray states, "View each wretched one, however unlovable he is, in the light of the tender love of Jesus the Shepherd searching for the Lost." If we had this attitude towards the lost when we prayed for them, not only would we see more people saved, we would find our hearts very different by the end of the day.