Chapter 8

^[*]Jesus lived and still lives and prayed and still prays the perfect prayer of perfect love and wisdom and faith and power. He also taught and teaches us how to pray the prayers that are so fully in God’s will and wisdom that they are either answered at once, or are being answered, or are soon to be answered.

Moreover there is so much power in all prayers that are inspired by strong desire and backed by our best efforts that it is well to remember the wisdom and the warning in young Emerson’s first sermon which was on prayer and contained these three affirmations:

1. “We are all the time praying, always desiring and going after something.”

2. “All of our prayers are being answered,” not literally answered, but answered in the sense of affecting us within and of producing results without.

3. “We should therefore be very careful what we pray for.”

At Harvard young Emerson found so many ques­tions asked and so few answered that it brought confusion to his mind and a near breakdown to his body. After teaching for a short time in his brother’s school for girls, he wrote his notable poem “Good­bye Proud World” and went to the country for the recovery of his health and for an opportunity to think things through. Providentially, he found there an enthusiastic young Methodist by the name of Tarbox, who taught him the sense in which all of us are all the time praying and the sense in which all prayer is being answered. This was the light that started off Emerson towards clarity and health, and in his first sermon, he used this light and added to it the wise counsel: “We should be very careful what we pray for.”

Happily not all prayers are answered, happily for God and for mankind and especially for the ones who do the praying. Anyone whose prayers and efforts of false pride wish to inflict the worst injury possible to everything that stands in the way of his getting what he thinks he wants (in the end he will find it is the very thing he doesn’t want), will find that the evil he has desired for others will come to himself. You can’t make a hell for others without get­ting in the hottest spot of it yourself. But false praying, backed by false effort, does have tremendous power. Hitler was powerful in false prayer as well as in false action, and it did seem for a time that his prayers were being answered. But according to perfect law, the destruction he sought for a race and the injury he sought to inflict upon all who stood in his way came to himself. Evil reacts in large measure against those who seek to bring it to others.

There is also prayer that is not wholly good, but largely good. This kind of praying has great power, though not perfect power because not inspired by perfect love fully backed by the perfect Lover. The prayer that your boy will not be killed in battle may be answered, but it is not as good a prayer as the prayer to stop war and the causes of war and that the lives of all the boys on both sides will be spared. You can even pray for your side to win, and if the winning will be in the interest of mankind, so long as men are foolish enough to fight, your prayer will be answered.

People often get what they ask for and work for because they can only be taught by experience that much that they think they want and pray and work for is the very thing that they don’t want.

The children of Israel thought that they wanted a king and the only way they could be convinced that they didn’t want him was to get him. According to Genesis, Eve chose to experiment with the forbidden fruit and God did not stop her. Why? Possibly because our high destiny to be like Him requires that we shall be free to choose the wrong in order that we may know we only want the right. Anyway to be like God we have to have the freedom to choose, and no matter how badly and foolishly we choose, the all loving One is always doing His best to make the best of our worst sinning and blundering. The Prodigal Son had his prayer answered for His part of the Father’s riches. The Father even furnished the means, the health and the material supplies that enabled him to experiment, and stood ready to welcome him back as well as to draw him back and to give him the very best of Himself and His possessions.

Moreover, where we are ready to accept it there are Divine interventions to save us from the worst and to bring us back Home. There are not too many miracles. If there were we might become careless and lazy. If there were not any we might be destroyed. Here as well as everywhere else He is perfect in power as well as in wisdom and love, or rather He is perfect in wisdom as well as in love and power.

When seen at long range nothing really succeeds but the good. The temporary success of evil is a part of the Divine process of defeating the evil and of even saving the agents of evil as well as its victims. It was at this point that Gandhi saw and desired and prayed and lived in advance of any other world leader. Seeing, when he read the New Testament, that the cross is God’s answer to sin, he chose for his work the liberation of the victims of injustice and oppression, but to liberate them in patience and nonviolence (with soul force) and in liberating them also to liberate their oppressors. His marked success has given humanity not only a new technique for meeting evil with good, but it should greatly increase our faith and endeavors.

But we come back to Jesus as the example and in­spiration of Perfect Prayer and Praying. He prayed and taught His disciples and still teaches the prayer and prayers of Perfect Love, Perfect Wisdom, Perfect Faith and Perfect Power. In the Sermon on the Mount, He taught His disciples and He is still teaching them to pray for God’s perfect will of limitless love and good-will and good sense to triumph on earth as they have already triumphed in the heaven where He is actually Lord; for the Kingdom of Heaven to come to earth, for God’s great good will and good everything else to be victorious in Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, London, Washington, and everywhere else; for the hungry to be fed everywhere, for the naked to be clothed, for the homeless to be housed, for the sick to be healed, for the miserable to be joy­ous, and for unbelievable good to be received by all and given by all. In this perfect prayer is also the prayer of perfect adoration, the prayer for us to be kept from choosing evil, and the prayer for perfect forgiveness. The very nature of love requires that we love in order to receive the fullness of love, that we forgive in fullness in order to be forgiven in fullness, that we be merciful in order to be recipients of limitless mercy.

In the presence of death, He prayed the prayer of perfect knowing, knowing that the so-called dead were only asleep, and therefore wakeable; the prayer of perfect thanksgiving and perfect faith combined so that the Father always heard Him; and He used the prayer of perfect command. The mere knowing that Lazarus and the maiden were not dead, did not resurrect them; it only furnished the knowledge that they could be resurrected. Giving thanks did not resurrect them either. They were resurrected by commandment. The storm was also stopped by com­mandment and the possessed people were likewise set free by commandment.

On the last night He prayed the perfect prayer for perfect union for the disciples to have with Him and with one another, for the perfect love among themselves, and that they might be kept from the evil of this world without being taken out of it. His great concern is not to get us to Heaven, but to bring Heaven here, and for us to become co-partners with Him in the bringing.

In Gethsemane, He prayed the perfect prayer of perfect submission, the most difficult prayer there is to pray, and it was much harder for Jesus than it has ever been for anyone else, or ever will be. At first, He seems to have hoped that there might be some other way than the Cross. He had said before that nobody took His life from Him, that at His command a multitude of angels would come and rescue Him. Then His prayer becomes a prayer to be held fast to the Highest of all, and it turned out He had to go down in the deep, dark waters of death and come up as victor over death, as well as over every other enemy. He is victor for us as well as for Himself. On the cross He prays the prayers of perfect love for others and of perfect forgiveness for those humanly responsible for all that the false judgment of man, Gethsemane and Calvary, cost Him.

He did not submit to death as an escape, but be­cause He could do more by self-offering and resurrection, by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by manifesting Himself by coming within and ultimately by coming in perfect triumph, than by remaining in the flesh as the Son of God. It was Love that brought Him, it was Love that took Him away to give the other Comforter who was to come within, and to come at the right moment in visible triumph.

Since His gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is still with us and longs to be within us and to have us in Him, doing more for all who will receive His spirit and receive Him than He could have done for a single one of us if He had remained among us.

When I asked Him, for example, how to pray for Japan, the answer came “pray for all aggressors to surrender and all victors to show mercy.” When I asked him how to pray for the United States and Russia, the two nations under special temptation, and with great privilege to go the right way and point the way, the answer is “pray for the triumph of My great good-will among all the nations,” and of course among all the races, classes, groups and in the whole of life. When I ask how to pray concerning the atomic bomb and other similar new secrets in man’s hands either for his destruction or for making life rich for all, the answer is “pray for all of these things to be brought under the control and uses of Love and Wisdom; for all the realms of this life and kingdoms of this world to become His.”

To whom shall we pray?

Until we know that Jesus is God-with-us in perfect availability and in perfect triumph with perfect power to answer, we are to pray the Father in His name; and, as previously indicated, in His name means in His love, in His spirit, in other words as disciples of His. The good and true wife can get in her husband’s name everything he has and everything he can get. She does not get it as a formula, but she gets it because of her relationship. So, as I understand, we do not get our prayers answered because we attach to them the empty phrase “in the name of Jesus” but because we are His and are seek­ing to live and pray and do everything in His spirit and in His love and under His leadership.

Jesus said to His own disciples they could not only get in His name anything that the Father had, but the Father loved them and would give them everything He had as fast as they were made ready and they made themselves ready to receive. Some of our prayers are answered even before we ask, and God even more than good human parents is always listening to answer every cry of need.

In my experience, I asked Jesus for something that I was not sure he could do—that he would come within and be within, and by abiding in me enable me to go His way as perfect love, perfect sincerity and perfect courage. In a few hours when I was made ready and helped to make myself ready by choosing to go His way, He baptized me with the Holy Spirit, manifesting Himself without and came within. This, so far as I remember, was the first prayer I ever made directly to Jesus. Since then I pray directly to Jesus, and I also pray to the Father in Jesus’ name and sometimes I go directly to the Father. The early Christians did everything in the name of Jesus, even baptizing in His name. As the former president of Union Theological Seminary and a great church his­torian, McGiffert, in his illuminating book, The God of the Early Christians, says, Jesus was to the early gentile Christians “their all sufficient God” and in all high tides of spiritual experience Jesus is experienced as God, yet for intellectual clarification, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were used to express three manifestations of the one God. But God is not a stickler for formulas and is always doing all He can for everyone, no matter how He is addressed. Still when it is seen that Jesus Christ is God, in perfect triumph and availability, there is much more power in His name than in any other name.

I find myself most lifted when I desire and ask in the name of Jesus for the best He has for me and for all that He has, all that I don’t know as well as all that I do know.

I have also found that the prayer of invitation after this manner has brought sanity to the insane, healing to the sick, and liberation to the enslaved:

• “Jesus, I want You to come into me and reign, Be all in all, in all of me and my affairs;
• Come in and be Spirit of my spirit;
• Come into my mind and bring Your understand­ing and humility;
• Come into my body and bring Your health and healing;
• Come into my affairs and direct them;
• Be will of my will—
• Soul of my soul—
• Brain of my brain—
• Heart of my heart—
• Life of my life—
• Joy of my joy—
• Perfect everything for all of me!
• Perfect everything for the all of all.”

The all-inclusive perfect desire, longing, prayer, and effort is perfect everything for everybody, and everything. You can’t desire and ask and dedicate to join Jesus for the achievement of perfect everything for all without being lifted into a new world of union, love, and transforming power and presence.

1. * [Note, footnote is on the Subtitle word Prayer*.] See Manifest Victory, pp. 256-262. (↩)