If you will ask

This is something I read this morning from the book "If You will ask" by Oswald Chambers. The book is about prayer. Below is something out of chapter 3

 

 

If we struggle in prayer it is because the enemy is gaining ground. If prayer is simple to us, it is because we have the victory. There is no such thing as a holiday for the beating of your heart. If there is, the grave comes next. And there is no such thing as a moral or spiritual holiday. If we attempt to take a holiday, the next time we want to pray it is a struggle because the enemy has gained a victory all round, darkness has come down and spiritual wickedness in high placeshas enfolded us. If we have to fight, it is because we have disobeyed; we ought to more than conquerors.

". . . and having done all, to stand"— a mental state as regards confidence, no panic. What is it puts us into a panic? The devil is a bully, but he cannot stand for a second before God. When we stand in the armor of God he pays no attention to us, but if we tackle the devil in our own strength we are done for. If we stand in God's armor with the strength and courage of God, he cannot gain one inch of way, and the position of prayer is held, as far as we are concerned, untouched by his wiles. Confidence in the natural world is self-reliance, in the spiritual world it is God-reliance. We run away when we have not been practicing, when we have not been doing anything in private, then when there is a new onslaught of the wiles of the devilwe lose heart instantly. Instead of standing we scuttle, and others have to fill the gap until we are sufficiently ashamed to come back. We cannot stand against the wiles of the devil by our wits. The devil only comes along the lines that God understands, not along the lines we understand, and the only way we can be prepared for him is to do what God tells us, stand complete in His armor, indwelt by His Spirit, in complete obedience to Him. We have not to wait for some great onslaught of the enemy, he is here all the time and he is wily. The secret of the sacred struggle for prayer lies in the fact that we must stand in the armor of God, practicing what God would have us do, then we can hold the position of prayer against all the attacks of the devil.

If we are struggling in prayer it is because the wiles of the enemy are getting the upper hand, and we must look for the cause of it in the lack of discipline in ourselves. There are some things we have not been strenuously practicing—we used to pray in the morning, do we now? We used to commune with God over the Bible, do we now? We used to be in contact with God wherever we went, are we now? Put on the whole armor of Godand keep continuously practicing, and then the wiles of the devilcannot get you unawares.