Conditions of prayer
“Ask, and ye shall receive.”—John 16:24
In the forty-third Sermon I shall show how necessary prayer is for us, and how powerful it is to obtain for us all the graces that can help us toward our eternal salvation. “Prayer,” says St. Cyprian, “is omnipotent; being one, it can do all things.” We read in Ecclesiasticus that God has never refused to hear anyone who called upon him for aid. “Who hath called upon him, and he hath despised him?” (Ecclus. 2:12). This he can never do, for he has promised to hear all who pray to him. “Ask, and ye shall receive.”
But this promise holds only for the prayer that has the necessary conditions. Many pray; but because they pray badly, they do not obtain the graces they desire. “You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss” (Jas. 4:3). To pray as we ought, we must pray, first, with humility; secondly, with confidence; and thirdly, with perseverance.
First Point.—We must pray with humility.
1. St. James tells us that God rejects the prayers of the proud: “God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble” (Jas. 4:6). He cannot bear the proud; he resists their petitions and refuses to hear them. Let those proud Christians who trust in their own strength, and think themselves better than others, take heed of this, and let them remember that their prayers shall be rejected by the Lord.
2. But he never sends away the prayers of the humble without hearing them: “The prayer of him that humbleth himself pierceth the clouds; and he will not depart till the Most High behold” (Ecclus. 35:21). And David says, “The Lord hath had regard to the prayer of the humble” (Ps. 102:18). The prayer of the man who humbles himself penetrates the heavens, and he will not depart till God looks upon it and hears him. “You humble yourself,” says St. Augustine, “and God comes to you; you exalt yourself, and he flies from you.” If you humble yourself, God himself comes, of his own accord, to embrace you; but if you exalt yourself, and boast of your wisdom and your deeds, he flies from you and abandons you to yourself.
3. Even the most dissolute sinners, when they repent of their sins from the heart and humble themselves before God, confessing that they are unworthy to receive any grace, the Lord cannot despise. “A contrite and humble heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51:19). Let us pass on to the other points, where there is a great deal to be said.
Second Point.—We must pray with confidence.
4. “No one hath hoped in the Lord, and hath been confounded” (Ecclus. 2:11). Oh, how much courage these words give to sinners! Though they may have committed the most enormous crimes, let them hear what the Holy Ghost says to them: “No man hath hoped in the Lord, and hath been confounded.” Never has anyone placed his trust in God and been left abandoned. He who prays with confidence obtains whatever he asks. “All things whatsoever you ask when you pray, believe that you shall receive, and they shall come unto you” (Mark 11:24).
When the graces we seek are spiritual ones, profitable to the soul, let us firmly believe that we shall receive them, and we shall certainly obtain them. This is why the Savior taught us, when we ask graces of God, to call him by no other name than Father (Our Father), so that we may have recourse to him with the confidence with which a child turns to a father who loves him.
5. Who, asks St. Augustine, can fear that he will be denied what truth itself promises to all who pray? “Who shall fear deception when truth promises?” Is God perhaps like men, who promise and then do not keep their word, either because in promising they mean to deceive, or because, after promising, they change their minds? “God is not as a man, that he should lie, nor as the son of man, that he should be changed. Hath he said, then, and will he not do?” (Num. 23:19). Our God cannot lie, because he is truth itself; nor can he change, because all that he ordains is just and holy.
6. And because he greatly desires our good, he exhorts and urges us so earnestly to ask for the graces we need. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). Why, asks St. Augustine, would the Lord exhort us so strongly to ask his graces, if he had no will to give them to us? Non nos hortaretur, ut peteremus, nisi dare vellet—“He would not urge us to ask unless he wished to give” (Sermon v on the Word of the Lord). All the more, since by his promise he has bound himself to hear our prayers, and to give us what we ask with the confidence of obtaining it. “By his promise he has made himself a debtor” (Sermon ii on the Word of the Lord).
7. But someone will say: I have little confidence in God, because I am a sinner. I have been too ungrateful to him, and so I see that I do not deserve to be heard. But St. Thomas tells us that the power of our prayers to obtain graces does not rest on our merits, but on the divine mercy. Oratio in impetrando non innititur nostris meritis, sed soli divinae misericordiae—“Prayer in obtaining graces does not rest on our merits, but solely on divine mercy” (Summa II-II, q. 178, a. 2, ad 1). Whenever we ask with confidence for things profitable to our eternal salvation, God hears our prayer.
I have said, “things profitable to our salvation;” for if what we seek would harm the soul, God does not, and cannot, hear us. For example: if a man wished to take revenge for some injury, or to bring to completion some business offensive to God, and prayed for help to do it, the Lord would not hear him; for then, says St. Chrysostom, this rash man offends God in his very prayer; he does not pray, but in a certain manner mocks him. Qui orat et peccat, non rogat Deum, sed eludit—“He who prays and sins does not ask God, but mocks him” (Hom. 11, in Matt. 6).
8. So too, if you ask the divine help and wish the Lord to assist you, you must not place any obstacle in the way that would make you unworthy to be heard. For example: if you ask God for strength not to relapse into a certain sin, but meanwhile will not remove the occasion of it—will not keep away from that house, that object, or that bad companion—then, though you pray, God does not hear you. And why? Because “thou hast set a cloud before thee, that prayer may not pass through” (Lam. 3:44). And if you do relapse, do not complain of God, saying: I prayed the Lord to give me strength not to fall, but he did not hear me. Do you not see that, by not removing the occasion, you have set in the way a thick cloud, with which you have kept your prayer from passing through to be heard by God?
9. It must also be noted that the promise of Jesus Christ to hear those who pray to him does not extend to all the temporal favors we ask of him—such as winning a lawsuit, gathering a good harvest, or being delivered from some illness or persecution. These favors too God grants when he is prayed to, but only when they are profitable to our spiritual welfare. Otherwise he refuses them; and he refuses them because he loves us, seeing that such favors would be misfortunes for us that would harm the soul. “A physician,” says St. Augustine, “knows better than the patient what is useful for him” (tom. 3, cap. ccxii).
He adds that God refuses to one, through mercy, what he grants to another as a chastisement. Deus negat propitius, quae concedit iratus—“God mercifully refuses what he grants in anger.” Hence St. John Damascene says that sometimes, when we do not obtain the graces we ask, we receive them all the better by not receiving them, since it is better for us that they be refused than granted. Etiam si non accipias, non accipiendo accepisti, interdum enim non accipere quam accipiendo satius est—“Even if you do not receive, by not receiving you have received, for sometimes it is better not to receive than to receive” (Paral, lib. 3, cap. xv.).
We often ask for the poison that would kill us. How many, had they ended their lives in the sickness or poverty they were suffering, would have been saved! But because they recovered their health, or were abundantly supplied with goods and honors, they grew proud, forgot God, and so were damned. Hence St. Chrysostom exhorts us: Orantes in ejus potestate ponamus, ut nos illud petentes exaudiat, quod ipse nobis expedire cognoscit—“Let us place ourselves who pray in his power, that he may hear us asking for what he himself knows to be expedient for us” (Hom. 15 in Matt.). Temporal favors, then, we must always ask of God on the condition that they will be profitable to the soul.
10. But spiritual favors, such as the pardon of our sins, perseverance in good, the love of God, and the light to accept his divine will, ought to be asked of God absolutely, and with a firm hope of obtaining them. “If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from Heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13). If you, says Jesus Christ, who are so attached to your goods, cannot refuse your children the blessings you have received from God, how much more will your Heavenly Father—who is in himself infinitely rich, and desires to do you good more than you desire to receive it—give the good Spirit, that is, sorrow for your sins, divine love, and resignation to the will of God, to those who ask him for it?
Quando Deus negabit petentibus qui etiam non petentes hortatur ut petant—“When will God refuse those who ask, when he urges even those who do not ask to ask?” says St. Bernard (Sermon 2 on St. Andrew). How can God refuse the graces profitable to salvation to those who seek them, when he exhorts even those who do not pray to ask for them?
11. Nor, when the Lord is prayed to, does he inquire whether the one who prays is just or a sinner; for he has declared, generally, for all: “Every one that asketh, receiveth” (Luke 11:10). “Every one,” comments the author of the Imperfect Work, “whether he be just or a sinner” (Hom. 18). And, to encourage us to pray and to ask with great confidence for these spiritual graces, Jesus Christ has said: “Amen, amen, I say to you: If you ask the Father anything in my name, he will give it you” (John 16:23). As if he said: Sinners, though you have no merit to obtain the divine graces, I have merit enough for them with my Father; ask, then, in my name—that is, through my merits—and I promise that you shall obtain whatever you ask.
Third Point.—We must pray with perseverance.
12. Above all, we must persevere in prayer until death, and never cease to pray. This is the meaning of those Scriptures which say: “We ought always to pray” (Luke 18:1). “Watch ye, therefore, praying at all times” (Luke 21:36). “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). And so the Holy Ghost admonishes us: “Let nothing hinder thee from praying always” (Ecclus. 18:22). This means not only that we should always pray, but also that we should take care to remove the occasions that hinder us from praying; for if we cease to pray, we shall be left without the divine helps, and shall be overcome by temptations.
Perseverance in the grace of God is a wholly gratuitous gift, which we cannot merit of ourselves, as the Council of Trent has declared (Session 6, ch. 13); but St. Augustine says that this gift can be merited by prayer, that is, obtained by praying. Hoc Dei donum suppliciter emereri potest, idest supplicando impetrari—“This gift of God can be merited by supplication, that is, obtained by supplicating” (On the Gift of Perseverance, ch. vi). Hence Cardinal Bellarmine teaches that the grace of perseverance “must be asked for every day, that it may be obtained every day;” for on whatever day we neglect to ask it, we may fall into sin.
13. If, then, we wish to persevere and be saved—for without perseverance no one is saved—we must pray continually. Our perseverance until death depends, not on a single help, but on a thousand helps which we hope to obtain from God throughout our whole life, that we may be kept in his grace. Now to this chain of divine helps a chain of our prayers must correspond; without these prayers, the Lord ordinarily does not dispense his graces. If we break this chain of prayers and cease to pray, the chain of divine helps will also be broken, and we shall lose perseverance.
Jesus Christ said to his disciples, as we read in St. Luke: if a friend comes to one of you at night and says, Lend me three loaves, for an acquaintance of mine has come to my house and I have nothing to set before him; he will answer: I am now in bed, the door is locked, I cannot get up. But if the other keeps knocking at the door and will not go away, then in the end, not for friendship’s sake but because of his importunity, he will rise and give him as many loaves as he has. “Although he will not rise and give him because he is his friend; yet, because of his importunity, he will rise, and give him as many as he needeth” (Luke 11:8).
Now if a man will give his loaves to a friend because of his importunity, “how much more,” says St. Augustine, “will God give, who exhorts us to ask, and is displeased if we do not ask?” How much more will the Lord, if we persevere in praying, give us his graces, when he himself exhorts us to ask for them, and is displeased if we do not?
14. Men grow annoyed at being asked importunately, again and again, for the same thing. But God exhorts us to repeat our prayers, and far from being annoyed, he is pleased to be prayed to repeatedly. Cornelius à Lapide says that the Lord “wishes us to be persevering in prayer, even to importunity” (in Luc., cap. 11). And St. Jerome had said before him: “This importunity with the Lord is seasonable” (in Luc. 11). This is the meaning of those repeated words that St. Luke records: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Luke 11:9).
It was enough to have said ask; but no, he chose to add seek, knock; for he meant by this to make us understand that throughout our whole life, in asking for graces, we must do as beggars do, who are importunate in asking for alms: though they are sent away, they do not cease to cry out, to knock at the doors, and to keep on asking, until they receive.
15. If, then, we wish to obtain perseverance from God, we must be always importunate in asking it of him: when we rise in the morning, when we make our meditation, when we hear Mass, when we visit the Blessed Sacrament, when we go to bed at night, and especially when we are tempted by the devil to commit any sin. Thus we must always keep our mouths open, praying to God and saying: Lord, help me, assist me; give me light, give me strength; keep your hand upon me, and do not abandon me.
We must do violence to God. “This violence,” says Tertullian, “is pleasing to God.” The violence we do to God by our prayers does not weary him; on the contrary, it pleases him, and he welcomes it. St. John Climacus adds: “Prayer piously does violence to God.” Our prayers constrain the Lord, but in a way that pleases him, to grant us the graces we ask. And because he takes great delight in seeing his divine Mother honored, he wishes, as St. Bernard says, that all the graces we receive should pass through her hands. Hence the saint counsels us “to seek grace, and to seek it through Mary, because she is a mother and cannot be refused” (Sermon on the Aqueduct). When we commend ourselves to Mary for any grace, she graciously hears us and prays for us; and the prayers of Mary are never refused.
Points for Reflection
1. “The prayer of the man who humbles himself penetrates the heavens, and he will not depart till God looks upon it and hears him” (§2)
2. “Prayer in obtaining graces does not rest on our merits, but solely on divine mercy” (§7)
3. “We must always keep our mouths open, praying to God and saying: Lord, help me, assist me; give me light, give me strength; keep your hand upon me, and do not abandon me” (§15)