18 "“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.
25 “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.28 You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. 30 I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, 31 but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here."
John 14:18-31
What was said in yesterday's Note serves to explain what is a very real and perplexing mystery in the teaching of the Scriptures about prayer. There are, for example, the statements such as we have in the Upper Room discourse, in which prayer is made to seem so very simple - 'If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it'. What could be more effortless. But we know that prayer is not simple like that; we think of other passages, some of them spoken by Jesus also, in which prayer is represented as importunate, agonising, and full of the spirit of wrestling - Abraham wrestling with God for the doomed city of Sodom, Moses agonising for sinning Israel, Daniel fasting and weeping for God's blessing on his people. How does this square with the other, simple version, as in 14; the answer lies here: The wrestling, the battling, the importunacy, the agonising, all are part of the discipline that brings us into alignment with God's redemptive purposes in the world. And we often have to fight and battle with ourselves and certainly often with principalities and powers that are intent upon drawing us away from God's redemptive purposes. And it is when that battle is won - often at tremendous cost - that we are through to praying ground, where we can look up into the Father's face, and ask simply and know that our prayer will be heard. It is all a question of relationship and character - and the battling and wrestling serve to bring us into substantial alignment with Christ's will and purpose, and make us into a certain kind of person. In the life of prayer, as in so many other departments of human experience, it is character - what we are - that tells.