Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should ask.  “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33), he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for deliverance from evil.  Pray, too, “Thy kingdom come.”  “Pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest” (Matt. 9:38).  This is perhaps the only place where he asked his disciples to pray for his great work.  Identification with God’s purposes—­identification with the individual needs of those we love and those we ought to love—­identification with the world’s sin and misery—­these seem to be his canons of prayer for us, as for himself.  For both in what he teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say:  “Thy will be done.”  Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of God.  Obedience goes with it; “we must cease to pray or cease to disobey,” one or the other.  If we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright about our prayers, because we do not quite believe that God will really look after the things about which we are anxious.  We must indeed go back to what Jesus said about God; we had better even leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says, and then begin again with a clearer mind.

“Ask, and ye shall receive,” he says; and if we have no obedience, or love, or faith, or any of the great things that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them.  The Gospel gives us an illustration in the man who prayed:  “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24).  But it is plain we have to understand that we are asking for great things, and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our thoughts.  Not away from the little things, for if God is a real Father he will wish to have his children talk them over with him—­“little things please little minds,” yes, and great minds when the little minds are dear to them—­but not little things all the time.  There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves.  Perhaps it is a mere slip, but God, it has been said, can use misquotations; and Clement’s quotation, or misquotation, certainly represents the thought of Jesus, and it may give us a hint for our own practice:  “Ask,” saith he, “the great things, and the little things will be added unto you” (Strom. i. 158).

The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on God.  Short-range thinking, like the rich fool’s, may lead to our forgetting God; but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the thought-out life; and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning with God.  That is what Jesus urges—­that we should think life out, that we should come face to face with God and see him for what he is, and accept