No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:44

Do we not often harbor the thought that something yet remains to be done – either by ourselves or by Him – in order for us to draw near?

Do we not often thus become occupied with the circumstancials of worship rather than with the Lord Jesus – the substance?

Are we not often false to Him in questioning our right to draw near because we find distance in our own hearts, as if it was the warmth of our affections, instead of the blood of the Lord Jesus, which brings us near?

William Kelly

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.

1 John 2:15-17

“While sitting on the bank of a river one day, I picked up a solid round stone from the water and broke it open. It was perfectly dry in spite of the fact that it had been immersed in water for centuries. The same is true of many people in the Western world. For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity; they live immersed in the waters of its benefits. And yet it has not penetrated their hearts; they do not love it. The fault is not in Christianity, but in men’s hearts, which have been hardened by materialism and intellectualism.”

Sadhu Sundar Singh

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 15:7

In creation God acts sovereignty and alone. But in the unfolding of His redemptive purposes, He wills it otherwise. He chooses to unite with Himself human instruments and share with them the excitement of creativity. The incarnation was part of the working out of this plan.

In sending His Son to become man, God revealed in a new way His purpose to limit Himself to working in and through a relationship with man. The vital, indispensable part of this working relationship is prayer. God communicated His will to the Son in the intensive exercise of prayer that occupied so many of our Lord’s nights in desert places.

Then on earth, working according to His Father’s will, the Human Instrument acted in the performance of signs and wonders, counting on the power He had requested in prayer because His will was one with the Father’s.

This brings us to the basic divine principle in prayer – that God unites His people with Himself in whatever He wants to do, first leading them to pray and then giving the thing for which He burdened them to pray. God’s will is to send rain on Ahab’s drought-stricken land. He will not act alone. He unites Elijah with Him in His purposes by communicating to him His intention; then when Elijah prays, God acts. Elijah could bring a drought on Israel in the first place, not just because he prayed the rain out of the sky, but because he could first say, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand.” He was not initiating some self-conceived idea, but was acting with God for the performance of God’s will . . . for just such a situation as prevailed in his days.

The same principle is taught by the Lord Jesus in His Upper Room discourse under the symbolism of the vine and the branches. Abiding in Him is the condition He established for our asking and His acting. What had been set up as the working arrangement between Himself and His Father is perpetuated in the New Covenant-based relationship between Himself and His Church. It was to be standard operating procedure.

Arthur Matthews

Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me?

Jeremiah 32:27

Could it be possible that God would so  love an individual as to give His only Son to die for him and still love him to the extent of following him with pleadings and drawings of His grace until He has won that soul into His own family and created him anew by the impartation of His own divine nature, and then be careless as to what becomes of the one He has thus given His all to procure?

Lewis Sperry Chafer

The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, And He delights in his way.

Psalm 37:23

To penetrate deeper in the experience of Jesus Christ, it is required that you begin to abandon your whole existence, giving it up to God. Let us take the daily occurrences of life as an illustration. You must utterly believe that the circumstances of your life, that is, every minute of your life, as well as the whole course of your life – anything, yes, everything that happens – have all come to you by His will and by His permission. You must utterly believe that everything that has happened to you is from God and is exactly what you  need.

Such an outlook towards your circumstances and such a look of faith towards your Lord will make you content with everything that comes into your life as being from the hand of God, not from the hand of man.

Jeanne Guyon