November 1 – Seasonable and Visible Help

Hope for Today: A Daily Devotion from Reasons for Hope*Jesus

 | Hope for Today Archive | Sign Up for Our Resources | 

“At the beginning of your supplications the command went out.” Daniel 9:23

“Continuing steadfastly in prayer.” Romans 12:12

Oh, comfortable and encouraging thought, that in the same moment that the supplication arose from the prophet’s heart, the gracious answer descended from the heart of the prayer-hearing God! When we call upon the name of the Lord with simplicity and holy earnestness of soul, the return of grace and love meets our request before it has ascended half-way to heaven. And when the Lord is going to bless us, He pours out a spirit of prayer and raises a cry in our hearts after the particular blessing He is going to communicate. Therefore, when we are enabled to pray earnestly, we may be sure that blessings are coming, and that we shall certainly receive in due time seasonable and visible help. Then let us only go on and put, as it were, one weight of prayers after another into the scales of the sanctuary. Surely our greatest distress will, at last, be overbalanced, and salvation brought down. But it is well to be observed that we must also be watchful, and not act contrarily to the intent of our prayers, which might provoke the Lord to disannul His grant, or at least to delay His help. But when He tarries long, it is not His intention to give us a denial — but rather make us more desirous and earnest, that He may bestow the more upon us afterwards; for, this delay He will certainly well recompense and grant us abundantly above all that we could ask or think.

Devotion by Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky (1690—1774)