Contents
Praying Asking and Receiving
By John R. Rice
John R. Rice’s work on prayer, Asking and Receiving, is a short 25 page book on the basics of prayer.
Dr. John R. Rice was widely known as a man of prayer—not just a man who spent time in prayer, but one who was heard and answered by God. In this, he was like the heroes of the Faith of which we read in the Bible. From before the days of Elijah on through the days of the early church, prayer has always been God’s means of pouring out His greatest blessings on His servants.
Dr. Rice’s burden was that all of God’s people learn the secrets of prayer and receive the blessings that it brings. His book Prayer—Asking and Receiving serves as a manual to instruct us in this matter.
He begins by defining just what biblical prayer is, tells us what the proper objects of prayer are, and then describes just how to pray. We are encouraged to discover how vast the potential of prayer is and also warned of the things that will keep prayer from being effective in obtaining the answer from God.
In our day, God is seeking men who will stand in the gap to avert His judgment. Men of prayer are just the kind of men needed for this task. Any child of God can use the access to God we have through Jesus and come boldly to His throne for help. Dr. Rice will lead you in the right way to engage in this blessed ministry of prayer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS of Rice – Prayer Asking and Receiving
Preface 2
I. A Prayer-Hearing God 3
(1) It is God’s nature to hear and answer prayer. (2) It is
impossible to come to God or to please Him without believing
that He is a prayer-hearing and a prayer-answering
God. (3) Every attribute of God is implied in the fact
that He hears and answers prayer. (4) Nature itself points
to a benevolent God who hears and answers prayer.
II. Why Pray? 9
(1) Because God insistently commands it in the Bible.
(2) Because prayer is God’s appointed way for Christians
to get things. (3) Because prayer is God’s way for Christians
to have fullness of joy. (4) Because prayer is the way
out of all trouble, the cure for all worry and anxious care.
(5) Because answered prayer is the only unanswerable
argument against skepticism, unbelief, modernism and
infidelity. (6) Because prayer is the only way to have the
power of the Holy Spirit for God’s work. (7) Because
“…whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall
be saved.”
III. Prayer is Asking 19
(1) Prayer is not praise, adoration, meditation, humiliation
nor confession, but asking. (2) Bible prayers were
asking. (3) Hypocrisy in so-called praying that does not
ask for something.
IV.The Answer to Prayer is Receiving 25
(1) The Scriptures teach that an answer to prayer is getting
what you asked for. (2) How to pray in the will of
God for a “yes” answer
Preface
PREFACE
Every thoughtful minister must be impressed with the hunger of good Christian people for instruction on prayer. Untaught Christians do not naturally know how to pray though their hearts long after God. John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray; and the twelve came to Jesus saying, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” People need to be taught from the Bible to pray as truly as they need to be taught to preach or win souls. And even in their study of the Bible they need help, as the Ethiopian eunuch who was asked by Philip, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” and replied, “How can I, except some man should guide me?”
The great popularity of books on prayer by Andrew Murray, by Bounds, by Dr. R. A. Torrey, by Dr. Blanchard, by Hallesby, by Mrs. Goforth and even by modernists, shows there is a deep hunger in the hearts of the people to learn to pray and to learn to pray aright and get things from God. To meet in some small measure, if I can, this hunger of the people of God and to help men and women and young people really to pray, to ask and receive, is my purpose in writing this book. Oh, the dearth of real prayer! We have not because we ask not. The churches are powerless, Christians are neither happy nor prosperous in spiritual matters, our loved ones are unsaved, all because we do not effectually, Scripturally, get hold of God in prayer. Revival, with the enlargement of God’s cause, with the widespread blessing of Christians, with the saving of multitudes of precious souls, surely waits on prayer. When we remedy the prayer life of the people of God, we remedy what is wrong with Christians and churches and open the way for every needed blessing. So I have earnestly set out in this book to teach people to pray according to the Scriptures and to stimulate faith in a God Who answers prayer.
Frankly, this book is a book of Bible teaching on prayer. It is not a book of philosophy nor reasoning about what is or is not possible or probable about prayer. The book is written on the simple basis that there is a God Who has revealed His will in the Bible, an infallible book. The Bible teaches that God delights to answer prayer. The Bible gives us many great and exceedingly precious promises about what God will do for those who come to Him in prayer, and the Bible clearly gives the conditions for getting things from God.
The Saviour said, “Ask and it shall be given you” (Matthew 7: 7), and again, “Ask and ye shall receive” (John 16: 24). So prayer is asking and an answer to prayer is receiving. In answer to prayer, God miraculously intervenes in human affairs and changes things; changes people, changes weather, changes outward
circumstances, changes health, even to the working of physical miracles. So the title of this book is PRAYER —Asking and Receiving. To this author prayer is a very simple and blessed matter of going to God daily for what one needs and desires, and getting it, and living in the fullness of joy of answered prayer which Jesus promised in John 16: 24, “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”
This is no untried theory that I bring. Every promise that I write about, I have tried and proved; so I write this book as a matter of personal testimony. I know God answers prayer. He has answered mine in thousands of instances. The answers to prayer have been so definite, so clearly out of the realm of probability that an unbiased investigator must be convinced that these answers to prayer were really the supernatural intervention of a loving God Who works miracles for His children when they trust Him. Others ought to tell what God has done for them, and so I ought to tell what God has done for me.
With a confession of my own weakness, with an earnest exhortation to others that we really come back to the Bible teaching and to Bible examples of prayer, and with a fervent hope that God may use this book to the blessing of thousands, I commit it to God and send it on its way. As for me, “I love the Lord, because He hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because He hath inclined His ear unto me, therefore will I call upon Him as long as I live.” Oh, beloved, we have not because we ask not. Ask and ye shall receive!
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