session.
But how can we know the will of God when we pray? In two ways: First of
all, by what is written in His Word; all the promises in the Bible are
sure and if God promises anything in the Bible, we may be sure it is His
will to give us that thing; but there are many things that we need which
are not specifically promised in the Word and still even in that case it
is our privilege to know the will of God, for it is the work of the Holy
Spirit to teach us God's will and lead us out in prayer along the line of
God's will. Some object to the Christian doctrine of prayer; for they say
that it teaches that we can go to God in our ignorance and change His will
and subject His infinite wisdom to our erring foolishness. But that is not
the Christian doctrine of prayer at all; the Christian doctrine of prayer
is that it is the believer's privilege to be taught by the Spirit of God
Himself to know what the will of God is and not to ask for the things that
our foolishness would prompt us to ask for but to ask for things that the
never-erring Spirit of God prompts us to ask for. True prayer is prayer
"in the Spirit," that is, the prayer which the Spirit inspires and
directs. When we come into God's presence, we should recognize our
infirmity, our ignorance of what is best for us, our ignorance of what we
should pray for, our ignorance of how we should pray for it and in the
consciousness of our utter inability to pray aright look up to the Holy
Spirit to teach us to pray, and cast ourselves utterly upon Him to direct
our prayers and to lead out our desires and guide our utterance of them.
There is no place where we need to recognize our ignorance more than we do
in prayer. Rushing heedlessly into God's presence and asking the first
thing that comes into our minds, or that some other thoughtless one asks
us to pray for, is not praying "in the Holy Spirit" and is not true
prayer. We must wait for the Holy Spirit and surrender ourselves to the
Holy Spirit. The prayer that God, the Holy Spirit, inspires is the prayer
that God, the Father, answers.

The longings which the Holy Spirit begets in our hearts are often too deep
for utterance, too deep apparently for clear and definite comprehension on
the part of the believer himself in whom the Spirit is working--"The Spirit
Himself maketh intercession for us _with groanings which cannot be
uttered_" (Rom. viii. 26, R. V.). God Himself "must search the heart" to
know what is "the mind of