Here is something that puzzles me and I expect it puzzles you too. Ever since we started prayer meetings in Ilford, we’ve prayed for people we know to come to Jesus. I’ve not counted how many such prayers we’ve offered, but there have been many. And yet we’ve seen very few clear answers.
The puzzle is this: are we really more anxious to see people saved than God himself is? That’s how it can look and feel. We really want people to become Christians. If it were in our hands, we’d save everyone straight away. So it appears that we’re more merciful than God.
In his book, Only A Prayer Meeting, Spurgeon puts his finger on that issue and tackles it very helpfully. His answer is that it’s just an optical illusion to think we care more for conversions than God does. It’s only how it looks at a casual glance, for if we probe further and examine ourselves a bit more, we’ll see that we’re seriously misrepresenting our own hearts. We’re being pretty puffed up about how zealous we really are.
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