Judges 1:1

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"The children of Israel asked the Lord." Judges 1:1 .

Notice the simplicity of this. The conscious nearness of God. The very easiest form of worship. No enlargement of this form has been given even in Christianity, whose exhortation is, "Ask, and it shall be given you." Speaking to God elevates the soul. Communion with God compels the spirit to search out acceptable words. Such asking is really part of spiritual education. The soul is called upon to recount its needs, and to set them in order before God. The impossibility of imposing upon the Omniscient. The suppliant must not do more than ask; that is to say, he must not make the answer a condition of his piety, or a standard by which he will judge the reality of the divine existence, and the goodness of the divine government. All we can do is to put our case before God, and to plead it, and then the answer must be absolutely left with him. We are to ask about everything. We shall undervalue the sacredness of life if we suppose that some things are not worth asking about. The life is equally sacred at all points when it is hidden in God. Nothing unimportant can ever arise in human life. Spiritual wisdom is shown in making every point of consequence and needing the direct intervention and blessing of God. The word "children," as descriptive of Israel, comes suggestively before this act of asking. Are we not all the children of the living God? What have children to do but to ask? not to dictate or demand, but simply to state in terms of supplication. All such asking is to be done in the name of him who taught us how to pray. God is still approached through priesthood, only now the priesthood is not human, but divine. We should so cultivate communion with God that our prayer will be reduced to the simplicity of "asking." The question is put as if from child to parent, or from friend to friend, or from scholar to teacher; all traces of formality, ceremony, servility are absent, and the communion is marked by frankness, directness, and childlike simplicity. This is the true genius of prayer.