Praying for Money by Russell H. Conwell

Author:Russell H. Conwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Praying for Money, Russell H. Conwell, inspirational, motivational, social, Christianity, religion, faith, truth, wisdom, Jesus, theology
Publisher: The Big Nest
Published: 2015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter V

Unanswered Prayers

THE many letters which report that prayers have not been answered made the examination into that department of the investigation to be most discouraging until the testimonies were read the second or third time. Slowly it dawned on the reader that the writers did not know, after all, whether their prayers were answered or not. A bright light was let in on the subject by the expression of one who stated that he had prayed for the means to pay off a mortgage on his home until he had abandoned all hope and had decided to sell his house to the railroad company for a siding. In answer to a later inquiry the discouraged petitioner stated that the jury, to which by contract both parties agreed to leave the assessment of the “land damages,” had given him money enough to buy a much finer home away from the continual annoyance of passing trains.

Many of the wholly disappointed petitioners closed their complaints or doleful faultfinding outbursts with the stereotyped quotation, “nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done!” To some “the heavens are as brass”; to others, their prayers did not go “higher than their heads,” and to still others their prayers became meaningless and like “words called into the thin air.” This phase of our topic could not be followed up as far as a careful investigator could wish, because it involved so much correspondence and so much delay. But a general statement of the conclusions reached by those whose prayers had, seemingly, not been answered can be safely made. They all naturally and necessarily formed a concept of God by imagining him to be an all-mighty and all-good man. The human mind seems incapable of forming any other idea of God than can be obtained from a human model, greatly enlarged. Jesus knew what was in man when he taught his disciples to say, “Our Father.” Human kings, human fathers, human saints human sinners are really pictured in the minds of all who strive to visualize the Almighty, or his Son, or the angels. No Hindu can even think Nirvana. No mind can meditate on nothing. Everything conceived in the mind must be like something else. Reasoning from “the known to the unknown,” or “the lesser to the greater,” is the only possible process by which man can know God. So all those seemingly defeated ones had looked up to God as to a great man, and when he seemed to do nothing in answer to their requests they concluded that he either did not hear or that he would not even reply. They did not think, however, of their heavenly Father as they would of an earthly father who was perfectly good. A good and wise father must often deny his child the article for which he asks, but he will not dismiss the matter with a curt denial. He will try to find something else for his child, as has been already stated in a previous chapter.

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