Prayer Precedes Mercy
Return to sacred history, and you will find that it is rare for this earth to have received any declared mercy without supplication. You may find this to be true in your personal experience. God has generously bestowed many blessings upon you, yet great prayers have always preceded great mercies in your life. When you first found peace through the blood of the cross, you prayed earnestly and interceded fervently for God to remove your doubts and deliver you from your distress. The confirmation of His response was a direct result of your prayers.
Whenever you experienced great joy and happiness, you were compelled to recognize that these blessings were answers to your prayers. And when you were delivered from painful troubles and received great help in times of great danger, you always said, “I sought the Lord, and He answered me; He delivered me from all my fears.”
Prayer always precedes blessings, goes before them, and clings to them like a shadow. When the sun of God’s mercy shines upon our needs, it casts the shadow of prayer upon the earth. Or, to use another analogy, when God gathers an abundance of mercies, He shines behind them, casting upon our souls the shadow of prayer so that we may rest in assurance. If we are deeply engaged in prayer, our intercession becomes the very shadow of God’s mercy.
Thus, prayer is directly connected to blessings, revealing their true worth. If we were to receive blessings without asking for them, we might consider them mere occurrences that happen from time to time. But prayer gives our mercies an invaluable worth, greater than that of pearls. The things we ask for in prayer are immensely precious, yet their true value is often unnoticed until they are sought with earnestness and fervor.
