A perfect prayer has a great deal of God in it. It is inspired by His Spirit, prompted by His purpose, strengthened by His will, and in a deep, mysterious way sets forth the operation of the Godhead. All creation sets forth the trinity.

In the heavenly luminaries there are sun, moon, and stars. In the world there are earth, water, and air. In the zones there are frigid, temperate, and torrid.

In human destiny there is life in this, and then the disembodied state, where soul and body are separated, and then the glorified state, with soul and body united in the believer’s glorification. In Scripture there are three dispensations of the Father—through law, and in the Son, and by the Holy Ghost—Mount Sinai, Mount Calvary, and Mount Zion.

When Jesus gave us a synopsis of prayer, in Matthew 7, He evidently spoke out of His own experience, saying, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Here are three stages in prayer: the asking, the seeking, the knocking. Jesus lived a life of prayer as no other being on earth ever did, and He knew in His human soul all the depths and mysteries of prayer. When we look into His words we should remember they were not only spoken out of the infinite knowledge of His eternal Person, but also out of the acquired knowledge of His human soul. Let us look into these three steps of prayer:

1. “Ask.” This is the prayer of the heart, of request, of conscious want.

This is the easiest and simplest stage of prayer. The prayer of asking can be offered by little children, by sick people, by those who are just beginning a life of prayer. This form of the simple, outspoken prayer of the affections involves a sense of need. All prayer has its origin in a sense of need; and the greater the feeling of want, the stronger and more direct is the prayer. There must be a sense of need for pardon, or cleansing, or enlarging, or mellowing, or filling, or for healing of disease, or for temporal supplies, or deliverance from trouble, or divine guidance, or a deep sense of want for others’ welfare, where we, as it were, take their needs upon ourselves.

This prayer of the heart also includes desire, more or less heart longing for some promised good, some state of happiness or holiness which is held out before the soul. This intense yearning of the heart in prayer is more than the supply of absolute need; it is a definite desire for well being and blessedness over and above our actual needs.

While we should not pray selfish prayers, and God will not hear such prayers yet, on the other hand, it is right and proper to pray earnestly for our highest interest and well being. Madame Guyon was accused of teaching the annihilation of self to such an extreme as to ignore all self-interest in our present and eternal well being. But in her “Justifications” she carefully explained that a soul of man or angel could not in the nature of things be indifferent to his highest welfare, and that she only meant that the soul in prayer should not have selfish motives. Fenelon explained that our self-interests were to be merged into motives for the glory of God. And later Faber wrote most beautifully and accurately of how God had arranged all our highest interests and His highest glory to be one and the same thing. So the prayer of the affections includes the greatest longings of the heart for our possible well being in holiness and usefulness.

2. “Seek.” This is the prayer of the mind, of the most intense activity of the understanding in searching after God. Of course, we must remember that in the prayer of the heart the activity of the mind is involved, and also that of choice and determination, for all the faculties act in concourse. But what I mean is that the prayer at this stage seems to centralize itself more in the mental powers than in the affections or emotions, and the beautiful storm of divinely-inspired prayer has swept onward from the incipient stage of mere want, and the storm center is now in the thinking power where the prayer engages all the wit, and reflection, and spiritual investigation of the mind.

To seek is the prayer of searching. God has told us, “Ye shall seek and find me, when ye search after me.” This prayer of the mind implies searching into our own moral conditions to find whether there is anything in us, or in our lives, to prevent the answer to our prayers. Such a person will say, “Lord, is there anything between us to hinder my prayer, have I grieved Thee in anything; have I wounded Thy tender love; am I selfish; have I neglected something; have I left some wrong unrighted? Help me to search into my own life, and into my motives, and intentions, and to discover any lack of obedience on my part, and give me such perfect humility to confess and obey that it will be your pleasure to answer my prayer.” This searching prayer of the mind involves also the hunting up of precedents, or similar cases to our own, in Scripture and in the lives of God’s people, and pleading them before the Lord. This, a great point with lawyers in courts of human equity, and a clear case of parallel precedent, has wonderful power to sway the decision of a judge. We find instances in Scripture where God’s servants would plead what God had done for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or for Job, or David, or Elijah; and by searching out the points of analogy between their cases and God’s deliverance of their forefathers, they made, as it were, a strong fulcrum on which to place the lever of their prayer. It pleases God to have us get wide awake, and bring all our mental energies to bear upon His dealings in the past and plead them in our own behalf.

This seeking prayer of the understanding also involves searching into the disposition of God, into His character and attributes, plunging our thought into the beautiful bright abysses of the ocean of the Godhead, and appealing to His creative love, His eternal wisdom, His impartial compassion, His gentleness of nature, His ease of power, His ultimate glory, that by the answering of our prayer all His perfections will be illustrated, the precious blood of His Son will be honored, and His most loving purpose accomplished.

It has often been the case with persons of prevailing prayer, to lay before the Lord in detail the various reasons why the prayer should be answered, both from the human standpoint and from the divine. This is the prayer of diligence, of searching, and far-reaching investigation. This is the kind of prayer that makes wonderful discoveries. Please notice the various forms of answer to the various degrees of prayer. Those who “ask, receive,” but those who “seek, find,” or make discoveries.

3. “Knock.” This is the prayer of the will, of continued perseverance, of an unflagging and constantly-increasing zeal. The will has two forms of action; first, that of choice, then that of perseverance. The will is the highest and ultimate expression of personality, both in God and in man; hence the prayer that begins in the heart, then utilizes all the searching power of the understanding, and then rises to the possession of all the energies of the will, is a perfect prayer. Thousands begin to pray but stop before reaching the stage of deep, abiding perseverance. This stage of prayer is attended with the least noise and scantiest exhibition of emotion of any of the previous stages, because it has ceased to be a rippling mountain current and has become the resistless flow of a great river which combines, unites, and impels every power of the soul in one direction toward the throne of God.

This prayer of perseverance is the one specially magnified in the teachings of Jesus, as in the case of the widow with the unjust judge. In his parable of asking for “three loaves,” which, by the way, is another instance of the trinity of prayer, the bread is granted, not on the basis of friendship, “but because of importunity”—the prayer of perseverance. In this stage of prayer there is a growing sense of holy determination in the suppliant, as if God had come over on our side and encouraged us to prevail with Himself. Seasons of discouragement are followed by reduplicated zeal to “give God no rest,” as Isaiah exhorts us.

This form of prayer has a triumphant ignoring of all sorts of hindrances and seeming impossibilities. In spite of darkest appearances, and in the face of being criticized, or undersized, or ostracized, and of the doleful prophecies of others against us, the soul secretly “laughs at impossibilities, and cries, It shall be done,” as if it had discovered a secret gold mine for itself in the will of God, and was inwardly jubilant over the mighty spoil.

Again, this highest form of prayer finds a way of uniting all its private and personal interests with the personal honor and interest of God, so as to make common cause with the infinite One. This is the prayer that is answered with great “openings”: open doors, open fields of service, open visions into Scripture, open windows into Heaven to see the coming King and kingdom, open vistas of possible experiences where the soul stands victorious on the mountain peak and waves its banner over a newfound world.