The fear that prayer will not be answered.
With what historical conditions may we fairly associate and illustrate this psalm? Suggest—Uzziah smitten with leprosy. Jeremiah cast into the dungeon. Hezekiah humbled by sickness. Job crushed by accumulated sufferings. Probably the case of Job provides the most effective and varied illustration. When it pleases God to delay the answer, or to send the answer in unexpected forms, it is our common temptation to think that he does not mean to answer. The plaint of the psalmist is that he "had cried unto God day and night," and nothing seemed to have come of his crying. Happily this only drives him the more earnestly to seek an answer. "Oh let my prayer come into thy presence!" Spurgeon says, "His distress had not blown out the sparks of his prayer, but quickened them into a greater ardency, till they burned perpetually, like a furnace at full blast."
I. FEAR THAT PRAYER WILL NOT BE ANSWERED MAY BE REASONABLE. There may be good ground for the fear in the character of the prayer itself.
1. Its tone may indicate that we are not greatly interested in it ourselves. We cannot expect God to be if we are not.
2. The prayer may have in it no note of submission. God cannot heed prayer that does not express the cherished feeling, "Not as I will, but as thou wilt." Delay often means God's waiting until we are in right moods.
3. There may be in prayer a dictating to God the time and the way in which he shall answer. If so, and his delay excites fears, those fears are most reasonable.
II. FEAR THAT PRAYER WILL NOT BE ANSWERED MAY BE UNREASONABLE. That is God's ways with us, though somewhat strange, may really give no occasion for such fears.
1. Delay is not refusal. We know that our delay in responding to requests is not refusal, and we are grieved if it is so taken. But in our case, too often, delayed answer means neglect, which may be more cruel than refusal. It is full of gracious assurance that, with God, delay no more means neglect than it means refusal.
2. Delay may be answer. At least, it may be if we can see that the moral answers God sends are always more important than the material. Delay sets us upon thought, self-searching, clearing of ourselves, and makes us at once simpler minded and more earnest; and that is God's first soul answer to our prayer.
3. Delay prepares for answer. It may be God's time for looking round, so that the answer may be a better one than he could have sent at once.
III. FEAR THAT PRAYER WILL NOT BE ANSWERED MAY BE UNWORTHY. It will be if in it there is any cherished doubt of God's power, or wisdom, or willingness to bless us.—R.T.