By Alexander Whyte

      "But without faith it is impossible to please him..." (Heb. 11:6).

      "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt. 3:17).

      First in His believing study and believing appropriation of the Messianic Scriptures, and then in His life of unceasing and believing prayer, our Lord stands at our head as the author and finisher of faith.

      And not more in His believing reading of the word than in His believing prayer and intercession continually. 'Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared.' Day and night, early and late, our Lord lived and moved and had His being in believing prayer.

      He could never have entered on His great work, far less could He ever have finished it, but for His faith in His father as the Hearer of prayer. At every successive step in the process of our redemption, He took that step after a season of prayer, till He had fulfilled in His own experience what He preaches with such point to us concerning believing prayer.

      Preaching clearly and undeniably from His own experience in prayer, He says to us in one great place--concerning prayer: 'What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. 'There is a window opened into our Lord's secret life of prayer in these wonderful words--words much too wonderful for the best believer among us, but true to the letter of Him and of His faith in His Father.

      'I know,' He said to His Father, at the grave of Lazarus, 'I know that Thou hearest me always. But because of the people that stand by I said it, that they might believe that Thou hast heard Me.' Such close communion of faith, and such strong assurance of faith, was there between the Father and the Son in the Son's life of believing reading and believing praying.