Raise your voice

Mon­day. [Eph. 1:22-2:3; Mark 10:46-52] The blind man of Jer­i­cho raised up his voice when he learned that the Lord was walk­ing past. His wail reach­ed the Lord; noth­ing sur­round­ing the Lord could in­ter­fere with His hear­ing it, and the Lord call­ed the blind man over and re­turn­ed his sight. At ev­ery time and in ev­ery place the Lord does not just walk by, but is there; He gov­erns the whole world. As hu­man think­ing would have it, this means that He has man­y cares; fur­ther­more, mul­ti­tudes of an­gels sur­round Him with doxologies. But if you are able to raise up your voice like the blind man of Jer­i­cho, noth­ing will stop your wail from reach­ing the Lord; He will hear and ful­fil your pe­ti­tion. It does not de­pend on the Lord; He Him­self is near, and all that is nec­es­sary for you is al­ready pre­pared in Him; now all that is want­ing is you. Man­age to raise up your voice to the mea­sure of the Lord’s hear­ing, and you will im­me­di­ate­ly re­ceive ev­ery­thing. What then is this mea­sure? Faith, hope, de­vo­tion to God’s will. But even these mea­sures have their own mea­sures. What then should these mea­sures be? Ask the one who has pray­ed and re­ceiv­ed what he re­quest­ed; he will say to you: “I pray­ed a­bout this and a­bout that and I re­ceiv­ed ac­cord­ing to my re­quest; now I need this, I have been pray­ing and have not re­ceiv­ed it, and I know why: be­cause I can­not in any way as­cend to that mea­sure of prayer which I had earli­er.” It turns out that it is im­pos­si­ble to de­ter­mine this mea­sure with lit­er­al pre­cise­ness. On­ly one thing is def­i­nite­ly true, that the mat­ter de­pends up­on us, and not on the Lord. As soon as you reach the point where you are ca­pa­ble of ac­cep­tance, you will un­quest­ion­a­bly re­ceive.