Every truly converted man knows from this experience that God answers prayer. He has verified the promise. "Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not." (Jer. xxxiii., 8.) His life is a life of prayer, and grows more and more to be a life of almost unconscious dependence upon God, as he becomes fixed in the habit of prayer. This, and it is the purpose of God, is the result secured by prayer. With this in view, it will not be so much what we expect to get by praying, as a consciousness of coming into closer relations to God, the giver of all, in our prayers, that will give us true joy. Often God's children are driven to the throne of grace by some desperate need of help and definite supply of an absolute want, and, as they cry to God and plead their case with tears before him, he so manifests his presence to them and so fills them with a consciousness of his love and power, that the burden is gone and _without the want being supplied_ that drove them to God, they rejoice in _God himself_ and care not for the deprivation. This was Paul's experience when he went thus to God about the thorn, and came away without the specific relief he had prayed for, but with such a blessing as a result of his drawing near to God, that he little cared whether the thorn remained or not--or, rather, rejoiced that it was not removed; that it might be used to keep him near to God, whose love so filled his soul. A widow once told the writer of the turning point in her Christian life, when God's love was so shed abroad in her heart that she had been enabled to go on through all her trials rejoicingly conscious of God's presence, and casting all her burdens upon Him. She was driven to seek God by great need. Her husband's death left her destitute, with little children to provide for, and few friends from whom to look for continuous aid. Winter drew on, and, one day, her little boy came in shivering with cold and asked if he could not have a fur cap, as his straw hat was very cold and none of the boys at school wore straw hats. She was without a cent in the world. She gave a hopeful answer to the boy and sent him out to play, and then went to her bedroom and knelt and wept in utter desolation of heart before God, praying most earnestly that God would give her a token that He _was_ her God and was caring for her by sending her a cap for her boy. While she prayed the peace of God filled her soul. She was made to feel the presence of her Saviour in such a way that all doubts as to his love for her and his fulfillment of all his promises to care for her vanished away, and she went out of her room, rejoicing in the Lord and singing his praise. She had no burden about the cap, and was quite content for God to send it or not as it pleased Him; and, in the afternoon, when a neighbor called, occupied with the Lord and his wonderful love, the thought of the cap had gone from her mind.