The Laws of Faith

I want to start with the boldest thing Finis Dake ever wrote about prayer. He did not toss it off in passing. He put it at the close of a careful argument, in a book he published in 1950, and he meant every word of it.¹

Read that last clause again. Not unlikely. Not rare. Impossible. If you belong to God and you pray believing, the answer must come. No exceptions.

Now listen to a very different voice. A garden, past midnight. A Man who never once wavered in His trust of the Father.

He asked. The cup did not pass. And the writer of Hebrews tells us the Father heard Him.³

Between those two sentences sits a whole doctrine of prayer. This chapter is going to pull it out into the open.

Dake believed prayer runs on published law. God has put His terms in writing. The terms are scattered through Scripture, and Dake gathered them into numbered lists, one condition after another. Meet every condition, and the answer follows the way gravity follows a dropped stone. Miss one, and the answer does not come. And when it does not come, the blame always falls on you. Never on God.

He was not vague about any of this. He spelled it out in the plainest language he had, over and over again, across two of his major works.⁴ This chapter will document that machinery from his own pages and then answer it from the Bible he annotated.

But three things belong to other chapters, and I want to name them now so we do not cover them twice. The limit this system puts on God's power belongs to Chapter 11. The question of healing in particular belongs to Chapter 17. Where this teaching traveled after Dake belongs to Chapter 23. What we are looking at here is the machinery itself: the conditions, the certainty, and the God who is bound by His own statutes.⁵

Why This One Matters

You can carry a doctrine in your head for years without it costing you much. Prayer is different. Prayer is where what you believe about God meets the worst night of your life.

First, what you think of God when the answer is no. If Dake is right, then a silent heaven has only one reading. You failed. You wavered. You broke the law of faith. There is nothing else on the table.

Second, what you say to someone else who prayed and heard nothing back. A woman buries her husband. He loved God. She loved God. They both believed. A father sits beside a hospital bed that is not going to get better. What is a friend supposed to say? If the machinery is true, then the friend has a duty. He needs to help her find the condition she missed. That is not cruelty. Inside the system, it is the most loving thing he can do.

Third, whether God keeps any say at all. A promise with conditions still leaves God free. A statute with conditions does not. If meeting the terms obligates Him, then He has already spent His freedom. Prayer is no longer asking. It is filing a claim.

Before I press any of that further, I need to say plainly what Dake gets right. And he gets a great deal right.

He is right that the Bible commands us to ask, and to keep asking. He is right that Jesus told a parable about a widow who would not stop knocking, and told it on purpose. He is right that a shrug is not humility. In his day a lot of pulpits taught a soft fatalism, a kind of whatever-will-be resignation dressed up as submission, and Dake hated it. He said so bluntly, and I think he was right to be angry.⁶ He is right that God is generous. He is right that God is a Father. He is right that God's children may come to Him expecting real things. A Christian who never expects anything from God has not learned humility. He has learned unbelief and given it a nicer name.

Dake in His Own Words

1. The Statute Book

We should start with Dake's own picture of what prayer actually is. This comes at the head of his longest lesson on the subject, in God's Plan for Man.

Read that last line again. Prayer is a case. God is the bench. That is not a slip of the pen. It is the shape of everything that follows on these pages.

And a court needs a statute book. Dake built one. In Bible Truths Unmasked he set out sixteen numbered conditions of answered prayer, each drawn from a passage, each printed in capital letters.⁷ Here are four of them, in his own format.

Read it for what it is. This is a checklist for getting a result. Each item is a requirement. The requirements together make up the price. Pay it in full and the goods are owed. Dake says exactly that in the very next paragraph.

Refuse to be denied. That is a courtroom posture, not a child's. Now, I want to be fair. A child can be persistent, and Jesus praised persistence. But a child who has memorized the terms so he can refuse denial is doing something different from asking. He is holding his Father to a contract.

Hold on to condition sixteen. We are coming back to it. Dake's reading of that one verse is the hinge this whole chapter turns on.

2. The Certainty Clause

The conditions are the statute. The certainty clause is the guarantee stapled to its back. Dake said it more than once, in different places. Here is the version from his main lesson on prayer.

Four sentences. Each one tightens the bolt a little more. Prayer never fails when it is done right. Turn that around and you get the rule a reader will actually live by: a prayer that failed was not done right. Then he borrows the Lord's own words about heaven and earth passing away and fastens them to a method. He finishes with a formula: prayer is absolute and unfailing when faith is the same.

Absolute leaves no room for a case that does not fit. Elsewhere he boiled the rule down to fourteen words.

He runs the logic both directions. Keep the law and the answer is certain. Break the law and the answer is impossible. A few pages later he names the penalty and tells the reader how to diagnose himself.

A settled fact. Not a question to bring before God. Not one possibility among several. The unanswered Christian can stop wondering. He already knows what went wrong.

Elsewhere Dake put the same thought as a kind of ratio. This is the sentence I find hardest to sit with.

Notice what does the heavy lifting. He starts from a true premise. God does not fail. God does not change. Amen to both of those. But the conclusion does not follow. From "God cannot fail" he jumps to "God cannot decline." Those are not the same thing. A father who says no to his child has not failed. He has fathered.

The plainest form of the certainty clause shows up as a rule about how you are allowed to word your prayers. It appears in his healing material, which Chapter 17 handles in full, but the rule itself is about the act of praying, so it belongs here.

He is not softening anything here. Praying "if it be Thy will" is not weak faith. It is sin. It makes God a liar. Two pages earlier he had already explained why God cannot make an exception: "He is not that kind of God, and He will not break His laws for anyone."⁸

I have sat with that sentence a long time. It is meant to comfort. God plays no favorites. But look at what else it says. The laws stand over God. He will not step outside them. Not for you. Not for anybody.

3. The Mastery Clause

The system does not stop at prayer. Dake runs it across the entire field of Christian struggle. His chapter title in Bible Truths Unmasked says it outright: "Complete Mastery Over the Devil Possible."⁹ Here is what he promises the believer who meets the terms.

Let me be careful here, because some of this is true, and gloriously so. The devil is a defeated enemy. The name of Jesus is above every name. A believer is not a helpless victim of dark powers, and anyone who has been taught to cower needs to hear that. I preach it myself.

But look at the verbs. Sicknesses will have to go. Pains will have to leave. Every failure becomes a thing of the past. Money troubles are solved by taking a stand. This is not a promise that Christ has already won and we walk in His victory. This is a promise that a correctly performed act produces a guaranteed result.

Think now about the woman Dake wrote this for. She is oppressed, discouraged, frightened. She picks up his book looking for hope, and she finds a page telling her that all of it will have to go. Then it does not go. What has the page given her? One more failure. And this one has her name on it.

He even scripts her next move: "Refuse to take no for an answer. Refuse to even think that it is possible that you have not been heard of God."¹⁰ The system does not only promise a result. It forbids the believer from ever considering another explanation.

4. The Prosperity Clause

The same machinery runs the money. In a supplement of God's Plan for Man written for this purpose, Dake introduces his list this way.

Guaranteed success. Six pages later he closes the section with the claim stated like a law of nature.

First, a lot of what he lists is plain wisdom. Work hard. Be honest. Give generously. Do not waste. A Christian who lives that way will usually do better than one who does not, and the Bible's wisdom books say as much.¹¹

Second, Dake is not preaching greed. In the posthumous compilation Heavenly Hosts, there is a passage about the devil's deceptions that actually rebukes the person who chases money first.¹²

On its face that is a rebuke to worldliness, and I will not pretend otherwise. But watch what the sentence still commits God to. Serve the Lord truly and abundant prosperity follows. Now turn it around, the way the system always invites you to. If you are poor, you have not truly served.

This is the pattern across all four exhibits. Each one starts from a real promise in Scripture. Each one ends by turning that promise into a mechanism. And the mechanism only has one place to assign blame.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. His Own Last Verse

Dake's list of sixteen conditions ends on 1 John 5:14. So let us begin where he stopped, and read what the verse says.

Dake read "according to His will" as a filing instruction: pray for the things God has already promised in writing. He said so in condition sixteen, and he said it again elsewhere. "Never question the will of God in anything that you ask according to the promises. It is already His will for you to ask what you will."¹⁶

Look at what that reading does. It turns a clause about God's living will into a clause about my paperwork. If I can find a promise that covers my request, the will question is closed. God has no further say.

But that is not what John wrote. The Greek word is thelema, meaning what a person wills or wants. It is the same word Jesus used in the garden.¹⁷ John is not describing a filing category. He is describing the desire of a living Person who is listening right now.

And look at what John actually promises. He does not promise we get the item. He promises "He hears us." That is the confidence John offers. The Father is not distant. He is not distracted. He is not deaf. He hears. And what a Father does with what He hears is still His to decide.

So the clause Dake turned into his last requirement is the very one that dissolves the whole list. "According to His will" is not a final box to tick. It is God keeping the last word.

2. The Gallery of Unanswered Saints

Dake wrote that "not one Scripture says that unanswered prayer indicates any other cause" than unbelief. That is a large claim, and the Bible can test it. Scripture keeps a gallery of people who prayed, believed, and did not receive.

Start with Moses. He asked God to let him cross into the land. He asked more than once.

God refused him. He gave a reason, and it was not unbelief. It was a judgment already passed at the waters of Meribah.¹⁸ Then God showed him the land from a mountaintop and buried him with His own hands. That is not how you treat a failure.

David is next. His child was dying. He fasted seven days and lay on the ground through the night. The child died anyway. David got up, washed, worshiped, and ate. When his servants asked why, he told them he had hoped God might be gracious. God had not been.¹⁹ Scripture does not scold him for the fasting. It does not scold him for the answer, either.

That is a no. A tender no, with something better attached to it. But it is still a no. Paul asked, and the thing he asked for was not given. Dake knew this passage was a problem and handled it by arguing that the thorn was a persecuting angel rather than a disease.²⁰ Grant him the point for the sake of argument. It does not help. Whatever the thorn was, Paul prayed three times for it to go. God said no.

And then the garden. Jesus asked for the cup to pass. He added, "nevertheless, not as I will." That single word, nevertheless, is the very thing Dake's system calls sin.

Think about what that costs. If praying "if it be Thy will" makes God a liar, then the sinless Son of God made His Father a liar on the night He was betrayed. If the only failure possible is on the human side, then the failure in Gethsemane was Christ's. Nobody holding a Dake Bible would say that out loud. But the machinery says it. And the machinery has no exit.

3. What Faith Is Aimed At

Dake leaned hard on Mark 11:22–24, and he was right that it matters. But look at how Jesus opens it.

Three words at the center of it. Faith has an object. It is not a force I generate and aim at a mountain. It is trust placed in a Person. Jesus does not say have faith in your faith. He does not say have faith in the promise. He says have faith in God.²¹

That is why Hebrews 11 can end the way it does. The first half is the highlight reel. People shut the mouths of lions and quenched fire and saw the dead raised. Then the chapter turns.

Same chapter. Same word for faith. Opposite outcomes. Some were rescued. Some were sawn in two. The writer commends every one of them in the same breath.²² On Dake's reading, the second half of Hebrews 11 is a record of law-breaking. On the writer's own reading, it is the hall of faith.

That is the difference the Terms callout above is marking. Faith aimed at God can hold a no. Faith aimed at the outcome cannot, because a no would prove the faith was counterfeit all along.

4. The Machine That Cannot Be Tested

Ask what evidence could ever count against Dake's laws. If the prayer is answered, the laws are proved. If the prayer is not answered, the person praying is convicted. Every possible result confirms the system. Nothing can weigh against it.

A rule that no outcome can question is not a discovered law. It is a closed loop. Biblical promises are not built that way. They are made by a Person who can be trusted. They leave room for His wisdom about timing, about means, about answers better than the one we asked for.

There is a second cost, and this one lands on God Himself. In the system, God has bound Himself so completely that He has no freedom left. Dake said it: He will not break His laws for anyone. But if the laws stand higher than God, then God becomes the guarantor of a process rather than the Father of a family.

That is the same God we met in Chapter 11. The God whose grace is described as "naturally limited by the free moral agency of man." The prayer machinery in this chapter and the limited God in that chapter are one teaching seen from two angles. A God small enough to be bound is a God who must be worked rather than trusted.²³

And the pastoral fruit follows the logic. If unanswered prayer always means hidden unbelief, then every suffering saint has a hidden fault, and the job of a friend is to help him find it. That is not a new idea. It is exactly what Job's three friends did. And God's verdict on their counsel is on the record.²⁴

5. How the Bible Teaches Us to Ask

I do not want to take something away and leave a hole. So let me say what the Bible puts in place of the machinery. Because it is not less than what Dake offered. It is more.

Ask boldly. Jesus said ask, seek, knock, and He piled up the verbs on purpose. Then He made the argument from the smaller to the greater. If sinful fathers give good gifts, how much more will the heavenly Father give? And notice what Luke names as the gift at the end of that sentence: the Holy Spirit Himself.²⁵ The best gift on the table is God's own presence.

Ask persistently. The widow in Luke 18 kept coming back. Jesus told that story so we would not lose heart.²⁶ Everything Dake admired about tenacity is right here, on the Lord's own authority. But persistence is not a lever. It is what love looks like when it waits.

Ask submitted. Gethsemane is not the low point of faith. It is the summit. The Son knew the Father could remove the cup. He asked Him to. Then He held His Father's will higher than His own relief. Any theology that calls that prayer sinful has told us something about itself.

Read the guarantee carefully. Paul does not promise the item. He promises the peace. And he promises it now, while the request is still outstanding. That is a real guarantee, and it is one no unanswered prayer can take away.²⁷

Answering the Defenders

Four defenses deserve a hearing. I have heard every one of them from people I respect, and each carries some real weight.

But God's truthfulness is exactly the reason to read His promises carefully, not the reason to flatten them. Scripture speaks in different kinds of sentences. A covenant oath is not the same kind of sentence as a proverb. Neither one is the same as an invitation to pray. "Train up a child" is a proverb about how life usually runs, not a warranty. Prayer invitations belong to that same family of speech. And John supplies the governing clause for the whole set when he writes "according to His will."

So believing God fully includes believing that clause. Dake's system honors God's honesty by removing His freedom. That is a strange way to honor a Person. It is like trusting a friend so completely that you refuse to let him answer.

No. Doubt and submission are not the same thing, and the difference is not hard to see. Doubt says God may not be able, or may not be good. Submission says God is able, God is good, and He is wiser than my request. Gethsemane is the clearest case in all of Scripture, and it contains no doubt at all. It contains a real request pressed three times and a real surrender.

Submitted prayer can actually be bolder than the other kind. A person who believes a no would expose him as a fraud will pray carefully. He will stick to safe things. A person who knows his Father can ask for the hardest thing, because he trusts the answer either way.

Third defense: "The conditions are just holiness and obedience. Are you against those?"

Not for one second. Look at the sixteen conditions again. You will find humility, forgiveness, obedience, submission, hunger for God. Every one of those is commanded, and I preach them gladly. Sin does hinder prayer. Scripture says it straight out, and I am not softening that.²⁸

My target is not obedience. It is the ledger. Think about the difference between two sentences. "Abide in Me, and My words abide in you" describes a life shared with Christ. John 15:7 says that shared life shapes what a person even wants to ask for.²⁹ "Meet these sixteen items and refuse to be denied" is something else entirely. It turns obedience into leverage.

Here is a simple test. Ask what happens when the answer does not come. In the first picture, you go back to your Father with your grief. In the second, you go back to the list to find your fault. Those are two different religions. Only one of them is good news at a graveside.

The fourth defense carries the most weight in a real conversation: "It works. I have seen it."

Dake made that case himself. He kept a stack of letters on his desk marked Testimony. He printed some of them. A woman had been sick ten years and had not done her housework. She heard him on the radio, got out of bed, and went back to work. A paralyzed man in Detroit heard Dake tell him to believe he already had it, asked out loud what he was still lying there for, and jumped out of bed shouting.³⁰

I am not going to explain those stories away, and I do not want to. I believe God heals. I have prayed for people and watched God act. A book written by a continuationist has no business going skeptical the moment an answer shows up. If those events happened, God did them, and He should be thanked.

But notice what the testimonies actually prove. They prove that God answers prayer. They do not prove the mechanism. Every one of those stories fits just as well under a simpler and better explanation: a good Father gave good gifts to children who asked Him. The letters prove the Giver. They do not prove the formula.

And there is a second file that never gets published. Where are the letters from the people who heard the same broadcast, believed with everything in them, refused to be denied, and stayed in bed? Those people existed. They always do. A system that collects its successes and files its failures under the sufferer's unbelief has not been tested by its results. It has been insulated from them.

That is where the real damage lives. The testimony page raises the bar for the next reader. She knows now what faith is supposed to look like. When her own body does not obey, she has a printed standard to measure against. And she will come up short.

What We Have Seen, and the Word Underneath It

We have watched a system get built out of real Bible verses. Prayer became a case in court. The conditions became a statute. The statute came with a guarantee. The guarantee came with a diagnosis for anyone who did not collect. God stayed generous in the vocabulary and lost His freedom in the fine print.

The word that carried all the weight was "faith." In the church's mouth it has always meant trust in a Person. On these pages it means a certainty strong enough to obligate an outcome. Same word. Different thing entirely. And once that swap is made, every no becomes a verdict on the person who prayed.

I have a friend a little like the man I described in Chapter 1. He is a Sunday school teacher who taught from a Dake Bible for thirty years. He is one of the most prayerful men I know. He also buried a daughter. And the thing that nearly finished him was not the grave. It was the arithmetic he had been taught to do at the grave.

So here is what I want to leave you with. I believe it is better news than the machinery ever offered.

Your Father hears you. That is John's promise, and it does not hang on your performance. He hears when your faith is strong and He hears when your voice shakes. He is not running a claims department. He is raising children.

Ask Him for everything. Ask for the healing, the job, the marriage, the prodigal. Ask loudly and ask often. Do not let anyone shame you out of expecting God to act. Then, when you have asked, say the words the Son said in the dark, and know that they are not sin but sonship: nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.

That prayer was not answered the way it was asked. It was heard. And through the no He received, we received everything.³¹

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, 1950), ch. 16, "How to Exercise Unlimited Authority Over All Satanic Powers," sec. 15, "No Defeat Possible to Christians," p. 124. Page per the printed page markers embedded in the resident digitization (GPFM library). Dake's own section numbering is retained throughout this chapter.

↑ 2. Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted. Scripture quoted inside Dake's own material is his King James text, reproduced as he printed it.

↑ 3. Hebrews 5:7: "who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear." The Greek verb rendered "was heard" is eisakouo, to hear favorably. The text says the prayer was granted a hearing, not that the cup was removed.

↑ 4. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing). All page numbers for this work are given per the printed page markers embedded in the resident text files. The prayer material is concentrated in Lesson 16 (pp. 279–293), Lesson 28 (pp. 503–511), Supplement 5 (pp. 180–186), Supplement 6 (pp. 217–223), Supplement 9 (pp. 328–335), and Supplement 11 (pp. 403–405).

↑ 5. On the division of labor: the metaphysical limit Dake places on God's power, including the "Thirty Things Grace Cannot Do" material at God's Plan for Man, p. 342, is documented and answered in Chapter 11. Healing in the atonement, including his conditions for healing and his diagnosis of the unhealed, is documented in Chapter 17. This chapter takes only the general machinery of prayer and blessing.

↑ 6. See God's Plan for Man, Lesson 28, pp. 510–511, where Dake blames preachers directly for teaching resignation, and argues that such teaching has produced "a condition of unbelief and such resignation to defeat in prayer." The complaint had real targets. Much mid-century preaching did counsel passive acceptance in a way Scripture does not.

↑ 7. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 16, sec. 14, "Be Sure Conditions Are Met," pp. 123–124. The list runs to sixteen numbered items; the four quoted here are representative of its form. Dake prefaces the list by noting that he prints "the definite promises of God in these passages . . . in capital letters and the conditions in lower case type" (p. 120), which is his own description of the promise-and-condition structure.

↑ 8. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 14, "How to Get Healed and Stay Healed," p. 93. The fuller sentence reads: "You cannot expect God to be a respecter of persons and give you these benefits when you fail to do as He requires. He is not that kind of God, and He will not break His laws for anyone."

↑ 9. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 16, sec. 11, "Complete Mastery Over the Devil Possible," pp. 120–121. The related sec. 10, "The Secret of Power with God" (p. 120), opens with the governing rule: "The secret of power with God is to believe His word and conform to it to the letter."

↑ 10. Bible Truths Unmasked, ch. 16, sec. 12, "How to Deal with Demons," pp. 121–122. Dake's demonology proper, including the causation catalogs in Heavenly Hosts, is treated in Chapter 19; only the prayer instruction is in view here.

↑ 11. Proverbs 10:4; 13:11; 21:5; 22:29. The wisdom literature describes the ordinary course of things under God's providence. It does not issue guarantees, and it sits in the same canon as Ecclesiastes and Job, which record the exceptions at length.

↑ 12. Heavenly Hosts, "Methods of Satan," under the sub-heading "Deception About Wealth." This volume is a posthumously compiled topical edition of Dake's material issued by Dake Publishing; the resident copy carries modern Scripture-reference hyperlinks, marking it as a recent edition. It is cited here by section heading, since the resident copy carries no printed page markers. This is the one quotation in this chapter drawn from a posthumous compilation rather than a book published in Dake's lifetime.

↑ 13. God's Plan for Man, Lesson 16, sec. V.10, "The Faith That Takes," p. 288. Dake's bracketed gloss on Mark 11:24 in the same passage is his own: "BELIEVE THAT YE RECEIVE THEM [Believe that you have got them]." See also p. 287: "If one wants to obligate God to an answer he must take God at His word and count it a settled fact that he has the thing prayed for according to the Word."

↑ 14. Hebrews 11:35–39. On Mark 11:22, the Greek is echete pistin theou. A handful of interpreters have pressed the genitive to mean "the faith of God" or God-given faith, but the standard rendering is objective: faith directed toward God. The disputed reading does not help the mechanism, since it would make faith God's gift rather than the believer's achievement.

↑ 15. 1 John 5:14–15 (NKJV). Dake's own list makes this passage the sixteenth and final condition; see note 7.

↑ 16. God's Plan for Man, Supplement 11, p. 404. Compare Supplement 9, p. 330: "Never under any circumstance question the will of God in the matter of answered prayer. . . . It is always God's will for you to ask and get what you will."

↑ 17. Greek thelema, "will, wish, what one desires." Matthew 26:42 uses the cognate verb in the Son's petition and the noun of the Father's will: "Your will be done." The word describes the personal desire of an agent, not a category of permitted requests.

↑ 18. Deuteronomy 3:23–27; Numbers 20:2–13. Moses is refused for a stated reason connected to Meribah and to his representation of God before Israel. Deuteronomy 34:1–6 records what God gave him instead.

↑ 19. 2 Samuel 12:15–23. David's own account of his fasting is instructive: "Who can tell whether the LORD will be gracious to me, that the child may live?" (v. 22). That is a prayer offered without a guarantee, by a man the New Testament calls a man after God's own heart.

↑ 20. God's Plan for Man, p. 255: "Some people stumble over Paul's thorn in the flesh and claim that God will not heal some people. His thorn in the flesh was not weak eyes as most men teach. It was plainly 'an angel of Satan,' for the Greek word for messenger in 2 Cor. 12:7 means angel and not a disease." The exegesis of the thorn as it bears on healing is weighed in Chapter 17. The point pressed here is independent of that dispute.

↑ 21. Mark 11:22–24. On the mountain-moving saying, compare Matthew 17:20 and 1 Corinthians 13:2, where Paul assumes mountain-moving faith can coexist with a total absence of love. The saying is proverbial hyperbole about the power of even small trust in a great God.

↑ 22. Hebrews 11:32–40. Verse 39 is decisive for the argument of this chapter: the same faith that delivered some left others unrescued, and the writer commends both groups without distinction. The promise they did not receive in this life is deferred, not denied (v. 40).

↑ 23. See Chapter 11 for the documentation, including God's Plan for Man, p. 342, where Dake writes that "God's grace or love is naturally limited by the free moral agency of man." The prayer machinery in this chapter and the limited God in that one are two views of the same doctrine.

↑ 24. Job 42:7. The friends' error was not cruelty of tone. They reasoned from suffering back to hidden fault, which is exactly the inference Dake's system requires from unanswered prayer.

↑ 25. Luke 11:9–13; compare Matthew 7:7–11, where the parallel reads "good things." Luke's naming of the Holy Spirit as the gift is the fuller answer. Dake also cites this passage in his list of conditions, reading it for the asking rather than for the gift.

↑ 26. Luke 18:1–8. The parable argues from the lesser to the greater. If an unjust judge yields to persistence, how much more will a just and loving Father act for His own. The point is God's character, not a technique for wearing Him down.

↑ 27. Philippians 4:6–7. Paul wrote this from custody, with his own circumstances unresolved. The peace he promises is presented as the guarded result of prayer, independent of the outcome of the request.

↑ 28. Psalm 66:18; Isaiah 59:1–2; James 4:3; 1 Peter 3:7. Scripture does connect sin, wrong motives, and broken relationships with hindered prayer. The historic faith has always taught this. What it has never taught is the converse claim, that every unanswered prayer proves a hidden fault in the one praying.

↑ 29. John 15:7. The promise is set inside the vine-and-branches image, where abiding is union with Christ rather than compliance with terms. Dake cites this verse repeatedly as the "all-inclusive condition of answered prayer" (God's Plan for Man, Supplement 5, p. 184), which reads a condition where the passage describes a life.

↑ 30. Bible Truths Unmasked, p. 62 (the desk of letters marked "Testimony," and the woman sick ten years who "acted upon the Word and got out of bed"), and p. 94 (the paralyzed man in Detroit; Dake tells him "Believe you have got it and you shall have it," and reports that the man said, "If I have got it, what am I lying here for?"). A closely parallel account of the Detroit visit appears at God's Plan for Man, Lesson 16, p. 281, where the interval since the visit is given as about three years rather than about four. Nothing in this chapter turns on the discrepancy; it is noted because the two books were published twenty-seven years apart and the story is told in both.

↑ 31. Romans 8:32. The argument of that verse is the opposite of a mechanism: because the Father did not spare His own Son, the believer may trust Him with every lesser request, including the ones He answers in ways we did not ask for.