The model prayer

I The Disciples’ Request.

“And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.”—Luke xi. 1.

It is my purpose, God willing, to give at intervals, on Sabbath mornings, a series of expositions of that prayer which our Lord taught His disciples to pray, which, because of its beauty, its spirituality, its broad, loving charity, has well deserved the names “Epitome of the Gospels” and “Pearl of Prayers.” But before I address myself to the consideration of the prayer itself, I would like to clear the ground a little—to explain its setting—to consider the circumstances that called it forth, so that we may be able to appreciate and understand it the better.

This prayer—the Lord’s prayer as we commonly call it, though I often think it might be more appropriately called “The Disciples’ 10Prayer”—is a prayer we learned at our mother’s knee; it is hallowed for many of us by the fact that those who taught it to us at the first have exchanged prayer for praise: earth for heaven. Their lips have been silent for long years, but the prayer they taught us in our childhood, we repeat morning and evening still! Ah! how many times we have repeated it! From the very dawn of life this has been our prayer! We repeated it as children! We are repeating it to-day, as grown up men! Some of us are repeating it as old men! This prayer is one of the dear familiar things of life. But there is a danger in our very familiarity with this beautiful prayer. The peril is that by using it so often, it may become to us a mere form of words; the danger is that when we repeat it, we may do so mechanically—that we may say the Lord’s Prayer without praying. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” we say. People who live in the Alps think nothing of the splendid scenery that we English people go hundreds of miles to see. The dwellers in inland towns long for the time to come which will allow them to spend a brief holiday by the sea. They are fascinated, spell-bound by the changeful, mysterious, beautiful ocean. There are on the other hand, those of us who live in 11towns like this, who allow weeks and months to pass by without ever visiting the shore. There is ever this danger, that through our familiarity with them, the beautiful things around us should lose their beauty, and appear common-place in our eyes. That is the danger we are in with regard to this “Pearl of Prayers.” It is one of the familiar things of life, and our very familiarity with it may have dulled our sense of its beauty. Frequent usage may have dimmed our perception of its sweet simplicity, and its soaring spirituality. There is the danger of its becoming on our lips a mere form of words. There is the danger of its becoming, instead of a real, throbbing, living prayer, a cold, heartless, formal utterance.

The next best thing to saying a new thing, is to say an old thing in a new way. Originality consists not so much in discovering new truth, as in making old truth real and vital. The painter does not invent the beauty of nature which he depicts on his canvas, he simply brings it out and makes it visible. “I never see the kind of things you paint in your pictures,” said a lady one day to Turner, the great artist. “Don’t you wish you did, madam?” was the painter’s reply, The fault was in the lady’s vision. The artist saw beauties in nature 12which were missed and unheeded by the crowd, and painted them for us on his glowing canvases. The preacher sees wonders and glories in old and familiar things—glories missed or unheeded perhaps by those who have less time to read and ponder this grand old book. It is his business to bring them out, to show to his people the peerless beauty there is even in the most common and familiar things. Buttercups and daisies are common little flowers. They cover our fields. They carpet our meadows. We cannot take a walk in the fields in summer without treading hundreds of them under foot. They are so cheap and common that no one ever thinks of making a posy of daisies, unless it be our children, and they often enough fling the little flowers away before they reach their homes. Yet there is beauty in the daisy, and a glory in the buttercup. It is only familiarity that has made us blind. We should think them beautiful perhaps if they were as rare as orchids. And even as it is, we need only listen to a lover of flowers as he describes to us the delicacy and beauty of the daisy and the buttercup, to realise that even these—the commonest flowers that bloom—reveal something of the glory of God. Probably there is no form of words so absolutely and universally familiar as the Lord’s Prayer. 13I would like, if I can, to reveal to you some of its wonder, and beauty, and glory. There are, in this old familiar prayer, heights we have never scaled, depths we have never sounded. I want, if I can, to help you to realise its meaning, to feel its power, to grasp the sweep of its demands, so that this—the most familiar of all prayers—may be on our lips, fresh, real, vital; so that we may pray, not with the lips only, but with the understanding also, so that when we use these sacred words, whether it be in public or in private, we may not simply repeat the Lord’s Prayer, but really and truly pray. To bring out the full meaning of this familiar prayer, to illustrate its truths, to point out the demands it makes—that is the aim I have set before myself in this series of expositions which I purpose to deliver.

I would first of all call your attention to the circumstances of the origin of this prayer. My text sets these forth. Jesus Christ had been praying. He was a man of prayer. His favourite temple was the mountain top. Away from the noise and bustle of the town, in the solitude of the mountain summit, in the solemn hush and silence of the night, Jesus Christ prayed. No one can talk much with God without bearing about with him visible 14results of that high fellowship. Moses, after he had been on the mount with God, came down with a countenance that had caught and retained some of the divine glory. His face shone. John G. Paton, the heroic missionary, tells in his autobiography how his saintly father would withdraw every day to talk with God, and as children he and his brother used to notice with wonder and awe the beautiful light upon their father’s face when he came forth from that interview. Do not think me fanciful when I say that I believe that the Master’s face in the morning used to proclaim plainly in what sacred communion He had been spending the night. The halo of the old painters may be fancy, but I am sure that there would be a radiance about the Saviour’s face, an aspect of such unruffled serenity and calm upon His countenance, as would proclaim to all that Jesus had been spending the night in holy fellowship with God. There were many things to try our Lord in life—the malignant hatred of the Pharisees, the persistent blundering of the disciples; and often when Jesus left the mountain He was tired, worn, weary, but after His night of prayer Jesus always came down from the mountain peaceful, calm and strong. And I cannot help thinking that His disciples must 15often have noticed that expression of calm and peace on their Master’s face after His nights of prayer. It quickened within them the desire to pray as their Master prayed, that they too might enjoy the like peace and strength. And that leads me to remark in passing that people are to be convinced of the supreme value of prayer—not by tracts about prayer, not by eloquent and clever sermons which profess to explain away all the difficulties connected with prayer, but by seeing in us the effects of prayer. When they see us calm, happy, and strong in the midst of the difficulties and worries and cares of life, they will want to know the secret, and so they too will be led to pray. Was it not so with these disciples? Jesus had gone apart to pray. And when He ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, “Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.” They wanted to be in command of the secret of peace. They wanted to be in possession of the key to God’s storehouse of power. “Teach us to pray.” And it was in answer to that request that Jesus gave to them the “Pearl of Prayers.”

Now, looking at this request of the disciples for a moment, will you notice that it is:

16I. A Confession of Need. “Teach us to pray.” We ask the question sometimes, “Why do men pray?” Why do men pray! We might just as well ask, “Why does the nightingale sing? Why does the eagle soar into the boundless blue?” The nightingale sings because it was made to sing; the eagle soars away because its pinions were made for flight, and man prays because he was made for prayer. “Teach us to pray.” That is just the cry of men who must have their instincts satisfied. Man was made to pray. This is the cry that gives expression to the necessity of his nature. “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let me remind you that this is not a need which Christianity has created. Oh, no! the need is in the very make and constitution of a man. Christ only satisfied the need. Prayer is as old as man himself. The first man is far removed from us; in outward circumstances we are utterly unlike him, but we are like him in this respect, in our need of prayer. Society to-day is very different from the primitive simplicity of society in the time of the patriarchs; but we are like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in this respect—we all pray. The Bible is a book of prayers. It is the great prayer-book of the world. All the prayers in it are not on the same spiritual 17level. In many you will find much that is mistaken. But there they are—the prayers of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, Hezekiah—all bearing witness to the same need, the same instinct. And I will not confine what I am saying to the men who are mentioned in the Bible. This sense of need is universal. God made man for Himself, and wherever you find man you find his heart and flesh cry out for the living God. The African who worships his fetish, the Hindoo who prostrates himself before his idol, even those poor, benighted people who do their praying by machinery—all these by their acts bear witness to the universal need. Indeed, it is this sense of need that makes the wide world one. When an infant is in need of anything it cries, and the cry of the little one is its prayer. When we men are in need of anything we pray; we may pray in a hundred different ways; we may utter no spoken word, but pray we must. In this respect, men the whole world over are the same. North and south, east and west, whereever you find man, you find him with this instinct for God, under this necessity to pray. It was because these twelve disciples felt that necessity that they made this request eighteen hundred years ago to the Man who 18was best able to answer it, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

II. This request of the disciples is a confession of ignorance. “Teach us to pray,” said the disciples. Prayer was a necessity to them. But how were they to pray? What were they to pray for? These disciples felt that there might be a right and a wrong way of praying; that there might be a right and a wrong in the things prayed for. And they judged rightly. Prayer is the key to the treasure house of God, but it will lie useless in man’s hand until he is shown how to use it. So here comes the Confession of Ignorance, “Lord, teach us to pray.” “We know not how, nor what to pray for—Thou must show.”

“Teach us to pray!” Teach us how! for there is a right and wrong of praying. Man must pray—he cannot help himself. But how he blunders in his attempts at prayer sometimes. Look at the Hindoo cutting and maiming himself! Look at the Mongol with his praying machine! Ah, yes, man needs to be taught how to pray. I think the disciples wanted to know what I may call without irreverence the “etiquette” of prayer. “Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the High God?” that was their difficulty. They knew 19not how they were to enter into the presence of the great King. If a man wishes to be presented to the King, he must obey all the formalities of Court etiquette, and to many that seems rather a formidable task. Perhaps these disciples thought there were equal difficulties in the way of approach to the throne of the Heavenly grace. They wanted to know the etiquette of God’s court. “Teach us to pray. We know not how.” Do we need an intermediary at the throne? Do we need to be introduced to Him that sits thereon? By what name shall we address Him? “Lord, teach us to pray. We know not how.” And here Jesus instructs their ignorance. “You need no intermediary, go boldly to that Throne yourselves; you need no introduction to Him that sits thereon—He knows you, calls you by your name; address Him not as King, Judge, Lord—call Him Father.” It was in answer to their confession of ignorance that Jesus taught His disciples how to pray.

But further, these disciples knew not what to pray for. They did not know what they were to ask for in their petitions! Nor do we! We are “the sons of ignorance and night.” We do not know what is best for us! I often think that if God wished to be unkind to us, He has 20only to answer our prayers; for we ask Him for things that can only do us harm. The little child often begs for things that look nice, or are pleasant to the taste, but the mother, who knows the harm that would result if these things were given says “No.” We are like little children in our ignorance, and have often asked our Heavenly Father for things that would only injure us. We have all of us to make this confession of ignorance. We have all of us to acknowledge “We know not what to pray for.” We all need to go to Jesus with this request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And He will teach us. He will tell us what to pray for. He will tell us what He prayed for. He will tell us how He told out to His Father all His desires, but ended every prayer with these words, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done,” and He will give us the assurance that whatsoever we ask of the Father in His name after the Spirit of His prayers, the Father will give unto us.

III. This request of the disciples is a confession that the old prayers are no longer good enough. “Lord, teach us to pray,” they said. Had, then, these disciples never prayed before? Yes, many a time, every day of their lives, and probably several times each day. I imagine that before Jesus called the twelve, they had been 21what the world would call “religious men.” In fact, we need not imagine it, we know it. Several of them had been disciples of John the Baptist before they became disciples of Jesus. The Jews were, we are told, particularly conscientious in the matter of prayer. Three times a day they withdrew for devotion. And these disciples were good Jews, strict Jews, punctilious in their regard for all points of ritual. We are justified, therefore, in saying that the disciples all through their lives had been attentive to the duty of prayer. What, then, is the explanation of this request “Lord teach us to pray?” Well, the explanation is simply this: the old prayers no longer satisfied them; even the prayers John the Baptist had taught them seemed strangely deficient or inappropriate. After living with Jesus, after hearing Him preach, after listening to His words about God, the old stereotyped prayers seemed to lose all their beauty and power. The disciples felt they could not pray them any longer. They had received from Jesus a new revelation of God, and this new revelation of God created the need for a new prayer. There is a familiar ballad the first line of which runs, “I cannot sing the old songs.” Some change has taken place in the singer’s feelings which makes 22the old song inappropriate, impossible. It was so with these disciples. They could not pray the old prayers, because their hearts were changed. We all know something of this kind of feeling. Sometimes I look back over old sermons, and very often I have to say to myself, “I could not preach that again.” God has been teaching me during the years of my ministry, and leading me into a fuller knowledge of the truth. In sermons, as in wellnigh everything else, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” It was so with the twelve. They had been to school to Christ; from their great Master they had learned many a new and glorious lesson about God, and the result of their new knowledge of God, their larger, grander conceptions of His character, was the absolute necessity for a new prayer. They had outgrown the old ones in which they had been brought up. They no longer expressed their feelings or satisfied their needs. You have an illustration of what I am trying to point out in the history of Paul. He was a prominent man in religious circles before he became a Christian. He was scrupulous in his observance of religious duties. After the straitest sect he lived a Pharisee, and if the Pharisees were punctilious about one thing more than another, 23it was their prayers. But yet, in the account of his conversion, Scripture, after describing Saul as alone and blind in the house in the street called Strait, adds this remark, as if recording a new fact in Saul’s history, “Behold he prayeth.” Saul had said his prayers thousands of times before, but now, for the first time, he was praying the new prayer, which a sense of his own sin and the gentleness of God had made necessary. Oh, yes, when religion is a formality then a prayer which is also a formality will suffice. But once we see the love of God, once we feel our own unworthiness, we shall find the old formal prayers will no longer suffice. We shall need a new prayer then, and like these disciples we shall come to Christ with the request, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Notice what the disciple adds, “As John also taught his disciples.” Christ might imitate John in the act of teaching, but in the prayer taught Jesus was no imitator. Here Jesus was grandly, supremely original. This was a new prayer He gave. John could not have given it. No man, however saintly and good, could have given it. It surpasses the best efforts of man as the sunlight surpasses the starlight. No one but the Son, who lay in 24the bosom of the Father; no one but the Son, who had intimate knowledge of the very heart of God, could have taught this prayer, for it opens with a New Name for God—the name Father—and no man knoweth the Father but the Son.

This short but perfect prayer is the Master’s answer to the request of His disciples. They say that prayer is never answered! This “Pearl of Prayers” is the best refutation of that statement. It was given in answer to prayer. “Lord, teach us to pray,” said the disciple, and the answer to his request was this prayer, which has met the needs and expressed the desires of God’s people throughout all generations. And so this prayer itself becomes the best proof of the truth proclaimed in our hymn,

II “Our Father”

“After this manner therefore pray ye, Our Father which art in heaven.”—Matt. vi. 9.

“When ye pray, say Father.”—Luke xi. 2.

I said last Sunday morning that in the prayer He taught, Jesus was grandly, supremely original. That originality appears in most striking fashion in the invocation with which the prayer opens. The prayer Jesus taught His disciples to pray begins with a new name for God, “When ye pray, say Father.”

In the Old Testament God is very seldom spoken of as Father, and when the name is used, it is always with reference to the nation of Israel and not to individuals—that is to say, the name “Father,” the few times it occurs in the Old Testament, stands for a national not a personal relationship. The Old Testament has many names for God—names 26that tell of His might, His power, His majesty. It speaks of Him as Jehovah; it speaks of Him as the great “I am”; it speaks of Him as “King” and “Lord”—but from Genesis to Malachi you will not find a single instance of an individual speaking of God as “Father.” Moses did not dare to use this name. David, the sweet singer of Israel, missed this note of tenderness from his songs. Isaiah, in the sweep of his passion and genius, never took this name into his lips. It was left to Jesus Christ to tell us God’s best and truest name. It was left to Him to say, “When ye pray, say Father.”

I suppose no one can pass from the Old Testament to the New without being conscious of a change of atmosphere. Between the books there is a difference of theological climate. It is the difference between starlight, clear but cold, and the warm and gracious sunlight; it is the difference between law and gospel; it is the difference between debt and grace; it is the difference between fear and love; it is the difference between servitude and sonship; it is the difference between Sinai and Calvary. And the whole of this vast difference is made by this word “Father.” That name is written large upon every page of the New Testament, 27and that new name has brought with it a new joy and gladness into the world.

This name “Father” is a new name. It is a name no one but Jesus could have revealed to men. We could never have known God the Father save through the Incarnate Son. Men only saw God from the outside. They only judged Him by His works. They were impressed by His greatness, His wisdom, His power, as revealed to them in the wonders of earth and sea and sky, and they named Him accordingly. But men felt that, after all, wisdom and power and might were only parts of God’s ways; they felt there was a secret about God which they had not been told, and they had to confess that, strain as they would, there were clouds and thick darkness about Him through which no eye could pierce. But here we get a view of God, if I may so speak, from the inside. Here you have God’s heart laid bare. Here you have light thrown upon the inmost nature of God. The secret hidden from prophet and psalmist and seer is here declared to the world in this name “Father.” Who could have given God this name? Who could have discovered this grand secret? Who could have thrown this light upon the Divine nature? Only Jesus—only 28the Son who from eternity had lain in the bosom of the Father. The knowledge of God, the Father, is only to be gained through the Incarnate Son. “No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son shall reveal Him.” And it seems to me that one of the chief ends for which Christ came to earth was just to tell us this new name, and so to bring sunshine into our souls and hope into our lives. In Bethlehem, in Nazareth, in Galilee, in the garden of Gethsemane, on the Cross of Calvary, Jesus was spelling out for us this new name, revealing to us that God is more than wisdom, more than power, more than justice; that God above and beyond everything else is Love. So the very opening phrase of this “Pearl of Prayers” brings us the best news ever whispered into the ears of men. It tells us that love is at the heart of all things. It tells us that God is our Father and we are His children.

Is God Father to everybody? Yes, to everybody. He is Father to the humblest, the poorest, the most degraded. God said, “Let us make man in our likeness,” and in the image of God created He him. All men belong to God’s family, and upon all some trace of the family likeness is to be seen. The old Greek 29poet, whose words Paul quoted in his memorable speech at Athens, had a glimpse of this truth when he wrote, “We also are his offspring.” Yes, God is the Father of all men! That is the truth that has been rediscovered within the last half century, the truth of the Universal Fatherhood of God, and a blessed and glorious truth it is. That many men have forgotten God and rebelled against Him does not affect the reality of His Fatherhood. Absalom turned out a wayward, disobedient son. He brought trouble, shame, and distress upon his father David. But the son’s wickedness could not destroy the father’s love. When news came that Absalom was dead, David wept long and sore, and the agony of his broken heart found expression in that pathetic cry, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom; would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.” And you can parallel that story of David and Absalom from modern life. I read of a young man who had sunk into a life of excess and sin and shame. He brought disgrace upon all connected with him, and one by one men turned their backs upon him. One only clung to him—his poor old father. The one who had suffered most at his hand was the one who continued to bear with him. “Why 30don’t you turn him out?” said his friends to the long-suffering old man. “I cannot,” replied he; “I am his father.” Those are hints, suggestions of the truth about God. God is the Father of men, and though men sin, the Father still loves. That is what Jesus would teach us in that most precious of all the Parables—the Parable of the Prodigal Son. God is Father not only to the obedient son, but He is Father also to the son who has strayed into the far country and is wasting his substance there with riotous living. The Father’s heart yearns for that absent and wayward child; and when that son returns in his rags and with penitent heart, it is the dear word “Father” that leaps to the prodigal’s lips, and it is with the word “Son” that the father welcomes him home again. Yes, God is the Father of all. His love embraces all—the lost, the ruined, the undone. His family is co-extensive with the race. But let me go on to say—paradoxical as it may sound—that though God is the Father of all men, all men are not sons. Wendt, the great German scholar, puts it in this way, “God always is the loving Father of all men; nevertheless, men must become sons of the Heavenly Father by attaining His spirit of gratuitous, forgiving love.” That is the Bible teaching I 31myself firmly believe. This old book proclaims the Fatherhood of God, and yet talks about men becoming God’s sons. It talks about receiving the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The right to become children of God, it says, is given to those who receive Christ and believe in His name. In a word, while God is the Father of all, men become His sons only through Jesus Christ. Possible sons all men are; but sonship becomes actual and real only in Jesus Christ. It is those who are in the home, who experience the father’s tenderness and care, who know what sonship means. The son who has wilfully left home, who has taken his life into his own hands, who has wandered into the far country, he cannot know what a father’s sympathy and love mean. He has deprived himself of the privileges of sonship. It is only the child who has remained at home who is obedient to the father’s commands—it is only he who can really be called a son at all. He alone knows the blessings of sonship. He alone knows the father’s affection and love. Christ came into the world to show us the Father, to seek lost children and bring them back again home. Those who receive Him into their hearts receive the spirit of adoption. They know what sonship means. 32They speak the name “Father” with a new accent. It becomes to them invested with a richer and fuller meaning. God is the Father of all men. Yes, but specially of them that believe.

Now this new name, “Father,” Christ places at the very commencement of the model prayer. This name is to be the very basis of our prayer. To pray aright, certain things are required in him who prays. The Psalmist asked himself this question one day, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in His holy place?” Who has the right to worship God and pray to Him? That is the Psalmist’s question translated into present day speech. And he proceeds to answer the question he himself asks. And this is the answer he gives, “Who has the right to worship and pray? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully.” But the Psalmist’s answer is one of blank despair. For who is there whose hands are clean? Who is there whose heart is pure? Where is the man who has not lifted up his soul unto vanity? Brethren, when we look upon ourselves what do we see but sin! SIN! SIN! and the cry that breaks from our lips is the terrible cry of 33the leper of old—Unclean, unclean. If we have to wait till our hands are clean and our hearts pure we shall never, never ascend unto the hill of the Lord or stand in His holy place. But thank God there are no impossible conditions of that kind to be fulfilled before you and I can pray. What right have I, sinful man, to pray? What warrant have I for coming boldly to the throne of grace? Well, brethren, I have no right but that which this name gives. I have no warrant save that which the name “Father” supplies. That is my right—not that I have clean hands or a pure heart, but that I am a son, and He, the Almighty God, is my Father. I have read a story somewhere which says that when one of the Roman Emperors was entering Rome in triumph, a little child darted through the ranks of the soldiers who lined the road and made for the gorgeous car in which the Emperor was seated. Some of the soldiers tried to restrain the little one and said to him, “It is the Emperor.” “Your Emperor,” said the little one, “but my father.” That was the little child’s right to sit even in the triumphal car. And so some would say, “What right have you, a poor sinner, to approach the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, before whom Cherubim and Seraphim veil 34their faces with their wings and continually do cry?” What right? Well, the right this word gives. Lord of the Universe? Yes. Maker of the worlds? Yes. King of Kings? Yes. But my Father. Who shall dare keep child and parent apart? When ye pray, say “Father,” said our Lord. Let us preface every prayer with that blessed word. It is our claim upon God. No prayer can be too bold; no petition can appear presumptuous when we have commenced by saying “Father.”

But this word not only supplies our warrant for prayer, it also suggests to us the spirit in which our prayers must be offered. We must pray in the spirit of filial trust, in the spirit of childlike confidence. “He that cometh to God,” says the Apostle, “must believe that He is.” We must believe first of all in the reality of God. To many God is a name and nothing more. The world to them would be no emptier than it is if there were no God at all. We must first of all believe that God is. But that is not all. The Mongol, the Hindoo, the African savage believe that God is; but no one would say that their devotions illustrate the true spirit of prayer. No: we must not only believe that God is, we must also believe 35He is a REWARDER. We must believe He is eager to bless. Some would have you believe that God is the helpless creature of His own laws, bound and held captive by them, and therefore unable to listen or to answer the cry of men—like one of those great stone impassive deities of Egypt, that sit there with staring eyes, and hands on knees, the very picture of impotence and helplessness. If God were no more than that, prayer would be a mockery, a delusion, a sham. But the God we are asked to believe in is a Rewarder—a Father more eager to bless us than any earthly parent is to answer the request of his child. And Christ puts this word in the very front, in order to help us to come with boldness, in order to beget within us a spirit of childlike expectancy and trust. I fancy when I hear some prayers, that we imagine God keeps His heart bolted and barred, and that we have, by the importunity of our petitions, to force and batter our way through. That was the kind of notion Job had. You remember his cry, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him.” Well, what would Job do if he did find Him? “Oh,” says Job, “I would order my cause before Him, and fill my mouth with arguments.” Job thought that every blessing had to be wrung out of the 36hands of God. “I would fill my mouth with arguments,” as if nothing were to be had from God except by hard and importunate pleading. “Fill your mouth with arguments?” What need is there for that? Go to Him and call Him “Father”—that is all the argument you need. Brethren, we receive not, because sometimes we ask amiss. The old book says that according to our faith it shall be done unto us. We have received little, because our faith has been so little. We have treated God as if He were close, economical, niggardly. This word “Father” is here to teach us confidence, trust, faith, holy boldness; to inspire us with that perfect love which casteth out all fear. Let us go to God in the childlike spirit of a simple trust; let us use this golden key to His great treasure house, which He has placed in our hands; when we pray, let us say “Father,” and we shall find that before we call He will answer, and while we are yet speaking He will hear.

“Father,” that is how the prayer begins in Luke’s version. That glorious word stands alone in all its royal simplicity. Matthew in his version expands that into “Our Father, which art in heaven.” “Our Father!” No word in this old book is meaningless, and this 37little word “our” gives us a glimpse of the splendid truth. It is not the singular, but the plural possessive pronoun that our Lord bids us use, not “my Father,” but “our Father.” Of course it is legitimate to use the singular pronoun “my,” and say “MY Father.” There come times when, with a great rush of feeling, we realise that God loves us as individuals, and then we take refuge in the first person singular, just as Paul did when he said “The Son of God loved ME, and gave Himself for ME.” In fact, religion never becomes real and vital until it becomes individual and personal, until we can say like Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” But in this prayer Christ would have us think not simply of ourselves, but also of others—not simply of blessings peculiar and personal, but of blessings shared. So we are to say, not “my Father,” but “OUR Father,” and by doing so we have linked ourselves to all others who pray this prayer. “Our,” that is the pronoun of partnership. We have said “OUR Father” in this church this morning, we have confessed that we have the same Father. But people who are the sons and daughters of the one Father must be brothers and sisters the one to the other. So that when we said “our Father,” we did more than simply proclaim God’s Fatherhood—we 38proclaimed our BROTHERHOOD. And I will not confine myself to this congregation. It is not simply the brotherhood of those of us who meet week by week in this Congregational Church that we proclaimed when we said “our Father,” we proclaimed the brotherhood of the race. Not my Father simply, but OUR Father—for He is the Father of all! The great truth of the Fatherhood of God implies the correspondingly great truth of the brotherhood of man, and universal brotherhood depends upon the universal Fatherhood. You cannot have this brotherhood of man, except by getting them to kneel together and say “our Father.” The link that binds men together is the possession of a common Father. When we address God by that sweet name, we awake to the fact that we are all members of one great family, bound to one another by the strongest and dearest of ties. Oh! we pray for the time when jealousy, pride, hatred and war shall cease, when “man to man the world o’er shall brothers be for a’ that!” I will tell you when that time shall come. It shall come when you can get all men everywhere to kneel down and begin their prayer with these grand but simple words “Our Father.”

39“Our Father, who art in Heaven,” says Matthew. Our Father is high and lifted up, He is “in Heaven.” That does not mean that God is not with us here on earth. He is the High and Holy One who inhabits eternity; but He is also the one who dwells in the lowly and the contrite heart. But as Dr. Morison puts it, “On earth there are spots, hearts at least and many of them, where God is not. He is not admitted. He is shut out. But in heaven He is all in all. In a peculiar fulness of acceptation, then, God may be said to be in Heaven.” But this little phrase, “who art in Heaven,” is something more than a topographical direction. It is more, shall I say, than God’s postal address. This little phrase tells us what kind of a Father we have. I do not think it at all fanciful to say with Dr. Stanford, that, as Heaven is the place of perfection, “our Father, who art in Heaven” may be interpreted to mean, “our Father, who art the one perfect Father.” But whether this interpretation is legitimate or not, the idea is a true and Scriptural one. God is the model—the pattern Father. Paul says that “of Him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.” You can look at the tender relations that bind the best of fathers to the best of sons here on earth, and I tell you they but faintly illustrate 40the tender relations that bind God to you. He is the one perfect Father. He is perfect in LOVE. “No earthly father loves like Thee, no mother half so mild.” Mothers may forget their children but God will never forget us. Parents may turn their backs upon us, father and mother may forsake us, and even then God will take us up. He is perfect in wisdom. Earthly parents are not always wise. They are sometimes unwise in severity; they are oftener, I think, unwise in their love; and many a child’s character has been injured, if not ruined, by the unwisdom of its parents. But God is all wise. He is always thinking upon His children for their good. In perfect wisdom, perfect love, He is working for the best. He is perfect in helpfulness.

Human love can do much, but there are times when human love is helpless. Have you ever seen a mother watch by a sick child? I have seen a little one lie in her cot with fevered brow, fighting for life. I have seen her eyes make mute appeal to her mother, and I have seen the mother sitting there in torment and agony, watching the death struggle going on and powerless to help, the very picture of impotent, defeated love. But God is perfect in helpfulness. There is no limit to His power. 41He will be a refuge for us in trouble; He will make our bed in sickness; He will make us conquerors over temptation; when we pass through the waters He will not suffer them to overflow us; and when we enter the valley, into which no human friend can accompany us, God will be with us still, His rod and staff they will comfort us. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” one other idea the words suggest to me. “Heaven” is spoken of in the Bible as the place of dominion and authority. “The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens,” says the Psalmist, “and His kingdom ruleth over all.” In another psalm we get the picture of kings and princes plotting together to destroy the kingdom of God. “He that sitteth in the heavens,” in the place of supreme dominion, “shall laugh.” Your governors and kings are not the true rulers of the universe; they may fret and fume and bluster as they will, but they are only puppets in the hands of Him who sitteth in the heavens. When, then, our Lord teaches us to say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” the blessed truth conveyed by it is, that our Father is in the place of supreme dominion, that love rules the universe. It is the truth proclaimed by the little silk weaver as she passed through the streets of Asolo and sang, “God’s in 42His heaven—all’s right with the world.” What a blessed truth this is, and what peace and strength it brings into the soul when it is realised and felt. Paul had realised it, so he could say, “I know that all things work together for good.” That President of the Orange Free State had realised it, whose favourite word was, “All will come right,” which word stands engraved to-day on his tombstone! Yes! what peace will be ours when we remember our Father is in Heaven. I remember hearing my friend Mr. Hopkin Rees, one of our devoted Chinese missionaries, telling about one of his converts in that far-off land, who had to bear much from heathen relatives when she became a Christian. They beat her, locked her up in a room, and tried to starve her into surrender. How do you think that poor woman sustained herself? I will tell you. By the thought that her Father was in Heaven, and that “all would come right.” Mr. Rees had translated an old Welsh hymn into Chinese, the last line of every verse in which runs, “Fy nhad, sydd urth y lliw.” It cannot sound as sweet in any other tongue, but this is a rough translation, “My Father’s at the helm.” And that was the song that poor woman sang day after day, “My Father’s at the helm.” Yes! He’s at the 43helm! Let not your heart be troubled! “Your Father’s at the helm.”

“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” The gospel is in that phrase. I have not been able to translate into language the half of the beauty and glory I myself have seen in it. You must find out for yourselves, by experience, the joy and peace it can bring into life. This name is ours to use; the love implied in it is ours to enjoy. Not one of us need go through life alone; not one of us need be orphaned and poor; not one of us need carry a troubled anxious heart. For Christ has taught us to see love on the Throne, and to call to the Almighty and Everlasting God who fainteth not, neither is weary, “Our Father, who art in Heaven.”

III “Hallowed be Thy Name”

“Hallowed be Thy Name.”—Matt. vi. 9; Luke xi. 2.

Last Sunday morning we talked together of the new and beautiful name by which Jesus taught us to address God when we draw near to Him in prayer. “When we pray, say Father.” This morning we pass on to the consideration of the first petition in the prayer itself. Between this first petition and the invocation there is the closest and most intimate connection. In the invocation Jesus gave us a new name for God. In the first petition He teaches us to pray for grace, to honour that new name of “Father” by thought and life.

This “Pearl of Prayer” divides itself naturally into two parts, and it is a fact worth noticing that the petitions in the first half of the prayer are all concerned with God’s honour and glory. Our first thoughts when we kneel in 45prayer must be of God. Our first petitions must concern themselves not with our own personal advantage but with God’s glory and praise. This petition, “Hallowed be Thy name,” stands first, because it is the first in natural order. For there is an order, “an order of precedence” shall I say, in prayer. I have seen a volume of sermons by Mr. Jackson, of Edinburgh, which bears the title “First things first.” “First things first” is a rule we may well remember in our prayers. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,” said our Lord, and that precept is one for prayer as well as for life. Have you noticed how faithfully Jesus Himself observed the rule He here laid down for others? Examine His prayers, and you will find that with Him first things always came first. The glory of God was always the master petition in the prayers of Christ. He had to pass through times of sore distress and pain and agony—and Christ was not above asking for relief, deliverance, escape from the pain. But His own wishes were always kept in a subordinate place, it was ever “God first” with Him. “Nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done.” “Father, glorify Thy name.” That is the true order in prayer—God first. But we oftentimes reverse the order. Instead of “first things being first,” 46first things are often last and last things often first. Our prayers are occupied mainly with our own wants and needs and desires. It is a case oftentimes of “self first.” When we pray even this prayer, the petitions that we utter with the deepest fervour and earnestness are petitions for personal blessing. “Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses. Deliver us from evil.” But the true order is the one observed here, “God first.” The King of all the petitions is the one that stands in the forefront. The Westminster Confession says that the chief end of man’s life is “to glorify God.” The old divines who drew up that confession had gained a clear glimpse into the true relation of things. Above all personal interest, above all selfish advantage, stands the glory of God. In the soldier’s thought, far above any consideration of personal comfort or safety, or even of life, stands the thought of the honour of the flag and his country’s weal. And so in the Christian’s mind far above the thought of self must stand the thought of God. “First things first.” Before the prayer for daily bread, for forgiveness, for deliverance, comes the prayer that God may have the glory due unto His name. My object this morning is to point out, if I can, the sweep and grandeur 47of this petition, so that we may understand what it is we pray for when we say, “Hallowed be Thy name.” Let me first of all try to explain what is meant by the name of God. As Bishop Westcott points out in his “Revelation of the Father” no thoughtful person can read the Bible without being struck by the importance which is attached to the Divine names in the different books. And the names of God are important because they are revelations of God’s nature. You remember that when Jacob wrestled with the angel till break of day by the side of the brook Jabbok his last request to his antagonist was this, “Tell me I pray Thee, Thy name.” What was it Jacob really wanted to know? I will tell you. He wanted to know the nature, the character of the mighty Wrestler. He wanted to know whether it was love or wrath that had constrained him to pass through that terrible agony. “Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name,” tell me Thy character, reveal to me Thy heart, “to me Thy name, Thy nature show,” that was the real meaning of Jacob’s cry. Well, the Bible is a great book of “names.” If you will turn up your concordances, you will find in them a long list of “names” for God. And the point to notice is that every name applied to God means something; 48every name tells us something about Him; every name is a light upon His nature. When you hear a man’s name, it tells you nothing about his character. You are not a whit nearer knowing what a man is really like for hearing that his name is John, or David, or Thomas, or Joseph. The names of men mean nothing, or perhaps it would be truer to say, their meaning has absolutely no relation to character. They are mere labels. But it is different in the case of God. Every name applied to Him is significant. It expresses some aspect of His character. Men caught fresh glimpses into the depths of the Divine nature, and their new knowledge they expressed by a new name. So that the names of God are all of them keys to God’s character. They help us to spell out the secret of His nature. When then, you read of a man crying out, “Tell me Thy name,” you understand that what Jacob really wanted to know was what God was. And when you read of the Psalmist saying, “They that know Thy name, will put their trust in Thee,” you know that what the Psalmist means is this—that those who really know God, who know His heart, will, cannot help trusting Him. That, then, is the meaning of “God’s name,” it means the character of 49God, as that character has been revealed to us.

When, where and how has that name been revealed to us? Well, it has been revealed, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “by divers portions, and in divers manners.”

(1) It has been revealed to us in Nature. The Psalmist watching his sheep in the still and starry night saw God in the arching sky, and sang, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.” And one of our own great poets, John Ruskin, has said, “It is but the outer hem of God’s great mantle, our poor stars do gem.” The Arabs speak of tracing God’s footsteps in the world; Kepler, in studying the planets, said he was thinking God’s thoughts after Him; Mrs. Barrett-Browning cries, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.” Yes! God reveals His name to us through nature. I have been shown rocks which bear upon them indentations that have some resemblance to a cloven foot, and I have been told of legends that connect those marks with the devil. The devil, so the legends say, made those particular rocks a momentary resting-place, and in the cloven foot he has left his mark upon them 50for ever. But, brethren, it is not the devil’s mark, but God’s mark that the great world bears. I can see God’s mark on the sky and the sea, on mountain and flood, on flower and tree. When I look at the great mountains I cannot help remembering that it was God who planted them there. “He weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance.” When I look at the great and wide sea, at the sunny, sleepy sea, at the angry, restless sea, I remember it was God who placed it there. “He measured the waters in the hollow of His hand. He has placed bounds for it which it cannot pass.” When I see the lightning flash, I remember that the lightning is His messenger. When I hear the thunder roll, I remember that the thunder is His voice. When I see the birds of the air, I remember that not one of them falls to the ground without God. When I see the lilies of the field, I remember that God clothes them. Oh, yes, the world speaks of God. It is true, as Coleridge sings in his magnificent “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni”—

But Nature does not tell all the secret. If we knew only what Nature tells we should be 51compelled to cry with the old Hebrew prophet, “Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.” After all Nature has to say, our entreaty is still, “Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name.”

(2) God’s name has been revealed to us more plainly in the Bible. In this book you have one name for God following another, and with every fresh name came new light. Westcott says that “the three chief stages in the history of the Old Testament are characterised in broad outline by the names under which God was pleased to make Himself known in each!” First He is El-Shaddai, the God of might. Then He is Jehovah, the Great I AM, the God of the covenant. Then He is Lord of Hosts, the King of the Universe, the Disposer of Events, the Ruler of the world. It was a great event in the history of men when God announced by His servants and prophets a new name for Himself: We talk about great discoveries—the discovery of a new mountain range, or river, or lake in the Dark Continent, the discovery of some new facts in the realm of science, the discovery of some new method of applying Nature’s forces to do men’s work. I am not saying these are not great discoveries, but I do say the greatest discovery that ever happens in this world of ours is the discovery 52of a new name for God. You have the history of those names, those discoveries in the Bible. To trace the giving of these names is to trace the history of men as they were being led out of darkness into His most marvellous light.

But who would not feel that, if the Bible stopped short at the book of Malachi, the light at best was only the dim and uncertain twilight. If the old book finished there, our cry would be still, “Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name.” Well, thanks be to Him, He has told us His name. He has kept nothing from us.

(3) God has revealed Himself fully to us in Jesus Christ. He had given glimpses of Himself to seers and prophets before. But God was greater and better than the best word even Isaiah had said about Him. And at last, when the fulness of time was come, God told the final truth about Himself by sending Jesus Christ into the world. He is the effulgence of His glory and the express image of His person. There are likenesses between human beings. We talk about “family likenesses.” There are striking resemblances between father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister. But with the resemblances there are also differences. You can always distinguish between 53one and another. But between God and Jesus Christ the likeness is absolute. There are no differences. Jesus is the Word of God. He is what God is, expressed in terms of human thought and speech. God has kept nothing back from us. He has reserved no secret. You may enter into the holiest place by the blood of Jesus. What is God’s name? God’s name is Jesus Christ. In Jesus you get the full and final revelation of God’s character. God could not fully reveal Himself through nature. He could not have been pictured for us in a book. It was only in a life that God could fully reveal Himself, and that full revelation He gave in the life of His Son. When Philip said to Jesus, “Shew us the Father,” Jesus answered, “I and my Father are one. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Jesus was God’s answer to the cry of man—“Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name.” It is by looking at Jesus, then, that we discover the character of God. And if you ask me, after studying Christ’s life, what I find God’s character to be and what His best name is, I answer that His nature is love, and that the best name that describes Him is the name “Father.” When, then, Jesus tells us to pray, “Hallowed be Thy name,” He is telling us to honour God’s 54character as revealed in Himself. He is telling us to honour God as Father both in thought and life.

Now let me pass on to ask, How may we hallow God’s name? You remember the old commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Well, we must give a strict obedience to that old commandment if we are to hallow God’s name. There are men in our midst who can scarcely utter a sentence without dragging in the name of God. They interlard their speech with oaths, and blasphemously use the name of the sacred Majesty on High. Such men dishonour and degrade the Holy Name. But if we imagine that by abstaining from the vulgar and wicked habit of swearing we have “hallowed God’s name,” we are much mistaken. The Jews of old gave scrupulous obedience to the letter of the command, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” but they violated its spirit. They were so scrupulous that they would not even pronounce the sacred name. They passed it over in silence; they would never tread upon a piece of paper lying on the ground for fear the sacred name might be written upon it. And yet the Jew, while giving this strict literal obedience to the command, was all the 55while violating its spirit, and by his sin, his greed, his hypocrisy, was dishonouring that God whose name he feared to pronounce.

And for the matter of that, there are people amongst us who attach, as the ancient Jews did, a superstitious reverence to the name, who treat it as if it were a charm; who pay an idolatrous worship to the mere word. I have been occasionally to services in the cathedrals and parish churches of our land, and I have noticed that the men and women who attend them will bow at “the name.” Now I am not prepared to say that act is wrong, but I am quite prepared to say that the tendency of all such practices is to make people imagine that God is to be honoured and worshipped by mere externalisms. The danger of such a practice is that of making people imagine they have “hallowed God’s name,” by bowing in church. Brethren, it is all a very pitiful delusion. What is the use of bowing at the name, if people go home to be selfish and unkind, or to their business to be hard and over-reaching; or into society to be gossips and tale-bearers? In spite of the outward respect they pay, such people dishonour God’s name, drag it through the mire, and make it the jest of blasphemers and fools. “Hallowing God’s name” does not mean bowing 56when that sacred name is pronounced: it means honouring the character of God, as that character has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. This is a prayer not simply for the man to pray who is fighting against the blaspheming habit, it is a prayer that the best of Christians may well utter. Well, how shall we “hallow God’s name?”

(1) By cherishing worthy ideas of God. We are dishallowing (if I may be allowed to use the word) God’s name when we have unworthy ideas of His nature. We are sinning against this name “Father” when we think of God as harsh, unkind, cruel. Our new theology may have its defects and its dangers, but at any rate it “has hallowed God’s name.” It has made God more beautiful, more tender, more loving and lovable. Do you know I am not surprised that men broke out into revolt against the stern, hard, pitiless theology of a century ago. Theologians were attributing to God conduct that would be branded as hateful in men! Augustine and Calvin have laid the Church under vast obligations, but when Augustine and Calvin talked about little infants being damned, they were dishonouring God’s name, casting a slur upon His character, and sinning against His Fatherhood. There is an old painting in one 57of the Italian galleries which pictures God as shooting arrows at men, and Jesus catching them before they reached their mark. That picture represents the spirit of much of the old theology. Christ is represented as kind and pitiful, but God is represented as cruel, vengeful, vindictive. Brethren, that is a libel upon God. It is a cruel slander upon God’s character. “God is love.” “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.” God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. That is the true picture. Refuse to believe in anything that contradicts that. Refuse to believe that God can ever be guilty of what would be accounted base in man. Believe with Whittier, that

Say with Browning, “Thou, God, art Love. I build my faith on that.” You must cherish lofty, beautiful, gracious thoughts of God if you are to hallow His name. And go on to know the Lord. There are depths of love in God, unrealised as yet by the best of us. I know a valley in South Wales, which outwardly is not much to look at, but in its bosom are buried vast treasures, and men who have digged beneath the surface have found there boundless 58wealth. The deeper we penetrate into the nature of God, the more loving, the more gracious we shall find Him to be. Therefore, press on to know Him, until you come to feel that God is your passion and your joy, that in earth, in heaven, you want none but Him. By so doing, you will be hallowing God’s name.

But God’s name must be hallowed not only in thought, but in life. So I pass on to say that not only can you hallow God’s name by cherishing worthy thoughts of God, but you can hallow God’s name also—

(2) By the trustfulness of your life. Jesus has told us God’s name of “Father” by quietly trusting Him. You cannot dishonour a friend more than by refusing to trust him, can you? Distrust, suspicion, is an insult to friendship. A child cannot dishonour a father more than by fearing him, being suspicious about him, doubting his love. Fear, suspicion, distrust—these things are an insult to fatherhood. Are we never guilty of insulting the Fatherhood of God? I have heard people sometimes complain of God, of God’s dealing with them in Providence. They have spoken as if God used them hardly. They have spoken as if God had His favourites. They have spoken as if God had lost His love for them. What were they doing? 59Dishonouring God’s name, casting a slur upon His character, forgetting that His nature is love and His name is Father. Men who, in spite of Calvary, think God can be unkind, are doing insult to His love. If you want to hallow God’s name, trust Him to the uttermost; “rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.” Job hallowed God’s name, when, amid the wreck of all his earthly fortunes, he said, “Even though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Paul hallowed God’s name when, looking at the cross, he said, “All things work together for good to them that love God.” Samuel Rutherford honoured God’s name when, writing from his prison in Aberdeen, he said, “I have nothing to say of my Lord’s cross but much good.” I have read of a child who in the midst of a storm at sea remained quiet, calm, and fearless, and who, on being asked how it was she was not afraid, answered, with the simplicity of childhood, “My father is the captain.” She honoured the name father by her perfect trustfulness. We find ourselves in storms sometimes—storms of trouble, storms of doubt, storms of bereavement and grief. It is in such storms we have the most glorious opportunities of hallowing God’s name. Let us ask Him for grace to honour His Fatherhood 60by trusting Him in the dark and cloudy day. Man, the child, cannot hallow God’s name of “Father” better than by a quiet, simple trustfulness.

(3) We can hallow God’s name of “Father” by our obedience. The Italian brigand will repeat the Pater Noster and then go on with his robbery. The Mussulman will interlard his filthiest talk with appeals to Allah. But nothing is so dishonouring to God as profession without practice. God will have obedience and not sacrifice. God was weary of the outward marks of respect the Jews paid Him, because all these outward marks of reverence were accompanied by gross and persistent disobedience of life. Does a child want to honour his father? He cannot do it better than by being an obedient child, by giving prompt and willing obedience to his father’s commands. Do you want to honour your Father in heaven? Obey Him. Obey Him in the home; obey Him in society; obey Him in your business; obey Him in your public and political life. Obey Him promptly, absolutely, willingly. That was how Jesus hallowed His Father’s name. From the earliest dawn of life He was about His Father’s business. It was His meat and drink to do God’s will. He was born at Bethlehem, He laboured in Galilee, 61He drank the bitter cup in the garden, He died upon the Cross—all because it was God’s will. He gave to His Father full, absolute, glad obedience, so that in His prayer He could say to God, “I have glorified Thy name,” and God could look upon Him and say, “Thou art My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” If you want to honour your Heavenly Father, obey Him! We try to put God off with a little outward respect, we bow at His name, we bend in prayer before Him, we sing hymns to His praise; but better than all your bowing and hymn singing and multiplied prayers is the daily obedience of the life. “If ye love Me,” says God, “keep My commandments.” To-morrow, in the shop and the office and the school and the home, make it your meat and drink to do the Father’s will and to finish His work; so will you, too, like your great Elder Brother, glorify God’s name, and like Him you, too, will one day hear God say, “Thou art My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

IV The Second Petition

“Thy Kingdom come.”—Matt. vi. 10; Luke xi. 2.

The Bible is a book of hope. It looks, not backward, but forward. It has its face turned towards the light. It always speaks of “a best that is still to be.” We open its pages and we read of Eden; of a time when the world was free from pain and sorrow and sadness, because man was free from sin. While man was innocent his home was a garden, all nature served him, a sky that was always blue smiled down upon him, and God was his familiar friend. But we read on a chapter or two and a change comes over the aspect of things. Eden disappears, and has never been found since. Joy, harmony, peace vanish, and leave behind them discord, sorrow, hate. When man sinned, pain and grief and death entered the world, man’s sky grew black with clouds; God no longer spoke 63with him in the cool of the evening, and he was driven out of the garden, at the gates of which the cherubim were posted with swords of flame which pointed every way, as if to say, “No return, no return.”

But even in the story of that bitter loss I detect the note of “hope.” You perhaps remember the old Greek legend which says that when Pandora was married to Epimetheus the gods gave her a box, which was full of winged blessings, as a wedding present. As long as Pandora kept the box locked, so long life was like a summer’s day. She and her husband enjoyed every blessing. But one day, tempted by curiosity, she opened the box, and on the instant the little winged creatures who were locked inside took flight and left her for ever. All? did I say. No, not quite all. Hope remained at the bottom of the box, the only blessing left to Pandora and her husband! And so exactly man lost everything by sin except hope. When God made man He gave him every blessing. But when man unmade himself, these blessings took flight. He lost his innocence, he lost his peace, he lost his happiness, he lost his home, he lost everything but hope. God left him hope to comfort him in his bitter grief. God left him hope to save him from despair. 64When man’s night was blackest, God sent into his sky a star, a star that was the promise of a day to come. In pronouncing doom upon disobedient man, God also gave him a promise as if to say, “It shall not always be midnight and deep despair with thee. Thy dayspring shall again arise.” That note of hope, struck even in the story of the tragedy of the fall, is the key-note of the Bible. The Bible is a book of the future, and the spring-time, and the dawn. You will not find its pages taken up with regrets for the Eden which has been lost; it looks forward to a better Eden still to come. It does not spend its time in bewailing the sunshine that has disappeared from the earth; it rather bids men wake and watch that they may be ready to greet the still more glorious day which is about to break. For as you read the Bible, what do you discover? You discover one glowing promise after another given by God; you find hope ever waxing stronger; you find the assurance that the night is departing, ever waxing more confident, until at last some prophet, of keener vision than the rest, catches on the peaks of distant hills the foregleam of the dawn, beholds the vision of the light, not of moon or stars, but of the sun, and announces to a world sick with longing for the day, that “the light is come, 65and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” It is to the future the Bible looks. From its first page to the last it preaches the glad gospel of hope. The old Eden which has been lost is a prophecy of the better Eden to be gained. The “golden age” of the Bible is before, not behind. Paganism could only look back wistfully to the past and sigh for the reign of Saturn, when the earth had peace and plenty and joy—those glad days which had been, but could return no more. But the Bible teaches us to look forward. Our good time is still to come. Our golden age is still in the womb of the future. We are still looking for that glorious “last for which the first was made.” It is of the golden age to which the Christian looks forward that this second petition speaks. “Thy Kingdom come” is a prayer for the good time coming, a prayer for the golden age, a prayer for the better Eden. For the earth’s golden age will come when God is King. I say the earth’s golden age advisedly. Let me emphasise it—the earth’s golden age! For many have misinterpreted the reference of this petition. Tertullian, the old Latin father, would have made this petition the third, not the second. He would have read the prayer thus, “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy will be done, Thy Kingdom come,” because he thought this 66prayer for God’s kingdom referred to the end of the world and the second advent. But when Jesus teaches us to pray that God’s kingdom may come, He means that we are to pray that God may reign here upon the earth, that men here may acknowledge Him as King, that life here may be regulated by His commands. This is not a prayer that we may be taken out of earth into heaven, but it is a prayer that heaven may come down to earth, so that earth itself may become heavenly. It is a prayer for the “new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.” It is a prayer for the world’s golden age—a golden age which shall come when there is established here on earth that kingdom of God which is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Have you noticed how in most men’s minds the idea of a “golden age” is associated with the name of some king? The Israelites associated it with the name of David; the Germans associated it with the name of Frederick Barbarossa; for us British folk a special halo of romance gathers round the time of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. And as a matter of fact, the world’s good time is inseparably connected with the coming of a King and the establishment of a kingdom. But the kingdom is no 67earthly royalty, and the King is no David or Barbarossa or Arthur come back to life again. The kingdom is the kingdom of God, and the name of the King is Jesus. When that Kingdom is established, when that King is enthroned, a better Eden shall be here than the Eden we have lost. It is the world’s evil time just now. Earth is full of misery and grief and pain. Many are the schemes propounded for mending matters, and God knows they need mending. Each man has his own nostrum, every quack his own panacea; but if we leave God and Christ out of account every plan is doomed to fail. We shall mend matters only by making God a reality, and the final establishment of right and justice, and joy will come only when He is enthroned as King. But you may say to me, “Is not God King now? Is not the world His? Are not all men in His hands?” That is perfectly true! I do not forget that the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. It is my joy and strength to remember that in spite of all the bluster and brave show made by the forces of evil, the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! But if you will examine the basis of that Kingship you will find it rests on God’s Creatorship. He is Lord of the world and of 68men because He has created them—because in Him they live and move and have their being. But God wants to be King in Jesus Christ—that is to say, He wants to be King in virtue not of His power, but of His love. He wants men to obey Him not because they are afraid of Him, but because they love Him. Look at the prayer: “Thy kingdom come.” Whose kingdom is it? Well, it is “our Father’s” kingdom. Oh, this is a kingdom of love! God wants to be King not because He is Creator, but because He is Father. He wants men to be obedient to Him not under the pressure of force, but under the sweet constraint of love. God has been King by the title of Creator since the world began; but He is not even yet King by the title of “Father.” He is not even yet King in Jesus Christ. It is for this kingdom we are to pray; for the time when men shall realise what God’s Fatherhood means, for the time when men’s hearts shall be so touched by God’s love to them in Jesus Christ, that out of pure and grateful affection they will render Him a willing and glad obedience.

“Thy kingdom come.” The prayer, you will notice, regards the “kingdom” as something still to be realised. As yet it is in the future. In other places in the New Testament 69it is talked of as actually existent. Both views are true—the kingdom is both present and future. You remember that when the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God should come, he observed, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, for lo, the kingdom of God is in your midst.” The Pharisees were treating as future what was already present. The kingdom of God was already in their midst. But it was not surprising that the Pharisees failed to discover the presence of the kingdom. It was a very tiny affair at the time. Its subjects were only a handful of Galilean peasants. Our Lord Himself, speaking of the tiny, unnoticed beginning of the kingdom, said it was like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal! The kingdom is not hidden to-day. The leaven has been working through the centuries. The presence of the kingdom is the most noticeable fact in the world’s life to-day. We talk about the great empires of the world! We talk about the British Empire embracing one-fifth part of the habitable globe: and the great Russian Empire claiming a sixth part of the world; and the German Empire and the French Empire, and the rest of them. But there is one Empire greater, vaster than any 70other—the Empire of King Jesus. It is in our midst, the mightiest kingdom, the most potent force on earth.

And yet, while the kingdom of God is thus present and potent, it is still future. Its full realisation has yet to come. So long as there is in this world one man who has not yielded his heart to Christ, so long as there is a single department of life which is not brought into subjection to the law of Christ, so long will the kingdom be unrealised, so long shall we need to pray this prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” All the misery of this world is due to the fact that there are multitudes of men still in rebellion, that there are whole departments of human activity which are not regulated by the spirit of Christ. The kingdom is still imperfect, incomplete. Its full establishment lies in the future somewhere. Until that full establishment takes place, until God is King everywhere and over everybody and everything, the world’s golden age will never come.

What kind of kingdom is this? It is worth while noticing that the “kingdom” occupied a large place in the thought and speech of Christ. His gospel was a gospel of the kingdom. He announced that He had come to found a kingdom; He claimed the title “King” for 71Himself; and in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, He gave us, shall I say, the laws and rules of the kingdom. Christ was not the first to picture an “Ideal State,” Plato had already done it in his “Republic.” But Plato’s picture would not satisfy you or me. It is an impossible, fantastic dream. Plato’s state, with its philosopher king and its destruction of the family, repels instead of attracting us. But the kingdom of God which Christ has pictured for us, that gleaming vision of a new earth in which love shall rule, fascinates and enthrals us, and the hope of its realisation becomes the mainspring of all human progress and attainment. Well what kind of a kingdom is it? Let me answer in the words of the great Apostle Paul, and say, “The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” There you have in one brief sentence the characteristics of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is righteousness, or, in other words, the kingdom of God is justice. There is cruel wrong in this world of ours, wrong that daily cries up to God for vengeance. Man wrongs man, brother oppresses brother. The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty, and places that are usually supposed to be “light,” like this favoured England of ours, 72are full of cruelty also. Oh, brethren, to see the wrong, the oppression, the wickedness of life, is a maddening sight! I can understand how men are sometimes driven by it into the blasphemy of despair! But the kingdom of God is justice—strict, level, even-handed justice. When His kingdom comes, tyranny, oppression, wrong shall cease; men shall do right out of love for their righteous King.

The kingdom of God is peace. Peace between men, peace between nations. All strife and mutual distrust shall be for ever buried, and the noise of war shall be heard no more, but men shall beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks. Hate and enmity shall die. “The wolf and the lamb shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain,” saith the Lord.

The kingdom of God is joy. We are in the winter of our discontent just now. Life is full of tears and grief and pain. The tears and the grief and pain spring from the hate and the oppressions and the injustices of life. But when God is King there shall be justice and peace, and joy will follow as a natural consequence. Justice, peace, happiness those are 73the characteristics of the kingdom of God! Is not this a kingdom worth praying for?

Now let me go on to ask the question, What is the sphere of the kingdom? First let me say, the sphere of the kingdom is the individual heart. When I pray, “Thy kingdom come” I do not feel that I am praying solely for the work of foreign missions. I do not think only of the millions of heathen in China or India or Africa. When I pray “Thy kingdom come,” I am not satisfied with adding to the thought of the heathen abroad remembrance of the heathen at home. No! when I utter that prayer I feel I am praying for myself. I am praying that God’s kingdom may come in my own heart. Oh, yes, this prayer has reference to ourselves. When we pray “Thy kingdom come,” we pray “Lord, come into our own hearts; rule there; take the throne there: make us completely thine.” “Thy kingdom come!” Brethren, do we mean it? Do we honestly desire it? For see what it means. It means that we are asking that every cherished sin and passion may be cast out of our hearts; it means that we desire that neither money nor pleasure nor fame should have any power over us or draw away our love from God. It means that God’s will and not our own may rule. 74Oh, that is a great prayer! Do we honestly and sincerely mean what we say? I have known men who loved their sins too much, their pleasures, their money, themselves too much, ever to be able to pray sincerely “Thy kingdom come!” May God give us grace honestly to pray this prayer! May He make us able and willing to give to His commands a glad and complete obedience! God’s kingdom must come in our own hearts before it can come in the world at large! It is only true and loyal subjects of the kingdom who can extend its boundaries and further its interests. Men will not enter the kingdom, though we preach to them till Doomsday, if we ourselves remain without. But if God truly reigns in our hearts, and His kingdom begets in us righteousness, peace, and joy, we shall then be able to go forth and win others as loyal subjects to our King.

But in offering this prayer, we must not stop at ourselves. The prayer embraces the wide world in its sweep. Thy kingdom come! Where? Everywhere. All nations are to bow down before Him, all people are to serve Him. Men discuss the question sometimes as to which race is likely to become the dominant race in the earth. We people who live in this little island are inclined to believe that this splendid destiny 75is reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race. We stand among the nations for the principles of liberty and truth and justice; and as I heard Dr. Clifford say some months ago, we believe that “the momentum of these ideas will carry us to the government of the earth.” And so far as England does stand for those great ideas, I am not ashamed to confess I am an English Imperialist. But there is something I am more anxious about even than the dominion of England, and that is the dominion of Christ. Above everything else I am a Christian Imperialist. I want to see the banner of the Cross floating over every land. I want to see every nation acknowledging one and the same King—even Jesus. I want to see the crown of the world on the brow which bears still the scars of the crown of thorns! And, brethren, I know that all this shall come to pass! The place of England in the future of the world is, after all, a matter of conjecture. But there is no conjecture, no doubt, no perhaps about the place of Christ. He is destined for the throne! He shall reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet, “Thy kingdom come” in my own heart, over all the world, and let me add in every department of life. When we pray this prayer, we are praying that God may rule in our business 76life, and our social life, and our political life. We are asking Him to preside in our Parliaments and our Council Chambers. We are asking Him to take the government of our markets and our offices and our exchanges. We are asking Him to be Lord in the realms of art and literature. What an enormous sweep this prayer has! And we must not only pray this form of words, but if our prayer is not to be a sham and a pretence, we must toil to realise the kingdom. “Laborare est orare,” says the old Latin proverb: “To labour is to pray.” At any rate, no one has truly prayed this prayer who does not bend all his energies to the task of seeking to establish this kingdom on earth. England keeps in every important foreign town consuls to look after the interests of English people. Let me use that to illustrate the duties of Christian people. We are in this world to look after the interests of God and of His kingdom. We are His consuls. You business men, you are in business to look after God’s interests and to promote His kingdom! You professional men—doctors, lawyers, schoolmasters—you are in your professions to look after God’s interests and to promote His kingdom! You politicians, you are in politics to look after God’s interests and to promote His kingdom! You 77fathers and mothers in the homes, you are there to look after God’s interests and to promote His kingdom. You must be Christian business men, Christian lawyers, Christian doctors, Christian teachers, Christian politicians, Christian parents. Be faithful to your trust! So live, so labour, that God’s kingdom may come! No wish or prayer of ours can make the summer come an hour before its time, or stave off by one hour the approach of grim winter, but it does depend upon our prayers and labours whether it shall be soon or late that summer gladness shall come into the souls of men; whether it shall be soon or late that Christ shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied.

Let me now proceed to the question, “How is this kingdom to be established?” Let me first say how it cannot. It cannot be established by force. Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon built up their empires with the sword, and cemented them with blood, but not so is the kingdom of God to be established. Men have tried that method; they have used fire and sword to make God’s kingdom come. Peter had that spirit when he pointed to the two swords the disciples possessed. Mahomet followed this plan when he gave to men the alternative, either Islam or death. The Crusaders, spurred on by the 78burning eloquence of Peter the Hermit, committed the same blunder. The old Saxon and Gothic kings, who when they accepted Christianity themselves compelled their people to be baptised as well, followed the same mistaken method. But these people did not advance the kingdom of God one whit. You do not make a man a member of this kingdom by baptising him, or enrolling him among the adherents of a church, or by calling him a Christian. Men must have their hearts changed, they must be born again. They must be willing to render glad obedience to their Father King before they become members of this kingdom. Force may increase the numbers of a sect, it cannot add one to the membership of the kingdom. The sword may compel a man to change his name; it can never compel him to change his heart! Oh no; it is not by the sword that God’s kingdom will come. To all ecclesiastical persecutors Christ says, “Put the sword up into its sheath.” Not by the sword is the kingdom to come, but by the Cross! Constantine of old, when on the eve of a critical battle, dreamed he saw a cross in the sky, and around it this legend, Σὑ τουτῷ vῖκᾳ, “by this conquer.” That is the weapon we have to use in our warfare. That is the weapon whereby 79God’s kingdom is to be established. We are to conquer “by the Cross.” We are to conquer by the power of love. For the Cross means love—love at its best, love in the glory of sacrifice. The Cross is the power of God. It is by the story of the Cross that men’s hearts are to be broken, and their affection and allegiance won. “By this conquer” is the charge given to us. Preach the Cross! Exalt the dying Redeemer of men! When we lift Him up He will draw all men unto Him.

“Thy kingdom come.” It is a prayer to-day; but the time will come when the prayer shall be changed into praise, and we shall be able to say, “Thy kingdom has come!” It has been coming for eighteen hundred years, and it is not here yet; but doubt not, despair not, faint not, it SHALL come. Men have called the visions such men as Plato and Sir Thomas More have given us of the “Ideal State,” “Utopias,” “Nowheres,” to mark their idea of those visions as fantastic, impractical, impossible. But let no one dare to call the kingdom of God a Utopia. Let no one dare to say of the new earth which Christ foretold that it is a vain, an impossible dream. To say that is to deny the faith, and to be guilty of the great Apostasy. Do you say that the establishment of a kingdom of 80justice and peace and joy is impossible? I will tell you nay. God is pledged to it, and He shall not fail nor be discouraged. The time is coming when our evil hearts shall be made pure and clean; the time is coming when our life day by day shall be sweet and holy and happy; the time is coming when lying, deceit, and greed and strife, and distrust and shame shall be banished from the earth; the time is coming when asylums and penitentiaries and gaols shall no longer openly proclaim our shame; the time is coming when the drunkard and the profligate and the criminal and the harlot shall be no more, but the people shall be all righteous—a branch of God’s planting, that He may be glorified! The time is coming when trade and politics and pleasure shall be carried on to the glory of God. The time is coming when literature and art shall be cleansed of all impure taint, and shall speak of God as the Bible speaks of Him to-day. The time is coming when China and India and the Dark Continent and the isles of the sea shall place their crowns on the head of Christ. The time is coming when every idol shall be broken and every superstition destroyed, and the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. The time is coming when 81righteousness, peace, and joy shall everywhere prevail, and sin and wrong shall be words whose meaning men no longer understand. Sursum corda. Lift up your hearts! That glorious time is coming! That glorious day is about to break. “The world is grey with morning light.” Thy Kingdom come! It must come; it will come. Its coming does not depend upon you or me, but upon the risen and exalted Christ. “The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hands.”

V The Third Petition

“Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.”—Matt. vi. 10

The third petition, which is omitted from Luke’s version of the Prayer, springs directly and naturally out of the second petition, and is really explanatory of it. We have been taught to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” God’s kingdom will come, when His will is done on earth, as it is done in heaven.

The central idea of kingship is that of rule, authority, power. Kingship is only real and effective when the King commands and the people obey. In heaven God’s kingship is a reality. The eyes of all the inhabitants of the better land wait upon God. Cherubim and Seraphim, saints and angels, delight to do His will. In heaven, God speaks and it is done. This third petition is a prayer that men may learn to obey God as the angels do, so that His 83kingship may be as real and as effective here on earth as it is now in heaven.

Jurists draw a distinction between kings de jure—kings by legal right, and kings de facto—in actual possession and exercise of the royal power. Now God, if I may be allowed to say so, is the world’s King de jure. He is the world’s lawful Sovereign and rightful Lord. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” But God is not King de facto. His kingship is not effective. His people do not obey. There are large sections of the world, whole departments of human activity, where His rule is not recognised. Ireland is part of the Queen’s dominions; but there have been times when the Queen could scarcely be said to reign in Ireland. At the time when the Irish troubles were at their height, it was a common saying that in certain districts of Ireland it was not the Queen who ruled, but the Land League. Cuba was until last year part of the dominions of the King of Spain. The Spanish flag floated over its arsenals and forts. It was with the ministers of the King of Spain that all negotiations with reference to Cuba had to be carried on. Cuban coins and Cuban postage stamps bore the image and superscription of the Spanish 84sovereign. But for all that, for the past ten years or so the kingship of Alphonso over Cuba was merely nominal. Outside Havanna and Santiago Alphonso could not be said to reign. Not all the armies of Spain could make his kingship real and effective over the rebellious interior. In much the same way God is the King of the world. He is its lawful Sovereign. No one else has a shred of title or claim to an inch of its territory or to the allegiance of one of its inhabitants. “The kingdom is the Lord’s, and He is Governor among the nations.” But while God is King of the world de jure, He is not King de facto. His kingship is nominal—not real and effective; for there are parts of the world over which God cannot be said to rule. There are multitudes of men who are in rebellion against Him, and who refuse to acknowledge His authority. God’s writs do not run. His law is not obeyed. His will is not done.

And here we come across that solemn and awful power which is the prerogative of manhood—the power of resisting the will of God. Nature obeys God’s will. The flower that blooms in hedge-side or meadow; the lark that sings its way up to heaven’s gate in the spring sunshine; the rivers that roll towards 85the sea; the ocean with its regular ebb and flow; the sun and moon and stars observing their seasons and travelling along their appointed orbits—all these are what they are, and do what they do in obedience to God’s will. The wind is God’s messenger; the thunder His voice; the lightning His sword. Nature obeys God. And above, in heaven, the angels and the blest do God’s pleasure. “Thousands at His bidding speed, and post o’er land and ocean without rest.” Is there any one then who resists God’s will? Yes, there is one, just one, and that one is man. In all God’s universe he is the only one who is disobedient. He is the only one who clenches his fist and says “No” to God. He is the only one invested with the terrible power of resisting, thwarting, opposing the will of God. And that awful power he possesses because he possesses a free and independent will of his own. God made man, we are told, in His own likeness. The special feature that marks man off from the brute creation and links him on to the Divine, is his possession of moral freedom. God is a moral Being. Man, too, is a moral being. But in order to make man a moral being, God had to limit Himself and make man free. For there can be no moral quality where there is no 86freedom. Nature is un-moral because nature acts under necessity. Man is not under necessity. He can either obey or disobey. He is a moral being because he is free.

Now all the misery of the world is due to the fact that man abused his freedom, that he chose not to obey, but to dis-obey. What was the first sin? An act of disobedience; and that act of disobedience brought in its train a multitude of woes. I want you to remember that vice is not here by God’s will; lust is not here by God’s will; strife and malice and envy are not here by God’s will; war and bloodshed and slaughter are not here by God’s will; misery and poverty and shame are not here by God’s will. They are here by man’s will, because man set up his own will in opposition to that of God. The secret of the world’s unhappiness and sorrow and pain you will find in these familiar words of the General Confession, “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” “Selfishness,” as Bishop Westcott says, “lies at the root of all sin.” Here is the fountain of the world’s woe, that man preferred his own will rather than the will of God. While man was obedient there was happiness and joy, happiness that lasted. As John Milton says—

But from that day, that day of disobedience, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in pain until now. But to discover the fountain of the disease is also to discover the secret of the remedy. If the world owes its present misery to the fact that man has followed his own will, the world will see its perfect day when man submits his own will to the will of God. “Come and let us return” is the prophet’s cry, “let us get back to the old allegiance.” “Come and let us return” is the preacher’s call to-day. The way to the millennium is along the path of obedience. When God’s kingship is real and effective, because men everywhere are obedient, the Golden Age will have dawned. The new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness will be a blessed fact when—

Thy Will be done! This petition teaches us that it must be our supreme desire that God 88may have His way with us. You will notice, as I pointed out a Saturday or two ago, that this petition comes before the petitions for personal blessing. It is infinitely more important that God’s will should be done than that we should have the things upon which we have set our hearts. “Thy will be done!” Do you not feel humbled and reproached by this petition? I will speak for myself, and say that this petition and its place in the prayer put me to utter shame. Why, our very prayers are selfish! A secularist once said with a sneer that “prayer was a machine warranted by theologians to make God do whatsoever His clients want.” Have not our prayers given some ground for the sneer? Have not our wants and interests occupied too large a place in our petition? This is the true order in prayer—God first. This is the petition that must dominate every other, “Thy will be done.”

Let me not be misunderstood. I am far from saying it is wrong to tell God about our personal wishes and desires. No! Tell Him everything. There ought to be no reserve in the conversation between a child and his Father. I am not afraid or ashamed to tell God about my personal affairs. I ask Him to preserve me from trouble and loss. I ask Him to keep me 89safe from harm and danger. I ask Him to ward off from me sickness and suffering. I ask Him to watch over those I love. But there is another prayer I must learn to pray, another prayer I must learn to pray first—and oh! what a lot of learning it takes—and that prayer is this, “Thy will be done.” For it may be God’s will to send me the very things I shrink from. He may see that it is the discipline of trouble and loss and sickness that I need. I am but as a little child, blind and ignorant as a little child, and when I pray for temporal gifts, I may be only praying to my own hurt. This is the only prayer for me, for you, for all men, “Father, Thy will be done.” We wish for success in life, but because such a success might prove a curse and not a blessing, we must add, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.” We pray for freedom from bereavement and sorrow, but because such discipline may result in truest blessedness, we add, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.” We pray for peace and comfort and quietness, but because struggle and conflict may be necessary, in order to make us strong, we add, “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.” We have not learned to pray truly at all, until every petition in our prayers is made subject to this one; until it becomes 90our chief and supreme desire that God’s will may be done.

Will it be hard? Hard? I know of nothing harder. This is the great feat of life. You can only learn to say “Thy will be done” through struggle and agony and heartbreak. This old Book compares the agony through which men must pass before they learn sincerely to pray this prayer, to the agony inflicted by the plucking out of an eye or the cutting off of a limb. Obedience to God leads to the land of blessedness and peace, but the gate by which we enter—the gate of self-denial—is a narrow gate, and we have to agonise to enter in. God has a will for each of us, and His will concerning us often clashes with our own. The desires of the flesh and of the mind hanker after earthly comfort and wealth and ease. God’s will concerning us is, that whatever the cost and the pain, we should be clean and honest and true. Scarcely a day passes but our desires and the will of God for us come into violent conflict. To surrender our own wills, to make God’s will ours, means pain. It is a dying. It is a crucifixion. But there are one or two considerations of which I would like to remind you, which ought to make this surrender easier for us. This is the first:—

91(1) The will we are asked to make our own is our Father’s will. “Thy will be done!” Whose will? Our Father’s will! After all, it ought not to be very difficult to obey a father’s will, to fulfil a father’s desire, even when that will runs counter to our own, for we know there is love in the case. Remember, you are not asked to obey a despot; you are not asked to obey a tyrant; you are not asked to obey a slave-driver; you are asked to do the will of your Father—your Father, whose love is only to be measured by the Cross of Jesus Christ. It was the remembrance that the will He was called upon to obey was His Father’s will, that helped Jesus in the Garden. It was a hard thing for our Lord to say “Thy will be done,” when He knew that involved the Cross and the Grave; for Jesus, let me say it with all reverence, had all a man’s feelings, and He shrank from the bitter agony and shame. He would gladly have escaped the Cross and the Tomb. “If it be possible, let this cup pass.” Then he remembered it was His Father who was bidding Him drink that bitter cup. That thought steadied Him, gave Him courage, made Him strong, He was ready for anything and everything that His Father appointed. “The cup which the Father hath given me to drink shall I not drink 92it?” We, too, shall be strong to make God’s will our own, when we remember it is our Father’s will. For our Father is love—love at its best and highest. Mr. Spurgeon tells a story about a man who had in his garden a weather-cock which had on it this inscription, “God is Love.” A friend seeing it asked if it was meant to imply that God’s love was as fickle as the wind. “No,” was the reply, “I mean that from whatever quarter the wind may happen to blow, God is still love.” Bear that in mind—God is love; the will you are asked to obey is your Father’s will. Then, though that will ordain for us sorrow, sickness, pain, loss, we shall have grace to say, “Thy will be done.”

The second consideration which I would impress upon you is this:—

(2) God’s will ever seeks our highest good. What else could any one expect, seeing that it is our Father’s will? How we who are parents plan and scheme and contrive in order to secure a happy and prosperous future for our children! In exactly the same way God plans and purposes for us. He is always thinking upon us for our good. His will, says the Apostle, is our sanctification. It is a good and perfect and acceptable will. The very discipline through which He sometimes calls upon us to 93pass is meant to build us up in patience and purity and faith. The boy in school is apt to regard his lessons as a hardship. He would prefer the field and the sunshine to the school-room and the desk. But in after years he will be thankful he did not get his own way in the days of his youth, for he will recognise then that the hours he spent over his Algebraic problems and his Latin declensions enriched his life by contributing to the culture of his mind. We are scholars in God’s schools. The discipline of the school is painful sometimes; but in later years we shall be thankful even for our sorrows and losses and bereavements, when we see how they have enriched our lives by contributing to the culture of our souls. Yes, it will be easier to embrace God’s will when we realise with the Apostle that all things work together for good to them that love God.

Thy will be done! Notice, God’s will is not simply to be endured or suffered—it is to be done. In our every-day speech we have unduly narrowed the scope and meaning of this petition. We talk about this petition as if it were a prayer that God would give us the grace of resignation. It is in times of bereavement that this phrase leaps to the lips of men. It is upon tombstones that it is inscribed by sorrowing 94relatives. Again do not let me be misunderstood. Suffering God’s will is embraced in the scope of this prayer. To many of us the hardest part of all is patient submission to the will of God. The man bereft of wealth, stripped of all his possessions, flung back again into the poverty from which by hard and persistent effort he had emerged, needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” The man who languishes upon a bed of sickness, who lies there helpless while perhaps wife and children look up to him for bread—he needs grace to say, “Thy will be done.” Those who have parted with some loved one, who have seen father or mother, or husband or wife or child, hidden from them in the dark cold grave, and who come home again to miss the well-loved face and familiar voice—they need grace to say, while their hearts are aching and their eyes are full of tears, “Thy will be done.” Some of you know how hard it is. You find it impossible almost to say, as Job said, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Yes, it is hard to be submissive and resigned, and it is out of a broken heart the prayer often ascends, “Thy will be done.”

But this prayer is much more than a prayer for the grace of resignation and patient submission. 95The petition is not “Help us to suffer thy will,” but “Help us to do it.” This is not a prayer simply for the invalid and the mourner and the bereaved; it is a prayer also for those who are happy and well and strong. This is not a prayer simply for our times of trouble and our days of deep distress; it is a prayer for all times and every day. It is not every day, nor every month, nor even every year, that we are called upon to suffer God’s will, but not a day, not an hour passes, but we are called upon to do it. Do not narrow the scope of this prayer. You prayed this morning, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? What did you mean by it? I will tell you what you ought to have meant by it: “Help me, O God, to do what Thou wouldest have me do, to be what Thou wouldest have me.” That is what the prayer means. It means that we accept God’s plans and purposes as our own, and resolve to realise them. You can pray no nobler prayer than this, for in the doing of God’s will lies the secret of the perfect life. We look at the life of Jesus—so beautiful, so pure, so perfect—and we are lost in wonder and rapture. But the secret of that life is here: Jesus from the beginning to the close of life was intent on doing God’s will. He Himself let us into the 96secret. “I am come,” He said, “not to do My own will, but the will of the Father who sent Me.” “My meat and drink,” He said, on another occasion, “is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work.” When a boy of twelve He had come to the sublime decision that every moment of His life should be spent in doing His Father’s business. Do not commit the mistake of thinking that it was only in Gethsemane and the Judgement Hall and on Calvary that Christ was doing the will of God. He was doing it during those silent years at Nazareth. He was doing it when at school, He was doing it when He was in the carpenter’s shop, mending the tables and chairs and ploughs of the dwellers in Nazareth. He was doing it when He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom in Galilee. He was doing it when sharing in the festivities at Cana, and taking part in Matthew’s farewell dinner. He was doing it when healing the sick and comforting the lonely and lifting up the outcast. In fact, He was never doing anything else. Every day, every moment, Jesus was doing the Father’s will, and the result is the only perfect life the world has ever seen. And so, in our case, the doing of God’s will is not something confined to our times of darkness and sorrow; the doing of God’s will is a daily 97and hourly endeavour. God’s will is really done by us only when, to use the Apostle’s words, “whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we do all to the glory of God.” “Thy will be done on earth,” so runs the petition; the sphere in which God’s will is to be put into effect is this earth of ours—its business life, its public life, its social life, its family life. The employer is doing God’s will when He treats those in his employment justly and generously. The tradesman is doing God’s will when he buys and sells honestly. The shop assistant is doing God’s will by being diligent and courteous, and yet withal scrupulously straightforward and true. The artizan is doing God’s will when he respects his employer’s time, and does every bit of work as well as it can be done. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in the home are doing God’s will when they strive to make home happy by their self-forgetfulness and ready helpfulness. “Doing God’s will” means doing everything as we know God would have us do it, making God supreme over every detail of human life. It means buying and selling, keeping ledgers, serving at the counter, teaching at the desk, toiling in the fields, sitting in the council chamber, casting a vote, taking our pleasure, sharing in social joys, and doing all this for God. 98This is what we pray for when we say, “Thy will be done.”

Look at the qualifying words that follow: “as in heaven so on earth.” Heaven supplies the pattern for earth. I have just two words to say about the way in which God’s will is done in heaven—(1) It is done cheerfully. Saints and angels find their highest joy in doing God’s will. If earth is to be like heaven in this respect, we must obey God cheerfully. God wants no grudging service. Our obedience must be glad, willing, free. God’s will can not be done by us as it is done in heaven, until we can say sincerely, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God, yea, Thy law is within my heart.” (2) It is done by ALL. You will look in vain in the heavenly land for the disobedient and the refractory and the rebellious. Heaven is perfectly happy, because all its people are perfect in their obedience. Before earth can be like heaven, God’s will must be done by ALL. It is done to-day only by a FEW. There are multitudes who rebel against Him. When these return to their allegiance, the day of God will break.

Thy will be done! This petition calls our attention to the most crying and urgent need of our day, the need of a simpler and more implicit 99obedience. It is not more knowledge of God’s will that we want, but grace to put in practice what we know. What is the use of coming here to-day to hear God’s will declared, if to-morrow in our business life, we deliberately flout and reject it? I venture to say this, that if to-morrow and the following days we only did what we know our Lord desires us to do, we should revolutionise the life of this town. And will you suffer me to remind you that it is not to those who make a profession and parade of religion that heaven is promised, but to those who faithfully and loyally obey. “Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven.”

VI “Daily Bread”

“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Matt. vi. 11

“Give us day by day our daily bread.”—Luke xi. 3.

The petition which we are to study together this morning opens the second part of the Lord’s Prayer. Up to this point our petitions have all been concerned with God’s glory and praise. We have prayed “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” Having thus observed the rule, “first things first,” having sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, we are now at liberty to pass on to secondary things, and to offer up to God petitions for personal blessings. And the first petition we are taught to offer is this, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We begin at the very bottom. We start the list of personal petitions with a prayer for “daily bread.”

101Will you notice what a gracious light this petition throws upon the condescension of God? Our Lord is the high and Holy One, who inhabits eternity, and yet He stoops to lowly folk and lowly things. “The Lord thinketh upon me.” Whatsoever concerns me is of concern to Him. “Give me bread” is not too humble a petition to bring into the presence of the great White Throne. A one-sided notion of the majesty of God has led men oftentimes to feel that the ordinary little cares of a human life are quite too insignificant and trifling for Him to notice. “God is so busy,” they say; “He has so many things to think about, that we ought not to trouble Him with our little anxieties and worries. Such petty things are quite beneath the dignity of His attention.” That was exactly how the disciples felt long ago, when they were for driving away those mothers who had brought their little children for Christ to bless. They felt that the great Preacher, on whose lips vast crowds hung, ought not to be bothered about babies. They thought that Christ had so many things of importance to think about, that it was absurd to expect Him to take notice of little children. The same kind of feeling has possessed many of the men who have commented on this petition. Many of the old 102church fathers, and indeed many modern commentators, refuse to believe that this is a prayer for ordinary food, for mere bread. They cannot persuade themselves that a petition for so commonplace a thing as bread could possibly find a place for itself in the Model Prayer. This is too trifling a request to trouble God about. So they cast about for some other than the obvious and literal meaning of the sentence, something which they imagine is more dignified, and satisfy themselves at last by saying that bread here means spiritual bread, food for the soul, the Bread of Life. But the simple and obvious meaning of the phrase is, after all, the true one. Erasmus, the great sixteenth century Grecian, thought a reference to physical food would be incongruous “in so heavenly a prayer.” But far from being incongruous, the prayer becomes more gracious and beautiful because this petition for bread is in it! The picture of Christ, which is given us in the Gospels, is all the more winsome for the story which tells us that He took the little children in His arms and blessed them; and the character of God becomes all the more beautiful when we see His love stooping even to caring for our commonest wants. “Give us bread.” This petition asks God to supply our primary physical wants. It 103is not an unworthy petition. It is not too trivial a request to bring to God; for God is not a God simply for great crises, supreme emergencies, tremendous catastrophes: He is a God for every day, and for the common events of every day. Our God is, shall I say, a Master of detail. He cares not simply for the movements of worlds and the policies of nations. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and He counts the very hairs of our head. Nothing is too small for God to notice; the commonest affairs of the commonest life are matters of concern to Him.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Will you notice!—

(1) That this prayer proclaims the fact of our dependence upon God for the very simplest of boons. “Give us bread.” At first glance we might be tempted to think this was a poor man’s prayer; a prayer for the man who is face to face with hunger; a prayer for the man who does not know to-day how he is going to live through to-morrow; a prayer for the man whose balance at the bank has been exhausted, and whose last shilling has been spent; a prayer for the man whose cupboard is empty, and who has nothing in basket or store. “But,” we say, “this is not a prayer for a rich man; this is not a prayer 104for a man whose barns and storehouses are full; this is not a prayer for those who are nursed in the lap of luxury—the well-to-do, the affluent, the millionaire.” This is a prayer for Lazarus, not for Dives. But, as a matter of fact, I do not read that Jesus anywhere says that this is a petition the rich men need not offer. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, you will find that some of the prayers, e.g., the general thanksgiving and the prayer for all sorts and conditions of men—contain petitions which may be inserted or omitted according to the circumstances of the congregation. Such petitions you will find printed in italics and enclosed in brackets, and the instruction is given at the side, that such a petition is only to be used when any members of the congregation specially desire it. But this petition is not printed in italics. It is not enclosed in brackets. There is no instruction at the side to say, “This petition is to be offered by a congregation of the poor, but may be omitted by a congregation of the rich.” Oh no! there it stands in the body of the prayer. Before it you will find the command of Christ “When ye pray, say, Give us this day our daily bread.” There are no exceptions made. This is a prayer for all men, for the prince as well as the 105pauper, for the rich as well as the poor—“Give us this day our daily bread.”

And it is thus a prayer for all, because all are absolutely dependent upon God. We have nothing which we have not received. Every good and perfect gift cometh from above from the Father of Light, with whom is no variableness neither shadow cast by turning. In God we live and move and have our being. All men depend upon God, and they depend upon him for everything. For life, for breath, for vigour of mind, for strength of body, we all depend on Him. And nowhere is this utter dependence of man upon God more clearly seen than in the matter of DAILY BREAD. The possession of wealth is apt to blind us to the fact of our dependence. Men who are rich and increased with goods are always in danger of thinking they have need of nothing. Men whose affairs have prospered, like the rich fool in the parable, are always prone to think themselves secure and safe for future years, and say to their souls as he said, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” Why, we talk ourselves about a man who has private property which brings him in a few hundreds a year being “independent.” Independent of what? 106Independent of whom? It is not simply that wealth has a curious trick sometimes of taking to itself wings and flying away; it is not simply that life is full of instances of tragic vicissitudes of fortune; it is not simply that we see the supposed possessor of millions the friend of titled lords one day, figuring in the Bankruptcy Court the next. Even assuming that riches when made can be kept, of whom is a man “independent”? Why, though you had the wealth of the Rothschilds, you would still be as dependent upon God for mere bread as the meanest pauper in Christchurch workhouse. For consider for a moment the facts of the case. All wealth in the last resort depends upon the produce of the soil. In these days, when civilisation is so complicated, this is a fact we are always in danger of overlooking and forgetting; but it is a fact, nevertheless, all wealth in the last resort depends upon the produce of the soil—the simple necessaries of life. Gold is only valuable for what it can buy—its power of purchasing what is needful for the support of life. But supposing for one moment that the earth did not yield her increase; supposing a summer should pass without a crop; supposing there should be no harvest of corn or fruit; supposing the world suddenly 107found itself without food, of what use would your glittering sovereigns be to you? Of what use would your railway shares and bank shares be to you? Of what use would your costly diamonds and precious stones be to you? You could not live upon them! They would be as worthless as the very dust of the street if there was nothing to buy! Yes, that is the simple truth; if the world should wake up in the morning to find itself absolutely without food, the man whose safe is stuffed with share scrip and whose plate-chest is crammed with gold and precious stones, would be in just as sad a plight as the poorest beggar in Bournemouth. In the last resort all men depend upon the produce of the fields; and the produce of the fields is the gift of God. Man cannot make food. He cannot create bread. With all his knowledge of chemistry he cannot command a harvest. God must GIVE it. And He gives the harvest year by year. Some things, as Dr. Dods remarks, God gives us once for all—our supply of coal and the various minerals and metals. But corn, food, and bread He gives us year by year, as if to emphasise the fact of our dependence upon him. I have read somewhere that when the month of August comes round the world is each year within two months 108of famine. The world’s granaries at that time contain only eight weeks’ supply of corn. How forcibly such a fact preaches the truth of our dependence upon God! Rich and poor alike depend for very life upon the harvest God shall give. “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer for us all. It is a prayer for Job in his prosperity quite as much as for Job in his adversity. It is a prayer for Joseph amid the well-stocked granaries of Egypt quite as much as for Jacob face to face with starvation in Caanan. It is a prayer for rich and poor, for the man who has his thousands as well as the man who has not a shilling; for we are all pensioners upon the bounty of God; what He gives us we gather, and it is only when He opens His hands that we are filled with good.

Now, let me pass on to speak, in the second place, of:

(2) The modesty and simplicity of the request made in this prayer, “Give us this day our daily BREAD.” “Bread” that is what is asked for—the bare necessities of life. As T. T. Lynch quaintly puts it, “This is a prayer for daily bread, not for daily cake.” And as if to emphasise the modesty of the request, it is not for the necessities of a lifetime, but for the 109necessities of to-day that we are to ask. “Give us this day our daily bread.” The adjective which is translated “daily” is a word that has caused scholars no end of trouble. It is found nowhere else in literature, either sacred or profane, and there have been at least thirty different meanings assigned to it. But only two interpretations need be considered. One is that which we have in our familiar version of the prayer, “daily bread”; the other would make the word to mean “sufficient for my sustenance.” The old Syriac version translates it “bread for my need.” So that you will notice that whichever interpretation is adopted “human wants,” as Godet says, “are here reduced to the minimum.” We are to pray for bread; we are to pray for only as much of that as will suffice for the day, or meet our present needs. The spirit of this petition is that of the prayer of Agur of old, “Feed me with food convenient for me.”

I cannot help feeling that our modern life, with its insatiable appetite for wealth and its love of luxury, stands rebuked by this prayer. Men in these days desire not simply enough for their wants; they desire more than enough—more even than they can use. They struggle and strain that they may get a superfluity; and 110the result is poverty at one end of the social scale, and luxury, extravagance and waste at the other. Now, I am not prepared to say that to acquire wealth is wrong. But I am prepared to say this, and in saying it I base myself on our Lord’s own words, wealth and the luxury it buys are perilous to the best interests of the soul. Rome was strong and vigorous and happy while her people lived simply, and her noblest sons thought it no shame to share in humble manual labour. But when wealth and luxury entered in, when her populace, despising honest toil, lived on the doles of the Emperor, and her nobles wasted tens of thousands of pounds upon a single banquet, Rome became weak, rotten, wretched.

Wealth is as perilous as ever it was. Luxury still corrupts the soul. Plain living is most conducive to high thinking. It is easier always to be a Christian in a peasant’s hut than in Cæsar’s household. For the Christian life is a simple, spare—may I not say a severe life. Therefore Christ warned us against riches when he said, “How hardly shall they that 111have riches enter into the kingdom of God.” Therefore here He teaches us to ask for simplest, barest necessaries—“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Let me go on to notice further that in offering this prayer:—

(3) We pray for others as well as ourselves. How does the petition read? “Give us this day our daily bread.” The prayer is in the plural, not the singular. It is not “Give ME,” but “Give us” our daily bread. Christ will not let us forget the fact of brotherhood. He will not let us forget that we are members of a great family. He will not let us forget what moderns call “the solidarity of the race.” We must pray for others as well as ourselves. Christ when He was on earth gave us an improved edition of the commandments. Moses had ten commandments in his code. Jesus reduced them to two. And the two commands in the code of Christ were—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,” and second, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Now this petition illustrates that second commandment, and embodies its spirit. We are “loving our neighbours as ourselves” when we say “Give 112us!” This is a prayer for our brother’s need, for our brother’s want. We are remembering him, bearing his burden when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” When we uttered that prayer this morning we were praying for the poor and needy everywhere—the poor in Bournemouth, the poor in vast London yonder, the poor the wide world over. But, do you not see, you cannot pray for the poor and needy and then turn a deaf ear to their cry. The genuineness of this prayer must be proved in action. I often ask God to bless the work of this Church, but I should simply be mocking God if I left it there and did not at once proceed to put whatever power and energy I possess into the work for which I have been praying. And so I should consider I had prayed a sham prayer if, after saying “Give us this day our daily bread,” I was not ready even at cost of sacrifice to help to provide bread for those who lack. The gospel of charity and mutual helpfulness is in the verse. At this blessed season appeals come to us from all quarters on behalf of the orphan, the widow, the friendless, and the poor. There are multitudes of our brothers and sisters in bitter need. We have prayed “Give us this day our daily bread,” making their cause our 113own. May not the true answer to that prayer be, that God will bid us contribute to their need out of our abundance and plenty? The best proof of the sincerity of our prayer would be that we should go forth during this week and carry into some desolate homes a little Christmas gladness and joy.

Yet again notice that in offering this prayer we pray:

(4) For what is legitimately and honestly our own. “Give us,” so runs the petition, “our daily bread.” I do not think it is at all fanciful to interpret this pronoun OUR, as Dr. Dods does, to mean that the bread we pray for must be our own and not another’s; that is to say, it must be fairly earned and honestly come by. “Except a man work,” so says the Scripture, “neither shall he eat.” The divine law is that the bread a man eats should be bread won by his own labour. But there are plenty of people in this world who try to live out of the labour of other people. They are busy, as the saying is, “taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.” They do this not simply by deception and theft and robbery—they do it also by unfair competition, by false dealing, by bogus company promoting, by stock-exchange gambling, by oppression, injustice and wrong. There are those among us 114who devote their talents to the task of drawing hard-earned money out of the pockets of English people without giving value in return. They want to live and grow fat on the bread of others, not on bread of their own earning. But what we have to pray for is our own bread, bread honestly and fairly earned. That little word “our” stands there to warn us against all dishonesty, trickery, fraud, injustice. The man of business must be able to say that every sovereign of his profits has been gained by fair and honest trading. The artisan must be able to say that every penny in his week’s wage has been earned by good and faithful labour. The master who pays his men less than their due, the man who wastes his master’s time, the shopkeeper who resorts to sharp practices—in fact, any one who strives to get hold of money otherwise than by fairly and squarely earning it, are all sinning against the spirit of this prayer which teaches us to say, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Just one word more before I close. I have said that the primary and essential reference of this petition is to bread, this material bread that nourishes the life of our bodies. But we need not exclude altogether from our thoughts that spiritual bread, that Bread of Life, to which the old Fathers saw reference here. Man does 115not live by bread alone. Man is not a mere animal. God breathed into man the breath of life, and he became a living soul. And the soul needs fit nourishment even as the body does, and that fit nourishment the soul finds in Jesus Christ. He is the “Bread of Life.” This petition is also the right prayer for the hungering soul, “Give us this day our daily bread,” for our souls need a daily supply. The supply of yesterday will not do for to-day, any more than yesterday’s dinner will suffice us for to-day’s work. You cannot live on the memory of past spiritual experiences. You cannot live on the remembrance of blessed fellowship with your Lord held long ago. You cannot live on the recollection of mercies received months or years back. For every day you need a fresh gift of grace. The manna of old only held good for one day. It had to be gathered fresh every morning. The manna of one day grew corrupt and worthless before the next. So it is with the bread of our souls. You must get it fresh every day. For every day you must get new stores of grace. This is the prayer for you and me, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Give! yes, this also is a gift. You cannot buy “the Bread of Life.” Its price has never been quoted in the markets. No money could 116purchase it. But what no money could purchase is offered to you and me for nothing. God never sells. God is a king, He gives. Buy? No, you cannot buy, Can you buy pardon? Can you buy peace? Can you buy redemption? Can you buy heaven? No, you cannot buy; but what you cannot buy God will give. Listen, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat, yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Listen again, “Everyone that thirsteth let him come and take of the water of life freely.” Listen yet again, “The gift of God is eternal life.” Giving! This is royal giving. Hungering souls come to God—come to God for the Bread of Life. There is in the Father’s house enough and to spare; why hunger ye any more? Why spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not? Your father is waiting to give you all you need. He is only waiting to hear you say, “Evermore give us this bread.”

VII “Forgiveness”

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”—Matt. vi. 12.

“And forgive us our sins; for we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us.”—Luke xi. 4.

My exposition of the Lord’s Prayer brings me this morning to speak a few simple words upon the two great fundamental facts of the Gospel—man’s need of forgiveness, and God’s willingness to bestow it.

The petition immediately preceding this one is the prayer for daily bread. We are absolutely dependent upon God for our very existence; so our Lord teaches us to ask God for the food—the material bread that is to sustain our physical life from day to day. But “man shall not live by bread alone.” There is another hunger than hunger of the body—there is a hunger of the soul; and what the soul hungers for 118is pardon, forgiveness, and the peace forgiveness always brings. So when we have prayed for bread we have not come to an end. We have another prayer to offer. We have a larger request to make. We have a greater boon to ask—“Give us this day our daily bread, AND forgive us our sins.”

The question has often been asked, “Is life worth living?” By some the question is answered without reservation in the affirmative, by others in the negative. For myself, I am not prepared to answer either “Yes” or “No.” My reply would be, “It all depends.” Life, it seems to me, is not worth having if it be not lived in the sunshine of God’s smile. Life is not worth having if God’s face is turned away from us. Life is not worth having if our sins interpose themselves like a black frowning cloud between us and the Eternal Light. To make life worth living, life must be made happy and blessed and peaceful, and before life can be made happy that barrier of sin must be removed, and we must walk in the light of God’s countenance. The prayer for bread is a prayer for life—for mere existence. But mere existence may be a doubtful boon. To some the prolongation of life simply means the prolongation of misery. Why should men pray for the continuance 119of a life which is radically wretched? There are multitudes in our world more inclined to pray for swift death than for long life. They say, with Charles Kingsley, “The sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep.” No, it is not mere life, it is not life at any price, but it is the blessed, the peaceful life we want. So we go on to pray for a gift greater far than the gift of bread; we go on to pray for that which alone can make life tolerable, welcome, really worth living; we go on to pray for mercy, pardon, reconciliation, peace. “Father, forgive us our sins.”

“Sin” is an ugly word, a word that stands for the ugliest, most terrible fact in the universe of God. The world was fair and bright till sin entered it; all its wretchedness is the result of sin. Man was pure and happy till sin entered; his foulness and broken-heartedness are the result of sin. The Bible looks at this terrible fact of sin, and fails to find a single word large enough to describe it in all its many aspects of horror. It employs various words for this one terrible thing according as it views it from different standpoints. Looking at it from the standpoint of the true end of human life, sin is a “missing of the mark.” The chief end of man is to glorify God. The sinner fails in 120that. He misses the mark. Sin from this point of view means failure, defeat, disaster. The Bible looks at sin from the standpoint of Law, the Divine Law written in the nature and on the conscience of man, and brands sin as lawlessness. Every single sin is a trespass, a transgression, and overstepping of the bounds. The Bible looks at sin from the standpoint of prudence, and stigmatises sin as folly—the most stupendous and senseless of all follies. The sinner is a man who, for a few moments of delirious excitement, barters away his immortal soul. The Bible looks at sin from the standpoint of God, and sin then becomes disobedience, or, as in the text quoted from Matthew, it becomes “debt.”

Perhaps we are too apt to think of sin only in its effect upon ourselves. We think of the blight it brings upon human character and the ruin it makes in human lives. It is terrible to us because it always brings a curse with it. We fear and dread sin, not always because of its own intrinsic horror, but because of the penalties it inevitably entails; so that all too often our very fear of sin has its roots in selfishness, and springs out of self-love. I want to say to you that we shall never see sin in its naked horror, we shall never see it in its awful 121hatefulness, until we look at it from another standpoint. We sin not against ourselves alone, but against God. David, in the great crime of his life, had sinned against Uriah, whose blood he had caused to be shed, and against Bathsheba, the partner of his sin, and against his own soul; but when under the faithful speech of Nathan he was brought to see that awful sin of his in its true light, he lost sight of himself, and Bathsheba and Uriah; he could only think of the God he had flouted and outraged and grieved, and this was the agonised cry that broke from his lips, “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.” Then comes in the enormity of sin. It is sin against God! Let me illustrate what I mean from our ordinary human life. Say that a son who has been loved at home and has been the pride of his mother’s heart, falls into disgrace and is brought up in the police courts charged with some shameful deed. If such a son has any sensibility at all, his sin will appear hateful to him, not so much because it has brought disgrace and loss of liberty to himself, but because away at his home a mother’s heart is well nigh broken with shame and grief. That will be the keenest stab of pain such a lad will suffer. It is the picture 122of his heart-broken mother that will make him loathe and despise and hate his sin. It is then we shall see the hatefulness of sin, when we occupy David’s standpoint, and say, “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned.” Even though sin entailed no loss to the sinner, involved no penalty, brought with it no curse, it would remain still utterly loathsome and hateful if we only realised that every sin of ours caused grief and pain to the heart of the eternal God, our loving Father in heaven.

Now that is the point of view from which sin is regarded in this prayer. It is against God! Matthew uses the word “debt.” As Dr. Morison says, “When we sin there is something in our act for which we become liable to God. Formerly He had a claim upon us; now He has a claim against us.” The sins of our past history are included in this word “debt.” They have not done with us, though we try to persuade ourselves that we have done with them! Ah! what a relief it would be if we could only be sure that sin when once committed was over and done with for ever! But it is not so! These sins of ours enrol themselves in a great book of accounts; not one is omitted; not one is overlooked; not one is forgotten. Do we try to persuade ourselves that somehow or other 123the sins of the past have been lost sight of? Do we try to flatter ourselves that they have been buried in the dust of the years? That is a vain hope. There are no mistakes, no omissions in the eternal account books. The ink of those books never fades. There every sin is enrolled. There you see them—a long, black, damning list. That is your DEBT. Sins of commission—the evil words we have spoken, the evil deeds we have done, they are all there. Sins of omission are there as well. In fact, I fancy that it is to sins of this class that the word “debt” specially points. “Debt” is something we OWE. In relation to God it is something we owed to Him and failed to pay. So it stands here for the many things we ought to have done, which we have left undone.

There are some of us who perhaps flatter ourselves that we have never committed any flagrant sin. We are not blasphemers; we are not drunkards; we are not profligates; we have never committed theft or adultery or murder; we have never been guilty of any crime that has brought us to public shame; and on the strength of that we are half inclined to think that the name “sinner” is not applicable to us. But notice how this word “debt” lays hold of even the most respectable of us. 124There are certain things we owe to God. We owe Him reverence. Have we given it to Him? We owe Him obedience. Have we given it to Him? We owe Him service. Have we given it to Him? We owe Him our heart’s best love. Have we given it to Him? We owe Him the first place in our thoughts and affections. Have we given it to Him? We owe Him complete self-surrender. Have we given it to Him? Ask yourselves these questions. Probe your hearts with them. Face them frankly and honestly. Have you given God perfect obedience, the best love of your hearts, the first place in your lives? Oh, how such questions humble us! How they cover us with shame and confusion! Looking back over my own life, I can see how my years have been marred and disfigured by my failure to give to God what He has a right to expect. I can see that I have not reverenced Him as I ought; that I have not obeyed Him as I ought; that I have not placed Him first, as I ought. When I begin to ask myself if I have done what God expects from me, my pride all disappears, my heart is pierced as with sharp swords, my self-satisfaction is torn to shreds, and I am humbled to the dust; for as I look back every day tells its tale of things left undone which I ought to have done, 125and these sins of omission rise up before me—a mountain load of debt which I owe to God.

Debt! what a terrible word that is to every true and honest man! There are multitudes who would prefer to bear privation and poverty rather than run into debt. The workhouse is bad enough, but better the workhouse than “debt.” But will you suffer me to say that “debtors” we all of us are? “We have all sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” We have come short—we have given God less than His due; He has a claim against us; we are “in debt” to Him. And the debt is one that cannot be expressed in the figures and coinage of earth. It is a debt that money can never pay. I have heard sometimes of men who, when they have found themselves in financial difficulties, have called their creditors together, and have said to them, “If you will but give me time, I will pay you all in full”; and from time to time we read in our newspapers of honourable men discharging with interest debts they had incurred years before. Can we do something like that with this debt we owe to God? Can we work it off in the days and years that are to come? I cannot hold out to you any hope of doing that. Work as hard as you like to please God to-day, when 126the day is done, what will you have to say? Just this, “We have been unprofitable servants—we have only done what we ought.” Only what we ought—there is no margin, nothing over, which you can apply to the reduction of the old debt. The arrears of obligation are untouched. May I venture to say that, before night comes, by some sin or other, you will have added to the debt? It would be as easy to bale the ocean dry as to hope by your own efforts to pay this debt. It would be as easy—nay, it would be infinitely easier—to count the sands of the seashore than to remove this mountain load of obligation. Try your best, and you will fail as Paul failed, as Luther failed. Spite of your best efforts the debt—that crushing debt—goes on increasing. Well, what can you do? You can do nothing! Sin past and present, sin of commission and omission, sin—that long, black, damning record that stands against your name in the eternal account book—what can you do with it? How can you remove it? How can you blot it out? How can you bury it out of sight and mind? How can you erase out of the book that fatal story? You say you must have something done, or that debt will strangle you. What can you do to be delivered from 127this body of death? My brother, you can do nothing; you cannot pay the debt, you cannot blot out the sin, you cannot erase the record from the book. Do your best, and at the end you will be “in debt.” But you say, “Can nothing be done? Am I, then, doomed to ruin and to death? Is there no way of paying this debt?” Here is the gospel in a nutshell. Here is the good news, old as the centuries, but new in your ears and mine to-day. Something can be done! You can do nothing, I can do nothing, but God, the God against whom we have sinned, He can do everything. He can remove that mountain load of debt. He can blot out that fatal record in the book. He can erase every entry. He can bury our sins out of sight for ever. We can never pay that overwhelming debt; but He, He can give us our account back with “Settled” written at the bottom of it. Oh yes, here is the Gospel: Sin in man, but forgiveness in God; debt in man, but mercy in God. “Where sin doth abound there grace doth much more abound.”

Listen, as to what God will do with your sins and mine! He will cancel the debt! He will blot out the handwriting that was against us and put it out of the way, nailing it to the Cross of Christ! He will erase that fatal 128record in the book! He will remember our sins against us no more. As far as the east is from the west, so far will He remove our transgressions from us. Listen to His invitation and His gracious promise, “Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow, though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool.” This is the Gospel—this is the good news. There is something greater, stronger even than the sin of man, and that is the grace of God. I can see a limit to human sin. I can see no limit to the Divine mercy.

Yes, there is mercy with God! There is forgiveness with Him! The wonder of the world still is that the God against whom we have sinned is the One who will take our sin away.

That remedy was the Cross of Christ. It is He, the sinless Jesus, who has cancelled the debt. “He died for us according to the Scriptures.” It is His pierced hand that shall 129blot out the record of our sins. It is in His life-blood that we are to be washed free from every stain. It is at the foot of His Cross our sins are to be buried. Christ the sinless one is the Lamb of God. He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. This is the Gospel. There is a debt against us we can never hope to pay. But God for Christ’s sake will cancel it. There are sins which crush us with their weight and burden, but God for Christ’s sake will take them all away. There are stains upon us—black and deep and foul; but the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. Just as the snow descends from heaven and hides all the grime and filth of earth underneath its mantle until the whole surface is one pure glistening white, so God will let His mercy cover us; He will clothe us in righteousness until every stain is covered and we stand forth whiter than snow. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their trespasses. The Cross proclaims that there is forgiveness with God. And I want to preach the free glad Gospel of the Cross to you this morning. I want to say to you sin-stricken, perishing, dying men and women, there is forgiveness 130with God. There is nothing which His mercy cannot do. There is no sin too great, no guilt too black for Him to pardon. A poor criminal in Scotland, as he went forth to his place of execution kept crying out, “He is a great Forgiver. He is a great Forgiver.” Yes, He is a great Forgiver! Let us men and women, ruined and undone by sin, praise God, for He is a great Forgiver. His tender mercy is ever upon us. In God’s mercy is our hope. And the Cross is the pledge of pardon which stoops to the lowest and most vile. The Cross, the Cross—the bitter, shameful Cross; the glorious, radiant Cross; our most jubilant songs arise from the Cross—

Well! and what was the price of pardon? I can tell you what it cost God. It cost God the death of His own, His only Son. The Cross was necessary to make pardon possible. “Without shedding of blood there is no remission.” That is what your forgiveness and mine cost God, it cost Him the blood of His Son. But what will it cost us? What will it cost? It will cost us nothing. As I said, when speaking 131of the previous petition, God does not sell, God gives. Some have tried to buy forgiveness by fasts and vigils and penances and rigid self-discipline. That is how Luther, when he was a monk at Erfurt, and Thomas Bilney, when he was a student at Cambridge, tried to obtain pardon and peace. Some have even believed that pardon was to be bought with money, so the boxes of the Indulgence sellers in Germany were filled with the coins of men and women who wanted forgiveness. But pardon is not to be bought, neither with money nor with penances nor vigils nor fasts. Forgiveness is to be had for nothing. Pardon is given without money and without price. All that is required is that you should ask for it. “Ask and ye shall receive.” Zacchæus asked, and he received it. Mary of Magdala asked, and she received it. The thief on the cross asked, and he received it. Come and ask, and you too shall receive it. Why will ye be stricken any more? Why will ye die, O house of Israel. Come and ask, and you shall hear the answer fall on your ears like sweetest music, “Son, daughter, thy sins are forgiven thee, go in peace.” That is what this petition teaches us to do. It bids us come and ask. For Jesus recognizes that we are all of us “debtors.” 132But the debt will be remitted for the asking. Therefore He teaches us to pray “Forgive us our trespasses.” The ground of forgiveness is not in ourselves. It is not because of our own merit that the debt is cancelled. We are saved not by works, but by grace. We are forgiven because of the boundless love that fills the heart of God, the love that found expression in the Cross of Christ. Our confidence lies in the fact that God is our Father. Let us trust the Father! Let us believe the message of the Cross! Let us not hang back through doubt or fear! Let us go with boldness to the throne of grace just as we are—guilty, sin-stained, and vile. He will cast none of us out, but He will forgive us freely; His anger will be turned away and He will comfort us, and peace like a river shall flood our troubled souls!

Let me now go on to ask you to notice for a moment the qualifying clause: “As we also have forgiven our debtors,” says Matthew. “For we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us,” says Luke. I think these words are meant to be in the first place words of encouragement. If man can forgive, much more can God. They remind us of that splendid verse, “If ye being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall 133your Father who is in heaven give good things unto them that ask Him.” We have known men who have generously and freely forgiven great wrongs committed against them. We are here told to think of the way in which even men can forgive in order that we may have faith to believe that God, who is infinitely more loving and pitiful than the best of men, can and will forgive to the uttermost. But these words are also words of solemn warning. Sometimes they make the prayer die upon our lips, for they require the forgiving spirit to be in us before we ask forgiveness from God. Do you notice how this prayer, which soars to the heights, enforces also the simple everyday moralities? Look at this petition, “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us.” “For we ourselves also forgive every one.” Is that true? Have you forgiven every one? Are there no grudges that you cherish? Are there no enmities in your heart? Is there no one against whom you cherish malice or ill-will? If there is ill-will against anyone in your heart, can you pray this prayer? Can you say to God, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive every one?” You remember how, in the striking story of the two debtors, our Lord condemned the man who 134could ask God to forgive him that awful debt of sin, and yet cherish an unforgiving spirit against his neighbour. Oh what a warning, a solemn warning, there is in this petition, “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Or look at the way Matthew puts it, “Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors.” I want to ask you a plain question: “Would you really like God to forgive just in exactly the same way as you forgive your enemies?” Do you think you would? Why, is not our forgiveness all too often grudging and half-hearted? Do we not often cherish the remembrance of the offences? Do we not say, “I will forgive, but I cannot forget?” Would you like God to forgive you like that? I can never forget the words which Augustus Hare writes on this passage. He pictures an unforgiving man praying this prayer, and this is what he says: “O God, I have sinned against Thee many times from my youth up till now. I have often been forgetful of Thy goodness. I have neglected Thy service. I have broken Thy laws. I have done many things utterly wrong against Thee. Such is my guiltiness, O Lord, in Thy sight; deal with me, I beseech Thee, even as I deal with my neighbour. He has not offended 135me one-tenth, one-hundredth part as much as I have offended Thee. But I cannot forgive Him. Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord as I deal with him. He has been very ungrateful to me, though not a tenth, not a hundredth part as ungrateful as I have been to Thee. Yet I cannot overlook his ingratitude. Deal with me, O Lord, I beseech Thee, as I deal with him. I remember and treasure up every trifle which shows how ill he has behaved to me. Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him. I am determined to take the very first opportunity of doing him an ill turn. Deal with me, I beseech Thee, O Lord, as I deal with him.” Oh, what a terrible curse such a prayer is! But, brethren, may it not be that, if we cherish unkind feelings in our hearts, if we hug secret hates and enmities, when we ask God to forgive us, in exactly the same way as we forgive others, we too may be invoking not blessing, but doom upon our own heads. Before we can pray this prayer we need the spirit of forgiveness in our own hearts. Emerson says of Abraham Lincoln, that “his heart was as big as the world, but there was no room in it for the memory of a wrong.” Such must be our spirit also, the spirit that Jesus showed when on the Cross 136he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” May God help us even now to forgive from our hearts our brothers their trespasses, then can we draw near with boldness to the throne of grace and pray, “Father, forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us.”

VIII “Temptation”

“And bring us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.”—Matt. vi. 13.

“And bring us not into temptation.”—Luke xi. 5.

Forgiveness is the beginning not the end, the first step not the last in the Christian life. In the Gospel according to John, we read a story about a poor woman who was dragged half dead with shame into the presence of Christ, and charged before Him with a nameless crime. Her enemies crowded round clamouring for her instant punishment. But Jesus, just because He was so pure and good, was infinitely tender and pitiful. He had no harsh judgment to pronounce upon this poor, shame-stricken woman.

When her brutal accusers, made cowards by their own consciences, slunk away one by one, leaving the sinner alone with her 138Saviour, His word to her was one of pure compassion, “Neither do I condemn thee.” There was pardon for her black sin, forgiveness for her shameful past. But having forgiven her, Christ did not let her go without laying a command upon her. This forgiven woman was not at liberty to return to her old life of folly and shame. “Go,” said Jesus, dismissing her, “sin no more.” That is an illustration of Christ’s unvarying methods with sinners. Forgiveness—full, free forgiveness—is to be had for the asking. Bring your sinful, shameful past before Him; you will hear no bitter, angry words of reproach from His lips. The words you will hear will be words of tenderest compassion. Bring your terrible debt before Him and tell Him of your dire, your abject, your utter poverty. Say to Him, “Lord, I have nothing to pay,” and He will say to you, “All this thy debt, I freely forgive.” Bring your burden of guilt and shame to Him. He will not spurn you from Him though He is so pure and you so unclean, but with words of pity and love He will welcome you, and take the burden of your guilt and shame clean away. Yes, Christ will freely forgive you. He will have mercy upon you. He will abundantly pardon. But forgiveness of the past is not all. What of 139the future? Well, as to that future the Master will lay upon you also the old injunction, “Go, sin no more.” For the forgiven man cannot return to his old life of sin. After forgiveness comes the life of struggle and conflict against the world, the flesh and the devil. After the blotting out of the shameful past comes the earnest striving to keep the record of the future clean. Forgiveness is not the end, but the beginning. After forgiveness comes all that our fathers meant by the old term, “sanctification.” After forgiveness comes all that John means when he tells us to purify ourselves even as He is pure; all that Paul means when he tells us “to work out our own salvation.” The struggle, the conflict, the battle comes after pardon has been bestowed. For when Jesus whispers into our ears the gladsome message, “Thy sins are forgiven thee,” He lays upon us also the command, “Go, sin no more.”

What I have been saying up to this point illustrates the connection between this petition and the one we studied together last Sunday morning. “Forgive us our debts” is a prayer that God will blot out the record of past sin. “Lead us not into temptation” is a prayer for protection in the future. For I want you to notice that the man who has truly repented of 140his sin wants not simply the past to be blotted out, but he wants grace to shun sin in the days to come. He wants not only to be delivered from the penalty of sin, but he also longs to be emancipated from its power. Let not the freeness of forgiveness ever lead you to think lightly of sin. There were some in the very early days of the Church who interpreted this freeness of forgiveness as a licence to sin. They said, “What matters it? God will forgive.” Nay, they even thought, or at any rate they tried to persuade themselves, they were doing a favour to God by continuing their old wicked practices, as the greater their sin was, the finer the opportunity for the display of God’s forgiving love. They sinned, so they said, that grace might abound. The Church has been troubled and harassed by many a heresy in the course of the centuries, but the most damnable, the most soul-destroying that ever assailed it, was this Antinomian heresy, which bade men sin on because God was ready to forgive, which taught that sin was light, trivial, cheap, because pardon was free. Sin light? Sin cheap? Sin trivial? Brethren, look at the Cross of Jesus Christ! Measure the enormity of the sin by the sacrifice of the Cross! It cost God the life of His own Son to deliver us from it.

Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid! for by every sin of ours we crucify the Lord afresh, and put Him to an open shame. The programme of the Christian life is not sin and pardon, sin and pardon, sin and pardon, day after day, month after month, year after year. The programme of the Christian life is pardon, sanctification, holiness. After pardon comes the daily struggle with sin, until its power in our souls is broken, and we come off more than conquerors, through Him who loved us. Not that I would imply that any one on this side the grave attains to a state of sinless perfection, or that the time will ever come on earth when the prayer, “Forgive us our sins,” will be out of place on our lips. But the goal set before us is the perfect life; towards that goal we must daily press, and though on earth we may never attain to it, yet to-day ought to see us nearer to it than yesterday, and to-morrow ought to find us nearer than to-day. There is something radically wrong with us if sin has as great a power over us to-day as it had, say, ten years ago. Repentance 142is never genuine and sincere unless it creates within us a hatred and loathing of sin. We have never been truly forgiven if we can go on sinning the old sins day after day; for we never hear Christ say to us, “Thy sins are forgiven thee,” without hearing Him add this charge, “From henceforth sin no more.”

But the command is a hard one to obey. In a world so full of trial and temptation, so full of seductions and enticements to evil, how hard it is for poor, weak, frail men to obey the command, “Go, sin no more.” In a world that presses in upon us on every side, that spreads its glittering prizes before our eyes to tempt us, how hard it is to be unworldly, to hold earth’s best gifts cheap, while we set our affections on things above! In a world so full of uncleanness and impurity, how hard it is to keep one’s garments clean and unspotted! Hard, did I say? Nay, impossible. With the world as it is, and man as he is, the task is impossible. To obey that command, we need help and strength. The task is too difficult for us. It is more than we can do in our own native strength. So we cast the burden back again upon our Lord and say to Him, “Master we would fain obey Thee: we would fain live without sin; but we are weak, and the world 143is strong—too strong for us. Lord, undertake Thou for us. Have pity on our weakness, and bring us not into temptation.” There it stands, a prayer for the future; a cry to God that He will not suffer the world to overcome us, and drag us down again to sin.

Now you will notice that this prayer recognises the fact that—

(1) The world is full of peril to the Christian, because it is full of temptation. The word translated “temptation” in my text really means “testing, trial.” Never a day passes but something happens which puts our moral strength to the test. God does not “tempt” in the sense of inciting to evil; God TESTS. The presence of evil in our world, the incitements to evil that abound, looked at from God’s standpoint, are tests—tests of character, tests of moral strength. But these incitements to evil appeal to weakness and evil in our own hearts, and so to us they become “temptations.” And of such “temptations” our world is full. Bunyan described the Christian life as a journey, but it is a journey through a very dangerous country. There are snares and pit-falls around us on every side. The path leads between a ditch on one side and a quagmire on the other, and along the route are the Slough of Despond, 144and By-Path Meadow, and Doubting Castle, and the Mount of Error, Broad Way Gate, and Dead Man’s Lane, and Vanity Fair. Yes, the path is one that is surrounded with peril, and to stray from it is a very easy matter. That path is the path of life, and these pitfalls and snares and by-paths that endanger the unwary traveller on every hand, are the temptations that beset a man in life, and lure him to his ruin and death. The old story of the fight between the English and the Scotch at Bannockburn says that Bruce, on the night before the battle, honeycombed the ground in front of his army with pit-falls, each of which contained a hidden stake, and then covered them up again with the green turf. In the morning the English cavalry, when it charged upon the Scottish troops, found that the ground, which looked so firm and solid was deceitful and treacherous, and, falling into these hidden pitfalls, horse and rider met their fate. Does life to you look in prospect like a firm, safe, solid road? I tell you that at every step you take you need to beware of some secret pitfall. Does life appear in prospect to any of you like the still, glassy sea of a summer’s noon? I tell you that beneath that shimmering, smiling surface lie hidden the dark and treacherous rocks which have meant wreck and death to many 145a voyager. Oh, yes, human life is beset with temptation. No one is exempt from it. No moment of the day is free from it. Incitements to sin abound. Invitations to enter the broad way meet us at every turn. Why is it parents are so anxious, when their children are sent for the first time to fight life’s battles for themselves in a large town? I will tell you. It is because they know that temptations abound. There is temptation in the glare and false gaiety of the public-house. There is temptation in every painted shameless face seen upon our streets. There is temptation in the companionship of foolish and godless friends. There is temptation in the coarse and filthy speech of associates. There is temptation in unclean literature. There is temptation in business, in the home, at work, at play. Nay, where is it temptation does not lurk? It penetrates everywhere. It found its way into Paradise of old, and Adam yielded to its power. Who is free from it? Not one. Wherever man is, there temptation is. There is no escape from it. Men try to avoid infection, in case of an outbreak of disease, by removing from the infected district. So men of old tried to escape the assaults of temptation by leaving the busy world and fleeing into solitude. But it was 146all in vain. Temptation followed them to their retreats, and many were the fierce struggles an old saint like St. Anthony had to wage in the secret of his cell. Oh, the world is full of temptation. Every lot has its own fierce tests for character. Business life has its temptations; home life has its temptations. The life of hard grinding toil has its temptations; the life of ease and leisure has its temptations also. Never a day passes but in some way or other an appeal is made to our lower, baser nature, and we are urged to yield. The old Greek legends speak of the syrens—creatures half women, half fish—who lived upon the rocks and could sing the most ravishing songs. So entrancing was the music that who ever heard it was irresistibly drawn to the singers. But it was woe to them; for the rocks whereon the syrens lived were strewn with the bones of dead men who had listened to their song and yielded to its fascination. That syren’s song is still being sung, and every mariner on life’s main hears it. The world, the flesh, and the devil are the syrens of to-day. Who has not heard their song? Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we hear its luring, tempting strains. God grant, brethren, we may not yield—for yielding still means destruction and death.

147(2) This verse implies the WEAKNESS of man. “Bring us not into temptation,” into trial, into testing, because we are so prone to break down under the trial. The fact that temptations abound would not matter very much if we were proof against them. It is because we ourselves are so prone to yield that temptation is terrible. To take a spark to green wood would not do very much harm. But to bring temptation upon us is like applying flame to dry shavings or a match to gunpowder. The attack of temptation from without is made formidable by the weakness and treachery within. It is because we know our own weakness, it is because we know how liable we are to break down under any severe test, that we pray, “Bring us not into temptation.” I am simply stating a matter of fact and observation when I say that there is in all of us a bias toward sin, an inclination toward evil. We talk lightly sometimes of the old doctrine of “original sin.” But surely it expressed a truth that we dare not ignore. There is a bias in the human heart toward sin. It is easier for us to do wrong than to do right. That was the truth our Lord meant to convey when He said the path of evil was a broad way, while the road to life was a narrow path. To do evil 148is easy; you have only to shout with the crowd and swim with the stream. But to do right is hard; you must swim against the current, you must dare to stand alone. And it is just this that gives temptation its power and makes it terrible. It accords with our own inclinations. The passions and desires of the flesh second its efforts. The devil finds his best ally in the lusts and weaknesses of a man’s own heart. There is no man safe from temptation. There is no one who can boast that he is strong enough to resist every allurement. There is in all of us some weakness of the soul, and temptation will assail us just at the weakest point; it will find the unfortified place and concentrate its attack upon that; it will find the joints in our harness and point the poisoned arrow there. The old Greek story says that Achilles, the great hero of the Trojan war, was dipped while he was yet a child in the waters of the Styx by his mother, Thetis, in order to make him invulnerable. And the result of that plunge was that every part of Achilles’ body was proof against wounds with the exception of the heel by which his mother held him, and which had not been submerged in the waters. For many years, as a result, Achilles escaped unhurt, but at 149last the poisoned arrow of the Trojan Paris found the weak spot and inflicted the death wound there. So sin and temptation attack us where we are weakest. They appeal to our inclinations, our passions, our lusts; they find out the weak spot. I can only discover One Man in the history of the whole world who was proof against temptation, and that was the Perfect Man, Christ Jesus Himself. But as for everyone else, the best, the bravest, the noblest, surprised by some temptation, betrayed by some weakness, have fallen into sin. Do not say, brethren, that this petition is a prayer for the weak! Do not say it is a prayer for the timid and the cowardly! It is a prayer for us all. Peter very likely thought that there was no need for him to pray this prayer. Perhaps in his heart he longed for an opportunity to be given him of showing how strong and brave he was. Deny his Lord? No! not though all the world forsook Him! No! not though it meant death to be faithful! Well, the night did not pass without bringing an opportunity of putting his boasted strength to the test. But how badly Peter came out of the trial! Would you recognise the proud boaster of a few hours before in the swearing, blaspheming denier at cock-crow? And we 150have many an example in the old Book, beside that of Peter, to warn us against over-confidence. Abraham, whose faith is commended in Scripture, lost all his faith in Egypt. Moses, the man who was renowned for his meekness, lost his temper when the children of Israel murmured. David, the sweet singer of Israel, the man after God’s own heart, was swept by his lust into an act of foulest wickedness. And these examples are enshrined in the pages of this old Book, to bid us beware of over-confidence, and not to boast ourselves in our strength. Pride ever cometh before a fall. There is weakness in all of us. To the strongest of you here this morning, to you who perhaps think yourselves beyond the reach of temptation, let me repeat the old Bible warning, “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” It is the knowledge of our own weakness that makes temptation terrible. We distrust ourselves. We look back over past years and see the number of times we have fallen, the number of times we have yielded to the fascination of the world’s syren song. We remember, too, that when we did escape it was so as by fire; it was through pain and agony. We remember how hard the struggle was, and how near we were to yielding. And the remembrance both 151of our falls and our escapes makes us afraid. We feel that our safety lies in never hearing those fatal strains again. So, conscious of our own weakness, and yet desiring not to offend our heavenly Father again by our sin, we make this our prayer, “Bring us not into temptation.”

(3) Let me ask you to notice that this petition illustrates the spirit of true Christian courage. It is not courage, but foolhardiness that courts danger. It is not courage that risks life and limb in an utterly stupid, needless, bootless task; it is folly. It was not courage that made that mad youth climb the sheer face of the cliff at Folkestone the other day, it was mere senseless bravado. True courage will keep away from danger; true courage will only incur risk and peril when duty demands. Let us learn this lesson. You young men learn this lesson. It is not courage to venture into doubtful places; it is not courage to unite with questionable companions; it is not courage to peer into unclean books; it is not courage to spend your evenings in the public-house; it is not courage to dally with the intoxicating cup; it is not courage to frequent the theatre, with its evil associations, to accustom yourselves to gaze upon the indecencies and to listen to the pruriencies too often heard upon 152the stage. It is not courage to court company where the filthy jest and the coarse laugh and the brutal blasphemy are common; it is not courage to see how near you can go to the edge of the precipice without falling over. No, this is not courage, unless you are prepared to say that it is courage that makes the silly moth flutter round the flame until at last it flutters into it. Courage? No! it is not courage—it is wicked, mad bravado! Your safety, brethren, against sin lies in being shocked at it. True courage looks at the incitements to evil with which life abounds and confesses, “I am afraid of them,” and then makes this petition its prayer, “Father, bring us not into temptation.”

But it may be that in spite of our fears, and in spite of our prayers, God may see fit to bring us into temptation, into some fierce trial that shall test our moral strength. “God,” we read in Genesis, “did tempt, i.e. did test, Abraham.” He put Abraham’s faith and obedience to a searching trial. Jesus, we read, was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, to undergo those forty days of fierce testing. We shrink from these fierce trials, but they are good for us, for if resisted they knit thews and sinews of strength in our souls. We are better 153for temptation resisted and overcome than we should have been if we had never been tempted at all. It is in conflict with temptation that God’s Victoria Cross—the Cross “for valour”—is to be won. Let us ever remember this—there is nothing sinful in being tempted. We sin only when we yield to temptation. Well, supposing that God does see fit to let us enter into temptation, to let our strength and courage be tested in fierce, grim, deadly conflict with sin and evil, what shall we pray for? We will pray then, “Deliver us from the evil one.” We will pray to Him to help us, that we may not sin against Him by yielding. We will ask Him to clothe us with the whole armour of God, and to put in our hands the sword of the Spirit, and so enable us to withstand the assaults of the evil one, and having done all things to stand. There shall be on our part no foolish rushing into temptation; nay, remembering our own weakness we will pray, “Father, lead us not into it.” But if temptation comes upon us when we are in the path of duty, then we can look up to him, claim His presence with us in the battle, and say, “Deliver us from the evil one.” We say “Let us not be overcome in the struggle. Let us not be beaten in the fight. Suffer us not to fall away from Thee. 154Deliver us, by Thy mercy deliver us, good Lord.” And God will deliver us. I say nothing about the man who rushes into temptation of his own free will; but of the man upon whom temptation comes when he is in the line of duty I am bold to say, “God will deliver him.” His promises are here in this book. Here they are—“God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptations make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it.” “The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation.” “I will keep you also in the hour of temptation.” Christian had a fierce, long, and stubborn fight with Apollyon, but he won the victory at last, and was able to shout exultingly, “Now, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” Oh, take comfort, you who feel the force and keenness of temptation. No conflict need end in defeat. No struggle need end in disaster. Pray to your Father, “Deliver us from the evil one.” By prayer link yourself to God’s Almightiness, take Him with you into the conflict, and every fight shall end in victory, and every struggle in triumph, and these very temptations when vanquished and overcome shall help to make 155you a strong man in Christ, and you will be able then to realise the truth of that word of the Apostle James, “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, for when he hath been approved he shall receive the crown of life which the Lord promised to them that loved Him.”

“Deliver us from the evil one,” that must be our prayer. Do you remember that sentence in Christ’s great intercessory prayer? “I pray, not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil.” We are in the world, and we have no right even to wish to leave it. It is the coward who runs away, locks himself up in some monastic cell, and leaves the world to perish. Our place is IN the world. But the world is full of evil, evil which presses itself, forces itself upon us at every turn. From that evil we must ask God to keep us. “Deliver us from evil.” We have been forgiven. We want now complete deliverance from sin. We want to be emancipated from its power. We want to be rid of its foul stains. We want to grow in purity, truth and grace, and to become daily more like our Lord. Oh, this is the prayer of the Christian life “Deliver us from evil!” When shall this deliverance come? 156Perhaps not completely here—though the chains shall be loosened. But absolute deliverance shall come in the beautiful homeland.

IX The Model Prayer

“After this manner therefore pray ye.”—Matt. vi. 9.

A fortnight ago we completed our study of the petitions that make up the Lord’s Prayer. For the prayer as it fell from the lips of Christ ended with that petition, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The great doxology, which in the Authorised Version you will find at the close of Matthew’s account of the prayer, and which has become so familiar to us by its constant repetition in the public use of the prayer, formed no part of the original prayer at all, but must be regarded as a liturgical addition made by the Church in later years. It is wanting in the great Greek MSS., and in some important versions, and has been quite properly omitted from our revised English Bible. The probability is that the words “For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and 158the glory, for ever, Amen,” were added to the prayer in its public recitations, much in the same way as we to-day sing, “Glory be to the Father,” at the end of the Psalms.

It is not my intention, therefore, to make any comment upon that doxology with which, in our daily use, we end the prayer, but rather to call your attention to some thoughts on prayer in general suggested by the study of this prayer which Jesus gave to His disciples in answer to their request that He would teach them how to pray. First of all, let me say that I believe Jesus gave this prayer to His disciples for use, that is to say, He contemplated their using this very form of words. The circumstances of its origin seem to place this beyond dispute. This is the record Luke gives, “And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.’ And He said unto them, ‘When ye pray, say Father.’” In face of those words, “When ye pray, say,” there is, as Dr. Dods puts it, “no getting past the evident precept here delivered, that we ought habitually to use these words.” “Then our Lord,” some one will remark, “sanctions the use of forms of prayer.” I am here, I 159know, on the very edge of a question which is one of the most difficult to deal with, and one on which Free Churchmen differ strongly among themselves. Discussions upon the use of liturgical forms in worship crop up periodically at various assemblies, but my experience of them is, that they generate a good deal of heat without giving much light. In our Congregational Churches free prayer is the general, almost the invariable practice. Our forefathers were so shocked at the formalism of the liturgical worship of the Established Church, that in the interest of true spiritual worship they rejected forms altogether; some even going to the length of objecting to the use of the Lord’s Prayer in the public services of the sanctuary. Their dislike and distrust of forms we have to a large extent inherited. But the fact that many people are asking the question to-day whether our services would not be all the more helpful if a little of the liturgical element were imported into them, is proof that there are those amongst us who think that our fathers in their revolt against formalism went to the opposite extreme, and by their complete rejection of forms injured themselves and impoverished the public worship of the sanctuary. Of course formalism is fatal to true 160worship. But the use of forms is not formalism. Formalism is the abuse of forms. But the fact that forms get abused is no reason for discarding them altogether, any more than the fact that liberty sometimes, and with some people, degenerates into licence is a reason why we should all abjure our freedom. In fact, a certain amount of form is absolutely necessary. As some one has put it, “there may be occasionally form without life, but there can never be life without form.” No one, of course, proposes to do away with free prayer. The abolition of free prayer from our services would, I am convinced, do irreparable injury to the spiritual life of our Free Churches. Our freedom in prayer has been our glory and our proud privilege, and that freedom we must jealously guard. But there are in our congregations men and women of differing temperaments. There are those amongst us—and I am speaking now out of the experience I have gathered during my ten years’ ministry—who would find simple forms a help to them, and the question is whether the interests of a congregation as a whole would not be better met by an order of service which should combine free and liturgical prayer, rather than by an order which should confine itself rigidly to the 161one, to the utter exclusion of the other. Further into the question I do not mean to enter. I shall have achieved my object if I have brought you to see that the question is really one of Christian expediency. There is no question here of right or wrong. About our perfect right to introduce forms if we choose there can be no doubt. But a thing may be lawful and yet not expedient. And that is the point we have to settle with reference to liturgical forms. Is it expedient to introduce them? Would they enrich our worship. Would they edify the worshipper? Would they help us to come with boldness to the throne of grace? If they would, then adopt them. But if they would tend to formalism, if their effect would be to make us say our prayers instead of praying, or if their introduction would create bitterness or breed dissension in the Church, then better for ever remain without them.

This form of prayer, however, stands quite apart from every other. It has a sacredness all its own. It is the Lord’s prayer. With perfect appropriateness this form finds a place in all our services. I welcome the public use of the Lord’s Prayer for various reasons. First of all, it is the one perfect prayer. In its six brief petitions it seems to include everybody and everything. 162Men are always partial and one-sided and our human prayers are partial and one-sided also. They express the needs of some and not of others. But this brief prayer is like its Author, it is complete. Jesus was the Son of Man, the Universal Man. Everybody finds his counterpart in Jesus. And the prayer He gave is an universal prayer. It voices the cry of every heart, the need of every soul. Then I welcome the use of this prayer for its associations. What sacred associations cluster around it! It is sacred to us because of Him who first gave it. This is our Lord’s prayer, His gift to the world. Then it is sacred to us because of the Saints, Apostles, Prophets, Martyrs, who have used it. This prayer is a link that binds all the Christian centuries together. Peter and John and Paul and James used to kneel down and say, “Our Father.” Those early Christian assemblies in the upper room in Jerusalem, Lydia’s house in Philippi, and the Catacombs at Rome, used the very words we repeated together just now. This prayer is an heirloom in the Christian family, handed down from one generation to another, and binding the “whole world by chains of gold about the feet of God.”

Then for many of us it has associations of a still tenderer kind. It comes to us burdened 163with memories of the past. Dr. Guthrie, when lying on his dying bed, used often to ask the members of his family to sing him a bairn’s hymn. Those childish hymns used to carry him back to the old home and the long ago. Vanished days came back again as he listened to the songs he learned first at his mother’s knee. What those “bairn’s hymns” were to Dr. Guthrie, that, this prayer is to most of us. It is the prayer in which we learned our first lessons of Christian truth. The first words we were taught to lisp were the words “Our Father.” When we pray this prayer we are back again in the far-off days of childhood. We remember our fathers and mothers, some of them in glory now, who would have given their lives for our souls. And as we think of those happy days, we become children once again, and becoming children we become fit to receive the blessing; for except we turn and become as little children we shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. So this form of prayer becomes a vehicle of grace. Tender, sacred, universal, it lifts us near to God and rightly finds a place in all the public services of the sanctuary.

But this prayer is much more than a form to be used—it is also a model for all our prayers. 164The disciples came to Jesus asking Him to teach them how to pray. This prayer is the answer to that request. Instead of giving the disciples a string of rules and principles, instead of delivering a long discourse on the theory of prayer, Jesus did what was infinitely more helpful, He gave them a pattern prayer. He taught them this exquisite prayer of six petitions, and said to them, “After this manner, therefore, pray ye.” This prayer is a model prayer, both as to manner, and order, and spirit.

(1) It is a model as to manner. I will note here only three characteristics of the prayer. First, will you notice its brevity! The prayer that teaches to pray contains only six short petitions. The measure of a prayer is not its length, but its sincerity and earnestness. One good friend reminded a minister who was accustomed to take full time in his preaching, that there was all the difference in the world between the length of a sermon and the strength of a sermon. So there is all the difference between the length of a prayer and the strength of a prayer. We are not heard for our much speaking. The priests of Baal cut themselves with knives and cried from morn until the dusk of evening, “Baal, hear us.” The mob at Ephesus shouted out for the space of two hours, 165“Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” But the command is laid upon us, “Be not ye like unto them.” We are to avoid all vain repetitions. If prayers were valued according to their length, then there would be no prayers to compete with the prayers of the Pharisee. But the publican, who could only stammer out that one heart-broken petition, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” went to his home justified rather than the Pharisee, in spite of his long prayers. We have not yet got rid of the notion that there is some kind of merit in “long prayers.” We need to learn the truth Augustine wishes to enforce when he says that much speaking is one thing and much praying quite another. There can be much prayer in very little speech. In fact, the shortest prayers are always the most eloquent. Need abbreviates prayer. Want will make prayer direct and pointed. Two of the most moving prayers I know of in the whole range of Bible literature are, the prayer of the poor Canaanitish woman who had a sick daughter, and whose prayer consisted of three simple words, “Lord, help me”; and the prayer of that dying thief on the cross, who, in the agony of mortal pain, cried, “Lord remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom.” Brethren, it does not require many words to pray. No one 166need restrain himself from prayer because, like Moses, he is slow of tongue. You can compress a great prayer into the compass of a brief sentence. As Thomas Binney used to say, “A little prayer may bring a large answer, and bring it soon, if sincerity and faith give it wings. A short word may be made long enough to span the distance between earth and heaven if it be struck off from the living heart.”

Secondly, notice the directness of the prayer. How pointed the petitions are! There are no waste words! Here are a number of distinct and definite requests, each of which is stated clearly and plainly in a few simple words. There is no need for a cloud of words in prayer; there is no need of elaborate and highflown language; there is no need to beat about the bush. Let us be direct in our prayers! I am afraid we have got into the habit of using a kind of conventional language in prayer, as if God did not understand our common talk! The ideal prayer, however, is that which makes our request known to God with the same frankness and directness with which a child makes known his wants to his parents. Look at these petitions! Each of them is a prayer for a distinct and definite object. We want the same directness in our prayers to-day. As 167Matthew Henry quaintly puts it, “We should always strike at the white.”

Then notice the simplicity of the prayer. It is a prayer so simple that a little child can understand it! This is not a prayer reserved for the use of the learned, the cultured, the highly educated. This is a prayer everybody can understand. Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein. But its simplicity is not shallowness. People are apt to make mistakes. They think that profound which is simply turbid and muddy. They think, on the other hand, that which is pellucid and clear must of necessity be shallow. But the turbid pool is often very shallow, while those waters of crystal clearness contain depths no plummet can fathom. It is so with this prayer. It is simple, exquisitely simple, so simple that even a child can grasp its meaning. But what depths these simple sentences hide! Have we not been learning Sabbath by Sabbath something of the grandeur and sweep of the prayer? We have been trying during these past Sabbaths to explore the length and breadth, the height and depth of this prayer, but have you not felt, as the preacher has felt, that after all our exploring, there are yet undiscovered regions in this prayer?

Profundity is always a matter of idea, not of language. A man is not profound because he revels in polysyllables. The profoundest thought can be clothed in the simplest language. Shall I tell you the profoundest truth ever uttered by mortal man? Here it is, “God is love.” Yet the words are the simplest that language could afford. It is so exactly with this prayer. Beneath these simple sentences there are depths we have never fathomed. That is why this prayer will never be among the childish things which we can put away. Added years will only increase our sense of its sweep and depth and beauty.

(2) Now let me pass on to say that this prayer is a model as to Order. I need not dwell long upon this, for I have already drawn attention to it in the course of my exposition. But let me repeat again that this Model Prayer teaches us that in all true prayer God’s glory will occupy the first place. Before ever a word is said about personal needs our Lord teaches His disciples to pray that God’s name may be hallowed, that His kingdom may come, 169and that His will may be done on earth as it is done in heaven. It is “after this manner” we are to pray always. That is the order we must observe in all prayers, “First things first.” First God’s glory, then our personal wants. This is the hardest lesson of all to learn. The great feat of life is accomplished when we have learned to prefer God’s will to our own, and when we honestly seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. And yet this hard lesson we must all learn if we are to find strength and comfort in prayer. People talk about “unanswered prayers!” There ought to be no unanswered prayers. I make bold to say that to the man who has learned the true secret of prayer there are no unanswered prayers. It is the man who has forgotten the true order who complains of unanswered prayers. It is the man who has thought more of his own personal desires than of the glory of God who complains that Heaven is deaf to his cry. The man who has learned to seek first the kingdom of God, who sincerely desires that God’s will may be done, that man never talks about unanswered prayers. All his prayers are richly and graciously answered. He asks and receives, he seeks and finds, he knocks and the door is always opened. If you 170put the emphasis in the wrong place by laying stress on your own desires, you will be troubled by “unanswered prayers”; but if you put God first, if you desire His will may be done, what-e’er betide, you will never miss the blessings, but you will find in your own experience the old promise still true, “If we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.”

(3) Let me ask you to notice that this prayer is a model as to Spirit. After all, the power of a prayer depends not upon the words we use, but upon the spirit in which we offer it. “According to your faith it shall be unto you.” Our prayers may be beautiful in their language, correct in their theology, brief, simple, direct; and yet they may rise no higher than the ceiling of the room in which they are uttered. Yes! even this Pearl of Prayers, as uttered by some of us, may be nothing but a barren form. Before prayer becomes living, throbbing, vital, before it can take to itself wings, before it can reach the ear of God, we must pray in the spirit. And the spirit which alone gives prayer its efficacy and power, is the spirit of childlike confidence and trust. This Model Prayer is full of that spirit. Notice how it begins, “Our Father” That implies that we come to God as His children, believing He is readier to give good 171things to us than we are to give good things to our children. It is “after that manner”—in childlike faith in God’s love—that we are always to pray. The measure of our trust in God will be the measure of our power in prayer. “According to our faith it shall be unto us.” Christ’s prayers were prevailing prayers, because He had a perfect faith. He called God “Father,” and He honoured God’s Fatherhood by placing an absolute and utter trust in Him. We want the Christ spirit to make our prayers effectual. It is not the words that are wrong, it is not the order that is amiss, it is the faith that is lacking. If only Christ’s spirit of loving confidence in God were breathed into our prayers, how irresistible they would be. Dr. Stanford, in his little volume on the Lord’s Prayer, quotes those exquisite lines, in which George Macdonald applies the legend of how the boy Jesus once made some clay birds fly to the prayers men offer—

172Our prayers are often like those clay-birds. They do not rise. They are lifeless and dead. But how they would soar if only the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of childlike faith in God, were breathed into them! “Our Father,” the first words of the prayer, teach us the spirit in which we should pray. Is there anything we want more than faith, confidence, trust in God? If we are straitened at all, we are straitened not in Him, but in ourselves. If no mighty works are being done in our midst, it is not because God’s arm is shortened, it is because of our unbelief. We have not yet realised the meaning and the power of that word “Father.” We have not yet realised that He loves us with an everlasting love. We have not yet realised that He is willing to do for us exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think. So we are hungering when there is abundance within reach. We are weak when we might be strong. We are feeble when we might be resistless. We live at a poor, dying rate, when there is abundant life to be had for the asking. What do we need more than faith? A simpler trust in the power and love of God would make us irresistible. If we had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, we might say to the greatest mountain of difficulty, “Remove hence,” and it should 173remove, and nothing would be impossible unto us.

This prayer is the Model Prayer. It is a pattern which we are to imitate. And the pattern Man of Prayer was Jesus Himself. Prayer was His vital breath. After the labours of the day were over, Jesus was accustomed to steal away to some lonely hill, where He would spend the night in quiet, loving fellowship with God. Days of toil were followed by nights of communion, nights of communion prepared Him for days of toil. The example of Jesus enforces the Apostolic precept, “Pray without ceasing.” And Jesus illustrates also the blessing of prayer. What great answers were given to His petitions. As He was praying at His baptism, the heavens opened. As He was praying on the Mount, His countenance was altered, and His raiment became white and glistening, and there came to Him Moses and Elijah, to converse with Him and speak of His departure, which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. As He was praying in the garden that last bitter night, there came an angel from heaven, strengthening Him. Yes; Jesus knew the comfort, the strength, the calm that only prayer can give! We may know them too. Let us be instant in prayer, and we, too, shall 174be brave and peaceful and strong, for it is as true to-day as it was when Isaiah penned the words, that they who wait upon the Lord renew their strength; they mount up with wings, as eagles, they run and are not weary, they walk and are not faint.

HEADLEY BROTHERS, PRINTERS, LONDON; AND ASHFORD, KENT.

Works by Rev. J. D. JONES, M.A., B.D.