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 the 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 for
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.
Deliver 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 you 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? Perhaps not completely here—though the chains shall be loosened.
But absolute deliverance shall come in the beautiful homeland.
Where we shall see His face,
And never, never sin,
And from the rivers of His grace
Drink endless pleasures in.
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
the 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 know, 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 worship. 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 one, 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. Men 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 with 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_. The 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, “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 need 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 Matthew
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?
There’s a deep below the deep, and a height beyond the height,
And our hearing is not hearing, and our seeing is not sight.
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, and 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 put 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 things 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—
My prayer-bird was cold—would not away,
Although I set it on the edge of the nest,
Then I bethought me of the story old,
Love-fact, or loving fable, thou knowest best,
How, when the children had made sparrows of clay,
Thou mad’st them birds, with wings to flutter and fold;
Take, Lord my prayer in Thy hand, and make it pray.