_Friendship with God--Speaking_
Quite a sufficient guide as to how God should be addressed is afforded
by the Lord's Prayer. It was given by the Master in response to the
earnest request of His disciples for instruction in prayer. Brief,
compact and complete, it is as it were the Christian seed-prayer. Once
let it be planted in the heart of a Church or the soul of a child of God
and it will grow into the glowing devotion of wondrous collects and rich
liturgies. Indeed there is no Christian prayer worth anything which does
not owe its whole merit to the Lord's Prayer; and the noblest liturgy of
the Church is but the expansion and application of the same. Hence it is
the touchstone of all prayer. By it the Christian's mode of address to
God is finally approved or condemned.
How important is it, then, that a man should know the Lord's
Prayer!--know it, not merely as a formula, but as the embodiment of the
vital principles of converse with God. The process of yore must be
repeated by the disciples of to-day. Like their predecessors of Galilee
they must approach the unchangeable One and prefer the old entreaty:
"Lord, teach us to pray." Nothing short of this will suffice. Then if
they listen they will receive the familiar measures of the "Our Father"
as a new and personal gift fresh and living from the lips of Jesus. It
is good sometimes to "wait still upon God" between the sentences, and
let the Holy Spirit apply each several petition to one's own special
case and to all those interests which concern one's life--in sooth,
translate it into the terms of our own day and generation. It is thus
that the compressed richness of the Lord's Prayer is unfolded.
The Lord's Prayer is one of those most precious of things known as
common property. But a common possession to be worth anything to anybody
must be related by every one of the multitude who claim a share in it,
each to his own personality. Before common property can fully justify
its claim to be common, it must become in a sense private by a process
of implicit appropriation on the part of the individuals concerned. So
while the Lord's Prayer ideally belongs to every child of God as the
common heritage of prayer, it actually belongs only to those who have
recognized and used it as a personal, though not exclusive, gift from
its Author.
Not the least important characteristic of the Lord's Prayer is its
simplicity in thought and expression. Surely it is not without
significance that as it stands in the English tongue it is the purest
piece of Saxon in literature, a monument of clearness and simplicity.
God neither speaks or desires to be spoken to in grandiloquent language
which belongs to the courts of earthly kings. The difficulty that so
many persons find in praying without the aid of some form of devotion is
largely due to the impression that the language needed for address to
God is not such as an ordinary mortal can frame. There are four leading
principles, the first of which contradicts this misconception, that
stand out in bold prominence in the Lord's Prayer, and tell us what all
speech Godward should be.
Sec. 1. _Prayer must be familiar yet reverent._ We are taught to address
God as our Father. What a host of intimate confidences this single word
calls up! There is no familiarity so close as that between child and
father, no sympathy so sensitive. When Scripture declares that Enoch
walked with God, whatever else it means beyond, it means at least that
Enoch was able to hold familiar converse with God in prayer. Those who
knew him could find no better way of describing his relationship with
God than by drawing the picture of the familiar companionship of two
intimate friends. Or again, when Abraham is termed the friend of God it
implies, as well as much beside, that he knew how to speak familiarly
yet acceptably to God. All this was long ago, before man's full relation
to God was made known. The coming of the Son of God as the Son of Man
makes what was really deep seem shallow, so mighty was the change that
was wrought. It is not merely as an ordinary friend that the Christian
may speak to God, but as a son. Filial relations are the highest type of
friendship.
But familiarity must be chastened by reverence, a quality strangely
lacking in our national character. It would seem as though in the
boldness of our search for independence reverence had been largely
forfeited. The Father addressed is in heaven. That is He is where
holiness prevails to the utter exclusion of sin. So while we may tell
out the whole mind it must be done with regard for the moral character
of God and His eternal and infinite attributes; with the familiarity,
not of equals, but of lowly souls addressing sympathetic greatness and
holiness. To dwell exclusively on either one of these two
considerations, God's Fatherhood or His infinite character, will result,
on the one hand, in familiarity without reverence; or, on the other, in
reverence without familiarity. Familiarity without the discipline of
reverence is desecrating impertinence, and reverence without the warmth
of familiarity is chilling formalism.
Sec. 2. _Prayer should be comprehensive yet definite._ In the Lord's Prayer
each petition gathers into its grasp whole groups of desires, and all
the petitions taken together give shelter under their hospitable shadow
to every need and every aspiration that belong to human life. Great
gifts are asked for--"Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth, as it
is in heaven." In such requests we even claim things _for_ God as well
as _from_ Him. The dignity of each several petition is marked. We are
taught to expect royal gifts from our royal Father, gifts worthy of
members of that royal family, the children of the Incarnation. The
effect of the persistent use of these comprehensive petitions has
filtered right through human experience and taught man to expect great
things in all departments of life, in science, in invention, in
literature. Man's best desires have become a true measure of his
possibilities.
The prayer that is shaped after the great model must not be timid or
faltering, but bold and aspiring. It is a great mistake for one to be
satisfied with praying for, say, purity instead of "Thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven." That is to ask for the crumb from the rich
man's table when the rich man is beseeching you to sit by his side and
share all that he has. Let us pray for purity by all means, though not
as if it were a flower that grew in a bed all by itself. We can get one
Christian grace only by aiming at all.
No less marked than the comprehension is the definiteness of the
petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Each is as clear cut as a crystal. There
is no mistaking its meaning. Like the articles of the Creed they are all
too simple to be vague, and they carry their meaning on their face. It
is a common fault in prayer to be content with a certain comprehension
that abjures definiteness. If the latter without the former can at the
best make a character of but small stature, the former without the
latter can make no character at all. Take the one matter of penitence.
The mere admission of sinfulness, as in the prayer of the publican, is
but the first moan of penitence. A riper penitence rises from the vague
to the definite in declaring the sins, and not only the sinfulness, for
which God's mercy is implored. True comprehension implies detailed
knowledge and minute accuracy.
Sec. 3. _Prayer should be social rather than individual in spirit._ _Our_
Father; forgive _us_. The "our" and the "us" warn men never to think of
themselves as units, or of religion as a private transaction between God
and the individual. God regards each as a part _of_, and never apart
_from_, the whole race, at the same time cherishing each part as though
it were the whole. Consequently petitions for others ought to keep even
pace with those for ourselves. A moment's reflection shows how true
philosophically the social form of prayer is. So closely is the web of
human life woven that what touches one touches two at least, unless a
man be a hermit, when he is as good as dead. Even supposing one were to
pray for a spiritual gift for himself alone and receive it, it would at
once become the property of others in some measure at any rate. It is an
inflexible law that the righteousness or the evil, as the case may be,
which dwells in a man, becomes forthwith the righteousness or the evil
of the society to which he belongs. It is only common sense then to pray
"give us" and "forgive us" rather than "give me" and "forgive me."
Of course, this does not mean that "I" and "me" should never occur in
our private prayers. They must do so. But I am to love my neighbour as
myself on my knees as well as in society. My neighbour is my other or
second self to which I owe an equal duty of prayer with myself. To link
"their" or "his" with "mine" on equal terms is really to say "our"; to
ask for others separately what I have already claimed for myself is to
be social rather than individual in prayer.
It would follow, then, that intercessory prayer is not a work of
extraordinary merit but a necessary element of devotion. It is the
simple recognition in worship of the fundamental law of human life that
no man lives or dies alone. But intercession rises to sublime heights
when it claims the privilege and the power for each child of God to
gather up in his arms the whole family to which he belongs, and carry it
with its multifold needs and its glorious possibilities into the
presence of the common Father for blessing and protection. It is grand
to feel that the Christian can lift, by the power of prayer, a myriad as
easily as one, that he can hold in his grasp the whole Church as firmly
as a single parish, and can bring down showers of blessing on an entire
race as readily as the few drops needed for his own little plot.
Sec. 4. _Prayer must maintain proper proportions._ Spiritual needs are
paramount, material are secondary. Out of seven petitions six bear upon
the invisible foundations of life and the remaining one alone is
concerned, directly at any rate, with things material. It is further
remarkable that the latter is as modest as the former are bold. The soul
needs the whole of God's eternal Kingdom where the body requires but
bread for the day. The Lord's Prayer does not teach asceticism, but it
certainly condemns luxury, and implies that the physical nature requires
a minimum rather than a maximum of attention and care.
With the vision of God above and the Christian seed-prayer well planted
in the soul, man can dare to hope that his speech Godward will not waste
itself in hollow echoes, but will travel straight up to the throne of
Grace and bring a speedy answer.