1. Too often man trips in and out of God's presence, saying words that he does not feel towards a Person of whom he has no intelligent conception. But we must not do so. Our love and our awe must be first evoked. " Father," we approach Him as a child in the tenderest relationship ; He is One who loves us with more than human love, loves us more than we can love Him, One who is more ready to hear than we are to pray.
TJ Father ! It is the greatest word on mortal tongue, and the truth of the universal Fatherhood of God is the greatest which ever dawned on the intelligence of man. But did it ever dawn upon the intelligence of man in such a way as the other truths have done ? When Peter made his great confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," our Lord answered him in joy and thankfulness, "Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." May we not say that flesh and blood never revealed this truth of God's eternal Fatherhood ? It is God's own direct supreme revelation of Himself in Christ His eternal Son.1
TJ No exercise of will can procure for me, and no amount of demerit can forfeit for me, the fact, the existence, of a sonship and a Fatherhood. Even in the far country, where the prodigal son is feeding swine, not memory alone, but consciousness, recognizes a relationship between himself and a far-off person, whom he confidently calls his father. And when he forms the
1 C. F. Aked, The Lord's Prayer, 14.
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resolution to escape from his misery and his destitution, and to seek again the land and the home which for years have been to him but a dream and an illusion, he frames into words, without a doubt or a peradventure, the confession with which he will present him- self at the door of that house and that heart, and it begins with the assertion of an inalienable relationship — "I will say to him, Father ! " »
2. The Lord's Prayer bids us lay aside all selfishness at the outset. Its first word — " Our " — is the most difficult of all ; for to lay aside selfishness is the hardest thing in the world. We must begin by casting off self, by realizing that we are only one minute unit in the great millions of humanity. Think of it, what this word "our" means — all those who are separated from us by impassable barriers, those who are so far above us that we cannot reach them, those who are so far beneath us that we reckon the slightest act of human recognition is a gracious condescension, all those who belong to the opposite faction in politics, those who belong to hostile nations, those whose religion or whose irreligion wars with our deepest convictions ; all those who are outcasts too, and criminals, the enemies of society, and those — it is often hardest to remember — with whom we have had disagreements, quarrels, those whom we feel we cannot like. He is our Father only in connexion with these others also. We cannot speak for ourselves unless we speak also for them ; we cannot carry our petitions to the throne of His grace unless we carry theirs ; we cannot ask for any good unless it is for them as much as for us. For He is their Father as much as ours, and we cannot say, " Our Father which art in heaven," unless we have first learnt to say, " Our brothers who are on the earth."
fl The Lord's Prayer is the simplest of all prayers, and also the deepest. We are children addressing a Father who is also the Lord of heaven and earth. In Him all the families of the earth become one family. The past as well as the present, the dead as well as the living, are embraced by His love. When we draw near to Him we draw nearer also to our fellow-men. From the smaller family to which we are bound by ties of relationship we extend our thoughts to that larger family which lives in His presence. When we say, " Our Father," we do not mean that God is the Father of us in particular, but of the whole human race,
1 C. J. Vaughan, The Lord's Prayrr, 15.
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the great family in heaven and earth. The Heavenly Father is not like the earthly ; yet through this image we attain a nearer notion of God than through any other. We mean that He loves us, that He educates us and all mankind, that He provides laws for us, that He receives us like the prodigal in the parable when we go astray. We mean that His is the nature which we most revere, with a mixed feeling of awe and of love ; that He knows what is for our good far better than we know ourselves, and is able to do for us above all that we can ask or think. We mean that in His hands we are children, whose wish and pleasure is to do His will, whose duty is to trust in Him in all the accidents of their lives.1