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“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in
the Heavens.” — Matthew vi. 9
In the preceding verses which we have already considered, our Lord
has taught us what motives and methods to avoid in prayer, when and how
to offer our petitions, and He has given us the assurance, if we follow
these directions, of a full and open reward. He offers every
encouragement to come freely to the “Father who seeth in secret,” and
open our inmost desires to Him. He seeks to win our confidence, and with
paternal kindness He asks us to make known to Him our wants, our
sorrows, and our joys. He sympathizes with us in all our difficulties,
labors, and temptations; helps us in every struggle with evil, and
rejoices with us in every victory over our selfish and worldly desires.
If we could realize, even in a remote degree, how forbearing, how
patient, how gentle, how kind He is, how deeply He desires to help and
bless us, we should not be so reluctant and formal in going to Him for
sympathy and guidance, and pouring into His compassionate ear the
sorrows and the joys of our hearts. We all need help; we all long for
sympathy. There is no greater comfort in this cold and selfish world, no
treasure more precious than a friend who fully appreciates us, and to
whom we can unbosom ourselves with the perfect assurance of being
understood, and from whom we can get the wisest counsel and the deepest
consolation. The Lord is such a friend, though infinitely wiser,
tenderer, truer, and more considerate than any earthly friend,—than the
wisest father, the most loving mother. These qualities will appear more
clearly as we enter into the deep and genuine import of the prayer He
has taught us.
“After this manner therefore pray ye.” We are not to understand by this
direction that we are to limit our petitions to these words. The Lord
gives us the manner, the spirit, the scope of our prayers. We must pray
in this simple, direct, and unostentatious way. We may make our prayers
as specific as we please. Sometimes one want will press upon us and
absorb our whole thought. We are in distress, in the agony of some
conflict; we are overwhelmed by some great sorrow and we can only say,
“If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” We are in despair; we
seem to be deserted by men and forsaken by the Lord, and we can only
cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!” Then, again, we have
met with some great deliverance by which the soul is filled with peace
and rest, and our lips can but feebly express the gratitude and praise
which thrills our hearts. But every want which we can feel, every desire
of which the heart is capable, every good it is possible for the human
mind to conceive, or the lips to ask, is comprehended in the few brief
petitions of this prayer, and the more fully we enter into its infinite
depths, the more clearly we shall see that it comprises all our needs,
from the lowest to the highest.
First, the Lord teaches us to whom we must offer our prayers, and how we
are to conceive of Him. “Our Father.” We are to think of Him as our
father. There is nothing more simple, tender, and kind than this. Every
child can understand it. The Lord does not ask us to conceive of the
inconceivable, to think of Him as He is in Himself; that no finite being
can do. He does not ask us to know the unknowable, to comprehend an
infinite essence. He comes to us in what we know. He comes to us in the
simplest and most familiar form. The relation of father is one of the
first conceptions by which the little child distinguishes one man from
another. There is a class of learned men at the present day who call
themselves agnostics, or spiritual know-nothings. They do not deny that
there may be a God, and a spiritual world, and a life after the death of
the body, but they have no belief upon these subjects, because they do
not know anything about them, and they conceive all knowledge of them
in our present state to be impossible. They cannot conceive of an
infinite Being, and, therefore, they do not believe in one. The
principle which lies at the root of their denial seems to be, disbelief
in what we cannot fully comprehend; but, if this principle was made of
universal application, we should not believe in anything, for we cannot
fully comprehend the simplest things. The most profound scientist
cannot comprehend how we see or hear; how a blade of grass grows. He may
know much of the means by which these effects are produced; but why they
produce them he cannot tell. We only look upon the surface of things.
The most learned man is as ignorant of inmost causes as the little
child. We cannot fully comprehend one another; but we can know
something, and know that with certainty. A little child knows but little
about its father; but it knows enough to initiate and define its
relations to him. As its understanding and affections become enlarged,
it will know more. The little serves the present purpose and leads to
more.
The Lord takes the simple, universal relation of fatherhood, and by
means of it leads us to Himself; instructs us to think of Him as a
father. We can form no idea of God except by means of what we know of
men. If there is no likeness, no inherent and essential relation between
the Lord and man, we can gain no idea of Him. What do we know of love,
or mercy, or wisdom, or of any of the attributes we ascribe to the Lord,
but from what we have learned of their nature as they exist in
ourselves, or as we have seen them manifested in others? Nothing. To
ascribe these qualities to Him, therefore, unless they are of the same
nature as they are in us, conveys no idea of Him. They do not apply to
Him; they are an empty sound signifying nothing; they are worse: they
are misleading; they deceive us. In our thought we attribute to the Lord
qualities which do not belong to Him. All that we can say or think of
Him is simply a delusion.
But if man was made in the image and after the likeness of God, if the
Divine nature was finited in man, then human qualities give us a hint of
Divine qualities; human relations give us a true idea of our relations
to the Lord, and by means of them the Lord can instruct us in Divine
knowledge, and lead us to know Him “whom to know aright is life
everlasting.” In this Divine prayer He instructs us to think of Him as a
father, to pray to Him as a father, to trust Him as a father, and we
must give to the word, father, its genuine meaning. If we begin by
divesting it of all the forms, qualities, and relations which belong to
a human father, we vacate it of all meaning. Let us take this human
relationship, then, and follow its essential qualities to their
legitimate conclusions. If we do we must find the Being to whom we are
to direct our prayers.
A father is a personal being in the human form. He is one being in one
person. The Father in the heavens must be one Being in one Divine
Person, and that Person must be in the human form. It is impossible to
conceive of a father in any other form, or as a mere abstract essence.
The father of a human being must be a man, and a man without the human
form is impossible. The Father whom we are to love, and whom we are to
meet in prayer in the inner chamber of the soul, must be in the human
form, and He has revealed Himself to us in that form in Jesus Christ.
By the Father is generally understood Jehovah, the Divine Being as He is
in Himself.
Consequently Christians generally address their prayers to Him. But the
human mind is incapable of forming any idea of Jehovah, as He is in
Himself. We cannot approach Him in thought or affection. There is no
access to Him possible except through His Divine Humanity. Jehovah as He
is in Himself is above the heavens, above all created and finite forms,
beyond all human conception. We must keep in mind that prayer is not
merely a matter of words. One may repeat all the words ever addressed to
the Lord, and not offer a prayer. Prayer is real communion of the human
soul with the Lord; it is the opening of the affections to the reception
of the forces of life from Him. There must, therefore, be conjunction of
mind with mind. To effect this there must be adaptation and adjustment.
But there can be no direct contact between the Divine as it is in itself
and any finite form. Even the sun, as it is in itself, cannot come in
direct contact with the plant in a way to produce vegetable growth. It
must be modified and adapted; its rays must be tempered by atmospheres
and by the earth, before they take effect upon the seed and cause it to
grow. How much more impossible it must be for man to approach and to
receive into himself the awful forces of the Divine life!
We cannot approach or conceive of a human being as he is in himself. We
can only form some idea of men and women as to their inmost and
essential character as it is revealed to us through the medium of the
material body. How much less can we form any conception of the uncreated
Divine life as it is in itself? We cannot gain any conception of the
nature of a fruit even as it exists in the seed. The inmost forms must
clothe themselves with the flesh and blood, the pulp and juices of the
fruit, before we can tell whether they are sweet or sour, good or
harmful. If we cannot judge of the essential qualities of the lowest
things until they clothe themselves with a proper medium by which they
can act upon our senses, and in that way reveal themselves to us, how
much less can the infinite First Cause of the creation and of all
created beings, reveal Himself to our consciousness without appropriate
mediums?
No. When we look at the subject as it is, we can see that we cannot pray
to Jehovah, the Father above the heavens. We can use words; we can say
Jehovah, God, but the words are not the prayer. The prayer is the
process which goes on in the closet; the internal turning and opening of
the affections, and the perception, the thought, the idea which results
from the entrance of the Lord into the closet.
We can form some idea of Jehovah as He has revealed Himself to us in the
human nature which He assumed and made Divine. Jesus Christ is the
Father in a human form, adapted to human conception. The Father and Son
are one person, as the soul and body are one man. The Father and Son are
not the same plane or degree of the Divine personality, as the soul and
body are not the same plane or degree of our personality. It requires
many degrees and forms to make a man. Look at the material body for
example. It is composed of many bodies in the human form. The bones, the
arteries and veins, the nerves, are all the human form. Each one
constitutes a body by itself. But it requires them all to make the human
body. And besides these material forms, it requires the soul and the
spiritual body to make a man. All these different spiritual degrees and
organic forms are parts of the one being.
So the Father and the Son are not two persons, two beings; nor is one a
Divine being and the other simply a human being. Both make one Divine
Being. This our Lord Himself declares in the most positive manner. “I
and my Father are one.” One what? One God? If they are one man, then
there is no God. If they are one God, then we have a God who is the
centre and source of life, in His inmost nature entirely above all human
conception, but who has also a human nature in which He reveals Himself
to human consciousness, in which He comes down to human apprehension.
“He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father. How then sayest thou, Show
us the Father.” This is the same as to say, Where will you look for Him
except in me? In what form do you expect to find Him except in the one
in which He has appeared to you? “Believe in me,” He says; “I am in the
Father, and the Father in me.” The Divine and the human interpenetrate
each other in my person, as the soul and body interpenetrate each other
in every man. The soul, as we all acknowledge, is in the body. So our
Lord’s soul, which is called by the name Father, dwelt in His body. A
man’s body is in his soul, also, though not in precisely the same sense
as the soul is in the body. The body is not in the soul, as water is in
a vessel, as blood is in the arteries. It is in the sphere of its active
forces. It is in it as a plant is in the heat of the sun, and the heat
of the sun is in it. It is penetrated, infilled, suffused with it. So
the Human nature was penetrated, infilled, suffused, glorified, and
became one with the Divine nature: and both together, each within the
other, make one Divine Being. “Our Father in the Heavens” is this
glorified Humanity, in which the infinite First Cause, the
incomprehensible and primal Source of all being, comes out from His
infinity and manifests Himself to His children in a personal, glorious,
Divine, human form.
We are not, then, to think of the Father to whom we pray as a diffused
essence, as an omnipresent force; but as a glorious Divine Man in the
human form; as the same Being who was incarnated, who healed human
diseases, who instructed the ignorant, who as to His human nature
suffered, and was crucified. When He dwelt in a material body He was our
Father on the earth. Now He is risen and glorified, He is our Father in
the heavens. The necessity for having a distinct object, a distinct
personal form in our minds when we pray, is vastly more important than
we generally suppose. It is for the want of this that prayer is so
unmeaning and ineffectual. As Swedenborg has said, there can be no
conjunction with an invisible, abstract essence. The thought has nothing
to rest upon. It passes off into empty space, like the light which does
not reach any recipient object. Think of a child asking help, or a
blessing, from the abstract qualities of a father! In what a different
state of mind we ask a favor of a man from that in which we ask
blessings of the Lord! If we have a distinct personal being in our minds
of whom we know something, to whom we are related, who possesses what we
want, whose character we know, whom we know where to find, and how to
address, the way is clear before us, and our praying will have some
purpose.
All these requisites to genuine prayer we have, when we go to the Lord
Jesus Christ, and think of Him alone, without any mental reservations,
or any effort to go behind Him, and to think of some being distinct from
Him. We can fix our thoughts upon Him, as He appeared to Peter, James,
and John when he was transfigured before them, when “His face did shine
as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light.”
Having gained a clear and distinct idea of the personal Being whom we
are to address in prayer, the next of inquiry which demands our
attention is, what paternal qualities we shall attribute to Him. Father
is not a general term implying no more than that the Lord is the creator
of the human race. Every word of Scripture has a universal meaning; that
is, it applies to every particular
to which it relates; to the least things as well as to the greatest. It
is not limited by time or place or special relation. We are to take the
term Father in its universal sense; we are to infill it with all the
qualities, and with the highest qualities of fatherhood we can conceive,
and when we have done that, we shall fall infinitely short of the
reality. But let us particularize:
1. Our natural fathers are only instruments in the Lord’s hands to
perpetuate and enlarge the creation of human beings. In this respect, as
in all acts of natural creation, we are merely instrumental means. In
the production of our harvests, the husbandman is only one link in the
vast chain of causes and effects by which the end is reached. The Lord
is the Creator and Father of every form of vegetable and of animal life.
If, therefore, we take the lowest idea of fatherhood, the Lord is our
primary and real father, our father upon the earth.
2. But before we can enter the kingdom of heaven we must be born again,
born from above; the spiritual degrees of the mind must be formed; the
new heavens and the new earth must be created; and this is effected
without any special, direct intervention of others. In the formation of
this heavenly mind, the Lord is more especially our Father; we are born
of God. In this degree of our being we are created into His image and
likeness; we bear the impress of His form and character which show our
lineage we become His children and heirs of His infinite riches. Oh that
we could gain such a clear conception of this glorious truth that it
would seem to us to be as it is, a most positive reality! How proud men
are of noble descent! How delighted they are to know that they have blue
blood in their veins! We do not see so much of this ancestral
worship as is found in those countries where a titled nobility exists.
But the principle is native to the human heart. And there are just
grounds for it. It is fortunate to be well born. Blood tells. The
virtues as well as the iniquities of the fathers descend to the
children.
Now apply this law of the Divine Order to the case before us. The Lord
teaches us to call Him “our Father,” and what He directs us to call Him
He seeks to become. Here open to us the grand possibilities of our
being. Let us not pass the subject by as an unmeaning one, or the
possession as unattainable. The Lord is our Father! We can claim our
descent from Him. We can become the finite forms of His love. That love
which is the infinite source of all life can become our life, the
germinal principle of our characters; our hearts can beat responsive to
it, our affections can be animated with its warmth, imbued with its
purity, our understanding can be molded into the form of the Divine
wisdom, become the embodiment of His beauty, and illuminated with His
truth. Our whole spiritual forms can be so impressed with the infinite
perfections of the Divine Character that our parentage will be evident
to every beholder. It can be seen in the clear and lovely lines of the
face. It can be proclaimed in pure tones in the voice. It can be
discerned in every motion of the body swayed to grace and dignity by the
indwelling spirit hereditarily derived from our Father in the Heavens.
There can be no nobler birth than this. What is the ancestry of kings
and emperors compared with this? If it is a cause for gratitude and joy
to be able to look back through a long line of progenitors and find in
it great and wise men, pure and lovely women, how much greater cause
have we to rejoice that we can claim the Lord for our Father, and become
heirs to the everlasting and ever-increasing glory and blessedness which
He delights to bestow upon His children; and which He does bestow upon
them, just in the degree that they become His children and are able to
receive His blessings!
Having thus gained a distinct idea that the Lord is our Father,
essentially the Father of our bodies and natural minds, and specifically
the Father of our souls, if we have “been born from above,” let us try
to fill that term with all the perfections of the paternal relation
possible to our conception. We shall find them all in Him, and
infinitely more.
1. A good father will provide according to the best of his ability for
the support and physical comfort of his children. Has not our Heavenly
Father done this? He has the world with substances for the support of
the body; for its sustenance, clothing, and comfort. The harvests of the
world are His gifts. In what lovely forms He presents these provisions
of His love! He is not content to give us the substance alone in a
shapeless mass: He gathers His gifts into purple clusters; He moulds
them into beautiful fruits; He dyes them with lovely colors; He fills
them with delicate aromas; He makes them savory, and sweet. In supplying
one want He gratifies every sense; He makes every step of their creation
beautiful. The stem which bears them is beautiful in form, and then He
clothes it with a garniture of green, glorifies it with the beauty of
blossoms, and crowns it with a diadem of fruit. Is He not a provident
and bountiful Father?
2. A good father will provide for the instruction of his children. Our
Heavenly Father has so arranged His provisions for our natural support
that they shall be the constant means of intellectual and moral
cultivation. All our industrial, domestic, social, and civil relations
are means of developing our affections and enlarging our understandings.
Our best lessons are learned in the school of the family, in the school
of labor, and in the school of society. But, besides these schools and
teachers, He has given us His prophets, and He has come Himself to teach
us the lessons we could not learn from nature and from which each other.
He has left nothing untried or undone which it was possible for infinite
love and wisdom to do to teach us our true nature and destiny and the
best means of obtaining it. Does He not, therefore, possess this
paternal excellence in the highest degree?
3. A good father is patient and gentle, kind and wise. He will withhold
as well as give; he will restrain and guide. The Lord is infinitely kind
and gentle and patient. “His mercy is forever.” “As a father pitieth his
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” He waits for us with
an infinite patience; He loves us with an infinite love; He watches over
us with an omniscient eye, and omits no occasion to confer upon every
one of His children the greatest blessings He can persuade them to
receive. Take any parental quality you choose and exalt it to the
greatest excellence you can conceive, and our Father in the Heavens is
all that and infinitely more. There is no quality which could entitle
Him to the name of Father which He does not possess.
But there is one respect in which He is entitled to the claim in an
eminent degree. Our earthly parents become less our parents as we
advance in life. Children become less dependent upon them. Parents can
do less for them. The ties which bind them together grow weaker, and
parent and child grow away from each other. But our Father in the
Heavens will become more and more our Father to eternity. We shall be
growing into His likeness; we shall become more fully His children. He
will continually create us anew. The marks of our lineage will become
more distinct. We shall become larger embodiments of His love, and
continually advance into the beauty of His image and the glory of His
wisdom. There is no other hope so grand; no other possibility of
attainment so blessed as this.
“Our Father.” The Lord does not teach us to say my Father, but our
Father. There is a grand significance in this. It sweeps away human
distinctions and reverses human judgments. When we offer this prayer, we
place ourselves on the level of a common parentage, we confess a common
humanity. The king in his palace, clothed in rich attire and surrounded
with elegance and beauty and abundant means to minister to every desire,
kneels at a cushioned altar and says, “Our Father.” The peasant in his
hut, clad in coarse and soiled garments, sheltered from storms only by
rough and naked walls, in the midst of rude and scanty furniture, clasps
hands hardened by toil and utters the same words, “Our Father.” The most
learned scientist, the most skilful artist, the genius, the hero, whose
name is upon all lips, and the little child whose eyes are just opening
to the wonders of the universe, or the most unlettered laborer, must
address the same Being in the same words: they must say, “Our Father.”
The rich and the poor, however widely separated by external conditions,
must ignore them all when they enter the closet or kneel in the house of
worship. They must utter the words which confess a common parentage, a
common nature, and fraternal relations. The artificial and merely
natural distinctions which men and women estimate so highly, and on the
possession of which they assume so much superiority, do not appear
before the Lord. He looks only upon the heart, and estimates us by what
He sees there. We are His children; we are brethren and nobly born, in
the degree that we are created in His likeness and partake of His
nature. In the light of this truth, how all merely natural distinctions
fade away! Can you pray this prayer? You can say the words with your
lips. Can you enter the closet, and shut the door against all natural
and artificial distinctions and say, with the understanding and from the
heart, “Our Father”? Only in the degree you come into this state do you
pray “after this manner.”
“Our Father who art in the Heavens.” Why, heavens? Because there is more
than one heaven, and we can only pray to the Father in the heaven in
which we are. Every human being has in possibility three planes, or
degrees of his spiritual nature, entirely distinct from one another.
These degrees of the mind constitute the heavens within him. The one
which becomes opened and formed is the one in which the Lord dwells; it
is the one in which we think, in which we love and live. The heaven we
shall consciously enter when we throw aside the veil of flesh will
correspond with the one which has become formed within us. It is in the
heavens within us that the Lord becomes our Father. As these heavens are
formed by learning the truth and living according to it, He comes in and
dwells with us and we with Him. Our real worship consists in the opening
and creation of one of these degrees of the spiritual mind. There He
builds the mansions in which we are to dwell with Him forever. If only
the lowest degree is opened, we shall enter the corresponding heaven. We
shall find our home there, and the Lord will be our Father there,
according to the measure of our knowledge and love. If the second degree
of the mind is opened, we shall rise into the light and glory of the
second heaven and live and love and worship our Father as He can
manifest Himself to us in that degree. If the inmost degree is opened,
we shall live in that, and enter into the fullest and most blissful joys
it is possible for a finite being to experience.
It is not, therefore, without a meaning specifically applicable to us
that our Lord teaches us to address Him as Our Father in the Heavens. It
is an acknowledgment of His Fatherhood by
everyone in the degree he is becoming regenerated. Every angel can use
it with special application to himself. It is also a prayer that we may
become His children; that we may become more innocent, more childlike,
more pliant to the brooding power of His love; that we may become
gentler in spirit, stronger in affection, nobler in action, purer in
life, and in all respects more like our Father in the Heavens, into
whose image and likeness He is in the constant effort to create us. |