Читать книгу With God in the World: A Series of Papers - Brent Charles Henry - Страница 4

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.

§ 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.

§ 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.

§ 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.

§ 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.