This Mighty Prayer

Yesterday, I began a series on the Lord's Prayer which continues today. Look for new installments each Sunday (Rev. Foote preached these sermons at King's Chapel)
Sermon 1 "Lord Teach Us To Pray" continued:


"I want to ask you to try with me, in some of our Sunday mornings together, to enter really into the heart of the meaning of this mighty prayer of our Christian faith as we only can do by pondering it deeply, sentence by sentence. I said it was at once the simplest and the most profound form of human words. Yet the fact that all of us have learned to say it, that the youngest child is not thought too young to be taught it, that every word in it is a simple word, may easily hide from us the infinite depth and height that is in it. Each sentence in it is transparently clear as the purest water — even the water of life; and as the clearness of a stream hides its depth, so I think we may easily fancy that we can sound this which is far beyond the reach of any merely earthly plummet. It would be possible for a person to imagine that he had got beyond the use of anything so familiar, so commonplace, as the Lord's Prayer, who never had really learned to say it at all. And the Lord's Prayer is not only infinitely deeper than the shallowness of any merely superficial thoughts about it, it is also far larger than to be only the expression of the gentle, pleading side of the character of Christ, — the breathing of the religious sentiment of Christianity. As a drop of water contains forces which, set loose, are akin to the thunderbolt and the earthquake, so the secrets of uttermost human need, of intensest human passion, and of the powers of Divine omnipotence, are all locked up in this mighty prayer which we have from our Master, Christ, — which we have from him because it was first in his own heart, with all its depths and heights and powers. If only we can be empowered to unlock these divine forces of strength and peace so as to bring them to bear prevailingly on our own spirits, filling them with the spirit of Jesus Christ."

Blessings