rest the weary heart...

"But Deliver Us From Evil" marks the final message in Henry Wilder Foote's sermon series on the Lord's Prayer. He has been a fine companion on the way...

'So then we can see how our Lord's Prayer should culminate in this final petition, " Deliver us from the evil that is so real." How can we be delivered ? Only by laying hold on and being upheld by Him who is more real.

Men were tempted enough to let the evils shut out everything else from their sight. Therefore it is that our prayer began at the true beginning with the great thought of God, " Our Father," and it passed on to make His Name, His kingdom, His will supremely present to us before it trusted us to speak of our own needs at all. So now at last it brings us face to face with the problem of evil, with our minds full of the thought of God.

And when our minds are illuminated by that thought I think we all feel that every other evil seems small to us except that of sin and conscious wrong. It is that from which in our deepest prayer we pray to be set free. "O . wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?"

We in this church may have gained an advantage in the simplicity of our faith, by the omission of certain phrases in our Liturgy. But we lose more than we gain if we fail to remember that the real enemies indicated by the words " the world, the flesh, and the Devil" beset us every hour.

We smooth over life, sometimes, till we smooth away all its meaning. The fact remains, from generation to generation, that human nature has its mingled substance of good and evil, and that it casts its shadow, long and dark, before the light of God's righteous law. If we loose our hold for a moment on the word which is associated with the church and religion, the word Sin, and take the word which carries practical religion into daily life, the word Right, the whole subject is at once depolarized for us.

Our religion teaches us that God is Love. Faith in His love implies trust in His loving-kindness. But what kind of faith is that which can trust no further than it can see? Life is hard, you say; it bears painfully upon you. Be thankful still, and all the more be thankful, that you know that behind its stern seeming is this blessed Reality, the one ultimate ground of Christian Faith, the Living God, our Father in Christ Jesus. If, indeed, we may know Him as the Father, we can flee from Him by fleeing to Him; the darkest affliction will drive us to the Heart of the Mystery, which is God; and we shall find that we can rest the weary heart there in communion with Himself."

Blessings

sifting the soul

An animated series that my children love begins with the son of the evil ruler relentlessly chasing the character that represents good. Well into the series he renounces his evil heritage and joins the forces of good in the world. His first few efforts don't go well however, and at one point he screams, "Why is it so hard to be good?"

This is the question that Henry Wilder Foote takes up this morning in our continuing Sabbath series on the Lord's Prayer.

"Lead us Not Into Temptation"

The true function of temptation in our human life was stated by Jesus in one striking pictorial sentence, in a conversation with his disciples, when he warned Peter that temptation was the very sifting of the soul. "Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he might sift you as wheat."
How vivid the picture which it must have called up to his disciples' minds, that primitive process which they had seen every harvest time since they could remember!...

It is a living parable of that which Christ seeks to teach by the illustration. So, he would tell us, temptation is no light thing; it shakes the soul with a perpetual disquiet and annoy; it will not let it remain in peace, any more than the grain which the energetic holder shakes in air can sleep in its receptacle. The winds of heaven, cold and searching, must blow through it.

Every test must be applied which will sift the golden grain of character, sweet and wholesome, and free it from the chaff of a light- minded and frivolous spirit, which the breezes may blow where they will, — from the lumpish and earthy sins which only by this thorough winnowing can be purged away from the wheat of the soul. And if the sifting reveals the substance of the character to be but poor stuff after all, at least the test has been applied ; the opportunity has been given. We are revealed honestly, as we are, as we have chosen to be. And how searching the tests are by which the whole being of man and woman is tried and proved in this world of God!...

The discipline of temptation is what we must have to toughen the moral fibre. How can the soul learn to choose good rather than evil, unless it has the evil presented to it as well as the good ? This world mysterious...

The sum of the whole doctrine of temptation is in this, — that it is the needful discipline of the immortal soul "Temptations," says a Roman Catholic writer, "are the raw material of glory." And every step of the long struggle, in which the higher gains the mastery over the lower, the spirit over the flesh, is a step onward and upward, at which we may well believe that the very angels of God raise songs of triumph.

I know, indeed, — ah ! who does not ? — by what slow degrees and toilsome and difficult ascent we struggle upward. I know the infinite evil if we fail. But shall we not still rejoice to be called to the solemn privilege which belongs to the children of God ? Shall we go complaining all our days of the hardships which prove to us the worth of the soul educated at such a cost ? No! if temptations are your lot in life — the school of trial which is the school of faith — you will go on resolved the more to wrestle with them till they disclose their heart of meaning, remembering that the Captain of our salvation was tried in the same furnace, was "made perfect through sufferings," was tempted and overcame.

Blessings.

"melt our hearts into a fervor of love..."

Last Sabbath, Henry Wilder Foote, in his series on the Lord's Prayer, spoke on the Divine side of forgiveness. This week it is our turn. But, of course, part of the point is that we can't have one without the other. Some excerpts (and you can read the full sermon here)

FORGIVENESS. — THE HUMAN SIDE

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. — Matt. vi. 12.

Then came Peter to him and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him ? till seven times ? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times : but, until seventy times seven, Matt, xviii. 21, 22.

"And I say again the spirit of forgiveness is hard to attain. For consider how great and utter a virtue of soul it is. In its true meaning forgiving is the giving away of an offence; and the Greek has the same idea even more delicately expressed; it is the sending away of a thing, that is, the making it to disappear from between two persons...

The true forgiveness must be a part of the very temper of the soul itself; not merely a word or act, but a disposition...

For we ourselves have lived, and having tasted life we know how hard it is not to sin against one's neighbor. Experience should teach us tolerance. In these paths where it is so easy to stumble, so difficult to walk with sure and steady step, we should rather learn to reach out a helping hand to a brother than to push him further if he fall. Says Marcus Aurelius : " It is right that man should love those who have offended him. He will do so when he remembers that all men are his relations, and that it is through ignorance and involuntarily that they sin, — and then we all die so soon." He died sixteen centuries ago, but the golden thought lives to teach us charity. The sense of human frailty should prevent us from crowding this little span of life with hates and discords that leave no room for serener thoughts...

Nay, not alone on the side of human fellowship, but on the side of God's loving-kindness, does the principle of forgiveness come to us. For the strong sense of God's love for us should melt our hearts into a fervor of love which can see His children in all men, and feel His pardon moving us to pardon.

Forgiveness is the duty of sinners. In the presence of the perfect justice which we have offended, and the absolute purity before which the very angels bow themselves to the dust and cry, " Unclean, unclean," knowing that we too deserve to suffer, humility should teach us a long-suffering charity. "He that cannot forgive others," says Lord Herbert, "breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven."

Forgiveness is the obedience of disciples. For it is in the law of Jesus Christ that we should forgive our enemies, and pray for those who despitefully use us, and return good for evil.

Forgiveness is the privilege of God's children. It is a gift whose exercise is the sign and pledge of our divinity, of the victory of His loving spirit in our hearts. Said Martin Boos: " People think it a weakness to forgive an insult. Then God would be the weakest in heaven and on earth; for no one in heaven or earth forgives so much as He."

Blessings

fullness of forgiving love...

Forgiveness is not an easy thing. It is sometimes not easy to give, but even more difficult to receive. Henry Wilder Foote looks at the Divine Side of forgiveness in our continuing Sabbath Series on the Lord's Prayer:

"Forgiveness: The Divine Side"

What is history, but the proof of the unforgiving sequence of cause and effect ?
Hence arose the idea of Fate. Men felt the iron laws constraining them, deaf to their cries, ordaining their lot of loss and pain, crushing them, while still the sunshine laughed and the skies were blue above them and Nature disregarded their calamity though their hearts should break. The austere and antique genius of Michael Angelo has caught the spirit of the old fable, in his picture of the Parcae, where the three withered crones who spin and sever the thread of human life, sit in aged majesty of mien, and look forth from the canvas with stony, unsympathiz- ing eyes on the humanity whose destinies they shape, but do not share.

And yet, side by side with an iron fatalism has gasped for life the human sense of need. Men have felt the need of forgiveness, and their longing has cried out even to the heavens which they believed deaf, in all manner of uttered and inarticulate petitions. Their sins and their sorrows were stronger than all their theories of destiny; and, as so often, the warmth of the heart has melted the icy logic of the head.
It is therefore one of the most interesting of all questions which concern the relations between man and God, — what the nature of Divine forgiveness is, and how we are to believe in it

The only theory of the Divine forgiveness which will hold in face of the New Testament, or of a true idea of the nature of God as drawn from that of man, or of the moral law, or of the needs of our own souls, is that which makes forgiveness a part of God's fatherhood. His all- embracing love is the only thing which will break the stony silence of nature's unforgiving laws, or solve the riddles in which human ingenuity has involved the free grace of God.

The doctrine of God's forgiveness lies at the root of the religious life.
1. It gives a ground for hope, because it gives an opportunity to start anew, feeling that the future is not mortgaged beyond remedy to our error-laden past.
2. It gives a ground for faith, because it reveals to us a God whom we can trust and love. It makes repentance a stepping-stone to truer living, and prayer a real cry to one who really answers.
3. It takes hold on life itself, to make it divine by breathing into it the same spirit of forgiving love. Men have learned this hardest of all the graces by trying to imitate God. This is the spirit which glowed in the Christian martyrs. John Huber, a distinguished Huguenot galley-slave, has recorded the following experience: —
" We arrived one night at a little town, chained, my wife and my children with fourteen galley slaves. The priests canoe to us, offering freedom on condition that we abjured. We agreed to preserve a profound silence. After them came the women and children of the place, who covered us with mud. I made my little party fall on their knees, and we put up this prayer in which all the fugitives joined: ' Gracious God, who seest the wrongs to which we are hourly exposed, give us strength to support them, and to forgive in charity those who wrong us. Strengthen us from good even unto better.'"

"From good even unto better." This is the aspiration of the human soul. And from better unto best we still look up adoring at the perfect fullness of forgiving love which is in the bosom of our Heavenly Father. When the Pharisees heard Jesus, they said, "Who is this, that forgiveth sins also ?" But all men since have recognized in this very thing the sure evidence that he is the Son of God. And so far as we are touched with his spirit, we shall rise into his likeness, and " forgive, as we also are forgiven."

Blessings

A little more living by the day...

A couple of possible opportunities have me thinking far too much in the future (and regretting bits of the past.) Today's sabbath sermon from Henry Wilder Foote on the Lord's Prayer (part of a series deferred during Lent) is a good reminder...

"OUR DAILY BREAD"

Give us this day our daily bread. — Matt. vi. 11.

WE have felt, I think, as we have gone on together meditating on the successive clauses of our Lord's great prayer that it was more full of teaching, of doctrine in the true meaning of the word, than we had supposed. And now as we come to the first petition which touches our personal wants, there is a lesson for us in the very place which this link holds in this golden chain which binds His asking children to the throne of God. This is the first word in which we speak of our own needs. We have approached our God not merely in the attitude of suppliants before an omnipotent Monarch, but as children coming to their Father; we have prayed that His Name may be hallowed; that men may know Him in His perfect attributes and may worthily honor Him; that His kingdom, which is over all, may more and more prevail; that His perfect will may be done, not simply borne, with free, willing service, everywhere as it is by the blessed ones in heaven. All this has taken you away from yourself, if you have really prayed it; it has filled the universe for you with God, nay, has not filled it, but has opened your eyes to see His fullness in it, who filleth all things. It seems as if Christ said to us, Wait, before you venture to ask for yourself. At the threshold of the Temple, lay aside all selfish thoughts, and try to make your own soul a living temple; when.you have done that, you can trust yourself to approach the altar and ask your gift from it...

But the prayer is only for this day. Again, how strange a contrast to the temper of our anxious, foreboding way of life, which is continually borrowing from tomorrow care to cloud the happiest present! Are we to say, then, that Christ really taught that we were to live as if there were no morrow, with spendthrift lavishness beggaring our future, or with indolent acquiescence leaving it unguarded ? Did he mean that we were so to consider the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field ? The question is its own answer. We interpret Christ by Christ; and in the spirit of his religion, and in other words of his, we find the meaning, and in our own lives abundantly the wisdom of his warnings against that feverish worry and strain, that rush after wealth at any price, those discontents and repinings which spoil the sweetness and mar the peace of so many. There are few of us who would not be helped if they could be met tomorrow in their hurry down town by one who would say to them, " A little more living by the day in the wise quiet of a sober mind would not hurt you, my friend. Try, for to-day, to possess your soul in patience. You have this day to live in. Put all the life into it you can, of goodness and love and trust.

Give us this day our daily bread." I suppose there is no single sentence in the Bible or in all literature more in contrast with the average habit of mind of the average man of our time. Daily bread! is that what he is striving for, slaving for, wearing out his life to get ? It does not in any wise follow that it would not do him good to try honestly to tone down his desires to this bounded limit. One thing is certain, — the richest man in America really gets for his wages only his food and clothes and a roof over his head. If he wins real respect, it is because his character justifies it; if he has intellectual tastes or pleasures to enrich his life, his money does not buy them. And if we would school ourselves to ask for daily bread, meaning a more sober limit on our hot ambitions, our race after money, our temptations to luxurious life, we should bring whole new horizons of light into our spirits."

Just today, "put all the life into it you can." Blessings

Thy will be done...

About a year and a half ago, I was at a particular low point and among the things that conspired to drag me up again was a radical acceptance of "Thy will (not mine) be done." A particularly difficult notion for Unitarians (and most everyone) to abide by, turning over one's will is not a cheap way out or a shallow fatalism but a spur to healing and positive action as Henry Wilder Foote reminds us in his continuing series on the Lord's Prayer:

"Thy Will Be Done"

Jesus taught his disciples to pray in these words, which are the essence of Christian trust, and which indeed are the essence of all prayer, if we interpret them in their Christian breadth actively as well as passively.

We need..to beware first of all of a fatalistic way of viewing the connection of Providence with our earthly lives. There are certain black moods of the mind which are most likely to come upon us when some untoward thing has thwarted the direction of our lives, — a well-devised plan brought to nothing, a cherished hope crushed ; or when all the powers of evil seem to encamp around the soul like savages in the woods around a frontier fort, and to be gradually but surely overcoming its resistance to temptation. Then we may easily find ourselves, weary and sick at heart, looking on the world as a great machine with most complicated mechanism, driven by the mighty engine of a relentless destiny, that seems to be shutting us up continually within narrower limits. In such a mood we fold the hands with a feeling of despair ; and though we say, " Thy will be done," the voice within us seems rather to murmur, with the writer of Ecclesiastes, " Time and chance happeneth to them all."

Yet I hardly need argue that this is a feeling which we ought to resist with all the strength of our souls, — morbid and weakening, if we yield to it till it becomes the habitual state of the mind. He utters the Lord's Prayer with no true comprehension of its meaning who makes it an excuse to himself for supineness, and sits lazily by as the various events of life rush swiftly' past him, doing no more to direct their course than the man who lives beside a rushing stream can do to control it when the rains have descended and the floods have come. "Thy will be done!" we say. But that it may be done on earth, our hands and our hearts are needed.

And when we look within our own souls do not reason and faith and plain common sense (which, when touched with religion, is reason transfigured by faith), — do they not all revolt at the idea that we can forget to repent and reform, and then, forsooth, think it enough to accept the consequences of our own faults (which we ought never to have committed), and attribute it to the mysterious will of God, whose holy will really was that we never should commit them at all ? No! we never were taught to say, " Thy will be done," merely as an easy way of shifting our own responsibility upon Heaven; but in order that we might, as the Apostle says, " gird up the loins of our mind " to perform every duty religiously, and thus make ourselves the instruments of God in the doing of His holy and acceptable and perfect will."

Tomorrow, more on this pivotal notion. Blessings.

in the making...

On this Sabbath morning Henry Wilder Foote continues his sermon series on the Lord's Prayer with a reminder that all things are and are still to be...

"Thy Kingdom Come"

I think there is nothing which we so much need as this great and hopeful faith in the present, ruling God. The imperfections of this world, and of ourselves, are not difficult to perceive. The fact that this world is in the making, only, is plain enough to every one.

Men have always grasped, from the beginning, this great fact; religious men have laid hold upon it as giving a clue full of light and comfort to the darkest mysteries of this human life; and even those who could find no light or hope in it have felt its power, like the iron stroke of a flail beating on their hearts. The truth that the Almighty Maker of our lives and Father of our spirits has placed us here not as He might have done, doubtless, with finished and symmetrical lives, everything happy and smooth about us, everything bright and easy within us, characters complete and rounded, minds and hearts whose even pulse-beat kept temperate time, the voices of neighbors and friends making harmonious music on our way, the business of our calling running with untangled threads, no shadow of disease, no dread of loss, no agony of parting; but, instead, in a world overhung with mystery and filled with discipline, the machinery of life needing constantly to be oiled and tended, and even then getting out of running gear, the human relations of it so complicated, so difficult, hardest to do one's full duty in for those whose conscience in duty is keenest, our own selves the most unquiet kingdom for ourselves to rule, with puzzles of heart and will and brain and conscience, and over all the shadows which men knew of old as the visitings of Fate, and which, though they know them now as the touch of a merciful God, gathering the soul into the hollow of His hand, they still must see in part as what they are on their earthward side, — change and sickness and pain and loss. The only solution is the double truth: that God has not finished but is still making His world; and that He does not work in this alone, but calls for the co-operation of man and nature with Him.

Have a blessed Sabbath.

Our

We had an all church birthday party last night; a wonderful gathering of parishioners and friends old and new. And this morning we will have church...Henry Wilder Foote, in this week's installment of his sermons on The Lord's Prayer, reminds us of the communal necessity of the spiritual life:

OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.

After this manner, therefore, pray ye : Our Father which art in heaven. — Matt. vi. 9.

" AFTER this manner!" When Christ bids his followers pray thus, he tells us in substance that the few sentences of the Lord's Prayer are the essence of all prayer. Since prayer addresses God, he teaches us first of all how to think of Him...The first words of this mighty prayer lift us at once to the highest level...

We are heirs of the past to a greater degree than we are aware. From the Middle Ages we inherit the unconscious tendency to measure spiritual feeling by extravagance of expression ; from two centuries of New England parentage, an inborn zest for theological subtleties; and either way, we hold too narrow an idea of what this spiritual affection is. We need to go back to Jesus Christ, and look at it in his light. And when we thus bring the New Testament spirit to bear upon the interpretation of the great commandment, we at once find that in its genuine and true and Scriptural sense, love to God is not a mere sentiment dependent upon the happy possession of a glowing temperament, nor only a fervid expression of devout feeling called into being, quickened by supernatural grace; these are only special manifestations of it in partial forms. But underlying them and manifesting itself in many other ways also quite as true and as worthy, it exists as a great persuasive principle of life, vitalizing the whole being in the soul which religion has entered as a power... Yes! it is a divine, a blessed decree, that in obeying the best impulse of the heart towards what is holy and good and true, we are led into sympathy with Him in whom all perfections are in their fullness.

Mr. Maurice has well said that " much of the practical difficulty of the prayer lies in the first word of it. How can we look round on the people whom we habitually feel to be separated from us by almost impassable barriers, . . . and then teach ourselves to think that in the very highest exercise of our lives they are associated with us; that when we pray we are praying for them and with them; that we cannot speak for ourselves without speaking for them; that if we do not carry their sins to the throne of God's grace, we do not carry our own; that all the good we hope to obtain there belongs to them just as much as to us. ... Yet all this is included in the word 'our;' till we have learned so much we are but spelling at it, we have not learned to pronounce it."
Have we so learned, any one of us, dear friends ? For if we have hard thoughts about any in our hearts; if we find it difficult to hold them graciously and tenderly in our remembrance as we rise to the great thought of God; if we fail to grasp the sublime conception of "the whole family in heaven and earth" which is named of Him, we can hardly pass this portal of our Lord's Prayer into the deeper meaning of the sanctuary within. We do not really pray to Him unless we are willing to kneel, as it were, on the outer step of His temple, beside the publican and the sinner. We can hardly dare to call him Father, unless we will also call them our brethren.

But there is not only a lesson of humility and of charity for us when we begin to say " Our Father," — there is infinite hope and cheer. For if we all come together before him, we may well feel upborne by the praying might of all who are higher than we on the shining ladder that leads to the foot of His throne, — His saints and faithful children, all that great company who are joined in the praises of the Te Deum."

May our Sabbath be a blessed one.

To be overruled...

Some warm words on the Lord's Prayer from Henry Wilder Foote on a bitter cold New England morning...

" As he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples."

"...the first condition of prayer is, that it shall be really offered to God, — that is, to the highest and purest will of which he who prays has any conception. It must mean desire not to overrule, but to be overruled by Him." A selfish wish, even if thrown out in that form, is still selfishness praying to itself. He who gave us the Lord's Prayer, with its trustful voicing of our great human needs, has shown us the spirit which should underlie all our prayer, when in his own hour of trial he cried, " Nevertheless, Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt! "
" In Christ's sense, Christian prayer addresses primarily not God's omnipotence at all, but his spiritual nature. . . . Prayer is ... the chief method by which the eager and short-sighted and imperfect mind gradually learns to purify itself in the flame of Divine love. People talk and think as if prayer only meant bringing pressure to bear for private purposes on the Power which touches the secret springs of life. But in Christ's teaching it means bringing Divine influences to bear on these private purposes, so as to extinguish or transform them."
The highest view of life is the truest. Only when we regard it as God's gift to us, and its privileges as ways of serving Him, do we know how to use them aright... Our deepest wants are those which touch no other human spirit, — which no outward possession can satisfy. The soul meets problems of duty, and our unaided wisdom is not able to solve them. We need an absolute standard of right to regulate our conduct. How shall we obtain it, unless by turning our thoughts to the Highest ?
We need, too, to pray in order to deepen our thankfulness to God. We go on from day to day, often almost without thought of Him to whom we owe the gift of our happiness and the blessing which He has hidden even in our pain. Prayer gives us time to think, and brings a light above the earth into our thought.
Who would not desire to bring the Divine Life, the Divine Presence, into our daily consciousness, to transfigure the common things about us by that light?"

Have a blessed Sabbath

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

The Living Way...

The reciting of the Lord's Prayer by Pastor Warren at the inauguration caused a slight controversy among Unitarians who felt it was an exclusivist moment. Whether or not this is true, the prayer itself, taught by Jesus, is a powerful one. In a series of Sermons given at King's Chapel and published after his death, Henry Wilder Foote (1838-1889) spoke of the depths of the Lords Prayer. "Preached after a time of deep experience in his own life, they spoke to those who heard them of the spiritual realities in which he himself had been living; and it is hoped that any who, in quietness, seek to enter into near companionship with this little book, will find in it a like help and blessing."(from the Preface)

From Sermon 1 "Lord Teach Us To Pray"

"What else, indeed, is the life of Jesus Christ, if it be not, supremely, the visible expression of the duty which calls us to prayer, the renewal which is in prayer, the answer which is bestowed upon prayer ? Whether it be in the consecration of the deep moments in his ministry when, at each point of crisis, he withdrew into the mountain alone and passed the night alone in prayer to his Father, or when he girded his spirit anew for great works of healing or mercy by lifting it from the heaven in which it always was to the heaven above it, or when he met the supreme hour in his life-work by bending in Gethsemane to take the cup whose bitter portion his Father gave him to drink of, — in all, his divinest moments manifest themselves to us through this act of prayer, as it were a window. The moments when he seems to come closest to us, yet seems most above us, are those when his soul blends in light and love with his Father's spirit, and we say, " Behold ! he prayeth !"
So, then, that question asked by the disciples as by children coming to a wiser friend and helper, "Lord, teach us to pray," is brought home to us in the most affecting way by the persuasion of our Lord's example upon our loving obedience, and in the most convincing way by the clear shining in him of the truth of that spiritual law which lies at the heart of his religion, — that prayer is the living way open between our human spirits and the Divine Spirit."

More in the next few days from this series. Blessings