It remains for us to notice some of the great principles which are enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer as a whole.
1. The Lord’s Prayer is not one prayer among many, as you may have a number of collects for a number of different objects, and each particular collect is just one prayer among many. The Lord’s Prayer is rather the type and mould of all Christian prayer: “After this manner pray ye.” Understand the Lord’s Prayer, and you understand altogether how to pray as a Christian should. It is not really an exaggeration to say that the climax of Christian growth is to have thoroughly learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in the spirit of Him who first spoke it.
And this has been clearly recognized in the use which the Church in all ages has made of the Lord’s Prayer. Among human compositions there are hardly any more beautiful than the liturgies in which Christians, at the altar, have approached the Father of their Lord in the pleading of His sacrifice. Now, almost all the ancient liturgies, both Eastern and Western, are so constructed that the point upon which each service converges is the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. That is the point up to which they climb. That is their central act; becausethe highest thing in the way of worship that the Christian can do is to say Christ’s own prayer in the freedom of that approach to God once won for him by the Son of Man.
So, in our English Communion service, we put ourselves into the right frame of mind by saying the first Lord’s Prayer; and afterwards, in the power of His sacrifice and in the unity of His life communicated to us in His body and blood, we say again the Lord’s Prayer with its doxology as the highest point of our whole service.
Once more, in the daily offices of morning and evening prayer the Lord’s Prayer occurs at the beginning, and again in the prayers after the Creed. It occurs at the beginning to put us into the right frame of mind for praying; and at the end it sums up our petitions—all that we have learned to pray for in the Psalms and lessons. And to leave out the second Lord’s Prayer, as is sometimes done by way of shortening the service, is surely to betray ignorance of the structure of the service and of the use of the Lord’s Prayer.
This is indeed the way in which theChurch, catching the spirit of her Lord, has used the Lord’s Prayer; and, as individuals, it is a great happiness and power for us when we have learned to use it freely. Whatever particular object we may want to pray for, we have never prayed for it aright till we have prayed for it in the words and spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. That, I repeat, is not one prayer among many. It covers all legitimate Christian praying, and indeed the saying of it affords the best test whether our wants of the moment can become a prayer offered “in the name of Christ.”
2. I say “in the name of Christ.” The Lord’s Prayer is the great prayer in His name. You know how many people have a very strangely childish notion, that praying in the name of Christ means simply the addition of the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” at the end of their prayers. But depend upon it they do not by adding these words, or any words, bring it about that their prayers should be in the name of Christ. To pray in the name of Christ means to pray in such a way as represents Christ. The representative always must speak in thespirit and meaning of those for whom he speaks. If Christ is our representative, that must be because He speaks our wishes, or what we ought to make our wishes; and if we are to pray in the name of Christ, that means that we are, however far off, expressing His wishes and intentions.
Therefore, as this Lord’s Prayer represents profoundly and perfectly the spirit of Him who first spoke it, and who taught it to His Church, it follows that it is, beyond all other prayers, the prayer in Christ’s name. Do you then want to know whether this or that thing can be prayed for in Christ’s name? The answer is to be found in another question, Can it be legitimately covered by the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer?
3. The knowing and saying of the Lord’s Prayer, as the prayer in Christ’s name, was in the early Church regarded as being, like the knowing and saying of the Creed, the privilege of those only who were members of the Christian family. It was the prayer of the family because of its first words, “Our Father.” The Christian creed, we know, would teach us to believe that God is the father of allmen, and that He wills all men to realize their sonship. They cannot reach true manhood till they have come to know themselves to be, and to realize what is involved in being, sons of God.
But since sin has separated men from God, it is through Christ and by the partaking of His Spirit that they enter or re-enter into the privileges of sonship. Thus the right of calling upon God as “Our Father” was believed to have come with the coming of the gift of the Holy Ghost: “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” We are apt to have rather “free and easy” notions of the divine fatherhood. And it is important to be reminded that to call God our Father, we must ourselves be sons, and it is they who are led by the Spirit, they and they only, that are the sons of God.