The Christian Law of Prayer—
I. To the Father.—1. How honourable! Right of entry to an earthly sovereign. 2. How delightful! Our pleasures may be graduated according to the part of our nature in which they have their rise. The pleasures of devotion are the highest taste for devotion. 3. How profitable! God is able to bestow all temporal and spiritual blessings. 4. How solemn! The intercourse of our spirit with the Father of our spirits. Heart to heart.
II. Through the Son.—1. Through His atonement. Legal barriers to our access must be removed. Have been removed by the death of Christ as a satisfaction to Divine Justice. He has demolished the wall, He has constructed a bridge across the chasm, He has laid down His own body as the medium of approach. 2. Through His intercession. It perpetuates His sacrifice. The Jewish high priest entering the holy of holies on the Great Day of Atonement. Amyntas, mother of Coriolanus; Philippa after the siege of Calais.
III. By the Spirit.—1. He teaches us what are our wants. For the most part we are likely to be aware of our temporal wants. In spiritual things the greater our need the less our sense of need. 2. He makes us willing to ask the supply of our wants. Aversion to beg. Aversion to lay bare the symptoms of humiliating disease. 3. He gives us power to spread our wants before God. One person employed to write a letter or a petition for another. 4. He inspires us with confidence to plead with importunity and faith. Confidence in the Father, in the Son, in the power of prayer.—G. Brooks.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 19–22.
The Church the Temple of God.
I. Enjoying special privileges.—1. A saintly citizenship. “No more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints” (ver. 19). The apostle has spoken of the separation and enmity existing between Jew and Gentile. The Jew, trained to believe in the one invisible and only true God, who could not be imagined by any material form, learned to look with hatred and contempt on the outcast, lawless Gentile, with his idol deities in every valley and on every hill; and the intellectual Gentile looked with philosophic pride on the stern land of the Hebrew and in philosophic scorn on his strange, exclusive loneliness. They were not only at enmity with each other, but both were at enmity with God. Now the writer is showing that by the provisions of the Gospel both Greek and Jew are united as citizens of one Divine kingdom. They enjoy the same privileges and are in actual fellowship with prophets and apostles and all holy souls in all ages and are sanctified subjects of a kingdom that can never be moved.
2. A family life.—“And of the household of God” (ver. 19). The Church is a family having one Father in God, one Brother in Christ, one life in the Spirit, and one home in Heaven. As in earthly families, there are diversities of character, tastes, gifts, tendencies, and manifestations, but all the members of the heavenly household are bound together by the one common bond of love to God and to each other.
II. Resting on a sure foundation (ver. 20).—The materials composing the foundation of the Church are living stones—teachers and confessors of the truth, “apostles and prophets”; but Christ, as the one foundation, is the “chief corner-stone.” The foundation of the Church is not so much in the witnesses of the truth as in the truth itself, and in propagating which truth the first teachers and confessors sacrificed their all. The truth which produced and sustained the martyrs is itself immovable. The apostles and prophets—teachers in the apostolic times—laid the first course in the foundation of the Church and were careful to recognise and build only one foundation, united and held together by the one corner-stone—Christ Jesus. They fixed the pattern and standard of Christian doctrine and practice. The Christian Church is sure because the foundation is deep and broad and can never be removed and replaced by any human structure.
III. Ever rising to a higher perfection (ver. 21).—The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points over a wide area. The builders work in concert upon a common plan. The several parts of the work are adjusted to each other, and the various operations in process are so harmonised that the entire construction preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the apostolic Church—one but of many parts—in the diverse gifts and multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one Divine purpose (Findlay). Since the Day of Pentecost, when three thousand living stones were laid on the foundation, the Church has been growing in symmetry, beauty, and vastness, and it is constantly advancing towards perfection. The building, though apparently disjoined and working in separate parts, is growing into a final unity.