I. The foundation of the citizenship of the Christian.—In access to the Father—in the power of approaching Him in full, free, trustful prayer.
1. Christian prayer is the approach of the individual soul to God as its Father.—Until a man utterly believers in Christ he can never pray aright. There are veils around the unbelieving spirit which hinder this free, confiding approach. The touch of God startles memories, rouses ghosts of the past in the soul’s secret chambers; they flutter fearfully in the strange Divine light, and the man shudders and dare not pray. A man bathed in the life of God in prayer feels he is no more a stranger and a foreigner, but has entered into God’s kingdom, for God is his Father.
2. That prayer of the individual soul must lead to the united worship of God’s Church.—We cannot always pray alone. The men who stand most aloof from social worship are not the men who manifest the highest spiritual life. Our highest prayers are our most universal. I do not say we don’t feel their individuality, we do—but in and through their universality.
II. The nature of Christian citizenship.—1. Prayer a witness to our fellowship with the Church of all time. Realising the Fatherhood of God in the holy converse of prayer, we are nearer men. Our selfishness, our narrow, isolating peculiarities begin to fade. In our highest prayers we realise common wants.
2. Prayer a witness to our fellowship with the Church of eternity.—All emotions of eternity catch the tone of prayer. Sometimes in the evening, when the sounds of the world are still, and the sense of eternity breaks in upon us, is not that feeling a prayer? We know that we are right, that in worship we have taken no earthly posture, but an attitude from higher regions.
Lessons.—1. Live as members of the kingdom. 2. Expect the signs of citizenship—the crown of thorns, the cross. 3. Live in hope of the final ingathering.—E. L. Hull.
The Communion of Saints.
I. Society becomes possible only through religion.—Men might be gregarious without it, but not social. Instinct which unites them in detail prevents their wider combination. Intellect affords light to show the elements of union, but no heat to give them crystalline form. Self-will is prevailingly a repulsive power, and often disintegrates the most solid of human masses. Some sense of a Divine Presence, some consciousness of a higher law, some pressure of a solemn necessity, will be found to have preceded the organization of every human community, and to have gone out and perished before its death.
II. Worship exhibits its uniting principle under the simplest form, in the sympathies it diffuses among the members of the same religious assembly.—There is, however, no necessary fellowship, as of saints, in the mere assembling of ourselves together; but only in the true and simple spirit of worship. Where a pure devotion really exists, the fellowship it produces spreads far beyond the separate circle of each Christian assembly. Surely it is a glorious thing to call up, while we worship, the wide image of Christendom this day. Could we be lifted up above this sphere and look down as it rolls beneath this day’s sun, and catch its murmurs as they rise, should we not behold land after land turned into a Christian shrine? In how many tongues, by what various voices, with what measureless intensity of love, is the name of Christ breathed forth to-day!
III. But our worship here brings us into yet nobler connections.—It unites us by a chain of closest sympathy with past generations. In our helps to faith and devotion we avail ourselves of the thought and piety of many extinct ages. Do not we, the living, take up in adoration and prayer the thoughts of the dead and find them Divinely true? What an impressive testimony is this to the sameness of our nature through every age and the immortal perseverance of its holier affections!