And never, never sin,
And from the rivers of His grace
Drink endless pleasures in.
IX
The Model Prayer
“After this manner therefore pray ye.”—Matt. vi. 9.
A fortnight ago we completed our study of the petitions that make up the Lord’s Prayer. For the prayer as it fell from the lips of Christ ended with that petition, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The great doxology, which in the Authorised Version you will find at the close of Matthew’s account of the prayer, and which has become so familiar to us by its constant repetition in the public use of the prayer, formed no part of the original prayer at all, but must be regarded as a liturgical addition made by the Church in later years. It is wanting in the great Greek MSS., and in some important versions, and has been quite properly omitted from our revised English Bible. The probability is that the words “For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen,” were added to the prayer in its public recitations, much in the same way as we to-day sing, “Glory be to the Father,” at the end of the Psalms.
It is not my intention, therefore, to make any comment upon that doxology with which, in our daily use, we end the prayer, but rather to call your attention to some thoughts on prayer in general suggested by the study of this prayer which Jesus gave to His disciples in answer to their request that He would teach them how to pray. First of all, let me say that I believe Jesus gave this prayer to His disciples for use, that is to say, He contemplated their using this very form of words. The circumstances of its origin seem to place this beyond dispute. This is the record Luke gives, “And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.’ And He said unto them, ‘When ye pray, say Father.’” In face of those words, “When ye pray, say,” there is, as Dr. Dods puts it, “no getting past the evident precept here delivered, that we ought habitually to use these words.” “Then our Lord,” some one will remark, “sanctions the use of forms of prayer.” I am here, I know, on the very edge of a question which is one of the most difficult to deal with, and one on which Free Churchmen differ strongly among themselves. Discussions upon the use of liturgical forms in worship crop up periodically at various assemblies, but my experience of them is, that they generate a good deal of heat without giving much light. In our Congregational Churches free prayer is the general, almost the invariable practice. Our forefathers were so shocked at the formalism of the liturgical worship of the Established Church, that in the interest of true spiritual worship they rejected forms altogether; some even going to the length of objecting to the use of the Lord’s Prayer in the public services of the sanctuary. Their dislike and distrust of forms we have to a large extent inherited. But the fact that many people are asking the question to-day whether our services would not be all the more helpful if a little of the liturgical element were imported into them, is proof that there are those amongst us who think that our fathers in their revolt against formalism went to the opposite extreme, and by their complete rejection of forms injured themselves and impoverished the public worship of the sanctuary. Of course formalism is fatal to true worship. But the use of forms is not formalism. Formalism is the abuse of forms. But the fact that forms get abused is no reason for discarding them altogether, any more than the fact that liberty sometimes, and with some people, degenerates into licence is a reason why we should all abjure our freedom. In fact, a certain amount of form is absolutely necessary. As some one has put it, “there may be occasionally form without life, but there can never be life without form.” No one, of course, proposes to do away with free prayer. The abolition of free prayer from our services would, I am convinced, do irreparable injury to the spiritual life of our Free Churches. Our freedom in prayer has been our glory and our proud privilege, and that freedom we must jealously guard. But there are in our congregations men and women of differing temperaments. There are those amongst us—and I am speaking now out of the experience I have gathered during my ten years’ ministry—who would find simple forms a help to them, and the question is whether the interests of a congregation as a whole would not be better met by an order of service which should combine free and liturgical prayer, rather than by an order which should confine itself rigidly to the one, to the utter exclusion of the other. Further into the question I do not mean to enter. I shall have achieved my object if I have brought you to see that the question is really one of Christian expediency. There is no question here of right or wrong. About our perfect right to introduce forms if we choose there can be no doubt. But a thing may be lawful and yet not expedient. And that is the point we have to settle with reference to liturgical forms. Is it expedient to introduce them? Would they enrich our worship. Would they edify the worshipper? Would they help us to come with boldness to the throne of grace? If they would, then adopt them. But if they would tend to formalism, if their effect would be to make us say our prayers instead of praying, or if their introduction would create bitterness or breed dissension in the Church, then better for ever remain without them.
This form of prayer, however, stands quite apart from every other. It has a sacredness all its own. It is the Lord’s prayer. With perfect appropriateness this form finds a place in all our services. I welcome the public use of the Lord’s Prayer for various reasons. First of all, it is the one perfect prayer. In its six brief petitions it seems to include everybody and everything. Men are always partial and one-sided and our human prayers are partial and one-sided also. They express the needs of some and not of others. But this brief prayer is like its Author, it is complete. Jesus was the Son of Man, the Universal Man. Everybody finds his counterpart in Jesus. And the prayer He gave is an universal prayer. It voices the cry of every heart, the need of every soul. Then I welcome the use of this prayer for its associations. What sacred associations cluster around it! It is sacred to us because of Him who first gave it. This is our Lord’s prayer, His gift to the world. Then it is sacred to us because of the Saints, Apostles, Prophets, Martyrs, who have used it. This prayer is a link that binds all the Christian centuries together. Peter and John and Paul and James used to kneel down and say, “Our Father.” Those early Christian assemblies in the upper room in Jerusalem, Lydia’s house in Philippi, and the Catacombs at Rome, used the very words we repeated together just now. This prayer is an heirloom in the Christian family, handed down from one generation to another, and binding the “whole world by chains of gold about the feet of God.”
Then for many of us it has associations of a still tenderer kind. It comes to us burdened with memories of the past. Dr. Guthrie, when lying on his dying bed, used often to ask the members of his family to sing him a bairn’s hymn. Those childish hymns used to carry him back to the old home and the long ago. Vanished days came back again as he listened to the songs he learned first at his mother’s knee. What those “bairn’s hymns” were to Dr. Guthrie, that, this prayer is to most of us. It is the prayer in which we learned our first lessons of Christian truth. The first words we were taught to lisp were the words “Our Father.” When we pray this prayer we are back again in the far-off days of childhood. We remember our fathers and mothers, some of them in glory now, who would have given their lives for our souls. And as we think of those happy days, we become children once again, and becoming children we become fit to receive the blessing; for except we turn and become as little children we shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. So this form of prayer becomes a vehicle of grace. Tender, sacred, universal, it lifts us near to God and rightly finds a place in all the public services of the sanctuary.
But this prayer is much more than a form to be used—it is also a model for all our prayers. The disciples came to Jesus asking Him to teach them how to pray. This prayer is the answer to that request. Instead of giving the disciples a string of rules and principles, instead of delivering a long discourse on the theory of prayer, Jesus did what was infinitely more helpful, He gave them a pattern prayer. He taught them this exquisite prayer of six petitions, and said to them, “After this manner, therefore, pray ye.” This prayer is a model prayer, both as to manner, and order, and spirit.