I
The Disciples’ Request.
“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.”—Luke xi. 1.
It is my purpose, God willing, to give at intervals, on Sabbath mornings, a series of expositions of that prayer which our Lord taught His disciples to pray, which, because of its beauty, its spirituality, its broad, loving charity, has well deserved the names “Epitome of the Gospels” and “Pearl of Prayers.” But before I address myself to the consideration of the prayer itself, I would like to clear the ground a little—to explain its setting—to consider the circumstances that called it forth, so that we may be able to appreciate and understand it the better.
This prayer—the Lord’s prayer as we commonly call it, though I often think it might be more appropriately called “The Disciples’ Prayer”—is a prayer we learned at our mother’s knee; it is hallowed for many of us by the fact that those who taught it to us at the first have exchanged prayer for praise: earth for heaven. Their lips have been silent for long years, but the prayer they taught us in our childhood, we repeat morning and evening still! Ah! how many times we have repeated it! From the very dawn of life this has been our prayer! We repeated it as children! We are repeating it to-day, as grown up men! Some of us are repeating it as old men! This prayer is one of the dear familiar things of life. But there is a danger in our very familiarity with this beautiful prayer. The peril is that by using it so often, it may become to us a mere form of words; the danger is that when we repeat it, we may do so mechanically—that we may say the Lord’s Prayer without praying. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” we say. People who live in the Alps think nothing of the splendid scenery that we English people go hundreds of miles to see. The dwellers in inland towns long for the time to come which will allow them to spend a brief holiday by the sea. They are fascinated, spell-bound by the changeful, mysterious, beautiful ocean. There are on the other hand, those of us who live in towns like this, who allow weeks and months to pass by without ever visiting the shore. There is ever this danger, that through our familiarity with them, the beautiful things around us should lose their beauty, and appear common-place in our eyes. That is the danger we are in with regard to this “Pearl of Prayers.” It is one of the familiar things of life, and our very familiarity with it may have dulled our sense of its beauty. Frequent usage may have dimmed our perception of its sweet simplicity, and its soaring spirituality. There is the danger of its becoming on our lips a mere form of words. There is the danger of its becoming, instead of a real, throbbing, living prayer, a cold, heartless, formal utterance.
The next best thing to saying a new thing, is to say an old thing in a new way. Originality consists not so much in discovering new truth, as in making old truth real and vital. The painter does not invent the beauty of nature which he depicts on his canvas, he simply brings it out and makes it visible. “I never see the kind of things you paint in your pictures,” said a lady one day to Turner, the great artist. “Don’t you wish you did, madam?” was the painter’s reply, The fault was in the lady’s vision. The artist saw beauties in nature which were missed and unheeded by the crowd, and painted them for us on his glowing canvases. The preacher sees wonders and glories in old and familiar things—glories missed or unheeded perhaps by those who have less time to read and ponder this grand old book. It is his business to bring them out, to show to his people the peerless beauty there is even in the most common and familiar things. Buttercups and daisies are common little flowers. They cover our fields. They carpet our meadows. We cannot take a walk in the fields in summer without treading hundreds of them under foot. They are so cheap and common that no one ever thinks of making a posy of daisies, unless it be our children, and they often enough fling the little flowers away before they reach their homes. Yet there is beauty in the daisy, and a glory in the buttercup. It is only familiarity that has made us blind. We should think them beautiful perhaps if they were as rare as orchids. And even as it is, we need only listen to a lover of flowers as he describes to us the delicacy and beauty of the daisy and the buttercup, to realise that even these—the commonest flowers that bloom—reveal something of the glory of God. Probably there is no form of words so absolutely and universally familiar as the Lord’s Prayer. I would like, if I can, to reveal to you some of its wonder, and beauty, and glory. There are, in this old familiar prayer, heights we have never scaled, depths we have never sounded. I want, if I can, to help you to realise its meaning, to feel its power, to grasp the sweep of its demands, so that this—the most familiar of all prayers—may be on our lips, fresh, real, vital; so that we may pray, not with the lips only, but with the understanding also, so that when we use these sacred words, whether it be in public or in private, we may not simply repeat the Lord’s Prayer, but really and truly pray. To bring out the full meaning of this familiar prayer, to illustrate its truths, to point out the demands it makes—that is the aim I have set before myself in this series of expositions which I purpose to deliver.