A study of the Lord's prayer

Foreword

The aim of the following study is to call attention to certain features of our Lord's teaching as exhibited in the prayer which bears his name. On such a theme one may hardly hope to say anything that has not often been said before, but some things are worth saying over and over.

Especially tie prayer always reminds us that the human bro herhood into which Jesus urged his disciples rests on a faith in the divine fatherhood ; and that if we want a righteous democracy among men we must pray for the kingdom of

God.

W. R. R.

The Brick Church, New York.

September, 1909.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction. Teach Us to Prat 9

I. Our Father 21

CHAPTER I ©ur jFatbet

We have seen in the introductory chapter that our Lord by his own example was always teaching his disciples to pray; but when a specific request for such instruction came from one of the disciples, what the man himself intended to ask for was some form of words that might properly be used in their supplications. Such a form was furnished them, and from that day to this the disciples have loved to use it in their prayers to God. And we never tire of studying it as a model for all our praying, even when we might not word our requests according to this particular form.

The successive chapters of this little book are studies of the successive petitions of this form of prayer which Christ taught to his disciples.

"But when ye pray," he said, and as good old Matthew Henry says, "it is taken for granted that all the disciples of Christ pray. As soon as ever Paul was converted, * behold, he prayeth.' You may as soon find a living man that doth not breathe as a Christian that doth not pray." "When ye pray, . . . after this manner therefore pray ye."

"Our Father," and that one opening phrase of the prayer will furnish material enough for this first chapter.

May I quote here another quaint observation from old Matthew Henry: "The Lord's Prayer (as indeed every prayer) is a letter sent from earth to heaven. Here is the inscription of the letter, the person to whom it is directed, 'Our Father'; the place, where, 'in heaven'; the contents of it, in several errands of request ; the close, 'for thine is the kingdom'; the seal, 'Amen'; and if you will, the date, too, 'this day.' "

This chapter will be taken up with the inscription — the person to whom this letter is addressed, "Our Father."

The question has been much discussed by students of the Bible how far the several phrases of this prayer were original with Christ; or whether he may have selected them from phrases already familiar to the Jews in their customs of worship. Some of them must have been familiar, for some evident parallels have been pointed out; but Canon Plumptre seems justified in saying that "these parallels do not carry us very far." At all events, however it be with the separate phrases, this Lord's Prayer as a whole was altogether original with Christ in the new spirit which breathes through and unifies all its sentences. Preeminently is that true of this opening phrase, this name for the God to whom the prayer is to be offered.

The ancient Hebrews, like our own Indians and other primitive peoples, made much of names. The names they claimed for themselves or gave to their children were always understood to mean something, something indicative of the character or circumstances of the person named. And so it must be with the name for God — it was far more than a sound; it was the disclosure of God himself. To the mind of a devout Hebrew there could be no more vitally interesting religious question than, What is God's real name?

We read of Jacob in that crowning spiritual experience that we call his wrestling, that he said to the mysterious Antagonist, "Tell me thy name." The name was not told then. But we read afterwards of Moses, in the hour of his great experience by the burning bush, that he asked a similar question of the Presence that had been ordering him to Egypt ; by what name should Moses speak of God to the people in Egypt ; and the name was told, "I am." "I am hath sent thee." The early patriarchs had known God only as the Almighty ; now it is the "I am," Jehovah. First came the thought of God as power; now the deeper thought of God as being.

But Christ does not put either of those names at the head of his prayer; it is ' ' Father, ' ' and our question is how far this title is original with Christ, how generally this word "Father" had come into Jewish usage as a true name for God in prayer.

Of course, you can find some hints at such a usage — not very many — in the books of our Old Testament. As where, in Deuteronomy * or Isaiah 2 or Malachi, 3 the people are rebuked as disobedient and disrespectful children. Malachi says, speaking for God, "If then I be a father, where is my honor?" Or again God is sometimes appealed to as the last resource of those who have no other, as in Isaiah 4 one is heard crying, "Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not." Or again the psalmist cries, 5 "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." But the passages are not many. No such name would stand in their common forms of prayer.

In those later Hebrew writings which we call the Apocrypha, these hints at a faith in the fatherhood of God become somewhat more common ; as where the son of Sirach 8 calls God the Father and Governor of all his whole life, or where Tobit declares that "God is our Father for ever." It is evident that the sound of this name at least would not be altogether unfamiliar to our Lord's Jewish hearers. And, indeed, heathen as well as Jews had sometimes spoken of the divine being as a sort of parent to the creation : "Zeus the father of gods and men." But that this name should be used as Jesus was now encouraging them to use it, used by every disciple at the beginning of every prayer — this was a religious phenomenon without precedent. That any one plain man in his own daily personal prayer should venture to say, "Father," as if that were name enough; as if that told all that we ever need to tell about the God whom we wish our prayer to reach; — there never was a more original contribution to human thought than when Jesus spoke this opening phrase in the prayer which he was teaching for all his disciples, and so for the whole world.

But here let me recur for a moment to what was said in the introductory chapter, that our Lord did more than furnish a form of words for prayer, that his own example had been for these men one long course of instruction in the subject of prayer. Indeed if it had not been so, if this new name for God had been a form of words and nothing else, it is quite certain that the world would never have learned it so as to remember and use it. But it was very much more than a form; it came from a speaker who himself always began his prayers in this way. It was by his own example that Jesus was teaching men, and has taught men whenever they pray to say, "Father/'

There are two peculiarities to be noticed in the religious situation of our time; the one is that to many it seems increasingly difficult to believe that the unseen power which made and rules the world can be like a father ; but the other peculiar fact of the times is that if we are to go on praying at all we must now believe in the fatherhood of him to whom we pray.

That first difficulty of believing that God is like a father arises from our wider observation of the stern facts of the universe. The apparent heartlessness of it weighs upon our souls like an intolerable burden. The very phrases that our later teachers have taught us: " natural selection," "the struggle for existence, " " the survival of the fittest" — what a hopeless, Godless sound they have ! Or again, when the earthquake swallowed up those Italian cities, how many were asking what father, if he had the power to prevent it, would have allowed such an immense disaster to fall on his children. Men never knew before, as we know now, how hard it must be in our moods of scientific observation to turn our faces toward the mysterious but inexorable power that rules the world and say, "Father."

Yet that is what nearly the whole world is saying in its moods of prayer, so far as it is moved to pray at all. For in these days we have all come to believe that a being of infinite power merely, or of infinite wisdom, but without the moral qualities that would allow us to trust him as a father, ought not to be called God, and would not be worthy of our prayer. Men of other ages might worship their bloody Moloch, or Baal, or Mars, or Thor — we simply could not. So while it is harder now than ever before to believe in a Heavenly Father, and pray to him, yet we must offer our prayer to him, else we shall not pray. That is the twofold peculiarity of the present religious situation the whole world over. And we do pray to him. Every day more and more of the children of men are lifting up their voices in prayer to "our Father which art in heaven."

The historical explanation of this strange religious phenomenon of our time is that Jesus, by the compelling power of his own example, has been teaching the world to say, "Father." For he himself said it ; spite of all the dark mysteries of the world, he said it, and he knew it. A volume of sermons has lately been published under the title ' ' The Creed of Jesus, ' ' meaning by that title "The Lord's Prayer," and the title applies with peculiar appropriateness to the first phrase of the prayer, ' ' Father ' ' ; there you have the creed of Jesus himself. Through the whole story of his life, from those early days of his childhood in the temple when he was about his " Father's business, ' ' through the scene of his baptism and his temptation, through the whole course of his teaching, in his own prayer in Gethsemane, and his prayer as he hung dying on the cross, always it was ' ' Father. ' ' The one event which has made the deepest mark upon the history of the world is the birth into the world of this one child of our race whose one surest element of faith and knowledge was that the unseen God was his Father. That was truly the creed of Jesus Christ; that is why now nearly the whole world, if it is ever moved to pray at all, finds its lips shaping themselves to say, " Father." Already in all parts of the earth you could find a fulfillment of what Paul wrote long ago in his letter to the Galatians: "Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Oh, may the Lord teach us all this lesson. For really I do not believe we can ever master it except as we learn it from him. It must be the spirit of God's dear Son coming into our hearts that should ever enable us to speak so daring a name, and mean it. Some one has well said that "this is a prayer that might be committed to memory in a few minutes; but it is the work of a lifetime to learn it by heart;" and what we want is to learn it by heart, so that we can mean it when we say, ' ' Father. ' '

' ' Father, ' ' yes, but in the prayer it is " Our Father, ' ' for there are other children ; and we are not to forget these others when we pray. Let me quote you a few sentences from a sermon preached more than fifteen hundred years ago in the old city of Constantinople: "Jesus teaches, moreover, to make our prayer common, in behalf of our brethren also. For he saith not 'My

Father,' but 'Our Father,' offering up his supplications for the body in common, nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere to his neighbor's good; and by this he at once takes away hatred, and quells pride, and casts out envy, and brings in the mother of all good things, even charity, and exterminates the inequality of human affairs; and shows how far the equality reaches between the king and the poor man. . . . For to all hath he given one nobility, having vouchsafed to be called the Father of all alike." The slow passing centuries have taken nothing from the truth of those words spoken so long ago by St. Chrysostom. Jesus was laying the foundation, not of Christian charity alone, but of a universal democracy, with the whole doctrine of freedom and equal human rights, when he taught us in praying to say, "Our Father." For if God is our Father, it means that we have brothers whom we remember in our prayer.

The attempt has been made sometimes to establish a doctrine of human brotherhood, while forgetting or denying the divine fatherhood. But the success of such attempts has not been encouraging. Take, for instance, that great revolution of 1789 in France. There was a land where the Christian religion had long been discredited by the corruption and greed and heartlessness of its official representatives; and so, when the outburst came, men were impatient to have done with everything belonging to the hated church. Brothers, they would be to one another; but no Father, God; let their worship be rendered to a goddess of reason, or to an opera dancer, or to Robespierre's "Supreme Being"; to anything rather than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Almost everywhere in Paris you can see deeply chiseled in the stone the old revolutionary motto of " Liberty, equality, fraternity"; but those same men were preparing for 1793 and the Reign of Terror; and again for 1870 and the Commune. Historically that term brotherhood has now an ominous sound, unless there be a Father. And so any of us who really wish to deal fairly with our human brothers; who really wish to see that motto of liberty, equality, fraternity, worked out into a social order that shall be altogether brotherly, must pratice our lips and hearts over this prayer which Christ has taught us to our Father. For it was Jesus, always knowing himself the Son of God, who has given us also the one, the only, effective example of universal human brotherliness.

I was talking once some years ago to a poor girl who had not many days to live and not much breath for speech, and whispering to me about her own weakness and weariness of body and of mind, she said that even when she tried to pray she could not get beyond, ' ' Our Father. ' ' The saying has often come to me since. If she had gone as far as that certainly it was a good prayer. And I think the Father could be trusted to fill in for his tired child all that was needed of confession, and thanksgiving, and request. Our Father,

The first petition of the Lord's Prayer. It is to be noticed at the outset that this model prayer begins with requests that have to do with God. In this it resembles the commandments of the ancient Jewish law. For the first table of that law lays down the duties which a man owes to God; only in the second table do we come to the duties that he owes to his fellow-men. When our Lord issued his famous summary or interpretation of the ancient law he followed the same order, for the first and great commandment was of love to God; and the second, which was like unto it, was of love to our neighbor man.

So it is now in the matter of praying. The first three petitions have to do with

God and his glory and his kingdom, and after that we come to the petitions which express our desire for our own good as men.

There are some good people in the world who profess great admiration for Jesus and his teaching and his example, but who quite contradict his teaching and example in this important particular, for what he placed first of all they entirely omit. They profess themselves eager to follow him in his kindness toward men, but they decline to listen when he speaks of reverence toward God. That blunder is to be avoided. If Jesus is worthy of any attention from men it is worth while that we should begin with him where he begins. And with him the beginning of all good things, whether in heaven or on earth, was what he called the glory of God, or the hallowing of God's name. The third commandment of the old law was that a man should not take God's name in vain ; now the first petition of the new prayer is that God's name may be hallowed.

There is a wonderful passage in one of F. W. Robertson's sermons in which he argues that "the decay in the meaning of words" is a certain mark of "the decay of national religious feeling"; that "the debasement of a language is a sure mark of the debasement of a nation. ' ' And he adds that the name of God may share this fate. "No marvel that we are taught to pray, 'Hallowed be thy name.' We cannot pray a deeper prayer for our country than to say, 'Never may that name in English stand for a lower idea than it stands for now.' " In offering this prayer we ask that we and our fellow-men may be enabled to keep the third commandment, that we may never take God's name in vain, that we may be saved from all flippant irreverence of speech.

One would think that by this time this particular prayer might have been answered, this particular command might have been obeyed. For this sin of profanity is so needless and objectless, so repulsive to all refined taste, so degrading and coarsening to the sinner. Nothing in the world to be gained by it, everything in the world to be lost by it. But the prayer is not yet fully answered, that commandment is not yet fully obeyed; the same old sin goes on, and heaven is still insulted by this harsh and monotonous chorus of profanity rising from every corner of the earth where men have taken God's name in vain. It still sounds like a confession of the sin of our people, perhaps our own, as often as we pray, "Hallowed be thy name."

But you notice the petition in the prayer takes a positive form, while the language of the older commandment was negative. "Thou shalt not," said the law, and a man might have flattered himself that he was secure against breaking the commandment if only he was careful enough never to speak the name of God at all. And perhaps that is as far as some of us have advanced in our practice of reverence in our common conversation; for fear of swearing we have left the name of God severely alone.

But evidently, even if that was obeying the commandment, it would be no true answer to the request in the Lord's Prayer. "Hallowing God's name" cannot mean the same thing as burying it in oblivion. For remember what this latest and dearest name of God is, as Christ has just been teaching it to us, "Father," "our Father." How would any other father feel toward the use of his own name in the language of his children? He would be grieved, certainly, if he ever heard them speaking it in tones of disrespect. And yet if this offense had been committed because the child was angry or thoughtless, blurting out his words under some strong provocation, or letting them slip without perceiving how much they meant, in such- a case any sensible father would make allowance and easily forgive or ignore the childish fault. But how must a father feel if his children never spoke to him at all, never spoke of him at all, never once named his name in their familiar speech ?

We may well tremble to think how God's ear is still wounded by this harsh chorus of profanity rising from the lips of his enemies in every corner of the earth ; but are you sure that the Father's ear may not be still more cruelly wounded by this strange conspiracy of awkward silence which so often falls upon his own children when we ought to be speaking our Father's name?

If we are careful not to grieve the Lord by any profanity of speech, we must be equally careful not to grieve him by our irreverent and ungrateful silence. "Men conscious of deep and real reverence,'* Robertson says, "are not fearful of the appearance of irreverence"; and he goes on to show how in the days of the great Hebrew prophets the name of Jehovah used to be named devoutly and freely; a mighty cedar would be called a cedar to Jehovah; a lofty mountain a mountain of Jehovah; Moses was said to be beautiful to God. "No beauty — no greatness — no goodness, was conceivable except as emanating from him." It was in a later and more degenerate time, when the spirit of prophecy was dead, that the Jews came to think the name too holy for human lips; and even when reading the Scripture in the synagogue, if they saw those awful characters, always substituted another sound. They dared not say Jehovah, but offered the spurious reverence of an awkward silence. It would be well if all who have learned from Jesus to call God "our Father" could also learn to hallow his name by using it more naturally and thankfully in our daily speech at home and among our friends. "Whatsoever ye do," says the apostle, "in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."

So much for reverence when we are at home. But what of the reverence that we try to pay to the name of God when we gather to worship him in church? This first petition in the Lord's Prayer may fairly be taken as the divine warrant of the whole institution of public worship. The first desire of all true believers alike being that God 's name may be hallowed or honored, we all naturally make it our first business on the first day of the week to come together and unite in showing it honor. "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," and the Father is seeking such to worship him. It is the will of God that we offer worship. This first petition of the Lord's Prayer is to be associated with all the public services of prayer and of praise. "Hallowed be thy name" — the meaning of every hymn that his people sing, and of every prayer that they offer; of every bended knee or bowed head; of that hush of silence that falls upon those who enter the door of a church — it is all an expression of our common desire that the name of God may be hallowed by us and about us. In everything that we do in our forms of public worship we are endeavoring ourselves to serve as instruments for bringing about an answer to our request that God's name be hallowed.

It is to be noted that this petition stands first of all the petitions in the Lord's Prayer. It is the very first thing that a disciple thinks of as he begins to pray ; indicating what must be our first business on the first day of every week — to hallow God's name. Nothing else is to take precedence of that. Other things may follow. Before the day is over it will be right to offer a prayer for daily bread, but that can wait till later. Even the prayer for forgiveness of our sins comes later, and the prayer for deliverance from temptation comes later. In Christ's order earliest of all stands this petition that the name of God our Father may be hallowed.

It reminds one of the oft-repeated declaration of the psalmist that he will make his worship of God the very earliest business of the day. "Awake, psaltery and harp," he cries ; ' ' 1 myself will awake early. I will praise thee, Lord, among the people. " " God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee." "Early," what a favorite word it is with him ! Naturally so for a man who could go on to say, as the psalmist says, "My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; to see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary." A man who felt so strongly on the subject would not be apt to be late. "Early will I seek thee."

In another place the psalmist cries to God, "0 satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. ' '

So in the Proverbs we hear Wisdom saying, "Those that seek me early shall find me. ' ' So the prophet cries to God, 7 ' ' With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early. ' ' And so in the Gospel story on that memorable first day of the week certain women were early at the sepulcher, and it was they who were able to come back telling of the vision of the angels, and that the Lord was alive. All these devout and highly favored souls seem to have accepted the logic of the Lord's Prayer which puts this request for the hallowing of God's name earliest among all the petitions; not late, but early.

So anyone who had learned the Lord's Prayer by heart would find that this

"early" is a proper word to be associated with all the exercises of the public worship of God; not late, but early. Those who have made an appointment with him, or with each other, that at some specified time we will unite in showing honor to his name, if we are really anxious that his name should be honored, will expect to be at the rendezvous on time. Of course our best endeavors at promptness do not always succeed. The common agencies of transportation cannot always be depended upon to live up to their schedule. Sickness and accident will sometimes disarrange the best of human plans. Once in a while in traveling you even miss your train. We could hardly approve a rule that locked the church door against every late comer, for it might shut out some poor publican who most needed to come in. Indeed you have known some of the very saints of God who because of bodily infirmity had to content themselves with only part of a service ; and the part they were hungriest for might sometimes be the Lord's Supper at the end, so they are compelled to come late.

But making allowance for all such occasional accidents and exceptions, it is not putting the matter too strongly to say that where Christian people have agreed to unite at some specified time in showing honor to the name of our God, those who are really anxious that his name should be honored will take pains to be at the place of rendezvous on time. We should be most unwilling to form part of a belated and hurried procession struggling noisily toward their places two or three or five or ten minutes after time, thus confusing the thoughts, and hindering the worship, and perhaps ruffling the spirits of their prompter fellow-Christians who had taken pains enough to be in their places on time. The rule for catching a train is ''better ten minutes early than one minute late"; and that is a good rule for church going. "I myself will awake early." "Early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, . . . in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; to see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary." Yes, this is the first of all the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, and it prescribes a very resolute promptness in our public worship.

But this prayer for the hallowing of God's name ought to be finding an answer in many other ways and other places besides the public services of the church, or even our own habits of daily speech. We ought to have that due sense of all God's mercies "that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we show forth his praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to his service, and walking before him in holiness and righteousness all our days." "Hallowed by thy name," and by the very ordinance of baptism that sacred name has already been placed on almost every disciple. Every man or woman who can be called in any sense a Christian is to that extent a namesake of Christ, a namesake of God.