Chapter 3 starts at 22:49.
“No man hath seen God at any time; but the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”
John 1:18
“We that cometh from above is above all; he that is of the earth is of the earth, and of the earth he speaketh: He that cometh from heaven is above all. What He hath seen and heard, of that He beareth witness; and no man receiveth His witness. He that hath received His witness hath set His seal to this, that God is true.”
John 3:31-33
“1 am the good Shepherd the good Shepherd layeth down His life for the sheep. … Therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down BIy life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment received I from My Father.”
John 10:11,17,18
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do: because I go unto the Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask Me anything in My name, that will I do."
“And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive ; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him: ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you. … But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name. He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.”
John 14:16,17,26
“But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He shall bear witness of Me.” John 15:26
Having considered the subject of the possibility of prayer generally, we now proceed to think of it particularly, and as within the Christian fact. In the three groups of Scriptures with which this study is prefaced we have indicated the threefold fact which creates the possibility of prayer according to Christian teaching and experience. The selection of verses is not intended to be exhaustive. It would be quite possible to take other single verses containing the same truth in some other setting. It is also self-evident that in this study there is no intention of dealing exhaustively with the verses selected. I propose only to deduce from them their suggestiveness on this particular subject of prayer.
In the first place let me state the general value of each group. In the first our Lord is presented to us as the One who has revealed the Father. In the second He is presented as the One who brings us, through His mediatorial work, into the presence of the Father that there we may appear complete in the Son, and therefore unafraid. In the third He is presented to us as the One through whose perfect and accomplished work the Spirit is given to us to abide with us, to be in us.
This threefold fact creates the Christian platform of prayer. Its first phase is that Christ has made such a revelation of the Father as creates in our hearts a desire for prayer. The second is that He has done such work for us as admits us to the presence of God in order that we may have the right to pray. While the third is that upon the accomplishment of His work and as its crowning glory He poured forth His Spirit who by indwelling is the inspiration of our prayer as we stand in Christ in the presence of that God whom Jesus has perfectly revealed.
The relation of this threefold fact to our previous study should be noted. Therein we declared that we believe prayer to be possible because of our doctrine of God. From whence did we obtain this doctrine? From Christ’s revelation of the Father. We declared in the second place, that we believe prayer to be possible because of the teaching of Christ. What was the final teaching of Christ in answer to that request of His disciples? It was not the teaching of His words, but that of His work. The meditation of Jesus is His ultimate teaching which brings conviction to our hearts of the possibility of prayer. Finally, we declared that we believe in the possibility of prayer because of the experience of the saints. How has that experience been created? It has ever been the result of the indwelling and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Let us now approach the subject from another standpoint, by asking whether prayer is possible apart from these truths. I unhesitatingly reply that it is not. If they are denied prayer will cease sooner or later. There may be prayer in some senses apart from a consciousness of these things. There is an instinct for prayer in human nature which expresses itself among all peoples; but prayer, as we understand it, as our fathers have experienced it, and as the New Testament teaches, is absolutely impossible save on that platform. Let us begin with the first fact. Suppose it were possible to blot out the revelation of God which the word has received through Jesus Christ. The supposition is of course an absurdity. The revelation can never be entirely lost. It has become ingrained in the common consciousness of the age. Those who deny the deity of Jesus and tell us they believe in the Fatherhood of God speaking with exquisite beauty of that fatherhood, are speaking of that which Christ revealed. For the sake of argument, however, let us suppose it possible that the world should lose that consciousness of God which Christ has created, what then would be the result? The measure of intellectual progress apart from revelation would be the measure in which men would cease to pray. It may be objected that this is to declare that prayer is not an intellectual exercise, but that is not so. When I refer to the measure of man’s intellectual progress apart from revelation I am proposing to omit the quantity without which the intellect is at once darkened and imprisoned. No man is a full grown intellectual who is not ready to receive revelation. To turn the back upon revelation is necessarily to cease to pray. Why did Huxley, Tyndal, Darwin and Spencer cease to pray? The answer inevitably is, because they ceased to believe in revealed religion; they denied that God had revealed Himself to men directly and specifically. Some declared that He was unknowable, that it was not possible for Him to reveal Himself to men or for men to receive any revelation from Him. Denying revealed religion, they turned to nature and prosecuted their inquiry with absolute honesty and splendid devotion. Some of their number, as we well know, who in their early days possessed a love of poetry and music, lost it entirely in their devotion to cold scientific investigation. What was their ultimate position? They could not pray. And this, because nature never reveals that fact concerning God which creates desire for prayer. Nature does reveal God, but not in all the facts of His Being. What can a man find in nature if he shuts the book of revelation, and declines to believe that God has spoken in His Word or through His Son? The Apostle, writing to the Romans, declared that God had evidently revealed Himself in nature in two particulars, namely in His power and divinity. The men to whom reference has been made declared that they found at the back of all natural phenomena an eternal energy. One of them spoke of this as “a double-faced somewhat, a combination of intelligence and force.” I accept the testimony of the Apostle and of the modern scientist, that you find God in nature as force and as intelligence, but to neither of these nor to the two in cooperation, is it possible to pray. I cannot pray to force. All I can do in Its presence is to discover its law and obey it in order that I may constrain it to serve me rather than to blast me. It is a perpetual law of force that It will do the one or the other according to the relation which we bear to it. Take dynamite as expressive of force. To disobey its law is to be scattered by it into fragments. By obedience to its law is the rock blasted and the highway created. When men would use dynamite they do not pray to it. They discover its law. If God be only an eternal energy, then I cannot pray, but even then I will attempt to discover the law of His operation and obey it. During the last fifty years man’s conception of the divine intelligence has been greatly enlarged. As man has prosecuted his inquiry and come to understand more perfectly the marvel of the universe in the midst of which he lives, he has come to a larger comprehension of the marvel of the all-governing intelligence. For instance, there was a time when man turned his telescope to the heavens and counted the stars. A little later on with a more powerful instrument he declared that the number was far in excess of that first affirmed; until at last Rosse turned his great refractor to the heavens and declared that the stars cannot be counted. That is the scientific position to-day. The Bible affirmed it long ago. Jeremiah sang that the stars were without number, but men declared it was the license of poetry. As a matter of fact it was cold, hard, scientific fact. To return, however, this scientific investigation has enlarged man’s conception of the intelligence behind nature, and in that proportion it has been less easy for man to pray. That may sound a strange thing to say, and yet I think it must be conceded as true. When I find illimitable intelligence ordering seasons and marshalling stars I cannot believe that by any asking of mine I can hope to affect or persuade such a mind. I cannot pray to intelligence.
But now I read “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” Here is a new quantity, a new fact, “the bosom of the Father.” Put this into other words and read, “the heart of God.” Jesus has revealed the fact that God is more than force and intelligence working in cooperation. He is a personal Being, and at the back of the force presiding over it, behind the intelligence inspiring it, is love. If that be true there is at once born, within me a desire to pray. If it be true that behind all the rest there is a heart, then I will pray in spite of force, and notwithstanding intelligence. If God is but another name for intelligence, that intelligence is demonstrated to be so stupendous that it is unthinkable and foolish for me to attempt to pray to such a mind as that. Prayer is impossible. I am bruised and broken upon life’s highway but there is no help for me in the inscrutable might and mind of which I am conscious. But out of the infinite spaces there comes to me a great love song. Out of the bosom of the Father comes a message of tenderness and compassion. Immediately, bruised and broken as I am, 1 want to pray. I desire to speak out of my sense of sin and sorrow to the heart behind force and intelligence concerning my need. Agony can sob itself out upon a heart. Impotence can trust love. A sinner can turn his face back towards a Father. ISTeither force nor intelligence, nor both working in cooperation constitute God. If that is all a man knows of God he will cease to speak of it as God, and presently will write the word with a small ‘g’, or he will simply use the word in accommodation to the age in which he lives, not because of its personal significance. Christ has revealed to men the fact that the personality behind the universe is force, intelligence and heart, a complete personality, not only volitional and intellectual but emotional withal. While I cannot comprehend Him nor encompass Him within my finite thinking, I still know that I have found in that infinite conception something which perfectly corresponds to my finite life. There is something in me of force and intelligence, but the greatest of me is my heart. “When my finite heart finds the infinite heart of God I am able to trust my finite strength to His infinite strength, and my finite mind to His infinite intelligence. This then is the first fact in the platform of prayer, that the God of the universe has a bosom, a heart, and that the Son has spoken to men out of it. By the way of Jesus Christ there has come to man this new revelation concerning God, the revelation of His heart, of His essential essence, of His love. Out of that revelation is born the passion for prayer in the soul of man.
Yet that fact alone does not make prayer possible, neither does it reveal to us the platform upon which we stand to pray. Though I appear to contradict what I have already said it must be affirmed that in the moment when I stand face to face with God as the God of love, even though the desire to pray is born within me I am conscious that I dare not pray. When Jesus Christ brings me into His presence and I find His love, there is immediately in my nature a going out after Him; but simultaneously with the birth of desire comes a new consciousness which seals my lips. It is when I stand in the presence of God as love that I realize for the first time the real meaning of sin, and I am silent. This assertion may not carry conviction at first, yet think of it! The men who have missed the vision of God’s love have invariably lost their sense of their own sin. Those who have lost the God of revelation never speak of sin as do those who live in the light of revelation. Sin to the former is an infirmity, a weakness, a process of development. It has recently been affirmed that this is an age in which men of highly developed intelligence do not care to think of or speak of sin, but it is surely no proof of high development that men desire to close their eyes to facts. I repeat, that to lose the vision of God is to lose the sense of sin. If I simply think of an eternal energy working in response to supreme intelligence, I become conscious of my own weakness and my own foolishness, but never of my sin. It is when I stand in the presence of the heart of God that I really begin to know what sin is. To illustrate briefly from personal experience. I was born in a Christian home, nurtured by Christian parents, and by that fact graciously and tenderly spared from many of the vulgarities of godlessness. Consequently Mount Sinai with its thunder never made me tremble, never brought deep conviction of sin to my heart. I have always sympathized with the young ruler who confronted by the six final words of the decalogue, could yet look into the face of incarnate purity and say, “All these things have I observed from my youth.” But when I came to stand consciously, not at the foot of the mount which might not be touched, but on the green hill outside the city wall, and saw in the mystery of that passion and pain the revelation of the heart of God, the self-sacrificing, self-denying heart of God, I knew what a sinner I was. When I came into the presence of God as love I found in love a light which bowed me to the dust in shame, and though my sad heart yearned to pray, I dared not take His name upon my lips, for He is love ineffable who has - let me say it reverently - denied Himself in order to help men. In the light of that love I discovered that sin does not consist in incidental acts of passing days, but in the essential attitude of selfishness. It is when Jesus brings me into the presence of the heart of God that I put my hand upon my lips and cry. Unclean, unclean. I want to pray. I dare not pray. I have forfeited all right to ask for anything from such love. I need yet more than the revelation of the Father before I can pray. Thank God there is more.
I pass to the second group of Scriptures and in them I find the provision I seek. “I am the good Shepherd the good Shepherd layeth down His life for the sheep.” Death and resurrection are in that sentence. He layeth down His life, that is the mystery of His dying. He layeth down His life for the sheep, that is, in such a way that it becomes communicate to them. “No one taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment received I from My Father.” Thus in the radiant splendour of these words of Jesus I see One who comes out from God, lays down His life, and in the mystery of that act clears me from sin, who takes His life again in resurrection and in the might of that act places at my disposal a new life which makes it possible for me to stand unafraid in the presence of God. All this is exactly what I need. I cannot pray unless my sin is forgiven and my dead spiritual nature is brought to life. Hear me in solemn reverence as I speak out of my heart’s deepest consciousness. I need something done for me whereby the pollution of sin can be blotted out, if not for God’s sake for my own. If you could persuade me that God could forgive me without all that the Cross means, you could not persuade me that I could forgive myself. I must have something that cleanses from the pollution which spoils and harms and clings to my life. Sentimental passion and pity cannot purge the stain from my own conscience. In the very deepest of me there is a cry which answers the very word of revelation, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission.” Ere I can enter the presence chamber of the revealed Father and pray, I need some mystery of cleansing and healing, some new dynamic which should touch and quicken into life the withered powers within me. I am amazed at the love of God, but I dare not pray until the revealing Son stands before me as Mediator also. “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in His apparel, marching in the greatness of His strength?” It is One with wounded hands, the mystery of pain written upon His face, with all the evidences of the passion of sacrificial dying enwrapping Him as with a purple robe. Who is He? He is the Son, the good Shepherd. The One who came after lost ones. The One who found them bruised and broken; mangled and torn by wolves. The One who laid down His life to rescue them, and yet in such power as to be able to take it again and communicate it to them so that it became their life. The One who by such dying and living has given to men of His life the vision, the virtue, the victory. It is God Himself acting out in the limitation of time and sense and flesh that infinite mystery of love saving through sacrifice. Thus it is through the rent veil of His flesh that I enter the place of prayer. It is through the mystery of His accomplished work that I dare to draw near. I who had felt the moving of God’s heart as Jesus spake and taught and yet was made afraid thereby because of sin, am now brought near by the mystery of mediation and in the presence of God I dare to pray, standing unafraid in the light of God’s love in the merit and might of the death and resurrection of His Son.
And yet once again, I cannot pray. The love of God revealed has made me desire to pray. The work of Jesus as Mediator has brought me into the place of prayer, but I was never more afraid to pray than now. That is the meaning of the Apostolic declaration, “We know not how to pray as we ought.” For who are these of whom he thus speaks? They are the people whose experience is described in the chapter which commences with “no condemnation,” and ends with “no separation.” There is surely no time in which a man feels less able to pray than when having seen the vision of God through Jesus, and having been made nigh by Jesus to God, he stands in the place where he is free to pray. The nearer we live to the heart of Jesus, and the closer we abide in the consciousness of God’s love the less shall we feel able to pray. We sometimes sing:
- The weakest, feeblest need the mostThe praying in the Holy Ghost.
That is a great truth, and yet I think it may be written in another way,
- The strongest, mightiest need the mostThe praying in the Holy Ghost.
That is to say those who have answered the revelation of love by absolute abandonment to the mediating Son; those who have entered most perfectly into the experience of the Divine provision, need most sorely a true inspiration, and are the most acutely conscious of their need. To stand in the presence of such love by such grace is to shrink back lest by some impurity of motive or faultiness of desire prayer should become unworthy.
Thus we are brought to the third fact in the provision for prayer, that was dealt with in the final discourses of Jesus when He promised the Comforter. The indwelling Spirit interprets to us the meaning of the life we live and gives us to see the will of God in Jesus, and the way in which we must act in order to realize that will. The indwelling Spirit who knows the will of God creates our new aspirations and desires, and out of these comes our prayer. Thus standing in the light of the revealed Father through the mediation of His Son and answering the inspiration of the indwelling Spirit we pray.
In conclusion let these thoughts be summarized. By the coming of Jesus God has been so revealed as to create the desire for prayer. By the work of Jesus mediation has been made which brings man into the place of prayer. By the indwelling of Jesus by the Spirit desires are created and choices are made which express themselves in prayer. Thus through the mercy of the Father, the merit of the mediating Son, and the might of the inspiring Spirit, prayer is possible. That conception of the platform of prayer must have an effect upon our praying. If we lack that vision we shall pray ignorantly and foolishly. We shall ask and have not because we ask amiss. If once that platform of prayer be recognized and we understand to whom, and through whom and by whom we pray, our praying will become prevailing. The whole truth may be constantly remembered by the Apostolic benediction, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit.” The only difference is that in this benediction we commence with the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and then pass to that infinite fountain, the love of God, and finally refer to that abiding fellowship, the communion of the Holy Spirit. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,” “though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich.” That is the story of mediation. “The love of God,” that is the whole word of Christ’s revelation. “The communion of the Holy Spirit,” that is the fact of the Spirit’s indwelling and inspiration.