Our Father.
1. All true enjoyment of blessings depends on our being willing to share them. To keep for ourselves is to lose. We enter by faith into a great community.
2. The effect of this on our prayers: to destroy their selfishness. We bow to Him of whom the whole family is named.
3. Effect on our lives.
Dare we rise from our knees to plan and plot for ourselves? How we are tempted to forget our brotherhood in personal animosities, vanity, and self-interest, competing with others! Our differences of ideas arising from differences of race, training, occupation, country, fling us apart. Our differences of wealth and position alienate us. Our differences of conception of Christianity often separate and embitter us. But do these not crumble when we say' Our Father'?
Think of the generations who have gone to the grave saying this prayer. What a prophecy of the heaven, where all shall be gathered and each feel his sense of Fatherhood increased by his brethren!
And this is the only possible basis for true fraternity among men.
Opinion? Men are not thinking machines.
Interest? Men are not ruled by calculations, and such union is the destruction of true unity.
Common aims?--shallow.
Nation or race?--artificial and not capable of universality.
There is no brotherhood but that which rests on God's Fatherhood, Christ's Sonship. For the world Christ has come, therefore we are no more strangers and foreigners.'
Therefore, listening to His voice, and trusting in Him who has made us heirs together with Him, let us lift up our voices, Our Father,' and therein proclaim that God who loves every soul of man, who knows each man's wants, who bends over him in pitying tenderness, who can neither die nor change, and who will gather into His eternal home all His prodigal children and keep them blessed by His side for evermore.
