Page:The Lord's Prayer (Saphir).djvu/18

4 therefore, in which He is light and gives light, in which He is life and resurrection, and therefore quickens, Jesus is prayer. Sympathy has, in like manner, its eternal origin in the Son of God. The Father loved and pitied us, but the mind, which was in the Son of God, was to humble Himself, and to take upon Him our nature, to learn obedience, and to be made perfect through suffering; that He might be a compassionate and merciful High Priest.

Jesus teaches prayer. This is the sum and substance of His teaching; the object of His life and death. He came to bring us unto God; He died for our sins, that the love of God may now come freely and fully into our souls, and that eternal life may be ours. He became man, that we, through Him, might obtain the adoption of sons. He is a High Priest, that we, gathered round Him, should be priests unto God and His Father. That His disciples may pray in Christ's name, as one with Him, as standing in a filial relation to God through Him, this is the high end of the incarnation and of the sufferings of the Son of God,—this is the glorious fruit of His resurrection and of the Pentecostal gift. For prayer is not one among many manifestations of spiritual life; it is not even enough to say that it is the first and most important. It stands by itself, and pre-eminent. It is the manifestation of our personal relation to God; it is the essential and immediate expression of our filial relation in Christ