REFLECTIONS

About Prayer…

“[The Lord’s Prayer] is undoubtedly a pattern prayer. The very way in which our Lord introduces it indicates that…it really covers everything in principle. There is a sense in which you can never really add to the Lord’s Prayer; nothing is left out. That does not mean, of course, that when we pray we are simply to repeat the Lord’s Prayer and stop at that, for that…was not true of the Lord Himself…He spent whole nights in prayer; many times He arose a great while before day and prayed for hours. You will always find in the lives of the saints that they have spent hours in prayer. John Wesley used to say that he had a very poor view of any Christian who did not pray for at least four hours every day…

[The Lord’s Prayer] really does contain all the principles…What we have is a kind of skeleton…The principles are all here and you cannot add to them. You can take the longest prayer that has ever been offered by a saint and you will find that it can reduced to these principles…Take our Lord’s High Priestly prayer [John 17]. If you analyze it in terms of principles, you will find that it can be reduced to the principles of this model prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer covers everything; and all we do is take these principles and employ and expand them and base our every petition upon them…I think you will agree with St Augustine and Martin Luther and many other saints who have said that there is nothing more wonderful in the entire Bible than the Lord’s Prayer. The economy, the way in which He summarizes it all, and has reduced everything to but a few sentences, is something that surely proclaims the fact that the speaker is none other than the very Son of God Himself.”

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“Do you know that the essence of true prayer is found in the two words in [Matthew 6] verse 9, ‘Our Father’?...If you can say from your heart, whatever the condition, ‘My Father’, in a sense your prayer is already answered…

There are people who believe it is a good thing to pray because it always does us good. They adduce various psychological reasons. That of course is not prayer as the Bible understands it.  Prayer means speaking to God, forgetting ourselves, and realizing His presence. Then again, there are others…who rather think that…one’s prayer should be very brief and pointed, and that one should just simply make a particular request. That is something which is not true of the teaching of the Bible concerning prayer. Take any of the great [Bible] prayers…None of them is simply what we might call this ‘business-like’ kind of prayer which simply makes a petition known to God and then ends. Every prayer recorded in the Bible starts with invocation…We have a great and wonderful example of this in the ninth chapter of Daniel. There the prophet, in terrible perplexity, prays to God. But he does not start immediately with is petition; he starts by praising God. A perplexed Jeremiah does the same thing…he does not rush into the presence of God for this one matter; he starts by worshipping God. And so you will find it in all the recorded prayers. Indeed, you even get it in the great High-Priestly prayer of our Lord Himself which is recorded in John 17. You remember also how Paul put it in writing to the Philippians. He says, ‘in nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God’ (Philippians 4:6 RV.). That is the order. We must always start with invocation.”

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“Our Lord says, ‘Our Father which art in heaven’; and Paul says, ‘The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’…It is vital when we pray to God, and call Him our Father, that we should remind ourselves…of His majesty and of His greatness and of His almighty power…remember that he knows all about you. The Scripture says, ‘all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do’…It is not surprising that, when he wrote Psalm 51, David said in the anguish of his heart, ‘Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.’ If you ant to be blessed of God you have to be absolutely honest, you have to realize that he knows everything, and that there is nothing hidden from Him…as the wise man who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes put it, it is vital when we pray to god that we should remember that ‘He is in heaven and we are upon the earth.’

Then remember His holiness and His justice, His utter, absolute righteousness…whenever we approach Him we must do so ‘with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire’ [Hebrews 12:19].

That is the way to pray says Christ…never separate these two truths. Remember that you are approaching the almighty, eternal, ever-blessed holy God. But remember also that that God, in Christ, has become your Father, who not only knows all about you in the sense that he is omniscient, He knows all about you in the sense that a father knows all about his child…Put these two things together. God in His almightiness is looking at you with a holy love and knows your every need…He desires nothing so much as your blessing, your happiness, your joy and your prosperity. Then remember this, that He ‘is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think’. As your ‘Father which is in heaven’ He is much more anxious to bless you than you are to be blessed. There is no limit to His almighty power.”

-From Martyn Lloyd-Jones Works  Complied by Frank Cumbers  Eerdmans Publishing Company  Grand Rapids, MI  1970  Pages 76, 83 and 92

REFLECTIONS

The Love And Work Of The Holy Spirit

“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be 

the propitiation for our sins.” 1 John 4:10 NKJV.

“Here we notice again two things:

First, the Love wherewith God loved the world proven by the fact that He spares not His own Son, but delivers Him up for us all.

Second, the love of Christ for the Father, whose work He finished, and for us, whom He saved.

The second is of greatest importance to us. In Christ, whom we honor as God manifest in the flesh, the divine Love is seen; in Him it appeared and scintillated with all-surpassing brightness. The reality of the divine Love appeared to men for the first time and once for all in Him: “That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, declare we unto you”; and that was always the glory of the eternal Love which had captivated and pervaded their whole soul.

Until now men had walked in Love’s shadow, but in Immanuel Love itself appeared in the flesh and after the manner of men. It was not merely a radiation of Love, its reflection, an increased feature, sense or inclination, but the fresh, irresistible waves of Love’s own constraining power issuing from the depths of His divine heart. It was this Love which, in the heart of Immanuel, brought heaven down to earth, and which by His ascension to heaven uplifted our world to the halls of eternal light. Even though Europe had felt nothing of it, and America had never thought of a Savior, though Africa had not heard the tidings, and it was but a small spot in Asia where His feet pressed the ground, yet it was the heart of Immanuel that bound every continent and the world-yes, the very universe around it, to the divine Mercy.

That Love shone forth as a love for an enemy. Man had become the enemy of God: “There is none who doeth good, no not one.” The creature hated God. The enmity was absolute and terrible. There was nothing in man to attract God; rather everything to repel Him. And when all was enmity and repulsion, then the Love of God was made manifest in that Christ died for us when we were enemies.

Love among men and animals rests upon mutual attraction, sympathy, and inclination; even the love that relieves the sufferer feels the power of it. But here is a love that that finds no attraction anywhere, but repulsion everywhere. And in this fact sparkles the sovereign liberty of divine Love: it loves because it will love, and by loving saves the object of its love.

Since this Love attained its severest tension on Calvary, its symbol is and ever shall be the Cross. For the Cross is the most fearful manifestation of man’s enmity; and by the very contrast the beauty and adorableness of divine Love shine most gloriously: Love that suffers and bears everything, Love that can die voluntarily, and in that death heralds the dawn of a still more glorious future.

But even the work of the Son does not finish the work of putting the impress of God’s Love upon the human heart. Wherefore, as the Creation is followed by the Incarnation, so does Pentecost follow the Incarnation; and it is God the Holy Spirit who accomplishes this third work by His descent into the heart of man.

“It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you.” This implies that the Holy Ghost would give the disciples still a higher good than the Son could give them. This is not independently of the Son; for the Scripture teaches emphatically that He neither will nor can do anything without the Son, and that He receives of the Son only to give unto us. However, the difference remains that, although Jesus suffers and dies and rises for us, nevertheless the actual work in the souls of men awaits the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit. It is, as St. Paul writes to the Romans, that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.”

And this is the proper work of the Holy Spirit, that shall remain His forevermore. When there remains no more sin to be atoned for, nor any unholiness to be sanctified, when all the elect shall jubilate before the throne, even then the Holy Spirit shall perform this divine work of keeping the Love of God actively dwelling in their hearts. How, we cannot tell, but this we understand, that it is the Holy Spirit who, being, the same in all, unites all souls in blessed union. When at the same moment spiritual life is wrought in your soul and mine and the souls of others, the mutual bond of Love must be the result. For, although men and things are grounded in the Father, and the souls of the redeemed are united in the Son, yet personally to enter every soul, making it His temple and dwelling-place, is the work of the Holy Spirit.”

-From Abraham Kuyper’s The Work Of The Holy Spirit  First Published in 1900  Published by AMG Publishers  Chattanooga, TN  1995  Pages 545-547.