Charles Brent - With God in the World - A Series of Papers

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills." The vision of God unseals the lips of man. Herein lies strength for conflict with the common enemy of the praying world known as wandering thoughts. Personality will enchain attention when the most interesting intellectual, moral and spiritual concerns will fail to attract. If the eye is fixed on God thought may roam where it will without irreverence, for every thought is then converted into a prayer. Some have found it a useful thing when their minds have wandered off from devotion and been snared by some good but irrelevant consideration, not to cast away the offending thought as the eyes are again lifted to the Divine Face, but to take it captive, carry it into the presence of God and weave it into a prayer before putting it aside and resuming the original topic. This is to lead captivity captive.

It is hard for those to see God's face who confine their contemplation of spiritual things to moments of formal devotion, who, while occupied with material things, do not explore what is beneath and beyond the visible, who do not strive to discern the moral and religious aspect of every phase of life. On the other hand the vision of God becomes increasingly clear to such as look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen. These may be exceedingly practical people, people ever active in the commonplace duties of life, but their wont is to cast everything into the upward sweep of the Ascension of Jesus and everything is seen by them with the glow of heaven upon it. Of course they pray well.

After all "the sin of inattention" does not begin at the time of formal approach to God. It only makes itself peculiarly manifest then. If a person lives listlessly and does not put his full force into the ordinary duties of his life where the aids to attention are plenty, how can he expect to command his mind at those times when it is called upon to make a supreme act of attentiveness and see Him Who is invisible? A good man of our day 5 5 Charles Kingsley. said of himself: "My greatest help in life has been the blessed habit of intensity. I go at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being."

Here then are two obvious, simple and rational principles upon obedience to which hinges the ability to make one's own the growing vision of God – the habit of spiritualizing the commonplace and the habit of attention in work. Whoever equips himself with them has made the best possible preparation for approach to God. It is an indirect way of getting at things, it is true; but often the method that is most indirect is the most direct. It is certainly so in this case.

Of course in considering the subject of God's Being one cannot wholly avoid the difficult question of personality. It would be aside from our purpose, however, to discuss the matter philosophically. For all practical purposes there is ample and secure footing near at hand. When by faith we look toward God, it is not toward an immovable but beautiful statue we turn, not to an abstract quality or a tendency that makes for righteousness, but to One Who looks with responsive gaze, Who notes our desires, Who heeds our words, Who lives, Who loves, Who acts. It is a horrible and deadening travesty of the truth to conceive of God as a great, impassive Being, seated on a throne of majesty, drinking in all the life and worship that flow from the service of His myriad creatures, Himself receiving all and giving none. Though probably no one believes this as a matter of theory, when men look for God in the practice of prayer too often it is such a God they find. And many can say with Augustine as they review moments of fruitless devotional effort in the past: "My error was my God." 6 6 For thou wert not thyself, but a mere phantom, and my error was my God. Confessions, Bk. iv. 7. The truth is that though a great tide of energy moves ceaselessly toward God, it is but the shadow of what comes from Him. Indeed He is the Source of the life which flows inward toward Him as much as of that which flows outward from Him. He is undying energy, with unerring purpose, moving swiftly and noiselessly among men, striving to burn eternal life into their lame, stained, meagre souls. He is the Father that goes out to meet the returning profligate, the Shepherd that follows the track of the wandering sheep. Man has never yet had to wait for Him. He has always been as close to man as man would let Him come. His hands have never ceased to beat upon the bars of man's self-will to force an entrance into starved human nature. All this must be in man's conception of God as he approaches Him.

What above all gives to God that which enables man to see Him is the Incarnation. In the Godhead is a familiar figure – the figure of Man. It was this that absorbed the attention of the dying Stephen. The Son of Man standing on God's right hand, was the vision that enthralled him as the stones battered out his life. And it is this same vision that makes the unseen world a reality to men now. Humanity is there at its centre, the pledge of sympathy, the promise of victory. Not by a flight of imagination but by the exercise of insight we can look and see the sympathetic face of the Son of Man, who is also the Son of God; and with the sight fellowship with God becomes possible, the string of the tongue is loosed and we are ready to pray.

Quite a sufficient guide as to how God should be addressed is afforded by the Lord's Prayer. It was given by the Master in response to the earnest request of His disciples for instruction in prayer. Brief, compact and complete, it is as it were the Christian seed-prayer. Once let it be planted in the heart of a Church or the soul of a child of God and it will grow into the glowing devotion of wondrous collects and rich liturgies. Indeed there is no Christian prayer worth anything which does not owe its whole merit to the Lord's Prayer; and the noblest liturgy of the Church is but the expansion and application of the same. Hence it is the touchstone of all prayer. By it the Christian's mode of address to God is finally approved or condemned.

How important is it, then, that a man should know the Lord's Prayer! – know it, not merely as a formula, but as the embodiment of the vital principles of converse with God. The process of yore must be repeated by the disciples of to-day. Like their predecessors of Galilee they must approach the unchangeable One and prefer the old entreaty: "Lord, teach us to pray." Nothing short of this will suffice. Then if they listen they will receive the familiar measures of the "Our Father" as a new and personal gift fresh and living from the lips of Jesus. It is good sometimes to "wait still upon God" between the sentences, and let the Holy Spirit apply each several petition to one's own special case and to all those interests which concern one's life – in sooth, translate it into the terms of our own day and generation. It is thus that the compressed richness of the Lord's Prayer is unfolded.

The Lord's Prayer is one of those most precious of things known as common property. But a common possession to be worth anything to anybody must be related by every one of the multitude who claim a share in it, each to his own personality. Before common property can fully justify its claim to be common, it must become in a sense private by a process of implicit appropriation on the part of the individuals concerned. So while the Lord's Prayer ideally belongs to every child of God as the common heritage of prayer, it actually belongs only to those who have recognized and used it as a personal, though not exclusive, gift from its Author.

Not the least important characteristic of the Lord's Prayer is its simplicity in thought and expression. Surely it is not without significance that as it stands in the English tongue it is the purest piece of Saxon in literature, a monument of clearness and simplicity. God neither speaks or desires to be spoken to in grandiloquent language which belongs to the courts of earthly kings. The difficulty that so many persons find in praying without the aid of some form of devotion is largely due to the impression that the language needed for address to God is not such as an ordinary mortal can frame. There are four leading principles, the first of which contradicts this misconception, that stand out in bold prominence in the Lord's Prayer, and tell us what all speech Godward should be.