Lesson 22: The Infinite Fatherliness of God, part 3
This is the one chief thought on which Jesus dwells here, and which He would have all His scholars take in. He would have us see that the secret of effectual prayer is to have the heart filled with the Father-love of God. It is not enough for us to know that God is a Father. He would have us take time to come under the full impression of what that name implies. We must take the best earthly father we know; we must think of the tenderness and love with which he regards the request of his child, the love and joy with which he grants every reasonable desire. We must then, as we think in adoring worship of the infinite Love and Fatherliness of God, consider with how much more tenderness and joy He sees us come to Him, and gives us what we ask correctly. And then, when we see how much this Divine arithmetic is beyond our comprehension, and feel how impossible it is for us to apprehend God’s readiness to hear us, then He would have us come and open our heart for the Holy Spirit to shed abroad God’s Father-love there. Let us do this not only when we want to pray, but let us yield heart and life to dwell in that love. The child who only wants to know the love of the father when he has something to ask will be disappointed. But he who lets God be Father always and in everything, who desires to live his whole life in the Father’s presence and love, who allows God in all the greatness of His love to be a Father to him, oh, he will experience most gloriously that a life in God’s infinite Fatherliness and continual answers to prayer are inseparable.
Beloved fellow-disciple, we begin to see what the reason is that we know so little of daily answers to prayer, and what the chief lesson is which the Lord has for us in His school. It is all in the name of Father. We thought of new and deeper insight into some of the mysteries of the prayer-world as what we should get in Christ’s school. He tells us the first is the highest lesson; we must learn to say well, “Abba, Father!” “Our Father who is in heaven.” He that can say this has the key to all prayer. In all the compassion with which a father listens to his weak or sickly child, in all the joy with which he hears his stammering child, in all the gentle patience with which he bears with a thoughtless child, we must, as in so many mirrors, study the heart of our Father, until every prayer be lifted upward on the faith of this Divine word: “How much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask Him.”
Prayer: Blessed Son of God, the Father loves You and has given You all things. You love the Father, and have done all things He commanded You, and therefore have the power to ask all things. Lord, give us Your own Spirit, the Spirit of the Son. Make us childlike, as You were on earth. And let every prayer be breathed in the faith that as the heaven is higher than the earth, so God’s Father-love, and His readiness to give us what we ask, surpasses all we can think or conceive.