13 Reality of Christ in Prayer
Chapter 13 WE HAVE AN ADVOCATE WITH THE FATHER.
Christians sometimes offer heathen prayers. The lifelessness of devotion may often be attributable to the want of a cordial recognition of Christy as the medium of access to the throne of Grace. Prayer, in the Divine plan of things, has but one avenue. ’No man cometh unto the Father but by me.’ Whoever slights Christ in devotion, ’ climb3th up some other way.’ The central idea in the Christian theory of prayer, is that of privilege gained by mediation. The language of Christian faith is, ’I am permitted to pray because of the merits of another; I do not deserve to pray, I cannot claim to pray, I have no right to pray, but by Christ’s permission.’ The doctrine of prayer, as a doctrine of Nature, is but a fragmentary truth. In its fulness, it is a Christian peculiarity. The fact of an atonement is its foundation. The person of a Redeemer is the nucleus of its history. One of the grounds on which the necessity of a Revelation rests, is that, by the teachings of Nature, we have no clear right to pray - no right which satisfies a guilty conscience. Philosophy has often taught men that prayer is impiety. To an awakened: conscience. Nature seems to shut man in to the solitude of his own forebodings. In its dim light, prayer and sacrifice grope hand in hand, as the blind leading the blind. The right of either to existence is only a presumed right. Faith in the efficacy of either staggers, whenever the soul is shaken by remorse, or philosophy approaches the Christian conception of sin. Not till Christ is revealed, does prayer settle itself as an undoubted fact; and then it is as a privilege only, and as a device of mediatorial government. We may pray, “for Christ’’ s sake.” This is the Christian theory of prayer, and this is the whole of it.
Now, it is not difficult to see that one may pray, with no adequate appreciation of this mediatorial element in the groundwork of devotion. A man may habitually pray, with no such cordiality of soul towards Christ, as is becoming to a suppliant whose only right of prayer is a right purchased by atoning blood. Is it unusual for a Christian mind to be thus heedless of Christ in devotion? Practical heresy of this kind may nestle side by side with irreproachable orthodoxy. A creed and a faith, even upon a truth so vital, are, by no means, of necessity one. The very soundness of the creed may shelter the decay of the faith. We may ’profess and call ourselves Christians,’ and yet may every day approach God, as a converted heathen would, who had never heard of Christ. The general mercy of God may be the foundation of all the hopefulness, all the trust, all the fervor we really feel in prayer, while not a thought occurs to us of Christ as the ground of that mercy. We may pray then, as, perhaps, Socrates and Plato prayed.
We may rejoice to believe that even such prayer would have power with God, from one who should be ignorant of Redemption. The northern Aurora lights up our midnight skies with scintillations, emanating from magnetic vortices, whose locality and causes are otherwise unknown to us. So, we can conceive of faith in mercy without a known atonement, and in prayer without a revealed Saviour, as looming up in radiant twilight, and suffusing the heavens with beauty, to the eye of a heathen seer, because of the secret history of such prayer, in its movement among the mediatorial counsels of God. But what an Arctic temperature does such prayer suggest to one who, in the full meridian of time, can say, with Simeon: ’Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation’! Such devotion could do no justice to Christian truth. It could be no exponent of Christian privilege. It is not Christian prayer. In the experience of a Christian mind, such prayer would involve a conceivable, but an impossible distinction, which expresses, perhaps, as nearly as language can describe it, the error of him who struggles with such an idea of devotion. It is, that one may approach God rather as a good man than as a redeemed sinner. This, be it repeated, is an unreal distinction in any religious life on this globe. Christian faith recognizes no other objects of God’s mercy than redeemed sinners. No others are invited to hold communion with God. The invitation is to ’the world,’ only because God so loved ’the world,’ that it is a redeemed world. That Christian struggles against impossibilities, who strives to realize in his own experience, any other than the joy of a redeemed sinner.
Yet the human heart is exceedingly tortuous in its exercises on this theme. I repeat, that a neglect of Christ may lurk in our habits of feeling, and may give character to our devotions, when no heresy infects the convictions of our intellect. A distinguished divine, of the last generation, expressed his confidence in the faith of a Christian brother, whose soundness as a theologian had been questioned; and he gave as his reason, that he had heard that brother pray, and that he prayed as if Christ, as an atoning Saviour, were a reality to him, and that such a man could not be essentially heterodox. The principle was truthful; but the converse of it is not so. The experience of prayer may be founded on no more than Socrates believed, and yet the creed of the intellect may be that of the Epistle to the Romans.
We do not need to be taught for the enlightenment of our understanding, - but do we not need that that Spirit which shall not speak of Himself, but shall take of the things of Christ and show them unto us, should teach our hearts? - that the most profound joy in communion with God, must centre in an experience of the reality of an atoning blood. In this one thought, it must culminate and rest. A divided heart, on this subject, cannot know the fulness of the liberty of prayer. A heart which is confused in its religious life, by a compromise of this truth, cannot. Christ, as the Atoning One, must be a reality to the soul, or prayer cannot rise to its full growth, as an experience of blessedness ill the friendship of God. For such blessedness, we need much of that sense of the reality of Christ, which one of the early preachers of New England is said to have had upon his death-bed, when, after giving his last messages to his earthly friends, he turned and said: ’Where, now, is Jesus of Nazareth, my most intimate, most faithful friend? ’ May we not often solve, with this principle, the mystery of God’s disciplinary providence? ’Many are the afflictions of the righteous;’ and ’wherefore,’ writes one, ’but to necessitate the use of prayer as a real and efficient means of obtaining assistance in distress?’ ’Lord, in trouble have they visited Thee,’ says another; ’they poured out a prayer when Thy chastening was upon them.’ Often, to deepen our knowledge of Christ in prayer, is the mission of the angel of sorrow. The truth is, that we never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity. Therefore, God makes us feel that necessity. He tries us here, and He tries us there. He chastises on this side, and He chastises on that side. He probes us by the disclosure of one sin, and another, and a third, which have lain rankling in our deceived hearts. He removes, one after another, the objects in which we have been seeking the repose of idolatrous affection. He afflicts us in ways which we have not anticipated. He sends upon us the chastisements which He knows we shall feel most sensitively. He pursues us when we would fain flee from His hand; and, if need be. He shakes to pieces the whole framework of our plans of life, by which we have been struggling to build together the service of God and the service of Self; till, at last, He makes us feel that Christ is all that is left to us. When we discover that, and go to Christ, conscious of our beggary in respect of everything else, - wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, - we go, not expecting much, perhaps not asking much. There may be hours of prostration when we ask only for rest; we pray for the cessation of suffering; we seek repose from conflict with ourselves, and with God’s providence. But God gives us more. He is more generous than we have dared to believe. He gives us joy; He gives us liberty; He gives us victory; He gives us a sense of self-conquest, and of union with Himself in an eternal friendship. On the basis of that single experience of Christ as a reality, because a necessity, there rises an experience of blessedness in communion with God, which prayer expresses like a Revelation. Such devotion is a jubilant Psalm.