To be near unto God - pagina 430

egotism, and coveteous selfishness, tuous claim of God for oneself. ''My God" with no thought of others. This sin in prayer is wondrously overcome in the "Our Father." This alway prays: Not give me, but give us our daily bread; not forgive me, but forgive us our debts not deliver me, but deliver us from evil. We never stand before God alone, but always in the fellowship of love with all God's saints. Hence we must pray as a member of the Body of Christ, and not as one who stands by himself alone. But the "0 God my God" does not antagonize this in any particular. It aims at something entirely different. It springs from the altogether different idea that God cares not merely for all his children, as a king watches over his million subjects, but that the Ejng of Kings has this advantage over all the princes of the earth, that he knows all his children personally, that he understands them thoroughly, that he sustains a peculiar relation to each of them, that he has given each a calling of his own, that he has apportioned each a separate task, that he trains each for a particular destiny in eternit}^ and that therefore he not merely sustains a general relation to all, but that in addition to this, he stands in a particular relation with each of them. This relation is so personal, that it is never the same with any one else. He is Our Father, but as a father of seven children is the father of all, and yet distinguishes between them, and adapts himself to each one, according to his nature, disposition and character, so the Lord our God is Father of all, and yet Father in a special sense of each of us, in a special manner, drawing near to us in a mystical 426

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