1. The life of Christ is the centre and core of the Bible, it is also the centre and core of the creation; it should become the centre and core of each individual life. “Let thy servant be exercised in thy life” is the desire which runs through the Imitatio Christi. That Imitatio has been an aid to many in realizing the end, but it pales in importance before the Four Gospels themselves; and if only we can find the right use of the Gospels, we may reach that goal which Thomas a Kempis and all the followers of Christ have desired.
The visitor to a certain church in Rome will be shown by the attendant priest a marble slab with two rather formless indentations impressed upon it. “These,” the priest will say, pointing to the depressions in the stone, “are the footprints of the Blessed Master.” The footprints, of course, are not genuine; if they were, even a good Protestant might wish to place his feet where the feet of the Lord had stood. Spiritually, this was the ambition of the Victorines: it is the ambition of all the saints. For every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure. Mr. Standfast, the Pilgrim, may speak in the name of all who walk in the process of Christ: “I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe on the earth, there have I coveted to set my foot too”. [Note: D. M. McIntyre, Waymarks in the Pursuit of God, 206.]
2. Now the most striking of the features of Christ’s life is that atmosphere of another world which unobtrusively but unmistakably pervades it. Consider how remarkable this is; how a wider and a higher realm is from the first brought in to explain and to redeem this transitory life. As a boy, He is conscious that He must be about the business of His Heavenly Father; as a man entering on His task, He sees the heavens opened, and hears the authenticating voice so vividly that He makes others share the vision and the message. He comes at once preaching the Kingdom of Heaven; He is certain that the heavenly atmosphere is already upon earth, and equally certain that it is to become more diffused and more recognized. His whole activity is directed to bringing the heavenly vision and power to redress the wrongs, the sorrows, and the sins, of earth. His lips are seldom opened but there comes out some parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, or some word which breathes heavenly power and insight into the shadowed hearts of men. And if we have attentively followed the records of the brief life, and of the portentous death to which the stupidity and sin of men subjected this messenger from another sphere, we are not surprised to read that death was not able to hold Him, but that, breaking the bars of the tomb, He returned naturally to the heaven whence He came.
If Jeremy Taylor, in his Life of Christ, gives a noble example of the use which may be made of the Gospels. Taking each section of the story in detail, he makes the most searching application of it to the practice of the Christian life, adding a prayer to be used for the assimilation of the truth which in each section has been elicited. One who should faithfully follow this great work day by day, learning the lesson and offering the prayer, would assuredly be exercised in the life of Christ, and would make much progress in the imitation of the great example. But there is little hope that the busy mind of the twentieth century will be disposed to follow the elaborate and discursive method of the seventeenth century. The sustained eloquence, the vast learning, and the spiritual fervour which pervade the pages of Jeremy Taylor will delight every reader, but will not induce many to read. [Note: R. F. Horton, The Open Secret, 138.]
3. Jesus set a great example in prayer. He had a real and intense prayer-life, great in its dependence and great in its earnestness. He prayed when He had special need of God, before the great events of His life, and before His great works. But He also prayed in intercession for His disciples and for future believers, for Peter and for the soldiers at the cross. He prayed before some great experience came to Him from without. Therein He was in line with the instinct of all of us. If a man stands at one of life’s great beginnings, there are words of prayer upon his lips. And He prayed before the output of energy. Great men of action, as well as men of thought, have found the need of prayer. But also, and particularly, in His intercedings, Jesus acted on that type of prayer which involves all the difficulties for modern minds.
(1) It is a source of intellectual rest to see Jesus in prayer and to listen to the tender pleading tones of His supplications. Sometimes we are tempted to ask,—who indeed is not?—Is it worth while to pray? Can it do any good? Is not this an ordered universe, based on law, administered in obedience to law by One who is Himself the Lawmaker and Lawgiver, and the very Fountain of all order, and who is not likely to have left room to deviate from His regulations in compliance with the expression of our confused and bewildered desires? Is He not bound in chains so inexorable that all asking and receiving are absolutely and for ever shut out? So it often seems, and yet He prays; and therefore I may. He, the Son of the Father, who comes from the bosom of the Father, from the deepest intimacies of the Divine, who knew the Father as no one else ever can—He prays, not once or twice, as if by accident, but often and long, and specially and with much feeling, in the crises of His work and mission.
Cold mountains and the midnight air
Witnessed the fervour of His prayer.
I cannot answer all the curious questions of the brain concerning prayer and law; not half of them, indeed; and I will not attempt it; but like Knox, I will cast my anchor here, in this revealing fact that He, the Holiest of the holy, and the Wisest of the wise, He prays; therefore I am assured this anchorage of Divine example will hold the vessel in the tossings of the wildest sea of doubt, and that I shall be safe as He was if the vessel itself is engulfed in the waves of suffering and sorrow. His act is an argument. His prayer is an inspiration. His achievements are the everlasting and all-sufficient vindication of prayer. [Note: John Clifford, Social Worship, 54]
(2) But secondly, it is a revelation of the truest sources of moral power to see Jesus the Son of God, in communion with His Father in this the chiefest crisis of His life. Indeed, it is this urgent need of immediate help He puts in the very foreground as His plea for praying at all. Each opening word indicated the hunger of His soul for strength. He says, “Father, the hour is come”. He is a child, and a child in sore trouble; and to whom should He go if not to His Father? And what should He do in this dark day if not talk to Him and tell all He feels and hopes and endures? The relation vindicates the fullest, freest speech, invites the most outspoken confidence. He is the Son of the Father; come from His bosom, and come to do His will; has found His meat, His very life and its nourishment, in this close and most endearing relation; and therefore, with a naturalness that is itself an argument, He begins in this dark night with the word, so sweet, so strong, so revealing, “Father, the great dread hour has come; hold Thou Me up; keep Me true, help and glorify Thy Son”.
There are on record three prayers of our Divine Lord, each of which presents Him to us in a different aspect. In one of them He appears in His human soul, shrinking with all the sensitiveness of innocence from the cruel necessity imposed on Him by the work of human redemption which He had undertaken; “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt”. In another He appears as a Prophet or Teacher, instructing His disciples after what manner they are to approach God, He Himself not being involved in the prayer which He dictates; for how could He who was “holy, harmless, undefiled”—who has no trespasses—pray, “Forgive us our trespasses”? This is the Lord’s Prayer. In the third prayer, He appears as a Priest interceding for His people; He embraces both Himself and them in His petition, asking for His own glorification and for theirs with Him. This is the prayer in the seventeenth chapter of St. John, usually called the Great High-priestly Prayer. Thus we have from the Lord’s lips one prayer for Himself exclusively, one prayer for His Church exclusively, and one prayer for Himself and His Church together. [Note: E. M. Goulburn, The Lord’s Prayer, 2.]
4. He who paces along this wondrous way of the life of the Son of Man, making it his example and his pillar of cloud by day, his meditation and his pillar of fire by night, is brought to a still surer conviction, for He whom he follows approaches to a more intimate intercourse—Christ is formed within, and is the clearer evidence of the Christ whose life was once lived without But our devotion can hardly proceed unless it throbs with the desire to make known our Lord, who is its object, to every human soul. With what countenance can we worship Him, and with what words can we show our obedience, if we do not share His longing for the extension of the Kingdom? And in this portion He reminds us that we may promote His object not only by going as His messengers, but also by praying that more labourers may be sent into the harvest. Here is a direction for our constant and believing prayers, and we are to grasp the thought that to pray in the name of Jesus is to pray for the things which He desires or commands.
I ask you to realize to yourselves that our own missionaries are very apostles who are ever pleading with you for help in the discharge of their Divine office, while they set before you the ends which seem to lie within their range. I ask you to see a fresh Corinth, no less beset by idolatry and unbelief and corruption than that Corinth from which St. Paul wrote to his Macedonian converts, in Calcutta, or Benares, or Cawnpore, or Delhi, or Lahore. I ask you to compare your own spiritual privileges with those of the Christians of Thessalonica, your freedom, your resources, your knowledge, your obligations, with theirs. And then when you have done this, when you have felt who are the pleaders now and what is the cause, I ask you if you can put aside the petition which comes to you in the apostolic words, “Brethren, pray for us, that the word of God may run and be glorified”; if you can decline the fellowship which is offered you in making known the Gospel by which you live, or if you are not rather grieved that more is not demanded of you to whom much has been given. [Note: Brooke Foss Westcott, Lessons from Work, 204]
It is said that the way-worn labourers of Iona found their burdens grow lighter when they reached the most difficult part of their journey because the secret prayers of their aged master Columba met them there. I can well believe the story; and such comfort of unspoken sympathy the Church at home can give to the isolated missionary. If when he is saddened by the spectacle of evil which has been accumulated and grown hard through countless generations; if when his words find no entrance because the very power of understanding them is wanting; if when he watches his life ebb and his work remain undone and almost unattempted, he can turn homeward with the certain knowledge that in England unnumbered fellow-labourers are striving from day to day to lighten his sorrows and to cheer his loneliness, I can well believe that he too will find that refreshment and joy in the consciousness of deep human fellowship, in our Lord and Saviour, which will nerve him for new and greater toil; that he will be strong again with the strength of holy companionship and courageous with the solace of hope. “You intercede for us, I know,” are words which I read this afternoon in a letter from one of our friends in a post of singular difficulty. God deals with us as men and helps us through men. [Note: Ibid., 208.]
