Swo Beau fiful Pray eng From you they receive their food, clothes, shelter, and all things needful for their lives, not as a matter of wages, but of grace. From you they must learn the first lessons of dependence, obedience, love, and trust. From you they acquire their first ideals. You stand in the place of God to them. Is it not a serious matter to have Christ point His finger at us and say to our children, "God is Father?" Is it not terrible to make our lives a standing slander of God? in What we need, if we are to know God, is better human fatherhood. God reveals some things about Himself through snowflakes, lilies, and the birds of the air; others through the facts of history; but His best word is spoken through human hearts. “The word is nigh thee thy mouth and in thy heart." Blessed is the father who is pure in heart; for he shall see God. Blessed is the child who has a pure-hearted father; for by that father he, too, shall see God. Fathers, we are the medium through which our children are to learn what God is like-the ladders on which angels must ascend to and descend from Our Father who is in heaven. Father of fathers, help us to look up to Thee, that our children may the more safely look up unto us, and through us to Thee. "Our Father"-Precious Name. G “Hallowed be Thy Name” OD is Our Father, but He is also God. Consequently we must be careful lest, presuming upon His fatherhood, we get so familiar with Him that we forget to be reverent. He is our Father; but He is in heaven, while we are upon the earth, His foot-stool. Because He encourages us to come to Him as Father, we should not be guilty of the presumptuous sin of irreverence. His Name is to be hallowed-that is, set apart from all other names, and treated as sacred. You may jest with other names, but not with this. Other names may be treated with easy familiarity; but God will be treated as God, not as a chum. Remember that in this Lord's Prayer Christ is teaching us to pray. I conclude, therefore, that "Hallowed by Thy Name" teaches us to be reverent in prayer. I once heard a noted evangelist say in a "prayer," "O Lord, make the people in this community so much interested in religion that they won't know a corncob from a monkey Co wrench; that they will forget to milk the cows," Beau and other similar expressions. Such impudence fiful is inexcusable. This getting funny in prayer is Pray ens a violation of the fundamental principles of prayer, and is not to be condoned even in professional evangelists, who too often forget that God's name is hallowed. "Be not deceived: God is not mocked," even though He be Father. When Jesus teaches to pray, He first teaches us to be reverent. Prayer without reverence is a contradiction of terms. Of course, this petition condemns all swearing and blasphemy. That should need no argument. To breathe in God's pure air and vocalize it in curses and oaths is evidence of a degraded soul. The sense of the sublime, the feeling of reverence are among the highest of human attributes. But how can sublimity and reverence exist in the soul of a common swearer, rolling from his filthy tongue the Hallowed Name of God? He who takes that Name, about which cluster mankind's best hopes, loftiest thought, and purest sentiment, and mingles it with vileness, shall not be held guiltless. If the man who contemptuously tramples the Stars and Stripes in the dirt deserves to be shot, what does he deserve who tramples under foot the Hallowed Name of God? What does a man when He swears? Think what you are, and then what God is. You and I, weaker than sunbeams, ephemeral as vapor: but who is God? His name is JEHOVAH, the Self-Existent One, the Eternal Spirit, Father Almighty, Creator of the heavens and the earth. Take a long look into the sky to-night, where countless suns sparkle on the robe of Deity. Then through your telescope look deep into awful space. The glories are magnified, but the end is not seen. Judge Brown, the noted juvenile judge of Salt Lake City, once overheard oaths from one of his wards a boy about fourteen years old. The boy hung his head in shame when he discovered that the judge had probably heard him, though the judge said nothing at the time. That night Judge Brown took the boy out to a high hill and told him to look up at the bright Utah stars. "Now swear," said the judge. "A feller can't swear a-lookin' up at the stars," remarked the boy. The night-sky ought to cure swearing. Then contemplate the stupendous earth with its multitudes of human beings, its infinitude of forms of life, and consider that it is He that hath made us, and we are His. Consider, also, that this planet we live on, twenty-five thousand miles around, is, in size, one of the most inconsiderable occupants of space-a speck, a gay Sa Beau fiful Pray eng Beau fiful Pray erg mote scintillating in the sunbeams. It is the footstool of Deity. What, then, is one human creature compared with the great Father-Jehovah, high over all? "Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are accounted as the small dust of the balance.' " "He stretcheth out the north over empty space," over the icy terrors of the North Pole, where the seas are fathomless, "And hangeth the earth upon nothing. He bindeth up the waters in His thick clouds; And spreadeth His cloud upon it By His Spirit the heavens are garnished—” All the Universal Glories we can see, even with miscroscope and telescope, "are but the outskirts of His ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?"† *Isaiah 40: 15. † Job 26. |