With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray, 24

This is another excerpt from Murray's discussion of the Lord's Prayer. God willing, there will be another excerpt from this discussion, posted next Sunday:

‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’  As bread is the first need of the body, so forgiveness for the soul.  And the provision for the one is as sure as for the other.  We are children but sinners too; our right of access to the Father’s presence we owe to the precious blood and the forgiveness it has won for us.  Let us beware of the prayer for forgiveness becoming a formality:  only what is really confessed is really forgiven.  Let us in faith accept the forgiveness as promised:  as a spiritual reality, an actual transaction between God and us, it is the entrance into all the Father’s love and all the privileges of children. Such forgiveness, as a living experience, is impossible without a forgiving spirit to others: as forgiven expresses the heavenward, so forgiving the earthward, relation of God’s child. In each prayer to the Father I must be able to say that I know of no one whom I do not heartily love.

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.