With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray, 11

And in truth.  That does not only mean, in sincerity.  Nor does it only signify, in accordance with the truth of God’s Word.  The expression is one of deep and Divine meaning. Jesus is ‘the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ ‘The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.’ Jesus says, ‘I am the truth and the life.’ In the Old Testament all was shadow and promise; Jesus brought and gives the reality, the substance, of things hoped for.  In Him the blessings and powers of the eternal life are our actual possession and experience.  Jesus is full of grace and truth; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth; through Him the grace that is in Jesus is ours in deed and truth, a positive communication out of the Divine life.  And so worship in spirit is worship in truth; actual living fellowship with God, a real correspondence and harmony between the Father, who is a Spirit, and the child praying in the spirit.

What Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, she could not at once understand.  Pentecost was needed to reveal its full meaning.  We are hardly prepared at our first entrance into the school of prayer to grasp such teaching.  We shall understand it better later on.  Let us only begin and take the lesson as He gives it.  We are carnal and cannot bring God the worship He seeks.  But Jesus came to give the Spirit:  He has given Him to us.  Let the disposition in which we set ourselves to pray be what Christ’s words have taught us.  Let there be the deep confession of our inability to bring God the worship that is pleasing to Him; the childlike teachableness that waits on Him to instruct us; the simple faith that yields itself to the breathing of the Spirit.  Above all, let us hold fast the blessed truth—we shall find that the Lord has more to say to us about it—that the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God, the revelation of His infinite Fatherliness in our hearts, the faith in the infinite love that gives us His Son and His Spirit to make us children, is indeed the secret of prayer in spirit andtruth.  This is the new and living way Christ opened up for us.  To have Christ the Son, and the Spirit of the Son, dwelling within us, and revealing the Father, this makes us true, spiritual worshippers.

This post continues what is intended to be 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.