With Christ in the School of Prayer, 39, by Andrew Murray

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.

‘Your Father which is in heaven.’  Alas!  we speak of it only as the utterance of a reverential homage.  We think of it as a figure borrowed from an earthly life, and only in some faint and shallow meaning to be used of God.  We are afraid to take God as our own tender and pitiful father.  He is a schoolmaster, or almost farther off than that, and knowing less about us—an inspector, who knows nothing of us except through our lessons.  His eyes are not on the scholar, but on the book, and all alike must come up to the standard. 

Now open the ears of the heart, timid child of God; let it go sinking right down into the inner most depths of the soul.  Here is the starting-point of holiness, in the love and patience and pity of our heavenly Father.  We have not to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school, that we may make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father to help us.  God loves you not because you are clever not because you are good, but because He is your Father.  The Cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love to us.  He loves all His children, the clumsiest, the dullest, the worst of His children.  His love lies at the back of everything, and we must get upon that as the solid foundation of our religious life, not growing up into that, but growing up out of it.  We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing.  Do take hold of this mightily.  We must go out of ourselves for any hope, or any strength, or any confidence.  And what hope, what strength, what confidence may be ours now that we begin here, your Father which is in heaven!