With Christ in the school of prayer, by Andrew Murray, 42

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.

Or was not this the glory of Jesus as a Son upon earth, that the Spirit of the Father was in Him?  At His baptism in Jordan the two things were united,—the voice, proclaiming Him the Beloved Son, and the Spirit, descending upon Him.  And so the apostle says of us, ‘Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.’  A king seeks in the whole education of his son to call forth in him a kingly spirit.  Our Father in heaven desires to educate us as His children for the holy, heavenly life in which He dwells, and for this gives us, from the depths of His heart, His own Spirit.  It was this which was the whole aim of Jesus when, after having made atonement with His own blood, He entered for us into God’s presence, that He might obtain for us, and send down to dwell in us, the Holy Spirit.  As the Spirit of the Father, and of the Son, the whole life and love of the Father and the Son are in Him; and, coming down into us, He lifts us up into their fellowship.  As Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father’s love, with which He loved the Son, in our hearts, and teaches us to live in it.  As Spirit of the Son, He breathes in us the childlike liberty, and devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived upon earth.  The Father can bestow no higher or more wonderful gift than this:  His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship.