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The Fundamentals
COURAGE AND HOPE And what new courage and hope it brings into a man’s life. You say to me, “Man, you have got to be like God,” and I reply, “Take your preposterous blasphemy away. To be like God?” But you say to me, “He is your own Father, and you are His son. We are not asking you to become like that to which you are essentially unlike; we are simply asking you to become like your Father. It is His own nature in you that He will develop until restored to its full relationship to Him from Whom it came.” You talk to us that way about our duty as men in the world, and it makes all the difference between death and life to us. If God the Father did not come near to men in Jesus Christ, I do not know what I am going to do; I do not know where to find the help that I know I need. Nowhere else in the world has any voice arisen tq offer it to men. But if God came near men in Jesus Christ and thereby guaranteed our own kinship to Him, I may be lieve that I can become like Him Whose son I am. I t 'is on just this ground that St. Paul makes his appeal: “Be ye therefore imitators of God as dear children RELATION TO PRAYER L IFE 3. And, last of all, think on t h e l i g h t t h a t t h i s c o n c e p t i o n o f G od t h r o w s u p o n o U r l i f e o f p r a y e r . I sus pect that prayer has been just a sham to many of us, or a thing that we have done because other people told us it was the thing to do. We never got anything out of it; it never meant anything to us. We might just as well have talked to stone walls as to pray the way we have prayed. We went out and said, “God,” and we might just as well have said, “hills,” or “mountains,” or “trees,” or anything else. Why have we not gone into the school of Christ and learned there, alike from His practice and His doctrine, what real prayer is and how a man can do it. You cannot find a single prayer of Christ addressed to God, not one; nor can you find a single
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