Quote of the Day

…in prayer the goal of the work of Son and Spirit is to introduce us to the Father and to establish us in fellowship with him.  So it follows from the nature of the gospel and life of the God it reveals that Christian prayer is properly and characteristically addressed to the Father.  What it says could not be said from the Son and the Spirit, but what both Son and Spirit have taught it to say is 'Our Father.  IF we do not find that right and natural, we need to ask ourselves why.  There is a type of protestant prayer that concentrates in an unhealthy way on Jesus, and that can easily become familiar and sentimental, because it has forgotten who Jesus is - the only Son of and the only way to the Father.  There is a Jesuology that can lavish an all too human love on an all too human Jesus and banish God to such remote transcendence, that we are back with the idea that we have to cling to a loving Jesus to keep us  right with a remote and probably angry God.  There is equally a prayer that concentrates on the Holy Spirit and the gifts and blessings he can bestow in a way that forgets that these things matter only when we use them to witness to the Son and to serve the Father in amore effective obedience.  To pray to Jesus rather than through him, to the Spirit rather than in him, as the established habit of our prayer, is to betray a doubt about our relationship to the Father.

Prayer is through Christ….in John 16..."I do not say I will ask the Father on your behalf."  He will not go instead of us, we are to come ourselves because the way is open.  Yet it is immediately clear that our ability to do so is entirely dependent on Christ and our relationship to him.  We do not come by ourselves, but it is we ourselves who come through him.  The same idea of mediation is implied in Hebrews 4:16.  Because he has gone into the holiest of all as High Priest we can "approach the throne of grace with confidence"…….It was into all this that Christ initiated his disciples when he said, "When you pray, say Abba,"…

 Thomas Smail

From his book, "The Forgotten Father"