l from Him. To pray in His Name is to pray as
He prayed. Christ is only our example because He is our Head, our
Saviour, and our Life. In virtue of His Deity and of His Spirit He can
live in us: we can pray in His Name, because we abide in Him and He in
us.

CHRIST OUR TEACHER.

Christ was what He taught. All His teaching was just the revelation of
how He lived, and--praise God--of the life He was to live in us. His
teaching of the disciples was first to awaken desire, and so prepare
them for what He would by the Holy Spirit be and work in them. Let us
believe very confidently: all He was in prayer, and all He taught, He
Himself will give. He came to fulfil the law; much more will He fulfil
the gospel in all He taught us, as to what to pray, and how.

_What to pray._--It has sometimes been said that direct petitions, as
compared with the exercise of fellowship with God, are but a subordinate
part of prayer, and that "in the prayer of those who pray best and most,
they occupy but an inconsiderable place." If we carefully study all that
our Lord spoke of prayer, we shall see that this is not His teaching. In
the Lord's Prayer, in the parables on prayer, in the illustration of a
child asking bread, of our seeking and knocking, in the central thought
of the prayer of faith, "Whatsoever ye pray, believe that ye have
received," in the oft-repeated "_whatsoever_" of the last
evening--everywhere our Lord urges and encourages us to offer definite
petitions, and to expect definite answers. It is only because we have
too much confined prayer to our own needs, that it has been thought
needful to free it from the appearance of selfishness, by giving the
petitions a subordinate place. If once believers were to awake to the
glory of the work of intercession, and to see that in it, and the
definite pleading for definite gifts on definite spheres and persons,
lie our highest fellowship with our glorified Lord, and our only real
power to bless men, it would be seen that there can be no truer
fellowship with God than these definite petitions and their answers, by
which we become the channel of His grace and life to men. Then our
fellowship with the Father is even such as the Son has in His
intercession.

_How to pray._--Our Lord taught us to pray in secret, in simplicity,
with the eye on God alone, in humility, in the spirit of forgiving love.
But the chief truth He reiterated was ever this: to pray in faith. And
He defined that fa