The CELESTIAL Spirit of the Lord's Prayer - Part 4

Based on what I shared with you for my new year's resolution in 2014, I will include a one line prayer in each post for the month of January.

I pray that God would take away anything that causes my heart and yours to wander away from Him. Whether it is materialism, laziness, lack of dedication to Him, seeking other's approval and praise, spiritual pride, seeking honour and living the kind of life that is full of pretenses......  

EXCERPT FROM THE KINDLE EBOOK: 

THE LORD’S PRAYER, Its Spirit and its Teaching.By Octavius Winslow, 1866

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN FORMATTED AS A KINDLE AND IT IS AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE  CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD!

"Thus heaven is gathering, one by one, in its capacious breast,
All that is pure and permanent, the beautiful and blest;
The family is scattered yet, though of one home and heart,
Part militant, in earthly gloom, in heavenly glory part.
But who can speak the rapture when the circle is complete,
And all the children, sundered now, before their Father meet?
One fold, one Shepherd, one employ, one everlasting home,
'Lo, I come quickly.' Even so, amen, Lord Jesus, come!"

This view of the celestial spirit of the Lord's Prayer is suggestive of many PRACTICAL LESSONS. We are instructed in the first place to look up in prayer. The proper attitude of the mind in approaching God is a heaven-bent attitude. The whole soul should be in the ascent. When we draw near to our heavenly Father we must remember that, He is in heaven. Earth with its cares and ties, its sins and sorrows, must be left below. For the time being we professedly have exchanged, in our mental and spiritual flight, the terrestrial for the celestial--the communion of the saints who are on earth, for the higher communion of our Father who is in heaven. How consonant with this the experience of the psalmist! "My voice shall you hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto you, and will look UP."

Alas! how little is there in our experience of this looking up to God in trial, in trouble, in sin. We look down, we look to the right hand and to the left, and there is none to help, none to deliver, and we despond and despair. It is just because our eyes are earthward and not heavenward, man-ward and not Godwards. What a tendency, also, is there to look within ourselves, and not from ourselves, through Jesus, up to our Father who is in heaven! We look at the darkness, at the vileness, at the barrenness, at the deadness of our hearts--absorbed in the profound contemplation of our own poverty, vileness, and unworthiness--rather than up to the loving, gracious, forgiving, paternal heart of God.

But our whole Christian course must be a looking up. The more we look to God, and the less to our own selves and to man, the holier and the happier shall we be. The memorable intercessory prayer of our Great High Priest when on earth is thus introduced, "And Jesus lifted UP his eyes unto heaven, and said, Father." Such, also, has been the attitude of the Lord's people in all ages. "My eyes," says David, "are ever toward the Lord." Thus, also, prayed Jehoshaphat, "O our God, will you not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that comes against us; neither know we what to do--but our eyes are upon you." Then again the psalmist, "Unto You lift I UP mine eyes, O You that dwell in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look into the hand of their masters, and as the eye of a maiden into the hand of her mistress, so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God until that he have mercy upon us."

Look up, then, tried believer! Look up, then, tempted saint! Look up, then, suffering child! Your help comes from where your trouble came--from above. Affliction springs not out of the ground, but is a Heaven-sent discipline; and from hence comes the divine strength that will sustain, and the grace that will sanctify, and the love that will soothe. Oh, look up! Look up to Jesus, your Elder Brother, now appearing in the presence of God for you. Look up to the sun shining behind the clouds, to the rock towering above the billows; to Jesus, the Author, the Sustainer, the Finisher, and who, holding out the diadem, waits to be the Crowner, of your faith.

Another lesson we are taught by the celestial spirit of the Lord's Prayer is, to seek heavenly blessings. Our Father is in heaven. Nothing but heavenly blessings should satisfy our desires. Earth's choicest, are poor; its sweetest, unsatisfying; its loveliest, fading; its fondest, passing away. If born again, God has given you a spiritual nature, which will be content only with spiritual things. The nutriment which nourishes the divine nature must be divine; the good which satisfies the heavenly nature must be heavenly. Our Father is in heaven, where our heart's treasure is, and from heaven our dearest blessings flow. "If you then are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God." Oh, let us be earnest after heavenly blessings! Deeply do we need them! The needs of the soul are infinitely greater, and more important than those of the body. Yet, how we pamper and gratify the body, and how we starve and neglect the soul. How eager our pursuit of the earthly!--how languid our desires for the heavenly!--as though the body, so soon to return to its original dust, were of greater moment than the soul, which never ceases to exist.

Great is our need of heavenly blessings. We need more love to God, more conformity to Christ, more of the anointing of the Spirit; a fuller assurance of our conversion, and a higher enjoyment of a present salvation. We need more personal, heart-religion; more spiritual life; a walking in closer fellowship with the unseen and the eternal; and a more filial and confidential converse with God. Since, then, our Father is in heaven, prepared to send down from above every good and perfect gift; and since Christ, our Elder Brother, is at His right hand, prepared to endorse every petition, and to urge every request, let us look up through the blood of Christ, and importune God for that grace, and strength, and help, which will promote our heavenliness, and fit us all the more perfectly for heaven itself.

What, my reader, is the real state of your soul? What is your hope for the future? Which the destiny that awaits you--heaven or hell? In the one or the other you must spend your eternity. Nothing will be admitted into heaven but the heavenly, the holy, the pure. None enter its holy gate but those who have washed in the Lamb's blood, and are robed in the vestment of His righteousness. None enter there but those who love God, and have union with Christ, and are the temples of the Holy Spirit. Oh, decide the question now! Heaven and Hell begin upon earth. So real is their commencement, so unmistakable their evidence, every individual may arrive at a moral certainty as to which of the two he is speeding his way.

Think of the joys of heaven, of the sorrows of hell! Think of the eternal glory, of the endless woe! Happy with Christ and the saints forever, or forever the companion and the associate of demons and the damned! Throw down the weapons of your enmity against God, repent and believe in Jesus, and henceforth you will become a child of the heavenly parent; your conversation in heaven; shedding around you the reflected purity and luster of that world of holiness and glory in which the Father dwells, and into which, before long, will be gathered and assembled, in domesticated union and eternal fellowship, the one family of God.

Children of the kingdom! repose, amid the weariness of your pilgrimage, upon the slopes of glory! Soon heaven will be reached--soon its golden spires, and cloudless dome, and towering turrets will burst upon your view--soon the portal will appear, and the pearl gate will open upon its golden hinges to admit you to an innumerable company of angels, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator, and to God the Judge of all. Your path through death's lonely valley will be all light, shining with increasing effulgence unto the perfect day. It was a strangely-beautiful remark of a child, when asked how his little sister, who had lately died, went up to heaven, replied, "She put her foot upon the sun, and went up." Thus will ascend to glory every child of the light. Perhaps the spirit, in its celestial flight, will make the sun in the natural skies a stepping-stone, from which it will spring into higher regions of glory. But, beyond all doubt, it will stand upon, and be clothed with, the divine "Sun of Righteousness," borne upon whose wings, and radiant with whose luster, it will float away into the world of light and song, of bliss and immortality--and so shall it be forever with the Lord!

"What is a scene of glory? I would say,
A Christian standing on the verge of heaven,
One foot on earth, another on the sun,
Standing sublime on Pisgah's lofty mount,
Spreading his wings, and ready for his flight;
Leaving earth's dim and shadowy things behind,
Catching already on his heaven-bound soul
The beams of that bright land to which he goes.
Done with the world, its sorrows, and its cares,
Its empty joys, and vain delusive hopes.
Done with the world, its sufferings, and its sins,
Its follies, and its frailties, and its fears.
Done with the world, and entering upon heaven,
With all its bright realities unseen
By mortal eye, full opening to the gaze
Of faith, so soon to be matured in sight.

"The sight of Jesus bursting on the eye,
The songs of angels floating on his ear;
The palm of victory, the spotless robe,
The crown of glory, and the golden harp,
Unfolding to the eyes, that close on earth
To open on the glorious things of heaven.
Around him waving the celestial wings
Of the angelic band, that waits to bear
His parting spirit to its heavenly home.
This is a scene of glory, in whose light
The brightest scenes of earth grow dim and fade;
The beams of this world's glory cease to shine,
E'en as the morning sun puts out the stars."

 THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE AS FOLLOW:

 The Filial Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Brotherly Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Celestial Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Reverential Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Submissive Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Dependent Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Penitential Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Forgiving Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Watchful Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Devotional Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Adoring Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The CELESTIAL Spirit of the Lord's Prayer - Part 3

EXCERPT FROM THE KINDLE EBOOK: 

THE LORD’S PRAYER, Its Spirit and its Teaching. By Octavius Winslow, 1866

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN FORMATTED AS A KINDLE AND IT IS AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE  CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD!

"We do not know how much we love,
Until we come to leave;
An aged tree, a common flower,
Are things o'er which we grieve.
We linger while we turn away,
We cling while we depart;
And memories, unmasked until then,
Come crowding round the heart.
Let what will lure us on our way,
Farewell's a bitter word to say."

"I know of no passage in classical literature," says an eloquent writer, "more beautiful or affecting than that where Xenophon describes the effect produced on the remnant of the ten thousand Greeks, when, after passing through dangers without number, they at length ascended a sacred mountain, and from its peak and summit caught sight of the sea. Dashing their shields with a hymn of joy, they rushed tumultuously forward. Some wept with the fullness of their delicious pleasure, others laughed, and more fell on their knees and blessed that broad ocean. Across its blue waters, like floating sea-birds, the memorials of their happy homes came and fanned their weary souls. All the perils they had encountered, all the companions they had lost, all the miseries they had endured, were in an instant forgotten, and nothing was with them but the gentle phantoms of past and future joys. O home, magical spell, all-powerful home! how strong must have been your influences when your faintest memory could cause these hungered heroes of a thousand fights to weep like tearful women! With the cooling freshness of a desert fountain, with the sweet fragrance of a flower found in winter, you came across the great waters to these wandering men, and beneath the peaceful shadow of your wings their souls found rest!"

Graphic and glowing as is this picture of the magic influence of home upon the returning exile, it pales before the believer's eye as he catches, from some Pisgah height, a view of the New Jerusalem, the happy home where he is forever to dwell--its walls of jasper, its gates of pearl, its sunlight dome, its golden streets, its crystal waters, its tree of life, its central throne, the Lamb seated thereon, its countless multitude of holy, happy beings, all united in adoration of the Lamb who was slain. And when the soul has actually crossed the flood, and planted its foot, weary and sore, upon the golden sands, what its ecstasy, what its transport to find itself in heaven at last! Heaven was the starting-point of our race, and heaven will be the final home of its ransomed portion.

The exquisite story of the younger brother who exchanged his home for exile, poverty, and need; but who, in penitence and faith, with confession and supplication, returned to its sacred shelter and met a father's welcome, is the true position of redeemed humanity. The sinner saved by grace, the wanderer restored by love, retraces his steps back to God, and home to the heaven from whence he originally departed. Heaven is the family home of all the children of God. It is the Father's home. There, day by day, hour by hour, the Father is bringing His sons and daughters--the adoption of grace. He Himself is there, and where should the children be but with the Father?

Not one of that REDEEMED family shall be absent from the domestic circle. The white-haired parent, whose sun had run a long and holy course and then set in a flood of golden light--is there! The youth of manliness and beauty, the flower and hope of the family, whose sun went down while it was yet day--is there! The child of prattle and of song, the sunbeam and the cherub of the house, whose brightness and music death has in a moment darkened and hushed--is there! The infant of a day, just opening its languid eyes upon the world of sin, then closing them, as if saddened by the scene it beheld--is there! Yes, enriched and domesticated by the countless number of the family who have departed with 'FAITH in Jesus', heaven is daily growing more enchanting and endeared to faith's far-seeing eye as the Father's house.

And is not OUR RECORD on high? "Rather rejoice," said Christ to His disciples when they reported to Him the subjection of demons to their power--"rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven." Oh, what a remarkable and precious mercy to have a name written in heaven! Better, infinitely better, to have it enrolled there than emblazoned on the page of historic fame, engraved in brass, sculptured in marble, or set in diamonds upon a mother's heart! But ALL the names of the family of God are written in the Lamb's Book of Life, and written there from the foundation of the world. Rejoice in this!

You ask, "How may I know it?" The Lord has not left you without evidence. Is the name of Jesus engraved upon your heart? Has the Holy Spirit shown to you in measure, the evil of your heart, and brought you to see its darkness, its vileness, and its treachery? Has the discovery led to a renunciation of your own righteousness, to an abandonment of all hope based upon the law, to a believing, simple, loving acceptance of the Lord Jesus? Have you been led by the Spirit as a poor, empty sinner to the blood and righteousness of the Redeemer, looking only to Jesus, trusting only in Jesus, clinging only to Jesus as the limpet clings to the rock, as the shipwrecked mariner clings to the plank, as the dying man clings to the last hope of life? Are you combating with sin, hating the garment spotted by the flesh, striving after and, in some degree, attaining unto holiness?

Then, be you assured that your name is written in heaven. If the Spirit of Christ has written the name of Christ, and pencilled the image of Christ, however faintly traced and dimly seen, upon your softened, believing, loving heart, doubt not the fact that your name is enrolled in glory on the pages of that volume in which divine love wrote it from eternity, and from which Christ our Captain will pronounce it when the great muster-roll is read in the last great day. Oh, mercy of mercies, to have a name written in heaven! Lord! write Your own precious name upon my heart, and I will sing aloud of Your righteousness all the day long!

Heaven, also, is the residence of Jesus, the Elder Brother, and must therefore be the final home of all His brethren. How often, and with what emphasis of meaning, did Jesus associate Himself with His brethren in glory. "That where I am, there you may be also." "Father, I will that they also whom You have given me be with me where I am, that they might behold my glory." "With Christ,"--"present with the Lord,"--"forever with the Lord," were modes of expression by which Jesus and the sacred writers instructed and comforted the saints in the prospect of their departure.

The return of Christ to heaven, His entrance within the veil, was as the Representative of His Church, as the First Born of His brethren. When He had found the "pearl of great price,"--His Church--for the discovery and rescue of which He purchased the "field"--in this sense, and in this sense only, becoming the Savior of the world--He returned in triumph to heaven, claiming and possessing it as the just reward of His sufferings, and as the fittest cabinet of the ransomed and priceless jewel.

From Christ his Elder Brother not one of the brethren--the lowest and unworthiest--shall be separated. The family would be broken, the home circle would be incomplete, were a place vacant at the banquet which shall celebrate the return of every wanderer home to God. Oh, the rejoicing, oh, the merriment when all shall safely arrive at heaven! What blissful reunions, what joyful recognitions, what fond greetings, what mutual congratulations, what entrancing music will resound through the bowers, and reverberate through the high arches of heaven, when the whole family on earth and in heaven shall meet in glory!

Is not this prospect worth living for, worth dying for? Is it not worth the struggle with sin, the battle with the world, the endurance of suffering, the light affliction, the cross, the moral, even the physical martyrdom which the gospel of Jesus involves? Yes! Christ our Elder Brother took the veritable nature of His brethren, wore it in poverty, suffering, and humiliation on earth; and then bore it to heaven as the first-fruits of that redeemed nature to be gathered home by the angel reapers at His coming. How did Joseph's soul yearn to have his brethren with him in Egypt, that they might see his greatness and be nourished at his side! Listen to the language of Joseph's spiritual Prototype. "Father, I will that they also whom You have given me be with me where I am, that they might behold my glory." What yearning of soul is here! what breathing of love! what power of will! That petition shall be answered!

Until then how incessantly and intently is the Elder Brother occupied in our behalf. Every moment, every thought, every affection is engaged upon, and entwined with, our present and future well-being. For us Christ is praying, for us He is governing, for us He is waiting, and with us He is sympathizing until His brethren are complete, and the last and least--theBenjamin of the family--is brought home to see His greatness, to share His glory, and to celebrate His praise.

Who, with any true, experimental knowledge of Him, would not love with the intensest affection of his heart, serve with every power of his ransomed being, make any sacrifice, and die, if need be, a martyr's death for such a Brother? Are we wearing His nature, as He still wears ours? Are we growing more divine, as He is changelessly human? Are we not ashamed of Him, as He is not ashamed of us? Are we living a Christ-imitating, a Christ-exalting life, even as He once lived a man-abased, yet a man-saving life?

I can only further remark, that the expression, "Our Father, which are in heaven," clearly describes heaven to be the only befitting abode of the saints in glory. Earth is not the proper realm for the holy ones. This world is indeed a school for the culture of our Christian graces, and a sphere for the exercise of Christian service, but here we have no abiding place. The moment a sinner is by grace transformed into a child of God he becomes a stranger here, an alien and a pilgrim. Heaven, henceforth, is the goal, the aspiration, the home of his spirit. God has provided and furnished a heavenly abode for the heavenly mind--a pure dwelling for the "pure in heart," a beauteous world for the beautiful in holiness. For this He is daily preparing you. All His providential dealings, and gracious operations; all your mental and spiritual exercises--every tempest, every furnace, every temptation--God is employing to prepare YOU for the prepared place. Accept every stroke of His rod, every discipline of His hand, as bent on this mission of love. Blend every trial, every affliction, every rebuke of your Father with a sweet, sunny thought of heaven.

SUFFERING and GLORY are united in golden links in the history of the saints. Peter speaks of himself as a "witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glorywhich shall be revealed." And again, "If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him." Look, then, beyond the dark waters and the leaden skies which lie between you and the holy, peaceful coasts of glory; and let faith's eye often peer within the door opened in heaven, and behold the place where your weary spirit, before long, will fold its drooping wing, smooth its ruffled plumage, lie down and rest upon the ineffable bosom of your glorified Lord. There they have arrived, and there they repose, who have out-sped us in the race, have reached the goal, and anticipate our coming. We mourn them not as lost, but as saved; not as far-sundered from us, but as nearer now than ever; not as wearing the sin-tainted and disfigured robe of the flesh, enfolded with the belt of suffering; but as clad with the holy, beautiful vestments of the Father's house, the glory-robe of heaven, all encircling and worshiping the Lamb that was slain.

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE AS FOLLOW:

 The Filial Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Brotherly Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Celestial Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Reverential Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Submissive Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Dependent Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Penitential Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Forgiving Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Watchful Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Devotional Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

The Adoring Spirit of the Lord’s Prayer

Read more at http://brokenness70.blogspot.com/#XTtIu1MZQTCJaIZv.99