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p170 [R T Grant] MY DEAR BROTHER, - I have long had before me as a present purpose writing to you, though I had no special subject before me, but I was brought very low, and for a little while it was more a question of leaving this world altogether than of writing letters. I am better: God did not see good to remove me at present, though for a little while my heart was looking that way. It is a good thing to have it near one. It was the action of the heart giving way from overwork, and I had a bad fall on that, and being in my eighty-first year I am still feeble under it, but sensibly better.

As regards the question you put, it has exercised saints, and the case has been before us of old, but one would not accept a person who would not worship Christ. I took this same ground at Auburn, in Maine. There are certain vital truths connected with the Person of the Lord, which, when possessed, guard the soul from interpretations to which the soul who merely follows the words may be liable. Tell me I am not to worship Christ: you take away the only Christ I know. I have none other but one I do adore and worship with a thankful heart which owes all to Him. The object of John 16:27 is to give immediate confidence in the Father, in contrast with the spirit of Martha, chapter 11:22. Here the Lord says, "I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: for the Father himself loveth you." Further, the question is not of worship here at all, they should ask Him nothing (ἐρωτῶ) but were to beg (αἰτέω) the Father in His name. But all the angels of God are to worship Him, every knee to bow to Him. But more; calling on the name of the Lord is, so to speak, the definition of a Christian. Paul thrice besought the Lord to take away the thorn, and the Lord heard his cry and answered. Stephen was "invoking and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Christ is the Adonai of the Old Testament, as Isaiah 6 and John 12 and indeed Psalm 110 and other places. The Sitter on the throne and the Lamb are associated in Revelation 5:13; indeed, it is a question if chapter 4 be not the Son in His divine Person. You cannot separate the Ancient of Days and Christ in Daniel 7, though as the Son of man, He is brought before Him; for in verse 22 the Ancient of Days comes. And judgment is committed to the Son "because he is the Son of man" - yet "that all men should honour the Son even as they honour the Father." I do not quote passages to prove His Deity - that He and the Father are one, the fulness of the Godhead dwelling in Him bodily; that He was God, and created all things - as it is not called in question.

As to the use of the Lord's name in addressing the Father, if it be that in substance the prayer is not in His name, I reject it altogether. The use of the blessed Lord's name did not belong to a lower state, for He says, "Hitherto ye have asked nothing in my name," whereas on His going away He says, "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name," so that it belongs distinctly to this time. If it is merely the form of words, it is another thing; we may get into any routine of words and lose the force. But our prayers are only rightly directed to the Father in the name of Jesus; and in walking down here, it is not as being in Him we pray, nor is that praying in His name - true as it is that we are in Him. It is rightly addressed to the Father according to all the value of Christ to the Father, but as a separate Person, and separate from the Father too. It will not do to deny the mediatorship of Christ, the Man Christ Jesus, between God and man. He is both present with God, and Advocate with the Father. The loss of the mediatorial place of the blessed Lord would be the loss of Christianity. To "us there is but one God the Father;" "and one Mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ." His divine nature is not the question in this, and I know of no right prayer that is not in His name; it is not in Him, but "through him we both have access by one spirit to the Father."

One who refused to worship Christ, or who did not own His mediatorship and that in every aspect, I could not walk with. But I think that worship of the Father and the worship of Christ as Mediator has a different character. In worshipping the Father I go to one who in infinite, uncaused love (the form and glory of Godhead never left) has revealed Himself to me, brought me into the place of son, not spared His own Son for me, reconciled me to Himself by Him, and given me His Spirit that I may have the consciousness of the place He has put me in, so that I cry, Abba, Father. It is all through Christ but I know the Father and what He is through Him - alas, yet how imperfectly! yet so as to joy or glory in God. It is God, but God known as Father, John 4:23: John always makes the difference. So Christ tells us He was going to His Father and our Father, and His God and our God. It is what the Father is in Himself to whom we are brought, and as revealed in love in the Son, we being made sons, that is specially before us in worshipping Him, though all blessings flow from Him. Now in the worship of Christ become Mediator, I own His divine title though He laid aside His glory - now taken again - but it is One who has come down to me, has lived and died for me, loved me, washed me from my sins in His own blood. He was slain and has redeemed to God those far from Him; has made Himself of no reputation; and in unutterable grace to me, has been in all points tempted like as we are, sin apart, can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Now I quite admit a child owes worship to a loving Father - all right; but sorrows, exercises, thorns in the flesh, cases where I want sympathy, my wants, and then the administration of everything in the church, connect themselves with my looking to and worshipping Christ viewed as Mediator. It is not a person simply as made partaker of the divine nature, and through the Spirit knowing the Father through the revelation of the Son, who worships the Father as so knowing Him. I come more into the scene as knowing Christ a tempted Saviour, as a Friend tried in the circumstances in which we are. Were He not God this would lose all its value, but it is of inestimable value to every exercised soul. But it is evident that it connects itself more with my state down here. It is just what is precious.

This is true, that the work of Christ has been so divine and glorious, God Himself glorified in it, that it lifts us up to worship Him in respect of the excellency of what He has shewn Himself to be in that, and so we rise up to Godhead: for hereby know we love because He laid down His life for us. This it is important to lay fast hold of for His glory. We at once see the unity of thought, purpose, mind, nature, in the Son and in the Father. Still it is practically true that souls are apt to rest in looking at Christ, however justly, in the mediatorial aspect which concerns themselves, and their worship descends to this. It is not the blessed nature of God in which they joy and glory, and that known in a Father's love as their Father, but in the grace and service and benefits of which they are the objects and recipients, found in Christ. Now this cannot be separated when true from the source of love in Him as a divine Person, but is connected with our wants, infirmities, and failures in a word - which, though divine grace, refer to self, and in which we ought to think of self, that the sense of it may be real, and we filled with divinely given thankfulness. Both are right, both are sweet, and what we have to cultivate by grace, but different. One lifts us up simply to God for our new man to dwell in and delight in, and surely worship Him. The other brings down that love in sympathetic goodness to our state, though felt and estimated by the new man - God revealed, but as entering into all we are, and all we want, and that even to our sins. Now that the adoring recognition of this is true worship I fully admit, and the exclusion of it wholly wrong and deadening to the affections of the soul; but it is a different thing from the soul, by the Holy Ghost, being with and adoring the Father, to whom Christ has brought us, loved as He is loved. I apprehend there was the tendency in - 's teaching, desirous of reaching to the former, to set aside the latter, and that was all wrong; but I fear brethren active in the matter had not learned to appreciate the difference between the two. The result was attack and then personal defences, and many things defended by others as right which were rash and ill-advised statements which might have been corrected.

Take hymns and see how many you have addressed to the Father, or which continue to have Him and not ourselves for their subject after the first verse? You may, perhaps, have hymns to the Father; but in revising the hymn book I found how grave a question the doing it had raised for me as to this: though our spiritual state affects everything we do, yet it requires a more spiritual state than hymns to Christ, though He be worthy of equal honour. But while I make this difference, you cannot separate them by a sharp mathematical line, so to speak. Affections do not flow in that way. And the love of the Father and the Son run into one another. If the Father did not spare His Son, the Son in the same divine love gave Himself. We have known the Father through His revelation of Him. "He that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." The incarnation, and service which follows it in grace, has given a special character to our heart relationship with Christ, but after all, all is of the same divine source. Worshipping the Father as being in Christ has been spoken of, as substituting it for worshipping Christ; but I find no such thought in scripture. In Christ is our place and privilege; worship is a separate thing which springs through grace from our hearts individually, or, yet rather, collectively; but worshipping in Him I find no trace of in scripture.

Affectionately yours in the Lord.

July, 1881.

[53144E]

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