Quiet Talks on Following the Christ | Page 5

This was
the natural thing with Him, the presence of the Father.
With this there went a second thing, the habit of getting alone to talk
things over with the Father. The common word for this is prayer.
Without doubt His whole outer life grew out of His inner secret talking
things out with the Father. Everything was passed in review here, first
of all. This naturally grew out of the consciousness of His Father's
presence, and this in turn increased that consciousness. So He was in
the habit of looking at everything through His Father's eyes.
And with these two, there was plainly a third thing, a settled sense of
the power, the authority, of God's written Word. It was not simply that
He did not question it, but there was a deep-rooted sense grown down
into His very being that God was speaking in the Book, and that this
revelation of Himself and His will was the thing to govern absolutely
one's life. This points back to a study of the Book. Doubtless that
Nazareth shop was a study shop too. He quoted readily and freely from
all portions of the Old Testament Bible. He seemed saturated with both
its language and its spirit. The basis of such familiarity would be long,
painstaking, prayerful study.
These three things naturally grew out of the dependent life He had
deliberately chosen to live and were a part of it. They were necessary to
it. These are the lungs and the heart of the dependent life.

Now His "Follow Me" does not mean merely that we try to imitate Him
in all this. We will naturally long to do so. And He is the example we
will ever be eager to follow. But the meaning goes deeper than this. It
means that as we really come close up in the road behind Him this will
come to be the natural atmosphere of our lives. We let Him in, and His
presence within, yielded to and cultivated and obeyed, will work this
sort of thing out in our lives. We will come to recognize, and then to
feel deep down in our spirit, how dependent we are upon Him in
everything. We will gradually come to realize intensely that the
dependent life is the true natural life. It is God's plan. It reveals
wondrously His love. It draws out wondrously our love, and radically
changes the whole spirit of the life.

Poor--Except in Spirit.
Now of course all this is in sharpest contrast to the common spirit of
life as men live, then and now. The spirit that dominates human life
everywhere is a spirit of independence. And this seems intensified in
our day to a terrific degree. There is, of course, a good independence in
our dealings with our fellows. But this is carried to the extreme of
independence of every one, even--say it softly--of God Himself.
Criticising God, ignoring Him, leaving Him severely out so far as we
are concerned,--this has become the commonplace. If for a moment He
ignored us, how quickly things would go to pieces! This has come to be
the dominant spirit of the whole race to a degree more marked than
ever before, if that be possible.
It seems to come into life early. I have seen a little tot, whom I could
with no inconvenience have tucked under my arm, walking down the
road, head up in the air, breathing out an aggressive self-confidence,
and defiance of all around, worthy of one of the old-time kings. And I
recognized that he had simply absorbed the atmosphere in which his
four brief years had been lived.
This has come to be the inbred spirit of mankind. Everywhere this
proud, self-assertive, self-sufficient, self-confident, self-aggressive

spirit is found, in varying degree. It is coupled sometimes with
laughable ignorance; sometimes with real learning and wisdom and
culture. It is emphasized sometimes the more by school training, and
other such advantages. But through all these accidental things it
remains,--the dominant human characteristic. The chief letter in man's
alphabet is the one next after h, spelled and written with a large capital.
The yellow fever--the fever for gold--so increasingly epidemic, is at
heart a bit of the same thing. The money gives power, and power gives
a certain independence of others, and then a certain compelling of
others to be dependent on the one who has the money and wields the
power. Men everywhere say just exactly what they are specially warned
against saying, "my power and the might of my hand hath gotten me
this wealth." They forget the words following this in the old Book of
God. "But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God, for it is He that
giveth thee power to get wealth."[8]
This seems to