The Magi came also bringing the incense of their intercession.  Their privilege was that they were admitted to the very Presence Chamber of the great King.  That the Infant in Mary’s arms did not show any sign of kingship, the humble room where they were received bore no resemblance to the presence chamber of such kings as they were accustomed to wait upon, was to them of no consequence.  They were endowed with the gift of faith, and believed the supernatural guiding rather than the outward seeming.  The faith that had followed the star from so great a distance was not likely to be quenched by the antithesis of what must have been their imagination of the reality, of all the pictures that had been filling their minds as they pushed on across the desert.  It was no more incredible that the King Whom they were seeking should be found in humble guise in a peasant’s cottage than that they should have been guided to Him by a heavenly star.  The gift of God to them was that they should be permitted to enter the presence of the King.

This right of admission to the divine Presence is the precious gift of God to us.  Since the heavens received the ascending Lord the Kingdom of heaven has been open to all believers.  Prayer is a very simple and common thing in our experience; and yet when we try to think out its implications we are overwhelmed with the wonder of it.  It implies a God Who waits upon our pleasure:  it reveals to us a Father Who is ever ready to listen to the voice of His children.  No broken hearted sinner, overwhelmed with the conviction of his vileness, cries out in the agony of his repentance but God is ready to hear.  “He is more ready to hear than we to pray.”  No man pours out his thanksgivings for the abundant blessings he discovers in his life but the heart of God is glad in his gladness.  No child kneels at night to repeat his simple prayer but God bends over him and blesses him.  The wonder of it is summed up in our Lord’s words:  “The Father Himself loveth you,” which are as an open door into the inner sanctuary, an invitation to enter to those who are hesitating on the threshold of the Holy of Holies.

And there is no danger of tiring God:  we come ceaselessly, endlessly.  The cries of earth go up to Him, pitiful, ignorant, foolish cries; but they find God ready to hear and answer, fortunately not according to our ignorance but according to His great mercy.  We think of the clouds of prayer in all ages, from all nations, in all tongues, and the very vastness of them gives us an index of the divine love.

And it is not simply for ourselves that we pray, nor do we pray by ourselves; it is of God’s love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another.  There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism.  Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes.  We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one between our souls and God.  But that precisely is not the divine method.  We come to God through Christ; we come in association with the members of the Body.  Our standing as Christians before Him is dependent upon our corporate relation to one another in His Son.