And if some one listening may ask:  Why put the condition of prayer so strongly as that?  I will remind you of this.  The true basis of prayer is sympathy, oneness of purpose.  Prayer is not extracting favours from a reluctant God.  It is not passing a check in a bank window for money.  That is mandatory.  The roots of prayer lie down in oneness of purpose.  God up yonder, His Victor-Son by His side, and a man down here, in such sympathetic touch that God can think His thoughts over in this man’s mind, and have His desires repeated upon the earth as this man’s prayer.

The Threefold Cord of Jesus’ Life.

Think for a moment into Jesus’ human life down here.  His marvellous activities for those few years over which the world has never ceased to wonder.  Then His underneath hidden-away prayer-life of which only occasional glimpses are gotten.  Then grouping around about that sentence of His—­“I do always the things that are pleasing to Him”—­in John’s gospel, pick out the emphatic negatives on Jesus’ lips, the “not’s”:  not My will, not My works, not My words.  Jesus came to do somebody’s else will.  The controlling purpose of His life was to please His Father.  That was the secret of the power of His earthly career.  Right relationship to God; a secret intimate prayer-life:  marvellous power over men and with men—­those are the strands in the threefold cord of His life.

There is a very striking turn of a word in the second chapter of John’s gospel down almost at its close.  The old version says that “Many believed on His name beholding His signs which He did, but Jesus did not commit Himself unto them” because He knew them so well.  The word “believed,” and the word “commit” are the same word underneath our English.  The sentence might run “many trusted Him beholding what He did; but He did not trust them for He knew them.”  I have no doubt most, or all of us here to-day, trust Him.  Let me ask you very softly now:  Can He trust you?  While we might all shrink from saying “yes” to that, there is a very real sense in which we may say “yes,” namely, in the purpose of the life.  Every life is controlled by some purpose.  What is yours?  To please Him?  If so He knows it.  It is a great comfort to remember that God judges a man not by his achievements, but by his purposes:  not by what I am, actually, but by what I would be, in the yearning of my inmost heart, the dominant purpose of my life.  God will fairly flood your life with all the power He can trust you to use wholly for Him.

Commercial practice furnishes a simple but striking illustration here.  A man is employed by a business house as a clerk.  His ability and honesty come to be tested in many ways constantly.  He is promoted gradually, his responsibilities increased.  As he proves himself thoroughly reliable he is trusted more and more, until by and by as need arises he becomes the firm’s confidential clerk.  He knows its secrets.  He is trusted with the combination to the inner box in the vault.  Because it has been proven by actual test that he will use everything only for the best interests of his house, and not selfishly.