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Ephesians 3:16-19:
16That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;
17That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,
18May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;
19And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.
Even in your most exalted frame of mind and in the urge of your soul to be near unto God you must not appropriate the Lord your God unto yourself. And yet this is a sinful abuse, which, from very intensity of devotion, is so readily committed.
In the Our Father stands a plural, where we, left to our own impulse, so readily would use a singular. It does not read: My Father, but "Our Father, who art in heaven," and that plural form: us is used in the Our Father to the end.
Of course this does not mean that in our supplications we may not also use the singular. In the Eli Lama Sabachthani Jesus himself borrowed this form from the twenty-second Psalm, and obviously with Jesus there could be no mention of a plural in His own prayers, as often as it was the Son of God Who held communion with the Father. As such, Jesus stood solely alone in holy isolation. And though it is not so with us in that exalted, unique sense, in which it was the case with Jesus, yet with us also arise conditions and soul's experiences that isolate us, and of which we do not know that we have them in common with others. Then it is a personal case, from which we call upon God, and it is natural that in the singular we speak of: "my God and my Father."
Only, this cannot be the rule, it may not be the ordinary tenor of our prayer. Of itself it is not this when we pray together, but it should not be this even in our ordinary quiet, secret and personal prayer.
With respect to common need, even though one prays alone, we feel of ourselves that this is not seemly. In a shipwreck, this has often spontaneously shown itself. If among the more than thousand miners who perished at Courrieres there were some who could pray in that dreadful subterranean hell, it probably was not otherwise. And when lately Vesuvius vomited fire and sulphur, the devout people did not each by himself remain at home to pray, but all gathered together for prayer in the churches.
So and not otherwise it is with us men before our God in the common need of our sin and misery.
With each of us this common need may assume a form of its own. With each of us sin may bear a special character, and with each of us the misery of life may present itself in a special manner. Yet this does not do away with the all-dominating fact that all sin and misery flows from one common source, makes us all sharers of one common lot, and must move us to a collective calling upon God for redemption and deliverance.
If this is so with our supplication in time of need, it is not different with our thanksgiving for grace and with our prayer for protection by this grace.
Every man's salvation and deliverance is from Bethlehem and Golgotha and the opened grave. To the grace of every man the selfsame Satan seeks to do harm. And the safe-keeping of all by the grace of God flows from the influence in our hearts by one selfsame Holy Spirit and from one selfsame glorious rule of Christ as our King.
If thus in sin and misery we stand in one common lot with all mankind, in the sphere of grace we stand in one common lot with all that have been given by the Father to the Christ; and our spiritual position in holy things may and can, therefore, be no other than that we know and feel, that "with all saints" together we make our approach to God and that "with all saints" together we stand before our God.
Now notice that the Apostle says: "With all saints" (Ephesians 3:18).
Some devout souls well know the fellowship with the devout in their home town, but they forget that the devout and the saints are not the same, and they largely lose sight of this distinction.
This does not say that it can not be good and excellent to have daily fellowship with the devout in one's home town, for the upbuilding of faith and for mutual edification. Only this common fellowship "with the devout" is something so altogether different from the sense of sharing a common lot "with all saints."
With "the saints" Scripture does not refer to subjective personal piety, but to objective sanctification by Christ and in Christ. The "saints" are the redeemed, those that have been drawn unto eternal life. Not your choice, but the choice of your God here counts. Not a communion with those whom you hold to be godly, but communion in the common lot with all those who have effectually been called by God.
The circle therefore is not narrow, neither is it temporary; nor local, but a multitude which no one can number, in all parts of the world, here and above, from paradise on until now, and from now on to all eternity.
So alone comes this "with all saints" to its own.
So in the Te Deum the jubilant choir sings to Christ: "The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee."
"With all saints," therefore, means fellowship with the redeemed through the blood of Christ, in your surroundings, in your whole country, in your church, in other churches, in other lands, of the present and of the past, of now and of later. It is the whole "Body of Christ" with all its members, not one excepted. With the patriarchs and Prophets, the Apostles and martyrs from of old, with your redeemed family members and acquaintances who have gone before you into eternity, and with those who still continue with you; with those who grow up from among the children of the church; with those that are still hidden in the seed of the church; and with those who shall be brought into the church from without.
Not one whom God included may you exclude.
And that this refers not only to your salvation, but also to your fellowship with the Triune God and to your being near unto God, is clearly evident from what the Apostle writes so enthusiastically, that you "with all saints may be able to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth in the mystery of the grace of your God."
Especially in behalf of practical benefit this expansion of your holy sense of fellowship is deeply significant.
If you accustom yourself to limit the multitude which no one can number to the few godly people whom as members of your own church you know personally, then your sacred horizon becomes pitifully small and narrow. Then the people of God sink away to a few hundreds, and all the rest of the world presents itself to you as a lost mass.
If, on the other hand, you picture to yourself the broad circle of all God's saints, of those near by and of those afar off, of the present and of the past, of those who are on earth and of those who are in heaven, and of those who are yet to be born, then at once all the saints of the Old Covenant come nearer to you, then you live in fellowship with Apostles and martyrs, and you have an innumerable multitude of brothers and sisters above, and then you expect from the rising generation and from those who shall come after them an ever steady increase of the Body of Christ.
Then recedes the dejected and depressed feeling, to give place to a feeling of triumph and endless glory. Then your case stands no more alone by itself, but thousands have shared it with you. Though other thousands have been far worse off than you, yet they have entered into eternal life.
You, too, undergo the glorious effect of the magnitude of the work of grace. Hence you do not belong to a small, forgotten group but to a multitude without end, a vast company which no one can number, to an innumerable multitude which already stands before God, or is on the way to the Father-house, or presently from God's Almightiness is to be born.
Your God and the work of grace then becomes so infinitely great to the eye of your soul. Everything little, everything that is limited falls away, and you journey on as a pilgrim, not complainingly nor mournfully, but jubilantly in the salvation of God and with your feet already here standing in the gate of the heavenly Jerusalem.
And this is the mood that equips you for the hidden walk with God and makes you be near unto Him.
So long as it remains a purely personal fellowship with God, as though with only a few fellow-believers you came to Him for hiding, the Majesty of the Work of Grace escapes you, and with it the Majesty of His Divine Being. Then the narrowness of your own soul's condition and of your outward need, limits also the length and breadth, the height and depth of the majestic doings of God. Then you transfer so readily your insignificance to the Eternal.
But when you feel that you yourself are a living member of the whole living Body of Christ, that you are one of the multitude which no one can number, that you are bound to all the saints above, to all the saints of God in the whole earth, and to all God's saints among the little children and among your children's children, then the pinnings of the sacred tent are widely set out, your outlook is enlarged, your love is extended to ten thousand times ten thousand, your faith is deepened, and your hope begins to glisten before you in the glorious radiancy of victory.
The heart of God is so wide of conception that nothing estranges you from that Father-heart but your own narrow-heartedness.
"The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee."
as it says in the Te Deum.
Sometimes the desire takes hold of you that you might have lived in the days of an Isaiah, and might have companied with a John, and might have witnessed the courage of dying martyrs. And then you dream that all this has sunken away in an inaccessible past.
Well then, live in the sense of fellowship "with all the saints," and they will all come closer to you. They are all your brothers with whom you are included in the Body of Christ.
And the nearer you come to that company of God's saints above, the closer you will find yourself in the nearness of your God, Who has included you with all these saints in one selfsame bundle of life.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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