This form of prayer, however, stands quite apart from every other. It has a sacredness all its own. It is _the Lord’s_ prayer. With perfect appropriateness this form finds a place in all our services. I welcome the public use of the Lord’s Prayer for various reasons. First of all, it is the _one perfect prayer_. In its six brief petitions it seems to include everybody and everything. Men are always partial and one-sided and our human prayers are partial and one-sided also. They express the needs of some and not of others. But this brief prayer is like its Author, it is complete. Jesus was the Son of Man, the Universal Man. Everybody finds his counterpart in Jesus. And the prayer He gave is an universal prayer. It voices the cry of every heart, the need of every soul. Then I welcome the use of this prayer _for its associations_. What sacred associations cluster around it! It is sacred to us because of Him who first gave it. This is _our Lord’s_ prayer, His gift to the world. Then it is sacred to us because of the Saints, Apostles, Prophets, Martyrs, who have used it. This prayer is a link that binds all the Christian centuries together. Peter and John and Paul and James used to kneel down and say, “Our Father.” Those early Christian assemblies in the upper room in Jerusalem, Lydia’s house in Philippi, and the Catacombs at Rome, used the very words we repeated together just now. This prayer is an heirloom in the Christian family, handed down from one generation to another, and binding the “whole world by chains of gold about the feet of God.” Then for many of us it has associations of a still tenderer kind. It comes to us burdened with memories of the past. Dr. Guthrie, when lying on his dying bed, used often to ask the members of his family to sing him a bairn’s hymn. Those childish hymns used to carry him back to the old home and the long ago. Vanished days came back again as he listened to the songs he learned first at his mother’s knee. What those “bairn’s hymns” were to Dr. Guthrie, that, this prayer is to most of us. It is the prayer in which we learned our first lessons of Christian truth. The first words we were taught to lisp were the words “Our Father.” When we pray this prayer we are back again in the far-off days of childhood. We remember our fathers and mothers, some of them in glory now, who would have given their lives for our souls. And as we think of those happy days, we become children once again, and becoming children we become fit to receive the blessing; for except we turn and become as little children we shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. So this form of prayer becomes a vehicle of grace. Tender, sacred, universal, it lifts us near to God and rightly finds a place in all the public services of the sanctuary.