We all know something of this kind of feeling. Sometimes I look back over old sermons, and very often I have to say to myself, “I could not preach that again.” God has been teaching me during the years of my ministry, and leading me into a fuller knowledge of the truth. In sermons, as in wellnigh everything else, “_Time makes ancient good uncouth_.” It was so with the twelve. They had been to school to Christ; from their great Master they had learned many a new and glorious lesson about God, and the result of their new knowledge of God, their larger, grander conceptions of His character, was the absolute necessity for a new prayer. They had outgrown the old ones in which they had been brought up. They no longer expressed their feelings or satisfied their needs. You have an illustration of what I am trying to point out in the history of Paul. He was a prominent man in religious circles before he became a Christian. He was scrupulous in his observance of religious duties. After the straitest sect he lived a Pharisee, and if the Pharisees were punctilious about one thing more than another, it was their prayers. But yet, in the account of his conversion, Scripture, after describing Saul as alone and blind in the house in the street called Strait, adds this remark, as if recording a new fact in Saul’s history, “Behold he prayeth.” Saul had said his prayers thousands of times before, but now, for the first time, he was praying the new prayer, which a sense of his own sin and the gentleness of God had made necessary. Oh, yes, when religion is a formality then a prayer which is also a formality will suffice. But once we see the love of God, once we feel our own unworthiness, we shall find the old formal prayers will no longer suffice. We shall need a new prayer then, and like these disciples we shall come to Christ with the request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Notice what the disciple adds, “As John also taught his disciples.” Christ might imitate John in the act of teaching, but in the prayer taught Jesus was no imitator. Here Jesus was grandly, supremely original. This was a new prayer He gave. John could not have given it. No _man_, however saintly and good, could have given it. It surpasses the best efforts of man as the sunlight surpasses the starlight. No one but the Son, who lay in the bosom of the Father; no one but the Son, who had intimate knowledge of the very heart of God, could have taught this prayer, for it opens with a New Name for God—the name Father—and no man knoweth the Father but the Son.