raying is to honour God, to unite ourselves with
His great purposes in heaven and earth.

Again, I would ask you to think of this from another point of view.
One of the great objects of life is to know God. To know God! This
sometimes seems a very mystical, far away subject, does it not? It
belongs, surely, to those who have been specially endowed, or to those
who have the mystical temperament! I do not think this is true. I
think we grow to know God as we grow to know our friends. And how do
we grow to know our friends? We speak to them, we take them into our
confidence, we tell them of the things that make up our lives, and by
so doing we grow into friendship. If we neglect this for long our
friendship begins to wane. Now I think it is very much the same with
our relations to our great Friend. We grow in our knowledge of Him and
His ways, and in our understanding of His mind, just in proportion as
it is our habit to go into His Presence and to take Him into our
confidence about our lives. And this is what prayer is. By prayer we
grow to know God. The highest prayer is "Thy Will be done", and we can
only come to those heights of prayer by praying,--for it is by talking
to God, looking at Him, taking Him into our confidence that we come to
understand some of His ways and purposes, enter into the secret places
of His dwelling, and thus learn to say, "Thy will be done!" Only they
who have learnt in the School of Prayer to say, "Father ... Hallowed be
Thy name" can go on to truly say, "Thy will be done". The object of
prayer is not to bend His Will to ours but to so learn of him, and to
so enter into His Friendship day by day that we can say, "Thy will be
done".

But, of course, in prayer we are meant to ask for things for ourselves
and for others. What has been said above by no means indicates the
complete reason for praying. No, the Christian prays for things for
himself and others. It cannot be too strongly stated "that prayer gets
things done". "Ye have not," says St. James, "because ye ask not". It
is the Will of the Father to give us things in response to prayer. Our
Lord in the model prayer taught us to pray definitely for certain
things in human life. His Father, so He teaches us, is interested in
the whole of human life, all its needs, its cares, its joys, its
perplexities, its strain,--all these can be made the subject of
intercourse between the Father and the child. The Father cares about