quietly look up and speak to the Father in the
midst of a crowd.[7] This was the natural thing to do. He was more
conscious of the Father's presence than of the crowd pressing in to get
near. When He was speaking to the crowd He knew the Father too was
listening. He felt the Father watching as He helped the people. This was
the natural thing with Him, the presence of the Father.

With this there went a second thing, the habit of getting alone to talk
things over with the Father. The common word for this is prayer. Without
doubt His whole outer life grew out of His inner secret talking things out
with the Father. Everything was passed in review here, first of all. This
naturally grew out of the consciousness of His Father's presence, and this
in turn increased that consciousness. So He was in the habit of looking at
everything through His Father's eyes.

And with these two, there was plainly a third thing, a settled sense of
the power, the authority, of God's written Word. It was not simply that He
did not question it, but there was a deep-rooted sense grown down into
His very being that God was speaking in the Book, and that this revelation
of Himself and His will was _the thing_ to govern absolutely one's life.
This points back to a study of the Book. Doubtless that Nazareth shop was
a study shop too. He quoted readily and freely from all portions of the
Old Testament Bible. He seemed saturated with both its language and its
spirit. The basis of such familiarity would be long, painstaking,
prayerful study.

These three things naturally grew out of the dependent life He had
deliberately chosen to live and were a part of it. They were necessary to
it. These are the lungs and the heart of the dependent life.

Now His "Follow Me" does not mean merely that we try to imitate Him in all
this. We will naturally long to do so. And He is the example we will ever
be eager to follow. But the meaning goes deeper than this. It means that
as we really come close up in the road behind Him this will come to be the
natural atmosphere of our lives. We let _Him_ in, and His presence within,
yielded to and cultivated and obeyed, will work this sort of thing out in
our lives. We will come to recognize, and then to feel deep down in our
spirit, how dependent we are upon Him in everything. We will gradually
come to realize intensely that the dependent life is the true natural
life. It is God's plan. It reveals wondrously His love. It draws