The untried door Author:Richard Roberts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO THE ROOTS OF THE NEW LIFE (Matt. 5:1-9; 6:1-5, 9-13; 7:25-34; 17:1-8; Mk. 10:13-25) "// ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto ... more »your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" BACK of everything in the mind of Jesus was a simple unwavering confidence in the friendliness of God. He was not the first to call God a Father, but none ever called him by that name so consistently or accepted the logic of the name with so great completeness. In the Parable of the Average an. 7:9-n Father he frankly accepts human fatherhood as a faint image of the divine fatherhood; and he habitually uses language which describes God as being in an attitude of intimate fatherly solicitude mt. 6;s toward men. "Your heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him." ait. 10:29-31 "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father: but the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows." Men needed to realise that God was on their side. It was not an easy lesson for those people to learn. Between the statesman and the churchman they lived a thin and precarious life, and of the security of life that all men crave for they had little or none. The Roman was no friend of theirs. Neither was the Pharisee. How then should God who seemed to allow these people to prosper be the peasant's friend ? Yet Jesus went on affirming that God was their father. He saw that the first thing that his people needed was courage to live. They were crushed between the upper and nether millstones, they had lost heart, were "distressed and scattered." Despair had overtaken them; they lived their daily lives on t...« less