what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on – and which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?”  He showed us the uselessness of turning to God with any thought or request to fulfill our needs. He stated in just so many words that our Heavenly Father knoweth that we have need of these things, and it is his good pleasure to give us the Kingdom. God knows our need, and we cannot believe that God is withholding any good, or that God will not fulfill our every need. The nations of the world pray for their food, their clothing and their housing, but the Master tells us “…seek ye the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

        As you live with these great passages you will begin to catch the idea, and ultimately you will come to the conclusion that there is no use in praying to God for any thing, because that kind of prayer puts God in the same classification as Santa Claus. So often we try to be good, and we acquaint God with our needs and desires, and then we wait in our goodness until God feels like bestowing our requests.

        After many years of study and the practice of spiritual truth, we have outgrown the idea of God as Santa Claus, and the idea of the prayer of petition and beseeching, and later affirming, so as to receive our good from God. Now it is revealed to us that in order to know the nature of prayer we must know the nature of God.

        The nature of God is fulfillment. It is the function of God to fulfill and to express Itself. However, there is that which will prevent us from coming into the experience of that fulfillment. Just as there may be brilliant sunshine, there are also shades, and we may use those shades to keep out the sun. As long as we entertain a sense of separation from God, this serves as the shade, which keeps away from us the benefits, the joys, the affluence of God. Our sense of separation from God is the barrier to our enjoyment of the blessings of God.

        For example, suppose, for one reason or another, we sin. Immediately a sense of guilt is set up within us and we believe, not only that God will not bless us, but that we do not even deserve to be blessed, and voluntarily we let the blessings of God escape us because of our own sense of inadequacy and insufficiency. In the same way, often when a person is ill he accepts the temptation to believe that he is separate and apart from God and that is why he is sick. He believes if only he could find God’s Presence, he would no longer be sick, and so he struggles and strives to find God in order to be well again.

        In either of these cases, the very sense of separation is sufficient to bar from us the harmonies of God’s presence. The truth is this: we are not separated from God even in sin, disease, poverty or death. God is as omnipresent in sin, disease, poverty or death as in the greatest affluence. Since God has not deserted us, what has happened that these inharmonies have come upon us? It is because we have entertained a sense of separation from God.

        “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”The Psalmist recognized that even in the midst of approaching death, the Omnipresence and Omnipotence of God was with him.“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?…if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” That very sense of Omnipresence transf