Sermon
Prayer
December 7, 2003
Pastor Donald Sheley

I'm going to ask you to take your notes as well as your Bible today, although I've placed most of the Scripture text for our lesson this morning in our notes. We come to the last of a series on the great doctrines of our Christian faith, and I felt that a good closing message would be a talk on the subject of prayer. So I thought it would be good to conclude with the thoughts on prayer.

Now there's a reluctance about me approaching this subject because each of us have a different kind of a prayer of life. Some of us pray in the morning; some of us pray out loud; some of us quietly sit in God's presence. There's such a variety to our approaches to God that I almost feel like I'm intruding on your private experience with God. So what I want to do today is to talk about just some the concepts that deal with his whole matter of prayer, and you allow them to fit within your prayer experience as we discuss them.

To start our lesson today I have selected two of Paul's great prayers...and listen to them:
"For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height-to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen."

Another prayer:
"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ; just as it is right for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers with me of grace. For God is my witness, how greatly I long for you all with the affection of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ." Amen.

The words of Jesus:
"Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also, and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father.
And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it."

Jeremiah:
"Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know."

And Paul writes on the subject of prayer:
"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will."

The words of Jesus:
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."

And again, the words of Christ:
"Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete."

Now for our thoughts today we have taken the prayers of Paul as well as these additional Scripture verses on prayer, and we'll find that the word of God is a record of prayer, of praying men and women and their achievements, and the divine warrant of prayer and of the encouragement given to those who pray.

It's an amazing and an interesting journey as you go through the Scriptures you'll find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prayers. So I suggested that as the house of God is called a House of Prayer, so the Bible is the Book of Prayer. Prayer is the great theme and content of its message to mankind. God's Word is the basis, as it is the directory of the prayer of faith. The Scripture says, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Colossians 3:16).

And as this Word of Christ dwelling in us richly is transmuted and assimilated, it always issues in praying. Faith is constructed of the Word and of the Spirit, and faith is the body and the substance of prayer. Jesus said that if you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Thus, the Word of God is the food by which prayer is nourished and made strong. Prayer, like men, cannot live by bread alone, "but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord."

And the absence of vital force in praying can be traced to the absence of a constant supply of God's Word, for He who would learn to pray well must first study God's Word and store it in his memory and his thoughts. And when we consult God's Word, we find that no duty is more binding, than that of prayer.

I'm at the top of page 3. What is prayer? I went to a number of different writers and I pulled these sentences from their books. One says that prayer is our need crying out for help...it is the voice of faith to the Father. Prayer is the Living Word on the lips of faith. Prayer is the channel through which all good flows from God to man, and all good from men to men. Prayer is a privilege, a sacred, princely privilege. It is a duty, an obligation most binding, and most imperative, which should hold us to it. But prayer is more than a privilege, more than a duty, it is a means, an instrument, a condition of getting God's aid. And it is the avenue through which God supplies man's wants.

Thus the essence of prayer is heartfelt supplication; it's bringing before God one's innermost needs and requests in the confident expectation that God will hear and that God will answer. Now in the Old Testament this kind of prayer is described as the outpouring of the soul or the crying to God from the depths. Many Scripture verses imply this. The psalmist says, "I pour out my complaint before Him, I tell my trouble before Him." And again he says, "O Lord, my God, I call for help by day, I cry out in the night before You. Let my prayer come before Thee, incline Thy ear to my cry."

And another writer in the Old Testament, "Arise, cry out in the night...Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord!" And Jonah says, "In my distress, O Lord, I called to You, and You answered me. From deep in the world of the dead I cried for help, and You heard me." And Isaiah writes, "O Lord, in my distress they sought Thee, they poured out a prayer when Thy chastening was upon them."

In the New Testament you find that same sense of the heart yearning, the heart crying out to God as in the description of prayer. Jesus said, "Ask and it will be given you; seek, and ye shall will find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened."

Listen to Christ's own prayer life described as "offering up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears." Paul urged the Philippians: "Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God."

Probably one of the most profound writers on the subject of prayer is E. M. Bounds. He's written a number of volumes. They are small volumes, but he is a great man of prayer. This is what he writes in one of his volumes, "God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed in death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world!"

The Westminster Confession gives this definition for prayer: "Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies."

Some years ago we had an older gentlemen join with us in our staff and we were talking about the subject of prayer, and he said, you know Pastor, John wrote some wonderful thoughts on prayer, and he called my attention to this passage in 1 John 5:14. Listen to what it says, "And this is the confidence (the assurance, the privilege of boldness) which we have in Him: [we are sure] that if we ask anything (make any request) according to His will (in agreement with His own plan), He listens to and hears us. And if (since) we [positively] know that He listens to us in whatever we ask, we also know [with settled and absolute knowledge] that we have [granted to us as our present possession] the requests made of Him."

The first principle I want you to remember in prayer is that to pray effectively and to pray with results, the Bible makes it very, very clear we must pray in accordance to the will of God. And the amazing thing about the Bible is that it contains, in almost every area of human life, the will of God. And so the idea is if we know God's Word this is what we're going to pray. And John tells us that if I pray in accordance with what God has said, then I can be assured that He hears me, and if I know that He hears me, I know that I have the answer to that prayer. Thus, the reason for suggesting that true prayer can only be prayed when we have taken God's Word and made to it such a part of our mind and our thought and our thinking, we pray God's Word back to Him, and when we do, we pray in accordance to His will.

I'm at the top of page 4. Besides petition there are other elements of true praying such as adoration, thanksgiving and confession. "Let all the joys of the godly well up in praise to the Lord, for it right to praise Him," the psalmist says. We should be reminded that prayer is not just a means of getting things from God, but is the means whereby we come to know God. Prayer, in its primary essence, is worship. Worship is the recognition of worth, the fitting of God into the overall picture of our lives in His proper perspective. The very act of prayer, whether we kneel, sit, lie on our faces, or stand, is an affirmation of the worthiness of God. And by prayer, we enter into God's holy temple, and we penetrate at once to the throne of grace.

Prayer is not only the shortest distance to God's mighty throne, it's the only way to it. The writer of Hebrews says, "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, His body, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful."

To think that this supreme wonder could take place so suddenly with one bold, blood-bought step. Glorious discovery: Almighty God is only a prayer away. The veil of sense and space that hides Him within His temple-universe is suddenly removed as we pray. We enter silently into His temple, and lo, suddenly we are before His throne. There too, we are suddenly in the presence of angels and archangels, and with all the company of Heaven we worship and adore Him. Only there do we discover the wonder of worship.

Secondly, I want you to remember...we often get caught with this idea that prayer is just simply presenting to God our wish list, our needs list, and oft times that's the ultimate. That's all that our prayers consist of -- God, I need this and I want You to do this for me, and I'll appreciate it if You do this. But real prayer...really, the matter of wish lists comes at the end of prayer.

Some years ago, I had a gentlemen say to me, you know Pastor, what I'd like for you to do is for one whole week in your prayer time don't ask God for a thing, just praise Him and worship Him. And by doing that you are simply expressing love to God, you're singing to Him, you're reading the Scriptures; you're just saying, God, I want You to know I want to take this time out today just to tell You how much I love You. I want to worship You. I want to sing praises to You. I want to read the Scriptures, Your Word, to You. When prayer becomes worship it takes on a vast new dimension than most of us experience. Because most of us simply bow and say God this is what I need.

And I'll tell you what happened. When I went a whole week without asking for a thing, what happened is the want list after that became very small because to be in His presence, to sense His joy, to feel His nearness, you already know it. The Bible says He already knows what you need before you ask Him anyway, so why not just spend the time worshiping Him? Because He already knows what I need. So the want list gets very short, but the praise list gets very long. Amen?

Go with me to page 5. There's another element to true prayer. The prayer of confession is even more indissolubly tied to petition than are praise and adoration. When we confess our sins, we ask the Lord to hear our confession and to grant us His forgiveness. So my point is...not only do I come with my heart and my mind filled with His Word, I come with a desire to worship Him, but when I do the first thing I must make sure is that my heart is right with my fellow man and thus I must confess my sins. I must confess my heart to Him.

I note here that when we confess our sins we ask the Lord to hear our confession, grant us His forgiveness, and in Isaiah 6, prayer begins with an invocation followed by a confession of sins and it culminates in an act of dedication. In true prayer we go out of ourselves in praise to God. But we also go into ourselves in revealing our deepest needs and our desires to God. And our deepest need is always for His grace and His forgiveness. And just as the soul of confession is heartfelt petition, so the whole life of prayer gains power and direction when anchored in confession. Until known sin is judged and renounced, we pray and plead in vain. Now let's stop there.

I'm suggesting that to come before God and to have a wonderful time of worship, I've got to make sure that I've confess my sins, and that I've forgiven where forgiveness needs to be forgiven, that I've shown mercy, and I need to ask God to forgive me.

I had an interesting call this week, the person didn't identify themselves only that they listened to the radio. And they said, Pastor, this morning on the radio you said something...did Jesus really mean in Matthews 6 that if we do not forgive He will not forgive us? She said, I always thought that salvation was a work of grace, and she said, I'm going to be saved just because of His grace. But, she said, I don't believe in works and I consider seeking forgiveness as works. And I said, ma'am, that's not really the way it is. Seeking forgiveness is a righting our hearts in the presence of God. That's not a matter of works, that's correcting the problems that hinders fellowship, and we take care of that first it's not a work. It's asking God to cleanse us. She said, I didn't know that. She said, I always thought that seeking forgiveness was an act of works, and in that I believe totally in grace I'm not going to do anything to work by salvation.

Confession is very, very important. When I come to God in prayer, I say, God, before we spend time now I want You to know if there's anything at my heart that needs correcting, if there's a sin, if there's a change that needs to take place, if You will tell me I'll correct it. It's important that confession clears the heart for fellowship.

Now there's one other aspect of prayer, and go with me to the bottom of page 6. And I put this in here and I have to be very, very cautious because you have to understand what I'm talking about -- Sometimes the prayer of faith involves defiance of God bordering on presumption. Now that is a statement, but I want you to catch a depth of prayer that again, most of us don't experience.

Listen to Moses: "O Lord, why hast Thou done evil to this people? Why didst Thou even send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Thy name, he has done evil to this people, and Thou hast not delivered Thy people at all." God, why don't You get about Your task. I've done my part, why don't You do Yours? That's what he's saying, isn't it?

Listened to the psalmist: "O God, don't sit idly by, silent and inactive when we pray. Answer us! Deliver us! You say, do you talk to God that way? Well Moses did, and David did. Look at the top of page 7. Listen to old David, "Rouse thyself!" Stop sleeping. Now he's accusing God of going to sleep on him. "Awake! Do not cast us off for ever! Why dost Thou hide Thy face? Why doest Thou forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our body cleaves to the ground. Rise up, come to our help!"

What am I suggesting? What we find in Moses and David and great men of prayer, were men who were confident enough in God's love and His mercy that they could be honest with God. And sometimes, and I say this with great caution, sometimes...God knows our hearts but we're not honest with God. I mean when we say God, I want to be honest with You, I don't agree with You. God, I love You, but You're really doing it the wrong way. We feel that, but very seldom do we say it. Right?

Now what I'm suggesting that in prayer there has to be genuine honesty of heart, and it doesn't bother God for You to tell Him off. You say I've never heard that from a preacher. What I'm trying to say is God appreciates an honest heart. And when you say that to God don't be quick to run away from His presence because if you wait long enough and you've been honest enough, He's going to clarify it in your mind and bring You to peace. He really does.

So in my prayer I come with my heart filled and my mind filled with the knowledge of His word. I enter the moment with Him as a moment of worship and I clarify my heart from any sin, and then I talk to Him just as honestly as I can. And when I do, He's ready to listen. He's amazing. He wants so much...He said that He is more anxious to give than we are to receive. Honestly with God. Let's pray.

Father, I know that prayer is individual and it's personnel, and yet today we've tried to think through some of the aspects of prayer that make it effective and that touch Your heart and bring results. Help us to be praying men and women, enjoying Your presence in worship, private worship, telling You our hearts and pouring out our very needs before You. Make us people of prayer. I ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. God bless you folks