The morning worship service had reached an emotional climax during the pastor’s fervent prayer. He had carefully crafted it with fine liturgical phrases, hallowed by centuries of use. It was backed up by a throbbing organ, playing a hymn that gently drew worshipers back to thoughts of that amazing grace and that sweet hour of prayer. The prayer had touched on all the right bases and strummed all the right heartstrings, and now was reaching its final pulsing power: "Lord, let us feel your presence" Then a long pause. "Lord, let us see your presence." Another, even longer pause. "Lord, let us hear your presence." From somewhere down the hall, "barroossssh" -- the unmistakable sound of a flushing toilet!
When we pray, we say we want to be heard, but I’m not sure many of us really expect God to hear us quite so immediately or so dramatically as all that! In fact, I wonder, do we expect to be heard at all? I wonder, do we really expect God to hear and act on our prayers. Why do I say that? Because if we do expect God to hear our prayers, why is it we have ignored the path most clearly laid out in the Bible? If we truly expect that God will hear our prayers, why do we pay so little attention to one of the clearest and most obvious instructions the Scriptures have to give us?
All over the world, men and women are trying to do some things that they think will assure that whatever god they pray to will hear them. Some bring gifts of money or offerings of food, expecting that their god will be pleased and will listen to them because he has been bought off. Yonder in India, where the temples of the Hindu deities dot every street corner, you will see offerings of food and of flowers brought every morning by the desperate and the suffering, who keep on hoping that these grotesque figures of wood and stone will hear them.
But this morning I want to tell you of a God who sometimes instructs his followers to forget about offering their gifts and go do something else before their gifts will be acceptable, before their prayers will be heard.
Some people set up rituals of petition that focus on how often prayer is offered. Our soldiers in the Middle East right now are being exposed to the Muslim prayer tradition, which provides that five times each day, each Muslim shall fall on his face, turned toward the holy city of Mecca. And the loud plaintive wail of the muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer, pierces the dry desert air as if it were designed to insist that God wake up and pay attention. So many of the world’s praying people seem to focus on the volume of their prayers, the quantity of their prayers. Surely if I keep on storming the gates of heaven, I will be heard. Surely if I jam the circuits to God, He will have to hear me.
And yet I am going to tell you this morning of a God who tells us to pray in secret and in quiet; of a God who Himself speaks in the still, small voice; of a God who counsels us not to heap up empty words; of a Christ whose model prayer can be recited in only 30 seconds. I am going to tell you of a God who will hear us, in fact, even when we cannot even form our prayers or speak our own minds!
What must we do to be heard by God? It’s really so simple; and yet, like everything that matters, it’s profound, it’s life-changing, and it’s demanding:
Matthew 6:1-15
I
What does it take to be heard by God? May I suggest that we begin by making certain that we are broadcasting to the right audience? It just stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if we want God to hear us, we’d better be talking to God! God had better be the real audience.
You see, a lot of us are praying to be heard, but to be heard by someone other than God. We get so caught up in our words, our phrasing; we get so bound up in our self-image, that before long it becomes clear that we are not talking with God. We are talking to other people; we are talking to ourselves; we are trying to make an impression. But if you want to be heard by God, then be sure your prayer is really directed toward Him and not to the wrong audience.
We have this practice in our churches called, "leading in prayer". "Leading in prayer". Now notice the language: it is supposed to be leading others to pray. It is not supposed to be praying instead of other people. It is not even praying for other people. Most especially, it is not "performing" the prayer. It is to be leading, encouraging, others to pray. If I lead you to pray, it means I merely suggest some things for which you might want to pray, and then you do your own praying.
But what happens to us? We get all caught up in sounding good. We worry about how to use Thou and Thee and Thine, as if God were frozen somewhere in the 17th century. We get all wrapped up in being eloquent and pungent. And that misses the point entirely. Peter Marshall, one-time chaplain of the-Senate, worried aloud in one of his Senate prayers whether he was more interested in impressing the Senators with his eloquence than in offering the Lord his sincerity.
The issue is, if we want to be heard by God, we need to make certain that God is the real audience -- not other people, not ourselves.
Listen to the Lord’s warning: "When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen of men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you".
I want this morning to encourage those of you who feel unable to pray because you think you do not know the right words. I just want to tell you that there are no right words except the words that express the heart.
And if when someone asks you to lead others in prayer, you get performance anxiety, afraid you’ll mess up, remember this: if the audience is God and God is a loving, forgiving, embracing God, does He care about our eloquence? Is he invested in our correctness? I believe our God would a thousand times rather hear the prayers of our hearts, however expressed, than to hear some carefully crafted composition that rings well in the ears. Because the ears belong to the wrong audience!
They say that after one of his revival services the great evangelist Dwight L. Moody was accosted by a prim and proper lady who informed Moody in no uncertain terms, "Sir, I counted six grammatical errors in your prayer tonight." To which Moody replied, "That’s all right, lady; I wasn’t talking to you anyway."
If you want to be heard by God, then make sure God is the audience, and forget about what others may hear; forget about what the traditional prayer language sounds like; forget that there is a human audience, whether it be those sitting around you or that editor that hides inside of you; forget all of these audiences and speak to the one audience that counts -- to God Himself. Pour out exactly what you feel in the language of feeling, and you will be on your way to being heard.
II
What does it take to be heard by God? Once you’ve established that God is your audience, make sure that all-important audience hears the real you. If you now know to whom you’re addressing your prayer, are you sure it’s really you doing the praying?
I sometimes wonder if God can hear us, the real us, coming through all of the static and the noise we throw out. How can we expect to be heard by God if when we pray it’s not the real person praying, but some sham, some facade, some actor in a role?
You see, our trouble is that we say prayers more than we pray. Let me say that again. Our trouble is that we are more adept at saying prayers rather than at praying. We lean on somebody else’s language; we fall back on someone else’s patterns, and we don’t make those our own.
I think that’s what Jesus is getting at when He says, just before He teaches the Lord’s Prayer, "And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him."
A friend of mine was a minister in another denomination - - one of the churches that depends heavily on a prayerbook for all of its worship services. We were at a dinner meeting together, and someone asked him if he would lead the prayer of thanksgiving. “Oh, I couldn’t", he said. "I don’t have my prayerbook with me."
I was astounded! Now don’t get me wrong. I can appreciate the prayerbook. I use prayerbooks frequently, and have used portions of the prayers of other people as part of our worship services here. But I am a little frightened when prayer has been reduced to nothing more than reciting the words of others, however beautifully composed. I am concerned when prayer is not the natural expression of the heart. For prayer, you see, is in the final analysis the cry of the heart. And the heart must make its own cries. The heart must use its own language.
Let your imagination run loose for a moment. Imagine a sixteen-year-old boy standing in front of his father, hoping to get the car keys for Saturday night. What does he say? Well, he might try the never-knew-what-hit-him approach, "Hey, Dad, gimme the keys, I’m outta here." Or he might attempt the bribery approach, "Dad, if you’ll let me have the car tonight, I’ll wash and wax it next week and I’ll fill up the gas tank (at post-Iraq prices) oh please oh please oh please". There may be a lot of ways to ask Dad for the car keys. But the one thing that sixteen year old son would not do would be to approach his dad like some of us approach God: "0 Father, source of my life, giver of three square meals a day, provider of all blessings, I thank thee that thou hast put a roof over mine head. I praise thee that thou hast covered all my iniquities and wallpapered over my childish scrawls. And so I humbly beseech of thee, that if it be thy will, thou wilt forgive me my fender benders and grant me, yea, one more chance with thy glorious eight cylinders."
No, you don’t expect real human beings to talk this way. You expect a personal conversation. You expect a real human being to be forthright and straightforward and honest. Then why is it we get stuck in the language of a prayer tradition? We Baptists may not have a prayerbook, but we certainly do have a prayer tradition. When we pray in buzzwords; when we rattle off the same phrases, the same sentiments, prayer after prayer, day after day, month after weary month; when we pray without ceasing but also without feeling and without thinking, then God is not listening to us. God is listening to a pattern that somebody taught us. And God has not yet been permitted to hear the real us, the real you. Do not heap up empty words.
If you want to be heard by God, make sure that it really is you that God is hearing, and not just words that somebody else taught you!
III
What does it take to be heard by God? We’ve said that first it takes a focus on the right audience: God Himself, and not others, not our own selves. And then we’ve said that it means that the real you needs to be doing the praying, not you just blindly following somebody else’s worn traditions. But now I want to focus on what I called a moment ago one of the clearest and most obvious instructions given anywhere in the Bible. Who could mistake the Lord’s meaning when He teaches us that if we want to be heard by God, we have to bring to our prayers a forgiving spirit? We have to be open to forgive those who have wronged us before we can expect God to hear us and forgive us.
The Lord’s Prayer has in it a very dangerous petition -- a dangerous petition: "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." And then, as if that were not already abundantly clear, Jesus adds a verse of explanation, "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
I want you to notice a very small but very powerful word here. The word is "as" -- "as". Forgive us our sins AS we forgive. I’ve called this a dangerous petition, because if you listen and look carefully, this “as” business will really get to you. "As" means "in the same way". "As" means "in the same proportions". And so if I must pray for God to forgive me in the same way as I forgive others, then I need to look very carefully at the way I forgive, the way I treat others, don’t I? If I am going to be heard by God in the same proportions as I hear others, well, then that just might explain why sometimes it feels as though God does not hear my prayers, because some us of sure do like to nurse grudges. Some of us certainly enjoy a juicy scandal. And others of us just get all wound up in keeping score of how many times we’ve been offended or, we think, insulted.
But folks, I am convinced that the thing that keeps many of us from being spiritually powerful is that we are too good. That’s right. The thing that keeps many of us from being spiritually powerful is that we are too good, or should I say too "goody-goody". We don’t know what it is to be forgiven and we don’t know what it is to forgive.
Most of us have never gone out and stolen money; we’ve never sold drugs on the street corner; we’ve never seduced someone into an illicit relationship -- and so it seems as though we haven’t been forgiven of very much. But that can mean that we are also not very forgiving.
You see, I know church folk who think that church is for the good people -- that church is for the folks who have their act together, who are well scrubbed and well behaved, that church is for the folks who can rattle off the language of Zion and whose idea of a happy hour is 29 choruses of "Kum Bay ya" around a campfire. And we don’t have a whole lot of understanding or tolerance of those whose lives are not together.
And you and I know church folk who feel that church is for the respectable, for the successful and the middle-class, that church is a mutual admiration society for those who can demonstrate that they are worthy to be here. But folks who are that goody-goody don’t know what it is to be forgiven and thus do not know what it is to forgive.
I have to say, I identify with the prayer of the little girls who knelt down at her bedside after coming home from church and prayed, "0 Lord, please make all the bad people good and all the good people nice!"
Oh, I tell you, church is for those who are being forgiven. Church is for those who have faced their faults and have given them over to the living God. Church is for those who bring their brokenness, their pain, their failure, and lay it all out at the feet of the Master and say, "Take it away, here, take it". And the Christian who does not see that is not going to be heard by God. The Christian who does not accept into the fellowship of faith the broken-hearted, the mangled, the distorted, the hopeless -- the Christian who does not accept and forgive these is forfeiting his chance to be heard by God.
"Forgive us our sins as •• as •• in the same way •• in the same proportions •• as we forgive others"
A few years ago, when I was chairman of the Missions Committee in a nearby church, we were approached by a group called Prison Fellowship and we were asked to provide hospitality and a meal for a group of federal prisoners. These prisoners were being led in Christian discipleship training by the staff of Prison Fellowship. Some of you will recognize that organization as the one led by Charles Colson, of Watergate fame.
Well, there was a lot of apprehension in the church as we prepared to do this. What would these people be like? What would they look like? Would they have balls and chains? Numbers across their chests? And what do you say to a prisoner? "What are you in for?" "How long until you get out?" "What’ s new in the license plate game?" But we did our best to calm our fears; we prepared the meal; and when the prisoners came, we mingled with them, ate with them, talked with them. And when it was allover, one of our committee members said, "Wow! I can’t believe it! They’re just like we are! I can’t see any difference between them and us •• except maybe that they love the Lord even more than we do".
Well, yes, that’s it, exactly. Of course they do. They’ve been forgiven. And they know it. And likely have had to a lot of forgiving too. Maybe, to tell the truth, when that pastor about whom I spoke at the beginning of this message asked to hear the Lord’s presence, and it was answered by a flushing sound •• maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth after all.
