Pray For One Another Series

A. The story is told about three men who were hiking one day and unexpectedly came upon a large, raging river.

1. They needed to get to the other side, but had no idea of how to do so.

2. The first man prayed to God, saying, “Please God, give me the strength to cross this river.”

a. Poof! God gave him big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours, after almost drowning a couple of times.

3. Seeing this, the second man prayed to God, saying, “Please God, give me the strength and the tools to cross this river.”

a. Poof! God gave him strong arms and a rowboat, and he was able to row across the river in about an hour, after almost capsizing the boat a couple of times.

4. The third man having seen how it worked out for the other two, also prayed to God saying, “Please God, give me the strength and the tools and the intelligence to cross this river.”

a. And Poof! God turned him into a woman. She asked directions from someone passing by and was told that just a couple of hundred yards up stream there is a bridge over the river.

b. The woman walked up stream, crossed the bridge and was on the other side in 15 minutes.

5. Prayer is indeed powerful, but sometimes we have to be careful about what we pray for!

B. Take a look at this Peanut cartoon…

1. Linus says: “I think I made a new theological discovery.” Lucy says: “What is it?”

a. Linus answered: “If you hold your hands upside down you get the opposite of what you pray for.”

2. Indeed, prayer is a mystery to us – we are always trying to figure it out, right?

3. I’m guessing that most of us believe in prayer, but would admit that we don’t feel like we are very good at it, or that we don’t do enough of it. Right?

4. One survey revealed that the average church member spends four minutes a day in prayer, while the average minister spends just seven minutes a day in prayer.

5. Why is that? Why don’t all of us pray more?

C. Richard Meyer wrote a book called “One Anothering,” and in his chapter on praying for one another, he gave three reasons for our lack of prayer.

1. First, he said that we don’t pray because we don’t know how to pray.

a. And that can certainly be a reason that we don’t pray as much as we might.

b. Many of us may feel like we don’t know where to begin, or we aren’t sure what to say.

c. Certainly, there is a need to learn how to pray, because it is not something that we automatically know how to do, but prayer doesn’t have to be complicated.

2. Second, he said that we don’t pray because we don’t think prayer accomplishes much.

a. I hope that this isn’t what we think, and yet many people may feel this way.

b. Some people have concluded that prayer is a nice religious thing to do because it makes us feel better, but that’s about all it does.

c. I hope that’s not what we think. I hope that we believe that prayer moves the hand of God.

d. I hope that we believe that prayer unleashes the power of God.

e. And if that is what we really believe, then shouldn’t it cause us to pray more!

3. Finally, Meyer says that we don’t pray because we have a faulty concept of God.

a. If someone views God as a demanding, wrathful, cosmic kill-joy, then they probably aren’t going to approach God in prayer very often.

b. Another wrong view of God is to picture God as a colossal vending machine, whose sole purpose is to give us whatever we want, and all we have to do is put in our “prayer quarter” and out pops what we desire.

c. People who hold that view become disappointed and angry, and they kick the machine for swallowing their “prayer quarter” when they don’t get what they asked for.

d. The right view of God is to see Him as our Heavenly Father, who is a great parent who hears all our requests but gives us what is good for us, which is not always what we want.

e. When we view God as a loving, heavenly parent, then this will have an effect on how we pray and will have an effect on our desire to pray.

4. I’d like to add two more reasons that people don’t pray to Meyer’s list.

a. Forth, I think that sometimes we don’t pray as much as we should because we are too self-reliant, too self-sufficient.