WHAT GOD IS LOOKING FOR IN YOUR PRAYER LIFE
ROMANS 1:7-13
Moody Crusade: Two men came up afterwards with arms around each others shoulders and laughing, ‘Mr. Moody, you won’t believe this. We have worked with one another for 13 years and we didn’t know that we were both Christians until we both showed up at your crusade’.
Moody replied, ‘That is some of the worst news I have ever heard. I don’t think either one of you is really saved if you can be together for 13 years and it not be known what your convictions are about Jesus Christ’.
That is the opposite of what Paul said about the church at Rome.
• The church in Rome not only had people who knew each other were believers but their testimony made it throughout the known world.
1:8 First I thank my God thru Jesus Christ for you all that your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world.
• Paul was hearing wonderful things about the church in Rome as people traveled from there thru the cities he was ministering in or had planted churches in. ALL ROADS LED TO ROME
• He was not hearing about their big buildings, their huge budgets, their large attendance, their bus or chariot ministries, their great preachers but Paul was hearing about their FAITH.
People may look at the church in America and say, ‘What beautiful buildings, great financial resources, creative ministries, but Paul would ask, ‘WHERE IS THE FAITH?’ ‘WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE OF TRUSTING GOD, believing His promises, standing on His Word?’
• We might ask why such faith would exist? What would bring it into the life of a church? What is next shows us how it arrived there. What would make that kind of faith a part of Holly Brook Baptist Church?
FAITH THAT COMES AS A RESULT OF PRAYER
1:9 For God, Whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you,
10 always in my prayers making request,
Every time Paul would hear about the church he would pray for them, the more he prayed the more he heard that God was at work there and the more he would pray and the more he would hear and the more he would pray and …..A VICTORIOUS CIRCLE
• What Paul says in these next few verses only gives us this clue about why the church in Rome had such a strong faith but it also shows us how Paul prayed and what God would have in our own prayer life.
• Paul had a tremendous prayer list: Hard to imagine how long it must have been, names, places, churches, people….
• For God ..is my witness as to… The first thing to realize about our prayers is that God hears them. He knows when we pray but He also knows if we don’t pray. HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT OUR PRAYER LIFE IS LIKE
WHAT IS GOD LOOKING FOR? Some obvious things that concern Him:
GOD IS CONCERNED WHETHER YOU PRAY: For God is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request….
1. Statistics tell us that the average person spends about 30 seconds a day in prayer.
How strong would your marriage be or any other relationship you have be if you only spend that
much time each day encouraging it?
a. 30 seconds is not a prayer life any more than
Try to determine how much you really pray.
• Take out the prayers of formality(open/close meeting, grace at meals)
• Take out uninitiated prayers(someone might ask you to lead in prayer)
• Take out wish list prayers: We call it prayer and we hope that God has certain things on His heart as we do on ours but to be honest we pray many self-serving prayers.
Lincoln once spoke to a young boy and said, ‘Son if a dog has four legs and a tail and you call the tail a leg then how many legs does he then have? ‘I guess he would have 5’ ‘NO, it does not matter what you call the tail, it is still a tail’.
There are lots of things we call prayer, we assume as God’s will, we tell God this is something He should really want to do and that it would be great for His kingdom but God won’t rename those things and call them prayer if they really aren’t.
PHIL 4:6-7 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Real prayer is separate from what we think prayer to be.
Notice how Paul prayed: He prayed for people, for blessing in people’s lives, and when he did pray for himself it was that he might be successful in reaching people with the gospel and that he might have power in ministry.
Judging your prayerlife by those standards then how much do your really pray?
God is concerned that we have a prayer life that is real. You may wonder why you don’t see many answers to prayer that you pray but it may be because you are not praying the prayers God is wanting to hear.
• The most accurate barometer of where you are spiritually is your prayer life. REPEAT. What is yours saying about you?
• If I gave you the assignment of reading Paul’s writings and writing down every time Paul said that he was praying for someone I think you would be amazed. How often we find Paul in prayer…asking for prayer…He was a person of prayer…..Jesus was a person of prayer…should we be anything less in our lives and in the life of our church.
They were a church of great faith because of the power of prayers on their behalf.
GOD IS CONCERNED WHETHER YOU PRAY
GOD IS CONCERNED HOW YOU PRAY: how unceasingly I make mention of you…(10) always in my prayers making request.
1. Prayer was a constant thing for Paul’s life: He was also the one who wrote for us to ‘pray
without ceasing’. Jesus spent entire nights in prayer from time to time.
It was a continuous activity that they were always prone to do because of their relationship with
God. KATIE and constant text messaging: text without ceasing
a. Cut Paul he would bleed a prayer. Kneeling must have been the most natural posture for him.
A baptist missionary was asked to come to the house of an older man. This older man shared that he had been led to the Lord thru conversation with Andrew Murray(many books in my library/deeper life emphasis)
Murray’s father had a practice of spending every Friday night fasting and praying for revival. Andrew picked up the same habit and the revival they prayed for came in his time.
This older man had once visited Murray’s home to pray about a particular issue. Murray began to kneel in a very natural way as this man said he struggled to get in position to prayer.
After a long silence….Murray said, ‘OH FATHER” Another long period of silence and Murray began to pour out his heart to God, issue after issue.
It seemed like hardly any time at all had passed when a knock came to the door and a voice said, ‘Mr. Murray, do you want your breakfast, are you going to eat this morning?’ They had spend the majority of the night in prayer and hardly noticed as the time passed by.
• How do you pray? Unceasingly? When God has your heart then prayer as natural in your spiritual life as breathing is to your physical life.
GOD IS CONCERNED WHETHER YOU PRAY GOD IS CONCERNED HOW YOU PRAY
GOD IS CONCERNED WHAT YOU PRAY. always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.
1. Paul was praying SPECIFIC PRAYERS.
God cannot gain the glory for answering your prayers if you are praying broad general prayers.
An unhealthy prayer life is one that always uses sweeping generalities when they pray.
a. God save the lost, heal the sick, bless the missionaries: God might ask, ‘WHICH ONE?’
b. What God hears is that there is nobody that is really on that person’s heart.
No specific leading from God about what or who to pray for.
PAUL PRAYED SPECIFIC PRAYERS: he told people, ‘you are on my prayer list’!
If you take the time to read through Scripture and through the biographies of people whom God used in a powerful way you will see a common threat in their lives.
THEY TOOK TIME TO LISTEN TO GOD, GET A WORD FROM HIS HEART and ACT UPON IT IN FAITH.
When GEORGE MUELLER prayed if his orphanage had a need for $2000.38 and he asked God to supply he said he would see God more in the 38 cents than the $2000. That gave God the greatest amount of glory.
Are you doing what you do out of a sense of God’s purpose arrived at by time spent with Him or are you just doing what you are doing because it seems like the right thing to do, the proper way for a Christian to live their lives or prayer their prayers.
God wants you to spend time with Him so he can speak to and challenge your heart with His will.
1. Paul was praying for success in coming to them, a prosperous journey.
a. Prosperous or successful to Paul meant achieving God’s ministry objective and not enjoying
life in the comfort zone
b. Paul did make it to Rome: attacked, arrested, jailed, slapped, years in prison, trials before
leaders, storms at sea, shipwrecked, snakebit.
Not what any of us might pray for or even call a ‘prosperous journey’ but Paul would. He
made it Rome and lives were changed all along the way. God’s Success
Hiding Place: Corrie Ten Boom tells about the time God taught her a very important lesson. She and her sister Betsy were placed in barracks in a German prison camp that was overcrowded and flea infested. The Scripture reading that morning was to rejoice always in everything. Betsy told Corrie to thank God for every detail of their imprisonment but Corrie flatly refused to thank God for the fleas. She finally succumbed and thanked God for the fleas and found out later that the reason the Guards refused to enter that barracks and interfere with their Bible studies was because of the fleas.
c. The defining factor in a successful journey is not our comfort or our wants being met but that
God is touching other lives though ours. Paul won souls all along the way.
Has God done that though your life this week, this month or even this year?
At your job, at your school?
GOD IS CONCERNED WHETHER YOU PRAY HOW YOU PRAY WHAT YOU PRAY
GOD IS CONCERNED WHY YOU PRAY (11) For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; (12) that is that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.
1. Paul was praying that he might be a benefit to others. That he might …impart some
spiritual gift….to bring encouragement….others benefit from his faith.
a. Why did you come to church today? What are you most concerned about today?
Whether somebody ministers or speaks to you somehow?
Walk out saying, ‘I didn’t like…..teaching…preaching…music…’ or are you here to touch
somebody else’s life? Have you used your spiritual gift today for the benefit of others?
Have your encouraged somebody else in their faith today?
b. Did you pray that you would be able to accomplish those things today? Paul would have.
1) Paul told Timothy to ‘stir up the gift of God which is in you’. Do you have a gift in you that
needs to get out and touch lives. Gift becoming a couch/pew potatoe? Soaking up
information but never getting the circulation moving.
Mannford: Not outlet for preaching for a time while I studied more than ever. Jog around the lake in an area where campgrounds were. Would pass an empty outdoor theater each day and finally could fight it no longer and went down and stood at the front and preached to all the empty seats the exciting things I had been learning.
2) Paul prayed that he himself might be part of the answer to his own prayers.
He saw that no apostle had gone to the church in Rome to help establish it in it’s faith.
He was sitting in the wicked city of Corinth and was compelled to go himself but until he
could he wrote what they needed to hear.
You may be ESTABLISHED: a word that might best be illustrated by our use of the word TRANSPLANTED. When you transplant anything there is always a concern that it will become healthy in it’s new setting. MOM’s TREE
THRIVE IN YOUR NEW LIFE.
Many not thriving in their Christian life because they don’t understand what it is all about.
3) A healthy Christian knows his spiritual gift and is compelled to be used by God in that
arena. They never outgrow being used by God and the gift is never put on the shelf.
c. Paul also wanted to be ministered to by their faith. He never became such a big shot that he couldn’t be ministered to be even the newest of believers. He knew God would work through them to bless him.
1) Wonderful to watch new believers learning and living out their faith with a fresh feeling of
excitement.
Like watching your kids experience for the first time things you first experienced long ago
2) Sometimes we need to be reminded by their excitement how we should not take for
granted some very important things in our spiritual life and get reignited about our walk
with God.
2. Paul prayed that his efforts might eventually bring fruit into their lives: (13) I do not
want you to be unaware brethren that often I have planned to come to you(and have been
prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest
of the Gentiles.
a. Paul had in his heart a compelling desire to see others grow in their walk with Christ and
Satan hated that and fought against it.
b. Satan does not mind our church services, our joining churches, being in Sunday School…
what he hates is to see fruit…someone beginning to look more and more like Jesus…growing
in their faith…deepening their understanding of God’s Word…becoming stronger prayer
warriors.
c. Paul knew that the hindrances would not win in the end and that ultimately God in His timing
would see Paul walking into the city of Rome.
1) Another barometer of spiritual maturity is what you do with adversity, can you trust God
through it, does it bring you closer to God or drive you farther away. Paul trusted God.
God is wanting to put people on our hearts. God is in the people business. When we commit ourselves to spending time with Him He will begin to lay on our hearts a concern for lost people, hurting people, and people who need to grow in their walk with Jesus.
Hudson Taylor: Missionary to China. Saw many come to Christ during one period of time. Many had heard the gospel message and had been newly saved. One particular older Chinese man came up to Taylor and said with joy in his heart, ‘How long have you had this wonderful news in your land?’ WELL WE HAVE HAD IT THERE FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS ‘Hundreds of years? You have had it for hundreds of years and are just now coming and sharing? My father searched for the truth all his life and died without finding it. Why did you not come sooner?
What are we waiting on? Begins with a serious prayer life…one like the prayer life of Paul.
