The Power and Purpose of Prayer: Making Prayer Your Second Language series part 1
Pastor Carlis Clinton (Community Seventh-day Adventist Church)
ESL (English as a second language) classes are for people who want to learn English as a second language. There are courses like this available all across the U.S.
I’d like you to think of our time together over the next month as a “PSL” class—prayer as a second language class. Like ESL, these are designed for people who say they’re not all that comfortable speaking the language of prayer. They don’t use it fluently and, if the truth were known, they really don’t speak it much at all.
I hope that this month as we fast and pray and study the subject of prayer that we will learn prayer as a second language.
PRAY
There is probably no question in our minds that prayer is an important part of knowing God, but it is actually also an imperative command from Scriptures, both in the OT and the NT. Look at these texts with me please:
1Ki 8:30 "And may You hear the supplication of Your servant and of Your people Israel, when they pray….
2Ch 6:26 "When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because they have sinned against You, when they pray….
1 Peter 4:7 (NKJV) But the end of all things is at hand; therefore be serious and watchful in your prayers.
Mt 6:5-9 "And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. Mt 6:6 "But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. Mt 6:7 "And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words…. Mt 6:9 "In this manner, therefore, pray: ….
Mr 11:24 "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray,…
Lu 11:2 So He said to them, "When you pray ….
Lu 22:40 When He came to the place, He said to them, "Pray ….”
Not only did Jesus tell us to pray, He also demonstrated by His example its importance.
In Mtt 14:23, Christ went alone to a mountain to pray
In Mark 1:35 He rose early in the morning and went alone to pray
Mark 6:46, again Jesus alone in prayer
In Luke 9:18, Jesus again in solitude and prayer
Over and over we find Jesus off praying by Himself. For 40 days He fasted and prayed as He began His ministry. It was the secret to His power and relationship with His Father.
Let’s look at the power and purpose of prayer.
When we look at the Scriptures and we see so many examples of answered prayer and we compare our puny prayer list, something doesn’t seem to jive.
When Joshua prayed the sun stood still! When Elijah prayed it rained down fire from heaven! When Jesus prayed, the dead rose to life! When the church prayed, an angel drug Peter from prison! When Hezekiah prayed his life was extended! When Hannah prayed God gave her a child!
Here is my favorite, Acts 4:31-- (NKJV)And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.
When the NT church prayed, God shook the whole building and they had power to witness like never before!
So it is clear from these examples that when God’s people pray, prayer gets results.
But prayer is much more than just power from God, it is the foundation of our relationship with God. Prayer is our one-on-one link with the Lord……Defined like that, it says something about the importance of prayer.
It means that if we are not praying, we are not communicating with God!
Take that one more logical step and that means if prayer is our communication link with God and we are not praying then we are not communicating with God, and if we are not communicating with God then we do not have a relationship with God since all relationships are built on communication!
There can be no relationship, whether earthly or heavenly if there is no communication. “It should therefore come as no surprise that men and women of God in every generation have been, without exception, people of prayer.” (Ministry Magazine, Dec 2003, p 14)
While it is true that no one will be saved merely because they pray, I don’t think anyone will be saved unless they pray. “When the last Bible study has been given and the last sermon preached, the fact is that it will have been through prayer [that people receive salvation]….because Jesus comes into our hearts as an answer to prayer (Luke 11:9). (Ministry, p 14.)
There are many things that we can have someone else do for us, but prayer is not one of them.
Given this important understanding of prayer; most of us can think back to a time when prayer might have been more important to us than it is now. But what usually takes place is the rush and hustle of life begins to nip away at our priorities and the “garden of prayer” that we once enjoyed has now turned into a wasteland full of weeds.
Without prayer, our spiritual life begins to deteriorate.
Let me give you [from Pastor Richard O’Ffill] Five symptoms of what happens when we begin to neglect prayer:
1) “Heartfelt prayer soon becomes only empty words and a form.”
There was a time when you prayed with spirit and passion, but now it is just an empty form. Words strung together mumbled through lips half asleep or words that are hastily spewed out in a moment of dire need, or perhaps words repetitiously pronounced to signal time to eat.
2) “The values of those who neglect it, inevitably begin to slip away from Christ toward the emptiness of the present age.”
When your prayer life begins to slip and the words become empty, gradually your values also begin to slip. You begin to go along with the secular worldview instead of holding onto the Biblical worldview. Those theories of science that contradict God’s word are not so outlandish any more. We start to slide down the slippery slope.
3) “Progressively we begin to think, feel, and talk less frequently about God and spiritual things.”
As our prayer-life diminishes, it is not that we deliberately leave Christ out of our lives and conversations; it is just a natural result of the first two symptoms of no prayer life.
4) “Private time alone with God becomes less and less frequent until at last it disappears altogether.”
We once had a living, vibrant private worship and prayer time but it becomes less and less important to our lives and even inconsistent with how we live until finally don’t even attempt it any more.
5) “Resisting sin becomes less and less important until it is resisted only when it would have the most serious consequences.”
Steps to Christ page 94- “The darkness of the evil one encloses those who neglect to pray. The whispered temptations of the enemy entice them to sin; and it is all because they do not make use of the privileges that God has given them in the divine appointment of prayer.”
When having a consistent time of communication and relationship with God, sin is something that we naturally want to avoid because we can feel the separation that it causes in the relationship, but as we have cut off the communication, the things that once were repugnant to us become attractive to us and unless we know we will get in some serious deep weeds, we just follow our inclinations.
I don’t believe that we can pray too much because we are told in 1Th 5:17 “pray without ceasing,” but prayer can become our goal; so that we can with much pride be able to stick out our spiritual chests and say that “I have a devotional life.” That has become the gold standard of the Christian life.
But if it becomes merely a goal to be able to reach and not something to transform our lives to be like Jesus, then it can become “unhitched” from the rest of our existence and looses its meaning.
Our lives can become compartmentalized. We take our life and divide it into the secular compartment and the spiritual compartment, but there is no true separation of the two.
Prayer is not meant to be the end in itself; prayer is the means to the end. It is not THE goal for which we are striving, although it should be A goal to strive for.
“Prayer is a means to an end—and that is to enable us to have a living connection with God and thus to live holy lives.” (Ministry, O’Ffill, p 16)
“Prayer is the communication foundation for my relationship to God.” (Review, Nov 30, 2000, p 8)
“But this brings us to a problem. Prayer doesn’t always work out the way we expect it to. In spite of the fact that we claim to believe in a God who is alive, a God who is there, a God who is love, we often find that He does not respond to our prayers in any way that we can measure.” (Venden, The Answer is Prayer, p 7)
“Of course, as Christians we aren’t supposed to believe in unanswered prayer, so we come up with all sorts of rationales to explain our disappointment. We say, `Sometimes God says Yes, sometimes He says No, and sometimes He says to wait awhile.’ Or we say, `The answer may not come in the way we expect.’ Sometimes we say, `God will answer Yes to prayer only when it is according to His will.’
“But in the end, many Christians find themselves just a little suspicious of the process of prayer. They’ve been burned too many times. So they continue going through the routine of `prayer,’ but their requests are so general that they can never be sure whether their prayers were answered.” (Venden, p 8)
Often we are afraid to pray too specifically, “especially in public, because we remember the times when it seemed that our prayers weren’t answered, and we remember what that did to us on the inside—what it did to our faith in a God of love. To avoid letting that happen again, we make prayer a routine, a ritual, a last resort.”
“Perhaps you heard about the two people who were discussing a friend’s crisis. The first described all the things that had been tried but hadn’t helped, and finally said, `It looks like there’s nothing left to do but pray.’
“To which the second responded, `…Has it come to that?’” (Venden, p 9)
“We smile at such stories. But we live them. We believe in prayer. Yes, go ahead. It can’t hurt anything to pray about it. But when it comes to the bottom line, we have a lot more faith in our own work then we do in God’s work for us.
“We start our children out with a stiff diet of Daniel in the lion’s den, the Hebrew worthies in the fiery furnace, and Moses crossing the Red Sea with the Egyptians hot on his trail. We put them to bed with stories of Elijah on Mount Carmel and Abraham on Mount Moriah…. But the first time their childish faith puts God to the test we cringe in fear…..
“Have you ever had car trouble, and your children in the back seat said, `Why don’t we ask Jesus to start the car?’
“Have you ever lost something important, and after hunting everywhere had your children suggest, `Let’s pray and ask Jesus to find it for us’? It puts you in a bad place, doesn’t it?
“As a Christian parent, you can’t exactly see your way clear to say, `Don’t bother praying. That surely won’t do any good!”
“Yet neither can you find an explanation that will satisfy your children (and yourself) if…the car fails to start or you don’t find the missing item.
“So you tell the children, `Maybe it wasn’t God’s will to… start the car.’ It that’s true, then maybe it would be better just to pray, `Please be with us and help us.’ That way it won’t be so noticeable if there’s no answer!
“Yet while all this is going on you find yourself begging God, `Come on, please, answer this one for the kiddies. They’re too young to…..
“To what—discover that God isn’t really what you’ve told them He is? To discover that prayer doesn’t really “work” after all?....
“Silence from God is one of our greatest problems with prayer. When we distinguish between effective prayer and ineffective prayer, we mean prayer that brings a response versus prayer that brings no response. We know that God, being omniscient and omnipresent, hears every word that we utter, in prayer or otherwise. So when we speak of His `hearing’ our prayers, we expect a response on His part. He must not only hear, but He must act because of what He hears.” (Venden, pp 9-10)
Like I reminded you earlier, prayer is our communication link with God. When you communicate with someone you expect a response, so it is natural for us to expect Him to respond to our prayers.
So what we need to discover during this month as we look at the subject of prayer is how to have effective prayer; Prayer that brings answers! Prayer that changes lives! Prayer that breaks down strongholds of Satan in our life and the lives of others! Prayer that causes the heavens to shake and demons to cringe!
But why do our answers not seem to come? Especially when we read texts like these:
Mark 11:23 (NIV) “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.
Luke 17:6 (NIV) He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.
We probably haven’t moved any mountains or mulberry trees lately so we struggle to understand what it means to have our prayers answered.
The Bible gives some different kinds of examples: In 2 Samuel 12:16, David pled with God that He would spare the baby born to he and Bathsheba, but the baby died.
In 2 Corinthians 12:7, 8, Paul asked God to remove his “thorn in the flesh,” but it didn’t happen.
In Matthew 26:39, Jesus Himself asked the Father to have the cup of sorrow and death pass from Him, but He ended up on the cross.
So certainly there was more to prayer for David, Paul and Jesus than just getting the answer that you want. There has to be a deeper meaning to prayer.
The real core issue here is not what I think about prayer, but what I think about God.
Remember prayer is our communication link with God. It is the way in which we build our relationship with the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth!
Prayer is not an exercise of convincing God to do something; it is a process of establishing and maintaining my friendship with God. It establishes my identity as a creature that is daily learning dependence on my Father, my Creator.
Ultimately, our picture of God determines our picture of prayer.
Back in the days of the OT the gods of the people “were supposed to make it easy on their followers. The rain god brought rain; the fertility god brought children; the green thumb god brought good crops; the war god brought victory in battle—a god for every need.”
“Gods who could do the most for you were chosen. And if the god was not working for you, then you changed gods or stopped praying. In the neighboring tribe had better crops, their god was better. If they got more rain, their god was better. If they were triumphant in battle, their god was better. You wouldn’t think of serving a god that couldn’t deliver you from some trouble or deliver you to some joy. The purpose of the gods was to smooth the path for human beings.” (Review, July 2003, Beitz, p 32)
If our picture of God is like this today, it messes up our picture of what prayer is to be.
“If our god is called on like Santa Claus at Christmas to fork over the rewards, if our god is there to make sure it doesn’t rain when we have our picnic planned, if our god is prayed to to …avoid a car accident, or it our god waits genie-like in the bottle of prayer to fulfill our wishes, then we have the same” picture of prayer and of God as the OT heathens did! (Beitz, p 32)
With all that said, I am not interested in “getting to the place where I see prayer as an exercise in futility” trying to get God to budge on something that He has made His mind up about, and neither “am I interested in seeing prayer as access to the divine credit card, getting whatever I want whenever I want it.” (Beitz, p 32)
Prayer is about trusting God completely. Knowing that He has the power to do absolutely anything in this world that He desires to do, but at the same time trusting that He has the wisdom to do what is best for His children.
That is why when faced with the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego could say with confidence, (*) Daniel 3:16-18 (NIV) …“O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
Their image of who God was was entirely different from the way gods were viewed back then. But their understanding of God forged their understanding of prayer and of how God responds to His children.
Ultimately, prayer is the hold that we have on God! Some of us have a strong hold and some of us have no hold at all or a very feeble one.
And in the end, prayer is our life line. Prayer is to the “soul” what breathing is to the body; you just can’t live without it.
Has prayer become just a way to end a meeting or to start a meal for you? Is it just a way to tuck the kids in bed?
As Christ hung from the cross, he uttered seven sayings, one was a heart-rending cry of anguish to His Father, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Christ was so separated from God by our sins that He did not even feel His presence with Him at that point, but even so, the last words that Jesus spoke were a prayer of trust, “Father into Your hands I commit My Spirit.”
Christ understood the power and the purpose of prayer.
It is not always about understanding the way things are working out in the present, but it is about trusting in the Father for the future.
PRAY
