Scripture Introduction
A man asked his friend, “What color are your pastor’s eyes?” He answered: “I don’t know. When he prays he closes his eyes, and when he preaches, I close mine.” That has little or nothing to do with today’s sermon; I simply liked it.
Dr. D. A. Carson, professor at Trinity Evangelical School, opened his book on Paul’s prayers by asking, “What is the most urgent need in the church of the Western world today?” (A Call to Spiritual Reformation, 11). He then noted a few of the answers being suggested.
Some say the pressing need is for sexual purity. One poll of single church members between the ages of 20 and 35 found the majority involved in illicit affairs, even though they are not married. Another study of teenagers from evangelical churches claimed that 40% engaged in premarital sex. Many pastors have ruined their ministry through moral failures. And added to these very physical examples is what Carson calls, the “Technicolor celebration of lust and violence” (12) which invades many Christian homes through various forms of media.
Others have suggested that integrity and generosity in financial matters is our pressing need. Individuals cheat on their taxes while scandals in major corporations are almost daily news. These are simply symptoms of the greed which too often governs our thoughts and grips our hearts. Both political parties pander to citizens convinced of their right to wealth, comfort, and ease. Of course, the church is not free from the love of money, which is a root of all kinds of evil. But is that our greatest need?
Maybe it is evangelism and missions. While the world comes to our door, we must admit that we have not cultivated a cross-cultural witness that brings the gospel to non-Anglo peoples. And neither are we particularly effective in evangelizing our nearer neighbors.
And even when we try, we must be concerned that the fruit of our efforts seems bitter. Less than 5% of people making a profession of faith persevere. And those who do remain committed to the church are more and more likely to think of Christianity as “something to add to their already busy lives, not something that controls, constrains, and shapes their vision and all of their goals” (Carson, 14). So maybe the problem is discipleship.
The list could continue; we have ample failures and weaknesses, each significant in its own place. But consider how Carson summarizes his review of the needs of the Western church: “But there is a sense in which these important needs are merely symptomatic of a far more serious lack. The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better. When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted…. In the Biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of the Scriptures, improved private and corporate worship, and much more.”
If Donald Carson is correct, then we should ask how we might obtain a deeper knowledge of God.
This sermon series on the Dynamic Church uses Acts 2 as a starting point. The New Testament church began by devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the Lord’s Supper and to the prayers. Today we how we might obtain a deeper knowledge of God through prayer, and we are looking at Acts 4 for an example of that in the New Testament church, as the believers unite in prayer when faced with persecution for their faith. [Read Acts 4.23-31. Pray.]
Introduction
The thought I am asking you to consider this morning falls out this way:
* The Christians in the early church were devoted to prayer and influenced their world
* The church today seems weak and flaccid
* Many outward measures suggest that we are more conformed to the world than transforming of it
* If we are not salt and light, maybe it is because we know too little of God and of true, vital, life-giving religion
* Prayer is the primary source of fellowship with God and for experiencing his power and presence in our lives. Prayer is not the whole of a dynamic relationship with God; it is, however, a most vital part.
Because of time constraints (due to membership and baptism today), I am limited to a brief exhortation on prayer. We will come back, Lord willing, to consider the specifics of Acts 4 next week. Today simply note this: Acts 4 describes the beginnings of persecution against Christians. The religious leaders and rulers of the city are “greatly annoyed” (Acts 4.2) by Peter and John and their teaching. So they arrested them and locked them away overnight (Acts 4.3). The next day, Peter and John are tried for their views. (It may seem like a little thing, but there is stupendous pressure to compromise in such situations.) The apostles give their defense, however, and the conclusion (in verses 18 and 21) is 1) an order not to again speak or teach in the name of Jesus, and 2) a threat should they refuse to comply. We are not told there what is threatened, but in the next chapter they are beaten with rods and in chapter six, one of the first deacons, Stephen, is executed by stoning. So we know the threats are real and serious.
Now hear well what happened after they were threatened — they prayed. They did not organize a protest; they did not call a committee meeting; they did not march on Rome; they did not write Caesar. They prayed. Nor is this the only time. The word “pray” and its cognates (prayer, praying, prayed, and prayers) occur 30 times in the book of Acts, more than any other book in the New Testament. So when God describes the way in which the church begins so that it flourishes, he draws special attention to Christians coming together to pray.
Dr. A. C. Dixon pastored in some of the largest and most influential Baptist churches at the beginning of the 20th century (such as the Moody Church in Chicago and Spurgeon’s Tabernacle in London). Though he was well known for his preaching and excellent oratory, he observed: “When we rely on organization, we get what organization can do; when we rely on education, we get what education can do; when we rely on eloquence, we get what eloquence can do. But when we rely on prayer, we get what God can do!”
Brothers and sisters, do we not want what God can do? Let us pray.
I wish I could speak to you today solely from my own experience of dynamic prayer. Instead, I confess my praying is weak; it is not as I would have it nor as it should be. I have, in the last weeks, been convicted afresh of the great sin of not praying. I have renewed my commitment to pray at least an hour a day for the church and the work of the kingdom. I have made a reminder sign for myself to set aside three specific times during the day to pray: as soon as I arrive in the morning, before lunch, and before afternoon tea. I am reading four or five books on prayer and I am working against to translate Matthew Henry’s great book on prayer into the ESV version of the Bible. I have times when prayer is sweet fellowship with the Spirit and times when it seems dry, barren, formal, and weak.
Here are some exhortations I have learned this month in my studies.
1. Exhortations To Those Who Do Not Pray
1) Do not claim you do not know how to pray. Prayer is simply listening and speaking with God. Just as an infant knows to cry when it is hungry, if you can hear and speak, you can pray. education is not necessary; every soul can be poured out before God. J. C. Ryle calls prayer, “The simplest act in all religion.”
2) Do not claim you lack time or place to pray. Pastor Bill Hybels well named his book, Too Busy Not Too Pray. The most influential and busiest Christians have been, unanimously, women and men of prayer. There is always time to move the hand that moves the world. Daniel ruled under the king, yet prayed three times a day.
3) Do not claim you lack a heart to pray. God gives life to the soul through prayer. Call upon the Lord, while he is near (Isaiah 55.6). Ask and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.
A day is coming when all will pray loudly and with great passion, but it will be too late. Let us seek God now, while his mercy tarries.
2. Exhortations To Those Who Would Pray
1) We must pray spiritually. There is value in learning forms of prayer and in prayers read. Yet we are always in danger of rote praying, leaving the heart out of it. Jesus warned us about honoring God with our words while our hearts remain distant. Prayer is not essentially the words spoken, but the soul communing with the living God.
2) We must pray regularly. Our age of resistance to rules and regulations makes many fearful of set times of prayer. And I would certainly not suggest a structure that governs all of us. But every person I have studied who prays well agrees with the point Donald Carson makes: “Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray.” Few people pray without setting aside time to do nothing but pray. J. C. Ryle: “Disorder is eminently one of the fruits of sin…. Just as you allot time to eating, sleeping, and business, so also allot time to prayer. Choose your own hours and seasons…. But settle it down in your minds that prayer is one of the great things of every day. Do not drive it into a corner. Do not give it the scraps, and leavings, and parings of your day. Whatever else you make a business of, make a business of prayer.”
3) We must be earnest in prayer. Elijah prayed “fervently”; and Hannah “poured out her soul before God.” Beloved, neither of those is a mumbled word to get God off our backs. J. I. Packer writes: “When we speak of prayer, we are not referring to the prim, proper, stereotyped, self-regarding formalities which sometimes pass for the real thing. The godly do not play at prayer. Their hearts are in it.” Let us labor to get our hearts in it, convinced that we will perish unless we are heard.
4) There is so much else I want to encourage you with! Let me give you, last, the one that benefits me the most: We must pray until we have prayed. This is Puritan advice and means that whenever we pray, we are likely to have feelings of cold formalism, vain duty, hollow sounds. Hit by such negative emotions, we often quit before we have prayed, rushing through this onerous duty. True prayer comes after we stick it out a while, when we “pray until we have prayed” (compare, Carson, 35 ff.).
3. Conclusion (Acts 4.31)
One reason we fail to pray is because we do not believe that God answers prayers. Well-meaning teachers remind us that prayer does not change God, it changes us. Certainly there is truth there, but not all. The Bible does not teach, “Que Sera, Sera,” “Whatever will be, will be.” Biblical prayer is answered prayer.
E. M. Bounds, The Reality of Prayer, chapter 2, correctly notes: “The clear and oft repeated language of the Bible is that prayer is to be answered by God; that God occupies the relation of a father to us, and that as Father he gives to us when we ask the things for which we ask. The best praying, therefore, is the praying that gets an answer.”
There is a great scene in part 2 of Pilgrim’s Progress, where Christiana and Mercy, must get through the narrow gate. Christiana began to knock, and she knocked and knocked again. But instead of an answer, all they heard was a dog barking at them; a great one too; and this made the women and children afraid. They stopped knocking and were greatly troubled about what to do. They dared not knock, for fear of the dog; they dared not go back, for fear of offending the gatekeeper. At last they thought of knocking again, and knocked more vehemently than they did at first. Then said the keeper of the gate, “Who is there?” So the dog quit barking, and he opened unto them.
God works through prayer; do not give up.
Leonard Ravenhill died about 15 years ago, after decades of fruitful evangelistic ministry. He noted: “The church has many organizers, but few agonizers; many who pay, but few who pray; many resters, but few wrestlers; many who are enterprising, but few who are interceding. The secret of praying is praying in secret. A worldly Christian will stop praying and a praying Christian will stop worldliness. If we are weak in prayer, we are weak everywhere. Tithes may build a church, but tears give it life. That is the difference between the modern church and the early church. In the matter of effective praying, never have so many left so much to so few. Brethren, let us pray.”
