Sermon for CATM – November 1, 2009 – “Pray Like You Mean It!”
A young man went into a drugstore to buy 3 boxes of chocolate: small, medium, and large. When the pharmacist asked him about the three boxes, he said, “Well, I’m going over to a new girlfriend’s house for supper. Then we’re going out. “
If she only lets me hold her hand, then I’ll give her the small box. If she lets me kiss her on the cheek, then I’ll give her the medium box. But if she really lets me smooch seriously, I’ll give her the big box.” He made his purchase and left.
That evening as he sat down at dinner with his girlfriend’s family, he asked if he could say the prayer before the meal. He began to pray, and he prayed an earnest, intense prayer that lasted for almost five minutes.
When he finished his girlfriend said, “You never told me you were such a religious person.” He said, “And you never told me your dad was a pharmacist!”
We all have our prayer stories. Prayer figures large in the experience of most of us.
The experience tends to range from simple comfort from knowing we can pray to a God who listens, to more than the occasional miracle that we can testify to. We all have our prayer stories.
I know for a fact that even atheists have their prayer stories.
When I was 16, having been raised with a remarkable ignorance of faith, of God and of anything that you might call ‘spiritual’, I recall that I would be up in my room alone on the 3rd floor of my parents’ house late at night, with nothing resembling faith, and I would look out the window at a light in the distance.
And I would talk about life, I would talk about sorrows, I would talk about hopes for life that seemed so distant and unlikely. And when I was finished I would simply say: “I pray this to the Lord inside”.
You’ve got to understand, I had no reference for the word “Lord” I had no reference for prayer at all. And yet, this young, depressed atheist slowly found language for the cry of his heart.
And, mercifully, a few months later I met some Christians who helped me to understand prayer on the one hand, but more importantly the One to whom I could safely pour out my heart.
Now, prayer can be a struggle for many of us. Even when we understand that when we pray, we’re simply talking to God, we deal with all kinds of temptations regarding prayer. We can get it in our minds that God is here to serve us, and that we deserve to have all our wants met.
This is the Santa view of God, a view that probably is a good indicator that we need to spend more time reading our Bibles. I’ve had people say to me, “I prayed for this or I prayed for that and God didn’t answer me. How dare He!?”
It can be tough to express to people that God doesn’t exist to serve our needs, to be some kind of cosmic gift-dispenser. When our faith hinges on God obliging us, effectively obeying our prayers, our faith dangles most precariously.
I’m thankful to God for his mercy. At one point just a few years after becoming a Christ-follower, I was on the phone in my pastor’s office talking to someone who was complaining that they felt very few of their prayers ever got answered.
As I was listening to the other person talk I started to think about my own life and my prayers since becoming a believer. And I was struck with the realization that pretty nearly every prayer I had prayed in the previous two years had been answered in the affirmative.
I remember being dumbstruck and I barely participated in the rest of the conversation. It was right around then that the answers to my prayers started coming more slowly or started to be “no” or “not now” rather than “yes”. That’s probably a good thing.
So we can get messed up in our idea of what prayer is for. Or we can become directive to God, as if we know best. “God, please help Frank to get this apartment or this car or this job because I know it’s Your will”. Rather than committing people and situations to God to find the answers to according to His will and purposes, we get hyped up about what we think is right and our prayers looe power because we sit ourselves down in the driver’s seat. That, my friends, just can’t work.
Or we can make the mistake of never praying for ourselves and only for others. “God’s too busy to worry about me!” I’ve heard more than once.
We can think we’re being selfish by praying for ourselves, so we deprive ourselves of the blessing of seeing God’s answers to our prayers about our own lives, which IS WHERE we’re best able to see and understand just how He is at work in our lives.
Folks who succumb to this particular temptation regarding prayer often loose steam, and their prayers become few and far between.
Or worst of all is the temptation to give up praying, which really means giving up communicating intentionally with God.
It can mean giving up hope that God cares, that He’s just not interested in what’s going on, rightly or wrongly in the world and in our lives.
I’d like us to take a closer look at today’s passage of Scripture, because it’s an important one and it’s a quirky one. It’s in the same stream of thought as when Jesus said in the book of Matthew 7:9-10“ "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” You’ll see what I mean.
[PT] Luke 18:1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.
Often the reason for the parable or the meaning of it would follow the parable. Here at least the gospel writer Luke gives us a heads-up about the purpose of the parable. Since we’ve read this once already, do you have a sense why this parable is introduced this way?
I’m asking? [Most likely since the parable is about someone petitioning a judge, it could be easy to misread the parable, imagining that the judge represents God, when that is absolutely not the case; Luke thus informs our reading of the passage ahead of time to help us avoid making that mistake]
Of course in a very general sense this is necessary. It’s important that we don’t give up praying, it’s important that we don’t abandon this lifeline to God. The temptations we talked about earlier are very real. If we take this encourage to pray always as a general rule, it’s a very good thing.
We’ll train ourselves to go to God all the time, when times are good and when times are bad. Habits come in handy when bad things happen. When really bad things happen, if we’re not accustomed to meaningful prayer as a rule, we either won’t pray and instead we’ll be filled with worry and anxiety, or we will pray.
But our prayers will be prayers of desperation, prayers of the soldier in the foxhole staring down death, bartering for his life; not intimate communion and communication between us and our Father in heaven who we’ve learned through experience to place our whole trust in.
So the parable begins:
2 He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men.
Not to state the obvious, but again, this judge is clearly NOT God. He is rather someone lacking wisdom [Proverbs 9:10 "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.] He is also someone who does not care about humanity.
This is interesting. Even in those days, apparently, you had the problem of public officials who got to public office with serious deficits directly affecting their ability to be good at what they do. Some things never change, eh?
3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ’Grant me justice against my adversary.’ In the Message paraphrase of Scripture by Eugene Peterson, the woman says: “’My rights are being violated. Protect me!’”
Women in Jesus’ day had few legal rights and in fact depended on the men they were with for a fair shake at life. If a woman had no man to advocate for her, she was on her own and in a terribly vulnerable situation. Now this woman did not give up easily.
She knew that justice could only come from the hands of the judge. She knew that he was unwilling to give her the time of day. But she was relentless.
She was in an oppressed situation and she did not let her situation get the better of her. She pursued and pursued, haranguing the judge.
4 "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ’Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’"
So eventually the judge, this pretty contemptible fellow, motivated not by compassion, not by any understanding of who God is; motivated only by a desire to remove an irritant from his life, this judge finally commits himself to seeing that she gets justice.
The point here? Even through someone bereft of human kindness and godly wisdom petitions get answered, wrongs get righted.
6 And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" NIV
So what we have here is a major study in contrasts, with Jesus working very hard in this parable to break through a common human foible, a common human mistake: believing that God does not care about EVERYTHING that happens on this planet and believing that God does not care about EVERYONE. Including, by the way, you. That’s the first point here.
Jesus says we should always pray and not give up. The most effective prayers in the Bible are those that were prayed persistently. In Psalm 55:16-17, David wrote: “I call to God, and the Lord saves me.
“Evening, morning, and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice.” David wasn’t one of those one-a-day vitamin prayers. He was an all-day pray-er!
In the Old Testament, Hannah desperately wanted a child. For many years she prayed and prayed to have a child. After her prayer was unanswered for years she didn’t say, “Well, it must not be God’s will for me to have a child.”
She kept on praying for years, and eventually God gave her a son–Samuel, the mighty prophet.
Jesus said “Pray and don’t give up”. The Greek word translated “give up” is enkenkao. It literally means to “be filled with bad thoughts.”
So the actual contrast we have here is to pray, another way we can fill our minds with good and hopeful thoughts, or to be filled with bad thoughts. William Ward wrote this about worry: “Worry is faith in the negative, trust in the unpleasant, assurance of disaster, and belief in defeat...
Worry is a magnet that attracts negative circumstances...Worry is wasting today’s time to clutter up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.” Worry is like rocking in a rocking chair–it gives you something to do, but you never go anywhere with it.
Prayer connects us to God, it reminds us that we are meaningfully connected to the King of the universe Who holds all power. Prayer points our hearts to the source of life.
We pray that God would be part of our life; eventually we come to understand that we are part of God’s life. Prayer does not mean asking God for all kinds of things we want, it is rather the desire for God Himself, the only Giver of Life. Sadhu Sundar Singh said that.
So there we have it. God wants your prayers. Jesus wants you and me to never, ever give up praying.
He wants that vital connection between Him and you to become or to remain strong. May we heed Jesus’ words.
May we shed wrong ideas about God, and instead embrace the truth that God wants the absolute best for us, and a huge part of what is the absolute best is to be in communion with God, the communion that comes by prayer.
Let’s pray. God, thank you that You never stop listening to Your people. Thank you that Your heart is always open and Your ears are always hearing the petitions of Your people.
May we truly pray like we mean it, may we understand how open-handed You are toward us, and may we experience life abundantly because of Your grace. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
