If someone is listening to your prayers, and they were making a judgment about your relationship with the Lord solely on your prayers, how strong of a relationship with the Lord will those who hear you pray say that you have? Will they say that it looks like you know the Lord, and that His will is important to you?
Obviously, our prayers are not the best way to make a judgment about our relationship with the Lord, but they can be pretty telling about the kind of time that we spend with the Lord and how many things that we may have in our lives that are choking the word out of us as we talked about last week.
When we are reading through scripture, we see a ton of prayers to God. Some of these prayers are amazing. There is something deep and profound about every single one of them. Their prayers just seem to be different; at times on a higher level than my own.
Why? Why does it seem that at times my communication to my Creator is inadequate?
This is the question I want to answer today. What things are going on in my life that is causing me to have the relationship with God in prayer that I need to have?
I. WE HAVEN'T REALIZED HOW IMPORTANT PRAYER IS.
How important is prayer to you? How much time do you spend prayer each day? 5-10 minutes per day? How often do you pray? Once a day? At almost every meal? The answers to these questions may show us how important we see prayer as being.
If you want to be close to a person in this life, what do you need to do? We need to spend time with them. It takes spending a lot of time with someone to be close to them. At times we can have 1-3 hour conversations with people as we are getting close, even doing it many times per week. But for some reason, we think that just talking to God about 5-10 minutes per day is enough. The hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” cannot be sung in our assemblies because we don’t know what it is like to spend an hour in prayer. How important to your spouse would you feel if they only talked to you that much per day? No relationship will be strong with lack of communication. The same is true with God. We must see our need to spend time with God in prayer many times each day, and even at times for a long period of time. We are too busy in this life not to pray.
This is how we see people in the scriptures view prayer.
1. Jesus. Prayer was important to our Lord. Prayer was so important to our Lord that He prayed at least once all night long before His choosing of the 12 (Luke 6:12). And He made sure that he spent time alone with the Father in prayer (Mt 14:23).
"But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray" - Luke 5:16 (NASB95)
At the darkest moment of his earthly existence, He spent time in prayer; in the garden before his suffering; while he was on the cross. If you knew that you were going to die tomorrow, would the first thing that you would think of doing is go to God in prayer for a long period of time?
Jesus was transfigured while he was praying. There was just something so different about our Lord’s prayer life that the disciples, men who surely grew up praying as Jews, came to Jesus and asked Him to teach them to pray.
2. The Disciples. What did prayer mean to the 1st century disciples? The Apostles in Acts 6 viewed prayer as an important thing. Widows were being overlooked. What a terrible thing. They came to the Apostles and asked them to take care of this situation, but they responded in v2, there is something more important that we have to do. In verse 4 they say “we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word!” They had something more important to do than wait tables, so they appointed others to do the work.
How would we respond if we went to a preacher in a congregation that we were a member of to tell them of a few widows that have been overlooked in being fed, and the preacher said, I can’t take care of this, I need to spend time in prayer?
Would we respond something like this: What do you mean that you need to spend time in prayer? You can pray at any time! You can pray on your way to help the widows! This is important! The Apostles said “we will devote ourselves to prayer.”
If we were in the situation of the Apostles, we would more than likely put off our time to pray till later to take care of the problem at hand. Our time with God in prayer can easily be put on hold if something comes up. We can pray double later, which hardly ever happens when we think that to ourselves.
In Acts 2:42 we are told many things that the disciples devoted themselves to:“They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
Prayer was important to 1st century Christians. Prayer just isn’t as much of a priority to us that it was to the Apostles and disciples in the NT.
Is prayer important enough to us that we would be willing to give up things important to us for a period of time to spend time with the Lord in prayer? (Food, Husband and Wife relations (1 Cor. 7))
Why did they spend all of this time in prayer? They saw their need and dependence for God!
We like to think we are independent, but nothing could be further from the truth! We need the Lord, and the scriptures make that clear. We could look at many verses in the bible to show this, but I think that they are all summed up in the fact that we are sheep in need of a shepherd.
Psalm 23 is just so loved by all. It just fills us with comfort and joy. God is the shepherd, we are the sheep. I’ve been thinking about this relationship. Have you ever thought of what this says about us as the sheep? Truthfully, that is not too complimentary! Sheep are weak and helpless. They are natural prey. They have no natural defenses. They constantly are going astray. Sometimes a sheep might fall onto its side, and start kicking and screaming because it cannot get back on its feet. It will dig its way into a bush to get one cusp of grass and then get caught there. It will start twisting and turning to get out, usually making the situation worse. It will get to the point where it is just so exhausted and collapse. Sheep are dirty, cannot clean or take care of themselves. They left to themselves would graze the same patch of land until there is nothing left. They will graze the same streams until they are contaminated and full of parasites. Left to themselves, sheep will kill themselves.
Psalm 23 is a beautiful psalm about our God and our relationship to him, but it also says something about us, we are sheep. It says something about us that few are willing to grasp and embrace and bring to ourselves. We are in need of care and guidance, and without our shepherd, there is no hope! We would left to ourselves die spiritually! We can fall into the danger of thinking we are doing good on our own, and sometimes we need God to give us that little extra nudge to make us better. But that is not what sheep are like. They are utterly dependent, and we need to be also!
We are helpless without our Shepherd!
We just cannot be powerful enough to take care of ourselves against the enemy. Satan will devour us if we think that. We are defenseless and natural prey without the Lord. We need to be honest about who we are. There is nothing that we have that was not given to us by God.
WE MUST SEE THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER IF WE ARE GOING TO BE EFFECTIVE IN OUR SERVICE TO GOD.
II. SIN
We know what sin does to our relationship with the Lord. The Lord speaking to his people in Isaiah 59:1-4:
"Behold, the LORD'S hand is not so short That it cannot save; Nor is His ear so dull
That it cannot hear. 2 But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,
And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear. 3 For your hands are defiled with blood And your fingers with iniquity; Your lips have spoken falsehood, Your tongue mutters wickedness. 4 No one sues righteously and no one pleads honestly . They trust in confusion and speak lies; They conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity" (Isaiah 59:1-4).
If we are unrepentant, unforgiving, or failing in our relationships with others, especially our families, our prayers are hindered. We need to listen to God if we want Him to listen to us!
God expects His children to be holy. He wants us to lift HOLY hands in prayer. If our hands are dirty because of sin, we should not even expect to be heard by the Lord. Our sins make a separation between us and God. There may be some here that just cannot talk to God today and be effective. If you feel like your prayers are not making it past the ceiling, your life may be why.
"You husbands in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with someone weaker, since she is a woman; and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered" (1 Peter 3:7)
If our relationships with our families are not what they should be, our prayers are affected! And I think we can make application of this verse to more than just husbands. Wives, are you fulfilling your responsibilities to your husband? Children are you fulfilling your responsibilities to your parents? Are you obeying them? If not, your prayers may be hindered.
"He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, Even his prayer is an abomination" -Prov 28:9 (NASB95)
III. WE AREN’T DEDICATED TO GOD’S WORK
My prayers have always been more effective, more fervent when I am focusing on the work of the Lord. I heard a quote that was very interesting that said “If you want to meet God in your prayer closet, you need to listen to him out of the closet. This is so true. If we have focused ourselves on doing what the Lord wants us to do, we will never run out of things that we can pray for. The many times that we see the Apostle Paul talk about prayer for the brethren or ask for prayers for himself, he was focused on the work that he was doing in sharing the gospel and on the well-being spiritually of those whom he was working with.
“and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight. 1 John 3:22 (NASB95)
If we are doing God’s will, we can be assured that God will answer our prayers. It is much more likely that we are praying according to His will because we are doing His will and not ours.
Don’t we usually talk the most to people in conversations about what is the most important to us? If God’s work is the priority that it should be for us, encouraging the brethren and sharing the gospel, we will more than likely be talking about those things when we talk to others, but most importantly, when we talk to the Lord.
I heard in a sermon a couple years back that offered another helpful point. Prayer needs to be our calendar. When there is someone that we want to help, it is always helpful to pray for them. The more that you pray for the brethren or for the lost, the more likely you will do something to help them. This will strengthen our concern for those who need the Lord and those who we need to encourage in the Lord. If we pray for others, we will be led to serve others more.
But in closing I give us all just one warning: Let’s not give the Lord lip service when we pray! Our prayers just will not be effective if they are nothing but a show for others. If we are praying to the Lord, telling Him that we love Him and that we want Him to use us in doing His will, and that we want to honor Him and Glorify Him, and be like His Son in our lives, we shouldn’t say amen at the end of the prayer and go and do nothing to show that we want to serve the Lord. We need to be careful not to lie to the Lord in our prayers. We need to love the Lord not only in words; we need to show it in our deeds!
