As a courtesy, a guest preacher was asked to give the offertory. Seeking to impress his captive audience, he went on and on … and on. Finally, one man leaned over to his neighbor in the pew and said: I don’t know about you but I’d double my offering right now if he’d just shut up!”
You might be feeling that way right now. “Enough about the mission trip and the church repairs already, Pastor. I’ll double my offering if you’ll just shut up!” Well … any takers?
Sometimes it seems that the church is always after your money. Well … guess what? I’ve decided to confess … to come clean … and admit what all the skeptics have suspected all along. If you’re one of those skeptics, guess what? You’re right! The church really is after your money. That’s right. It’s true. So you might want to make sure that you get a copy of this sermon and give it all of your skeptical friends and neighbors because … as far as I know … I’m the first preacher to let this centuries old secret out of the bag. This secret has been as closely guarded as the formula to Coca Cola. When this gets out, I fully expect to be black balled all over the conference and denomination. No more calls to preach at revivals and rallies. No more invitations to speak at workshops, conferences, or conventions. Of course, I wasn’t getting those calls and invitations to begin with, so I won’t be too great a loss for me.
If you’re tired of me preaching on stewardship, I recommend that you forward this chain letter I recently received. It goes: “If you’re tired of your preacher, send a copy of this letter to seven other churches who are probably tired of their preacher. Send your preacher to the church at the bottom of the list and then add the name of your church to the bottom of the list. In 30 days you will receive 2,178 preachers. Out of those 2,178 preachers, you should be able to find one that suits you. Warning: One church broke the chain and got their old preacher back.” Just kidding. I saw this joke on the internet.
Fortunately, this is the last Sunday of our fund raise for the mission trip and our capital campaign to raise funds for the building supplies. The last Sunday I’ll “preach” on it for this year … 2018, that is … but our need for money is constant and we’ll take any size donation any time.
The sermons and the series may be over but the praying … why, that’s just begun. I hope that you’ve been praying for the mission trip and the NOMADS already. If you haven’t, then I’m asking you to start praying for these projects today.
I guarantee you that we’re not going to do this on our own strength. We need to be praying for God to lead us … to speak to our hearts … and then we need to ask God to help us be obedient to what He has put on our hearts in terms of service and in terms of giving. And then we’re going to praise God and celebrate when we reach our goal.
I have a personal goal in his campaign that is much higher and much more important than our monetary goal. My goal is to inspire a congregational revival through sacrifice and prayer. I want to increase the number of people in this congregation who spend dedicated time with the Lord each day in meaningful prayer. If you already do that … as I know some of you do … then my goal is to increase your determination, perseverance, and confidence in your prayer ministry … and it is a ministry … a very important, powerful ministry. If you don’t spend dedicated time with the Lord each then I hope and pray that you will be inspired to do so … starting today. I believe in the time proven formula for power in the church: Little prayer, little power … much prayer, much power.
Persistent prayer is not something contemporary American Christians are know for. Let me tell you, in Korea they hold prayer services every morning at 6 a.m. and these “prayer services” are attended by hundreds. The members of the Korean Presbyterian church who met in my previous church also prayed every morning, except Sunday, at 6 a.m. Anyone here want to meet me every morning for 6 a.m. prayer? See me on your way out. I don’t like 6 a.m. but I can see holding a daily 8 a.m. prayer meeting. Let’s talk.
Many, many recent studies suggest that American Christians today … even ministry leaders … do not have regular times of daily prayer. Or, if they do, they involve two, three … maybe five … minutes … hardly enough time to say much to God or hear much from Him.
The obvious questions is “why?” Why don’t we spend dedicated time with the Lord each day? Today we’re going to listen in as Jesus explains to His disciples why it is so important to persist in prayer … and then we’re going to look at what we miss out on when we don’t spend dedicated time with the Lord each day.
“Dear, God,” little Andy prays. “Uncle Jim still doesn’t have a job. Sis still doesn’t have a date for the social. Grandma is still feeling sick … and I’m getting tired of praying for this family and not getting results!”
Do you ever feel as though your prayers are being returned unopened? Does it ever feel like you’re always getting Heaven’s voice mail? Like you’re getting the run around ad you wonder if there’s anybody else up there you can speak to? Maybe you’ve been praying for something for along time … regularly … with great fervor … but no answer seems forthcoming. You know the kind of situation I mean. God hasn’t answered you request but He hasn’t exactly closed the door on it either.
Towards the end of chapter 17 in the Gospel of Luke, a group of Pharisees ask Jesus when the Kingdom of God was coming. Jesus answered them and He told them this parable about their need to “pray always and not lose heart.”
Keep praying always and don’t lose heart.
Why do Christians lose heart and fail to pray? One reason is that we allow ourselves to get too busy. “The real problem of the Christian life,” says C.S. Lewis, “comes when people do not usually look for it. It comes,” he explains, “the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals and the first job each morning consists of shoving them all back and listening to that other voice … taking that other point of view … letting that larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in … and so, all day.”
What a beautiful image, amen? Letting that larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. “We can only do it for moments,” Lewis explains, “but from those moments, the new sort of life will be spreading through our systems because we are letting Him work at the right part of us.”
Another reason Christians may lose heart and fail to pray is that prayer is slow and sometimes appears to show no results. Conditioned by our “drive thru,” Alexia voice-commanded world, we like to see results … and we like to see them now … yesterday, if possible. And when we don’t, we lose heart … maybe even give up on prayer altogether.
Few are as out-spoken and as openly hostile to Christianity as media mogul Ted Turner. According to this billionaire, “Christianity is a religion for losers.” Turner was deeply religious growing up … he even considered becoming a missionary. That is until his younger sister, Mary Jane, contracted a rare form of lupus. She suffered terribly before dying a relatively short while later. “All of my prayers ... an hour a day … came to nothing,” said Turner, so he concluded that prayer doesn’t work and that Christianity is fraud.
We may not jump to the same conclusion as Ted Turner, but many of us, if we were to get honest, can understand his frustration and doubt. We’ve all prayed prayers that seem to go unanswered. So many of us don’t invest any significant time in prayer because we don’t think prayer really makes any difference. We don’t see any reason to spend what precious little time we have on an activity that seems to have no visible or tangible results.
None of this would have shocked or surprised Jesus. He knew that there would be times when His disciples, when His followers would get discouraged and be tempted to give up and possibly go so far as to quit praying. He spoke often on the subject of persevering in prayer … encouraging His disciples … and us ... to be like the widow in this parable who never lost heart and who never gave up. We need to be as persistent with our prayers as she was with her petitions to the unjust judge.
Jesus’ use of a widow to make His point was obviously done for a reason. His choice of a widow was significant because a widow in those day most likely didn’t have the money to bribe a judge … didn’t have a husband to speak up for her … and didn’t have enough influence to pressure the judge to do what was right. She was in a helpless situation. She had no other alternatives but to keep asking the judge to help her. Persevering was not only essential to her success, but was essential to her survival.
I don’t think we will really prayer … and keep on praying … until we come to the same place as the widow did … a place of complete desperation … a place where we have no choice … no other plan … no other recourse. We need to get to that place like the patriarch Jacob did when he wrestled with God all night. When his hip was dislocated, he had no leg to stand on, no strength of his own. All of his self-reliance was gone. It was then that he held on to God and wouldn’t let go until he got the blessing. In his weakness, he knew that perserverance was essential.
Jesus emphasized this same point in a previous parable dealing with persistent prayer … the parable of “The Friend at Midnight” in Luke 11:5-8. In this parable, a man needs bread to feed a friend who showed up at his house late at night. The man’s only option that late at night was to go around knocking at his neighbors’ doors asking for help. Perserverance in knocking … in other words, perserverance in prayer … was essential for success. We also need to get to a place where we realize that we have no strength of our own … that no plan that we have will succeed unless God come through. Our perserverance comes from our understanding that our only hope depends upon God answering our prayers.
Both the widow and the man searching for bread at midnight are powerful examples of people who are determined and persistent … no matter what odds or opposition they face. And when it comes to prayer, Jesus says we should follow their example and the example of His Prophet Daniel.
Daniel was an exiled Jew in the Medo-Persian Empire. He had a daily appointment with God. In fact, he had three of them. Once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the evening Daniel would go to his upstairs room where his windows opened towards Jerusalem and bow down on his knees, praising and giving thanks to God, and then praying and asking for God’s help in his life.
Some of Daniel’s co-workers became jealous of Daniel, so they came up with a clever scheme to get rid of him. They convinced Darius, the king of the Medo-Persian Empire, to issue a decree. For the next 30 days, no one could pray to any god or man except to the king himself. The penalty for disobeying this decree was death.
When Daniel heard the decree, guess what Daniel did? He went home … went upstairs … got down on his knees in front of those windows where the neighbors could see him … and he prayed. He prayed three times that day … three times the next … and three times the day after that – they came and arrested him and threw him in the lion’s den. Even under threat of death, Daniel refused to break his prayer appointment with God.
My friends, is that the kind of attitude that characterizes your prayer life? Do you have an iron-willed determination to have a prayer appointment with God that nothing can defer you from keeping? Suppose the secret Service came up to you today and said: “We have you under 24-hour surveillance. We can even see into your house and office. If, at any time, you pray over the next 30 days, you forfeit your life.” Would that be a problem for you? Or would NOT praying even represent a break in your routine? How may of us here this morning would rather get arrested … even die … before we would go 30 days without praying to God? And how may of us here this morning could go 30 days without prayer and not even give it a second thought, hummm?
Jesus also asks us to learn an important and valuable lesson from this evil judge by reflecting on the judge’s reaction to the persistent requests of this woman … this widow. By his own admission this judge neither feared God nor respected anyone … let alone some poor widow. And yet, says Jesus, this widow … this nobody … got an uncaring and unjust judge to meet her requests because of her perserverance.
Now, Jesus is NOT comparing God to an unjust, uncaring judge … nor is He comparing us to nobodies. Rather, He is making a point by contrast. If a nobody can get a hard-hearted, uncaring, unjust judge to answer her requests through sheer determination and persistence, then how much more can we expect from God, who does care, who is just, and wants to respond to His beloved children’s persistent requests? After all, we ARE somebody in God’s eyes. We are special to God. Jesus referred to us as “God’s chosen” in verse 7 … chosen … by God. So you can expect an answer to your persistent prayer even more so than the widow could in Jesus’ parable. If persistence worked for her, then how much more likely can we expect it to work for us? What a wonderful and powerful incentive for us to keep on praying, amen? God does care and can be expected to respond to our prayers because of who He is and because of who we are by His grace.
When you understand this … when you truly take this to heart … I believe it can change your prayer life. I keep on praying because I expect God to listen and respond to my request. I don’t expect Him to listen and respond because I have great faith. I don’t expect Him to respond because I have fasted or prayed for a prescribed number of hours. I don’t expect to be heard because I’ve been exceptionally righteous or religious. I expect God to hear and respond because He is a wonderful, loving, caring God who loves me and sees me as special. I, like all Christians, am one of His chosen … so I’ll keep praying, amen?
The Lord will NOT ignore His children who “cry out to Him day and night” (v. 7). He may “appear” to be delaying His answer to our prayers but I can assure you, He is not and will not keep putting you off. According to verse 8, God will personally see that His people get justice … that their righteous requests will be met.
At this point it should be noted that the widow’s request in the parable was for what was right. God will not honor our request if it comes from wrong motives, no matter how much we persevere. C.S. Lewis explained it this way: “Prayer is a request. The essence of a request, as distinct from a demand, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant them and sometimes refuse them.” Or, as Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, so succinctly put it: “If God answered every prayer of mine, I would have married the wrong man seven times!”
When we pray … sometimes the answer is “yes” …
sometimes the answer is “no” …
and sometimes the answer is “wait.”
Jesus said that the judge was slow to respond to the widow but that God is “quick” to respond to our payers. “… will [God] delay long in helping them?” Jesus asks (v. 8). Then why does it seem like God sometimes delays answering our prayers? Let me float this idea out to you this morning. If we understand and embrace what Jesus said … that God will “quickly” answer our prayers … as truth, then I think that we all should be more excited about seeking the Lord in prayer than we have been.
The idea is this: God begins answering our prayers as soon as we pray them. As soon as we pray for a loved one who is sick … God begins to answer that prayer. As soon as we pray over our finances … God begins to answer that prayer. As soon as we pray over our job situation, our marriage, our children, our parents, our family, someone who needs to know the Lord, a temptation or sin, our church, the mission trip … as soon as we pray those prayers, that soon, that quick God begins to answer them. He answers those prayers in ways that are positive, beneficial, and in the best interest of us and the people we’re praying for. It may seem like a delay because we can’t see everything that God is doing.
One day Daniel was praying for discernment. “While I was speaking, and was praying and confessing my sin and the sins of the people of Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God on behalf of the Holy Mountain of God,” Daniel writes (Daniel 9:20). While he was speaking, while he was praying, the Angel Gabriel showed up. “While I was speaking in prayer the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice” (v. 21). “He came and said to me, ‘Daniel, I have now come out to give wisdom and understanding. At the beginning of your supplications a word went out, I have come to declare it, for you are greatly beloved’” (v. 23). At the beginning of his prayer … once he uttered a single word … Gabriel was on his way to answer Daniel’s request. A wonderful example of God answering our prayers while they are yet in our mouths.
And yet, in chapter 10, Daniel had to wait three weeks to get an answer to his prayer. Daniel had been praying and fasting for almost a month before Gabriel appears and tells him: “Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God,” Gabriel says that “your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words” (Daniel 10:12-13).
So why the delay? “But the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia opposed me twenty-one days. So Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia” (v. 13). Now, Daniel didn’t “perceive” an answer to his prayer for three weeks, but his prayer to God set the wheels in motion the moment he uttered them.
In the 12th chapter of Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth, he wrote that he had prayed … not once but three times … to have God remove a messenger of Satan that was tormenting him. Instead of taking something away, God gave him something instead. He was given the grace to bear up under the problem and he was given a better and deeper understanding of God’s power and how God works through his weakness.
When the Israelites were about to cross the Jordan River and enter into the Promised Land, God stopped up the river the instant that the priests’ feet touched the water. They crossed through the Jordan River on dry land. But what they couldn’t see was the mighty work that God was doing 15 miles upstream in the town of Adam. In Adam, says the Bible, the waters stood still, “rising in a single heap” (Joshua 3:16). None of the Israelites could see what was happening upstream, but in order for them to pass through the river God had to cut the water off somewhere else. God always works in response to prayer … but sometimes it’s “upstream.” Sometimes it’s behind the scenes. And sometimes it’s before the fact because our omniscient God sees into the future and is able to plan events and make things happen long before we ask Him to do anything. Pretty cool, eh?
I believe that when we pray, God goes to work immediately. No … we may not always get the answer we’re looking for but that’s not the point. The point is that God … who is just and all-knowing … and who loves us … does what is best for us and those we pray for because we pray. If the situation is bad, it would be worse if we had not prayed. If the situation turns out all right I can assure you, prayer had something to do with it.
No matter what, the answer to your prayers will always be a new understanding of God that we could not have received part from prayer. The answer to prayer will often be a fresh visitation of power that could not be received except through prayer. When we fail to pray, we deprive ourselves of so much. We deprive ourselves of growth, faith, power, new understanding, deeper love and fellowship with God. When we fail to pray, we deprive our families of God’s beneficial intervention in their lives. When we fail to pray, we deprive our church of opportunities to win the lost and advance the Kingdom of God.
“When the Son of Man comes,” Jesus asks, “will He find faith in the earth?” (v. 8). This question is interesting because Jesus was not talking about “faith” when He asked this question. He was talking about persevering in prayer. Why, then, would He ask this question on faith in the context of prayer? I think the answer is that persevering prayer and faith go hand in hand.
I pray and I persevere in prayer because I have absolute and total faith in God …
Faith in His existence
Faith in His power
Faith in His omniscience
I have absolute faith in His righteousness
I have absolute faith in His love for me as His chosen … His child
I have absolute faith that He wants to hear my prayers
I have absolute faith that He will answer my prayers
Otherwise … well … frankly … why pray at all?
I am going to close by telling you a little good news … and a little bad news?
Are you ready?
The good news is that God has already answered our prayers and has already supplied the funds we need to go on our mission trip …
The bad news?
It’ still in your pocket.
Let us pray.
