Sermon: Powerful Prayer
Primary Scripture Matthew 17:14
Opening Illustration– Survey about Prayer
Focus Today: 2 Key Ingredients to powerful prayer
Passage Background:
--Jesus’ ministry winding down
--The cross is in view
--Jesus spent a lot of time teaching disciples and performing miracles (including casting out demons)
--Disciples often struggled with faith
--One more example of importance of faith
--Another demon possessed man
--Disciples failed at their attempt to cast it out
--They went into “evaluation and excuse mode” as to why they failed
--They decided to ask Jesus why they couldn’t cast him out
--Jesus replies: “It is because you have so little faith”…..
Faith is one of the primary ingredients of powerful prayer (c.f., Hebrews 11)
--Faith is the currency of God’s economy
--Discussion about the role of faith in prayer
--The faith of a mustard seed
--Story of Cornelius (Acts 10)
--Prayer of a Righteous Man (James 5.16)
Fasting is the second ingredient in Powerful Prayer
--The Power of Prayer and Fasting (see Matthew 17.21 footnote)
--Discussion about fasting
--Conclusion
--Prayer
Full Sermon:
Powerful Prayer (Chuck Gohn)
Well, good morning. So was the groundhog right, are we having an early spring or not? I don’t know. Well, not yet. Anyway, if you have your bibles, you’ll want to open them up to Matthew 17:14. And before I begin the sermon, I have a couple quick questions about prayer. First of all, how many have ever prayed a prayer? I hope most of you. I know this is a church, but everybody didn’t raise their hand. How many of you pray on a regular basis, like three, four, five, six times a week? How many of you pray for the church? How many of you have seen some real answers to prayer? Some direct answers to prayer. How many of you just don’t like to raise your hand no matter what I ask? Good, honest people. Anyways, you can tell by the screen, we are going to talk about prayer today. It is good to see that I think Bellevue Christian Church is really becoming a church that likes to pray, a praying church. When it comes to prayer, there are a lot of questions that surround prayer, really too many questions to be answered today. So today what I want to do is focus on what I would call two key elements, two key ingredients to powerful prayer. We see those elements today in this reading out of the Book of Matthew. What I’m going to do is read through that if you want to open your bibles there. A little bit of a quick refresher is that we are going through the core values: worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.
Today, we are back talking about worship. I was trying to decide where prayer fits. Prayer could, I think, fit under worship, or it could also fit under the value of discipleship. I finally decided to keep it included under the value of worship because really most of the prayer that we experience as a church happens in the context of worship, either Sunday morning or first Wednesday. Anyway, a little bit of background about this particular passage. In this passage, Jesus is at a point in his ministry where it is beginning to wind down. Where Jesus clearly has the cross, the crucifixion, in mind. If you know the Gospel stories, you know that Jesus spent a lot of time, about three years, with his core disciples, his 12 disciples. During that time, he taught the disciples. He spent time with them. They were able to see him perform miracles of giving sight to the blind and walking on water and calming the storm. They were able to see his interaction with the Jewish leaders and probably they were able to see him do some activity where he cast out demons. But even though they were with him for those three years, and Jesus was constantly teaching them things, there was one thing that they really, really struggled with the whole time that they were with Jesus. It was the concept of faith. That was really what Jesus was trying to teach them all through the Gospels. In fact, in the Gospels I believe the word faith or belief is mentioned over 200 times. So here is Jesus getting ready to depart, and what he is doing is giving them at least one more example of the importance of faith, especially when it comes to prayer. I am going to read through this passage here starting again with Matthew 17.14-20 (Scripture Passage read here.)
Jesus is on the way to the cross, and this real intense situation unfolds. A situation where you have a young man that is apparently demon-possessed. Now I don’t have time to go into whether or not demon possession is a real thing today, but even though we might not acknowledge demon possession in the United States as much as other places, it is very real in many parts of the world. Especially in Africa and the Caribbean where they are very open to the spiritual realm. Anyway, we can be certain that Jesus, during his ministry, probably talked to the disciples a little bit about the demonic. He probably taught them a little bit about how to exorcise, how to practice exorcism to remove the demons. There are other passages that speak about how the disciples went out and they were able to cast out demons. But for some particular reason, they failed in this attempt.
Now I suspect when they failed in their attempt, they might have gone into some evaluation mode. They began to think, why didn’t this work and maybe they began to question, maybe they began to doubt, maybe they began to feel a little bit anxious about the situation. They might have even become argumentative. In fact, if we look at the companion passage in Mark, we would see that they were arguing with some of the people. They may have even begun to make excuses. You know sometimes how we make excuses. Maybe they were thinking, well, this is probably not within God’s will for this demon to be cast out. Or possibly it’s the fault of the father or even the boy because they were not receptive to having the demon removed from them. Or possibly maybe they are like us and we think maybe they didn’t respond quickly enough or we failed to get it on the church prayer chain quickly enough or whatever it is.
In the midst of this evaluation, Jesus kind of cuts through the quick. He gets past all the excuses. So when they ask him, why couldn’t we cast this one out, Jesus replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Now if you have been a Christian for a while, you know that faith is one of the primary, the essential ingredients for powerful prayer. In fact, in the Book of Hebrews, I think it is about chapter 11, it says that without faith, it is impossible to please God. And I thought this was interesting that here it says with faith, nothing will be impossible for you. So faith is an essential ingredient for powerful prayer. Someone once said I heard somebody say, that faith is kind of the currency that drives God’s economy. That is a neat picture. We know that the apostles were going to need a large amount of faith because once the crucifixion and the resurrection happened, they were trying to kick start this church and they were going to face nothing but opposition for the rest of their lives. They had to have that faith. That is why Jesus was always teaching them about the importance of faith, example, after example, after example that would give them opportunities to demonstrate that they are getting this idea of faith. We know they constantly failed at the faith test.
You may be thinking about now, well surely these 12 guys who spent three years with Jesus, surely they had faith of a mustard seed. That is what it says is all you need here. But he says, no, you’ve got little faith. In other words, you’ve got faith less than a mustard seed. Surely, they probably had some faith, but the problem might have been that they had a misdirected faith. That their faith was focused on the wrong thing. Maybe they were focusing on some particular strategy or some particular technique that they learned from Jesus or possibly focusing on making sure that they used the right words. I think we all do that a little bit. We have somebody in a health crisis and we say we are putting our faith on God, but we are putting it on the doctor. Somebody is getting ready to travel somewhere and they say a little prayer and really what they are doing is putting faith in the person driving the car or the pilot or something. We are thinking about our retirement. We are thinking about the years down the road and some people put faith in the government that the government is going to take care of us for the rest of our lives. Even though those prayers or requests are couched in prayer, really prayer is kind of an afterthought. It is kind of like well, I’m going to put my faith in all these manly things, the doctors or the government or whatever, but I want to make sure that, if there is a God up there, I want to make sure that what I’ve done is covered my bases. I want to make sure that I’ve got good coverage there.
There are some people who actually put faith in using the right words. I think even that is an excuse why some people never pray because they are afraid, you know I don’t know the words to pray. We have to let the pastors and the priests and the holy ones pray because they know the right words. They have had training in this. I’ve got a confession to tell you. I really have never had a class that I know of in seminary in prayer. Like many of you, I just kind of learn as I go along. I’ve got no special technique. You just learn by doing. Even to this day, I still get nervous about standing in the public and saying a prayer. That is because my focus is not on God. It is on what do people think around me. See, God is not that concerned about the words you use. God will use the words of the smallest child to the most educated scholar out there as long as it is a prayer of faith. He doesn’t care about the man-made stuff. He doesn’t care about technique. He doesn’t care about any type of man-made thing, having the right technique, the right words, whatever. All he cares is that you have said that prayer in faith. To be honest, when you are getting ready to say your prayer or when you are praying, a certain amount of ignorance is helpful. Don’t get me wrong. What I am saying is the world focuses on things like information, data, scientific method, whatever it is that they are going to get the results that they want, but when you come into the spiritual realm, the realm of the heavens, the new realm, you might as well just throw those things out the window because they don’t work in that dimension, the dimension of faith. They don’t work in the dimension of the Kingdom.
I remember growing up one of my favorite television shows was The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling, he was an amazing guy. He was not only a good writer, but he was a theologian. You go back and watch some of those old shows, it’s always about God in there. I love that show. I remember the intro. He would say you are about to enter a new dimension, a dimension of sight and sound and of mind, a dimension of shadow, and a dimension of substance, you are about to enter the Twilight Zone. When you come before God in prayer, you are not entering a twilight zone, you are entering the God Zone. You are entering the Jesus Zone. When you are entering the Jesus Zone, you have to remove the worldly techniques. You have to remove all that stuff because you are entering into a new dimension with a new terminology with new words. Words such as spirits, words such as glory and holiness, and faith, and hope. You are entering into a dimension where there are people there that you have never met but you know they are there. Angels and demons and people from the past. You know that God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit operates in that realm. It is a realm where miracles are not the exception, they are the norm. That’s where the miracles happen. When you enter into that realm, when you prepare to enter into that realm, or put your prayers up into that realm, you might as well leave logic and reason behind. In fact, as I’ve said before, in the spiritual realm, faith always stumps reason. God is never, ever going to allow you to reason yourself into faith. Yes, our faith is reasonable, but God’s not going to let you sit down and figure it out. At some point, you have to make that leap of faith.
Again, the first essential ingredient is faith. Some may ask, well, how much faith? And again, I point out, the faith of a mustard seed. The mustard seed is a little bitty seed, I’m sure you have all seen one. But really, again, what Jesus is doing, he is using a human and earthly thing to kind of explain a spiritual thing. It’s very hard to take that and put it into some sort of a spiritual idea. We don’t know what the seed of a mustard plant looks like in the spiritual realm. We have no idea really what kind of faith he is talking about. Speaking for myself, I am blown away at the times when I kind of put up a prayer, and I think it is in faith a little bit, and all of a sudden, just like that, it’s answered. Have you ever experienced that? You say, wow. I think I prayed in faith but really didn’t have that much faith, and he answers it. We are blown away. We start thinking, well maybe I had the seed of faith there.
We are really blown away when God appears to answer the prayers of the unbelievers. We don’t like that because they don’t fit within our profile of people that God should be even talking to, let alone answer their prayers, but he does that. I was thinking of an example in the bible. I don’t have time to turn there, but you might be familiar in Acts 10 the story of Cornelius. Remember Cornelius. He was a guy in the Italian Army. He wasn’t a Jew. He wasn’t a Christian. He was what they call a Gentile, but he was also called a God fearer. Which means he didn’t have it all wired in exactly what he was supposed to believe. All he knew was that there was a God out there, and he wanted to make sure that he was talking to him and that he was serving Him. Cornelius was one who prayed to God and served the poor. Consequently, an angel shows up at his door one day and lets him know that Peter is going to meet him. What happens later on that day, the whole family is saved and baptized. It’s an awesome story of an unbeliever. And I believe that God uses the prayers of the unbeliever to draw them out of their world and into His world. To draw them out of their self-consumed focus and into the very presence of God. But having said that, I think there is something very special or very potent about the prayers of believers. About the prayers of those people who have a real vital living relationship with Jesus Christ. What I would call a born-again experience. Not perfection. People that know they are not perfect, but they have committed their lives to walking with God. To following, to loving the Creator God. To following the One who redeemed them, Jesus Christ. And allowing the power of the Holy Spirit to live with inside them that He might be able to sustain them through all the challenges of life. The apostle James has a name for this person. He calls the person a righteous man. I think it is James 5:16 says “The prayer of a righteous man (and I inserted woman there) is powerful and effective.” Powerful and effective to do what. To move those mountains. That’s what we’re talking about. Powerful and effective to be able to move those mountains that are in your life right now.
But even though you’ve got people that have this vital living relationship with Jesus Christ, that are able to offer up prayers that go into this new dimension, sometimes there is a situation where the need is so intense. Where the situation is so stubborn, like it was in this demonic kid here, that you need to have your prayers supercharged. The way you do that is by what we call the spiritual discipline of fasting. I might lose a few of you here because you’re thinking, ok Chuck, I followed you along, I read through my bible, but I never saw any mention of fasting. That’s because you’re not paying attention. If you’ve got an NIV Bible, look at verse 21 and tell me what it says. Verses 20, 21, 22. We’ve got a typo going on in the bible. What really the situation is that you aren’t paying attention. I’m kind of disappointed. The people who have been to the “How to study your Bible” class, what was the main thing you had to learn, observation. So instead of just reading through that casually, you have to look at the things that direct you to a footnote. I suspect that if you have an NIV Study Bible you might have a little “a” or something next to it and you look at the little “a” and you look at the footnote and it says “Some manuscripts say but this kind only comes out by prayer and fasting”. What is that about? Some people say is that some sort of a typo? I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but the thing here is we have to remember that the bible, contrary to popular belief, didn’t just drop out of the sky one day and land on our laps. It is based on thousands of manuscripts written over 2,000 years ago that are all relatively consistent. There are 5,000 manuscripts that are within 95% of accuracy between each other. But occasionally what happens, there is a discovery made and one of the earlier manuscripts contradicts the later manuscript. That is what is happening here. So the King James Version is actually based on a manuscript that included this phrase, which is Matthew 17:21, “However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” The King James contains that phrase but the NIV doesn’t. Why is that? It is because, again, it is based on manuscripts. When the King James was written, it was based on certain manuscripts that they found. They have found after the King James was found, they found additional manuscripts that were older. The scholars get together and they make a decision that the older manuscript, because it is closer to the original source, being the original person who wrote the gospel, they chose to use that, but to maintain the consistency of numbers, the NIV has to just skip verse 21. Did I explain that well? Good, because it’s very hard to explain.
But anyway, I don’t have a problem. I don’t use the King James a lot because it’s not based on the most reliable manuscripts. But in this situation, I think it’s proper to put it back in. I really do because when we add this back, we are not violating really a whole lot. We are not creating some sort of a new idea that is not found anywhere else in the Gospels or even the Bible. Fasting is a regular part of the Bible. Jesus practiced prayer and fasting. If we had time, we would look at Matthew 4 that talked about Jesus coming out of the Jordan after being baptized and what did he do? He went into the wilderness for 40 days to face up to Satan. What did he do for 40 days? He prayed and he fasted. He knew he was going to face intense opposition so he felt the need to fast. And really, fasting is a very common practice, which is just the idea of giving something up. It is a very common practice today, and it has been in practice for years all through history. In fact, it has even worked its way into our vocabulary. I am sure some of you have heard the word breakfast. Breakfast means break the fast. That was the first meal from the fast from the prior day. You are supposed to fast the prior day and then come and have a new meal. That is why, as a side note, I think the best time to fast is Saturday night. You know why? The first meal you get is The Lord’s Supper. There is not a better way to break a fast than sit down and have a meal with Jesus and all your brothers and sisters. Not only is it common in our language, but you see it this particular time of year. You good Catholics out there. What is this season called? Lent. And what do you do during Lent? You fast. What do you give up? Meat on Fridays. So all the Catholics are giving up their quarter-pounder on Friday, but they are replacing it with a half-pounder of cod over at the Assumption Church on Friday nights. Something is wrong with this picture. I can say that. I can pick on the Catholics because as I said I was a Catholic. I still have the birth certificate to prove it. In fact, they just notified me that I have a vote for the new pope already. I just have to show them my birth certificate. That’s a joke!
All kidding aside, there is something very potent about prayer and fasting and faith working together. Because what it does, it begins to remove you from the distractions of the world. It is like you are distancing yourself from the world, and you are trying to push yourself up toward the heavenly.
One of my favorite authors, a guy named Andrew Murray. He lived in the 1800s or whatever, but he wrote some phenomenal books on prayer. I love how he says it here. He says out of the book Believing Prayer, “Prayer is the one hand with which you grasp the invisible, fast in the other, with which we let go of and cast away the visible.” Fasting is the way that we let go of the visible and grab on to the invisible and to the heavenly. We push that prayer up there. What it is, it is a way of making sure that you are really getting full communion with God as tight as you can be. When you think about it, fasting could be food, but it could be the internet, it could be spending less time on TV, whatever it is. But think about food. Next to air and water, our closest connection to the earth is food. It’s food. It’s all lawful, but that has a grip on us. Every single day we have to rely on that food. Occasionally, it’s good to give up a meal or two or three. It is definitely going to help our spiritual life. And probably do justice for some of our physical life too. We can all miss a meal or two. It is not going to kill you. But again, when I say that, I say it is not something we have to do and it is not that food is bad. God wants us to enjoy the things of his creation, but thinking again about this, “This kind comes out only through prayer and fasting.” What he is saying is that there are situations that you prayed for days and months and years, intense situations where you feel there is no movement. There is no breakthrough whatsoever. When you decide to fast, what you are demonstrating to God is that you are serious about this situation and you will sacrifice whatever it takes for God to hear your prayer, even food. Andrew Murray again in his other book, The Believer’s School of Prayer, he says, “There may come times of intense desire when it is felt that the body and its appetites, though lawful as they might be, still hinder the spirit and its battle with the powers of darkness, and the need is felt of keeping it under.” I just love the way he says that. Food is okay, but when you have this intense desire, you’re saying, you know what, I don’t even want food to interfere with my relationship with you. I don’t want something to get away from my prayer reaching up into the heavenly realm. I am willing to give up whatever it is to see it happen. To see that prayer answered.
In conclusion, the two elements for completely powerful prayer are faith and fasting. It is pretty simple. But I also want to remind you again that I am not talking about some sort of a magical formula that says if you couple faith and fasting with your prayer that you are guaranteed a result. The problem if I was to do that, I am going back to the idea that the focus is on the wrong place. We are not to put our focus on prayer. We are not supposed to put our focus on fasting. We are not even supposed to put our focus on faith. In other words, we are not supposed to have faith in faith. We are supposed to have faith in the one behind the faith. Mark 11. Jesus clarifies this whole thing. He says “Have faith in God. 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.” I love how he uses his mountain imagery a little bit different. Before he says you can move the mountain. Here he says, you know what, I am going to rip it out of its roots and throw it in the sea, the depths, the abyss. It’s gone. It’s not moved, it’s gone forever. And I know that here, today, there are people who’ve got mountains that need to be moved. Some of them are dealing with some major financial mountains. Just can’t seem to get it past. Some people are dealing with mountains related to your children. That you’ve been praying and praying and praying for their salvation and that they would turn back from their wayward ways or whatever, and you need that mountain moved. Some of you have health crises going on in your lives. Maybe yourself or maybe a loved one. If some of you have been reading the prayer chain, I’ve got a brother right now in Florida who had a heart attack on Wednesday. He is in a medically induced coma, and I am trusting God that, you know what, he is going to come out of that. But the mountain that needs to be moved is the mountain that’s keeping him down. The mountain that wants to keep him from waking up. The mountain that is trying to prevent him from waking up not as the same person but a new man with a new heart, a new vision, a new purpose for living. Those are mountains that need to be moved.
Again, I am not saying that if you do the prayer of faith and fasting, I can guarantee that they are going to hear and it’s going be answered the way you want it. I can’t give that guarantee. But I can say that if you are willing to submit yourself, to humble yourself, not worry about what people think when you pray, get on your knees and pray, either in the church or home or wherever, and you pray that prayer in a prayer of faith, a faith that is not focused on your accomplishment, not focused on man’s ways, man’s intelligence, but faith in the God who created you, the God who redeemed you, the God who sustains you, that you might begin to see some movement. I couldn’t tell you that if you are to get on your knees and you are to pray in faith and you are to combine that with moments of fasting, food or whatever, and you are willing to demonstrate that you desire an answer to that prayer, again, I cannot guarantee that you will get your answer to prayer, but I suspect there would be some movement up in the heavenlies. I suspect that you might not even know it, and God has moved the mountain aside. All of a sudden, your eyes are open and you say, wow, this mountain was here and it’s gone. And that even possibly at some point you are going to see a miracle. You are going to see that mountain not only move, but you are going to see it stripped out of its foundation and cast in the farthest depths of the sea never to be seen again.
Let us pray. Gracious God in heaven, Lord. I thank you for this day. I thank you that you are the God who answers prayers. Lord, we are the ones with the lack of faith. Lord, speaking for myself, I know I come many times to prayer with a half-hearted faith. A faith that is directed towards the things of man. Faith that is directed towards intelligence or ability, but what it should be, as we know, it should be faith that is strictly focused on you, the one who created us, the one who redeems us, the one who sustains us. I pray for each person here, Lord, that are seeing that they just need something to happen in their lives and they maybe haven’t prayed for a while or maybe the prayers they have given are just half-hearted. But I pray that even today would be a new beginning. That people would begin to really value prayer. They would begin to come before, humble people, knowing that that is all they can do is come before you in humility with a seed of faith and as you begin to respond to that prayer because that prayer has been lifted up from the earth into the heavenlies. I thank you for those that are really committed, really want to see some action. I pray that would convict some of these people to say, you know what, I do need to give up some things. I know there are some things that are in my life that are just blocking my prayers, whether it’s food or TV or sports or internet, whatever it is. I pray that if your word is spoken to anyone here that they would consider a time of fasting, especially this time of Lent, a time of reflection that leads up to the crucifixion and ultimately to the resurrection of your son, Jesus. Lord, we thank you so much for this day. We pray all this in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
