The Prayer of Faith
Learning to Pray, prt. 4
Wildwind Community Church
February 13, 2005
You know the messages in this series are based on things I’m learning and experiences I am having as I read through Andrew Murray’s excellent book, With Christ in the School of Prayer and do the exercises there. This week I had the strange realization that I had actually read that book once before. As I began thinking about it, I remembered when. It was about five years ago. I had found it available on the Internet, and managed to get it loaded onto my Palm Pilot. When I’d find myself sitting in line somewhere I’d pull out my Palm Pilot and read a few pages.
I had forgotten all about that until this week. And the memory, frankly, was a little bit embarrassing. See I don’t recall actually STUDYING the book – I just read it – like a novel. I must have really thought I was learning about prayer, because I know I read the whole thing – it’s just that until this week I couldn’t remember having read it at all, which shows how valuable it was for me that first time. I guess I must have believed a book on prayer could be read, ingested, and just stored away in the old memory bank. I must have thought that just getting it into my head would make a difference. So I approached this book the way Linus in the Peanuts comic strip approached studying for an exam – placing the book under his pillow and hoping the information would seep up into his head during the night without actually studying. On the other hand, I suppose at least I was curious enough about prayer to actually try to read a book about it, and perhaps that’s at least a start.
I was foolish if I believed I could really learn about prayer just by reading about it. If you will learn to pray, you will only learn it by praying. And that fact led me to realize something singularly fascinating today. See, when I ask you the question: Did you spend regular time in prayer this week, if your answer to that question is No, then I can say with confidence that you didn’t learn anything about prayer. But if your answer is yes, that is the most important thing you will be able to say all week long. If you can say “yes, I spent a few moments in serious prayer every day or nearly every day last week,” then you managed to accomplish what many people in this room, and what most people in this world, did not accomplish, and it was one of the most important ways you could have spent your time. And all you have to be able to do is say yes, because it doesn’t matter if you prayed with proper motives; or if you prayed long enough prayers; or if you felt any emotion; or who you prayed for; or what position you were in when you prayed; or whether you prayed silently or out loud, or if you claimed God’s promises with great boldness or with great timidity and lack of confidence.
It just doesn’t matter. Don’t wait to pray until your motives are right, only God knows your heart. Don’t wait to pray until your feelings get on board because even once they’re on board they’ll almost certainly jump ship within a couple of days. Don’t wait to pray until you can pray for a long time, because a bunch of short prayers actually prayed are way better than the long ones you could never motivate yourself into praying. And besides, who says the length of the prayer has anything to do with its effectiveness? Don’t wait to pray until you can get down on your knees, God is calling when he’s calling. Don’t wait to pray until you can pray out loud, because God knows what’s in your mind anyway and you might as well think about Him because only God knows some of the other nasty things bouncing around in there. At least if your head is anything like mine. Don’t wait to pray until you can pray with great boldness because you will never learn to do boldly what you could never begin to do timidly.
Don’t wait for the right time, the right place, the right attitude, the right motives, the right position, the right spirit, the right mood, the right understanding of prayer, the right surroundings, the right circumstances – don’t wait for those things to begin praying. Instead, begin to orient yourself to prayer and you’ll see that prayer makes the time right, prayer makes the place right, prayer straightens your motives out and positions you properly. Prayer is what teaches you the right spirit and puts you into the right mood. It is through praying that you gain the right understanding of prayer, and in prayer you find the strength to say, no matter what your surroundings, the same words the Apostle Paul said in Philippians:
Philippians 4:11-13 (NIV)
11 . . .I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
Where is it that faith is learned? In prayer. Where do Christians go to obedience school? In prayer. That’s where we learn to listen to God, and when we’re listening the first thing we hear him say is “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
Matthew 6:33 (NIV)
33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Last week we spent time talking about when Jesus said:
Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV)
7 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
8 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
It is through prayer that we seek God. Let me ask you something and it’s a question that will be hard for many of us to realize the answer to. If we do not learn to pray, in exactly what sense are we seeking God? If we do not learn to pray, in what sense are we asking anything? If we do not learn to pray, in what sense are we knocking on His door?
Let me ask you one more question. What’s the difference between praying for something and just wishing for it? Are you willing to consider the possibility that many Christians have learned to tell God what they wish for, but have not really learned to pray?
Let’s spend the rest of our time considering that. Everyone has wishes. Everyone wants things, from the little stuff like a dog, a new watch, or new car or TV, to the big stuff like health for ourselves and our families, world peace, stuff like that. Wishing comes out of that part of us that is imaginative and ambitious. Did you catch that? Wishing comes out of that part of us that is imaginative and ambitious. In this sense wishing itself is a spiritual thing – in the sense that imagination and ambition are uniquely human capabilities, born of our capacity to reflect on our lives – to realize the quality of how our lives are and to aspire for them to be more, as well as the ability to think up specific ways we could make these plans actually happen.
So we all make wishes, don’t we? Anytime you find yourself desiring that things could be different than they are right now, you are basically wishing. Strange to think about, really, that when it’s really cold out, squirrels don’t think, “Brr, it’s freezing out here.” They just instinctively run for shelter. They do not even have the capacity to think consciously about their current condition, much less to wish it were different than it is.
That’s what I mean when I say wishing is itself a spiritual activity in a sense. It comes from the reflective, uniquely human, spiritual side of us. But there is a great deal of difference between wishing and true prayer.
If a wish is a desire that something be different than it is, true prayer is the confidence that it will actually BE different. We think of prayer usually in terms of just asking for something – God please bring complete reconciliation to that family. But when we pray this way, we are usually doing nothing more than expressing our wish that the family be reconciled. Prayer – true prayer – combines a request or a wish with the receiving of the answer. Does that make sense? In other words, prayer is a partnership with God.
In order for us to enter into this partnership, we have to listen carefully to all that Jesus has told us about the nature of prayer. Jesus – the wise man – the great moral teacher – and, we believe, the Son of God – had a relationship with God that was defined by prayer. He taught about prayer more times than most Christians realize.
I have mentioned several times Jesus’ statement, “Everyone who asks receives, the one who seeks finds. The door will be opened to the one who knocks.” There is a certainty in this we cannot, and should not, deny. Let me ask you – do you believe when you pray that an answer is forthcoming? Do you pray with enough specificity that you could recognize an answer if it DID come?
What Jesus tell us here is spiritual fact – a certainty. In the spiritual world, Jesus says, asking leads logically and inexorably to receiving – they go hand and hand. Andrew Murray puts this in a striking way by saying that just as a child has to prove a math sum on the board or on paper in order to be correct, so the proof that we have prayed rightly is the answer to our prayer.
The answer to prayer is the proof that you have prayed correctly. Ever thought about that? I’ll tell you, until recently I had never thought about that. Instead I had spent my life making excuses for why God doesn’t come through for me when I pray, and learning little by little to ask for smaller and smaller things so that I would not be disappointed when no answer came. Do you relate to what I’m saying? Does that describe you? Or you have spent your life praying bold prayers of deep faith and seeing answers come just as certainly as two plus two equals four?
Andrew Murray writes that if we pray and no answer comes, we are not to sit down in what he calls “the sloth that calls itself resignation” and suppose it is not God’s will to give an answer. Have you spent time in “the sloth that calls itself resignation?” Do you know what that is? That means have you ever prayed for something a few times, then when your answer didn’t come, you just got lazy and assumed maybe God wasn’t going to answer, and you stopped praying. And instead of admitting that what you were really doing was doubting that God will keep his promises, you thought of your laziness in prayer as humble willingness to accept God’s silence. That is the sloth that calls itself resignation, and I’ll tell you folks, I have spent a lot of time in the sloth that calls itself resignation. The laziness that just doesn’t really believe God is going to answer – going to come through for me – and just kind of giving up – but disguising it as faith – “Well, I guess that’s just not what God wants.”
Get ready because I’m about to give you the key sentence of this whole message and I’m going to quote it to you right out of Murray’s book, because it can’t be said any better than that. If this hits you between the eyes the way it did me, you might be on your way to a whole new understanding of prayer. Ready?
"Let us not make the feeble experiences of our unbelief the measure of what our faith may expect." –Andrew Murray {repeat}
Have you done that? Have you found that because you haven’t really believed God’s promises enough to ask with the expectation that specific answers will really come to specific requests, that you have been ineffective in prayer, and that those ineffective prayers have come to set the standard for all you believe God is able to do? Let us not make the feeble experiences of our unbelief the measure of what our faith may expect.
If we tell God something we want, something we feel we need, or that someone else wants or needs, and do not have the expectation that God will not only hear but answer our prayer as surely as we have prayed it, we have not really prayed – we have only made a wish in the presence of God. Prayer is something very different from wishing.
I don’t think I have ever used a verse from the King James translation of the Bible at Wildwind before – the thees and thous make it hard to understand, but I want you to get the clearest possible picture of what I’m saying. In Mark 10 a blind man comes to Jesus to be healed and Jesus said,
Mark 10:51 (KJV)
51 And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight.
“What wilt thou.” In other words, Jesus did not say what do you WISH, but what do you WILL. Wishing and willing are very different things aren’t they?
When you wish for something, the idea is that whatever you wish for is completely beyond your power. But to will something is to simply choose to make something happen. Have you ever thought of that before? What do we mean when we speak of “will-power?” We mean the power to make something happen even when it’s difficult, don’t we? Have you ever thought of prayer as not only a way of presenting our wishes to God, but the way God has given us to lay hold of the things we want, and to be involved in actually making them happen, in bringing them to pass, by our faith? We can’t overlook this because it is key to what prayer actually is. In prayer we actively exert our will and lay hold of something we want, and through faith in God, bring that thing to pass. Does that excite you the way it does me?
Let’s look at that whole passage:
Mark 10:51-52 (KJV)
51 And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight.
52 And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.
What healed this man? Did Jesus heal him? Jesus said it was his faith that healed him. Do you think his faith could have healed him apart from the touch of Jesus? I doubt it, yet Jesus clearly says it was his faith that healed him.
Matthew 17:14-20 (NIV)
14 When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him.
15 "Lord, have mercy on my son," he said. "He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water.
16 I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him."
17 "O unbelieving and perverse generation," Jesus replied, "how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me."
18 Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed from that moment.
19 Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, "Why couldn’t we drive it out?"
20 He 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."
Could this be any clearer? Could it? Faith is the key to prayer that receives. It is through faith that you come to God, present your requests, and lay hold of the answer through your faith in his desire, his will, and his ability to answer your prayers and bring to pass whatever it is you have asked.
Lack of faith actually ties God’s hands and renders him unable to answer your prayers. Lack of faith ties God’s hands. We see in Matthew 13, Jesus in his hometown preaching to the people. But because he had grown up in that place and everybody knew him from way back, they kept going, “What’s up with Joe’s boy and that Messiah complex?” They just couldn’t accept who Jesus was and Matthew 13:58 records that:
Matthew 13:58 (NIV)
58 … he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.
Let’s make sure we really get this:
Matthew 9:22 (NIV)
22 Jesus turned and saw her. "Take heart, daughter," he said, "your faith has healed you." And the woman was healed from that moment.
Matthew 9:29 (NIV)
29 Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you";
Mark 10:52 (NIV)
52 "Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.
Luke 17:19 (NIV)
19 Then he said to him, "Rise and go; your faith has made you well."
Who is the healer here? Of course Jesus is. But how does he heal? Through the faith of the one he heals. Without the faith of the people he healed, Christ could not heal at all.
This is one of the main reasons why we can say with confidence that God usually will not respond to the prayers of those who are not seeking to follow him with their whole lives. It is hard enough for those of us who ARE seeking to follow Jesus to really have faith in him. It is next to impossible for those who are not seeking to follow Him.
Do you understand what I’m saying about the prayer of faith? Without faith – without belief that what we pray for will in fact come to pass just as we prayed it would – we are not praying, but only wishing. Wishes don’t usually come true and when they do it’s just coincidence. But real prayer, prayer offered in true faith, is always answered – always.
Now faith itself is a mystery – we don’t know how or why it works, but somehow faith is something that allows us to operate in the spiritual realm to act on this physical world. Jesus made that clear when he said to his disciples:
Matthew 18:18 (NIV)
18 "I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
See the connection?
Before we close, I want to share something incredible with you. Did you know the Greek word for “receive” is the same as the Greek word for “take”? In Luke 18 Jesus heals Blind Bartimaeus, saying,
Luke 18:42 (NASB)
42 …"Receive your sight; your faith has made you well."
In other words Jesus says, “Take it. It’s yours because of your faith.”
Earlier in Luke 18 he says:
Luke 18:17 (NASB)
17 "Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all."
So Jesus is saying what? Receive the Kingdom – TAKE IT! We’re going to be taking communion here in a few minutes, and as you come through the line to get the elements I will say to some of you, “Receive the body and blood of the Lord Jesus.” In other words, “Take it!”
My friends the prayer of faith is one not only of expressing a wish to God that he would do something, but of asking him to do it, willing and expecting him to do it, and taking the answer he is already giving. So I tell you this morning to pray – pray to God and receive – in other words – TAKE the answer from Him. That is the blessing God has given us in prayer, and Christ waits for us to receive – to TAKE – that blessing for ourselves and use it in prayer to change this world.
