Getting a (Prayer) Life
Learning to Pray, prt. 5
Feb. 17, 2005
Ever tried to start a new habit? What kinds of habits do we often begin and then find we can’t keep at it? (solicit responses)
Let me give you my top seven habits I begin again and again and again but never seem to stick with, but keep beginning them because I believe they are valuable and I can’t make peace with a permanent decision NOT to do these things. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Practicing the guitar.
2. Going to bed early.
3. Writing in my journal.
4. Exercise
5. Taking a daily vitamin
6. Keeping my office clean
7. A consistent, regular time of prayer
The fact that I refuse to give up trying to establish these seven healthy habits means one thing – I do them in stops and starts, which in most cases means that whatever time I’m spending doing them ultimately isn’t coming to very much, because these are all things that need to be kept up with in order to see the most benefit.
What’s on your list? Take a minute and think about it. What are those things you know you should do, that you believe deeply are important, but for some reason cannot seem to really get any consistency with?
Do these things frustrate you? Do you find yourself taking precious minutes of your life to establish certain good habits, but deriving little benefit from it because you just don’t do it consistently? Today I want to talk to you about how this tendency many of us have affects our prayer life. Now if you’re here today and say, “What prayer life?” I hope you will not tune me out, because actually what I have to say today might apply more to those who pray infrequently than to those who pray all the time. You’ll see why as we go.
Before we really get into today’s content I want to remind you again of two things. First is that none of these lessons we learn on prayer will make any difference if we are not applying them through the experience of real prayer – so if you have not been praying consistently these past four weeks, it’s not too late to start. Make a commitment to pray so that you are hearing these messages in context and not in a vacuum. How do you know if you’re hearing these messages in a vacuum? The biggest sign is that you are probably getting sick of this series and wishing I’d talk about something else. If you’re not praying, this could be pretty dull stuff to you – like my trying to stand up here and talk about learning guitar to a bunch of people who don’t have any real intention of picking one up. That would get boring pretty quickly. But the difference between praying and playing guitar, of course, is that as fun as guitar playing is, and as meaningful as it is to me personally, Jesus didn’t tell us to do it, and certainly never took time to teach us how. However, he DID tell us to pray, and spent a great deal of time telling us, and showing us, what real prayer looks like. You can neglect playing guitar and be okay with God, but you can’t neglect prayer and be okay. So if you’re getting bored with these messages on prayer, I would simply ask you the question if you are hearing these messages in a vacuum – in other words, are you not praying?
Because it works the opposite way too. I would venture to say that if you have been willing to make prayer a priority, you have probably found these messages to be extremely interesting and challenging and substantive – perhaps on a level few series have ever reached for you. So first I want to remind you to actually be praying.
Second is I want to again remind you of an excellent book called With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. Don’t put if off and say you’re already reading too many books right now. If you’re committing to a time of prayer anyway, and committed to learning how to do it, then you are already setting time aside – why not make the most of it? You can read one lesson a day for 30 days – it will add maybe 15-20 minutes a day to your prayer time (at the most), but will teach you what you need to know in order to begin praying with power - and that’s what you’re praying for in the first place, isn’t it? And don’t say you’ll get to it later. I’ll only be preaching on this for a few more weeks. Once the sermon series is done it’ll be easy to neglect it. As hard as it may seem to some of you right now, it will only be harder two months from now. Don’t fool yourself – if you think you need to learn to pray – and most of us do – you need to join us right now.
So there again are your reminders – don’t just learn about prayer – be praying throughout this series and beyond so you’re not hearing these messages in a vacuum; and get this book With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray.
Now back to those things you know you should do, but you just can’t seem to get yourself to be consistent, yet you can’t give up the idea so you keep trying and trying and aren’t having much success. Maybe prayer has been one of those areas for you. I have struggled with that in the past, that’s for sure. This tendency we sometimes have with regard to simply not sticking to things we know we should be doing, is one that will cripple our efforts at prayer and leave us permanently ineffective.
I want to focus this morning on another of Christ’s teachings on prayer, this one from Matthew 9:9-11. In this passage Christ is specifically teaching about what we can expect from God as we pray. Let’s look at it.
Matthew 7:9-11 (NLT)
9 You parents if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead?
10 Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not!
11 If you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.
I have focused in parts of the last two messages on the assurance of God hearing and answering our prayers and that would seem to be the main point of this passage, but there’s something much more basic in it that it would be unwise for us to miss. What I want you to see here is the assumption that is made of the relationship between the asker and the giver. What assumption is made?
The assumption is that we can understand God’s heart toward us, and what our heart is to be toward God, by looking at the relationship between a parent and a child. Jesus uses this metaphor, a child asking something of a parent, to teach us something about our relationship to God. Of course Jesus always referred to God as Father, but isn’t it interesting that if you read the Old Testament and look at the incredible prayers that are prayed by people of faith there, not a single one of them ever addresses God as “Father.” If you were here for our names of God series we talked about the name Abba – a term Jesus used for God that means “Father,” but implies the dependence and affection we communicate with our word, “Daddy.” Jesus was the first to ever do this. The fact is that until Jesus came, there was no Father/Child relationship between God and individual human beings. God saw himself as the Father of the nation of Israel – that is clear in the Old Testament. But there was no personal relationship.
Then along comes Jesus with his socially unacceptable term for God – Abba – Father – Daddy. When the disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and he gave us the Lord’s Prayer as an example, how did he teach us to address God? As our FATHER. So Jesus referred to God as Father and told us that we should think of God as our Father as well.
There is a special relationship between Fathers and their children. Now understand we are talking about good fathers. Not all of you have had good fathers, and I know that, but here we are talking about the special relationship that good fathers have with their children, and vice versa. Whether you have or had a good father or not, you know many of the things that are special about that relationship.
The relationship between a good Father and his children is characterized by:
-- 1. A line of responsibility. The father’s responsibility is to love and care for the child and meet its needs. The child’s responsibility is to obey, to trust the Father, and to make its needs known to the Father.
-- 2. Affection and love. This is no formal contract where both parties are only grudgingly involved. It is an arrangement based deeply and implicitly on intense love and affection. In other words, both parties perform their duties to the other willingly, even joyfully.
-- 3. Trust. The child trusts the Father to keep its interests in mind. The Father trusts the child to be faithful and obedient.
-- 4. Communication. The Father makes his wishes known and the child obeys. The child makes his wishes known and the Father either grants them or not – but both responses are motivated only by love for the child, and the desire for the child’s well-being.
Are you seeing where I’m going with this? Jesus makes clear that we are to relate to God as a Father. We are to understand our responsibilities to him. We increasingly come to love him as we learn to trust him, and we learn to trust him as we learn to communicate with him and realize that he indeed does have our best interests in mind and he will answer our prayers as we bring them to him.
This relationship, my friends, between the child and the Father, is not merely a sentimental comparison Jesus uses so we can feel all gushy about God’s feelings for us. It is much, much more than that. It’s the hinge on the door of prayer. When a child asks a parent for something, the influence of the request comes entirely from the relationship the child has to the parent. If a child asks for a milkshake, for example, that request can only be granted if the child is close enough to the parent to receive the request. The child must be living, not only at the moment of the request but at all other times, in the home, in the love, of the parent.
See what I mean? The assurance that our requests will be granted in prayer comes from a loving relationship between us as children and God as the Father in Heaven. When we live in that relationship, and walk and live our lives in that relationship, the prayer of faith and its answer will be the natural result. So the lesson on prayer for today is that if you live as a child of God then you will be able to pray as a child, and as a child you will be heard. Remember, Jesus said we cannot enter the Kingdom at all if we do not come as children – with trust, intention and willingness to obey, and expectation that our requests will be answered.
Now we come to the crux – the part I’ve been really wanting to get at all morning. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans:
Romans 8:14 (NLT)
14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.
Yes it’s true that if we are to pray effectively, we must approach God as a child. But to be a child of God means living a life where we are led by God’s Spirit. It is those who are led by the Spirit of God who are children of God.
So we find that the childlike privilege of asking is inseparable from the childlike life under the leading of God’s Holy Spirit. As we give ourselves to be led by God’s Spirit in our daily lives, through all the moments of our days, we will find ourselves led by God in our prayers also. Why? Because Fatherlike giving is the response to childlike living. (Repeat).
[Note to SermonCentral reader: The above material about Fatherlike giving and childlike living is directly from Andrew Murray’s book, as are many of the points in this series.]
What this means for us, my friends, is that the person who only wants to know the love of the Father when he/she has something to ask will be frequently disappointed. But as we open up our lives to God’s presence, learn to submit the moments of our life to God as he gives them to us, we will find that a life lived in the infinite Fatherliness of God and continual answers to prayer are inseparable from one another.
Sometimes in the church we speak of a “prayer-life,” and when we say that we almost always mean how much time we are spending in prayer – where we are on our knees, or have set aside time specifically to bring our requests and needs to God. But this is the wrong way to think of prayer. When I say, “How’s your prayer life,” what that ought to mean is, “To what extent are you living your life in awareness and gratitude for the Fatherliness of God?” In other words there are two ways to approach God. The first is where you go through much of your day not even thinking much of God at all and your prayer time is the time you have set aside to think about him. The second is where you learn to live your life – all of it – in the awareness of God’s presence, his love, his good intentions toward you, his desire and willingness to meet your needs as you bring them to him. The first is the path to prayer that is weak and unfulfilling. The second is the path to prayer that is effective and powerful.
So it is time for us to take the next step. I began this series and have reminded you in each message to commit a certain portion of your time to pray every day. Now I want to challenge you to begin thinking of how you can bring God consciously into your world regularly throughout the day. How can you begin living in the Fatherliness of God – really allow yourself to be led by God’s Spirit?
As long as our prayer time is tacked on to the end of a busy day, God will never move to the center of our lives. As long as we approach it the way we do exercise or dieting or other habits we are trying to pick up, we will never move forward. As long as prayer is something we do in one set moment, in between living the rest of our lives pretty much the way we want to, we will never see our prayers come to make much difference. What we need to be seeking is not the magic formula that will unlock the secrets of prayer – rather we need to be seeking to live lives that are led by God’s Spirit morning, noon, and night. That requires God’s grace. And you won’t arrive tomorrow at the place where you want to be. But all you have to do right now is give God whatever you have right now. A good parent does not expect his toddler to act like his nine-year-old, but a good parent does expect his toddler to obey the things a toddler understands, and to love the way a toddler loves.
Let us pray now:
Father, we come to you because we do not know how to pray – in fact we do not know how to live – as we should. We need you to teach us how to LIVE, and as you show us that, we will learn to pray properly. Forgive us for thinking prayer is just a request line and neglecting to see that it is constant communication in a relationship of love between you and your children. Let our verbal prayers come increasingly to simply reflect what we want to be in our hearts – our desire for closeness to you. Help us get a life – a prayer life, characterized by focusing and refocusing throughout the day on all you want to do and be in our lives. In the name of Jesus we pray, because we are powerless to answer these prayers ourselves – Amen.
