Sermon Central
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We Don't Know How To Pray
Contributed by W Pittendreigh on Nov 28, 2017 (message contributor)
Summary: First in a series on prayer.
SUN is "with."
"With agony."
"Agonize with me in prayer."
What is missing from our prayers is emotional commitment, passion, feeling -- or as Paul’s case had it, "agony."
If we sit comfortably on our pew and pray with a shallowness, then Paul is right.
We don’t know how to pray.
If I sit at my fat table and pray for starving children and then have to get up from the feast and loosen my belt a notch, that is not prayer.
You know what real prayer is?
Real prayer is when my prayer begins to feel the pain of the growling stomach. To cry at the death of the nameless children, to be heartbroken at the bleakness of the future of those who live in lands we will never visit, who will die a starvation we do not know, but feel empathy for.
I stand in my freedom, living in a land of constitutional rights and I briefly pays to
pray, "Lord, remember the oppressed." Is THAT real prayer? No. Real prayer is the banging of bloody knuckles against the locked doors of a prison cell. SUN AGONIZO.
Pray with me. Agonize with me in prayer.
We stand in church and pray, "Lord, help us to grow in number." That is not real prayer.
Real prayer comes when you’re standing at your kitchen window and you look out and see your next door neighbor, and you know that he has never been to church. You know that he does not know the Gospel. You know that he lives life in darkness. And you begin to pray. Fervently, passionately and with great agony, begging God to let the church grow and to receive that one soul into its number.
SUN AGONIZO, praying fervently, agonizing and wrestling in prayer.
Paul said, "We don’t know how to pray."
Why did he say that?
The only reason I can think of is because it is true.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought to. We pray with a shallowness. We
need to pray more fervently, with greater passion and feeling. We need to agonize over
and wrestle with the things we pray about.
Copyright 2005, Dr. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved.
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