REVIEW
FLIP CHART: SOM’S KEY VERSE, GOAL, MOTTO
“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness ….” (Mt. 6:33a).
The law sends us to Christ for justification; Christ sends us back to the law for sanctification.
FLIP CHART: Show new “Perfect Righteousness” chart explaining steps to coming to Christ (As a worm, mourning, meek, spiritual hunger/thirst with the result of legal righteousness). Explain moral righteousness, immediate moral change at conversion, gradual change through life’s challenges and speeding up moral change via CCRC (Concentration, Choice, Reflection and Confession/Thanksgiving). Repeat the verse, “By one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” (Heb. 10:14)
FLIP CHART: John Stott’s outline of SOM.
INTRODUCTION
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:5-8)
OUTLINE FOR TODAY:
1. Mystery, Paradox, Incongruities in Prayer
2. We Pray Because Jesus Prayed
3. God is Love and Yearns for a Relationship with Mankind. Prayer is the Vehicle He has Provided to Cultivate this Relationship.
4. God Chose a Partnership to Run the World and Prayer is the Means to Give us a Role in the Partnership.
“When a doctoral student at Princeton asked, “What is there left in the world for original dissertation research?” Albert Einstein replied, “Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer.” (Prayer, Yancey, 11)
“Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul … prayer is the ultimate test of a person’s true spiritual condition.” (Martin Lloyd-Jones).
“As is the business of tailors to make clothes and cobblers to mend shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray” (Martin Luther).
“The greatest tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer” (F.B. Meyer).
“Prayer is God’s idea, not man’s idea. There could be no prayer if God did not condescend to speak with us, and we could not know how to pray had He not chosen to instruct us” (MacArthur, 366)
LOGIC BEHIND PRAYER
I. MYSTERY, PARADOX, INCONGRUITIES IN PRAYER
TABLE ACTIVITY: Make a list of questions that confuse you when thinking about prayer. Choose one question from your table and write it on the transparency strip on your table.
Phil Yancey’s Questions: Is God listening? Why should God care about me? If God knows everything what is the point of prayer? Why do answers to prayer seem so inconsistent, even capricious (changeable)? Does a person with many praying friends stand a better chance of physical healing than one who also has cancer but with only a few people praying for her? Why does God sometimes seem close and sometimes faraway? Does prayer change God or change me? (Prayer, Yancey, Pg. 16).
QUESTION: What are two incongruities in the statement of Jesus, “Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him?”
Why inform God about something he already knows. Since God is all love and our Father, why ask him for something if He already knows that we need it and is able to supply it?
If a child is sick and needs medicine, why would he inform a loving father and mother of his need for medicine and then ask him to give it to him?
QUESTION: Do our prayers change God, have any influence on the way things turn out?
Some hyper-Calvinists believe that prayer is hardly necessary. God is sovereign, will do what he will and my prayers will not change Him. Some Arminians believe that everything is contingent on our prayers.
“God does nothing on earth save in answer to believing prayer.”John Wesley
“Though our most merciful Father never slumbers nor sleeps, he very often seems to do so, that thus he may exercise us, when we might otherwise be listless and slothful, in asking, entreating, and earnestly beseeching him to our great good.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion)
“Origin was the first Christian writer known to mull over the paradox of praying to a God who does not change: He wrote, ‘First, if God foreknows what will come to be and if it must happen, then prayer is in vain. Second, if everything happens according to God’s will and if what He wills is fixed and none of the things He will can be changed, then prayer is in vain.” (Prayer, Yancey, Pg. 131).
(Origen, ca. 185–ca. 254) was an early Christian scholar, theologian, and one of the most distinguished of the early fathers of the Christian Church. He is thought to have been born at Alexandria. He taught in Alexandria, reviving the Catechetical School of Alexandria where Clement had taught. The patriarch of Alexandria at first supported Origen but later expelled him for being ordained without the patriarch’s permission. He relocated to Caesarea Maritima and died there after being tortured during a persecution. His writings are important as one of the first intellectual attempts to describe Christianity.)
Immanuel Kant called it “absurd and presumptuous delusion” to think one person’s prayers could change God’s plan.
Immanuel Kant ( 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment.
II. WE PRAY BECAUSE JESUS PRAYED
No one addressed Jesus as “Father” in the Old Testament yet Jesus referred to God as Father 170 times in the NT. Some scholars suggest that Jesus basically invented private prayer. There was much prayer in the OT but most was formal.
The Gospels record a dozen specific prayers of Jesus and several parables and teachings about prayer. We have five references of Jesus separating himself from His disciples for private prayer.
ILL: After a busy day and evening healing the sick we read of Jesus rising very early the next morning, while it was still dark, leaving the house where he and his disciples were sleeping and going out to a solitary place to pray. (Mark 1:35)
He prayed often enough that it pricked his disciple’s curiosity until they asked him “Teach us to pray.”
If God’s omniscience is a deterrent to prayer, then why did Jesus pray?
Jesus was fully aware of all the mystery, incongruities and questions posed by Immanuel Kant and Origin and yet he prayed. In fact prayer was very high on his spiritual life agenda.
III. GOD IS LOVE AND HE YEARNS FOR A RELATIONSHIP WITH MANKIND. PRAYER IS THE VEHICLE HE HAS PROVIDED TO CULTIVATE THIS RELATIONSHIP.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” asked the Psalmist. An excellent question, as well as a reminder of a point of view I easily forget. We are, we humans, a mere pinch of dust scattered across the surface of a nondescript planet. At the heart of all reality is God, an unimaginable source of both power and love. In the face of such reality we can grovel in humanoid humility or we can, like the psalmist, look up instead of down, to conclude, “O Lord, how majesty is your name in all the earth!” (Prayer, Yancey, Pg. 21).
QUESTION: If God yearns for a relationship with us, between such unequal partners, what could be a better medium than prayer? Can you suggest any other way He might cultivate a relationship?
He could reveal Himself in His majesty every time but that would greatly limit our freedom. ”For this is what you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said, “Let us not hear the voice of the LORD our God nor see this great fire anymore, or we will die.” (Deut. 18:16)
*** “We humans represent the only species on earth with whom God can hold a conversation. Only we can articulate praise or lament. Only we can form words in response to a miracle, and also the tragedy, of life. We dare not devalue this unique role in the cosmos, to give words to existence, words addressed to our creator. God eagerly bends an ear toward those words.” (Prayer, Yancey, Pg. 43).
Intimacy with God was lost in the Fall: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden of the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD called to the man, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:8-9).
God’s goal is to establish that intimacy, through the reconciliation purchased on the hard wood of the cross, through regeneration and adoption as his children and through prayer. Prayer is the medium for cultivating this relationship.
“He wants to hear us, He wants to commune with us, more than we could ever want to commune with Him — because His love for us is so much greater than our love for Him.” (MacArthur, 370).
“The essence of prayer is simply talking to God as you would to a beloved friend (or Father) – without pretence or flippancy.” (John MacArthur)
ILL: If you are in love, you don’t build a relationship with your wife just by looking into her eyes. Gloria likes me to look into her eyes but if that is all I ever did and never said a word, she would start worrying about me. People you care about expect you to talk to them and not just a few sentences a year. You cultivate and deepen a relationship by constant interaction and as the years go on the relationship deepens and sometimes you can even finish each other sentences.
Prayer is the vehicle, means God has given to us to cultivate a relationship with Him. It should be a vehicle that we use every day, every hour, every moment!!!!
IV. GOD CHOSE A PARTNERSHIP TO RUN THE WORLD AND PRAYER IS THE MEANS OF GIVING US A ROLE IN THE PARTNERSHIP.
God wanted us to love Him freely and thus in the garden He gave mankind freedom knowing well that that freedom would be misused.
Of course man’s freedom has been used to oppress, kill, maim and do all sorts of evil in this world. But coerced love is not the love that God desires. He wants us to truly love Him so he chose to err on the side of freedom subjecting himself to our choices.
ILL: C.S. Lewis suggested that we best imagine the world not as a state governed by a potentate but as a play, in the process of being created. The playwright allows the characters to effect the play itself and then incorporates all their actions into the final result. The scene and general outline of the play is fixed by the author but certain minor details are left to the actors to improvise.
God governs the world which depends on human agency and choice. He chose the course in which His human partners can contribute the most. As Blaise Pascal said, “God instituted prayer in order to lend to his creatures the dignity of causality.” Prayer is one of the means God has given us to affect the governing of the world. Thus God has decided to work from inside his creation rather than acting on it from the outside.
C.S. Lewis also writes, “For He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problems, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment a sort of divine abdication ….. Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing simply of Himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because He is a giver.” (Quoted by Phillip Yancy in Prayer, Page 144).
The real problem is how does a Sovereign God work in partnership with fallen people while still respecting their free will?
ILL: The Head/Body analogy means that here on earth God has delegated to us and depends on us to do His will and work, just as our head depends on our body to carry out its commands.
And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way …. Christ is the head of the church …And He is the head of the body, the church (Eph. 1:22-23; 5:23; Col. 1:18).
We are called “God’s fellow workers” in I Cor. 3:9 and in II Cor. 5:18 we are given the “ministry of reconciliation” and “God makes His appeal through us” when we implore people to be reconciled to God (II Cor. 5:19).
Is God’s will always done on earth? No. So how do we get God to do His will? We do what he wills! And we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone – for kings and all those in authority, that me may live quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and holiness.” (I Tim. 2:1-2)
Prayer is standing beside God and caring about the things that He cares about. Frank Laubach, the founder of the modern literacy movement said, “Our prayer releases God’s power, we know not how.”
Karl Barth wrote, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against disorder in the world.”
SO WHAT???
1. Although we may have many questions about prayer the greatest reason for praying is that Jesus prayed and told us to pray.
2. Our Father yearns for an intimate relationship with us and has given us the avenue of prayer as a way to cultivate that relationship.
3. God wants us to partner with Him in governing the world. One of the means He has given us is prayer.
4. Although the main outline of history and the end of the story of the world is determined, prayer enables us to effect the twists and turns of history, and to facilitate the doing of God’s will on earth.