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). Key verse, “By one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Heb. 10:14).
QUESTION / FLIP CHART: What are the key qualities in a good relationship? (Write those qualities on the Flip Chart.)
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:7-12)
OUTLINE FOR TODAY:
I. Why Should We Pray?
II. Why Doesn’t God Answer Every Prayer?
WHY SHOULD WE PRAY? WHY WON’T HE ANSWER?
I. WHY SHOULD WE PRAY?
A. WE PRAY BECAUSE JESUS PRAYED
No one addressed Jesus as “Father” in a personal way 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.”
B. GOD YEARNS FOR A LOVING RELATIONSHIP WITH US AND PRAYER IS THE VEHICLE HE HAS PROVIDED TO CULTIVATE THIS RELATIONSHIP.
FLIP CHART: Go back to the Flip Chart and repeat / review the qualities the class listed as keys to a good relationship.
Trust, respect, affection/love, sensitivity, time together, serving/giving, intimacy etc.
QUESTION: How does prayer contribute to any of these qualities of a good relationship?
Trust: In prayer I see God’s answers, His faithfulness in responding to my requests. He keeps His Word. He doesn’t betray me.
Love / Intimacy: I am able to communicate my love to Him through prayer.
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 re-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.
Sharing / Conversing: “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).
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’s sentences.
“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).
ILL: How often does a spouse say “Just talk to me!”
Sensitivity / Caring: He listens to my heart and my deepest concerns and I listen to Him and sense the desires of His heart too.
Gen. 6:6 says that “…his heart was filled with pain.” The KJV says in Mt. 9:36 that Jesus “…was moved with compassion.” Mt. 11:28-29 says that God is gentle, humble of heart.
Time Together: Prayer can be long stretches of time and short intervals of time throughout the day. God is Spirit and is omnipresent and the ultimate omni-multi-tasker. We can interact with him all day long .
Serving/Giving: He cares for me, meets my needs, both material and spiritual, often as an answer to prayer.
Prayer is the vehicle, the 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 to both enjoy and strengthen our relationship with him!!!!
C. GOD CHOSE A PARTNERSHIP TO RUN THE WORLD AND PRAYER IS THE MEANS TO GIVE US A ROLE IN THE PARTNERSHIP
ILL: C.S. Lewis suggests 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 scene and general outline of the play is fixed by the author but certain minor details are left to the actors to improvise. The playwright allows the characters to effect the play itself and then incorporates all their actions into the final result.
God made it so that governing the world depends on human agency and choice. He chose the course in which His human partners can contribute the most. And, 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.”
II. WHY DOESN’T GOD ANSWER EVERY PRAYER?
QUESTION: Larry asked, I think, a question something like this: If a person is a sincere believer, walking with the Lord and is praying in faith why won’t God answer his prayer?
Let’s look at four reasons why God doesn’t answer every prayer:
A. WE FAIL TO MEET ALL OF THE CONDITIONS IN ORDER TO RECEIVE AN ANSWER
There are “sweeping promises” that seem like “sure things” but we need to read all of the “sweeping promises” together including all of the pre-conditions for answered prayer.
Ask (and keep on asking) and it will be given to you; seek (and keep on seeking) and you will find; knock (knock and keep on knocking) and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened (Mt. 7:7-8).
And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father (John 14:13).
If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer (Mt. 21:22).
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you (John 15:7).
Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him (I John 3:21-22).
This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us (I John 5:14).
Synthesizing all of the promises gives us a better idea of how prayer works.
B. BECAUSE GOD IS HOLY, HE CANNOT ANSWER EVERY PRAYER
QUESTION: Is the following statement true? If so, why?
“A God that should fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of every man or every company of men would be an evil God – – that is no God, but a demon” (George McDonald in Yancey, Prayer, pg. 152.
QUESTION: What is the truth in the following statement?
“When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” (Oscar Wilde)
Many of our requests are not wise, not good for us, do not really benefit us. In fact many requests may cause us great sadness, distress and damage if answered. For example a person may be praying for wealth or power. But can he/she handle it? What kind of person would more wealth make a person?
ILL: Psychologist Steve Danish, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, has studied the impact instant wealth has on lottery winners. “The dream you have about winning may be better than the actuality of winning,” he said. “There have been families that have just — just been torn apart by this process.” Kenneth and Connie Parker were winners of a $25 million jackpot. Their 16-year marriage disintegrated just months after they became rich beyond their wildest dreams. Jeffrey Dampier, a $20 million winner, was kidnapped and murdered by his own sister-in-law. In 2002, Jack Whittaker won the largest individual payout in U.S. lottery history “I can take the money,” Whittaker said at the time, “and do a lot of good with this much money right now.” But it didn’t work out like that. Whittaker’s life was consumed by hardship, including the death of his beloved granddaughter Brandi, who was a victim of a drug overdose, and the breakup of his marriage. “If I knew what was going to transpire, honestly, I would have torn the ticket up,” said Jewell Whittaker, Jack Whittaker’s ex-wife. (Good Morning America, “The Curse of the Lottery Winners – Winning Millions Often Results in Hardships,” March 11, 2007)
How could a wise and good Father grant every request, even a request that to us seems a perfect and good request but a request, that if answered, He knows would not be best for us.
C. ANSWERING EVERY PRAYER WOULD MAKE GOD ABDICATE HIS ROLE AS RULER OF THE UNIVERSE
QUESTION: Why could answering every prayer be equivalent to abdicating responsibility for running the world?
“By answering every possible prayer, God would in effect abdicate, turning the world over to us to run.” (Prayer, Yancey, Pg. 228)
D. DELAYS IN ANSWERING OUR PRAYERS CHANGES OUR PERSPECTIVE
“If you want to see God smile, tell Him your plans.”
“Prayer may not always get what we want; but it always gets what God wants.”
“And here’s something I’ve found over the years. The more time I spend in prayer and learning about God from His Word, the more my passions start to conform to His interests and desires. Selfishness is replaced by a real desire for what He wants. And the things that matter most to Him start to matter more to me. And as my interests start to align themselves with God’s interests, the power of prayer becomes more evident and the results from my prayers increase” (David Hoke).
Initially my prayer request may be selfish but as I pray, little by little I come to see things differently. I know a person who always talked about purchasing a Lexus when he had enough money. Now he says that was wrong and he is focusing on buying a used Honda. A year after that he told me that he now realizes that his main task is to separate between wants and needs.
God’s not answering our prayers, even good prayers, is an answer to someone else’s prayer, that God may give us a correct perspective.
SO WHAT???
1. Although we may have many questions about prayer the greatest reason for praying is because 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. When we claim God’s promises it is best to claim them as a group of promises and pay attention to all of the qualifiers.
4. God, because He is love hears our prayers; God, because He is holy will not answer all or our prayers.
5. God has called us to partner with Him in governing the world. One way we participate in this partnership is by prayer. But if God granted all of our prayer requests the partnership would end. He would be abdicating His rule and letting us run the world.
6. Delayed answers to prayers are one of God’s methods of helping us get His perspective.