to have with us one of the missionaries that our church has supported for I don't know
how many years. Miss Payne maybe you could tell me how many years. Since 1961, so that's
about 20 years if my mathematics is correct. Her father was a pastor of Emmanuel Church
and when was that period of time? We're delighted that you're here visiting Zelsworth and we
hope that you have a good stay. We welcome you to Johnson's our missionaries to South
America. We're also here this morning service. I saw him during the middle of the sermon
but it's too late to introduce him at that point. But we're delighted with their popping
in and out occasionally so you have a chance to greet them I hope. Tonight we're going
to talk about the subject of prayer as we continue our series on basic training for
believers. Did you try to look me to Mark chapter 1 verse 35 to what I think is one
of the most humbling verses in all of the gospels. Mark chapter 1 verse 35. It says
and in the morning rising up a great frown before day Jesus went out and departed into
a solitary place and there prayed. That verse speaks volumes to me concerning the matter
that's before us tonight. Prayer. Here we have God the Son getting up a long while before
the sun even rose going out by himself to a lonely place and there praying to the Father.
And I want you to notice the context of the verse because it comes after one of the busiest
days that Mark records in his gospel. Jesus had been busy the day before healing and casting
out demons. In fact it says in verse 32 that the night before even after the sun had set
that they brought people to him who were diseased and possessed. And it says the whole city
was gathered at the door there. Peter's mother-in-law's home. And Jesus worked late into the night
in his ministry. And then it says after that exhausting day he got up early the next morning
and went out to a solitary place and prayed. This is but one of the occasions recorded
in the Word of God when Jesus took time to be by himself in prayer. We recall that before
he chose his disciples he spent a whole night in prayer asking God for direction unbattling
in those important choices of which men should walk with him and know his discipleship. Prayer
is important to the Lord Jesus Christ and dear beloved brother and sister in Christ
how can we therefore take it casually or carelessly as we so often do. Whenever I speak about
prayer I feel humbled and I feel almost unworthy to talk about it because I don't feel that
I pray enough. I think all of us share some of those emotions. A dear friend of mine who
went to be with Christ just a year ago in July. After being in the ministry over 40
years said to me you know I've done a lot in my ministry and he had. He had pastored
a number of churches he had preached in this country and in foreign countries. He was a
student of the Word of God he had an IQ that was probably double mine. In his early years
when his eyes were good he read 5,000 pages a week of books. In his latter years when
his eyes were bad he dropped to 2,000 pages a week. He said my biggest regret in my life
is I didn't take more time to pray. Sometimes we apologize to people and we say well there's
nothing I can do for you I guess I can only pray. And we have the wrong emphasis don't
we? Because there's nothing greater that we can do for ourselves or for anybody else
than pray. And we have done nothing until we have prayed. I'd like for us to consider
prayer tonight. I hope you got an outline on the way in. If you didn't you might just
lift your hand right now and the answers can get one to you. But there are some folks
who need them if you don't mind gentlemen just coming up quickly and passing those out.
But prayer is an important part of a growing Christian's life. A growing child has at least
four needs. He has a need for love, for food, for exercise, and for rest. He has a need
for love, for acceptance. Food for nourishment. Exercise for development. And rest for renewal.
It seems to me that these four needs of a growing child parallel what we as God's children
need as we grow. We need love. Where do we find that loving acceptance? Well hopefully
we find it within the local church where we fellowship with other people. We need food
to nourish us. Where do we find our spiritual food in the will of God? It is our milk, our
meat, our honey. It is our balanced diet of spiritual things. We need exercise for development.
It seems to me that that is a parallel to the challenges and the tests and the opportunities
that God brings to us in our work. And then we need rest. We need times for refreshment
and renewal. What provides that to us spiritually? Well it seems to me that's prayer. For it
is in prayer that we find that refreshment of the inner man that enables us to go on
and deface life's challenges. I'd like us to consider tonight some of the basic Bible
truths about prayer. Undoubtedly we will not say anything new for some of you, but hopefully
we will stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. To others of you we may say something
that will stir you to a deeper prayer life. Frankly I'm not sure we need more praying,
but I do think we need better praying. And that's what I want to talk about. What is
prayer anyway? Let me describe prayer in terms of three things. I see prayer first of all
as the expression of a child to his father. Remember with me how Jesus taught the disciples
and us to pray. How are we to begin? Part of the first two words class, our father. So
when the disciples said, Lord teach us to pray, Jesus said, this is how you should pray.
Our father. And so prayer in one essence, perhaps in its basic essence, is a child speaking
to his father. How does a child speak to his father? Well he speaks very simply. A child
speaks with trust. Twice in the gospels the apostle Paul says that God has sent his spirit
into our hearts and that his spirit teaches us to say, Abba Father. What does that word
Abba mean? Well there was a rock music group over in the Scandinavian countries that had
us serve that title. It's not talking about that. What does Abba mean? Well it comes from
an or make word. And what it really means is Bada. It's the very simplest expression of
a child as he begins to speak. One of the sweetest sounds any parent can ever hear is
that word Bada or Mama from a little child. Oh you hear all kinds of gooing and the other
little noises that are very, very important. And you write them down and remember them
in the baby book you know. I tell you when they come out with Bada especially. Or Mama
if you're a mother. That is true music to your ears. And what the apostle is saying
is that the Holy Spirit has caused us to be born into God's family and we begin by saying
Bada. Very simple expression. Someone has said that this term Bada denotes unreasoning trust.
Now that's the way a child is. A little baby. A child is not reason. Let's see this is a
man and this is a woman and they're taking care of me. So this must be father and this
must be mother. No it's not a child is it? A child knows that here are two people caring
for him and giving him love and meeting his needs. And he hears those terms from others
and he begins to pick up. This is Bada and this is Mama. It's an expression of trust.
An unreasoning trust. And that's the way that we speak to our father. We don't reason it out. We
can't see why God should listen to us or why he should answer our prayers. But he invites us to
come and so we come with that unreasoning trust. It says Bada. A very deep intimate term. And then
there's the term father. Jesus said pro our father. The Holy Spirit says Abba father within our hearts.
And that's a term that expresses an intelligent understanding of relationship.
Our prayer life begins with Bada and in some sense it never leaves that. Simple trust.
But we need to grow in our understanding of what we're doing as we pray. We are talking to our
father in heaven. And then secondly, prayer is a tool that is used by a laborer to do his work.
Turn to 2nd Corinthians chapter 1 for a moment. And notice what the apostle says to the Corinthian
believers. He mentions his experiences and how difficult a time he has been having. But then
he says in chapter 1 verse 11 of 2nd Corinthians, you also helping together by prayer for us.
We're just going to pick that clause out of the verse because that's the point I want to make.
Paul says you are helping us by your prayers. And so prayer is not only the communication of a child
to his father. The prayer is a tool, a spiritual tool, but is used by a laborer to accomplish his
work. I'll repeat what I said earlier. We can do nothing greater than pray and we have done
nothing until we have prayed. Prayer is the tool that God gives to us. When the only church was
being built and that foundation was being laid, the apostles were beginning to be overcome by all
the details of the administration of the ministry. And so he said pick out some men who can assist us.
We will give ourselves continually to the word of God and to prayer. Because you see it was the
preaching or the teaching of the word of God in prayer that was their work. Those were the tools
they were using to lay the foundation. And there was a danger that they should get bogged down in
the details of the administration of the ministry. The word of God is the brick. Prayer is the mortar.
And that's how we build the church. If you were to build a building just by tiling up bricks,
what would happen after a while? They would all fall over. They have to be cemented into place
by prayer. And folks, we can teach the word of God and we can preach it to people, but if we do
not cement the word of God into their lives by prayer and if we do not cement into our own lives
by prayer, we are just piling up bricks that eventually may lead to a collapse and a disaster
in our spiritual lives. As we take in the word of God and the bricks are put there, there needs to
be a sealing of our doctrine, the teaching into our lives by prayer. That's an important job of a
pastor, a pastor teacher in one of our small churches. Of every one of us, prayer. And then
thirdly, prayer is rust for a weary pilgrim. You know, Peter emphasizes our pilgrimage. He says,
we are strangers and pilgrims in this world. This world was not created to make us feel at home,
although we should not be surprised at times to be uncomfortable in the world.
We are pilgrims here and we need to rust. We get worried. And so Peter says as he concludes his
letter, chapter five, verse eight, casting all your, what? Your care upon him right. For he cares for
you. The word casting, that means to throw, means to throw all your anxieties upon him because it
matters to him about you. God is concerned about you as his pilgrim. And so prayer is to us a
marvelous rust of which we can be released from the pressures and the burdens and the anxieties
of our lives. That's what prayer is. Threefold answer to that. How then should we pray?
Let me give you just the general formula for prayer. Prayer is in a general sense now,
there may be some exceptions to this. Or in a general sense, prayer is to be directed to the
father, through the son and by the spirit. Each person of the Trinity has a part in our prayer
life. In the first place, our prayer is to be directed to the father. Jesus said, here's how
you pray, disciples, our father. In John chapter 15, John chapter 16, as he was getting ready to
leave and preparing them on that night when he established this Lord's table that we're about
to observe. He said, now I want you to pray to the father in my name. And so generally speaking,
our praying should be directed to the father. It's not wrong to direct our prayers to the Lord Jesus,
nor is it wrong, I believe, to direct our prayers to the Holy Spirit. But generally speaking,
our praying should be such that it is directed to the father. And then it is to be through the son.
That is, it is to be in recognition that we're coming to the father because of our relationship
to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why Jesus said, pray in my name. With the recognition that you're
coming to the father through me, through the authority that I give you. In Ephesians 2, 18,
it says that we have access to the father through the son. That word access is a marvelous word.
There was a word that was used in that day to describe the privilege that a person had to
come before a sovereign because of the rights of another. In other words, let's suppose that you
and I were to go to the city of Rome and we wanted to meet Caesar. Well, you just didn't meet Caesar.
He was up there fiddling on his roof, I guess. And if you wanted to meet Caesar, you had to have
an inside track to his throne room. If you knew somebody, maybe a senator, you could gain access
to Caesar. When you appeared before Caesar, you were there because of another person. Now that's
what we have in Jesus Christ. We can come directly to the father because we have access given to us
by Jesus Christ. According to Hebrews 10, 19, a new and living way has been opened to God whereby
we may come to the throne of grace. In the Old Testament, there was a sealing off of God's people
from his presence. There was a veil that hung in the temple and only that high priest could go into
the very presence of God once a year. And it was on the day of atonement and then with blood in a
very carefully prescribed manner. When Jesus died as God's perfect and final substitute for sins,
that veil was torn, wasn't it, from the top to the bottom, signifying something very significant.
And that is that we may come to the presence of God now through him. And then prayer is to be offered
in this world. Prayer that is offered in the energy of the flesh is not very useful. When we
now pray, it needs to be with a recognition that we need to pray in the Holy Spirit. That's what
Jude tells us, Jude verse 20. Ephesians 6, 18 says, praying therefore for all saints in the Spirit.
He's not talking about some kind of a charismatic experience. What he's talking about is being
energized by the Spirit in our inner man so that we can lift our voice to God with spiritual power.
The Spirit of the Lord within us, according to Romans chapter 8, prays through us when we don't
even have words to utter. Have you ever been to the point you didn't know what to say?
I have. There are times when I simply didn't have words to express the left foot on the inside.
The Holy Spirit then enables us sometimes to form words. Other times, he simply prays through us
and we don't utter a sound. He prays according to the will of God. And so prayer is to be to the
Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit. That's how we should pray. And then thirdly,
for that should be prayed. You listen to the average prayer meeting and what do you find?
You find people praying for the sick and praying for the unsaved. Now I'm not saying that's wrong.
We have to pray for the sick, as far as I know. And we have to pray for unsaved people.
If you look at your New Testament carefully, you'll find that there was not much praying in the New
Testament for either of those requests. And then those early days when the signs of the apostles
were still being evidenced, the apostles healed some directly. But how much prayer is there in the
New Testament for sick people? Not very much. When Timothy was sick, Paul didn't say, well Timothy,
I'm praying for you. He said, Timothy, take a little wine for the sake of your stomach.
Just take some medicine, in other words.
How often do you find Paul praying for unsaved people to come to Christ?
I'm not saying it's wrong to do that. But if you look at the praying of the apostle Paul,
you find very, very little, if anything, said regarding that subject.
By and large, Paul did not say pray for unsaved people to be saved.
He said, go out and witness to them. That's what he said. Sometimes I think that we excuse ourselves
for not witnessing by saying, well, I'm praying for them. Oh great. But the command is to go to them
and tell them, not pray for them. Well, to pray for labors to go into the harvest fields.
Then answer this third question, for what should we pray? What can we say to that?
I think the best thing that you can do and that I can do is to study the prayers of the Bible.
Then we can learn what we should pray for. When was the last time you prayed for another Christian
to have insight into the will of God that he may know the hope that he's called to?
You say, I'm not sure I understand all of that. Well, I'm not sure I understand all of that.
Well, I'm not sure I do either. It's good to meditate on it and then to pray it for ourselves
and for others. When was the last time you prayed that some person be strengthened with
might through his spirit in the inner man? You see, those are phrases lifted directly out of
scripture. We may pray those with full authority knowing we're praying according to the will of God.
When was the last time you prayed for someone to let hold of the love of Christ
that ultimately they can be filled with the fullness of God?
We would do well, dear folks, if we would go through the New Testament and look at the prayers
that were uttered by those people and pray as they pray for the things that they pray
and pray for more spiritual results in life than tangible things. Not wrong to think of tangible.
In fact, when Jesus taught the disciples to pray, he said that we may pray for our daily bread and so
on. There's nothing wrong with praying for the tangible physical material things that we need.
But the thing that is emphasized is the spiritual. And that ought to be the focus of our praying.
And perhaps one of the reasons that our praying today is not all that it could be or should be
is that the focus of our praying is not proper. We're praying on the material level,
when our prayers will have to be geared to a spiritual level. Think about it. Pray about it.
Study it in the Word of God. Let me just close with some thoughts that I've had regarding prayer.
I've shared these with some of you before, but I'd like to share them briefly with all of you tonight.
One of the thoughts that I've had regarding prayer is this. Well, sometimes I talk too much when I pray.
Do you want to feel that way? There is a time to be still and to know what the Lord has got,
to be quiet before him. There's a time when I think I talk too much, and my real need is just
to be quiet and listen to the inner voice of the Spirit. It never bothers me, frankly, when we have
a prayer meeting in the Word of God. I think that's the time to be quiet. I think that's the time
when we have a prayer meeting and there's a group praying and there's a silence of a minute or two
minutes or even five minutes. Some of the best praying gets done during that period of silence.
As the Spirit of God says things to us throughout the group.
I've also thought this, that I need to be aware of overused, repetitious phrases.
Even the phrase in Jesus' name gets to be meaningless after a while, doesn't it?
We kind of tag it on as the way to tell people we're done praying.
And that wasn't why Jesus said to pray in his name. It's not what it means.
What would happen if all of us took the word bless out of our vocabulary?
We would hardly know how to pray, wouldn't we? Try praying sometime and not using the word bless.
Let's see what happens. What about the word just? J-U-S-T.
You'll find yourself thinking, Lord, we just prayed that you would just do this and just do that.
Just. That's a more common, a more recent one that seems to be popular.
What are filler words and phrases that we use?
There was a person in one church, our pastor, who used the name Lord over and over and over again.
Wow, there's nothing wrong with saying Lord in praying. He did it so often.
But you knew, well, we used the filler word.
It was count his word, filling an empty space in his prayer. We would avoid those kinds of things.
Wow. So our praying is real.
And that brings me to the third part. Trying to be honest with God when I pray.
I think I'm fooling anyway. When I pray and have these long sentences that are filled with
hyperboles and whatever they are. You know, at times when I think about when I'm praying, I say,
oh, come on, Paul, you know what you're saying. You feel that way? We need to be honest with God.
When was the last time you said, Lord, when in the world are you going to answer this prayer?
How long are you going to wait till I die? I'm paraphrasing Psalm 13, verses one and two.
You see, you go back to the Psalms, you find some real praying.
People who are honest with God and they pulled out their emotions.
I mean, what are they doing? They're not doing anything.
People who are honest with God and they pulled out their emotions. I mean, one Psalm,
Psalm that says, well, I don't understand it, but rich people don't have any problems.
Don't you understand what they're like? They're grubby hands.
They're fat. They have plenty to eat. They don't have any cares or anxieties.
And here I am, I trust you and I'm poor and I have all these. Lord, what's going on?
And then the Psalmist says, then I went into the house, the sanctuary of the Lord,
and the Lord reminded me of their destiny. And his whole tone changes from that point on in the Psalm.
What happened? He got real in his praying, see? He told God exactly how it's felt.
He got halfway through and God said, now wait a minute, have you considered the
destiny of the rich who don't trust me? He said, no, I don't believe in them.
He said, oh yeah. If your heart's breaking and inside you are torn up, tell God about it.
If you feel angry and bitter at God, tell him about it. There have been times when I have said
things that I don't brag about this, but which have bordered, I think, on blasphemy.
Because I have been honest with God about how or what it felt. And you know, I remember one time
last year when I was in Texas and things were getting hot down there in more ways than one.
And I went for a walk one night and I stomp out of the house not mad at my wife and I was so mad
at God and I told him all about it for the first block and he told me all about it for the next
three. And the time I got back to the house I had to sit out in the car and just cry.
I repented at my words which were spoken too quickly.
What happened? Well, I was honest with the Lord. We need to be careful not to sin with our tongues,
but at the same time let's not hide some infection that's in our heart
and think that somehow God doesn't see this because he does.
And then our praying finally needs to be worship-centered. Instead of give me,
give me, give me. Our praying needs to be Lord, I love you. And then we need to praise him and
worship him for who he is and praise him for his attributes. Praise him for his goodness and then
have some verses that perhaps we pray, return to a psalm that deals with God's goodness and read that.
And then praise him for his grace and then go on and on and on. I used to wonder how some of those
people a hundred years ago prayed for three hours in the morning until I finally realized that they
didn't get down on their knees and just pray for three hours as we often think. Three hours
included long times of reading in the Word, included long times of just meditating and being silent
before God and praising God and then expressing needs. A beautiful thing.
I'd like for us to close tonight by singing a hymn. It's the one that was played for our offertory,
made to the heart of God. As we sing this, we're going to prepare ourselves for the Lord's table
here in the front. And to the men who are going to serve, would you please come out as we sing this.
I hope this evening this message on prayer has in some way fed you or motivated you, stimulated you
to better praying, if not more praying. Prayer is possible because of what we are about to observe
here. These elements represent something very, very precious to us. Names are important.
These elements represent something very, very precious to us. Namely, the body and the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Through his blood we have been cleansed and justified through his body a way has been
opened to the presence of God so that we can pray. Let's sing together, near to the heart of God,
410 we will stand as we sing. All of you joining please.