Sermon Tone Analysis

The Whole Life Prays

Good evening,

I’m so glad you came out tonight to join us in our journey to “Live in Prayer”.

Perhaps we should begin by saying that the vision of this class is to deepen our pray life, both on the individual and community level.

And saying this means that I should be clear on a few matters:

First, occasionally you’ll hear me take aim at “token prayers”, by which I’m referring to those short prayers and petitions that are placeholders, either in our life or in our worship service, which take the place of any deeper prayer life.

What I don’t mean to say is that those spaces in which we pray these short prayers are wrong.

My family prayers before every meal, for example.

I think it is good to pray before we go to sleep, and when we wake up.

I think it’s good to petition God with our life-requests when we assemble together in Christian community.

These are all good and blessed by God.

By “token prayers” I’m referring to those prayers that occupy these spaces simply because they always have and we want to look spiritual.

Token prayers kill our prayer life because they aren’t offered as the result of a deeper prayer life, but, instead, as a replacement for a deeper prayer life.

Second, saying that this class seeks to deepen our prayer life does not mean that it’s only for those who don’t pray, or who don’t pray often.

There certainly are times throughout one’s life when we feel distant from God.

Perhaps we have become busy and distracted.

Perhaps our faith has cooled over the years.

Whatever the case, most of us have gone through seasons when the reality of prayer was diminished in our life.

I think most people know what it's like when prayer feels more like an unusual and uncommon spiritual endeavor than spiritual norm.

But this class is also for the prayer warrior whose taste of God’s glory in prayer leaves them yearning for more.

So, whether you’re presently going through a spiritual dry-season, and you want more, or your prayer life is mature, and you want more, this class is for everyone who isn’t satisfied with simply getting a prayer through to God on occasion, but, instead, who wants a more satisfying prayer life, one that elevates and purifies our spiritual life, and one that brings all that we are into the very presence of God.

And this is the bridge from last week into today’s lesson: God is the reason and necessity of prayer.

This isn’t about us, though it will be full of things that are relevant to our life.

And this isn’t about “being more effective”, though it will confront errors that render our prayer lives ineffective.

This series is about pressing into the presence of God to know and glorify him more!

Such a prayer as this can only be the result of life in the Spirit.

A. W. Tozer put it this way:

“Prayer at its best is the expression of the total life.”

I suppose one of the first spiritual lessons I learned in my life was that we pray as we live.

Whether we understand this or not, our prayers never transcend the sum of our life.

Now this doesn’t mean that we can’t offer eloquent words and fine speeches to God in prayer that sometimes seem to far exceed the measure of our life, but God isn’t impressed by words; I’m not sure whether or not he even hears such prayers that are in word-only.

He doesn’t exactly say he won’t, but, he doesn’t exactly say he will either.

So I think it’s fitting that one of the shortest lines of Scripture offers us one of the most profound insights into prayer:

Unceasing prayer transcends our words by expressing the total life.

For those who struggle with finding words, this should be good news because it means that there is a way to pray that is more than the words you use.

To begin, such “unceasing prayer” necessitates that there be no unblessed space in our life, no parts of our mind in which the Spirit of God is not welcome, and no desires that would steal our hearts away from God.

To pray without ceasing requires that every component of our life become the vehicle by which we pray to God.

This might, and probably should, strike you as quite impossible.

Can we, being so fallen, even bring our sum - body, mind, and heart - into the very presence of God?

I believe grace enables precisely this:

Let me intercept one possible and tragic error at this juncture before it makes any trouble for us: I don’t, and never will, have in mind any notion of the man-made doctrine of “sinless perfection”.

I explored this vicious doctrine in my youth and you’ll find nothing there but “striving after the wind”.

You’ll notice that I said “grace enables” the kind of life we’re talking about.

We all both fall short of God’s glory and stumble in our own foolish sin!

And if such imperfections cuts us off from the blessings of God in our life, then we are all accursed and without hope.

So when I say that unceasing prayer necessitates there be no unblessed space in our life, no parts of our mind in which the Spirit of God is not welcome, and no desires that would steal our hearts away from God, I mean that we have not secured space in our life for sin, nor released parts of our thinking from the dominion of Christ, nor offered asylum to the secret passion of the heart that would draw us away from Jesus.

Put simply, unceasing prayer requires that every part of our life remain open and yielded to the instruction of God’s grace in our lives.

So, where do we find this grace?

The grace by which we can bring our sum - body, mind, and heart - into the presence of God is found in the unceasing fellowship of the Holy Spirit, in whom we are meant to daily live out our life.

We were meant to enjoy such sweet and close fellowship with the Spirit that all our thoughts and acts become prayers to God.

The highest aim of every Christian is that their whole life be one holy sacrifice of praise and worship to God!

We come whole into the very throne-room of God’s grace:

For this reason, living in the Spirit is the key to “praying at all times in the Spirit”:

When we walk in the Spirit in this kind of constant fellowship, then the whole life begins to pray as the artificial lines we draw in our lives between “the holy” and “secular” are erased and our every thought, our every passion, down to even the smallest, seemingly most insignificant act is brought into fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

Praying in the Spirit at all times like this allows for our individual prayers to simply express the prayers that our whole lives are living out every day.

To pray like this means that one’s special request for God’s comforts on the brokenhearted comes from one’s life comforting the brokenhearted.

This kind of prayer brings your will and life together.

So to pray like this means that one’s request that God “raise up laborer’s for the harvest” comes from one’s life spent in the harvest!

I want to say this in the absolute simplest terms: we only ever pray in the direction that our lives move in.

The discrepancies we see between the “eternal weight of glory” we read about in the Bible, or hear about from the mission field, and what we personally experience in our own lives come from the shallowness of our prayer life.

I’m entirely convinced of this: we so rarely see the glory of God in our lives because we pray on occasions rather than “at all times in the Spirit!”

Our whole lives are not chasing after the things that we pray to God for, and that is often because we have no passion for the things of God!

I remember one of the first times in my life when my whole life really began to pray:

We were English Teachers in China.

I started private English group classes with a Christian sister who taught in one of the local middle schools and high schools.

We had about eight students.

And, as I began praying daily for these students, my prayers for them began to grow from those prayers that were narrowly focused on their salvation to prayers for their personal wellbeing and growth.

Soon we started taking the children out for special events.

We went to the park, to museums, and hiking.

My prayers led the manner in which I taught class and related to them as their teacher.

Several of my students went on to place far into the Guangdong English competitions, and one of my students won the championship.

During this time as their teacher I had the opportunity to preach the full gospel (Genesis to Revelation) to them on two occasions: once on Christmas, and once on Halloween.

What I didn’t know was the impact of all this on these students.

One of whom - Ben - went abroad to the U.K. to study on a full-ride scholarship to their top Engineering program.

Ben was brilliant.

While abroad, he said he remembered my preaching and began attending a church in the U.K. Unfortunately, he became bedridden at 19 years of age with an undiagnosed disease.

He lost 40% of his body weight, getting to the point that the doctors said he would die if he lost another pound of body weight.

I didn’t know any of this was happening because we lost contact in the years since class.

But, he reached out to me when he returned to Zhuhai and shared everything that had happened.

He shared how he remembered my preaching from all that time ago.

He shared the impact our English classes had in his life.

There was, for him, an intangible difference that he could not explain.

And he shared what it was like when he finally experienced that very same intangible difference for himself when he believed Jesus.

You see?

When the lines that separate what we usually think of as our “prayers” from our “life” are erased, then our whole life begins to pray and we carry into our life all the fellowship, unction, desire, boldness, and grace that we find when we pray.

Ben’s testimony to me was that he felt in me this “new life”, what he describes as “an intangible difference”.

Somehow all the things I prayed for my students began to come into how I taught them English.

I prayed that they would see the love of Jesus, and his love saturated my teaching.

I prayed that they would learn English well because it was vital to their future success, and God’s wisdom blessed me with the skill I needed to teach them to succeed.

My teaching life brought to bear the realities of my prayers in their life.

Lest there be any temptation to think that I’m getting caught up in the moment with any undo religious zeal; lest you think that it isn’t necessary for the whole life to pray, consider Paul’s admonition:

This is why we began last week on the necessity of prayer with the glory of God: answered prayer glorifies God!

His will is to display his glory in our lives in all things.

Often one of the great hindrances of prayers is the utterly wrong notion that we shouldn’t bother God in the littlest things.

So we partition our lives into categories of “religious” and “secular”, those things that we pray to God about, and those things that we don’t; those things that we expect to see the glory of God in, and those things that we don’t.

We never find any such divisions in Scripture except for that which is “within God’s will” and that which is “excluded from God’s will”.

So now I want to bring everything together:

The whole life prays when our life moves in the direction of our prayers so tightly that we realize in our life what we pray in the Spirit to the point that the line between the two vanishes.

I remember once I shared all this with someone whose response was ecstatic because they thought this meant they no longer needed to pray.

I was like, “Really bro?