Prayer
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Good Morning everyone!
It is always a privilege when I get the opportunity to share with you all. As always, I like to share on topics which I believe God has been teaching me and laying on my heart!
For me recently, this has been the subject of Prayer. I feel that God has taught me much about the importance of prayer!
Since I moved up to Buchanan about 2 years ago, I have been praying for God’s guidance in 2 or 3 main aspects of my life!
Some of them have already been answered and completed, but others have been long awaited. Day after day waiting for an answer and seeking guidance for my life. Some days, this led to sadness. Other days it led to excitement when progress was seemingly made. However, things would fall through and pan out.
Where did this lead me, but to turn to God again and again. Recently, I have been seeing some of these prayers come to fruition as I see opportunities and feel that God is helping direct me in some of these areas.
And having endured the sadness, momentary excitement, and the “let-downs”, I can honestly say that it was worth it! For God to teach me some of the lessons He did and then practically help me to learn surrender yet again. It has been both humbling and rewarding to choose to keep surrendering areas of my life to God and trust for His help.
Then seeing them begin to be answered, and not with anxiety or worry that they will also “fall-through”. Rather I feel peace and confidence in them. Likewise I have learned to hold things in “open hands” and not grip onto them. God can put things in my hands and take things out of my hands.
In the words of Job: Job 1:21
21 He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
God has the right to give and take away, for all (including me, belong to Him). Coming to understand this has changed the way that I view prayer and the way that I view God as my provider in every area of life.
With all of this to preface my message, it is only fitting that we would start out this morning by praying once again!
PRAY
What is Prayer?
What is Prayer?
Well according to different parts of the Bible, Prayer is described as:
Seeking God’s favor (Exodus 32:11)
Pouring out one’s soul to the Lord (1 Samuel 1:15)
Crying out to heaven (2 Chronicles 32:20)
Drawing near to God (Psalm 73:28, KJV)
Kneeling before the Father (Ephesians 3:14)
Prayer is our means of talking with God; and the Bible is the greatest form of how He has spoken to us!
I have said this many of times, but I’ll ask it again:
“Can you have a friend if you have never and continue to never speak with them?”
Obviously, the answer to that is “No!”
You may know of them, you may even consider them an acquaintance, but they are not your friend!
So one could come to the conclusion that communication is essential if you are to have a friendship/relationship with someone.
We talk with our friends so that we can:
Know more about them
Tell them about yourself
Enjoy each other’s company...
If we go through all the effort to maintain simple friendships with other people, then why don’t we do these things with God?
Why do we fail to commit time to communicate with God?
Thats what prayer is! It is communicating with God. And it can be done in several different ways.
It is praising Him for what He has and what He is doing
It is laying out your whole heart to Him! (Even though He knows whats on your heart, He still wants to hear it, and He wants you to have the type of relationship with Him where you bring it all to Him!)
Why Do we Pray?
Why Do we Pray?
Well with all of this being said, one might object and say: “Well God is all-knowing. If He is truly God, then He already knows everything I need, want, and would have to say. So why go through the trouble of spending time in prayer when God knows it all anyways?”
Well, my response is: “I’m so glad you asked! Let me tell you why we should still pray, even though God already knows everything we would have to say!”
Praying to God shows a reliance on Him and not ourselves. It demonstrates that we are turning to the only person who we trust can handle what we have to say.
We fear telling other people, because we think that they will judge us.
Or maybe we fear that they will go around and start telling others! Have any of you ever had this happen to you before? It is very frustrating and disappointing.
So what do we do with it? - We decide to bottle it all up.
But next thing you know, its eating at you from the inside!
Let me assure you! You can go to God with anything and everything! He knows it all anyways right?
There are lots of biblical examples that teach us to “Pour out your heart to God”: Psalm 62:7-8 says:
Psalm 62:7–8 (NASB95)
7 On God my salvation and my glory rest; The rock of my strength, my refuge is in God.
8 Trust in Him at all times, O people; Pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us. Selah.
We see countless times that King David did this through the book of Psalms.
It is like a huge book of prayers where David expresses how he feels (and trust me, you get the good, the bad and the ugly!). But then he reaffirms to himself the goodness of God and finally he verbally expresses his trust in God!
This is a healthy way to pray:
Share your whole heart to God (everything that you feel; and doing this makes you feel better to just get it out of you)
Reaffirm His goodness
Express to God your trust in Him.
2. The second reason we pray to God is that He “acts on our prayers”! Look at Exodus 32:7-15
7 And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.
8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ”
9 And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.
10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”
11 But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?
12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people.
13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ”
14 And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.
15 Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides; on the front and on the back they were written.
Isn’t this remarkable?!?!?!
God has just delivered the Israelites out of slavery in the land of Egypt, has performed these amazing miracles, and has been supplying every need that they have while taking them to a promised land for them to live in peace with great benefits!
Along the way, Moses is called by God to go up Mount Sinai and receive instructions for godly living to deliver to the people. These are referred to as the 10 commandments.
Moses went up the mountain and has been up there for a while at this point. The people then turn to their own delusions and create an golden calf statue…an idol made from gold by their own handiwork. They then credit this golden calf with the miracles that God performed for them…
This statue is getting the credit for God’s deliverance of the people.
This stirs God up to anger with the people. They have been complaining the whole way through the wilderness and now they have abandoned Him and given the credit for His works to a piece of metal shaped as a cow (which they made). God is ready to release His frustration on the people. He essentially tells Moses: “forget about these people. I will make a great nation out of you instead!”
And this is where it gets really interesting!
Moses turns to God and pleads with Him not to destroy the people. Rather he calls on God to remember His promises and to keep them!
This is where a slightly confusing aspect comes to mind:
Would God have broken His promises and destroyed Israel (which was the lineage to Jesus the messiah)?
No! God is greatly characterized though out the entire Bible as being a God that always keeps His promises and never fails
13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself.
God is incapable to denying His character of being Faithful. It is not physically possible!
On the other hand, we see that God was consumed with wrath towards the people and His desire was to destroy them and use Moses instead. However, upon Moses’ intervention, God subsides from His frustration and does not act on the way which He felt towards the people who had seriously sinned against Him!
So… where does this passage leave us?
It leaves us seeing that God is always faithful to keep His promises
And it leaves us understanding that God acts based on the prayers of His people!
In some unique and strange way, God remains perfect yet also hears our prayers and acts upon them!
So if you wonder why you should pray, it is because God acts on our prayers! Even though He would be faithful to His character no matter what, we see that our prayers are like a catalyst which stirs God to action on our behalf!
3. The third reason we should pray is because: We desire a closer and more intimate relationship with God! I discussed this briefly as I mentioned what prayer is! Its like wanting to get to know your friend! Its impossible to get to know them or create a friendship without communication!
This all makes me think about the relationship I am in with my beautiful girlfriend, Ileana!
Ileana lives in the Dominican Republic. I live here in Buchanan, VA. Thats 1,442 Miles away! Thats a lot of miles!
In order for us to still be dating and seeking to know each other better, there is a ton of emphasis on communication!
That is simply all we have to go on when we are not visiting each other.
We don’t get to go to church together, we don’t get to simply drive over the to the other person’s home and hang out with their family
I don’t get to hold her hand, we don’t get “in-person” conversations.
So all we have to base our relationship on is communication!
And from experience, I can tell you that if we go only 2 days without getting to FaceTime each other, it feels like this great chasm has been placed between us! There feels like there is this huge separation that I do not like.
And how much more will that effect the life of a Christian. To separate yourself from you Creator and Savior!
Communication is essential to your relationship with God.
For me, I have made up my mind with Ileana. It is so important to me that I get to spend time with her at least once every other day, that I am willing to sacrifice the time I would be spending doing so many other things.
But guess what.... it is worth it!
To me, she is worth pursuing! and I greatly enjoy the time I get to spend with her.
Honestly the question for me to ask you in this situation is: “Do you desire to see God more in your life?” Is he worth pursuing?
The bible tell us that the wicked have no desire to pray:
4 The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him. All his thoughts are, “There is no God.”
But the children of God have a natural desire to pray:
1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”
If you don’t think that God is worth pursuing, then simply stop praying.
However, things start to drastically change in the world when the church starts praying to God!
And I can promise you… Your life will start to change when you start turning to God in prayer!
How Do we Do it?
How Do we Do it?
Okay, so far we have learned:
What prayer is: communicating with God
Why we should pray (To demonstrate a reliance on God and not ourselves; because God acts on our prayers; because we want to know God more!)?
Now that we have established an importance for prayer, what does the Bible say about “How to pray?”
#1. - To continue going back to my analogy of a friendship, in order to develop a friend, you have to get over the fear of speaking and simply start making conversation. Just start talking. Talk about the important things. Talk about work. Talk about your frustrations. Talk about what you spent time reading from the Bible. Talk about anything and everything.
Like many things in life, you will become more comfortable doing things when you practice. You will begin to see you prayer life with God turn from an awkward experience to a comfortable conversation like you would have with a family member or best friend!
Prayer can be audible or silent, private or public, formal or informal!
“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.”
- A.W. Tozer
#2 - A good way to learn anything is to see what Jesus did!
35 And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.
16 But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.
Jesus took the time to get alone when He prayed.
Why might He have done this?
Well I’m sure it helped Him focus! The world can be a very demanding place. Constantly, the world is yelling “look at me!” Jesus was doing all these miracles and teaching these incredible sermons, and so the people swarmed Him a lot!
So Jesus took the time to get alone and spend time in prayer.
The world today is even more distracting! We have these things called smart phones and notifications. They bing, ding, tweet and sing all just to get our attention. With this happening, it can be very difficult to focus in time of prayer with God!
#3 - The Bible is very clear that when we pray, we need to demonstrate faith!
(don’t be wishy washy, because He won’t answer that Prayer)
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.
6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.
7 For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord;
8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
If you don’t believe that God can/will do what you asking, then whats even the purpose?
Your wasting your breathe. James tells us to not expect an answer from God based on such a faithless prayer!
#4 - Pray for the right reasons
James 4:2–3 (ESV)
2 ....You do not have, because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
We are told here that people do not have the things that they need or want because they have not asked God for it!
Then James goes on to say that some do ask in prayer for things, however they do not receive them…Why? Because they ask with wrong motives!
People were going to God and asking for things simply to fulfill the passions and desires of their flesh. Not to honor God at all!
If you want God to answer your prayers, then pray in accordance with the will of God....
Basically, would the things that we pray for be to His glory? Would the things we pray for be done in a biblical manner.
God tells us how to live a godly life…do you pray for help in living in out. Pray for things that would be pleasing to Him! Not things that simply are to make you happy! (God give me a new expensive sports car. God, give me lots of money. God give me success in my career so I can be great.).
14 And we are confident that he hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases him.
15 And since we know he hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for.
Even Jesus, before His crucifixion, told God His desire that the suffering awaiting Him would be taken away. But then He ends His prayer by resorting to the will of God by saying: Luke 22:42
42 saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
#5 - If we want God to hear our prayers, then we need to take care of the sin which may be standing between us and Him.
Sin hinders our prayers from God! If we want to remove this hindrance, then we need to reflect upon our lives and ask forgiveness for the sins which we have committed before Him.
2 But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.
18 If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.
It is an important thing to remember that sin always destroys. And while nothing can separate a Christian from God’s love… sin can be a hindrance to your fellowship and prayer life with Him. Praise God for 1 John 1:9
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
#6 - There are many other things I could tell you about how we should pray, but this is the last one I will mention:
Pray with a reverence for God.
I first mentioned that we should be able to approach God with the confidence and comfort as though we were coming to a friend!
16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
While it is equally true that we should be confident in coming before God in prayer, we ought also remember that we are not equals with God!
It is proper of us to also remember that God is completely holy. Never tainted by sin! His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Therefore when we approach God in prayer, we should be respectful of Him and honor Him as being God while we are not.
24 Only fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. For consider what great things he has done for you.
Have a great respect for God as One that is greater than yourself, and one that you should approach with humility and not arrogance!
What is the Result of Biblical Prayer?
What is the Result of Biblical Prayer?
We will begin to see God acting in both big and little ways in our lives! God acts on our godly prayers…remember?
We will begin to know the heart of God better when we commit to spending time with Him. Your love for God will only grow the more you expose yourself to Him!
We will experience peace! Phil. 4:6-7
6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
When we give up our frustrations and anxieties to God, we have confidence that peace will follow!
“Scientific studies are now suggesting that the part of the brain which processes anxiety and the part of the brain which processes thanksgiving cannot happen at the same time!”
I’m not much of a scientist, but I can tell you that this is true based on my own experience. When I am coming to God in prayer and choose to “cast all of my anxieties of Him” WITH a thankful heart, all of a sudden my ginormous problems seem so little and insignificant.
What once felt like an immovable wall now seems like a tiny fence that I can easily step over. Why? Because God is bigger than all of my problems. And when I choose to trust Him for the help, I can live in peace!
4. When we pray, we experience freedom from Sin! We begin to align ourselves with the desire of God that give freedom in life. Not guilt, not fear, not shame, but freedom in forgiveness.
5. When we pray, the will of God is being accomplished! Others people are being saved based on God answering prayers and moving peoples’ hearts! The bible tells us to pray for those who don’t know Him! We are to be praying for their salvation!
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
I know this has been a lot. And I honestly don’t expect you to remember each and every part of what I have tried to share with you. But this is my desire:
1. That for those of you who have never prayed to God before; that you would try praying to God today! He desires a relationship with you!
Maybe you are going through some really difficult things in life right now. Maybe the world seems to keep getting the best of you! I can promise you this: Seek God and you will find yourself experiencing Joy and peace! Sin separates you from a right relationship with God! So, In the words of Isaiah 55:6
6 “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near;
2. Those of you who have chosen to give your life to Jesus and trust in Him. It is my desire that at whatever state you are in for your Christian walk, that you will simply grow.
3. Some of you only pray on a rare occasion. It’s my desire that you would learn to pray with daily
4. Those of you who pray daily, its my desire that you would learn what is means to “pray without ceasing” (to have this continual open line with God. Where you are at work and you just spend a few minutes praying silently to Him as you are going about your tasks. Your mowing the lawn and spending time in prayer. You are taking a shower and spending time in prayer. There is this continual mindset of speaking to God and depending on Him!)
When you spend the time to talk with God in prayer, and seek to hear from Him through reading His Word, I can assure you....your life will change for the better! God is worth pursuing!
Psalm 16:11 (ESV)
11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
**** As I mentioned in the beginning, based on my experiences recently, I can testify that there is freedom in surrendering things to God and pouring out my heart to Him. When I have learned to allow my reliance on God to grow, I experience peace and joy!
All of a sudden, my desires are more about honoring Him and being obedient to Him rather than just “what does Nate want”
When this happens, I then learn things from Him and experience the joy of watching Him answer my prayers because I am asking and seeking them in the right type of way!
Pray
Pray