Sermon Tone Analysis

Do you pray like this?

There is something deep and profound about this prayer.

This man has learned how to communicate with his God.

When we look at the many prayers recorded in the scriptures by godly men, I feel very inadequate in my prayers.

Their prayers just seem to be different; on a higher level than my own.

Why?

Why does it seem that my communication to my Creator is inadequate?

Some reasons why our prayer life is not too effective:

I.

We just haven’t fully realized the importance of prayer.

1. Jesus

Prayer was important to our Lord.

Prayer was so important to our Lord that He prayed at least once all night long before His choosing of the 12 ().

And He made sure that he spent time alone with the Father in prayer ().

But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.

(NASB95)

At the darkest moment of his earthly existence, He spent time in prayer; in the garden before his suffering; while he was on the cross.

If you knew that you were going to die tomorrow, would the first thing that you would think of doing is go to God in prayer for a long period of time?

Jesus was transfigured while he was praying.

There was just something so different about our Lord’s prayer life that the disciples, men who surely grew up praying as Jews, came to Jesus and asked Him to teach them to pray.

2. The Disciples

What did prayer mean to the 1st century disciples?

The Apostles in viewed prayer as an important thing.

Widows were being overlooked.

What a terrible thing.

They came to the Apostles and asked them to take care of this situation, but they responded in v2, there is something more important that we have to do.

In verse 4 they say “we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word!”

They had something more important to do than wait tables, so they appointed others to do the work.

How would we respond if we went to a preacher in a congregation that we were a member of to tell them of a few widows that have been overlooked in being fed, and the preacher said, I can’t take care of this, I need to spend time in prayer?

Would we respond something like this: What do you mean that you need to spend time in prayer?

You can pray at any time!

You can pray on your way to help the widows!

This is important!

The Apostles said “we will devote ourselves to prayer.”

If we were in the situation of the Apostles, we would more than likely put off our time to pray till later to take care of the problem at hand.

If you are like me, our time with God in prayer can easily be put on hold if something comes up.

We can pray double later, which hardly ever happens when we think that to ourselves.

In we are told many things that the disciples devoted themselves to:

“They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

Prayer was important to 1st century Christians.

Prayer just isn’t as much of a priority to us that it was to the Apostles and disciples in the NT.

Is prayer important enough to us that we would be willing to give up things important to us for a period of time to spend time with the Lord in prayer?

(Food, Husband and Wife relations ())

Why did they spend all of this time in prayer?

They all saw their need for God!

II.

Time in the word

Another reason that our prayer lives may not be as effective as they could be is because we don’t consistently spend time in God’s word.

I believe that receiving God’s communication to us through His word is vital to our communication to Him.

I’ll look at just 2 of the many reasons why:

1.

The word reveals to us who God is

We need to know the God who we are talking to so we can learn to trust in this God like we should.

If we don’t spend as much time in the scriptures as we should, our prayer life just won’t be up to par.

I think it is true to say that the more we allow the Lord to speak to us through his word the more we will desire to speak to Him.

The more you know someone, the more you want to talk to them.

We need a daily reminder of who it is that we serve and trust in.

He is our Creator, He is in control of what happens in our lives.

He is the one that gives hope and forgiveness; and He will be our judge.

And the amazing thing about our God is: He cares for us and He wants us to trust in Him and to approach Him as a child does to their Father:

“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, 7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.”

(NASB95)

Knowing about God’s power and what He knows and sees in us should not lead us to hide from Him, but to draw near to Him.

I’m sure that we all have had times since we have become a Christian that we have just felt too ashamed to pray to the Lord because of things that have been going on in our lives.

But He is the only one that can lift us up out of those situations.

Satan loves it when we don’t desire to pray to God.

He wants us to deal with our problems and sins alone.

But when we pray, Satan has no power over us because we are bringing the Lord into the circumstances of our lives.

Knowing the great spiritual war that is before us in this life, should we not pray to the one who alone can help us win in the battle?

The more we learn about who the Lord is the more we will learn to ask the question, “What reasons do we have not to pray to our God?”

2. The word reveals to us who we are

The word of God shows us not only who our God truly is, but also who we truly are.

We need to see ourselves as we are.

The hard thing to do for us is to honestly examine ourselves and our need for someone other than ourselves.

We like to feel independent sometimes, but nothing could be further from the truth!

We need the Lord, and the scriptures make that clear.

We could look at many verses in the bible to show this, but I think that they are all summed up in the fact that we are sheep in need of a shepherd.

This text is just so loved by all.

It just fills us with comfort and joy.

God is the shepherd, we are the sheep.

I’ve been thinking about this relationship.

Have you ever thought of what this says about us as the sheep?

Truthfully, that is not too complimentary!

Sheep are weak and helpless.

They are natural prey.

They have no natural defenses.

They constantly are going astray.

Sometimes a sheep might fall onto its side, and start kicking and screaming because it cannot get back on its feet.

It will dig its way into a bush to get one cusp of grass and then get caught there.

It will start twisting and turning to get out, usually making the situation worse.

It will get to the point where it is just so exhausted and collapse.

Sheep are dirty, cannot clean or take care of themselves.

They left to themselves would graze the same patch of land until there is nothing left.

They will graze the same streams until they are contaminated and full of parasites.

Left to themselves, sheep will kill themselves.

is a beautiful psalm about our God and our relationship to him, but it also says something about us, we are sheep.

It says something about us that few are willing to grasp and embrace and bring to ourselves.

We are in need of care and guidance, and without our shepherd, there is no hope!

We would left to ourselves die spiritually!

We can fall into the danger of thinking we are doing good on our own, and sometimes we need God to give us that little extra nudge to make us better.

But that is not what sheep are like.