Praying in the Spirit

We have come to the final sermon in our series Battleground. We are going to look at Ephesians 6:18-20 were we will learn about how prayer is given to us as a way to apply all of the pieces of armor we have looked at thus far in our spiritual battle. Let me begin with an analogy to help put this idea of prayer into perspective. I recently had the opportunity to experience one of the marvels of the modern age, that being commercial flight. I woke up Friday morning last in Norfolk, and by the evening I was in Paris, France’s Charles De’Gaulle airport on a layover to my final destination. This was possible because I got into an aluminum tube with wings. The tube had seats installed on the inside. It had wings on either side and underneath those wings were jet engines. There were miles of electrical wires, hydraulic lines, ventilation systems, fresh water systems, and waste flushing systems. It had electrical generators, batteries, and auxiliary power systems. There were sensors for the cabin air pressure, oxygen saturation, and temperature, in addition to the outside air temperature, altitude, attitude, and speed. All in all, it was a marvelous thing, but until the fuel that was stored in the wings was actually pumped into those jet engines and burned, it was a generally worthless thing at moving people to their destinations. This is similar to what prayer does for us when we are trying to stand firm with the armor of God. That armor is a marvelous thing, but if we want it to help us to stand firm against the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers over this present darkness, these spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, then just as the airplane needs to burn the fuel in the engine, we need to be in prayer. So let’s review what have we have learned so far then in this series? We know that we have a spiritual enemy who schemes against us in the spiritual realm. Against this enemy God has commanded us to take a firm stand (6:14a). It is this imperative “to take a stand” that Paul then describes when he tells us how we can stand firm against this spiritual enemy by making this analogy to the Roman soldier which would be a well-known image to the first audience. We are to stand firm having girded ourselves with the truth as a belt. (6:14b) Stand firm having put on the righteousness of God as a breastplate. (6:14c) Stand firm having shod as sandals the peace of the Gospel giving us surety and agility against the enemy. (6:15) Stand firm having taken up saving faith as a shield. (6:16) In verse 17a, we are told receive! or take! the helmet of salvation and in 17b, take! the sword of Spirit which is the spoken word of God. This salvation and the spoken word of God are also essential to our standing firm and we have a few more gifts from God to help us to withstand in the evil day. The first thing we see in verse 18 is that we can pray at all times in the Spirit, your translation may say in all occasions. At all times means two things, first it means God wants to fellowship with us in the good times and in the hard times. We can be in prayer even when there is no crisis. It is a good thing when someone comes to their brother or sister in Christ with their burden and asks that that burden be lifted up before God in prayer, but doesn’t that seem to only happen with the bad things? I cannot think of a time where someone came up to me as said “Andy, Andy, you won’t believe this, but I just found out that I am getting that promotion at work!” and I excitedly said that’s great brother, let me pray with you about that. It is my usual reaction to go before the Lord only in response to needs, but unless we make a conscious effort to, we will probably not pray at all times. Secondly, we frequently wait to go before the Lord until we have already tried to solve our problems on our own, and only then begin asking God for relief. This is like trying to push that jet plane across the ocean instead of just firing up the engine, you’re still flying the plane as it were, but God is doing all the work. God desires us to go to Him first with our needs, continue asking Him about them, and believe Him if the answer is no that it was for your good. We saw the prophet Jeremiah in the middle of pronouncing exile and judgement from God the promise of redemption and a better future. He wrote in 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” And what does he say in the very next verse? “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” God’s intention is to use their prayer to bring about the blessing. The next thing we read in Ephesians is to pray in the Spirit. This is not referring to your spirit, that is, it is not telling us that we are supposed to have deep, heartfelt, eloquent prayers that we think show God just how much we really have faith in Him. Rather, it means praying by the empowerment of God’s Spirit. Roman’s 8:26-27 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. There are two parts to this, the first has to do with what we are praying for, does it agree with the will of God or not? If our prayers sound something like “Oh dear God, please let my football team come back from losing in this game” or “God please give me that Aston Martin DB-9, you know the ghost metallic silver one with the V-10 and the fancy stitching in the leather seats” then you are not praying in the Spirit, but in the flesh because you are not focused on God’s will but yours. We are to lay aside our fleshly desires and be in submission to the Holy Spirit in our prayer. The second part of this is deals with the elements of the words of the prayer and the faith involved in the prayer. Let me illustrate this this way. When my daughter was a wee little baby, she could not speak to her mother and I with words we could understand. But she still had needs, and we love her and want to fulfill those needs. For example, when she would get hungry, she would not say something like “Dearest Father, I am hungry, would you feed me.” Instead she would blow raspberries and cry. We eventually learned this meant she was hungry. In our relationship with our Father in heaven, He has given us His own Spirit to translate our needs to Him. Like my daughter blowing raspberries, sometimes we just don’t have the words. That’s not a problem for God, He loves you and has already made a way for you to communicate with him. So, do not be anxious that you are not getting prayer answered because you think you haven’t used the right words. Also, as we will see shortly, you don’t start your prayer already possessing a faith that overcomes. It is by prayer and communion with God, by hearing His words that brings the faith. You cannot will yourself into having faith any more than you can in your flesh stand firm against a spiritual enemy or push that jet down the runway into the air. That phrase all prayer and supplication is trying to tell us that God wants to be a part of everything in our lives and that He has a purpose in it all. We see this in the second half of verse 18 where we are told to keep alert and to be persevering when we stand firm by our praying. This is a call to make an effort towards prayer. There is probably no greater distinction between keeping alert and persevering and not than that found between Jesus and His Disciples where Jesus is praying in the garden found in Luke 22:43-46 And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow, and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” We know from Mark 14 that this pattern of Jesus finding them asleep occurred 3 times. Jesus was firmly entrenched in prayer, Peter was not. Jesus went to the cross fulfilling the will of the Father through His trial, Peter denied Christ 3 times. Jesus prayed, Peter swayed. This is not the only place we read about the Disciples not praying successfully. In Mark 9 starting in verse 14, we read about the 9 disciples that Jesus had left behind when he went up on the mountain at His transfiguration. This is also recorded in Matthew 17 also starting in verse 14 and in Luke 9:37, although Luke does not record the disciples follow on question which is what we are interested in. The scene shows the disciples were trying to cast out a demon from a boy, but they could not. We should recognize that this was the first time Jesus’ disciples had failed to exercise a demon and the Scribes were all over them about it too, so there was pressure from the boy’s father, from the Scribes, and from the crowds. This pressure is worsened because in Luke 9:1 we know that Jesus had already given the disciples the authority over the demons. Looking back at the story as Mark recorded it, Jesus in verse 19 accuses the Scribes of whipping up faithlessness in the crown such that it has even infected the disciples. The boy’s father in verse 22 questions even if Jesus is sufficient for the task. Jesus disarm all of this building pressure by reconnecting faith to healing power and the boy’s father responds asking Jesus to help his unbelief. You see, this is the key of faith, it comes from hearing the Word of God, in this case from the lips of Jesus Himself. The demon was cast out and privately the disciples asked Jesus why they were powerless over this demon. Here we can see the application of prayer as it is explicitly discussed by Jesus as a way of building up faith and empowering his disciples. In Mark verse 29 Jesus tells the disciples that this kind of demon can only come out by prayer but in the parallel passage in Matthew 17:20 Jesus states that it is faith that empowers us to carry out the will of God, even if that is to move mountains! Matthew and Mark are not contradicting each other in the record of what Jesus, they are actually together showing us the intimate connection that existed in their minds, and should be in ours, between prayer and faith. Prayer not only expresses faith as Jesus said would have made those 9 disciples able to cast out the demon, but the boy’s father prayed that his faith would be strengthened, and it was the words of Jesus in answering that prayer that built up the boy’s father’s faith. We actually see something quite astonishing in the next 2 verses of Ephesians 6. Paul, the one we would probably least of all think would have been shy about sharing the Gospel asks for prayer to boldly open his mouth when proclaiming the mystery of the Gospel. If you ever think that there must be something wrong with you because you get nervous when you begin to witness to someone, then you can be assured you are in the best of company. And, you can see that Paul not only prayed for himself, but that he wanted the community of believers to pray for him too. Let’s quickly review what we have learned so far, our mission is to stand firm. We have been given armor with which we can stand firm, but in order to make that armor effective, we have to first put it on, that is to be united with Christ and second, we are to pray. But how are we to pray? Jesus was asked this very question. Turn with me to Luke 11. We are going to practice 5 patterns of prayer together after we look at what Jesus taught. 1. “Father, hallowed be your name.” This is us reminding ourselves just who God is, what His character is, what His nature is. We gain faith when we prayerfully consider who the object of our faith is. 2. “Your kingdom come” This is us reminding ourselves to lay aside those things we have put before God, and if we do not know what they are, we are asking God to reveal that to us, to change our feelings about them so that we can honor God in all aspects of our lives. We are not asking God to do our bidding, we want God to shape us into vessels that desire to bring forth His kingdom. We have a hard enough time assembling furniture from Ikea, we don’t need to be shaping the universe according to our will. 3. “Give us each day our daily bread” There is so much joy in not worrying about our future physical needs. How many times to we look at money as that solution. If I could only hit the lotto then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Well guess what, you have something so much better in the Lord. This doesn’t mean you won’t go hungry, or be cold, or sick in this world. It does mean that God will be faithful to carry you through according to His purposes. The Israelites were told not to store up manna in the desert, but to trust God each day literally for their bread. It also does not mean that you should be irresponsible with what God has given to you. God blessed some in excess of their needs so that they could be the provision for others if they would be obedient to the will of the Lord recognizing all they had was the Lord’s, they were merely the steward. 4. “and forgive us our sins” recognize Christian that you still sin and fall short of the glory of God. Jesus wanted His disciples to repent and accept the forgiveness of God, but he also reminded them in the same breath “for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” Just as marriage between a man and a woman is a model of the Church in relation to Christ, so to are we to reflect to the world the forgiveness offered in Christ for sins by how we forgive others. Jesus reminded His disciples that they should pray for the power to forgive others by reminding themselves of what they had been forgiven of. 5. “and lead us not into temptation” is asking for our path to be made clear of the things that lead us away from God’s will over our lives. When we look at this prayer we see that the belt of truth, the righteousness of Christ, the peace of the Gospel, our faith in God, our salvation from death, and the Word of God are all reflected in what Jesus taught us to pray. Remind ourselves of the truth of who God is, that he is righteous, that he has given us peace with him by faith. Paul wrote in the beginning of this letter to the Ephesians in 2:8 “for by grace you have been saved through faith.” He also wrote in Romans 10:17 that “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Practice this first part and see what the time is before adding verses to help guide prayer in each of the 5 parts. 1. Remind ourselves who God is a. b. c. d. 2. Ask God to change our hearts to put His will before ours. a. b. c. d. 3. Ask God to meet our needs, to ease any anxiety we may have over our situation in life, and to give us the proper perspective over the things we have. a. b. c. d. 4. Thank God for the grace given to offer us forgiveness of our sins, to accept our repentance, and to give us hearts of forgiveness for others. a. b. c. d. 5. Keep our path straight. a. b. c. d.