Sermon Tone Analysis

Why Pray?

January 20, 2008

*Jude 1:17-25*

* *

/./

We take time each year to focus on prayer because prayer is the breath of the Christian life and because almost nothing decays so fast in the fallen human heart as the desire to pray.

In other words, nothing is more vital than prayer, and few things are more vulnerable to neglect.

So we must come back to it again and again and stoke the fire.

So here we are coming back at the beginning of the year 2008 as we did at the beginning of 2007.

And I pray that the Lord will use this message and the church Bible studies and the prayer meetings and the prayers of those who carry this burden to stir you up again to devote yourselves to prayer –

       prayer in your private time with God each day over the Word,

       prayer with your family at meals and in devotions,

       prayer with husbands and wives,

       prayer with roommates and friends,  and prayer sisters,

       prayer in small groups, prayer in large groups,

       prayer in worship services,

       and all the hundreds of prayers that ascend during the day as you walk by the Spirit and breathe out your dependence on God and he breathes into you the grace of faith and life and love and joy and obedience and witness.

Let’s look at our key passage this morning.

Turn in your Bibles to Jude.

Jude the second last book of the Bible is also one of the shortest books – one chapter, 25 verses.

Jude identifies himself as a servant of Jesus and the brother of James.

Although Jude does not identify himself as an apostle, there is no obscurity in his purpose.

He writes to exhort us “to contend earnestly for the faith”.

The epistle conatins a strong warning against false teachers who reject Christ’s authority.

Lets start reading at verse 17

/But you, beloved, ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, 18 that they were saying to you, "In the last time there will be mockers, following after their own ungodly lusts."

These are the ones who cause divisions, worldly-minded, devoid of the Spirit.

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit,  keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.

And have mercy on some, who are doubting; save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.

Amen/

 

In his great mercy to me, God meets me every year at this time to stir me up to make new resolves and to be encouraged to encourage you.

One of the things he did for me this year is bring into my hands last week a little book by Bruce Wilkinson, /The Prayer of Jabez/.

I’ve read it before, but God brought it to my attention again two weeks ago, so I re-read it.

Bruce once heard a message preached on an obscure text, 1 Chronicles 4:9-10,and this message changed his life.

This is the first and last time we ever hear of Jabez.

He is a virtual nobody in Biblical history.

But if you were going to get only a two-verse biography, what would you want written of you?

Let it be this.

/“Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother named him Jabez saying, "Because I bore him with pain."

Now Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "Oh that You would bless me indeed and enlarge my border, and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would keep me from harm that it may not pain me!"

And God granted him what he requested.”/

That's all.

He appears.

He prays a great, expansive prayer.

And God grants his prayer.

And that's all.

Bruce Wilkinson says, “Pulling a chair up to the yellow counter I bent over my Bible, and began reading the prayer over and over, I searched with all my heart for the future God had for someone as ordinary as I.

The next morning, I prayed Jabez's prayer word for word.

And the next.

And the next.

Thirty years later, I haven't stopped.

If you ask me what sentence – other than my prayer for salvation – has revolutionized my life and ministry the most, I would tell you that it was the cry of a gimper named Jabez who is still remembered not for what he did, but for what he prayed, and for what happened next.”

What are you praying in the Spirit,  over and over to God in the name of Jesus that he will make of your life?

What are you asking God to make of you and your time on this earth?

What part of God's purpose revealed in the Bible has captured your imagination and become a passion for you so that you take hold of God day after day and ask him to use you in it?

I paused when I read this story from Bruce Wilkinson and asked myself, What prayer have I prayed most often over the last thirty years?

What thing do I want God to do so much that it is there in my prayers every day?

I suppose for many of us the answer to that would be prayers that our children be saved and walk in truth, and that our marriages be strong.

But what about the bigger picture?

God is the God of the whole earth and all the nations and all of history and all of life and culture and all the universe from one end of the galaxies to the other.

Each of us was created to have a significant place in that great scheme.

What is it?

What do you pray, in the Spirit, for day in and day out about how you fit into that?

I think the prayer I have probably prayed more often than any other at that level is, "Father, cause your name to be hallowed in my life and through my life."

"Hallowed be thy name."

"Make my life a means of people coming to reverence your name and love your name and praise and honor and cherish and treasure and glorify your name."

I can recall during my early Christian days praying, "God only give me life – only keep my heart beating – if it will cause people to hallow your name.

Let your name be hallowed by my life!"

In his book, Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby says: “It was common knowledge among the disciples that they would find Jesus praying during the early morning hours.

When they needed Him, they knew to go to the place of prayer.

When Judas betrayed Jesus, he led his cohorts to Jesus' place of prayer.

Every time the Lord Jesus faced an important decision, He prayed.

When He was being tempted to do things by the world's methods instead of the Father's, He prayed (Matt.

4).

When it was time to choose His disciples, He prayed the entire night (Luke 6:12).

If the Son of God required a night of prayer in order to determine the Father's mind, how long might it take us in prayer to clearly determine our Father's will?

Because Jesus was so often surrounded by crowds, He knew He must find a quiet place so He could clearly hear His Father's voice.

Jesus had many people seeking to influence the direction of His life.

His disciples wanted Him to go where the crowds were (Mark 1:37).

The crowds wanted to crown Him king (John 6:15).

Satan tempted Him to make compromises in order to draw a following (Matt.

4:3, 6, 9).

Jesus knew that His mission was not to attract a crowd, but to remain obedient to His Father.

It was prayer that set the agenda for Jesus' ministry (Luke 6:12).

Prayer preced­ed the miracles (John 11:42-43); prayer brought Him encourage­ment at critical moments (Luke 9:28-31); prayer enabled Him to go to the cross (Luke 22:41-42); and prayer kept Him there despite excruciating pain (Luke 23:46).

Follow the Savior's example, and let your time alone with God, in prayer, set the agenda for your life.”

So this Sunday I want to stir you up to pray that your life, your family, your church would count for something great for Christ and his kingdom.

I hope you will find articles and books to read about prayer.

I hope you will think about prayer.

I hope you will pray about prayer.

And I hope you will plan about prayer.

So many best things are squeezed out by merely good things because we don't plan a time and a way to do them.

So read and think and pray and plan – and then pray this year as you never have before.

Pick a prayer meeting and make it a priority.

Pick a private place and make it as sacredly sure as your favorite meal, or your favorite vacation spot or your favorite anything.

Now to make the Word of God the support and power of this exhortation, I want us to look this morning at our key text, Jude, verses 20-21, /"But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life."/

Thomas Manton, the Puritan, has twenty-three pages of commentary on these two verses.

Every phrase is worthy of a sermon.

But I would like to make only one observation.

Today's observation is that prayer is a means of God's grace designed to keep us from falling into disbelief, and to bring us safely to eternal life.

If the term "means of grace" is not part of your vocabulary, I would like to add it this morning, because I don't know of a better way of describing how God's decisive work relates to our dependent work.

Or, to be specific in this case: how God's sovereign governing relates to human prayer.

If God runs the world according to his own holy and inscrutable wisdom, why pray for him to do one thing and not another thing?