The Protection of Prayer

Intro

You know, as a kid I always loved drinking chocolate milk. It was one of my favorite drinks. And my kids have certainly inherited that same love for chocolate milk.

And even as an adult I find myself from time to time craving a tall glass of ice cold chocolate milk.

But how many hear this morning know that you can have chocolate in milk, but that isn’t the same thing as chocolate milk.

Confused? Allow me to explain.

Have you ever drank chocolate milk only to get to the bottom of the glass and realize that half of your chocolate was laying in the bottom of the glass?

Chances are good that is wasn’t stirred enough when it was being made.

Because what happens when you pour chocolate syrup into a glass of milk?.... It sinks to the bottom.

Just adding the chocolate syrup gives you milk with chocolate in it. It isn’t chocolate milk quite yet.

You have to stir it up in order to get the chocolate to swirl, and mix, and become part of the milk, so much so that the milk takes on entirely new properties.

It is still milk, but it is changed into something different, to something it wasn’t before.

Well, maybe you have picked up on where I am going with this by now.

Like milk that has chocolate syrup added to it, as humans who have put our hope, faith, and trust in Jesus we have been given a gift.

The Bible says in...

2 Corinthians 1:21-22 NLT 21 It is God who enables us, along with you, to stand firm for Christ. He has commissioned us, 22 and he has identified us as his own by placing the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the first installment that guarantees everything he has promised us.

When a person becomes a follower of Jesus the Holy Spirit enters into their body and takes up residence.

And we love that don’t we? The idea that the living God resides with us and in us. That is special and worth getting excited about.

But you know, like milk that has Chocolate syrup added to it that just sinks to the bottom, as believers sometimes the Holy Spirit is just sort of left to sink to the bottom of our lives.

We wonder why things in our lives don’t change and why things just keep as they always were even though we made this life changing decision to accept Jesus and by extension, the Holy Spirit.

Well, I think it is because we expect the change to happen because the Holy Spirit was added, but we fail to recognize that while we may be justified and forgiven of our sin, until we start to allow the Holy Spirit to be stirred within us.

To become intertwined with our own spirit, that we become something completely different than we were before. Something new.

So the question is, how do we allow the Holy Spirit to stirred within us?

If you are just joining us we are in part 3 of our current series titled Downfall: Lessons from the Book of 1 Kings.

Each week we are looking at both the successes and the failures of some of the kings of Israel as we strive to learn how to lead our families.

Power in the Text

We have been focusing a lot of our attention on King Solomon and for good reason. He was a King who got a lot of things right, but he was also a king who got a lot of things wrong.

And to catch us all up, last week we discussed how Solomon had been tasked with building the temple in Jerusalem.

This temple would be a permanent dwelling where God’s presence would be among his people.

And so now we find ourselves at the end of a very long construction project, and the temple is complete. In fact it took Solomon 20 years to complete the temple along with his royal palace.

And it was customary in the day when something like this was completed to dedicate it. And being that this was God’s temple it made sense to dedicated it to him.

So our text picks up with King Solomon praying this prayer of dedication over this building and this is what he says...

1 Kings 8:22-30 NLT 22 Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in front of the entire community of Israel. He lifted his hands toward heaven, 23 and he prayed,

“O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in all of heaven above or on the earth below. You keep your covenant and show unfailing love to all who walk before you in wholehearted devotion. 24 You have kept your promise to your servant David, my father. You made that promise with your own mouth, and with your own hands you have fulfilled it today.

25 “And now, O Lord, God of Israel, carry out the additional promise you made to your servant David, my father. For you said to him, ‘If your descendants guard their behavior and faithfully follow me as you have done, one of them will always sit on the throne of Israel.’ 26 Now, O God of Israel, fulfill this promise to your servant David, my father.

27“But will God really live on earth? Why, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this Temple I have built! 28 Nevertheless, listen to my prayer and my plea, O LORD my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is making to you today. 29 May you watch over this Temple night and day, this place where you have said, ‘My name will be there.’ May you always hear the prayers I make toward this place. 30 May you hear the humble and earnest requests from me and your people Israel when we pray toward this place. Yes, hear us from heaven where you live, and when you hear, forgive.

I can’t imagine what this moment would have been like for King Solomon. Imagine the pressure that he would have felt.

He had huge shoes to fill after his father King David. It was his father that first received the plan for the temple but it was Solomon who would build it.

Imagine your father dying and one of his last wishes was to complete this vision he had for something so grand and so holy. The fear of letting him down would have been tremendous.

Not only that, but knowing that God himself had commissioned you to construct something so special that it had never been done before.

The last time God’s presence dwelt with humans in this kind of capacity would have been in the Garden of Eden before the fall, and Solomon has to build this temple that wouldn’t just be a place that honored God or pointed people to him, it would house his presence.

Big Idea

In this prayer Solomon in a lot of ways is recognizing that his only way forward, his only way to lead his people as their King and to do it well is to do so in the presence, power, and protection of God.

Solomon knew that no matter what he faced as King, if he remembered the promises God made to his father David and to him that God’s presence would always guide him.

Now, I mentioned last week that maybe in your family, you did not start out well. You made a lot of mistakes and it seems like it is too late to do anything about it.

But there is hope and just because you did not start out well, it doesn’t mean you can’t finish well.

But like King Solomon, If we want to move forward in confidence that God’s presence, power, and protection will guide us as we lead, we must commit ourselves to prayer.

1 Kings 8:29-30 NLT 29 May you watch over this Temple night and day, this place where you have said, ‘My name will be there.’ May you always hear the prayers I make toward this place. 30 May you hear the humble and earnest requests from me and your people Israel when we pray toward this place. Yes, hear us from heaven where you live, and when you hear, forgive.

King Solomon here is showing us the benefit of God’s presence and that is the fact that we can come to him in prayer and we can have confidence that he hears us.

Why it Matters

Solomon’s prayer is important because it speaks to what it looks like to honor God.

Recognizes...

God’s incomparability (v. 23 “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in all of heaven above or on the earth below.)

His trustworthiness (v. 24 24 You have kept your promise to your servant David, my father. You made that promise with your own mouth, and with your own hands you have fulfilled it today.)

His transcendence (v. 27 “But will God really live on earth? Why, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this Temple I have built!)

For the second time in the account of Solomon’s reign, God appears to Solomon to commission and validate him as Israel’s leader. Again, God uses the history of Israel to remind Solomon that his place is among others whom God has chosen to lead.

1 Kings 9:4-5 NLT 4 “As for you, if you will follow me with integrity and godliness, as David your father did, obeying all my commands, decrees, and regulations, 5 then I will establish the throne of your dynasty over Israel forever. For I made this promise to your father, David: ‘One of your descendants will always sit on the throne of Israel.’

God reminds Solomon that the Lord will be present with him and Israel so long as they keep the requirements of the law.

Earlier I mention the illustration with the chocolate milk. And I asked the question how prevent the Holy Spirit from simply being an add on to our lives rather than a part of it?

How do allow this stirring and mixing, ultimately transformation to take place that we become something else that what we were before.

So that we can lead our families better than before… It starts with prayer.

Application/Closing

We need to understand that when it comes to leading our families we are wholly inadequate for the task on our own.

That doesn’t mean we won’t do anything right, but it does mean that there will be a lot that we get wrong.

It is only by prayer that we will position ourselves in such a way that we can lead well.

Praying for our families...

Grounds our priorities

I say this a lot but I can’t say it enough because the stakes are too high. The enemy wants to destroy your family. He wants it to fail because the family was always meant to be the backbone of a godly society.

And one of the ways he tries to do this is by getting us to shift our priorities away from the things that God would have us prioritize and on to things the world says we must prioritize.

Provide wisdom when difficult decisions need to be made

Your family, like all families will face hard decisions. There will be times when no matter how much you weigh the options and consider the facts, you just don’t know what to decide.

And what is crazy to me, as that as followers of Jesus we have access to the creator of the universe who has all power and knowledge of all that is.

Yet we don’t go to him when we need guidance and direction. Instead we stress ourselves out to no end because we don’t know what to do. PRAY

Anchors us when things get difficult

Every family struggles with difficulty… tragedy, loss, betrayal, financial, relational, you name it.

If we aren’t anchored in prayer then when that difficulty comes we will be tossed and thrown about left to drown in the chaos of the storm

But if we are people who are anchored in prayer, and we know God because we spend time in his presence, the no matter what comes. We won’t drown.

The truth his prayer is the single most powerful tool you have at your disposal when it comes to leading your family.

According to a study by Love Awake, while 50% of first time marriages end in divorce, and 80% of second marriages end in divorce, did you know that less than 1% of couples who pray together end their marriage in divorce?

If you and I want to lead well, we have to do so in the presence of God, and we enter into that presence through a commitment to prayer.