Moving beyond the theology of prayer, this message challenges believers to actively practice coming into the very presence of God. By embracing the necessary cost of daily devotion, we can transform prayer from an irksome duty into an experience of joy with Christ.
Transcript
Over the last four weeks, we’ve been looking at what it takes, really, to become a man or woman of prayer. To be able to pray prayers that God hears. To come before the Lord like James describes:
“The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.”
In the very first week, we looked at that text and we began to explore what it means to be a righteous person. We have no righteousness in ourselves, and so looking at coming to God in a relationship with God, in fellowship with God, having been washed in the blood of Christ, given new birth and life in Christ, and living in fellowship with Christ. That’s part of what it means to be an effective prayer warrior, is that we have a relationship with Christ so that Christ hears us. Jesus said, “Abide in me.” And what He meant by that is sharing His spiritual life and striving to live and walk the same way Jesus lived.
In one sense, the things that we were talking about are basic Christianity. This is fundamental to what it means to be a Christian, is to be able to come to God in this way, to pray to Him in this way. And yet, these are some of the deepest things in Christianity. What we’ve been talking about, to, as Jesus said, “abide in me,” if you abide in me, He says:
“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask what you will, and it will be done for you.”
To do those two things means:
- Abiding in Him: Sharing His spiritual life, striving to live and walk the same way Jesus lived and walked.
- Letting the Word of God abide in you: Knowing the Word. It certainly means that some of the Word you’ve hidden in your heart, you can at least paraphrase it, you know what the Scripture says, and you believe it, and you exercise it, you obey it.
And then we talked about what happens when we let sin, and this is a regular thing in this world, interfere with that relationship with God, and that fellowship is broken. So we talked about walking in the light and coming to the Word of God and letting the Word of God convict us of our sin, which is like letting God’s light shine into our heart, and repenting of that sin so that our relationship with God is restored.
Praying in Jesus’ Name
We spent one week talking about praying in Jesus’ name and what that means. Because we punctuate our prayers with that and close it off. So what we talked about that week is, we said that praying in Jesus’ name means coming through Christ’s authority and through His merit. Because we don’t have a record that can merit a relationship with God at all. In fact, our record would just bring judgment. And yet Christ in His mercy has done a perfect work for us, and we come before God, as we read this morning, through the veil of His flesh. We come through the work of Jesus Christ, we come through Christ’s authority and through His merit. We have merit because His merit has been imputed to us, given to us.
We also said that praying in Jesus’ name means that we are coming in the authority and name of Christ. And in doing that, it’s only reasonable that we pray in the character of Christ. Our prayers align with Christ’s nature and His attributes and His heart. We’re not praying things that He wouldn’t want. To come in the name of Christ means that we are praying in His name, it means that we are coming with our hearts aligned with His heart. And we’re relying on His mediation and we’re praying for His glory.
Seeking the Will of God
And we also looked last week at how prayer isn’t like pagan magic, where you try to bend God’s will to your will. You say the magic formulas so that you can achieve the things that you want. It’s not like that at all, and it’s not just pagans that believe that. There are preachers today that basically preach the same thing. Rather we come seeking the ultimate will of God because that’s the best thing, the best thing of all. We come praying, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done.” And we pray even for our daily needs in an unselfish way.
So these are some of the foundational things. Just touching on a few of the things we’ve talked about. Lots of teaching, really. If you look back at all those things and you bottom out point by point, there’s a lot of things. I know that it has affected me because I needed reminders of some of these things. But my concern is, we’re going to leave this topic for a little while, and I wonder if we will be affected by it ultimately in any real way, any significant way.
A Crisis of Faith and True Spirituality
I remember Francis Schaeffer, back in the 1950s, he had been preaching at a church for 10 years, and he had a crisis of faith, in a sense. He began to wonder, first of all, if any of the preaching that he had done had affected anybody in the church. And then he began to wonder if it had affected him. And so he took a leave of absence from the church and he began to explore the problem. He actually went back to the very beginning and started looking and studying to see if God is real. He went back to that foundational point and went from there, recognizing his faith is genuine and there’s real substance. We have good reason to believe in God. And everything else that follows, and we cannot possibly approach God apart from the work of Jesus Christ and the perfection of the gospel account. He exercised all those things.
And as a result of that, he wrote the book True Spirituality. And he realized that the church in the world then, and the church in the world probably today, does its things, gets involved in all sorts of things, works its practices, prays its prayers, and often does so as if the natural world is all there is. Let me see if I can paraphrase a question that comes up in that book. He says:
“If you woke up one morning and opened your Bible and there was nothing about prayer or the Holy Spirit in the book, not removed the way a liberal would remove it, through a misinterpretation, but actually removed, would it make any difference?”
And he said for a lot of churches and a lot of Christians, it wouldn’t make any difference at all. Because they don’t live their life with a spiritual mindset looking at the world as truly controlled by God and seeking God spiritually. I’m afraid he might be right. And as I explore it, as I think about the way we pray, I want us to move from all these details, all these truths, all the theology of prayer, I want us to put that to work in our life in a real way.
The Difference Between Theology and Practice
J.I. Packer pointed out that theology of prayer is really important because you have to know what the Bible says about prayer to be able to practice it. But he says just focusing on the theology, things like what it means to pray in the name of Christ, and His intercession and His work, it can leave you without knowing how to pray. You can know and believe something about what it means to pray rightly in Jesus’ name and not truly pray in Jesus’ name. And so the theology, if it’s just alone, if it’s not mixed with faith, if it’s not put into practice, is an empty thing.
When I was in college, I had some friends that were true football fanatics. They knew everything. They followed the NFL, they played fantasy football. They knew all the rules of the game, they knew the strategies, the statistics, the teams, and the players. They would go around and play the board game, and if they played it using the season’s statistics for the players, the outcome was often not too far off from the actual games as they played out. But with all they knew, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if any one of them actually took to the field to an actual professional football game, to be the quarterback that they imagined themselves to be. I kind of have a feeling that if that actually happened, it wouldn’t be just their dreams and fantasies that’d be crushed.
See, the problem for us is that we can understand a lot of truth about God’s Word. We can understand the details of prayer and never do it. Not really. We can fall back into our own routine when we offer prayers, say the same words that we always say, and never really pray. That’s my struggle. We need to recognize prayer is a difficult thing. It’s not easy to cultivate a life of prayer. One preacher confessed:
“One of the most difficult and challenging tasks I have is to have a fervent and vibrant prayer life. Over the years, my success in prayer has been more intermittent than persistent. There’s been times when I’ve gotten hold of the hem of His garment, but I’ve not always been able to sustain the grasp.”
That’s really true. Prayer isn’t a casual thing. We fall into it out of habit. Our attitude and thinking, how we’re approaching prayer is an important part of the key to it.
The Cost of Opportunity
There is a cost, a price to pay that we need to acknowledge. Jesus said that’s true of all discipleship. In Matthew 16, He told His disciples:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Now when we were talking about our prayers earlier, one of the things we mentioned was that it’s so easy to offer selfish prayers. We need to experience self-sacrifice in the prayers we offer. But praying itself, just to take time to pray itself involves sacrifice.
In economics, they have a term called opportunity cost. In business, if you decide your company is going to carry a line of products, your money and expenses and resources are going to be spent on developing that line so that you can possibly make a profit. What you give up when you do that is developing another line of products. You won’t be able to do that one because you won’t have the resources. You have to decide, will I lose out if I make that choice? What am I giving up in order to do this one thing? It’s the same way with investments. Invest your money in one company, you can’t invest it in another. There’s a cost to doing something.
Our lives are busy, filled with things we need to do or would like to do. If we spend time in devotion to God in prayer, that means we will likely give up something that we would like to do. There’s a cost to taking time to pray. I think maybe that’s part of the reason that we tend to think of prayer as a duty we must do. When we think about praying, we think, “Well, I don’t really want to do this, but I need to do it, I’m going to do my Bible reading today, and I’m going to spend a little time praying, because I really ought to do it.” We miss out a lot when that becomes our attitude.
There is a cost to pay, there’s no question about that. But there’s also a blessing to receive. The greatest blessings to receive. Jesus said, “The one who loses his life for my sake will find it.” That little part of your life that you’re going to give up there, you will find true life. That’s the promise.
Finding Joy in His Presence
In contrast to thinking about prayer as an irksome duty, throughout this series we’ve talked about men in the Bible and in church history that were powerful prayer warriors. We talked about George Müller and John Nelson Hyde. I found those biographies to be really interesting.
When people described George Müller, he was an incredibly joyful man. You’d think, if you had the weight of thousands of orphans on your shoulders and all the other things that he was involved in, he’d be a bit anxious. But he wasn’t anxious. He was a man filled with joy, and one of the things that marked his life was his joy in every part of his life, his domestic life was absolutely filled with joy. He described his marriage to Mary, his wife, as completely joy-filled. He would frequently tell her, “My darling, do you think that there’s a couple in Bristol or in the world happier than we are?” That’s a joyful person.
And then there’s John Nelson Hyde. When he began his missionary work, his fellow missionaries described him as withdrawn and kind of melancholy. That was his natural nature. He was a bit reclusive, he liked to get alone to himself. He could get depressed easily. But as he developed spiritually, he became known for his abundant joy. The thing that marked a lot of people when they met him, was they would begin to feel peaceful and joyful.
I don’t think that either of these men viewed prayer as an irksome duty or a chore to be done. I believe that their joy comes from the fact that more than almost anyone, these men were experiencing the presence of God in their life in profound ways. And when you experience the presence of God, you’re going to have joy. You’re going to have joy no matter what the circumstance is.
Even in dark, depressing times. Read Müller’s life when he lost his child. Sorrow, but joy. When God makes His presence known to you, you feel joy. I was in a hospital in 1986 waiting for a report for my dad. The doctor comes out and he tells us that my dad has gone. There was deep sorrow. But in that moment, I experienced the presence of the Lord. And with the sorrow, I felt joy. When we experience the presence of God, we experience joy.
Entering the Presence of God
This should tell us something about our prayers. R.A. Torrey said:
“A person should never utter one syllable of prayer, either in public or in private, until we are definitely conscious that we have come into the presence of God and are actually praying to Him.”
That’s really important. Because we can be praying prayers just to ourselves. The same things we say over and over. The empty words that we have by habit and rote repeat. Those are just words. Prayer is when we are talking to the Lord, and He hears us. We are in His presence.
When we realize we’re in the presence of God, prayer is not an irksome duty, it’s a great privilege. We begin to experience the actual presence of God, the infinite, transcendent, omnipotent God in all His majesty, who we come to as our Father, who loves us. Our hearts will be changed. And the kinds of prayers we pray will be changed. We find our life.
Let me pray for us.
Father, I am so thankful for the incredible cost that Christ paid to make us His sheep. To wash us from our sins, to clean us up, to make us presentable, to perfect us, and ultimately one day glorify us. The cost that He undertook and paid on the cross, the cost of His very life, every good deed, every perfect thing that He worked in this world, the infinite cost of bearing the penalty of our sin. Father, when we think about all of that, it is overwhelming to us. And it is that that gives us access to Your presence. It is that that enables us to know that when we are talking this morning, we are talking to You here. I thank You, Father, for hearing our prayers. I pray, Lord, that You change our heart to seek You, to find the joy of Your presence. And Lord, I pray that that changes the way we pray, the kinds of requests we make. And Lord, we pray indeed that Your name be hallowed, and Your will be done. This we truly ask, coming to You through the authority of our Savior, the Lord Jesus. Amen.