How’s Your Prayer Life?

INTRODUCTION

Our friends know us pretty well.

They see how we spend our money.

They know how we dress, how we conduct ourselves.

Our friends can describe our personality, our moods.

They have an idea about whether we are generous or stingy.

People pick up on clues about whether we are people of faith.

Sadly, our friends are aware of at least some of our faults—sometimes they see faults we aren’t even aware of.

They can hear our conversation, whether we express gratitude and love and kindness and affirmation of the worth of other people—or they see us as complainers and critics.

Our friends know what is important to us—TV, sports, books, music, family.

But there is one part of our lives that people are unlikely to ever know about because it’s not something we share with other people. It may be important to us, but others don’t see it.

And that hidden part of our life is our prayer life.

Our prayer life is hidden from the view of other people—but it makes all the difference.

Because how we pray directs our life—our priorities, our usefulness, how we use our money, how we relate to others—and even our eternal destiny.

Our prayer life is the mainspring of our life for God, the part that makes everything else go.

Prayer is a mark of a believer.

After unbelieving Saul of Tarsus met Jesus on the Damascus road, the Lord came to the prophet Ananias and told him: “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying.”

Saul was a dangerous man. He had sent Christians to their death. But when God sent Ananias to meet Saul he gave as evidence for Saul’s change of heart: “He is praying.”

I have been seriously trying to live for God for 67 years—ever since I was 18, when one week in December 1948 I understood what it means to live for God. It was during that week at a student Christian conference that I understood what it meant to have Jesus as the Lord of my life.

I remember that time well. I remember especially a Bible verse that opened up the way to faith. It was 1 Corinthians 6:20: “You are not your own. You were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body.”

I look back through those years with thankfulness. In the 67 years since, I have enjoyed many blessings, narrow escapes, kindnesses from other people, and a little success in living for God.

But in this matter of prayer, I am still in the kindergarten.

I have read books about how to pray. I have listened to sermons about prayer. I have taken part in many prayer meetings. I have shared stories about answers to prayer with others and listened as they shared their stories with me.

But I confess, I am still a beginner.

I’m not an expert on prayer. I am still learning. I’m still in the kindergarten.

But I’ve made a little progress—and that’s the important thing.

Maybe something I will tell you will encourage you.

I. Prayer is so prominent in the Bible because prayer is how we connect with God.

A. We connect with God by speaking to him, by keeping him in mind, by considering his ways, by experiencing his love, by reliving the gospel stories in our imagination, by admiring his goodness, by praise and thanksgiving.

Some people say they listen to his voice—and who’s to say that powerful thoughts and impulses in our minds aren’t God speaking to us?

Sometimes God speaks to us in our consciences, convicting us of sin in our lives.

Sometimes God speaks to us by impressing on us something we must do today.

Sometimes God speaks to us by showing us someone we need to help—some practical way to express our love—a way to put our faith to work.

B. Sometimes our personal needs take over our prayer life, and our prayers are simply our instructions to God of what we want him to do for us today. Sometimes they are cries for help.

Our prayers can become very selfish. I know. It’s hard to take myself out of the center of my life and put God in the place where he belongs. This is a never-ending battle.

II. So today I want to try to broaden our view of prayer and encourage myself and you to make prayer all it should be—as a way of drawing ourselves to God, experiencing his reality, his power, his love, his wisdom.

A. One of the best ways to connect with Jesus and to experience him as our constant companion is by giving thanks.

To take time to thank God for the good we experience opens our hearts to his love.

So generally, I begin my prayers with thanking God for something specific that I am experiencing.

Psychologists tell us that one of the surest ways to lift our mood from gloomy to happy is to name the good things that have happened today.

But we who are followers of Jesus carry that farther. We don’t just “be thankful,” we thank God as the giver of all that’s good.

Some Christians have said that we should thank God for everything, even the bad things. That’s wrong. Bad things are bad things and we can’t make ourselves think they are good. God doesn’t send illness, tragedy, setbacks, and disappointments into our lives.

But God uses illness, tragedy, setbacks, and disappointments to help us grow in faith and to draw us closer to himself.

I can learn humility from a humiliating experience. I can learn dependence on God. I can learn to empathize with other people who have similar experiences. Sometimes my troubles help me to connect and help other people who experience similar setbacks.

Wisdom and spiritual strength comes from the struggles of life. So we thank God that he is with us in our struggles and uses us to draw him closer to ourselves.

B. But for most of us the biggest part of our prayer life is bringing our needs to God and opening our lives to his working in us.

St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians (4:4-7):

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

The gospels recall over and over the encouragement Jesus gave his disciples to make their needs known to God.

A few weeks ago in our Bible study in Matthew, we talked about these sayings from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened.”

Some of us have trouble with these scriptures that seem to teach that if we pray hard enough we will never be disappointed. There are many reasons why it would be simply impossible for God to routinely give us everything we ask for.

We may ask for things that are not good for us.

We may be asking for things that will make life easier, but will not make us better people.

We may ask for things that depend on the free will of someone else. We may ask God for the salvation of a friend or family member—and that’s a good prayer—but salvation also depends on the free choice of the person we are praying for.

Remember that one of the most important prayers Jesus made—when he prayed in the garden for hours in agony—was not answered the way he asked. He begged God to remove the cup of suffering he was about to experience at the Cross. He evidently suspected that his request wouldn’t be granted and added to his prayer: “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done” (Mark 14:36).

C. But there is one kind of prayer that we can pray that we know is always in the will of God. And that is prayer that the Christian graces will become rooted in our lives.

We were pleased that at our granddaughter’s wedding last January, our daughter read these verses from Paul’s letter to the Colossians (3:12-14): “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

We won’t go wrong praying for more love, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness. And the more earnestly we ask for God to work his graces in our lives, the more we’ll cooperate with him as he answers those prayers.

III. I want to end this message with a practical suggestion that has enriched my own prayer life in the last few years. And that is the use of the prayers of other more godly believers have prayed in times past.

A. The Bible is full of prayers that we can use just as they are and make our own.

Every night as I pray after I have gotten into bed. Here is one I use from Psalm 4 and Psalm 31:

I will both lie down and sleep in peace;

for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety…

Into your hand I commit my spirit;

you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.

As you read your Bible take your pencil and underline the verses you can make into prayers.

B. I also like to pray with the saints.

Some people think that real prayers have to be always composed on the spot. That’s as foolish as supposing that we are not to sing a hymn to God composed by someone else. We once went to a church in which, in the middle of the service everyone stood up and began singing, each person making up the words and music as they went on. It was amazing. But most of us find that the words of other godly men and women enrich our song service.

In the same way, the words of godly men and women in the past enrich my prayer life.

Over the years I have collected and memorized not only prayers from the Bible but prayers of believers from the past that express what I want to—more effectively than I can.

I would like to share some of my prayers I use with you. I have prepared these little books of prayers. Some of them go back to the early centuries of the church. I find it deeply satisfying to pray prayers that have been used through the centuries by people of faith.

For example, there’s a prayer from St. Augustine, who lived from A.D. 354 to 430, that I repeat every night as soon as I get in bed. It is a simple prayer:

Watch, dear Lord,

with those who wake or watch or weep tonight,

and give your angels charge over those who sleep.

Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ.

Rest your weary ones.

Bless your dying ones.

Soothe your suffering ones.

Pity your afflicted ones.

Shield your joyous ones.

And all for your love’s sake. Amen.

As I use the words of believers from the past, I feel myself in fellowship with people of God from long ago—part of the great tradition of faith that has been passed down through the ages and had finally reached me.

There are two ways you can use this book. You can simply read the prayers, making the words on the page your own prayer to God.

But there’s a better way to use the great prayers of the past. Pick one prayer that you like and memorize it. Use it every day, maybe when you go to bed or when you wake up.

It will become like an old friend to you, and eventually it will just come onto your lips.

I have memorized many prayers—but start slow—one a week or one a month.

Here is another prayer I use every morning as I wake up, before I get out of bed. It is from Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, one of the translators of the King James Bible. Bishop Andrewes lived from 1555 to 1626:

Thou, who sendest forth the light,

createst the morning,

makest the sun to shine on the good and on the evil:

enlighten the blindness of our minds

with the knowledge of the truth.

Lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us,

that in thy light we may see light,

and, at the last, in the light of grace, the light of glory.

Maybe that’s a little more than you want to tackle right away. So how about this little prayer from Aelred of Rievaulx, who was the abbot of a monastery, the ruins of which we visited in Yorkshire, in northern England. Here is the prayer:

Lord, may your good, sweet spirit descend into my heart,

and fashion there a dwelling for himself.

CONCLUSION

An alcoholic patient was placed in a room with three other patients who did nothing but scream. When night came, he prayed to be able to sleep, but the screams continued.

Then suddenly he changed his approach. He began to pray for his three roommates. “May God give you peace,” he said quietly over and over. Finally, the screams stopped. “Not only that,” the alcoholic reported later, “it was as if something broke in me. Praying for them released my own tension. I was free.”

A short time later he was well enough to go home.

Sometimes our prayers actually change things.

Sometimes our prayers change us.

Sometimes they do both.

John 11:46-51, Mark 15:16-30, and Mark 15:31-32: The Witness of Jesus's Enemies to the Meaning of the Cross

INTRODUCTION

A bishop in France told this story.

A group of rowdy students, who had long since given up any pretense of faith, were passing by a church in Paris. Suddenly, one of them dared another to go in, seek out a priest and offer to make a confession—and then tell the priest that he had no confession to make, and that he didn’t believe a word of the Christian message.

The student went in, found the priest and entered the confessional booth—and then blurted out that he really wasn’t serious. He had simply acted on a dare.

The priest said to him, “Son, since you like to accept a challenge, I’ll give you one. I dare you to go over to that crucifix hanging there, look up into the face of Christ and say slowly: ‘You died for me—and I don’t give a damn.’”

The young man went to the foot of the cross and looked up for a moment or two. No words came. Then he returned and said to the priest: “Father, I now want to make my confession.”

The bishop who told the story paused at the end of it and said, “I know the story is true—for I was that young man.”

There’s a reason why the central symbol of our faith is a cross.

There’s a reason why the central sacrament of our faith is the Communion Service, or Lord’s Supper, or, in Catholic Churches, the Mass.

There’s a reason why Good Friday and Easter are the holiest times in the church calendar.

When St. Paul wrote his letter to the Church at Corinth, he wrote of his earlier visit to their city: “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2.:2).

And when he came to the end of the same letter St. Paul wrote, “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).

I regret that in these services I have spoken so seldom on this central fact of the Christian faith. In your churches the importance of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is kept front and center by the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

Because each of your denominations has different rules about who is to minister communion, the words the minister is to read, and the form of the bread and wine or grape juice, we can’t serve communion here.

Some of your churches have pastors or laypeople who regularly come to places like this to serve Communion to you. You might ask about that.

But we can do the next best thing. We can review the story of the Cross and remind ourselves of the this most fact of our Faith.

Recently I have been considering some of the statements Jesus’s enemies made that unwittingly went to the heart of the deep meaning of the death of Jesus on Good Friday more than 2000 years ago.

Sometimes we say the opposite of what we intend—for emphasis. An example might be: a long-suffering mother opens the door to her teen-aged son and exclaims, “What a beautiful room! You get the prize!” But what she really means is that the room is a hopeless mess and the only prize the kid deserves is the booby-prize.

English teachers call this “irony.” Sometimes we say the opposite of what we mean for humor, and sometimes we use irony for emphasis.

Sometimes the irony is unintended.

Three times in the story of the crucifixion Jesus’s enemies made bitter statements of condemnation that actually opened up the deep meaning of the Cross.

I. My first example is in John 11. Jesus’s enemies, alarmed at Jesus’s influence with the crowds, feared that Jesus’s popularity would cause an uprising against the Romans, which would upset the comfortable order of things.

The nation’s leaders—the chief priests and scribes—said, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”

But one of them Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”

John adds, “He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation.”

Actually, the nation was destroyed 40 years later, but it was because the nation had rejected Jesus. The irony was that one man did die for the people. Jesus’s death didn’t save the nation from the Romans as Caiaphas intended, but his death was the way of salvation, not only for the nation of Israel, but for the whole world.

So John tells us that Caiaphas’s words were an unintended prophecy of the meaning of Jesus’s death.

II. My second example is in Mark 15 (verses 16-20). We read that after Jesus was condemned by the council the soldiers took him to the courtyard of the palace and called together the whole company of soldiers. “They stripped him and put a purple robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head.”

Then Roman soldiers mocked Jesus, bowing down and shouting, “Hail, king of the Jews!” Matthew adds that they gave him a stick to hold, pretending it was a “scepter.” Then they spit on him in a pretense of “kissing” him. In this way they nor only show their contempt for Jesus but also for the Jewish nation.

But the reader knows that—in spite of the soldiers’ intention to ridicule Jesus, he is, in truth the king. The ignominy of his death actually enhances Christ’s glory because the glory of our Savior is not his almighty power but his humility and self-giving love.

The Medieval believers had a saying: “He reigns from the Cross.” In the glorious medieval cathedrals we saw in Europe, at the front of the worship area there would be, high up, a fresco or mosaic of Christ Almighty in Glory. But below that—even more prominent was a crucifix—Christ on the Cross—paying the price for our redemption.

So the purple robe, the crown of thorns, the stick scepter and the kneeling before him in the pretense of worshiping—although intended to ridicule him—really represented homage to Christ’s kingship and his greatest glory.

When believers wanted to be reminded of God’s great love and the cost of their redemption, they looked to the cross.

That is why it was the custom in medieval times, that when a believer came to die, a priest or loved one would hold a cross before the dying person’s eyes so that it would be the last thing they would see in this world.

III. My third example of irony at the Cross that held deep meaning is also in Mark 15 (vv31-32). As Jesus hung on the cross for those six hours, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, we read, “The chief priests, along with the scribes were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.”

A. The taunt, “He saved others; he cannot save himself” was actually the deepest truth about the meaning of the crucifixion of our Lord. Salvation could only come through the self-giving of the Son of God, who bore in his own body the sin of the world.

The Cross of Christ is at the heart of our faith. We put it on our church buildings and wear it around our necks.

The Cross is at the heart of the central service of our worship—the Lord’s Supper, Communion, or, as Catholics call it, the Mass. We take the bread and the wine as the body and blood of Jesus our Savior, who gave himself for us.

“He saved others; he could not save himself,” his enemies taunted, speaking a deeper truth than they imagined.

Jesus paid an awful price for our salvation. We know that Jesus faced his death with dread. He begged his heavenly Father to spare him that death. In the Garden, in the hours before he was arrested, he sweat as it were great drops of blood, and he prayed, “Let this cup pass from me...”

And then he went bravely to his death—his death that you and I might live.

B. In the early days of history of our faith made it clear, over and over, that salvation comes through the death of Jesus.

In Romans (5:6), St. Paul wrote: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

St. Peter also put the Cross at the center of the faith. In 1 Peter (2.24) we read, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

And St. John writes (in 1 John 1.7): “If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

CONCLUSION

During the war between the Red Army and the White Russian Army, after the Russian Revolution, a young woman whose husband was in the White Army found herself trapped behind the Red Army lines with her two children. She found a little hut on the outskirts of town where she hid herself and her children.

One night she heard a knock on the door. It was a neighbor who she hardly knew, a young woman named Natalie. The woman told her she must flee because she had been betrayed. The Red Army would be there in the morning and would kill her.

The young mother told Natalie that she couldn’t go because as soon as they found the hut empty they would be after her and with her two children.

“Go!” Natalie said, “I will stay. When they, come they will find me.”

“But then they will kill you?” the woman said.

“It is all right,” Natalie said, “I have no children; you do. Now go!”

And the mother and her children went, leaving Natalie behind. They escaped, and in the morning when the Red Army came Natalie opened the door. She was instantly shot.

Sometimes it is costly to love…

For God it is costly to love.

What Natalie did for the young mother and her children is only a dim reflection of what it meant for Jesus to die for the sins of the world. Theologians have written big books to explain how Jesus’s death could pay the penalty for all the sin that has infested the world from the beginning until now and until the end of the world.

I have read some of those books, but I still have questions. But this is the truth we believe and hold in our hearts and live out in our lives.

Somehow in those hours while Jesus hung on the cross at Golgotha and suffered and died, all the sin and evil of the world burnt itself out in him.

A Catholic theologian put it this way: “The most inward and most fiery suffering of Christ’s passion was not what he suffered directly in what befell him personally; but what he tasted of the ocean of all human suffering by the fullness of divine insight and divine depth of compassion—the whole detailed record, past, present, future, being unrolled before his gaze while he hung on the cross” (George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, page 328).

Almost 1000 years ago a godly monk wrote a hymn in Latin that contained these words:

What thou, my Lord, hast suffered

was all for sinner’s gain.

Mine, mine was the transgression,

but thine the deadly pain.

Lo, here I fall my Savior;

tis I deserve thy place

What language can I borrow

to thank thee, dearest Friend

for this thy dying sorrow,

thy pity without end.

O make me thine for ever

and should I fainting bem

Lord, let me never, never

outlive my love for thee.

(Hymn: “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,”

Latin hymn, attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century)