Prayer

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O Lord, in prayer I launch far out into the eternal world, and on that broad ocean my soul triumphs over all evils on the shores of mortality.
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Time with its gay amusements and cruel disappointments never appears so inconsiderate as then. In prayer
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I see myself as nothing, I find my heart going after Thee with intensity, and long with vehement thirst to live to Thee.
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Blessed be the strong gales of the Spirit that speed me on my way to the New Jerusalem. In prayer all things here below vanish, and nothing seems important but holiness of heart and the salvation of others.
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In prayer all my worldly cares, fears, anxieties disappear and are of as little significance as a puff of wind.
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In prayer my soul inwardly exults with lively thoughts at what Thou art doing for Thy Church, and I long that Thou shouldst get
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Thyself a great name from sinners returning to Zion. In prayer
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I am lifted above the frowns and flatteries of life, and taste heavenly joys. Entering into the eternal world,
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I can give myself to Thee with all my heart to be Thine forever. In prayer
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I can place all my concerns in Thy hands to be entirely at Thy disposal, having no will or interest of my own.
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In prayer I can intercede for my friends, ministers, sinners, the Church, Thy kingdom to come, with greatest freedom, ardent hopes, as a son to His Father, as a lover to the
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Beloved. Help me to be all prayer, and never to cease praying.
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Amen. That was a prayer from the Valley of Vision, which explains why
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I stumbled through some of it, because it was written hundreds of years ago or whatever. So this morning we're going to be talking about prayer.
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Prayer is something that is an absolutely critical component to being a
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Christian, to the life of a Christian. It's so important that Don Whitney called it the second most important discipline of the
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Christian life behind only Bible intake through preaching, reading, studying, etc. I think we know that prayer is critical, intellectually we know this, this is what
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Wayne Grudem said. He said, no matter how intelligent, if the student does not continue to pray for God to give him or her an understanding mind and a believing and humble heart, and the student does not maintain a personal walk with the
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Lord, then the teachings of Scripture will be misunderstood and disbelieved, doctrinal error will result, and the mind and heart of the student will not be changed for the better, but for the worse.
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Students of systematic theology should resolve at the beginning to keep their lives free from any disobedience to God or any known sin that would disrupt their relationship with Him.
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They should resolve to maintain with great regularity their own personal devotional lives. They should continually pray for wisdom and understanding of Scripture.
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Another commentator wrote about the importance of prayer and he said, without prayer and reading Scripture, all other Christian disciplines are empty and powerless.
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So, of course, as I was studying this, I've been convicted about my lack of adequate prayer. You know, I think introspectively almost every
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Christian, you know, will look back and say, you know, I haven't, probably haven't been praying enough. So, we'll talk about this later.
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Do you have that first Thessalonians 5 .17 mindset of praying without ceasing? That's the question.
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Let me ask you guys this question. There was a poll that was done in the 90s. It polled something like 20 ,000 evangelical
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Christians, self -proclaimed evangelical Christians about how much time they spent in prayer per day.
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Anybody want to take a guess what that number might have been in, I don't know, minutes? What was that over here?
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Two minutes? I have a two minutes? Three? You can't answer because you know the answer. Anyone else?
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Ten. Ten minutes a day. Okay, we're getting there. How many minutes are in a day?
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Does anybody know? 1 ,440 minutes in a day. I figured, you know, anybody know?
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I figured Becky over here might know. Blessed assurance, Becky. Yeah, so there's 1 ,440 minutes in a day.
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And remember, these are self -proclaimed evangelical Christians. It said on average they spent less than seven minutes a day in prayer.
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So, if you do the math, which is what I do, you know, that's less than one half of one percent of their day they spend praying to the
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God of the universe. I mean, prayer is not an uncommon topic that we see in sermons.
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Who here has heard a sermon on prayer that went beyond simply the exhortation that, hey, you need to pray?
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Anybody actually heard a couple of people? Okay, good. A couple of people over here, too. Good. So, I was thinking about this as I taught a similar message to Cornerstone a couple of weeks ago.
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And the conviction that I had when I was teaching on this, we were working through spiritual disciplines in Christian life or something like that, was that a lot of the time we talk about prayer, but we stop at you need to pray.
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And so how can we really understand prayer, what it is, why we do it, et cetera? And so that's my goal here.
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Has anybody seen All the President's Men, the movie? All the President's Men? One person? A long time ago.
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All the President's Men, it's a movie about Woodward and Bernstein, the reporters who broke the
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Watergate scandal. It's Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. It's actually a really great movie. It's on the
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AFI top 100 movies of all time. But the thing about this movie that this struck me with as far as prayer is concerned is that you see
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Woodward and Bernstein, and they grasp this idea that there's this puzzle, this mystery that they need to solve, and they want to know everything about it.
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I mean, this movie is the picture of investigative journalism is what this is.
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They're going to all these different people. They're asking all these different questions. And faced with this mystery, they just kept searching, kept hunting, asking questions.
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So that's what we're going to do with prayer today. We're going to go through. We're going to answer the five W's on prayer.
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It's not comprehensive. I only have 40 minutes, so there's really no way I could cover everything. But I do want to walk through these because I think this really fleshes out our perspective and gives us a really good idea of what prayer is, how we are to treat prayer, how it should fit into our lives.
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So what is prayer? Anybody want to give me a definition of prayer before we go into this? Talking to God.
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Good. Yep. Excellent.
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Excellent. I really, really like that acronym, and there's reasons why, if we get to it, we'll talk about it.
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I don't know if that's going to happen. Anyone else? I thought I saw another. Just spending time with someone you love.
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Just spending time with someone you love. I like that. Wayne Gruden said, Prayer is personal communication with God.
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The New Bible Dictionary expands on that a little bit. It says, Worship that includes all the attitudes of the human spirit in its approach to God.
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The Christian worships God when he adores, confesses, praises, and supplicates Him in prayer.
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Charles Hodge said, Prayer is the converse of the soul with God. So as we hold up this prism that is prayer, because there's a lot of different aspects to it, what other kinds of phrases can we use to describe what prayer is?
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Worship and glorifying God by being dependent on Him. I like that last part. That's very, very key. Acknowledging your neediness.
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Good. Is God one -way or two -way communication with God? Is prayer one -way or two -way communication with God?
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Are you like a deacon or something? Exactly right. This is amazing because sometimes when
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I'm preparing a message, I'll just do some random Internet searches just to see what other conventional
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Christianity is saying. I tell you what. Almost every single link was prayer as a two -way communication with God.
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Almost every single one of them was. I agree with that. You agree with that? You might be beseeching
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God on something and He'll bring a scripture verse. Warm your heart in some way.
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Experientially, you receive inerrant impression.
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Right, right, right. But it is not a… So, I mean, we see the model of communication that God provides to us through scripture, right?
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So the Holy Spirit will certainly act on scripture and drive scripture to us, right?
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And there's certainly a component of the Holy Spirit acting during the course of prayer.
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You know, when I talk about communication in this way, you know, we think of a conversation, sort of.
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At least that's my mindset when we look at this. And in that regard, it kind of is a one -way thing because we're not going to be receiving audible voices from God or anything like that during prayer.
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Does God listen to all prayers? No? Okay. Exactly.
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So when I taught this before, the question was, does God hear all prayers? When we intercede for us to make our prayers, it's hard.
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Right. But when Cindy and I put our head on the pillow every night and we talked about it just the other night, isn't it nice to go to sleep knowing you've been heard?
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And we don't know what the answer is going to be, but we know we have a Father that cares about whatever we brought to Him.
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Definitely true. Definitely true. Of course, conventional mainstream Christianity would say that, of course,
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God hears all of our prayers, everything. Pray to Him. But Scripture doesn't necessarily agree with that.
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Isaiah 115 is God speaking to Judah and says, When you spread out your hands,
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I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen, for your hands are full of blood.
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Psalm 66, 17, and 18. I cried to Him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the
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Lord would not have listened. So, there is a clear example here of God will only listen if we're in a right relationship and if we're approaching
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Him in the right way. So, prayer is this intensely personal communication that fallen man has with the
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God of the universe. That is what is prayer. Who?
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To whom do we pray? There is the easy Sunday school answer, and then there is the more complicated answer. To whom do we pray?
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To the Father. To the
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Father in Jesus' name, right? So, this is another one of those things where some people sort of said really the same thing in different ways.
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Some people say you only pray to the Father, but you can pray sort of through Jesus. We have this idea of Jesus as the intercessor.
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And certainly, we have many, many models in Scripture of prayer being directed to the Father, right?
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Jesus prayed to God the Father all the time. In Matthew 6, Jesus says, but when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your
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Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
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So, we have this model of praying to the Father, our Father who art in heaven, right? So, over and over again, we have this prescriptive model of Jesus praying to the
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Father. Right, right, sure.
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Yeah, we'll get into Jesus in a moment. Yeah, we'll get into that now.
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So, like I said, the vast majority of prayers in the New Testament are directed to the Father, and that's because most of them, actually a lot of the prayer that we really see spelled out or specifically described in the
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New Testament is in the Gospels, and it's Jesus praying. So, it'd be kind of weird if he prayed to himself, you know? But there are examples of praying to Jesus.
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So, Acts 1, 24 and 25, and they prayed and said, You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen.
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Acts 7, 59, and as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.
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Acts 9, 10 through 17, Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias.
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The Lord said to him in a vision, Ananias, and he said, Here I am, Lord. And we know that conventionally in the
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Scriptures, Lord refers to Christ. And then carrying on, so Ananias, this is
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Ananias receiving the vision to go to Saul before he was called Paul. So Ananias departed and entered the house, and laying his hands on him,
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Paul, he said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the
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Holy Spirit. So there is, that's a descriptive example because you have that two -way audible communication.
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But, 1 Corinthians 16, 22, Revelation 22, 20, 2 Corinthians 12, 8, there are examples of prayer to the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Now here's, this is sort of touching on what Bruce was saying.
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Hebrews refers to Christ as a merciful and faithful high priest in Hebrews 2, 17.
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Listen to what Hebrews says in chapter 4, verses 14 to 16. Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,
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Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
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Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
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So when Christ is on the cross at Calvary and He gives up His Spirit, the veil is torn in two.
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And that is a very symbolic thing. It's symbolic of the separation between God and man.
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And that separation being shredded, torn in half by Christ and His work.
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And Christ essentially serves as our intercessor now. And bridges that gap between God and man.
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And that's why we have a closeness with God. And so we are able to pray directly to God because of and through Jesus Christ.
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So we can pray to God the Father directly, basically because of the work of Christ.
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And certainly we can pray to Christ as well. Which brings us to the Holy Spirit. Is it appropriate to pray to the
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Spirit? Not inappropriate.
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That's pretty much the right response right there. Okay, so this is kind of a weird one because we don't have a whole lot of examples where we really see people praying to the
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Spirit in the New Testament. But in much the same way that we look at Christ's position as intercessor and what
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He accomplished and the capacity in which He serves because of what
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He has done, we can also look at the Holy Spirit and the responsibilities of the Holy Spirit and the things for which the
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Holy Spirit has been charged and use that to help us understand our position with the Holy Spirit through prayer.
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So the Holy Spirit is described as comforter, counselor, teacher, distributor of the spiritual gifts.
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That would be ministry of the Holy Spirit. So we know from Romans 8, and you had touched on this before,
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Pam, that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved in our prayer life. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.
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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.
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And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the
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Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. So basically like you said, it seems fine to pray to the
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Spirit even though, like I said, the example in Scripture is predominantly to pray to the Father and to the
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Son. But certainly as we desire the Lord to increase our spiritual gifts so that we can serve others with those gifts,
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I mean, spiritual gifts is a ministry of the Holy Spirit. So it certainly makes sense that we would incorporate that in our prayer.
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In the hymnal, Hymn 267, I was looking it up. Actually, that's the
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Emily Farrer shout -out because she has the hymnal at home and I don't. So I had to find out what it was. But verse 3 of Hymn 267 talks about the
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Holy Spirit as a comforter. You'll know the hymn if you look it up. And I'm just going to skip it for time.
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So we have the who, right? We have the what.
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We go into the where. Where do we pray? How do we approach God and how do we position ourselves in such a way to do that?
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Anybody know anywhere in the Bible that might talk about where we would pray? I already actually quoted one verse.
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In our prayer closet, exactly right. So that is certainly an example. Back to Matthew 6, 6.
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But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
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So why in secret? What's up with that? Let me ask this question.
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Who has an iPad here or a tablet or anything like that? Anybody have those things?
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So the New York Times did a recent survey. Well, they didn't do the survey, but they reported on the survey.
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They showed that this year, as compared to last year, so this year, 31 % of publishers, book publishers, believe iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e -reading platform.
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Last year, it was 46%. So the number is dropping. People are saying, you know what? This isn't actually the best platform for reading a book.
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Why is that? Anybody want to wager a guess? One of the guys from Forrester Research, which is the actual company that did this, said the tablet is like a
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Temptress. It's constantly saying, you could be on YouTube right now. Or it's sending alerts or pop -ups saying that you just got an e -mail.
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Reading itself is trying to compete for your attention. So we have this thing sitting in front of us like,
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I've got to go out and get that new iPad. Sorry, not the iPad 3, the new iPad. I've got to go out and get one because it's got the beautiful retina display for crisp text definition.
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And also my work e -mail, which I may or may not respond to when I'm trying to read anything else. Anybody who knows me knows that I've had a smart phone attached to my hip for years now.
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So that probably would be an issue for me. Although, iPad owners out here, there's an airplane mode for that.
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So the same thing can be said for prayer. If we don't shut ourselves off from other distractions, we very much run the risk of being unable to focus.
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I've seen, I don't think Anidra has done this before, but I've heard the story of the housewife who, when she really just needs a moment, she's got the kids who are running around screaming and doing all that crazy stuff.
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She'll take her apron and put it over her head to create a little private space that she can pray.
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Absolutely. You don't want to look silly or whatever.
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Even if you don't want to be that way, you can't help but resolve.
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Right. That's absolutely true. And the example that I always use for that is singing in your car. Because everybody does it.
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If you've ever driven in a car, you've been sitting there alone in the car, and you've been singing to yourself. And then you come up to the light, and you're having a great time, and you're singing.
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And you look over at the car next to you, and the person is laughing hysterically. And you feel like a fool immediately.
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Why? You don't know this person. It doesn't matter what they think. But we have this built -in thing about public perception.
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And as soon as somebody else sees us doing anything, it completely changes the way that we act. It's just innate in us.
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I mean, if you're not like that, then good for you. I guess you're better than 98 % of the rest of us. But I like grooving in the car, and then you look over, and it's awkward.
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So that's the example. When we're in private, we have an open communication.
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And there's nobody there that we have to be concerned about. Maybe, oh, did we say that thing right or whatever?
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That's why public speaking is so difficult sometimes. But are there any other reasons why praying in private is maybe better?
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Oh, I was just going to say, in that context, you were speaking of the Pharisees that put on a big show about, look at me, look at me.
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And it's more about the condition of your heart. Whether you are in private or in public, if you're speaking to the triune
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God right in front of you. Exactly right. Do you want to add to that?
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I was just going to say the same thing. Say the same thing, right? So was I, so. The verse is the verse immediately before that, so verse 5 of Matthew 6.
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And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others.
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Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. So that's that idea, is when you pray in secret so that you avoid this idea of public perception and being concerned about public perception.
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Do you want to add? When you go in secret, that starts to be problematic.
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Symbolism and pageantry. Right. Right, right, right, right.
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You're making the point that there's an inverted relationship. Open displays of religiosity and true spirituality.
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I love that word, religiosity. It's one of those. But, all right.
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We see Jesus modeled the same thing, right? Did the scripture say that Jesus sat down among them at the campfire and began to pray?
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No, almost every single time we see Jesus pray, when he's with the disciples, he goes away to pray. Arguably speaking, in the biblical context in that time, these are the most spiritual people on the planet, right?
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And yet, he still is separating himself from them to be alone in prayer. There's sort of another aspect to this, which we can talk about.
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Private prayer on an individual level is absolutely critical, I think. It's very, very helpful to us in a lot of ways that I've touched on.
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But, there's also this idea of corporate prayer, right? Corporate prayer in private would be a little bit difficult.
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But, Matthew 18, 19, and 20 says, Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my
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Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. So, what
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I want to pull out of that is just this idea that there is an attitude of approaching the
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Father in a more corporate setting. 1 Kings 8, 22 is an example of Solomon.
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Stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward heaven. So, he's standing there in front of the entire nation.
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This would be like Barack Obama getting up and praying, right? Certainly not in the closet. Probably not going to happen.
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But, certainly not in the closet. Acts 4, 24 talks about lifting up your voices together to God.
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Even the Lord's Prayer, right? Does it say, Give me this day my daily bread? No, it says, Give us this day our daily bread.
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The Lord's Prayer is not a model of a prayer closet prayer. It's a model of a corporate prayer.
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Give us this day our daily bread. So, public prayer is good. Private prayer is good.
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We see some problems already with public prayer. We have to be mindful of those when we pray. Which leads to the question, what's the real issue when we pray in public?
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We talked about this a little bit. And we can answer that with, why?
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The next W question, why do we pray? Some reasons why we pray?
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Anyone? We need to be dependent.
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Right, definitely.
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It builds the relationship that we have with God to maintain a position of humility towards Him.
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Definitely true. I was reading something. I don't remember what I was reading.
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I read a lot this week on prayer. It talked about prayer as the,
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I think it was the Don Whitney book, as the soldier on the battlefield reporting to his commander.
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Which I thought was an interesting way to look at it, because you have God back in control of all things, and then we're like the front line.
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We're reporting back. So I thought that was an interesting way to look at it. Was there a hand over here? Pam, you're my go -to girl on the right side of the room.
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About why? About why, right. I thought I saw a hand over here. Right, right.
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Yeah, you see it said we were commanded to pray Colossians 4, 2. Continue steadfastly in prayer. The New American Standard says devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.
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In that passage we talked about in Matthew, talking about exhorting us to pray in secret, and then talking about the
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Pharisees and all those other things, Jesus says four times when you pray. Not if you pray, not anything else.
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But he says when you pray. So the next question when we talk about prayer, especially if you're an open theist, is does
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God need us to tell him what we need? I see a lot of shaking heads.
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Yes and no. Does God command us to tell him what we need? Yes. Does he need us to tell him?
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No. I mean we have these things, and whatever you ask in prayer you will receive if you have faith.
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And I tell you, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, right? Do not be like the
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Pharisees, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Don't presume that you need to inform
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God of anything. You talked about how prayer increases and shows our trust and dependence on God.
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That is really, that's what faith is, is our dependence on God and our confidence in Him.
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James 1, 5 and 6 says, Because if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.
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But let him ask in faith with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.
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So we have this attitude of faith in our prayer life. We cannot, I mean, there is, with Christ's death on Calvary and the sacrifice of Christ, there is a closeness that we have with God that the
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Jews never did. That does not mean that we can approach Him cavalierly, right? Sproul talks about the attitudes in our minds and in our hearts when we approach
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God in prayer, and I'll hopefully get to that. So we need to pray for the purpose of confession, right?
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We need to confess our sins to God. We saw it in the Lord's Prayer, Forgive us our trespasses. We see it in 1 John 1. We confess our sins.
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He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We need to have a position of humility when we pray.
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I mean, there's no commanded position. You know, you have to lay prostrate on the floor with your nose touching the ground, or you have to do all these certain things, or if you're
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Pentecostal, you have to have one hand in the air, or whatever the thing is. There's no commanded, you know, prescribed way to pray physically.
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But one commentator did say that the common posture of prayer, folded hands, bended knees, or prostrate and bowed head, is the weakest defensive and offensive posture that a person can assume if you look at it from military theory.
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It's just interesting. It is this exact position, however, that the Christian assumes the greatest spiritual posture offensively and defensively.
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We're humbling ourselves before our Creator, right? And so it's not necessary that we physically emulate that, but it's a good mind picture to think about that.
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We pray because prayer is answered, right? It's not, you know, God, please give me my sight, and boom, every single time a blind person says that, they're going to get their sight back.
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But I think everybody in this room, just about, can testify to answered prayer in their lives.
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And that gives us confidence as we approach the throne of grace again, later, as we will all do, hopefully, that those prayers may be answered.
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1 John 5, 14 and 15 says this, John 15, 17, Hebrews 11, 6, there's a bunch more examples or scriptures that will talk about the fact that as we approach
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God rightly in prayer, that He will answer those prayers. So the fifth
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W, number 5, is when. When do we pray? Is there a special time to pray?
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Anything like that? At all times? 1 Thessalonians 5, 17?
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This is debatable, this is dubious for me, because I'm working through 1 Thessalonians for sermons right now, and I'm never going to be able to say the word right, so I don't know how that's going to work out.
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1 Thessalonians 5, 17 says, pray without ceasing, but I've been teaching for half an hour, and I haven't been praying, so does that mean
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I'm sinning? In not praying for those 30 minutes? No. But I've been teaching for half an hour,
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So what does it mean then? It's an ongoing confessional attitude of our hearts that we would be in a position where we would be always prepared to pray, and always mindful that God is watching us, and we have a responsibility to Him.
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So is that enough then? I mean, well, we're always, okay, I'm always ready to pray just in case, you know, when that need pops up,
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I'm right there, I get that email, boom, you know, five second prayer, and I'm good to go. Is that enough prayer for us?
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These are the rhetorical no questions here. The answer, of course, is no. We need to set aside time specifically for prayer.
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And as I wrote this, I added this last night, and this whole thing was the part that really was the most convicting to me.
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This is definitely, I think, where everybody stumbles, where most people stumble, is in setting aside a time specifically for prayer.
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We have this idea of first fruits with our giving, right, of our money, financially.
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It's drilled into us with tithing. We look at the example of Cain and Abel, and one of them gave of his first fruits and the other did not, and the
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Lord loved one and hated the other. So what does that mean here?
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The idea, this principle of first fruits, it goes beyond money. It's everything that we do. It's also our time.
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So, I mean, we have this example. We say, oh, well, you know, if the plate comes by and you reach into your pocket and you grab a 20 or whatever and throw it in the plate and it goes by and, you know, you're good, that's not giving of your first fruit.
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That is not planned, sacrificial giving of your money. And in the same way, we should have the same attitude with our prayer life, right, that we should be giving of our first fruits in our time, because I've made the argument for years now that I take the mass pike because I don't really care about paying a dollar.
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It's saving me so much time to drive, right? It's worth the money. I can get more money. I can't get more time. And when we talk about sacrificial giving to the
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Lord, sacrificing of our time is not something that is any less important than sacrificing of our money.
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And so it's exactly the same thing if we pray at the end of the day, and this is something
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I'm guilty of a lot, because, you know, Anitra goes to bed before me, and so, you know,
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I'll finish up with whatever I'm working on or whatever. I'll go to bed, and as I'm laying there in bed, I'll begin to pray.
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Though I may or may not finish my prayer, because I may fall asleep. But if that's the only prayer of the day for me, then that is not first fruits prayer, and that is not the way that God has commanded us to pray.
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We have this idea of first fruits, and that is how we are to give of our time to the Lord, spend time with Him. That's why devotion at the beginning of the day is such a good idea, because it's the beginning of the day.
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And it's easy to say, well, if I take a shower tonight, I can get up in the morning, you know, five minutes to get my bagel, and I'm out the door, good to go, get to work a little bit early, maybe get home, see the kids, whatever.
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That's an easy thought process for my brain, you know, because that's kind of how I think. But there's something missing, there's something critical missing there, and that is first fruits worship to the
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Lord in scriptural, in Bible intake, and in prayer. And then, sort of beyond that, on a less daily basis, we have this idea of our entire lives, and when things are or are not going well, this is another one of those things that was personally convicting to me, when things are going well, it's a lot less common to find a
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Christian man or woman prostrate on the floor praying to the God of the universe. I mean, we pray to ask for help, right?
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And if things are okay, if I have a good job, I'm paying the bills, whatever, does that mean that maybe we don't have to pray?
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Again, with a rhetorical no. Right, right.
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And we talked about that a little bit earlier. It really, private prayer shows the spiritual attitude of the heart, and in much the same way that you're talking about, is
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God our spiritual vending machine, or is God our Lord? You know, we have this whole lordship salvation, you know, is
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Jesus our Savior, or is Jesus our Savior and our Lord? And if Jesus is just our Savior, then it's really easy to say, well, if things are going well,
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I don't need to pray, because I don't need anything to be saved from right now. I mean, that's already, already it's a wrong idea, but it's very easy to fall into a trap like that.
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Right, right. Definitely true. And that's actually one of the reasons why
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I love ACTS, the acronym ACTS, because if you look at that, we have adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.
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So the first thing in there is a focus on God, and a focus on God's holiness and righteousness, and all of the attributes of God.
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That is the number, the first thing, if you walk through this in a chronological progression, if that's how you pray, so number one, you get down on your knees to pray, or whatever.
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So you begin to pray, and number one, you worship God for who He is, right? Then you confess your sinfulness to God.
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So now we've created this mental chasm between the amazing nature of God and the sinfulness of sin, and the, oh
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God, why am I so stupid? That's pretty common in my prayer life. So we have this big, big difference.
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And then what do we do? We step into thanksgiving, right? So now it's, thank you God for doing all these things that you have done for me because of who you are, not because of who
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I am, it's pretty obvious, because we just talked about how great you are and how terrible I am. And only then, and after we've done all of those things, do we move into supplication, which is sort of this issue that we're talking about right now, where that's when, once we have a right view of God and man, and the thankfulness that we have in light of that, that is when we ask for things.
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And when I say that, at that point it's usually, just save my family, and we'll be good.
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At that point, oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes -Benz, is a little bit less important, in light of everything else that we've talked about.
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Right, right, right.
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It is very hard. And it's so much more evident when you're a parent, right?
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Because you have kids that, why can't you just, it's so much easier for us in this physical world to say, why can't you just follow the rules?
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I'm dad, you obey, we're good to go. But man, we have black hearts, don't we?
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Those kids have black hearts. And it's so easy for us to see, and then translate to our own lives, suddenly it becomes very difficult.
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So, we're out of time, I have four pages left, but that's okay. Just quickly, what are some hindrances to prayer?
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So we talked about the importance of, prayer is a first root sacrifice to the Lord. What are some hindrances to prayer?
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Definitely true. I'm glad you didn't say my wife was a hindrance to prayer, that would have been bad. Unbelief is a hindrance to prayer, definitely.
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Lack of discipline, right? We talked about that planning, lack of discipline is big. Lack of faith, if we don't believe anything is going to happen when we pray, then why would we pray?
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You start from the result and you work your way back to, well, why do I need to start with this?
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Lack of sense in God, this idea that, oh, I don't immediately feel that God is, I can reach my arm around him.
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No awareness of need, this is the thing I talked about before, if things are going well, it's very easy to cause us to not pray.
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Lack of focus on the amazing nature of God, I think as we think about God, and we think about his holiness, and his righteousness, and his grace, and his mercy, already
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I'm like, okay, maybe I should probably pray. It puts us in an attitude where, we need to be just thankful to him.
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Just one more thing I'll touch on very quickly. I said this before, R .C. Sproul said there were three critical keys to our perspective when we pray, and this is what those are.
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One, we need to approach God with sincerity. If we're insincere in our prayer life, it basically means we're not taking it seriously.
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Two, we are to approach God with reverence. We have this idea that it's no longer a situation where we're separated from God by this veil anymore, but we can't go too far and say, oh, we have a friend that's closer than a brother, it's a father -son relationship, so hey,
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I'll give my dad a punch in the arm, right? God is still the king of the universe, and so we are to approach him with reverence.
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And thirdly, we are to approach God in humility. I think we talked about that a little bit before as well.
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One quote from R .C., the faith we bring to prayer must include a truth that God is able to hear our prayers and that he is disposed to answer them.
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So this whole attitude of prayer and the results of that is a very real thing, and we need to expect that God will do great things.
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We talk about that with the property. This is God's problem, so to speak, and we need to expect that he'll do great things because we don't have the answers to it, and we don't necessarily need to because we can approach him in prayer.
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So why don't we wrap up and pray? O God of the open ear, teach me to live by prayer as well as by providence for myself, soul, body, children, family, church.
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Give me a heart frameable to thy will, so might I live in prayer and honor thee, being kept from evil, known and unknown.
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Help me to see the sin that accompanies all I do and the good I can distill from everything.
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Let me know that the work of prayer is to bring my will to thine and that without this it is folly to pray my will to thine.
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When I try to bring thy will to mine, it is to command Christ to be above him and be wiser than he.
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This is my sin and my pride. I can only succeed when
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I pray according to thy precept and promise and to be done with as it pleases thee according to thy sovereign will.
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When thou commandest me to pray for pardon, peace, brokenness, it is because thou wilt give me the thing promised for thy glory as well as for my good.
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Help me not only to desire small things, but with holy boldness to desire great things for thy people, for myself, that they and I might live to show thy glory.
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Teach me that it is wisdom for me to pray for all I have, out of love, willingly, not of necessity, that I may come to thee at any time to lay open my needs acceptably to thee, that my great sin lies in my not keeping the savor of thy ways, that the remembrance of this truth is one way to the sense of thy presence, that there is no wrath like the wrath of being governed by my own lusts for my own ends.