Christlikeness in Prayer

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. If you would like to learn more about us, please visit us at our website at graceedmonton .ca. You can also find us on Instagram, Grace Church, Y-E-G, all one word, or on Facebook.

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Please enjoy the following sermon. We will not be in 1 John today, so if you would, turn with me to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1. We'll be looking at verse 35, and we'll consider our Christ-likeness in our praying, and our Christ-likeness, perhaps more specifically, in our secret praying.

So, before we begin, let's go to the Lord and ask for His help, and then we'll get into it. Oh, Heavenly Father, we do ask Your help, and we do so every week, and we don't do so because we think it's right, but because we must, because we depend on You so much.

Often we come with hearts hardened and distracted by the week that has been, and we need You to direct our heart's attention, and our heart's affection towards You, and really open our eyes and ears of hearts that we so often close.

And so, Lord, we plead, we beg of You that You would do that now, and that You would be pleased to speak to us from Your Word, that You would exhort us, rebuke us, encourage us, all for the sake of the name of Jesus Christ, and it is in His name that we pray.

Amen. I did have water here. I don't know if this is my cup or if this is your cup, but I'm going to use it anyways. It's good to share. We're brothers in the Lord. Amen. We often speak about our becoming more like Christ, don't we?

Our desiring to be more conformed to His image. We pray to that end very often. We often ask that He would increase in us. We want to act more like Him. We want to think more like Him, speak more like Him.

Our brother just prayed about it, to love like Christ loved. We want to submit our will more to that of the Father as Christ submitted His will to the Father. And all of these are good things to pursue, of course.

We must strive after these and pray for these. They're, after all, part of the process that is our progressive sanctification. But have you ever considered your Christ-likeness in prayer? In the way we see prayer, is it as important to us as it is to Him?

Is it as necessary really for us? Are we committed to make time for it? After all, He's our great example, isn't He? We ought to walk as He walked and to forgive as He forgave, but I wonder how often we stop just there and don't go past and don't consider really how much like Christ we have grown in our prayer life.

When Christ really was, I think we can see this so clearly, a praying man. We have several of His public prayers preserved in the New Testament, in the Gospel accounts, and we find the disciples themselves imploring Him, Lord, teach us to pray.

And so as we imitate Christ, we ought to imitate Him in His praying as well. We ought to see it as He sees it, follow the example that He set for us. I'm afraid there's a great distance still for us to be covered between our view of prayer and our Lord's view of prayer.

Even the men of old, when we think through the history of the church, seem to have had a greater assessment and appreciation of it than we do now. Instead of a priority to delight in, it has often become for us more of a discipline that we approach out of a sense of duty.

We know we should pray, but we don't always feel like doing it. Besides, there are so many things that need to be done, and so the importance of prayer, not in theory, but more in practice, diminishes drastically.

Likewise, it seems that the tremendous blessings and comforts that we enjoy have perhaps minimized our perceived sense of really needing to pray. There's a certain sense of security that we're surrounded by, and so often we do not feel helpless enough to go to the Lord.

So as a consequence, we are not resolved enough to really commune with our God in that way. It's become a casual affair for many of us, dictated by outside demands, whether whenever we happen to find time, we may on a good day seek our Lord.

And a lack of resolve leads to a lack of fervency and earnestness. Our hearts are not in it. I believe that is the situation that a majority of Christians nowadays find themselves in. And what we must do is recover Christ's view of prayer, and then conform ourselves once again to that view.

And we're going to try to do just that today. We have, as I said, several passages in the New Testament, and they paint for us a picture of our Lord's prayer life. They really show us how He saw prayer, how He implied Himself to it.

We will look at one of these in Mark chapter 1 verse 35. I want to observe four things today. The importance or the priority of prayer. Secondly, the necessity of prayer. And then a resolve to pray. And lastly, true, fervent prayer.

We only have one verse today, so let's read it, and then we'll look at the text. Mark 1 verse 35. And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, He departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed.

The Priority of Prayer

First thing we see is an importance or priority of prayer. I believe some of you truly desire to make prayer that priority. None of us, I trust, are happy with the current state of affairs and things that we have reached the pinnacle of prayer, that there's no more work that can or needs to be done.

But it's not easy. There are just so many things to do in our day. We have work that takes up generally a third of our lifetime. We have families, children need to be driven to their respective activities during the week.

For our marriage relationships to be healthy and God-honoring, we must invest time in them. School sometimes demands so much of our mental capacity, it's hard to focus on anything else for any period of time with any seriousness and focus.

And so how are we expected to make prayer this priority in our lives with all these demands? These are, after all, good and reasonable things to invest our time into. And besides these, we have all sorts of entertainment that tries to contend for time.

Well, we ought to make it a priority because Christ made it a priority. He understood the demands on time, the things that will draw us away from prayer. He was himself a very busy man. Let me show you this and perhaps more the text surrounding our verse, really our passage.

We're in the Gospel of Mark. We actually preached through the whole thing about three years ago now. And one thing, if you remember, that we repeatedly noticed was the sense of urgency that Mark is running through events rather quickly compared to the other Gospel.

This one moves the narrative forward at this rapid pace. Matthew, for example, spends three chapters on Christ's genealogy, his birth and his flight to Egypt because Herod wanted to kill him. He gives us an account of John the Baptist preparing the way for him.

It's not until halfway through chapter four that Christ begins his ministry. It's similar in Luke. He even adds a birth narrative of John the Baptist and Mark just cruises through all of that leading up to Christ, beginning his ministry, even omitting Christ's birth completely.

And then in verse one, he begins, for example, with the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and immediately he quotes from Isaiah about John the Baptist who then appears on the scene almost out of nowhere baptizing those who came to him from Judea and Jerusalem.

And by the time we come to verse 13, halfway through, not even halfway through, Christ has been baptized and tempted. But the pace doesn't slow down there at all. If there's one word that we could highlight throughout this Gospel that has often been highlighted, it is the word immediately.

It's been, if I counted it correctly, used 36 times throughout the Gospel. Nine times alone it's been used in chapter one, verses 10 through 42. And so we can get the sense of this urgency just by glancing at some of these events.

He's Christ preaching, verses 14 and 15, and then he goes to the Sea of Galilee, calls his first disciples, Simon, Andrew, and James and John, the sons of Zebedee. And from there he's in Capernaum and teaching in the synagogue.

And all throughout verses 21 and 34, this is all in the same day, he teaches and casts out a demon. And once he's done teaching, it goes to Simon and Andrew's house and there teaches Simon's mother or heals Simon's mother-in-law.

And then at the evening of that day, when you would think things would slow down and wind down a bit, they seem to ramp up again in verse 32. And when the sick are brought to him, the demon oppressed are brought to him, it says that the whole city was at the door and he ministers to them in his mercy, healing and casting out many demons.

It's almost exhausting just looking at it from this bird's eye view. It's just one thing after another. And it continues after verse 35 and verse 40, again healing a leper. So what does all this have to do with the priority?

Because you see in all this activity, in the middle of it, after all this busyness, the demands of the day, the teaching in the synagogue, Simon and Andrew's house, the casting out of demons, teaching late into the night, in verse 35, and for the first time we read of Christ being alone at a time of day when most people are not awake, there are no teachings, there's no healings, no casting out demons.

Finally some calm and quiet for one verse, because even that won't last very long. And what does he do? He prays. I don't know if there could have been another man as busy in Christ and in that region, but he made time for prayer.

He knew that he had to pray. He could not simply neglect his fellowship with the Father. His fame was already beginning to spread everywhere throughout Galilee. He was known for casting out demons and healings, and people wanted to see him, so much so that even his time of prayer is cut short by Simon and some of the others that come looking for him.

And after that, after just praying, the pattern continues, preaching, casting out demons. Brothers and sisters, we seem to be living in a time where we are busier than we have ever been. I could probably ask any of you or any random stranger how they're doing, and the answer would be something like, busy, but I'm doing well.

So that might not be easily changeable, but the question is, have we, because of our busyness, neglected the priority of prayer? We say, I just, I can't find the time. Demands take me late into the night, and then there's work in the morning again, and then in the evening there's this, that, and the other thing again, and so it goes on.

Have you ever considered to not neglect prayer because you're busy, but prioritizing it specifically because there are so many things to do, leaving aside any extracurricular, time-consuming activities?

Just the simple demands of being faithful, being faithful in our jobs, in our life, life as a student, to our spouses, to our children, brothers and sisters in the church, our service in the church. Are those not enough to overwhelm us at times?

Do you not think that drawing from a time secret prayer would help you doing all that needs to be done in that faithful and God-honoring way? To ask for His help in all that is coming your way, to take Him with you into the day, throughout the day, so that you don't fall into bed at the end of the day, dead tired, convicted that you have not even thought about Him or spoken to Him.

Christian, we cannot neglect prayer and make these other things more important because we believe we have no time. Christ was ministering daily, late into the night. He was doing a much more noble and important work than much of what ours is.

But prayer remained of great importance to Him. You must, like our Lord, prioritize it because there are so many things to do that need to get done. How do you expect to be a loving husband or wife? Raise your kids, do your work unto the Lord, study for His glory, serve faithfully without prayer.

These things are important, yes, but we cannot allow them to get or we cannot allow to get the order mixed up. It is prayer that really makes us a faithful man and woman. And so this then leads us into the necessity for prayer.

The Necessity of Prayer

In order for us to prioritize prayer, we must see our necessity for it. Now, how do we get to that, the necessity for prayer? Well, if we realize who it is that is praying in our passage, we see our necessity for prayer.

It's Christ. And two more times in the Gospel, we read about Jesus retreating to pray. Just a few pages over in Mark chapter 6 and verse 46. He removes Himself again from His disciples. He dismisses the crowd that He had just fed with two loaves, or excuse me, five loaves of bread and two fish.

And then He goes up to the mountain to pray. He ministered to the people, retreats to pray, and then continues to minister to them after. And then, of course, in chapter 14, we remember the after the Lord's Supper and before His betrayal.

He retreats to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray because, as He says there, His soul is very sorrowful even unto death as He looks ahead to what He is about to go through on going to the cross. And if Christ, the incarnate Son, the sinless Son of God, commits Himself to prayer before, after, in between His ministering and experiences the sorrow unto death that He has to bring to the Lord, how much more do we need to pray as weak men and women?

Are we more capable and able than Christ that we do not need to beseech our Heavenly Father that we can get by without it? What a ridiculous suggestion that would be. And that's almost how we often function.

Not only do we have these things that try to take away our time from prayer, but we can't even accomplish anything without it. We're in dire need of prayer. Think about it for a moment. It is the means by which we express our needs to the Lord, asking Him for daily bread to provide for us.

How do we bring our fears to Him but by prayer? It's how we ask for wisdom and discernment. It promotes our very holiness and resistance to temptation. The Sermon on the Mount, Christ commanded us to pray that we would not be led into temptation.

David, through the Psalms, prays for all sorts of different needs all throughout. Going further than that, it is only when we are helpless and when we are convinced of our helplessness that we will actually really pray.

Ole Haldsby, a theologian from Norway, he wrote a book on prayer, and in it he says, prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray. You see, we only believe in the necessity of prayer and the importance of it when we understand our own helplessness and weakness.

That's where we can have some real difficulty. You know, you might say, I know I'm needy. I have many needs. Well, we gladly admit that, don't we? We say it often when we go to the Lord and most of the time we present our needs to Him and we ought to do that, but being in need is not necessarily the same as being absolutely helpless.

Being convinced you cannot accomplish anything apart from the Lord's help and work is not the same as simply admitting you have a certain need. Speaking about this deep-rooted persuasion that you cannot deal with the difficulties that you're put in at work or with the constant hostility toward you at school that just wears you down or with these intricate, difficult family issues that require the Lord's wisdom and discernment with persistent health problems that seem to suck all the energy out of you or whatever else it might be.

You cannot deal with any of these unless the Lord intervenes. And when we come to that point, that is when we pray. I think too often we do not pray because there's a lack of this helplessness in us because we lack in helplessness.

We're blinded to our need for prayer. We still rely on ourselves too much, trust in ourselves too much, want to deal with our problems and struggles as real as they are in our own way and on our own terms.

We're not helpless enough most of the time. Self-sufficiency really removes the sense of necessity. It gets in the way of our seeking our Heavenly Father. Then on the other side of the coin, we can have almost a sense of too much helplessness.

What I mean, we can experience a sort of helplessness that is crippling. We feel so convicted of our sin at times that we seemingly cannot pray at all. So disgusted with ourselves that we do not know how we could possibly approach God after having trampled on the blood of Christ.

The helplessness that doesn't know where to start or what to do, doesn't know what to say in its current condition. Christian, if that's you, you have reached the mountaintop of the necessity of prayer.

Going before the throne of grace is your greatest need at that point in time. Storm the gates of heaven because you cannot deal with your sin. It leads away at you unless you bring it to the Lord through prayer.

And if you don't know what to say, the Spirit will help in your weakness. One minister from the 1600s put it like this. He said, let my broken words go up to heaven. When they come into the great angel's golden censer, that compassionate advocate will put together my broken prayers and perfume them.

Words, he says, are but the accidents. By that he means the incidental accompaniments of prayer. It is only when we seek the Lord in prayer with our sin that we can experience Psalm 32. When we kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. And then here is what prayer does. Psalmist writes, I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not cover my iniquity.

I said I will confess my transgression to the Lord and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Brothers and sisters, we must come to a place of absolute helplessness if we want to pray. If we don't see our great lack and weakness, we will not make prayer as important as it should be.

A Resolve to Pray

And then thirdly, if we do prioritize it because we understand our need of it and the necessity of it that we have and we want to become more like our Lord in our prayer, we must resolve to pray. One commentator in this verse used an interesting wording and said, quote, Jesus found time for prayer.

I don't mean to get hung up on man's words but that's probably how we too often think about prayer, that we must find time for it. I would tend to disagree with that statement and say that Jesus did not find time for prayer but that he made time for prayer instead.

He was resolved to pray. Look at the language that Mark uses. He says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place and there he prayed. Rising, departing, going, praying.

That doesn't sound like he found time. No, he has set his mind on it. It didn't happen to him by accident. He doesn't randomly find himself in this desolate place alone at an early hour in the morning, doesn't know what else to do and so he prays.

No, there's purpose in our Lord's actions. We don't know how long he labored into the hours of the previous night but after all this work and what was likely a short night, he actively pursues communion with the Father.

See, Christ has intentionality to pray. Christian, it takes a deliberate willingness for us to pray. Yes, we can pray short, impromptu prayers. We can pray them anywhere. We should pray as often as we have the inclination to do so but we cannot live our entire Christian life on prayer as if there's some sort of 10-second video on social media that randomly pops up.

No, we must target and set a point in time and place to pray. It takes effort. It takes work. It means we have to plan our days. We don't accidentally find ourselves praying for however long without having planned on it.

That's why we meet here on Thursdays. We plan on it. I think we function as if it ought to come to us almost exclusively by chance and all of a sudden we realize, oh, I just prayed sort of thing. No, we must be resolved to do it.

One man that was committed to it was Daniel, of course. You recall as a young man how he was exiled from Judah into Babylon and served there faithfully in the nation's kingdom and without ever dishonoring his lord and at one point was appointed by King Darius as one of three officers over the entire kingdom and even was faithful in that and was supposed to be over everything else in the kingdom and so these other officials tried to set up a scheme and take him down and get the king to sign an ordinance that anybody who would worship anyone else, any other god or man other than the king himself, would be thrown into the lion's den.

I think Daniel can really relate to the importance and necessity of prayer because in chapter 6 and verse 10 of Daniel, we read that when Daniel knew that the document had been signed he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.

He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his god as he had done previously. Then these men came by agreement and found Daniel making petition and plea before his god.

Daniel was committed to purposeful prayer over years in a pagan nation while working for the king of the land and was found praying when they came to take him. Sinclair Ferguson tells a great story of one of his elderly friends.

He used to teach a bible class to high school boys and eventually these boys would would go into several different professions and many of them turned out ended up going into ministry and so what this this man did he kept up with him and tried to encourage them and pray for them all throughout the years and then when he eventually died the police had to be called to get into his house and what do you think they found?

They found this elderly man dead on his knees with the lists of names of the men open beside him. They asked him, when would we, would we be ever at all found praying? Let us in our pursuit of Christ likeness in our praying set time apart to commune with our father so that it may not be a surprise to anyone that God's people would be found in secret prayer.

We must resolve and commit to it. Calvin on prayer writes, unless we fix certain hours in the day for prayer it easily slips from our memory. How true is that? I know I can't relate. Set a time Christian of day that works.

Christ prays here in the mornings. Probably the best time to do it. There are the least amount of distractions but there's there's no law that says we have to do it in the morning. He prays at other places in the afternoon and into the evening.

Daniel prays several times a day. David goes to the Lord evening, morning and at noon. Everyone works differently, has these different circumstances. Our times of prayer can differ from one another but what cannot differ is our being found in secret prayer.

The Lord himself assumes as much in his great sermon on the mount when he says, and when you pray you must not be like the hypocrites. Not if you pray but when you pray go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret.

I'm not trying to simply urge us to pray more. It's true we must. All of us will have to for the of our lives but I want us to see and understand and change how we think about this. The priority, the necessity and then our resolve and how we approach prayer.

True and Fervent Prayer

That we might pray meaningfully and purposefully like our Lord did and when we'll get there and I think lastly we will fourthly enjoy true and fervent prayer. Mark says at the end of the verse that there he prayed.

Christ prayed. This is where sinless and almost earnest fervent prayer from the purest of motives from the heart were uttered. He left his disciples behind, removed himself from everyone and got alone with the Father.

This was a meeting that was not intended for anyone else. Again we don't know how long he spent in this desolate place but he was there long enough for the others to wake up and come to find him. That's what actually interrupts his communion with the Lord.

See we must get alone with God in secret communion. We must go into the prayer closet. We can't take anyone else there with us. When we get there we should be comfortable being there. We should be glad to be there, enjoy being there and be able to stay there.

It's hard to talk about prayer without mentioning E .M. Bounds so I will mention E .M. Bounds. He's written a number of books on prayer. If you get a hold of one, read it. In one of them, Empower Through Prayer, he speaks about short and casual praying.

He writes, God does not bestow his gifts on the casual or hasty comers and goers. How often do you come hastily and casually? I'm not saying we never pray or that short prayers are no prayers at all but do we know what it really means to grab a hold of God in our praying, to wrestle with him as Jacob did, to stay with him in prayer?

Luther was known to spend many hours in prayer. Even he's quoted as having said that prayer is a difficult matter and hard work. He says it is far more difficult than preaching the word or performing other official duties in the church.

He goes on to say this is the reason why it is so rare. How often do we fight through the difficulty of praying even as we pray? Most of the time we go through a litany of things with the same familiar old phrases.

It's not wrong to bring the same needs to the Lord but if we do it the same familiar phrase it becomes mindless repetition without much thinking. I'm not sure if we're much better than the Gentiles who think they'll be heard for their many words.

So we often lack fervency, earnestness, zealousness in our prayer. We hear about these old divines and writers who regularly get up at three and four in the morning to be with God for hours on end. We're convicted by it yet somehow we think that's only special kinds of ministers or people in the scriptures that can do that sort of thing.

Do you remember what James says about Elijah in James 5 and 17 when he ministered to Israel and prophesied against King Ahab? He had gone and served Baal and abandoned the Lord and the land was to experience a drought.

Because by the true power of the living God, what does James say? He says that Elijah was a man with what? A nature like ours and he prayed. And how did he pray? James says fervently that it might not rain and it did not rain for three years.

Praying without fervency, without earnestness, without the heart. I submit to you there's no praying at all. It doesn't mean that every time we bow our heads we become an emotional wreck. But our words going up to the Lord must first be mined from the depths of a heart that is zealous to seek him.

One theologian writes a man may pray with his lips and yet not pray with an intense desire of the soul. How do we pray with a desire for the Lord especially when we so often can't seem to sense any? We can't manufacture it, can't stir it up in ourselves.

We know it comes from the Lord. It is our crying by the Spirit, Abba, Father. I think we can start on the right foot. We must pray. What do I mean? Beg the Lord to give you that earnestness, that desire to pray.

I don't know how many times I have prayed to that end. Often that means one thing for us, to be honest with the Lord, to tell him that we can't find a desire to be zealous. Their heart seems so disconnected.

Christian, you know you can go and say that to him, right? What you can't do is try to fake a desire that is not there to begin with. You see when there's no earnestness in our wanting to pray, the most earnest thing we can do is ask for it.

And so plead with him to give you that which you find yourself lacking. And if you don't know what to pray, pray his word back to him, especially, especially the Psalms. We have an inspired prayer book in our Bible.

It covers pretty much any topic you can think of, from the heights of the great joys and delight all the way to the depths of sorrow and despair. David has not experienced anything that we do not experience.

Read a verse, respond to it, give thanks to the Lord for the work that it describes. Praise him for his steadfast love and faithfulness that it speaks of, and how even you have experienced it in your life.

If it's supplication, ask for what the Psalmist is asking. If it makes you think of someone you know who's dealing with certain circumstances, pray it for them on their behalf. Believe when you ask him to give you a desire to commune with you.

You let his word wash over you. As you pray it back to him, we will eventually pray with a fervency and an earnestness and a longing after him, because we're not so much praying our own will anymore as we're praying his.

As a Christian, we must understand the importance of prayer. We must have this prominence in our life. It's absolute necessity because we are a weak and helpless people, and we believe. When we believe in those things, we will resolve to pray.

We will not try to find the time, but we will make the time, and then we will actually really pray with a deep longing desire to be with the Lord. So let us strive to that greater Christ-likeness in our praying.

He has made it possible for us to pray as sons and daughters to the Father, any time, any place, with hearts that long for him. So let us make prayer as an old hymn says, the Christian's vital breath, the Christian's native air.

Let's pray.

Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church. If you would like to keep up with us, you can find us at Facebook at Grace Fellowship Church, or our Instagram at Grace Church, Y-E-G, all one word.

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Soon.