7/15/07 Prayer

I mentioned a few weeks ago

that I was thinking about taking a short break from our John study

to share with you some thoughts that have been running around in my mind,

thoughts that would temporarily take us into a completely different direction.

I suppose that some of you thought that’s what I was doing last week

when I spent the morning trying to keep it simple,

but the truth is that last week was just sort of an unexpected internal impulse within me.

What I’ve really been thinking about doing

is taking a morning to share with you some thoughts about prayer.

And because some of what I shared with you last week

ties into some of the thoughts I’ve been having about prayer

I’m going to go ahead and share some of it with you today.

My relationship to prayer

and my understanding of it has changed profoundly in recent years.

Like many of you,

I was raised in a religious environment in which prayer was presented to me

mostly as a calling, a duty, an obligation, a responsibility that every faithful Christian is called to fulfill.

“Read your Bible,

Pray everyday and you’ll grow, grow, grow.

Neglect your Bible,

Forget to pray and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink.”

My friends,

it’s tragic that we have done that with prayer.

It’s tragic that we’ve done that with our entire Christian life.

Prayer is not a duty.

It is not an obligation.

It is not a commandment to be obeyed

or a religious responsibility to be fulfilled.

If I were to attempt to offer you a single statement

that I feel best describes prayer as I now understand it,

I would say that prayer is the way our spirits breath,

and when we understand what it really is

we will relate to it in that way.

Do you get up each morning

and tell yourself that you really need to remember to breath this day?

And when we begin to understand prayer as God intended

our spirits will respond to it

in the same way our bodies respond to oxygen.

I think I would go crazy at this point in my life if I could not pray.

And I know there is a huge danger in my saying that

because there are some of you who hear me say it and think,

“Oh my! He’s so spiritual,

he’s so close to God...isn’t that wonderful!”

And if that’s what you hear me saying

you haven’t got a clue as to what’s really going on in my life

or what I’m trying to say here.

Maybe I can do this best

by first reading for us some of the comments our Lord made about prayer.

Now, these may sound familiar to some of you,

but I hope you’ll stay with me

because there’s something here I want us to see.

LUK 11:5-8 And He said to them, "Suppose one of you shall have a friend, and shall go to him at midnight, and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him'; and from inside he shall answer and say,' Do not bother me; the door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs.

MAT 7:7-11 "Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened. Or what man is there among you, when his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he shall ask for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”

LUK 18:1-8 Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart, saying, "There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God, and did not respect man. And there was a widow in that city, and she kept coming to him, saying, 'Give me legal protection from my opponent.' "And for a while he was unwilling; but afterward he said to himself, 'Even though I do not fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will give her legal protection, lest by continually coming she wear me out.' " And the Lord said, "Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now shall not God bring about justice for His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them speedily. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"

Now, with each of these passages

there is a strong common thread running through all of them.

Obviously Jesus is drawing a parallel

between the prayer requests we bring before God

and situations in which a person asks for help from another person -

a son asks his father for bread,

a desperate man asks his neighbor for food,

a helpless woman asks a grumpy judge for legal help.

But in all of these situations

the motivation for asking is a given.

In fact the requests are driven by feelings of helplessness and desperation at a critical time.

There is certainly nothing here

that even remotely suggests

that those doing the asking

are doing it because they feel some sort of obligation to do so.

The son is not saying to himself,

“I guess I really do have a duty to ask my dad for bread.”

The man with no food is not thinking,

“I suppose I have an obligation to go next door and bug my neighbor.”

All of these requests in these parables given to us by the Master

are requests driven by real, deep needs or desires within those doing the asking.

But then when we take these teachings on prayer

and try to plug them into so much that is said about prayer in the religious world

they simply don’t fit.

Prayer as it is so often presented

is not an urgent cry for help,

it is an obligation to be fulfilled.

We’ve talked about this in the past -

this slight of hand thing that Satan uses,

the way he seeks to take the gifts that our Lord has given us

and turn them into religious duties we feel obligated to fulfill.

He’s done it with the Church.

Our Lord has created for us

the most remarkable support system we could ever hope for - His Church, the family of God.

Through other Christians

we can receive encouragement,

and love,

and hope,

and a true sense of belonging that literally sustains us and keeps us strong.

If we ever realized what we had

it would profoundly alter our lives.

So what does Satan do?

He comes at us through his religious systems

and says to us, “You HAVE to go to church every Sunday.”

He takes God’s gift to us

and turns it into a duty we think we must fulfill.

Folks, you don’t have to go to church every Sunday.

You don’t ever have to go to church.

If what happens here does not help you in your walk with the King

PLEASE don’t come.

Life is way to short to waste it in some futile effort to win God’s approval

through the fulfillment of a list of religious duties.

And please don’t confuse what happens here on Sundays

with all that God has given us when He gave us His church.

The truth is

that most of the really good stuff

doesn’t happen in this meeting,

it happens in what takes place between Christians on a daily basis.

During the past few weeks

I’ve been involved in several conversations between Christians

that have resulted in major healing taking place in the lives of those involved,

and I’ve also watched other Christians

taking major steps forward because of what was happening between them and a fellow believer.

That’s all part of God’s gift to us

and that is the heart and soul of the church - God’s people being God’s people together.

But my point here is that Satan has used this same tactic with prayer.

He has taken this incredible gift given to us by our God

and turned it into a religious duty,

an obligation we must fulfill in order to please God or earn His acceptance.

And it wasn’t until I saw where prayer really fit into God’s overall design for us

that it finally became the gift God intended rather than a duty I was suppose to fulfill.

You see, we’ve gotten it all wrong.

God never commanded us to pray.

He never commanded us to read our Bibles.

He never commanded us to “go to church”.

What He did do

is to command us to love.

JOH 13:34 "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

And only when we understand and accept that commandment as our high calling

will we begin to find a healthy, productive relationship to prayer,

or to Scripture,

or to our relationship with our fellow Christians.

Interesting how it is, though.

This commandment to love is so different from the ones that came before.

This commandment is not a call to perform,

it’s an invitation,

no not just an invitation but an assurance that for the first time in our lives

we can truly learn how to do what we most long to do -

through His leadership in our lives

we can learn how to build true, enduring love relationships with those around us.

And just so you don’t go all religious on my here

before I go any farther with this

let me state the obvious that no one ever stated for me when I was younger.

When God calls us to love those that He brings into our lives,

He assumes we will do it imperfectly,

He assumes we’ll love imperfectly,

that we’ll make mistakes,

that we’ll sometimes make a royal mess of it

because even when we want to love,

we often don’t know what that really means.

With every relationship we enter

we go in with our own bundle of expectations,

and needs,

and damaged areas in our own lives,

and fears of rejection,

and a whole bunch of assumptions, many of which are completely wrong.

But here’s the amazing thing -

when God calls us to love He looks not at our performance but at our hearts,

and His ability to use our love for healing in the lives of others

does not depend upon our ability to do it perfectly,

but rather upon His ability to work all things together for good

both in our lives and in the lives of those we love.

In fact, one of the greatest discoveries of my life

was when I began to realize

that most of the time it isn’t my strengths and my successes that bring about strong love relationships in my life,

it’s my weaknesses,

and my failures,

and my areas of greatest need.

When I allow those I care about

to see those areas within me

if often does more to build deep friendship and love than all the strengths put together.

And here’s the thing I want to try to share with you -

to the degree that we accept this one commandment as our true high calling in life,

to that degree everything else our Lord says to us

fits into its proper place.

Do you know when prayer began to make sense to me?

Do you know when it became the means through which my soul could breath?

It was when I began to risk loving the people God brought into my life.

And let me tell you that at first this loving thing will seem very risky indeed

because letting another person into our life,

and choosing to allow ourselves to care,

and letting their pain become our pain,

and their suffering become our suffering is terrifying stuff.

It puts us into situations

in which we have no answers whatsoever

and no hope apart from our God.

If you want a nice, safe, controlled life,

don’t let yourself care,

don’t let another person’s struggles or pain complicate your life.

Such a life is safe, protected,

but it also has no purpose, no deep joys, no real reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

But if we accept the high calling given to us by our Lord,

if we choose to love,

it is then that prayer takes its proper role as it becomes the air for which our spirits cry out.

And all of the sudden those parables of our Lord make perfect sense -

the man pounding on his neighbor’s door at midnight,

the desperate woman demanding help from the unrighteous judge.

And since I’m obviously wandering all over the place here this morning

let me also share with you

what I have come to understand about the role of prayer in parenting.

I know what we long for in parenting.

I know what we so desperately hope we can find.

We want a system,

some form or structure or approach we can take

that will guarantee that our children will choose our God,

and reach out to Him,

and open their souls to His love

and their hearts to His Spirit.

We want something we can do in the flesh

that will produce the life of the Spirit in our off-spring.

And as much as I wish I could offer you the hope of such a system

it simply does not exist.

Certainly if we choose to

we can so control and dominate and crush the spirits of our children

that they loose the ability to make any choices on their own

and live out their lives in a desperate dependance upon us,

attempting to win our approval and avoid our displeasure or rejection at all costs.

But that certainly isn’t skillful parenting.

It is, in fact, among the worst types of abuse.

Of course that is not to say that our a approach to parenting

does not have a potentially huge impact for good on the lives of our children.

But the way we achieve that good

is not always the way we may at first think.

And when I look at the heart of the parenting process now,

here’s what I’ve come up with.

I see two distinct phases in the parenting process.

Certainly these two overlap in many areas,

but in the broadest sense the first phase takes place in those years prior to adolescence.

And the primary goal during those early years

is to create a life structure for our children in which we protect and guard them

from the evil and corruption in the world around them.

Certainly we love them, we teach them, we discipline them appropriately,

but most of all we protect them from those expressions of evil they are not yet able to process.

In the healthiest possible way

we shelter them and provide them with a guarded and protected world in which their young spirits can grow and develop.

But then, as they move into adolescence, our approach changes.

And this is where it gets terrifying.

Increasingly we actively turn more and more control of their lives over to them,

giving them both the right and the responsibility to make so many of those choices

that we no longer should be making for them.

Not instantly,

but clearly and honestly.

And then we pray and pray and pray that they will respond to the Spirit of God in their lives.

And if they do,

when they do,

when we see within them life choices and goals and desires

that are clearly their choices, their decisions in response to their God,

then we come along side them

and help them to find practical ways of making those life choices a living reality in their life.

But here’s the tricky part -

until we see those life choices within them,

until they have personally chosen to hear and respond to the voice of their God,

we don’t pretend,

we don’t try to manipulate,

we don’t demand,

we simply consistently reaffirm to them

that we know we can never make their choices for them

and we give them the right and the freedom to make those choices for themselves.

Let me simplify it.

As our children move into their adult years

here’s the message we want to communicate.

“Every real change that will ever take place in your life

begins with a choice you make.

I can never and will never try to make those choices for you.

As much as I may want to try,

I know that they are yours alone to make.

I cannot choose your God,

nor can I choose how you respond to His voice in your life.

But whenever you do make a choice

that grows out of your response to His life within you

I will do everything within my power

to help you find practical ways of turning that choice into a living reality in your life.”

And then, hopefully, we shut up and pray.

And I know that what I’ve just said

raises far more questions than it answers,

but I share that with you this morning

because I know that what we long for the most in the lives our children

only God Himself can do.

And He does hear

and He does respond to our prayers as we cry out to Him.

It’s risky business...caring about another person.

There is nothing safe about it at all.

But the alternative should simply not be an option for the child of God.

It is what we are here for,

it is what our Lord has called us to do.

And it gives a purpose, a richness to life

that we simply cannot find any other way.

We are studying the Gospel of John,

but you are probably aware that near the end of his life

John also wrote three short letters to us, his fellow Christians.

The last of those letters is only 14 verses long,

but there is within that letter a statement that seems simple on the surface

but that I did not fully understand

until I experienced it myself.

It’s III John 1:4 where John says,

I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth.

He’s not exaggerating, you know.

He is simply putting into words

the deepest source of joy he’s ever known -

the joy that comes from seeing the life of Christ reborn

in the lives of those whom God has entrusted into his care.

There is nothing that has the power to more deeply touch our souls

than our seeing the life of Christ in the lives of those we love.

So that’s the way it works - the more deeply we love,

the more desperately we pray.

And it’s not just prayer that finds it’s proper place in our lives when we begin to love.

Our relationship with Scripture changes drastically as well.

No longer is it simply our nifty little theological resource book

through which we devise neat and tidy doctrinal systems.

Instead it becomes the anchor that holds us secure,

the anchor that does two huge things for us.

First, through it our Lord assures us over and over again that He loves us deeply, eternally,

that He really is living in us,

and that He truly can and will live through us,

showing us what it really means for us to love.

A good friend of mine pointed me this past week

to the words of a song by Rich Mullins

in which he states so powerfully

the heart of the kind of relationship our God offers us with Himself through Christ.

He says,

So if I stand let me stand on the promise

That You will pull me through,

And if I can’t let me fall on the grace

That first brought me to You

Where we stand we stand because He’s given us the ability to do so,

and when we fall we fall into His arms of grace.

Whenever we have understood Scripture correctly

it is that message most of all that we will hear.

And second, Scripture becomes our great and infallible source book

that explains to us exactly what it means for us to love another person.

It literally shows us what love is

and how we do it.

I’ve mentioned already that God assumes we won’t be good at this love thing when we first start out.

That’s a given.

But He does not leave us ignorant.

He wants us to know the truth,

that truth that sets us free to love without fear.

And our source for that truth is the written Word.

So, with all of that, let me just restate what I really wanted to say this morning.

Prayer will never make sense to us

until we begin to love those whom God has given us,

and once we begin to love

prayer becomes not some external religious duty we must fulfill

but rather our lifeline that keeps us sane.

And maybe next week we’ll make it back to John.