A Lifestyle of Prayer (2)
Heidelberg Catechism-Prayer • Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 5 viewsNotes
Transcript
“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. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 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.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
Scripture: Matthew 6:5-15, Matthew 7:7-12, James 5:13-20
Heidelberg Catechism: Lord’s Day 45, Questions and Answers 116-118
Sermon Title: A Lifestyle of Prayer
Aim: Why and How of prayer-“Conversation”
This evening we are starting a new series over the next four weeks or so on prayer, using the Heidelberg Catechism’s Lord’s Days 45-52 as our lens. Scripture will give voice along the way but the questions and answers will be our guide to seeing prayer, an activity that breathes in daily life. As I thought about prayer this week, it helped me to write down all of the ideas that came to my mind, the presuppositions and thoughts which might be floating around out there when we think about the topic. On the screen you can see the list, this is not a complete list of every possible noun, adjective, verb, or description relating to prayer, but I think it helps going into a study like this to recognize what we’re thinking about as well as others around us might be. I hope that some of what we cover over the next 4 weeks connects with the majority of what’s going on up there, whether in the message time or conversations happening elsewhere, but at least maybe we can consider some things we haven’t before. My plan is to put this up each week as we begin as a reminder, but tonight let me identify a few as we get started.
· In regards to how we use our bodies in prayer, some may be thinking about are my eyes to be closed or open, others maybe should we be or are we required to be kneeling?
· What are my prayers supposed to be, often I’ve heard it said that prayer can become a “grocery list” of petitions and things we ask God for, but there’s also praise, confession, healing, discernment, and so many other things that can be going on
· Do we pray alone or with others, in public or private?
· Do our prayers have to be ours originally or can we use a prayer book of someone else who has written down their prayers? Are there better pray-ers than others, and if so, what does that entail?
· How do we address God when we pray, and what do our prayers say about our view? Who do we pray to? How do we end our prayers? The pastor at my previous church strongly encouraged me to try to always end with “in Jesus’ name” or “for Jesus’ sake.”
· What are expectations do we have when we pray? Do we really expect God to answer in which case, is there a reasonable expectation for how soon or are we more wishing something to happen without full confidence?
· How do we describe prayer to others? We use language like talking to God, and often I have heard it described as a conversation. What does that actually mean and do we practice it well?
· What if we get distracted in prayer, or even are unable to pray?
Some of these will be touched on in our weekly Scripture readings or in the Catechism questions and answers, and some I hope to give voice to in my teaching, but please know that I can’t cover it all in 4 or 5weeks of a series, or even a whole 11 weeks, though I’m sure Pastor Jeff has all of the answers. My plan for tonight and for each of the following weeks as we gather is to read a few short passages of Scripture which speak to the subject of prayer being covered that night or exemplify models of prayer, then responsively go through 2 or 3 questions of the catechism, and then work through a couple of the key points and hopefully some of the questions that I brought up or others that I receive along the way.
Matthew 6:
· Prayer is not motivated by pride and being seen
· Prayer does not require our perfect speech but it also isn’t flowery because God knows
· The Lord’s Prayer-to be covered
· Active forgiveness
Matthew 7:
· Ask-seek-knock->Given-find-opened
· After giving them a prayer and speech form, we find a lifestyle of prayer: fasting, rewarding later, lack anxiety, lack judgment, trust is the epitome
James 5:
· Prayer is done in all circumstances
· Effective prayers require faith
· Re:active forgiveness
Heidelberg Catechism
116: Why do Christians need to pray?
117: How does God want us to pray so that he will listen to us?
118: What did God command us to pray for?
Prayer, brothers and sisters is the most theological act we are involved in and the primary act of faith that we practice. How we pray and why, the motivation behind it, tells something to ourselves and possibly others about how we see God and what our commitment to him is. If your Bible or if you’re like me, your seven printed Bibles, smartphone Bible app or apps, Bible software, internet access, and library card were all taken away, you could still pray. If there was not a church in your area, you could still pray. Even when we’re not living the way we should, often we turn to God in prayer for a lifeline. Regardless of one’s particular faith or even whether they actually believe in anything, when calamity strikes, people cry out in distress, If there is a god, why this happen? or God, if you’re real, please save us. When it comes to the Christian life in particular, in our affirmation of this confession, prayer isn’t just something to be doing, it is to be the most important part of thankfulness God requires of us.
When was the last time most of us thought of prayer like that? The Catechism structured on guilt, grace, and gratitude; sin, salvation, and service; the movement in the life of a believer from seeing their own sin, to accepting the unearned grace of Christ, and then living in thanks, which the most important thing we can do according to this is pray. Thinking back to Q&A 1, What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Who fully paid for all my sin and set me free and watches over me, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready to live for him, if that’s our start, that passionate comfort, then ending on the action of prayer jumps out to me as how we take that comfort and put it into a concrete practice, the only reasonable way we can live.
For some of you maybe there’s a push back, not wanting to see prayer as a requirement, but as something organic, something more intimate and personal than maybe we would say a “law,” but what I want to propose as we go is prayer as a lifestyle, a continual outward and inward expression of one’s relationship with God as what we’re called to give. If we look back to question and answer 116, prayer exists first because God acts and God gives his grace and Holy Spirit to those living in thanks to him; that comes complete one time, not a practice of him taking away completely when we’re too bad and then giving back a second and third and hundredth and a thousandth time when we finally straighten up. When God gives us grace and the Holy Spirit, we believe it’s for good, for life, and in that case, it’s one time but it’s continuing, we need to be worked in, to grow, to be nourished, to be sanctified. In this view of a lifestyle of prayer then, our practice is asking God for his power to be evident in our lives, we live into that by faith, and then we thank God for his action. It’s not out of guilt or out of worry that we pray, but it’s an active call and a response, it’s because of God’s interaction in our lives each day that we see his glory on display both in the grand and small things that happen.
So how can we do this, and the authors frame it in the manner of How does God want us to pray, which is appropriate because he’s the one hearing, he is higher than us, he is our ruler, what is God’s expectation in all of this? The authors write pray from the heart to only the one true God. How does God want it, he wants you to be yourself, to use your words, to see your ability to do this which he has instilled in us. God reveals himself in his Word, and that should give each of us an understanding of who God is. For me, that’s imagery of God as shepherd, who goes out and gathers, who watches over and rescues, the shepherd is level-headed through trial. Like sheep that go astray, all of us can probably be considered dumb at times, but the shepherd always wants the complete flock. For me, prayer comes in the midst of the assurance Be still and know that I am God. How does God want you to pray, he wants you to see how he has been at work and how he continues to work.
The second point of the answer to 117 feeds into this idea of living prayer, God’s desire is for us to acknowledge our need and misery, hiding nothing, and humble ourselves. If prayer isn’t this, then pride doesn’t lead to sin. If prayer is just a time of talking out loud in the middle of a room to someone who we can’t see, asking “give me this” or “give me that,” and saying “thanks for all this stuff,” then there isn’t a sense of how your life, your work, your relationship with the broader world connects to that which you call your faith and your reliance on your God. What a life of prayer does is connect everything, it speaks to our recognition that everything is broken and in need of God’s redemption, everything happens by his providence, that the Spirit is at work renewing all things, but we’re not there yet and we can’t take what we have for granted. We don’t deserve the houses and cars and wealth we have more than our brother or sister in Christ who gets turned away at the door of the rescue mission because they no beds and no room left. A life of prayer sees the issues of this world and claims them as our own, as something that we contribute to and are affected by; our cries for mercy are acts of faith that God will respond.
If we go back to how the question is worded, “How does God want us to pray so that he will listen to us?” I don’t know about you but that tripped me up the first couple of times I read it; it seems like after hearing all my life that there are a variety of ways to pray and that it’s not our words that make the prayer, wait there’s a specific method that is required for God to listen to us. But note the author’s third point, with all our undeserving, God will surely listen to our prayer because of Christ our Lord. That is what he promised us in his Word. Even though we recognize our unworthiness against the backdrop of God’s majesty and in a sense we shouldn’t even be able to enter his presence, if even the palace we might say where he is, God listens. God sees through our unworthiness when we truly live in thanks and gratitude, because of the saving actions of Christ, and he sees his creation, that which he formed and breathed life into in his image, and he sees that original goodness and God responds to prayer because the purpose of all of history is to redeem that which was lost. Is there something special we have to do when we pray like entering a code to gain access to a door, no, brothers and sisters, the good news is that we don’t have to do anything besides trusting God’s faithfulness, grace, and love.
There’s something very good about speaking directly to God and asking for his blessing on our day, on our meals, on the work we’re involved in by way of prayer of words, but I think prayer is a dedication of life in which we connect with God because we’re grateful to him for what he has done, and because we have been gifted with the opportunity to participate in the redemption of a broken world, we can come in praise and in confession, in pain and in joy, in prayers of healing, mercy, discernment, and commission. When we have questions or worries, God is big enough to hear them whether or not we give specific voice.
If you take a communication course, one of the first things they teach you about is what is communication. It’s the forming of a message by one party, it’s delivery over a medium, like voice, or written, or visual, or a combination, that message’s reception by another party, their processing of part or all of the message, and the ability to receive in order to give feedback. That’s what happens in a conversation, that’s where we move from prayer just being a 30 second, 1 minute or 5 minute event to prayer being a lifestyle. As a lifestyle there’s an expectation that God responds; it’s not just God answers when we ask a question, but God’s commitment is there before we even say, ask, or place anything before him and he knows exactly what we’re coming to him with, his faithfulness will abide in his time and in his way.
This means we can wait on the Lord for a response with great expectancy. This doesn’t mean the response is always what we want. But the prayer done in faith takes away any thinking that we’re just wishing, that things happen and thoughts pop up randomly in our heads; prayer as we read in James is powerful and effective, and we as believers are invited by Jesus himself to participate in our posture, in our willingness to forgive, to pray as Jesus commanded us to pray. Prayer is about recognizing what’s going on, both great and small, joyful and painful around us, bringing those things to God, living into what he teaches us about redemption in His Word and in his continual speaking, but we have to be able to listen then. Our enjoyment can be a prayer of glory and praise to God, which he sees and interprets. We to should be waiting to see how God speaks and acts, our expectations may not always be met as we would like, but we can trust that God listens and will give his grace abundantly, providing for every spiritual and physical need we have. As we grow as believers, prayer sinks in as something we’re drawn to, even something we can enjoy. Our interpretation of God’s response won’t be perfect, but we can grow to better grasp his work even when it doesn’t bring us the most pleasure.
Over the next few weeks, the Catechism will guide us through the commands and requests of the Lord’s Prayer. The simplest yet fullest expression of all of our thanks, petitions, needs, and promises as have been promised by Jesus Christ in his Word. It’s an active prayer, not just a statement that gets left behind at the dinner table as we say it with our brothers, sisters, mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, I hope we can grow in that during this season, and see how God’s grace is given to us and we can share it with one another by living lifestyles of prayer. Amen.