Sermon: "The Power Of Praying The Word"

Third in the "What Happens When We Pray" series.
Delivered July 31, 2005 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Theme: One of the biggest killers of prayer is the feeling that we're just wasting our time. In John 5 we are taught that if we ask according to God's will, God hears and answers. What does "according to God's will" mean? Here're a few principles that make it easier to understand what this means for us, practically.

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I would like to take the opportunity to read a passage from the Book of 1st John, Chapter 5 and I am going to read Verses 14 and 15. 1st John: It's towards the end of the Bible, right before the last few books:

"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us-whatever we ask-we know that we have what we asked of him."

Let's pray. God we thank you for your Word and pray you will show us whatever we need to know so that we might respond to you with obedience, so that we might respond to you with faith, for we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

Well we have been talking about prayer for a few weeks and I think at a time that we are dealing with something like prayer, I think it is important for you to understand the kind of struggles that I have praying also, because you know its easy when you start hearing a pastor talk about prayer and say "Oh okay, well he is a professional at this. You know he doesn't struggle with the same kind of struggles praying that I do." Well I just took a spiritual gift inventory yesterday and I have taken dozens of these spiritual gifts inventories and they have come out basically the same and never including yesterday was prayer one of my leading gifts. It's not one of the things that comes easily to me. I am devoted to prayer, but I am devoted to prayer not like Tiger Woods is devoted to golf. I am devoted to prayer like the people who like to sit and watch Tiger Woods play golf, okay? I am devoted to prayer like the person who is just delighted that they broke 100 this week. Sometimes I feel like I am delighted that I broke 100 on the first nine. Prayer is a struggle for me and that is not true for everybody because there are some people who have a special gift of intercession and we need those people in our body and we want to hold up that ministry as an important ministry in the church.

I knew a woman at Canal Street Presbyterian Church who had a gift of intercession. Dottie had this gift and Dottie would come early every Sunday: she and a few other women of the church. And they would go to the back of the church and they would pray for the service that day and for the church that day and then when the actual service would start Dottie would stay in the back, actually up in the balcony. And that's because Dottie kind of moved around a lot when she worshipped and this was a Presbyterian Church after all, and she didn't want to bother anybody else. So she was in the back worshipping, but she was also in the back because she could look out over the congregation and she could pray for people and pray for the service while she was in worship. When we went to Japan Dottie asked to pray for us and she prayed for us before we left and she prayed for us the entire time we were in Japan and when I faced a difficulty, when I faced something that was discouraging in my life or confusing, the first person I would tell after Debbie was Dottie and so we would have this correspondence going on all year, year round for ten years and she prayed for us. When we had an earthquake in Japan the first person who got through after the earthquake to talk to us was Dottie's son because he sat by the telephone hitting redial for six hours until the connection was made. We value people with these gifts and if you have a gift like that, we want you to be deeply, deeply involved in the ministry of this church. But I am not one of them. I don't have that gift. I struggle with prayer. There are times that I have deep faith. There are times when I have seen amazing answers to the prayer that we have given, but there is other times that I just doubt, and it's dry times when I am just downright lazy about prayer.

And so as I look at this issue of prayer I look at my own struggle and then I look at the Apostle John who is writing this epistle, writing this letter and his confidence in prayer and my struggle in prayer are just very different things, because he talks about this is the confidence we have that if we ask anything according to God's will he hears us. Now this comes in a section of the Book of John that some commentaries call the Christian certainties because there are so many things listed in these last few verses, verses 13 to 21 that talk about things we know as Christians. Some of the things that are listed here: we know we have eternal life. We know that turning to Christ means turning from sin. We know that we are children of God. We know that the world is under the influence of the devil. We know that the Son of God has come into the world and we know that prayers are answered. Incredible confidence: right up there with the fact that we are acceptable to God because of Jesus Christ. Right next to that is that confidence that when we ask according to God's will, God hears us and that word 'hears us' is more than the fact that God notices that we pray and understands what we pray. The word there contains that seed of meaning that God is already predisposed to answer. So the use of that word is that God is hearing and God is ready to answer and will answer the things that we ask of him. That's the kind of confidence that's in John's heart. The problem is the "if" clause. If we ask according to God's will. That's where the struggle is. Now I am not going to pretend that understanding what the will of God is, is easy. I am not going to say that, but there are some basic things we can do to wrestle with this issue of 'are we praying inside the will of God' and that is what I would like to focus in on for a few minutes today.

What does it mean to pray inside of the will of God? The first thing we need to remember is that praying in the will of God means that we submit our will to God's will. This is the first struggle that we have in prayer. We see it. I mentioned it last week. When Jesus prayed in the garden and he said, "God take away this cup from me, nevertheless not what I will, but what your will be done." Jesus submitted his will to God's will and that's the struggle that we have to have. If we are going to pray according to the will of God, if we want to have confidence in our prayer, we've got to struggle with this. And it is a struggle. Anybody who has prayed has wrestled with this.

A guy named George Mueller began all kinds of orphanages in Bristol, England. He supported the work of these orphanages and countless orphanages without ever asking for a donation from anyone. He would pray for God's provision, and God used him for years to support works that required in contemporary terms, millions and millions of dollars and he would see it come in every year. And he understood what it meant to struggle with this issue of our will versus God's will and he said this:

"I seek at the beginning to get my heart in to such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the trouble with people is generally just here. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. When one is truly in this state, it's usually but a little way to the knowledge of what His will is."

Anybody who has prayed much understands this kind of struggle of trying to get our will in to the will of what God has expressed. Sometimes we will be praying for somebody who aggravates us, somebody who has a clear fault and "God, oh God change this person" and as we pray it day after day we realize you know God might change this person, but without a doubt as we pray God begins to change us. And so we start seeing this person differently, or we start seeing this situation differently, or we start seeing ourselves differently, and maybe by the end of the time of praying for this person we are praying a different prayer. God has led us in to his will in the matter. So this is our first struggle. One of the saints of God put it this way: "The marvelous and supernatural power of prayer consists not in bringing God's will down to us, but in lifting our will up to his." That's the first struggle if we want to pray in the will of God.

The second is a lot easier than that and that is to pray the obvious things. There are so many things that are beyond dispute told to us in Scripture that we are suppose to have in our prayer. We are supposed to praise God. We are supposed to thank God. We are supposed to confess our sin. This is everywhere in Scripture. If we are praising God, we are praying in the will of God. If we are thanking God, we are doing just what God wants us to do in prayer and if we are confessing our sin, this is right, and we can be confident in our prayer. And yet think of how often these are the very parts of prayer that get eliminated. We forget the praise. We forget to thank God. We forget to confess and we immediately go to the fact: "God, I need this." And I think this is more than just a personal struggle, I think this is because we are in a spiritual battle and Satan knows that there is power in praise. There is power in giving thanks to God. There is power in submitting ourselves to God as we confess our sin. These are important things in prayer and so its not just coincidence that these are the things that are eliminated. It's absolutely beyond dispute that we should praise and thank and confess, so let's fill our prayers with these things. Let's do the obvious things.

Third point is praying the Word. If part of praying the will of God is understanding the will of God, then its obvious that praying and Bible reading is going to have to go hand in hand. So rather than going to prayer with just what's on our heart, we should also go to the Scriptures and read and see if God reshapes something, if God points out something as we pray, if something stands out to us and then that thing that stands out to us, we can shape our prayer around that. These are good things to do. And it helps give us confidence in prayer because we are actually using what God has revealed about himself and about his purposes and about us. We are using those very words as we pray to God.

Now one way of doing that is to take a Bible passage and actually just change the words so that it turns in to a personal prayer. Let me go to something in the Old Testament. There is a command in the Old Testament that says this: "These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." That's what is told to us to do. Now here is a way you can change that and use that as a prayer and it comes from a book called "Face to Face" by Kenneth Boa. (book1, book2) It's a book I recommend. It's filled. It's an entire book of Scripture passages that have been changed in to a response to God. But you can do this on your own. It's just these sorts of things are sometimes helpful. Here is that same passage but prayed back to God.

"Your commandments God will be upon my heart and I will teach them diligently to my children and talk about them when I sit in my house and when I walk along the way and when I lie down and when I rise up."

It just takes what God is showing us and returns that back to God as a commitment, as a prayer and often as a praise.

Sometimes we will be reading a Scripture and then as we think about it there are other things about what is said there that raise our hearts up in prayer, so we read a Scripture and then we pray about the things that come to mind as we read this Scripture. Here is a section of Scripture that is actually a prayer. It comes from Psalm 139. I am going to read it to you from King James; because that's the way it is in this book called "31 Days of Praise" by Ruth Myers. This gives you a Scripture text and Scriptures to read and then a prayer that reflects upon these Scriptures. Here is the passage:

"For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst weave me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are thy works and my soul knows it well."

That's the passage and here is just a part of what she writes about that as a prayer.

"I give thanks to you O Lord and I stand in awe of you for I am wonderfully made. Thank you that you uniquely designed and created me with the same care and precision that you used in creating the universe, that you formed me in love exactly to your specifications, that you embroidered me with great skill in my mother's womb. I am grateful that my looks, my abilities and my personality are like a special picture frame in which you can portray your grace and beauty; your love and your strength."

These are things we can do as we look into the Scriptures. We can take what's there, think about it, reflect on it and pray it back to God. If we do this, I think you will find that what you pray about begins to change.

About five years ago we had an accident in our Ford Aerostar, it's a van. The whole front end was caved in, the grille, the lights, the radiator, the air conditioning and the bumper were all gone and in addition it jammed the door and it wasn't operating properly on the driver's side. Now if you could imagine me going to the auto shop and walking in with this van with the whole front end caved in and say, "You know the door isn't closing right, would you fix the door for me?" They would say, "There is something a little more fundamentally wrong with your car than that." "Yeah, but right now what's bothering me is the door, fix that." I think so often that's what we are doing in prayer. We are looking at a symptom. We are looking at one of the small issues and that's where we are spending all of our attention when more fundamental things are going unaddressed in our prayer to God. There are fundamental things going on that we need to be praying about. There are people all over the world who are dying without ever hearing about Jesus Christ. There are Christians who are living powerless and hypocrital lives and we might be some of them. There are people out there whose marriages and families are falling apart. We live in a society that's calling right things wrong and wrong things right and we are getting farther and farther away from God. There are fundamental things like this that we need to be praying about. It's good to be praying that your cold gets better quickly. It's good to be praying that we get the new apartment quickly. It's good to be praying about these things, but there are bigger things too to pray about and I think we will pray about these things if we find ourselves praying the Scripture.

So let me focus in on some of the God-sized issues that are there in Scripture. Big prayers. Life-changing prayers. And we will take a look at one of them in Ephesians, Chapter 3, Verses 14 to 21. This is a God-sized prayer. Ephesians 3, beginning at Verse 14:

"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is in work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations for ever and ever, Amen."

What a prayer! Does this prayer reflect the kinds of things that you usually are praying about? I pray that they might have power, that God would strengthen us with power through his Spirit working inside of us and why? So that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. Now Paul is praying this for Christians. These are people who already believe in Jesus Christ and yet he is praying for them that Christ might dwell in them by faith and that's because there is always more of us that God can get a hold of and so he is praying for this and since this is a spiritual battle, since this isn't just a matter of knowing something more, he prays for power: for the Spirit to work with power inside of us so that these things would happen. He prays for power again in this prayer a few words later.

"May you have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide, and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge."

Power is needed for us to experience the fullness of what God's love is. To know together with all of us, we can't one of us understand this, even as a whole body of Christ, it surpasses our knowledge. But we need power. We need God's work inside of us to appreciate that love, to know that love, to respond to that love, to be channels of that love. It's not just a matter of saying the right things or reading the right things. There is a spiritual dimension that God has to work out in us and Paul prays for it. It doesn't happen automatically. So Paul prays a huge prayer here that affects the basic spiritual life of the people that he is dealing with: that Christ would dwell in them and that they would understand and experience and show the love of God.

Wouldn't it be nice to pray like this? Wouldn't it be nice, because we would know that that is in the will of God? And wouldn't it be nice if when we prayed like this, God would answer everything we ask? That would be great. What if God would not only answer everything we ask, but everything within his will, that we ask or even think, wouldn't that be wonderful? How about if God was willing and able to answer more than we ask and think? Beyond our comprehension, beyond our imagination, wouldn't that be wonderful if God could actually answer like that? Wouldn't it be great if God could answer immeasurably more than we could ask or even imagine? Well that's exactly what Verse 20 says. "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more". The way that this is put together, it's piled up in Greek: "exceedingly, abundantly more than all we could ask or imagine; now to him who is able to do that", that's the promise that's here. And the most amazing part of it: immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine through his power that's at work in us. With all of our faults, with all our problems, with all the things that bother us about ourselves, with all the hurts, with all the baggage that we carry around, there is this potential through God's power at work within us, power to change, a capacity to change, to love, to forgive, to heal emotionally, a capacity to serve, a capacity to be really good in those inner places, a capacity to know to be absolutely assured of God's love for us, a capacity to show that unrestrained love to other people. Power, exceedingly, abundantly, beyond all we can ask or even imagine. And Paul's model shows us that this power is let loose by prayer. May God give us the grace to be a body that prays some God-sized prayers.

Let's pray. God, we are all over the map when it comes to this issue of prayer. It's a struggle for all of us though, that much we can all say. Open our eyes to the hope for which you have called us, the riches of your glorious inheritance in the Saints, and your incomparably great power at work in us who believe. Open our eyes to this. Strengthen our faith that we might be able to pray some God-sized prayers, that we might be able to pray with confidence because we are growing in confidence, that we are learning to pray according to your will. We ask for this life change in us through the power of your spirit that can do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we can ask or imagine. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

© 2005, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org