What Does the Bible Say About Prayer?

What Does the Bible Say About Prayer? God uses prayer to build a relationship of understanding and trust with us. Today we are talking about What the Bible Says About.. Prayer. The three questions that you said you would like answered are: 1. How do I pray? 2. Why do so many of my prayers seem unanswered? and 3. How do I hear God s answer to my prayers? I d like to start today s message by asking you a question. I d like you to think about the prayers that you prayed recently. Take a moment to think about what they were. While you re thinking of your prayers, I ll start with a few of mine. Recently I was driving between my home and Hebron and my gas light came on. Unfortunately when my car s gas light comes on it means that I can only go seven (7) more miles before I run out of gas! I don t have to tell you that seven miles in the country can mean a pretty far stretch between gas stations. I was praying: Dear God, let me just make it to Imperial. My other daily, in fact, my many- times- a- day prayer, is Dear God, please don t let me say anything I shouldn t. Unfortunately, you all know first- hand that particular prayer often goes unanswered! Very often my prayer to God is, I don t know what to do about this particular thing Please help me decide according to your will. When God is involved, amazing things happen. God always takes my mediocre hopes and multiplies them into something extraordinary. What were your prayers like this past week? Were they thankful prayers for the way you could see God s hand at work in your life? Were they prayers for help to get through a rough time? Were they prayers for someone else who needs help? How many times did you think to pray first, before you worried or before you asked someone else for help? Were you able to see how God answered your prayers? In my case, I did make it to a gas station with one mile left in the tank. The people I offended by something I said were gracious and forgave me. And I must say, this past weekend, God exceeded all expectations with the wonderful response to the free peaches at Hebron Deacon s Fair Booth and blessing the Hebron Float with a first place ribbon in the Findlay Township Parade. Every time we pray, by turning to God, no matter what the prayer is that we pray, we are adding another link to building our faith. We get far more than an answer to our prayers. When we pray, we are doing something even more important. We are building our relationship with God. To help me think through what to say to you this morning about prayer, I read Charles Stanley s book, Talking with God 1 and I also read Timothy Keller s book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. 2 1 Charles F. Stanley Talking with God (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN, 2008) 2 Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (Dutton/Penguin Publishing; New York, 2014). Hebron Presbyterian Church Rev. Cinda Isler 1

The interesting thing to me is that neither these two books on prayer or all the other sources that I checked with, talked about prayer as what we can get God to do for us, but instead, they started with the real reason why we pray. You see, God has more in mind for us when we pray. Sometimes it is easy to picture God as some sort of cosmic vending machine. If we put in the right prayers and if we say them in the right way, and put on our I m a good person hat, we think that God should give us what we want. But prayer doesn t work that way. God wants us to pray so that we deepen our trust in Him and make Him a constant companion every minute of our life. We are to pray without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5:22). God invites us to come close to Him because God wants to share life with us. Our first reading today is from Jeremiah. Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet, because he was so grieved over the sins of Israel. Jeremiah was also likely weepy because he was disheartened and discouraged by the refusal of the people to listen to God s prophesy. When these words came to Jeremiah from God, Jeremiah was in prison, put there by King Zedekiah because he didn t like what Jeremiah was preaching. Hear what God had to say to Jeremiah..read Jeremiah 33:2-3 (pew Bible pg. 562) 2 This is what the LORD says, he who made the earth, the LORD who formed it and established it the LORD is his name: 3 Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know... Notice that God did not say to Jeremiah, I m going to get you out of prison. God did not say, I m going to free you as a reward for all of your faithful service. No, God told Jeremiah that if he would call to Him in prayer, God would share some of his future plans with him. Jeremiah would then know that all his torment was not in vain and that he was playing an important part in God s glorious plans. Do you see what an amazing privilege sharing this kind of relationship with God is? God invites you and me to do the same as Jeremiah. In the midst of discouragement and confusion. When we feel like we are living in a sort of prison and all we can feel is despair, God says to us, Call to me, and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know. 1. How Am I To Pray? This leads us to our first question for today, How am I to pray? Just how are we to call to God? I ve found that the most honest prayer is the best. Help me God! is very effective. (Psalm 107:28-30) We have an in with God that Jeremiah didn t have. We can approach the throne of God with confidence. Boldly, is what the book of Hebrews tells us. Because Jesus is there Hebron Presbyterian Church Rev. Cinda Isler 2

interceding for us, when we turn to God we will find grace to help in (our) time of need. (Hebrews 4:16). Jesus has explained to us in his Lord s Prayer that we have an Almighty God who is also our Father in Heaven. (Matthew 6:9) What a great privilege we have been given!!! There are scads and scads of books on how to pray. There are methods and acronyms to follow, and I can guide you to them if you think that would be helpful, but I think that the simplest way to begin praying is to 1. Realize to Whom you are praying and 2. Make sure that your connections to God are intact and 3. Be honest about your motives for the prayer. Jesus is our connection to God. If we want to make a phone call, we need to make sure that our landline is plugged into the phone company s phone jack. No matter how loud we yell into the receiver, or how hard we punch the number keys, the phone just won t connect us to the person we want to talk to without the proper connection. The same thing goes for the internet. At our house, our connection is very, very poor. So many times I can t log onto the internet because our server is not connecting to the computer. I have try to reset the router, which I don t really understand, but I do know that without the router, I can t connect to the internet. Jesus makes the connection to God for us. (I hope that Jesus will forgive my comparison of him to a phone jack and a router!) When we pray to God, we need to make sure that we are connected to Jesus. Jesus has told us, No one comes through the Father except through me. (John 14:6) We need to make sure that we belong to Jesus. If Jesus is not our Lord and our Savior, then he is not our connection to the Father. Jesus has made a way for us to be heard by our Father. Jesus tells us, Whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. (John 14:13) I can almost hear your mind turning, and asking another question. OK, so anything I ask, if I just add the little phrase in Jesus name onto the end of my prayer, then I m golden, right? Not quite. It s not a magic phrase. We say our prayers in Jesus name, because it is only through Jesus authority that we are able to present our prayers to God. We are able to have the privilege to talk to God because of our connection to Jesus. There is power being connected to Jesus name. In 1 John 5 we are told Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, 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 the petitions that we have asked of Him. (1 John 5:14 15) You see, when we pray according to God s will, God answers our prayer. There s the key. When our will is aligned with God s will and what we want will bring glory to God, God will bless our request. If a new truck or new puppy or new promotion is not in God s will, we will not receive the answer we were hoping for. The more we pray, the more we understand God, and the more our will becomes God s will. Hebron Presbyterian Church Rev. Cinda Isler 3

What we ask for and how we pray will become transformed as our relationship with God becomes deeper. This is the kind of relationship Paul prayed that the Christians in Ephesus would have with God. Turn with me to page 827 for our second reading, Ephesians, chapter 1, verse 16. read Ephesians 1: 16 19 (pew Bible pg. 827). 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18 I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, 20 which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead... So, if God s power is available to us who believe, then why does God sometimes seem to keep it from us when we ask? This brings us to our second question: 2. Why Do So Many of My Prayers Seem Unanswered? I think it is easy to think that only the prayers which God answers with a yes are answered prayers. In truth, God answers all our prayers with one of three answers: yes, no and wait. For instance, if God hadn t allowed me to reach a gas station before my gas ran out, would I think that God hadn t answered my prayer? No. It wouldn t take me very long to realize that I caused my car to run out of gas and that there was a lesson for me in the empty gas tank. Or, what if I ask God for a voice like Jennifer Beaumont s, rationalizing with God that I could use it for God s glory. If I remain with the same voice that I have, do I think that God hasn t answered my prayer? No. But I would realize that God is asking me to focus on using the gifts that God has given me and celebrate the special gift that God has given Jennifer. The wait answer is the hardest to hear. It can get very discouraging to wait and wonder Does God hear? Does God care? We hear the same questions throughout the Psalms and the Prophets, O LORD, how long shall I cry and you not hear? (Habbakkuk 1:2; Psalm 94:3; Psalm 90:13) The hardest no prayers are those we say for those who are ill and they are not healed. When this happens, God asks us to trust Him for the reasons that don t make any sense to us. We need to trust that God loves our loved ones more than we ever could, which we have a hard time believing. But it is true, Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. (Psalm 116:15). Hebron Presbyterian Church Rev. Cinda Isler 4

Remember that Jesus himself, God s only Son, received a no from his Heavenly Father. When Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was crucified, he prayed: My Father, if it is possible may this cup be taken from me. (Matthew 26:39) It wasn t simply the cup of death that Jesus wanted to avoid, but Jesus couldn t bear the thought of being separated and forsaken by God when he was judged for our sins. God did not say yes to Jesus prayer. 3. How Do I Hear God s Answer to My Prayers? The closer we grow to God, the more we will receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, which Paul wished for the Ephesians. As our faith matures, we can see with the eyes of our heart, how God is at work in our lives and in the world around us. There are things we can do to allow for the opportunity to listen for God s voice. We can t expect to hear God s answer if we keep up a frantic pace or allow distractions to cloud our connection with God. The best way to hear God is to set apart a daily time to talk to God, learn about God and listen to God. During this time, first ask God to examine your heart. Whatever wrongs God shows you, make them right. Recently God told me I needed to apologize to three people. God kept reminding me until I personally apologized to all three. In Mark, Jesus tells us that we must first forgive others if we want God to forgive us. (Mark 11:25) Then tell God all the things you are thankful for in your life. Some days it might be very hard to find things to be grateful for. But it s pretty important to thank God for what He has done for you. When God seems to give you an answer to your prayer, test it before acting on it. See what the Bible says. God will not give you a yes, which is against His Word in the Bible. For instance, if you feel God is leading you to take a job that would involve breaking God s commandments like lying or stealing, that job is probably not a true yes answer from God. Also test God s answer by asking the opinions of strong Christians you know. Have others who know God s voice to help you discern how God is answering your prayer. With practice, you will become like the sheep that recognize and follow their master s voice. You will grow to know when the Good Shepherd is speaking to you. (John 10:27) Take heart in the times of silence. Trust that God is answering your prayer. Know that God is working all things to His good purpose, (Romans 8:29) and that in God s perfect timing you will know His answer. Continually pray the prayer that David prayed to God:...Bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. (Psalm 143:8) May it be so for you, Amen. Hebron Presbyterian Church Rev. Cinda Isler 5