Prayer: How do I talk to God?

Let me invite you to stand now as we read Ephesians chapter six, verses ten to twenty.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

Stand, therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and as Jews for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace, in all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayers, all prayer and supplication.

To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly as I ought to speak.

Thus in the reading of God's word.

Let me do exactly what he was bidding us do here and pray and ask him to bless us.

In your word you call us to pray.

In your word you call us to listen as you teach us from Scripture.

And we want to become better prayers by becoming better listeners.

So bless us this morning.

Help us to listen, not just to what the dude up front is saying, but to our great God and King who loves us and is equipping us for life in a fallen world, who desires to commune with us and be with us.

Bless us and be with us, we pray, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have a seat.

That was a pretty powerful passage, right?

It's a it's a William Wallace moment.

It's a gladiator moment, it's a Winston Churchill moment, right?

It's uh be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

Take up the shield of faith and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and your feet clad with the gospel of peace, and having done everything to fight, fight, fight.

That's not what he says.

Rebecca's the only other one who gets to hear that on a regular basis, though.

No, I'm just we don't do that.

We don't do that.

We don't do that.

I'm in trouble.

I love you.

I'm sorry.

That's not what he says.

He doesn't say fight, fight, fight.

What he says is pray, pray, pray as if your life depended on it.

Because it does.

Prayer is absolutely vital.

It's absolutely essential.

And so he tells us here to pray on every occasion with all sorts of prayers.

It's not a spiritual discipline that you master, it is an absolutely vital activity for our soul.

So if it's so vital, why is it so hard to pray?

Because most of us, probably all of us in here, struggle with it at some point.

Why do we struggle with prayer?

And one of the probably if you ask a modern post-Enlightenment person why it's so hard to pray, we would say, well, you can't see God, can you?

And that's true, you can't see God.

He's not bound by matter, time, and space the way everything else is.

But maybe that's the reason why we can pray with utter and complete confidence, is because he's not bound by matter, time, and space like everything else.

Like if you if you listen to what people are saying around us today, they're all saying, where are the great heroes of the past?

Where are the great statesmen of the past?

Where are the George Washingtons?

Where are the Abraham Lincolns?

Where are the Lynn Manuel Miranda or whatever?

Where's Alexander Hamilton?

Where are all these people today?

And the fact is, they're dead, they're gone.

They can't hear you.

They can't answer if you call out.

They were bound by matter, time, and space.

And God is not bound by matter, time, and space, which means that he can be with you anywhere, everywhere, anytime to hear you when you pray.

And maybe that's a more powerful reason to pray.

There is no obstacle for him, even if we can't experience his physical presence the way we can experience Kentucky fried chicken.

He's with us.

And that's what the Bible says over and over again.

And he gives us, he can give us, his undivided attention.

C.S.

Lewis wrote this.

He said, God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.

He does not have to deal with us in the mass, like or every all of us together trying to sort through.

You are as much alone with him as if you were the only being he had ever created.

We can't see God, can we?

But maybe that's a better reason to pray.

Maybe that's a reason why we feel we can pray all of the time.

Prayer is vital, it's essential, it's critical.

He mentions the devil here.

He's an adversary, the flaming darts of the evil.

And the devil doesn't want you to know how big a blessing prayer is in your life.

He doesn't want you to know the clarity that prayer can bring, the comfort that prayer can bring as you entrust things to God, the celebration you experience in prayer when you recognize God's goodness to you in every area of your life.

He doesn't want you to recognize and experience the communion and closeness, the intimacy that we can have with God in prayer.

And some of you, as I'm talking about this, know exactly what I'm talking about.

You've experienced these things in prayer, and some of you have not yet.

And that's okay.

That's okay.

So this is what we're talking about.

We're talking about praying.

How do I talk to God?

And we're just focusing on teasing out Ephesians chapter 6, verse 18.

Ephesians 6:18

Praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication.

Okay, so what do we mean by prayer?

Prayer, simply put, is a conversation that we have with God.

It's that simple.

This is a little bit more involved, though, because it's not the words we say, which is sometimes, I think, part of why the apostles, and we feel like we can't pray in public, Lord, teach us to pray.

Like we think we have to use certain kinds of language.

But listen, this is a great quote.

True prayer is not first external words, it is a heart attitude.

The external words have meaning only if they express the right heart attitude.

The concern of God is not that you say the right words, but that you long for the right things.

It's your heart condition that is his concern.

Or, as John Bunyan, who wrote, who was the author of Pilgrim's Progress, wrote, he said, he wrote, Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit for such things as God has promised, or according to the word of God, for the good of the church, with submission and faith to the will of God.

That's a great summary.

It's dense, there's a lot there, but it's a great summary, and I'm operating with that kind of principle in mind as we go through.

Ephesians 6 17.

Praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication.

So that's the first thing.

He starts with just this little phrase praying at all times.

The NIV says, praying on all occasions.

So not just praying at religious events, not just uh praying uh in your prayer closet, but praying all the time.

The apostle Paul says, pray all the time.

You can talk to God about anything at any time, whatever you are doing.

So what kind of a God what kind of God would bid you and me as individual people to pray to him all the time?

What kind of God would listen to you as you're praying all the time?

A God who is infinite, eternal?

Absolutely.

A God whose mind can encapsulate all the prayers of all of his people that are being prayed, absolutely.

A God who also loves you and is engaged with you and wants you to speak to him.

A God who made us, in short, to do life with him.

We were made in the garden to do life with God, to commune with him.

And when we die, we're gonna go into his presence.

And the happy ending of the Bible is uninterrupted intimate communion with God in the place where he is and we are together.

So it makes sense to say that the reason that he put us here is for us to uh do life with him.

God made us to do life not just by ourself with the occasional calling out to him or going to a religious activity, but constantly, constantly to be in communion and be aware of him.

I was listening this week uh to uh a variety of sermons and something just came across my feed.

It wasn't really about prayer, but the guy did talk about prayer a little bit.

It's a neuroscientist, he's making the rounds on uh YouTube right now for me.

Um he's in my algorithm.

And he's a neuroscientist, very popular.

He's been on a lot of the big shows, and he uh apparently has become a Christian, he believes in God, and he prays.

He prays, and that's people are fascinated, the people shows he goes into.

And he one of the things he said, he asked this question, he said, How could it be that the thing that is hardest for human beings to do for themselves becomes far easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves?

So he's a neuroscientist, and the examples he uses, he says, you know, he said, No, I'll read it here because it's better.

He says, if you look at the science around religious belief or belief in higher power, what you will find is that for every crisis from recovery from addiction to recovery from immense tragedy, and his example is like the death of all of one's children, which happens.

It's horrible.

He says, almost without fail, moving through those hardships with any kind of sense of self-preservation and not engaging in a self-destructive lifestyle almost always involves some notion of top-down control from outside of you.

And he says, that's God.

And he said, if you look at all of the recovery movements, they all talk about finding your higher power, not necessarily the Christian God, but finding a higher power outside of yourself and entrusting you getting better to this other person outside of you, a top-down control in this, and he said, what's fascinating about it is in the literature, people as they talk about it, they said it makes it easier, not harder, to give control top down to somebody else.

And he says it makes it concrete more than abstract.

He said the only thing that might be abstract about it is you can't shake God's hand, like physically, not yet, in heaven, Jesus, yeah.

Um, but he said that idea of a higher power, we recognize I can't do this by myself, but I have to do it by myself.

But the only way I can do it by myself is to have somebody else.

How could it be that the thing that is hardest for human beings to do for themselves to get over these terrible things becomes far easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves?

So pushing that idea of we were made to do life with God.

And what Paul is saying is here, not just the hard and difficult things, he gets us through them, but everything.

You don't have to wait till there's a religious moment or a religious service or a tragedy.

He's inviting us to cultivate a personal continuous interaction with God in every single area of our lives.

You were made for it.

We pray all the time.

And he gives us another phrase here.

We don't just pray and just like it's it's not a running conversation with myself.

It's it is a conversation with God that he says is in the spirit.

We pray all kinds of prayers in the spirit.

What does that mean?

It's a prayer of real faith where your soul is communing with God through the Holy Spirit.

Praying in the Holy Spirit is praying in the power of the Spirit, by the leading of the Spirit, based upon the truth of Scripture.

So who is the Holy Spirit?

Now, in Christian theology, we believe that there is one God and three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And these three are one God.

But they each, when we begin to look at Scripture and how Scripture explains their involvement in our lives and what they've done, particularly in salvation, is the Father is the one who planned our salvation in eternity past.

So he planned it.

In space-time history, Jesus accomplished it when he died on the cross and rose from the dead.

And then the Holy Spirit is the one who applies it to our lives.

He's the on-site workman that the Bible describes as the helper of God's people to bring all the blessings and benefits of Jesus into our lives.

So it talks about the fruit of the Spirit, which is the transformation of our inner lives.

It talks about the gifts of the Spirit and us being able to have a positive impact on the world around us.

So the Spirit is involved in our lives to help us to live out what Jesus has accomplished for us.

His work is to enable us to understand, embrace, and embody the truth of God, the truth of Christ, and to live that out.

So the Spirit, the helper, as Jesus calls him, enables and guides our intimacy with God in prayer.

So in Romans 8, 15 to 16, we read this.

Paul writes, You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, that is, we pray, we cry, Abba Father.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our Spirit that we are children of God.

Now, what that means is sometimes it's hard for me to believe that these things are true.

Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that God really does love me.

And the Holy Spirit is in my soul, whispering to my mind, whispering to my heart, and convincing me this is true.

This is true.

And you can pray to God as your father in the power of the Spirit.

And so what that means is the walls come down between me and God.

And you may have had this before is where you feel like God is palpably in the room with me.

I can't see him or touch him, he's not matter, time, space, but he's here with me.

And I have a deeper sense of intimacy with him than I have had with any human being in my entire life.

Some of you know what I'm talking about.

Some of you maybe have touched upon that.

To pray in the Spirit means that you're praying from a heart and mind and inner life that's shaped by the Spirit.

And there are five things I'll tell you real quick.

One is it means that we pray in the truth of who we know God to be.

We don't invent a God and say, hey, here's how I want you to be.

This is the kind of God I want to pray to.

No, I pray to the God who is, who has revealed Himself.

Number two, we pray in love with complete intimacy with God.

My griefs, my guilt, my shame, my longings, my fears, all the walls have come down.

I can be more open with God in prayer than I can with a therapist, my spouse, or my children, or my best friends.

He knows me.

And there's a love that's here that led Jesus to sacrifice.

Three, we pray with assurance.

I can come with confidence, knowing that he loves me and Jesus died for me.

We pray on mission.

I don't know if you picked up on that here, but he asked, he is telling the Ephesians to pray for other Christians, to pray for missionaries, pray for others.

That means that when we pray, we're not praying simply for our agenda.

We're praying for God's mission to the world.

His mission has become my mission.

And then number five, we pray as a means of grace.

We pray, knowing that while we're praying, God is aligning my heart with his heart.

We know that while we're praying, God is bringing me into conformity to the likeness of Christ.

It's a means of grace for me to receive grace from God and to be transformed even while I'm praying.

I came across this quote this week while I was preparing this, somebody I'd never heard of, but I thought this is really true.

It said, the reality is my prayers don't change God.

But I am convinced prayer changes me.

Praying boldly boosts me out of that stale place of religious habit into authentic connection with God Himself.

Changes me.

And one of the things that changes about me is the way that I see God and therefore live my life, because we tend to see God as a genie or a miser.

And sometimes, and that definitely affects our way of approaching him.

But the scriptures teach us he's not a miser who's nickel and diming us for everything.

He's a generous father.

And he's not a genie who is obligated to give you anything you want just by rubbing his lamp.

He's not indebted to you that way.

When it comes to prayer, he listens, he responds.

Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the response is no.

He's a wise father who delights to give good gifts generously to his children.

And I can think of two instances from scripture where when you pray, you might not get what you're asking for.

One is in James 4.3, where he's talking to a group of Christians, and he says, You ask in prayer, but you do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.

So they're approaching God as a genie.

They ask for their own pleasure, which is pretty self-absorbed for pretty much all of us.

And so that becomes this process of sanctification in the midst of things as we end up praying to God as He truly is.

Think about it this way.

If you were if you were able to ask God for one wish, what would you wish for?

Money?

Fame?

Spend the rest of your life singing one song and crowds of people and making a horde of money off of that?

What would you ask?

Now, if you're talking to God, you know that He is the wisest, the kindest, the most loving, the most generous, who understands the end from the beginning.

So what would you ask?

What would your wish be for God?

Jesus has already told us in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Lord's Prayer, Your will be done.

Your will be done.

I don't trust myself, but I trust you.

Your will be done.

So we can treat God as a genie, but He's not a genie.

And sometimes that answer is no.

And that leads us to the second one is this is from Matthew chapter 7, verse 10.

Matthew 7:10

Talking about God who's a good father who gives good gifts.

He says, Which of you fathers, if your son 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 gifts, good things to those who ask him?

So he's saying, if he's a good father, if you ask for a fish, he's not gonna give you a serpent.

But isn't the opposite gonna be true?

If you ask for a serpent, do you think he's gonna give you a serpent?

I ask for a serpent, I didn't ask for fish.

Do you think he's gonna give you a serpent?

And the answer is, I don't think so, because he knows the things that would harm us.

And he keeps I ask for the wrong things.

There are times in my life where I say, Lord, thank you for saying no to that prayer request.

God give me a million dollars, God make me win the beauty pageant, God let me let my business take off.

And his response is, Do you know what that's gonna do to your marriage?

Do you know what that's gonna do to your children?

Do you know that so there are times he says no, and that's a blessing.

1 John 5.14 talks about why we have confidence, and he says, and this is the confidence that we have toward him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

And we think that's a trick, because you know, if you're asking what he's already going to do anyway, then he's gonna do it.

It seems like it's an answer to prayer, but it's not so much about sovereignty as it is about uh sanctification, it's about what God has said, as prayers.

A means of grace where God imparts grace that makes us more like Christ.

So your heart is conformed to God.

So the Spirit corrects and directs us as we're praying.

Have you ever had this moment when you're praying for something and you realize immediately, I shouldn't have prayed that?

I don't think that's what I really meant.

That's not really what I wanted.

I have had that.

It's not a bad moment, it's actually a good moment because you have the sense of God just talked to me in the midst of my prayer and said, Is that really what you're asking, or something else?

So here would be an example of that.

You ask God to make you wealthy.

But then you remember that Jesus taught us to pray, saying, Give us this day our daily bread.

Okay, so to stop and think about what I'm really asking in light of what Jesus is telling me to ask is I'm asking for contentment.

I'm asking to know that God is taking care of me and providing for me.

I'm asking to know that whatever happens, he's going to provide what I need.

Give me today my daily bread.

So we don't pray to God as a genie.

We to give us the treasures of the world.

We pray to him to rescue us from the influences of the world and to align our hearts with his.

In prayer, we're not just seeking God to give us as we see fit.

We're asking him to guide us so that we ask as he sees fit.

Your kingdom come, your will be done.

So we pray for all sorts of things in line with the Spirit and what the Spirit has taught, is teaching us.

Ephesians 6.18.

He says, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayers and supplication.

So we pray all the time in the Spirit and all sorts of different kinds of prayers.

So what do I pray about?

Where do I even start?

And Paul gives us important direction.

He says, at all times or on any and every occasion, pray about what's going on.

You're sick, pray about that.

You are worried?

Pray about that.

You've had a great week at the beach.

Pray about that and thank him for it.

So what kind of person prays?

A person who is expectant, a person who has need, a person who knows she is loved, a person who sometimes doesn't know that she is loved, a person who's not sure sometimes even if God is there or not.

The reality is that all sorts of people pray.

God hears all kinds of prayers and all kinds of people.

He hears the whispered prayer in your loneliness and grief.

He hears the desperate cry in the hospital room.

He hears prayers for countries and nations and kings.

He hears all those prayers and he listens to all of those prayers.

Can I really pray to God about anything?

Yes.

And the Bible bids us to.

James, the brother of Jesus, wrote in his letter, James 5.13, 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.

Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

We've seen that in our lives.

My daughter had skin rashes forever.

None of the ointments, none of the doctors could do anything for her.

She just itched and just broke out everywhere.

And we took her and started a new program, didn't seem to be doing anything.

We said, let's call the elders of our church.

So we called the elders of the church.

And they anointed her with oil and they prayed for her.

And it wasn't immediate.

And we think that it wasn't necessarily miraculous, but we think that God used that treatment that we had just started to bring relief.

She's not ever had the same thing ever again.

It was amazing.

We attribute that to God answering prayer, not necessarily miraculously, but providentially in what we were doing.

And so we how do we have confidence to come before them?

How do we have confidence?

Because we have a Savior who intercedes for us, who knew what it was like to pray in a garden sweating so intensely and pouring himself out to the Heavenly Father.

He knows what it's like to be in need and to say, I need to reach out to top-down control to my Father and say, Father, if it's possible, take this cup from me.

And this Savior meets us in our moments.

This is what we read in Hebrews 4, 14 to 16.

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, a high priest who is unable, we have a high priest who is able to sympathize with us in our weakness.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

So we come back around.

Prayer is about having God Himself, not getting God to give things to us, but about having God Himself, a deep personal relationship with God.

Prayer, as one person said, prayer is the heart aiming at God and talking to Him.

And yet, prayer can be hard, prayer can be difficult.

So let me close with two struggles and two kind of meeting you in the midst of that.

One is this when you are struggling with maybe your quiet time, and you have your Bible in front of you, or maybe you don't have your Bible in front of you, you're just trying to pray.

And your mind keeps just being distracted.

It runs to this and it runs to that, and it runs to it runs to the World Cup.

And it runs to where your kids are and what they're doing, and it runs to where your friends are, and it runs to your bills, and it runs to the government, and it runs to all the things that are constantly intruding upon our thoughts.

And we keep trying to rein them in and say, okay, I gotta just I want to focus on prayer.

I want to pray, I want to be with you, God.

And you keep trying to rein that in, and it's a struggle.

And then you start hating yourself and feeling guilty.

It's like, I must be a bad Christian.

So in the 1600s, there was a Catholic priest who did a lot of writing on devotional and devotions and prayers, and he gives us some relief here, and I love this.

He says, he wrote, If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently, and replace it tenderly in its master's presence.

And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour, you're trying to have your quiet time, even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour will be very well employed.

I love that.

I needed to hear that.

You probably need to hear that.

Struggling to be in God's presence.

That's our experience sometimes, but not all the time.

And then, if you want to be able to pray, um, ask God.

He might not do it the way you're thinking, but ask God to answer.

Say, Lord, I want to pray.

I want to experience this in your presence.

I want to have this sense of your presence with me.

Rebecca and I know a woman who she was struggling like we do.

It's like, I feel like my prayer life is really shallow, and I want a deeper prayer life.

And so this woman prayed and said, Lord, help me in my prayer life.

And she says, he didn't answer it the way that she thought, because she thought she was going to have 35 to 40 minutes of just in deep, I'm in the throne room of God.

This is gonna be amazing.

That's not how he answered it.

He answered it by everything that she saw as she was driving around, as she went to Walmart, as she did all of these things that we normally do, of God showing up in unexpected ways and talking, showing her the beauty and glory of his world.

So, like even driving at the street corner, you know, she she pulls up to a light and this man, you know, does the left-hand turn, comes around her, he is grinning ear to ear, had no clue what this man was thinking about or anything.

It was just like this beautiful, smiling face going by her as she's in traffic.

She said, That's God's glory.

That this man is enjoying the beauty of his creation.

God is doing something in this person's life, whatever it is, that he is joyful.

So even the smallest things.

So ask.

Ask.

Pray on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.

Pray, pray, pray.

Like your life depended on it.

Because it does.