Promised Believers: Prayer

There are a number of things that I will that we have covered in this series that I will just kind of refresh you on in just a second.

But I was remembering as we were getting into the fall weather, my own personal experience as a 12-year-old in church.

My dad was a pastor on a team of pastors in a church in New Jersey.

One of the other pastors on that team happened to have this strange background where he was a square dancing caller.

Now I don't know where you get that ability from.

But he was.

And so every uh October, the church would host a hoedown.

And uh we would all gather in this place, and he would call out the different moves, and um he taught us all how to do square dancing.

So um now the with this self-disclosure, that doesn't mean you should ever ask me to do any square dancing.

But what it rem what that reminded me of is this whole idea of promised believers of how in square dancing you have the music that is playing, and then you have the caller.

And the dance moves are actually the calls.

That's what it's called in square dancing.

And what we've been talking about with promised believers is the fact that we're doing life, kind of it's a dance in a sense, and God is calling out the moves.

But he's not just calling out the moves like in square dancing, but he's there with us.

He's like he's our partner, but also calling out, here's what to do next.

And yet, so many people have a perception of the Christian life that you give your life to Jesus, you're hunkering down, holding out for heaven, but the in-between is kind of this mysterious maybe I'm supposed to be a better person, maybe it means I go to church now, and I don't know how to read the Bible.

There's many Christians that kind of are are in that place.

And so my emphasis has been that this life of being a follower of Jesus is so exciting and to be integrated into our daily life.

Just like how we eat a meal three times a day, walking with Jesus is to be something that is just woven into the decision making and the emotions.

And so think for a second just about your own life.

Uh you know, as I'm thinking, I have the privilege of knowing some of you all in your own context.

Many things are going on when it comes to careers.

Some of you are thinking about a career change, some of you are out of work looking for a new job, um, some of you are wrestling with a discontentment at work.

And all of that is a setting in which we can walk out these concepts that we've been talking about in this idea of promised believers.

Others of you are struggling at home with relationships, either in your marriage or with your kids.

Some of you are struggling with your finances or with your health, whatever it might be, all of that is this beautiful context if we want to relate to the Lord, to take a hold of what the Bible teaches, and to hold on to the promises of God and see these things worked out in our life.

So the Bible comes along and it makes these beautiful promises.

Let me just put a few up here in front of us.

Here's Philippians 4.19.

I'm gonna read it and then I'm gonna ask you what is God promising here.

It says this, and my God will supply all your needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

What's the promise?

What's the Bible promise there?

Yes, yeah, it's pretty simple, huh?

God's gonna take care of what you have need of.

2 Corinthians 9, 8.

I'll ask you the same question.

And God is able to make every grace overflow to you so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work.

What are the promise or promises there?

Yeah, yep.

That he has every grace that can overflow for you.

It's like it could you be more universal in a statement?

This is easy, these kind of passages are easy to miss as you're going along.

But when we're saying that the Bible contains promises, it's important for us to recognize them as they pop up.

Because this is not just, you know, Tom Sawyer or, you know, some book by Jim Collins or some other, you know, leadership book, or this is the God of the universe extending himself to us in promise.

So when it says God is able to make every grace overflow to you, that's not just like a life based on that statement is like, well, I hope it happens.

No, it's this is God saying this is what he does.

And when God speaks from the very first book and first chapter of the Bible, when God talks, what happens?

Stuff happens, right?

If God says, Let there be light, does it like, well, maybe there'll be some light, maybe not, and our thumbs.

Is there a question mark over that?

No, there's no question mark over it.

There's no question mark.

And so let me give you one more here.

This is Hebrews 8.12.

It says, For I will forgive their wrongdoing and I will never again remember their sins.

What is that promise?

Yeah.

It's a promise of forgiveness.

I'll forgive their wrongdoing.

Here's how God it promises to relate to our sins.

So over the past four weeks, we've been looking at this idea that God wants us to live by faith in his promises.

Live is a very generic word.

What I mean there is that God wants us to breathe in, breathe out, wake up, brush our teeth, eat our food, go to work, love our kids, love our families.

That's living life.

He wants us to live by faith in his promises.

There is not one aspect of your life or my life that God has not spoken about, where his promises do not reach.

He wants us to trust him in his promises as we do life.

This is a life that responds to God instead of seeing oneself as the initiator.

If you've been doing this past week or your relationship with God from a perspective of, like, God, I'm going to get my act together so that you'll love me more, then you have fundamentally misunderstood what the Bible teaches about God.

God is the one who initiates with us.

He sent Jesus into the world so that our broken relationship with Him and our broken humanity could be restored.

He initiated and came into the world.

He died on the cross as the sacrifice, sacrificial lamb on our behalf, so that our sin could be forgiven, but also so that we could experience new life, a new heart, transformation.

We could be given the Holy Spirit who will speak into our life.

So here's what this looks like.

First, God has gone before us and knows the future, our future, and is totally in control.

Totally in control.

God knows what this week holds for you and for me.

Second, he speaks to us through his word with definitive promises.

He doesn't just give us wisdom.

If your perception of the Bible is that God just is going to give you instructions of what to do, it does do that.

But more importantly, the Bible tells us that God is at work on our behalf.

Third, those promises become a basis of our faith and patient obedience.

So we come to our Bibles, we're reading what He promises, and then our action is to say, God, I'm going to trust you with that and patiently be obedient.

So I'm going to wait, and then from my position of waiting, I'm going to obey what I know is right to do.

And then last week, we saw that Abraham is a working example of what it looks like and proof that we cannot turn to the law to have God's promises fulfilled in our life.

So Abraham is an example of a life lived based off the promises of God, and he is a proof to us that we don't earn the blessings of God or see God's promises fulfilled in our life through doing the moral law, but instead we see God's promises fulfilled through those who live by faith.

And then in parentheses here, living a moral life is a different conversation that is rooted in a love-based obedience and treasuring God's wisdom as a prescription for the best way to do life.

Because what I don't want you to do is walk out of here and hear that, oh, I'm supposed to live by faith, but that means I can throw morality out the window.

No, morality and the whole idea of doing what is right and living a holy life, that that comes from a completely separate conversation.

There's an inner relatedness to it, but it's we do what is right because we love God and because he's given us a wise prescription of the best way to do life.

The Bible's full of just so many wisdom principles that it's just good to follow what God says.

And the final thing that we've talked about, fifth, is that Jesus is God's greatest promise, and he is now the basis for all of God's promises to us.

So Jesus was promised from the very beginning.

As humanity fell into a place of sin and rebellion, God is coming to Adam and Eve and saying that he will provide a that he'll crush the serpent's head and that there will be the seed of the woman that will accomplish it.

This is one of the first gospel promises.

Then God comes to Abraham and says, Through you, through your seed, there's going to be a blessing that comes through all nations.

So Jesus is the fulfillment of that very promise.

So that's where we've been.

We've only got a couple more weeks of talking about this theme of the promises of God.

But my hope is as we leave this topic in a couple of weeks, that what you will at a minimum, as you read the Bible, that you'll be seeing it as just a um wealth of all these different ways that God is extending himself to you and I in promise.

That he's making promises that we can hold him to.

What I want to spend the rest of our time on this morning is the idea of prayer.

Prayer is so vital to our Christian life, and it is the way that we access, it's the way that we access the blessings that are contained in these promises.

It's the prayer is really the expression of our faith.

It's the verbalization of our faith.

So, you know, you may be in this difficult setting at school, and school may be difficult or whatever, and you go and you give God some time by reading the Bible, and you see that God is extending Himself to you, and He's promising that He's gonna be with you, that He'll be in the midst of it maybe a difficult relationship, that God is present.

And so what do you do then?

Once those promises are read in the Scripture, what do you do?

Well, then we take it back to Him in prayer, and you say, God, your word says this, you've promised this, and I'm gonna hold you to it that you're gonna fulfill those promises.

I want to give you one specific promise, Bible promise about prayer.

So there's two things that are going on when we talk about prayer and God's promises.

One, we talk to God, we should be talking to God about his promises.

The second thing, though, is that God makes promises about prayer.

And we're gonna not, I'm not gonna do a good job of of differentiating those two concepts.

They're gonna kind of, it's gonna be a swerving road back and forth as we go along.

Okay?

God's promises in prayer.

This is 1 John 5, 14 and 15.

This is the confidence we have before Him.

If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.

And if we know that He hears whatever we ask, we know that we have what we have asked of Him.

Do you remember a while ago I said to you that sometimes it feels like God overextends Himself in things that the Bible says?

This is one of those times where it's just like, God, are you sure you want to say that?

That seems like a lot.

I mean, you have to keep your word, and you're saying 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 whatever we have asked of him.

I mean, just notice as you read that the cooperation, the the uh the way in which God is um involving humans in the accomplishment of his will, the way that he's expecting that that his followers will understand his will.

Have you ever been in a place where you're like, I don't know what God's will is for my life?

Well, here, he's as he's talking about prayer, there is this idea of asking anything according to his will.

He hears us, and I don't think that John, the apostle, as he writes this, that he's thinking that you're shooting off hundreds of prayers and maybe one will hit the mark.

I think he's talking about a follower of Jesus who has a grasp of God's will.

In fact, I I want to take you to a guy's writing, uh, a man named Andrew Murray.

Andrew Murray is a Dutch Reformed pastor out of South Africa.

His dad was a pastor, he's one of 11 kids, and he became a pastor and was very influential in um the continent of Africa from South Africa and um the progress of Christianity across the continent.

He wrote an excellent book on prayer called With Christ in the School of Prayer.

There's 31 chapters, so that you can read it as a a book, uh, a chapter a day for 31 days.

And here's the cool thing Andrew Murray's old enough and dead long enough that it's completely free.

So I sent it to you in your email or your in my text message this morning.

I sent you the PDF of it.

There's no copyright on it, so you can go and you can grab it.

But this is um a lifted quote from um Andrew Murray.

Um, and here's what he wrote.

One of the greatest hindrances to believing prayer is undoubtedly this.

People don't know if what they ask is according to the will of God.

As long as they are in doubt on this point, they cannot have the boldness to ask with all assurance that they certainly shall receive, right?

So, how do you have confidence in prayer if you don't know what you're asking is God's will?

Right?

If 1 John says if we ask anything according to his will, he will give those things to us, then the missing component is knowing absolutely that what I'm asking for is God's will for me.

He goes on.

And they soon begin to think that once they have made known their requests and receive no answer, it is best to leave it to God to do according to his good pleasure, as they understand the words of John.

If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

They are persuaded that the answer to prayer is impossible because they cannot be sure of what really may be the will of God.

They think, they think of God's will as his hidden counsel, so how should man be able to fathom what really may be the purpose of the all-wise God?

So he's goes on in this chapter to talk about how, you know, determining and being assured of the will of God.

There's another contemporary with Andrew Murray named George Mueller.

George Mueller pastored in an uh English town named Bristol, and he cared for during his lifetime, he cared for 10,024 orphans.

That must mean that he kept kept good records, which, if you're taking care of orphans, you better be taking good records.

But still, it's amazing that it was 10,024.

10,024 orphans during his lifetime.

He provided educational opportunities for the orphans to the point that he was even accused by some of raising the poor above their natural station in British life.

So imagine, like in India, how you have the the deletes or the the Dalits, right?

Who it's a class system.

So in uh Britain at his time, people saw the poor as, well, that was you're born poor, you're supposed to stay poor.

And George Mueller was accused of raising the poor out of their natural station.

He established 117 schools, 117 schools, which offered Christian education to more than 120,000 kids.

He did not receive any government support, and he only accepted unsolicited gifts.

Joe, would you do me a favor and just make sure that the AC kicks off?

Thank you.

He so his view of how he would express faith in his own life was that he would never ask anyone for money.

He would just pray.

Now, if people asked him what the need was, he would say, Here's what I need.

But he would never go and ask for money.

At the end of his lifetime, his organization had received and distributed 1,381,000 pounds, which is equivalent to in today's money to about 120 million dollars.

All of that was received through prayer.

And he primarily used the money for supporting the orphanages and distributing about 285,000 Bibles.

So if 1 John comes along and says, you can pray God's will, and you pray God's will, and you will receive from God according to that prayer, then obviously the question is, how do you know what God's will is?

And so he wrote out very practically what this looked like for him.

There's a picture of George.

He said this First, I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter.

Nine tenths of the trouble with people generally is 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 is usually but a little ways to the knowledge of what his will is.

Number two, having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression.

If so, I make myself liable to great delusions.

I seek the will of the Spirit of God through or in connection with the Word of God.

The Spirit and the Word must be combined.

If I look to the Spirit alone without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also.

If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will He will do it according to the Scriptures and never never contrary to them.

Next I take it into account providential, I take into account providential circumstances.

These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with His Word and His Spirit.

So he's reading the Bible, he's listening to what he feels like the Holy Spirit is saying, and then he's looking at the circumstances as they present themselves.

And then fifth, I ask God in prayer to reveal his will to me aright.

And finally, thus through prayer to God, the study of the word and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my ability and knowledge, and if my mind is thus at peace and continues so after two or three more petitions, I proceed accordingly.

In trivial matters and in transactions involving most important issues, I have found this method always effective.

As you read through George Mueller's journals, one of the things that you see is as he follows this method, he's very specific in the ways that he prays.

He asks God of very specific things because he knows that God says, if you pray anything according to my will, you'll have it.

Prayer is instrumental in God's unleashing God's work in the world for some reason.

While God is sovereign and in control and he's the king of the earth, for some reason there is a verse in James that says, you do not have because you do not ask.

And then in Jesus' ministry, there is even cities where it says that Jesus couldn't do many miracles in that city because of their lack of faith.

And so for some reason, in God's sovereign plan and in his work, he's made his work in the world hinge off of prayer and faith, or prayer expressing faith back to God.

Now, how that all flushes out in sovereignty and God being in control, I have no idea.

And the implications of it are beyond my ability to comprehend.

But it's very clear from Scripture that God wants to accomplish His work in and through prayer, and that when we're not praying, there's certain things that are not happening.

And that doesn't disrupt the overall plan of God.

And so George Mueller is knowing that, operating off of that, and he's praying, he's deliberately walking through a process to discern what is God's will to the best of his ability, and then he's asking very specifically that God would do these things.

And he's saying, God, you have said, you've made this promise about prayer that if we ask anything according to your will, you will do it, and I know that this is your will.

That's a stretch, isn't it?

Do you feel when you hear that, do you feel like you wish it was not so contingent on you?

Do you do is there a part of you that's like, man, I don't know if I want it to work like that?

I think in me there is.

There's a part of me that's just like, God, can't you just do it?

Because I don't really get it.

I don't really know.

I don't know the will part necessarily.

And then I've got to like believe you that that you're gonna work and I'm gonna ask for something specifically.

It seems involved.

And I think it is, but I think that it is also the beautiful thing is that we can look through the Bible, through the New Testament, we can see Jesus praying.

You look through the Luke in like Jesus, the Son of God, is praying every morning for hours.

The Son of God, uninterrupted fellowship with the Father.

He is giving himself to the discipline of prayer.

And then the church is gathered together and it is praying, and prayer continues all the way throughout the New Testament.

It is central to the work, and this is the thing.

If our lives lack, if our lives lack, which they do, and God's like, I want to work, but I can't work unless you pray, then man, we should be willing to give ourselves to prayer.

Whether we're talking about George Mueller or Hudson Taylor or another heroic Christian, we can clearly identify in their biography a dependence on the promises of God and talking to God, praying those promises back to God.

How do we know the promises of God?

Or how do we know rather the will of God?

We know the will of God through the promises of God.

That's what's so great about seeing those verses that we looked at at the beginning, that it is God's will, because he promises to forgive us.

So is it God's will that he forgives us?

Yeah, it is.

So we can say, God, I don't care what Satan says to me, I don't care what other people are hitting me over the head with, I know that when I confess my sins, you are faithful and just to forgive my sins and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness.

That is what I can take to the bank because you have promised it.

But he's promised to supply our needs.

Look, we we're going through a crazy season in our economy, and it may be a prolonged season of hardship.

One of the things that George Mueller participated in for about a year, the economy tanked and it was crazy.

The uh price of wheat doubled in England and specifically around London during a nine-month period.

And so he felt like it was God's will for the church to take care of poor Christians and for them not to suffer.

That God, he read the Bible and he's like, I don't think that Christians should suffer from this.

I think it's a hardship, but that God allows hardship so that he can reveal his provision.

And so he began to pray.

And God worked in and through George Mueller to just begin to provide the finances to be able to buy bread and relieve the Christians who were in his church.

It's a beautiful, beautiful way in which God worked, and and it was George Mueller's, it didn't just fall into George Mueller's lap.

It was based off of this.

I think that this is what God's will is.

When we talk about the promises of God and pray, we're encountering two things.

One, God makes these promises to us about prayer.

He says, I will answer, I will hear you.

The second thing is that God promises are central to our conversation with Him.

And so we get to go back to Him and say, God, you promised this.

And I want to I want to wait for you to accomplish that.

In closing, I want to just take you back to the Psalm that Marvin read to us, Psalm 143.

And what I want to do is just an exercise with you.

An exercise because tomorrow morning when you get up and you read your Bible, um, I want you to see the promises, and then I want you to talk to God about the promises that you read in your Bible reading.

So in Psalm 143, it says, Lord, hear my prayer, in your faithfulness listen to my plea, in your righteousness answer me, do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one alive is righteous in your sight.

For the enemy has pursued me, crushing me to the ground, making me live in darkness like those long dead, my spirit is weak within me, and my heart is overcome and dismayed.

I remember the days of old, I meditate on all you have done, I reflect on the work of your hands, I spread out my hands to you, I am like a parched land before you.

Answer me quickly, Lord, my spirit fails.

Do not hide your face from me, or I will be like those going down to the pit.

Let me experience your faithful love in the morning, for I trust you.

Reveal to me the way I should go, because I appeal to you.

Rescue me from my enemies, I come to you for protection, teach me to do your will, for you are my God, may your gracious spirit lead me on level ground.

For your name's sake, Lord, let me live.

In your righteousness deliver me from trouble, and in your faithful love destroy my enemies, wipe out all those who attack me, for I am your servant.

You see, David wrote that psalm.

Right, I think David wrote that psalm.

Yeah.

David wrote that psalm.

Imagine Israel up to the time, up to the time of David, they had been given the they had the stories of the patriarchs, the five patriarchs.

Then they were given Moses and Moses' law, and then from there they went in and they were practicing worship under the Levitical priesthood.

But what they didn't know how to do is how to talk to God.

They did.

But what we have in David is these model prayers.

David here is taking the spiritual heritage that he's gotten from Adam all the way up through Moses, and then the Levitical priesthood practice, and he writes these beautiful devotional prayers.

But everything here that he's saying to God is based off of the way that God has extended himself in promise to Israel in time past.

And so I'd encourage you, read the Psalms and realize that each one of these requests, you know, don't bring your servant into judgment.

No one alive is righteous in your sight.

I mean, all of these things are coming from an inherited theology from what God has said.

The enemy has pursued me.

He's talking, he's freely talking about his own life.

But what is he doing?

He's integrating his theology with his life, and that's what I that's my prayer for us.

Lord, we thank you for giving us these promises of prayer.

Teach us, just like what the disciples said to you, Jesus, they said, Teach us to pray.

Lord, we ask the same of you that you would teach us to pray.

Help us to be good readers and uh students of your word.

And then help us to take the things that we read in your word and turn them into prayers, as David did in the Psalms.

Give us a sense of freedom that it's okay to talk to you about everything, the things that we're angry about, the things that we're afraid of, the things that make us sad.

Lord, all of those things you are completely comfortable with us having a conversation with you about.

And your word speaks to those things clearly.

And so, God, we would ask that you would speak to us in that way.

Lord, we love you.

As we take um communion now, we ask that you um would meet us afresh.

Um Lord, we want to confess our sins before you.

We don't want to come before the table um in pride or um arrogance.

Um we want to recognize our humanity and take a hold of you.

And so, Lord, um would you meet us as we take communion together?

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.