Pray Without Ceasing // Unbroken Prayer

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The Church of the Lookout is a fold of Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love.

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John 14.

Starting in verse 18.

I will not leave you as orphans.

I will come to you.

Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me because I live, you will also live.

In that day, you will know I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father.

And I will love him and manifest myself to him.

Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not the world?

Jesus answered him, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.

And my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

1 Thessalonians 5, 16 through 18, Paul writes, Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Come on, everybody said?

Amen.

Pray without ceasing is the way Paul framed this in when he was writing to the church.

He said, Rejoice always and don't stop praying.

It's a really curious phrase, this idea of pray without ceasing, it's Paul's way of saying live a life of unbroken prayer.

And uh and it's it's it's a little difficult to make sense of because if we're to define prayer as the act of filling the air with words constantly, or checking a box on our religious chore life, then praying without ceasing would not only be virtually impossible, it'd be frankly unenjoyable, right?

Because to imagine a life of prayer, of just a life of talking all the time, or of life of constantly just bringing requests and asking questions that doesn't actually strike to the very heart of what Jesus was intending, what God was inviting us into.

And as we're coming into a week of prayer where I'm trusting that so many of us are going to be carving out additional time this week to be in prayer, it's important that we continue to remind ourselves of what the purpose of prayer is.

And that the truth is it's not just an activity, it's a place from which we live.

It's the place from which we live from the inside out.

Now, John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, he wrote this a couple hundred years ago.

He said, Whether we think of or speak to God, whether we act or suffer for him, all is prayer.

When we have no other object than his love and the desire of pleasing him, all that a Christian does, even in eating or sleeping, is prayer.

When it is done in simplicity according to the order of God, and souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer.

And this is what we see in Jesus' life and the passage we read together in John 14, which is one of my favorite movements in all of the Gospels, it's this very intimate exchange between Jesus and his friends, and he's inviting them into a reality of not just good things to do, but a place to live from.

We see in the life of Jesus that prayer is both an activity, but it's this eternal reality.

And so we see Jesus, he did, he did adopt rhythms of prayer, morning, noon, and night, as all good Jews did at that time.

He did have it baked into his schedule of stopping in his day to be with God.

He would go on retreats for prayer, he would go to the mountaintop to be with the Father.

He would be, he would be driven to the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be set apart from God, to be in a place of abiding.

And then we we see, as I've already mentioned earlier, he would go into the garden for a time of preparation before his final hour.

And so he had rhythms of prayer and he had retreat times for prayer, but all of this really indicated a deeper invitation that Jesus was making and that he was inviting his disciples into, you and I, that prayer, while it is an activity, the deeper invitation is that we would be at home in the Father, that the Father was one with Jesus, and Jesus was one with the Father.

And really, what all of this is about is prayer is about returning home to the Father.

Prayer is about returning home.

Being at home with God and being at home with yourself.

Because you can't be at home with God unless you're at home with yourself as well.

Which for many of us, including myself, proves to be difficult.

All right.

Truth be told, the last couple months have been a kind of an intense season for my wife and I.

My family, we're kind of in a new life stage.

We have three kids in three different schools.

I've already commiserated with you about that from stage before.

So I'm not expecting you to feel sorry for me.

Um, I'm just saying that's where we're at.

Three kids, three different schools.

A couple of our kids are playing football right now, one just started playing basketball.

I don't even know how all that happened.

I didn't agree to this.

Um my son is playing high school football.

So it's a lot of practices, it's a lot of stuff.

We've had a lot of church events the last couple months, and so we've been kind of going at it.

And uh, and so you know, when I get home, um, oftentimes I get home when I arrive home after a day.

It's I'm I'm I'm I'm distinctly aware of everything I've been neglecting in my home and everything that is needing to be done in my home.

And so I cherish, this is why I cherish, we practice the Sabbath.

I would uh every weekend from Friday night to Saturday night, we do our best to have um the Saturdays in particular, Friday night to Saturday night as a day really set apart, not for work, but to stop as much as we can, to enjoy each other as a family, to delight in God.

And for me, uh it's always it's a routine every Friday.

Um uh, you know, I do my best to clean the house, and then I literally disable all of the email from my phone.

I delete all my social media accounts, and uh I just try to get my phone as far as away as I can from my existence so I can just live, you know, just kind of make it a rule uh to stay away from my phone as much as I can because that's associated with a lot of my work.

And so I do that.

I cherish being able to wake up on a Saturday morning in an unrushed uh time frame because I uh because it's important for me to feel that level of spaciousness and to have that time both with God and with myself and with my family.

And so Saturday morning, I I woke up and as per usual, I got my my cup of coffee and eat my cup of coffee, went to my living room to sit down and enjoy an unrushed time on the couch in my living room.

It's called a living room.

Somehow we all have a living room.

I we don't know why anybody named it a living room, except you're supposed to live in there somehow.

And so I'm gonna decide I'm gonna live in my living room this morning, which was great for about 15 seconds.

And then while I'm enjoying my coffee, a couple deep breaths, I start to look around the room, I start to notice clutter.

I start to notice toys that are not my toys, that are around this house, and they're not where they're supposed to be.

I'm noticing dishes, and I'm not really happy about it.

There's dirty dishes around the room, and I can't quite settle in because it feels disordered, right?

And so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna take care of all of that, and then I'll return to my my centered, you know, moment.

So 20 minutes later, return back to the couch, to my living room.

Take another deep breath, try to settle in, and then I look up on the ceiling and I see the big crease that is on my ceiling right now.

And it's been there for a couple months, and uh and I know it it is.

It's a leak that has been mysteriously there for a couple months, and it all came, it's all come from a faulty uh grout and caulking job up in my shower that I did myself.

And so when I see this crease, um it brings me to a place of unease because there's a lot of levels going on.

First of all, I'm aware of wow, that really needs to be repaired, and I keep neglecting this, but also I'm aware of if I would have done it right the first time, this wouldn't have happened.

Um and I don't even really know how to do it right a second time.

So I'm not even really sure uh even if I get it back up there and do any more work, which I've already done, I'm not even sure that's going to fix it.

So I'm trying to sit on my couch and uh in meanwhile, I see this crease that only reminds me of my failure and my shame of what has been neglected and what apparently I am not able to fix.

And so I'm thinking, you know, uh in this time that is reserved for unrushed silence and solitude with God, I'm uh I'm I'm not thinking about how much is lacking in my life and existence because of this crease.

So I deal with that for a second, but then, you know, even if I take my eyes off the ceiling, I settle down, take a breath, and then all of a sudden, thought after thought comes to my mind of that dentist's appointment I was supposed to schedule this week and the fact that my tires need to be rotated, and that person I said I was gonna call back by Friday and I didn't do it, and now they're judging me, right?

And and all of these things that I was supposed to do that haven't done, and they're all unresolved.

And so I'm left with these feelings of sitting at home, and how is it that I am supposed to enjoy my own home when I am so aware of what's disordered, what's broken, and what's undone.

Am I the only one that ever feels those types of things?

I don't know why they call it a living room.

They should call it a drowning room.

This is where you go to drown in your internal world of everything you wish was different about your life.

And so what I'm describing to you, I don't think is unique to me based on your groans.

The way we feel in our homes is oftentimes the way we feel when we come to God in prayer.

The way we what happens that first few moments when we settle down and carve out time for prayer.

When life stops, we're immediately confronted with all kinds of things in our souls and in our thoughts that inhibit us from being able to become aware that we were made to be at home and not to just work on home.

And frankly, it's easier in these moments.

This is why a lot of us, it's hard to find rhythms of prayer because it's way more easier to distract us with things that don't remind us of our shame or remind us of what's undone in our life.

We can busy ourselves with things that actually make us feel more productive and efficient in our life, which is oftentimes what we do, oftentimes what I do.

But what we forget is this, what we forget is this.

Whatever condition your life is in, the Father is pleased to make his home in you and with you.

This is the good news for us here today.

Whatever condition your life is in, it's the Father's good pleasure to make his home in you and with you.

God is not just trying to make his home in the life that we should have.

He wants to make his home in the life that we actually have.

Which means that everything that is lacking in your life, every thought, everything unresolved, everything, every waiting place in your life, the Father is saying, I want to dwell with you and make my home with you right where you're at.

Why?

Because this was his plan and his intention since the very beginning.

Okay?

And this is what we read in Revelation 21, 3.

In the end, John the Revelator, he says, This, I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

And the end of time, as we read the scriptures, we see all kinds of dwelling places that we made man.

David would build a temple.

There would be tents that were erected to house the presence of God.

And all of them really fell short because at the end, God's desire is not to dwell in a house made with hands, but to dwell in the house made with his hands, which is you and I and the people of God, that you are the temple of the will, the temple of the living God.

And it's his desire, listen, guys, what prayer teaches us is how to return home to God and to accept whatever our life actually is in the moment, that God is dwelling with us in all of those things.

And it's his desire to take up residence in my actual life.

And when we actually enter into that and invite them in, what we find is that we can enter into the same delight and the same mercy that he shows us, we begin to show ourselves.

And this is what I've learned that happens.

I when I push through that first 10 to 20 to 30 minutes, sometimes when I come to God and I'm like, God, this is what's out of order, this is what's broken, this is what I still need.

And I and I hear the quieting voice of his love saying, Yes, but can you just behold my face?

There's a lot of things going on in your home right now, but did you notice that I'm still here with you, enjoying this moment with you?

And you know that over time that actually rewires and changes how we come to pray.

That prayer is first, it's not primarily about changing something else out in the world or changing something out there or changing what's happening in the Ukraine or changing what's happening in the elections or changing what's happening with Hurricane Milton or whatever.

Those are things that we intercede for, those are certain things that we pray for, but prayer is first about abiding and being at home with the Father in our actual skin, in our actual lives, believing that he wants to come in without having to change anything first.

Okay.

Now, another home analogy, you might know what this feels like.

When we discover that somebody is going to be dropping by our house in the next five minutes, what ensues in that five minutes is what we've come to call rage cleaning.

Okay?

Rage cleaning.

Because there is this internal pressure we have to make them, whoever is coming to our house, not appear as if we have three kids and four pets.

All right?

There's this internal pressure we have to create a home that was always ready for them.

Nothing is out of place, nothing is out of order.

So we have five minutes to become the perfect family, or else we'd be perceived to have some part of our life that's out of order and messy.

Sometimes that's what we feel like when we come to God too.

All kinds of confessions here this morning.

That's sometimes what we feel like when we come to God too.

The reason why we don't come in, we feel like we have to deal with all of these things first.

And certainly when we come into God's presence, there's things that he wants to talk to us about.

But do you understand that God loves to make his home in you because his first desire is to delight in you and for you to delight in him because he loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he loves you.

You guys hearing me today?

God loves to make his home in us.

And what happens is when we live, this is actually where the transforming work of God, this is how actually transforms the work.

Because in the passage that we read together in John 14, Jesus says, I didn't leave you as orphans.

Meaning, I left you, I'm leaving you with sons and daughters at home with me.

Because orphans cannot change the world.

An orphaned spirit cannot change the world.

Only sons and daughters connected to the Father have the capacity to change the world.

And so if we don't learn to live at home with God in all of the mess and all of what's undone, then we don't have a capacity to offer anything else outside of that, which is why, which is why learning to recover moments in a practice of prayer to be with God in the content of our actual life is the basis of us living on mission with God on the outside.

Blaise Pascal, a famous mathematician who is also a believer in Jesus, here's what he said.

He said, All of humanity's problems send from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

That's a bold claim.

But I think there's some truth in that.

Are you able to sit quietly in a room alone with yourself and with the Father?

Prayer isn't primarily about bringing our lists of world events to him.

It's first about the Spirit of God taking up residence, about him being at home with us.

So as we enter into this week of prayer, I just want to invite us across the room, whatever you think prayer, whatever your experience of prayer is, whether you're the kind of person who sits down, is immediately distracted, and then angry and frustrated, and then you just decide to get on with your day because you can't bear how that feels, or you're aware of what needs to be finished or completed in your life or the longings, and that's that's really hard.

Or maybe you just don't feel like you can quite settle in.

My prayer for you this week is that as you carve out time, that what you would be met with is not the voice of God that says, Why didn't you have everything in order before I came?

But the voice of God that says, I am so delighted to dwell with you right here and right now.

Because when we hear that voice, what it does is it calms us, it settles us down, it brings peace, it showers mercy, it washes us from the inside out.

And when we can look at the face of Jesus and say, He's sitting with me in my stuff and he's non-anxious, that means I don't have to be anxious either.

He's sitting with me and he's at peace, that means I get to be at peace too.

And this is what we talk about.

He made a way for us that he could be at home with us.

And like I said though, what happens is when we as a people recover a life and live a life where we're at home with God, not just in our times of prayer, but it leaks, it spills out from that into the rest of our life.

This is what, this is the overflow that we get to live from.

And this is why almost every great movement of God in history started with prayer.

That's what D.

L.

Moody said.

He said, every great movement of God can be traced back to a kneeling figure.

And that becomes evident when you look at the Great Awakening and the Civil War revival and the urban revivals, the Azusa Street Revival.

They were all preceded by prayer, men and women.

He said, We're gonna make a home for God right here and now.

We're gonna invite God to take up residence in a whole new level.

This is the Moravian prayer movement in 1727.

I love it.

This is one of my favorite historical church stories.

And August 12, 1727, the Moravians, this is uh over in Europe, conducted an all-night prayer meeting.

And the group decided to start a prayer vigil.

They designated a place of prayer in the village.

It was Count Zinzendorf who brought that bought this huge property and said, we're gonna dedicate this place to prayer.

And they prayed in groups of two or three for one-hour increments for an entire week.

And there was there are there were 168 one-hour time slots in a week.

The Moravians filled all 168 time slots with two to three people per hour for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Two to three people were always praying in the put in the place of prayer.

This around the clock prayer meeting ended up going 110 years.

The Moravian prayer movement went for 110 years, all because they started with one week, and they said, We're going to create a spot within us for God to dwell.

So the Moravians' heart over that 110 years began to burn with things that were in the heart of God.

It ended up giving life to one of the greatest missions movement of all time.

Their hearts began to burn for unreached people groups of the world.

And over a 15-year period, the small group of 300 Moravians sent out 70 missionaries who went and lived among the unreached people groups, learned their language and culture, and told them about Jesus.

And the fruit of that was millions of people that came to know Jesus.

Because it started with the prayer meeting where they become so comfortable that they became at home with God.

And then they started being filled with the heartbeat of God, the pulse, the pulse of God that started to radiate out.

And they knew they couldn't just stay where they were at, that God was leading them out.

And I just want to stress this for all of us guys when we give ourselves to prayer, it's because God wants us to feel what he feels.

He wants us to think what he thinks.

He wants us, he wants to lead us where he is leading us.

He wants us to go where he is going.

My prayer this week is even as we carve out some extra space in our schedules and in our time, and God meets us, that he's going to unlock new ideas and dreams and a vision.

He's going to unlock movement in your life, in our life, and in this church that we haven't seen.

That we can catch a burden for what God is burdened for, so we can see people come to know the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

Is anybody with me on that?

It all starts with coming home and preparing a home for God.

First Corinthians 3.16, Paul says, Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.

The important part of this passage is the fact to remind yourself, I am the temple of God.

God loves to dwell with me.

Do you love to dwell with him?

Do you love to dwell with him?

And Hebrews 10, the writer of Hebrews gives language, and this is kind of where we're gonna land here this morning, and we're gonna receive a time of communion together in just a moment.

But Hebrews 10, the writer, talks about this capacity that God made a way for us.

And we sung it this morning, he made a way for us.

We didn't have a way to just waltz into the holy place, the place where God dwells, his presence before Jesus.

But because of the sacrifice of Jesus, here's what Hebrews 10 says.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of the faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

Is anybody thankful that your heart has been sprinkled clean this morning by the blood of Jesus?

And the the invitation is here.

Let us draw near with a true heart and in full assurance of the faith.

If you know what Jesus has done for you, he has made a way for you, for his spirit to abide in you, for you to abide with him, to be able to access the holiest of holies with him in his very presence.

That's happened through his blood, through his cross.

That's why we get to do it, and now we do it with full assurance of the faith.

It is our joy, it's not just it's not a duty, it's a joy and a privilege to fellowship with God because he made a way through his own flesh and his blood for us to be with him.