Renewal in Prayer

We are in a brief two-week series on spiritual renewal for 2018. God's program

for spiritual renewal for us, for the church, is called the spiritual

disciplines. And spiritual disciplines, they're the ordinary way God has given us

to change. They're the ordinary path that God has shown us in the New Testament

to find joy, to know Him, to change in life. And Donald Whitney, who's kind of

the grandfather of thinking about spiritual disciplines today, defines them

as the habits and the rhythms of our devotion to God. Now he says they are not

attitudes, but they're practices. They're attitude-shaping practices, the spiritual

disciplines. And the idea for this comes straight out of 1st Timothy 4-7. Paul says,

discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. And so we practice the

spiritual disciplines as the ordinary way to grow in the Christian life.

Typically the church has identified six or seven different spiritual

disciplines. So read, scripture, meditate on scripture, pray, learn, study, serve, or

show mercy, fast, and worship, corporate worship together. So those are the seven

spiritual disciplines that the church has recognized for two millennia that come

right out of the Bible. And last week Derek preached on reading and

meditating on scripture. And I wanted to do that one. I asked for it, but he put

himself in it instead and left today. Because, you know, because prayer is way

harder than reading scripture. I think it's the toughest of all the spiritual

disciplines. P.T. Forsythe, one of the great Scottish theologians of the last

century, he died in 1921. He said it like this, it's a difficult and even

formidable thing to preach on prayer. One fears to touch the Ark. But perhaps the

effort may be graciously regarded by the Holy Spirit, whoever and even now lives

to make intercession for us. And hopefully that will be true for us today.

Martin Louis Jones, the preacher of the 20th century in London, just a decade

before his death in 1971, he said, I've never written on prayer because of the

inadequacy I've always found in my own prayer life. I know how he feels. Maybe

you do too today. And so we're here this morning in this little series to revive

our prayer life. Things that need to be revived have to be revived because they

were once revived but are no longer revived. And so we need to revive our

prayer lives, some of us today, and strengthen them. So we're just gonna look

at two moments here in the greatest chapter, Paul's greatest chapter, Romans

8, to learn from Paul three things, the basis of prayer, the problem with prayer,

and some lessons for prayer or own prayer. So first, the basis of prayer, verse 15.

Verse 15, he says this, you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall

back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons or as sons

and daughters. The word means both. Paul here is contrasting two

spirits, the spirit of slavery and the spirit of adoption. He's talking here

about your inner life, about who you truly are at your deepest, about your

heart, and how who you truly are, your inner life, your heart relates to God. And

he's saying you can have one of two spirits. You can either have the spirit,

the heart, of slavery or the heart of adoption, of being a son or daughter. One

produces fear, the other produces freedom. And he goes on, did you see it, to

clarify, what is he talking about? And this is what he says, you have

received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba Father.

And what that means is that Paul is talking about prayer here. You've

received one of two, you have one of two spirits, and if you have the spirit of adoption, from

that spirit, that's the ground, the basis from which you can cry out to God,

Abba Father. He's talking about prayer, crying out, crying up before God. He's

saying that if you have the Holy Spirit of adoption, the spirit

that gives you the spirit of adoption, you can, you have a basis to cry out

before God, Abba Father. Now the first thing to say about this is that Paul is

assuming here something that the whole New Testament assumes and that he says

very clearly in Romans 1 and that Jesus also says in the Sermon on the Mount in

Matthew chapter 6, and that's that everybody prays. That's that everybody in

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

the whole world prays. Prayer is global, it's universal, it's always been at all

times and all places. There's never been a society, a people group, a religion,

nothing ever in history that hasn't been grounded in some sort of

prayer. People have always prayed, and that's not to say that every single

individual today prays. But in a BBC survey, in the last decade, they went and

interviewed most of the, a segment of the people who mark not the nuns, the people

who say I'm not religious, I'm either atheist or agnostic on a survey or a

census, and even among those almost 40% of those people said sometimes they pray

too, they try it, sometimes they even make an attempt and talk to, as you see in

the movie, something like the guy upstairs or however they might frame it.

An Italian scholar recently, a famous sociologist in the Academy named Giordon,

he says this, in virtually all studies of the sociology of religious behavior, it

is clearly apparent that a very high percentage of people in the world declare

that they continue to pray every day, and many even say that they pray many times

a day. But there are different reasons for prayer, there are different grounds of

prayer, there are different bases for prayer, there are different ways of praying.

The Muslim goes to mosque, the Buddhist goes to the prayer wheel and spends the

prayer wheel, the Hindu goes to a different temple depending on the God

that they want to pray to at any given time, and all of these types of religious

actions in prayer have different goals to salvation, praying for rain to come

down on the crops, praying to escape cycles of reincarnation, all different

types of reasons and goals and grounds and ways and forms of prayer.

And Paul is saying he's assuming here, as Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount,

that everybody prays, but not all prayers are equal, not all prayers are the same,

and what he's speaking of here, what he's assuming here is that there's a

distinct ground, a distinct basis of what it means to have Christian prayer, that

Christian prayer is distinct according to Jesus' categorization.

Christian prayer, pray then like this, our Father is distinct from all other types

of prayer in the whole world, and that's what Paul is talking about here.

There's a distinct idea of Christian prayer, and so the question he is

answering here is on what basis do you pray? On what basis, on what grounds do

you pray? And I think that he has in his mind in the background, I think

he's thinking of Jesus in Matthew chapter 6, I think he's thinking of

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus comes

and says, pray to his disciples, pray then like this, our Father who art in

heaven, and you know the rest of the prayer, but you remember that that passage

has a context, and the context is that when he says pray like this, he's saying,

because I've just told you don't pray like that, and before that prayer he had

introduced two ways not to pray, and he said first, don't pray like the

hypocrites who go out into the streets and pray eloquent prayers, he called

what they do hypocrisy, and what he meant by that is that their inner life,

their spirit is actually not a spirit of adoption but a spirit of slavery, in

other words they have a public prayer life but they have no private prayer

life, and that's the definition of a hypocrisy, to have a public prayer life,

a public religion with no private devotion, that's the spirit of slavery

because it's based on a slave's performance, the performance in the

hypocrites case before other human beings that need to be seen and known as

a person who's religious, as a person who prays but actually has no true

inner spirit of prayer, and then the second way that Jesus says not to pray is

not only not like the hypocrite but he also says don't pray like the pagan, now

the pagan that's kind of a dirty word today, all he means there is any other

religion out there, pagan religion is just any other religion besides the one

he's referring to there, the Christian religion, and he's saying how does, so

how does the pagan pray, and you'll remember from Matthew chapter 6, he says

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

that the pagan babbles before his gods, and the word babble there simply means

literally in Greek, empty and anxious words, so the hypocrite goes out into

the square and he prays in order to be seen and that's performative, it's

performance, it's the spirit of slavery, the need to perform for other people, but

the pagan goes into the temple he's saying and babbles empty and anxious words

also on the ground of slavery on the need as Paul categorizes it, the need to

perform, in other words empty and anxious words because their gods are

capricious, they have no stable foundation to come before their gods

and know that they're being heard and so what they're forced to do is to repeat

empty, vain, repetitious, anxious words, words as Paul calls it in Romans 8, words

of fear, right, and in both instances, both categorizations that Jesus gives

just like Paul gives here in Romans 8, a spirit of slavery in prayer is

performance, birthed out of fear, it's the spirit of performance, it's the need to

perform, it's the need to come before a god, a deity and exchange, have an

exchange relationship to say I'll do this for you if you'll hear me, if you'll

bless me, if you'll give me this, this, this and this, but the only way that that

god is going to hear you, Paul is saying and Jesus was talking about in the

Sermon on the Mount, is if you perform, if you do a dance, if you do a jig, if you

get it all right, if you come to the temple at the right time, right, that's

the spirit of slavery, it produces fear, how do you define Christian prayer? How

do you know if it's real and it's true? And what Paul says is this, it's when the

spirit of Christ testifies with your spirit, your heart, your inner life, that

you pray not out of the fear of a faraway deity, but on the ground of a

family relationship to a father. The basis of Christian prayer, he says, is

adoption, it's being adopted, it's being a son or a daughter and having a

father. Tim Keller, he helpfully illustrates the difference in these two

grounds, bases for prayer, by talking about the types of relationships that we

all have in our daily life in the modern 21st century world. All of us, the

well the the capitalistic situation that we exist in is helpful for making this

clear. All of us leave our house every day if you do and most of the

relationships that you experience on a day-to-day basis are retail relationships,

they're exchange relationships, business-like relationships, right? So anytime

you go before the sales clerk at Boots or Morrison's or wherever you go, you have

entered into a type of relationship there and that's a retail exchange

relationship and how does a retail exchange relationship work? Well, you

provide something that is worth the amount that the item cost, money in that

instance, and they give you the goods, right? It's performative. But there are

all sorts of other relationships in your life that are more meaningful than a

retail relationship, right? And that exists on a spectrum and you can think of

the relationship you've had with the best teacher that you ever had in your

life, a type of deep mentorship or something. That was meaningful but even

more maybe a boyfriend and a girlfriend, even more a really good lifelong

friendship, but even more. What is the deepest relationship? What is the

ground of the most strong, long-lasting, deepest, most meaningful

relationship in the human life? And it's, of course, it's family. It's being the

blood of your, it's being the blood of my blood. It's sharing blood with

somebody. It's family, right? In non-Christian prayer, non-Christian prayer

deals with a God who only responds based on retail exchange relationship,

performative relationship, sacrifices, pleadings, incense, empty and anxious

babble, hoping behind hope that if you got the dough, if you bring what you need,

you'll get the blessing. And Paul and Jesus and Matthew 6 are saying Christian

prayer is different. It's based on family relationship. It's based, it's not based

on performance, it's based on your status. It's based on status, on how you

stand, who you are before God. I mean scholars, theologians have said that when

Jesus says, pray them like this, our Father, that at that moment there was a

revolution in the history of prayer. That never before, never before in the

history of prayer had someone been told, go to your Father, go to your

Father. It was a revolution in the ground of your prayer life being childlike

dependency. It's totally new in the history of the world. Now did you think,

did you think the possibility of God listening to you was based on your

performance? And that's a pagan idea is what he's saying. That's a pagan

concept. Now just think about it. Just think about adoption, what it means to

be an adopted son or daughter. When somebody gets adopted, when a child gets

adopted, who is it that does the work of adoption? When a child gets adopted, of

course it's the parent that does the work of adoption. The parent goes, the

father, the mother goes and signs on the dotted line, signs the paperwork and

immediately as soon as the parent chooses and signs the paperwork, what

happens to that child? Their status changes. Immediately they were once a

stranger but now they're a son. Immediately in that moment by divine

fiat, just like that, it's the parents, it's the performance of the parent of

the father or the mother in an adoption that makes the child into a son or

daughter. It's the parents' performance that changes their status and that's

exactly what Paul, it's a metaphor of adoption. That's exactly what

happens to you. That's the ground, the basis from which you can go pray. Now

look, if you're a parent today and even if you're not, you know this too,

but if you're a parent especially, you know the love that stands behind this

reality with God. You know the love that stands behind this ground from

which you can come to your father and sit on his lap. If my oldest son,

Ethan, presently four, but if someday he grows up a little bit, we're close to

this already maybe, but if he becomes the worst guy on the block, the bully, the

rebel, the prodigal, the restless and he takes all my money and he goes and he

becomes the spin-thrift and he ruins himself and he ruins our family and he

becomes a criminal even. But then I see him on the horizon coming back towards

me, coming to speak with me, coming to talk to me. What do I do? I put on my

shoes and I get dressed and I run to him, right? And I greet him and I pick him up

and I hug him and I bring him back to my house and I throw a feast, right? And is

there discipline? Sure. Is there a consequence for what he's done? Of course.

Any loving parent would give discipline and consequence for that, for something

like that. But I'm not gonna cast him away. If he wants to come and speak to me,

I'm gonna be there, right? But why? Because he's blood of my blood. He's flesh

of my flesh. He's my son or she's my daughter, right? That they can always come

back to me. This is what Paul is saying. This is the ground. No matter what you've

done, no matter how bad your prayer life was in 2017, no matter how stale it was,

the ground of Christian prayer is that a father sees you on the horizon and he

runs out to you no matter what you've done, even as a Christian, no matter how

little you've prayed to him. He's a father, a father. Now just to close

out this point, this is the long point by the way in the next two are very short,

I promise. Let me just say, is your prayer life stale? Do you talk with your

father or do you talk at a distant God? Commentators say about this verse 15 and

16 that there's something strange. Paul puts side by side two different

languages here when he says, by the spirit of adoption, if your son or a

daughter in Christ, you can cry out, Abba, father. Now Abba is an Aramaic word and

father, pater, is a Greek word. So literally if you translated the Aramaic,

like they translate the Greek here, it would just say you cry out, father, father,

or dad, dad, or whatever. Now why does he put these two words side by side? Well,

it's at least for this reason. In the first century, Abba is a normal term,

the everyday term for speaking to one's father. They often spoke Aramaic in the

first century as well as Hebrew and Greek and Abba would have been the term

that Jesus would have used to talk to his earthly dad, Joseph. Abba was

the regular term that I've just come home from work or from school kind of a

term that you refer to your dad. Israelites, Jews in the first century,

would not use this term to talk to God. It was forbidden. You cannot say this to

God. It's too homely, it's too colloquial, it's too easy, if you will, but

how did this come? Why does Paul say this? It's because Jesus introduced this in

the Gospels for the first time in history. If you go back and look at how

Jesus prays in the Gospels, he goes and he says, Abba, a father, he prays all

over the Gospels using the colloquial, the homely term Abba, even in the Garden

of Gethsemane. Before he's about to go to the cross, he looks up and he says, Abba,

let this cup of death pass from me and his father says no. And John Stott says

this, Abba was an everyday word, a homely family word. No Jew would have dared to

address God in this manner, but Jesus did it always in all his prayers which are

handed down to us, but with one single exception. Jesus always prayed like this

to his father, Abba, dad, father, except for once. And when he was hanging on the

cross being murdered, he did not say, the one time he did not say Abba, he said

the generic, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He lost his father when he

was on the cross, you see, so that you could get adopted by the ultimate father

and you could look up to heaven and say Abba. That's Christian prayer. That's

Christian prayer. You can call God the same thing that Jesus does. That's

Christian prayer and you can have this status by faith. Now very briefly, the

last two points, just a few minutes each, the problem of prayer. Even when you know

what prayer is, what Christian prayer is, even if you have the firm basis, when

you come to God as Father, let's be honest, prayer is so hard. Prayer is so

hard. It is so hard to maintain a consistent prayer life, right? Yeah. 826,

just look down at 826. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we

do not know what to pray for as we all, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us.

Now here's the beauty of this passage. This is Paul. This is Paul saying, I'm

weak at prayer. You see, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He's talking about

Himself too. You see, this is Paul and I'm pretty confident that Paul prayed

more than you, I think. I know he prayed more than me. This is Paul, the

great apostle, and he had a strong prayer life. There's no doubt about it, but he's

saying there's a weakness. And what does he mean exactly? Well, I think that when

he says there's a weakness in our prayer, for we do not know what to pray for as

we all, he's giving you an example of one of our weaknesses. We have a weakness in

prayer. The first one is we don't know what to pray for as we all. We might

call that the problem, the weakness of knowledge, meaning we don't know what to

pray for as we all, because we don't know what we need all the time. And you know,

Paul experienced this in his own life three times. He prayed, God removed the

thorn from my flesh, and each time God said, no. He didn't know what to pray for

all the time. But John Knox, our reformed, reformed

father, he says it this way, our needs go far beyond the power of our speech to

express them. Our needs go far beyond the power of our speech to express them. But

I think he's thinking here that there's more weaknesses than just the problem of

knowledge of what to pray for. There's the weakness of emotion. And all, I think, I

think, all of you know, the weakness of emotion. I say them, but I don't feel them.

Right? And then as soon as I say them, I start looking at the dust on the ground

and the dirt on my shoe and the car that's passing by outside and the curtains

or whatever it is and my mind wanders away. Or when I come to prayer meeting and

we circle up in a group and where it's time to pray, I think the whole time

about what I'm gonna pray and miss entirely the prayers that everybody else

prays. Can we say it? Can we be honest there? That that happens to us. That's

our weakness, that's the weakness of knowledge, weakness of emotion. That's

not a relationship with a father. That's the spirit of slavery trying to

perform. Or the weakness of desire is another one. I know at least it's true of

me. I say them, but I don't really want to. I don't really have desire for prayer

sometimes. I feel forced. I feel a duty, not a delight. Flannery O'Connor, one of

the great Southern fiction writers from Savannah, Georgia. She was a devout Roman

Catholic, a very spiritual woman. And she laments in her journal once that she

quote was exasperated by her prayer life. And she said simply, is there anyone out

there that can teach me how to pray? And prayer is hard. And Paul said so too. And

admitting it is critical. Admitting it like Paul did here. It's biblical even.

You see, it's encouraging. It's helpful. One of the pitfalls in our weakness and

prayer is that if we can't come up against it and know that it's a

reality and fight against it in a minute and even talk about it, then we might

fall into the sin, the sin, the grievous sin of prayerlessness. One pastor says

this, the failure to pray is not merely to break religious rules. It's the failure

to treat God as God. And it's a sin against his glory. So thirdly and finally

very briefly, I'm just going to rattle off five lessons of prayer and no more

than a few sentences on these each. That we can get straight from what Paul

said here or discern by good and necessary consequence for our confession

fans. First, we may need to start, some of us may need to begin today by

repenting of prayerlessness. Prayerlessness is being self-oriented. It's living in

your world, not living in God's world. And so the first thing that some of us may

need to begin today by repenting of prayerlessness. Secondly, we need to

emphasize the spiritual discipline, the word discipline in spiritual

disciplines. And that's that just practically pray, prayer morning and

evening is critical. Praying morning and evening has been the recommended

practice of the church for two millennia. Every great theologian, church

father and church mother, all the great saints of the past have continually

written over and over again that morning and evening prayer is critical. It's

where change, how change truly happens, the habits of devotion and that in that

prayer we have to adopt a spirit that prays with expectation. Coming to prayer

thinking that this is real, this works. I expect things to happen, I

expect to change. Pray morning and evening with expectation. Secondly, that's

two, three of five. Paul tells us here that we have to fight, to cry, to cry,

abba father. In other words, we have to return to prayer as an experience of

communion with a living God. Prayer is not talking at a deity, but it's an

experience of communion with your father God. It's a real relationship. Now the

Roman Catholic tradition has on the far, on the one hand, really over

emphasized at times in its history mystical experiences in prayer, which we

call mysticism, which can mean all sorts of things, but it's over emphasizing

experience in prayer to the neglect of petition and kingdom centered type

prayer, thy kingdom come that will be done. But on the other hand, the Protestant

tradition, our tradition, we often over emphasize kingdom centered petitionary

prayers, listing our petitions over actually coming to prayer as

deep communion with God. And what Paul says here is the word cry. He said

cry, abba father. It's a deeply emotional word in Greek. It's using the

whole self. It's coming to commune with a real living person. It's a real

relationship. This is what John Stott says. Some commentators rightly say that

the verb cry, Cropso is often used in such a strong way that it expresses a

loud, spontaneous, emotional cry before God. But in this case, I think it's also

the case that Paul finds the particular verb here cry, not merely an

enthusiasm or ecstasy, but in childlike and joyous assurance as contrasted with

the attitude of the slave. It's at least coming in childlike joyous assurance

of a real communing relationship when you enter into that conversation. I had a

great C.S. Lewis illustration from his science fiction trilogy here, but we have

to skip it for time. That's what you're tragic because it's, if you haven't read

that trilogy, amazing. Four of five, very briefly. We have to recognize the spirit.

Paul says here, when we are weak, the spirit helps us and intercedes for us.

Strengthen your prayer life by being conscious, conscious of the spirit's

work in your prayer as you pray. John Stott, again, in prayers to the Father, we

experience the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. When we cry, Abba, Father,

taking on our lips the words what Jesus used, it is the Spirit himself that is

bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. What does this mean?

Very simply, why you pray the Spirit who knows you better than you know yourself

prays your heart with you. As you pray, this is a fact, this is a fact, catalog

this fact. As you pray, the Holy Spirit of God prays your heart for you in a way

that is more meaningful and powerful than your prayers. And you've got to be

conscious of it in your weakness. Alright, fifthly and finally, and we'll

close, it's a question, how much have you changed in your Christian life over the

years, over the weeks, over the days, maybe? Have you seen virtue spring up, love, joy,

peace, patience, kindness? Truly changed, true change. Are you different? And the

question is, depending on how much you've changed is what is your prayer life

like? But St. Augustine, he said the primary way we change, that our loves, our

desires get reshaped and reordered, is through real deep consistent prayer. If

he says, and I'll just close with this, if you love your success more than God, it

will make a heart heart. But if you love God more than your successes in life,

which has only brought about through a change in your inner heart through

prayer, no circumstance can crush you. You will be fruitful in all seasons. We'll

close with Paul, Galatians 4-9. Prayer is not just sharing your requests and

ideas. And this is actually Paul. It is knowing God and being truly known in a

way that no other body else can know you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the

gift of prayer. It is so hard. We need help. Change us, Lord, by your spirit who

intercedes now. In Jesus' name, amen.