This morning we are continuing on in our series on the spiritual disciplines called “Sacred Rhythms.” In order for a tree to be full, healthy, and growing it must send its roots deep into the earth. For us as Christians, our roots must be firmly planted in Jesus – He is the vine and we are the branches. Our behaviour (what we say and do) and our character (integrity), are directly related to the invisible part, our roots, our spiritual life, our relationship with Jesus. When our spiritual roots are shallow we will struggle with our behaviour and our character because they are directly linked to our spiritual life. If we are going to experience the abundant life God desires to bless us with, then we need to grow spiritually. As our roots go down in Christ, our behaviour and character begins to change as we grow more and more like Christ.
Remember, we are studying the spiritual disciplines because they help us to live a Christ-centered life all the time. By themselves, the spiritual disciplines will not change anything in our life; instead they make us available to God to be changed by Him. This is what we have been talking about for the past several weeks. We have looking at different spiritual disciplines that are designed to help us become more Christlike, as we move closer to Him. Today we are looking at prayer. Richard Foster in his book “Celebration of Discipline” wrote,
“Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life. Of all the Spiritual Disciplines, prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father. . . Real prayer is life creating and life changing.”
Isn’t that a great statement? Prayer launches us into the spiritual world as we seek to have a conversation with God, so that we can communicate with God. When we pray, we are engaging God in one of the deepest conversations we will ever have. Prayer opens the door to our learning and understanding of what God wants for us in our lives, the lives of our family and friends, the lives of people in our community and ultimately when we engage in prayer, we have the opportunity to call upon the most powerful person in our lives, God. We have the opportunity to change the world, along with ourselves, if we are willing to open ourselves to God.
I find it interesting that the disciples could have asked Jesus for just about anything in the world. They walked with Him for 3 years, they saw Him in action, yet, Luke tells us in Luke 11:1 “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples spoke to him. “Lord, teach us to pray”. Isn’t it interesting that these 12 men would ask Jesus – - “teach us to pray”? They had seen miracle after miracle, healing after healing – the blind were able to see, the lame could walk, the deaf could hear, the dead could breathe again; the hungry were fed. They could have said, “Lord help us feed the 5,000 like You did” or “Lord, give us the wisdom to say the right things at the right time.”
These men grew up in the Temple, they knew all about prayer, the times of prayer and the Sabbath prayers. They weren’t just looking for an easy answer. They noticed something different about Jesus and His prayer life. They saw Him pray at different times of the day and in different situations. They saw Him pray during crises, when He experienced need, when He was tired, when He wanted reconnection and wisdom from His Father – - the response from Jesus was to pray.
The disciples noticed Jesus looked forward to prayer and hungered for it. They saw that somehow prayer fed Jesus’ soul the way food nourished their stomachs. As a result, the disciples wanted what Jesus had, they wanted their heart, soul and mind to be nourished by prayer in the same way Jesus was nourished by prayer. Here’s the lesson: Prayer is a learned behaviour. Nobody is born an expert at it. No one ever masters prayer. One author (Thomas Merton) said: “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners all our life!”
So, how do we get started in prayer? I believe many people struggle with the starting point of prayer; along with what to pray for, how long do I pray, and so on. Many of us say we want to pray and believe it’s effective, but often times we feel defeated before we even start to pray; or we start and a few minutes later we find our minds wandering about our grocery list, last nights ball game, the housework, will the meeting go well, the hungry rumblings in our stomachs and a myriad of other thoughts and wanderings. John Ortberg calls our wandering minds, “Spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder.” Henri Nouwen once said that when we go to pray, thoughts jump around in our minds like monkey’s jumping around on banana trees.
I find myself doing this. I start praying and suddenly I’m rehearsing my sermon or my heart, spirit and mind begin to wander; or my body becomes tired. So, what do we do when we catch ourselves doing this? First we need to cut ourselves some slack. If you get off topic, and you think about your groceries, or a message you need to give to someone, don’t berate yourself, just catch yourself and move back into your prayer. Another suggestion is, at the beginning of our prayers to take a few moments to allow the monkeys to settle down. We can do this by simply by taking a few deep breaths and allowing our mind to slow down.
Another thing that hold us back in getting started in prayer is thinking we need to have wonderful and flowery words in our prayers. We think we need to speak like King James but if that isn’t you, don’t worry about it. God wants you to talk to Him just as you are, not as you think someone else would like you to be.
We also think our prayers should be a certain number of minutes long, and if we don’t hit our time limit we feel like we’ve bombed on our prayer. We especially fill this way when hear of so many people who were great praying saints. Protestant reformer Martin Luther said, “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.” John Wesley spent two hours per day in prayer. Adoniram Judson, a Baptist missionary would pray 7 times per day. At dawn, 9, 12, 3, 6, 9, and midnight. We hear these stories and we begin to think we should be doing the same thing. On day one we say we will pray for one hour, and after 3 minutes, we’re prayed out. And when we fall short, we tend to beat ourselves up and just give up from praying. But that is not what we are to do.
My suggestion is to start slow, start with 3 or 5 minutes, no more and no less, but you need to start and before we are done, I will give you a number of prayer patterns you can try. You don’t just wake up one day and say next week ‘I’m going to run in a marathon.’ That wouldn’t work, instead you set that as a goal and you begin to train. Maybe you start by walking for one mile and work your way to the point when running a marathon is a possibility. When we begin thinking about our need to pray, we need to start with the fundamentals, the basics and begin to strengthen ourselves as we seek to draw closer to God in prayer.
Then we hear Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing” in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and we again set ourselves up for failure, because as the day moves on we realize how many times we’ve forgotten to pray about one thing after another. So, it can become easy – or maybe a better word to use is convenient – to just give up on prayer. But don’t do that!! So, how should we read this passage? Let me give you another way to look at it.
One writer (Donald Whitney) describes these words of Paul as being very freeing:
“If talking with and thinking of God can’t be in the forefront of your mind, it should always be peeking over and ready to take the place of what you are concentrating on. You might think of praying without ceasing as communicating with God on one line while also taking calls on another. Even while you are talking on the other line, you never lose your awareness of the need to return your attention to the Lord. So, praying without ceasing means you never stop conversing with God; you simply have frequent interruptions.”
That is a great way to look at that verse. Just keep your phone lines open. Another way is to view prayer as having a conversation on a walkie-talkie with God. Even when we are busy doing something, we still have the walkie-talkie on so that when God speaks to us, or we speak to Him, we are ready, able and willing to listen or to speak to Him.
When we pray, we sometimes feel like we need to tap the shoulder of a very busy God, who needs to be reminded of something important He is supposed to do. We sense we need to nudge God along by our prayers, telling Him what to do, but we behave as though the outcome depends upon us. We ask God to do what we want Him to do and then we persist to ask God to conform to our will. When the answers don’t come as we want it to be, we usually end up angry at God. A different approach would be to slow ourselves down and begin the process of learning to listen to God, so that instead of our tapping God on His shoulder, we allow God to come to us and tap us on the shoulder and He gets our attention.
I feel like I have barely touched the surface of prayer, but our time is coming to a close and I want to give you some very practical steps, some ideas and ways to enter into prayer. Some people are able to just jump in and away they go, most, however, need some way to enter in, so here are some ideas or patterns for prayer. You can use these two acronyms as a way to enter into prayer ~ ACTS – Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication and PRAY – Praise, Repentance, Ask, Yield These are two pretty easy to remember acronyms. Let’s spend some time looking at these acronyms Since they are very similar we will look at them together
We are to begin our prayer with adoration and praise. It is important to note that many Biblical prayers start off with praise to God and follow similar patterns. We see it in many of the psalms, in Nehemiah’s prayer in Nehemiah 1; as well as in Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9. Whether we are stuck or not, this is one effective way to lead ourselves into prayer. So, we start your prayer the way Nehemiah did, when he said In Nehemiah 1:5, “O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands.” Nehemiah recognizes God’s greatness and just how awesome God is and he tells God exactly what he is thinking. This is how the prayer starts, he lifts up God’s name in praise. When we start out praying, instead of rushing to what we want God to do for us, start by telling God why we believe He is so awesome. Tell him how you adore Him. Remember the word adore means, “to love deeply and intensely, to regard with a deep rapturous love.”
Try expressing that to God first, praise Him, worship Him, give Him the reverence due Him. Then move on to confession and repentance. It’s what Nehemiah did next, as well. In the next verse, verse 6, Nehemiah said, “I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you.” He moved on to confession. He confessed the sins of the nation, his sins, as well as the sins of his family. He wanted to make his life right with God, so that when he did lay his needs and petitions at God’s door, his heart, soul, mind and body were right with God. We don’t like to admit our wrongdoings, our mistakes, especially our sins. Confession is not easy. Nehemiah admitted the people had acted wickedly and had been disobedient to God and in essence deserved their exile. He showed his humility in humbling himself and admitting his and the nations sinfulness before God.
Next in our progression is where the two acronyms diverge a bit. The ACTS acronym next has us giving thanks to God. At this point we would have PRAISED God, confessed to God, now we THANK God for the blessings and life He has given us. We should look at our lives and see what is good – how God has blessed us. This causes us to focus on what we do have, not on what we don’t have!
The third step of the PRAY acronym is the same as the final step of the ACTS acronym. We are called to ASK, or make our requests know to God in what is called SUPPLICATIONS. Supplication simply means to humbly ask, implore or even beg for something. It’s a this stage where Nehemiah asked God for something, he asked God to give him success in going to the king so that he may return to Jerusalem and help the rebuilding of the wall. For us, it is at this stage where we do as Paul said, “we make our requests known to God.” We tell God what our needs are and what we need.
I like the final stage of the PRAY acronym because it reminds me of the need to YIELD to God’s will. I know that Scripture tells me, ‘if I ask in His name it will be done for me.’ but it means I need to know what God’s will is, and in order to know His will I must be so connected to Him, and so close that it is not guess work, it is not a wing and a prayer, but it is my conviction that God wants something for me and I can confidently make that request, believing this is God’s will, not my will. That is what the YIELD means for me.
Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God. One author (Dallas Willard) put it this way: “Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.” In addition of all the other work that get done through prayer, perhaps the greatest work of all is the knitting of the human heart together with the heart of God. It is sharing with our loving Father your heart, thoughts, emotions, requests, needs, cares, anxieties, worries, praises, thanksgivings, hopes, and desires.
Here is my challenge that I want to leave us with: Make a personal prayer plan. Decide what time is best for you to set aside exclusively for prayer. Decide where the best place for you to pray at that time is. Do it!
Richard Foster writes of a friend walking through a shopping mall with his 2 year old son. The boy was cranky and out of sorts, and nothing the father did would settle him down. When nothing else works the father finally picks his son up, holds him in his arms, and begins to sing to him a song that he makes up as he goes along: “I love you. I love the way you laugh. I’m glad I get to be your dad.” Suddenly, this song does what nothing else could. His son’s eyes get wide, his mouth closes and grins, he nestles into his father’s chest and listens all the way out to the car.When his father puts him into the car seat and buckles him in, his son throws out his arms and says, “Sing it to me again, Daddy. Sing it again.”
Prayer is like that. With simplicity of heart we allow ourselves to be gathered into the arms of Father and let him sing His love song over us.
