The Church of Eleven22 - S01 E70 - Praying

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

Hey, church family. If you've got your Bibles, we're going to be in two places. We're going to be in 1st Peter chapter 5 and also Hebrews chapter 4. So again, if you've been following along this week, we're talking about the end of our service and the way we respond to the gospel because the gospel demands a response. That we sing. Talked about that. That we bring. We worship God with our generosity and we pray. And so if you notice that all of our campuses, we have prayer rails at the down front. And we invite you to come and to pray. Now, we should pray without ceasing. Paul says we should pray all the time. But this particular prayer at the end of the service is a responsive prayer.

This is the prayer where you are aligning your heart with what the Spirit of God has been teaching you because ultimately I can't teach you anything out of the Bible. I can teach you some facts about first century stuff and I can teach you some truths that Jesus said, but only the spirit of God can sear your heart. Only the spirit of God with the power of His word can like, can, can pierce into places that no human can get into. And then I think there is this ceiling that happens that when we go and we kneel before the almighty maker of heaven and earth, what we're saying in this part of our worship service is, ultimately what we're saying is amen. Let this be so.

God, the things that you have comforted me with, the things that you have convicted me of, the challenge that we just heard from the word, God, I want to marinate in this moment right now. and I want to confess to you, Lord, I need your help. I need your help with, and it just kind of depends on what we're talking about. For the salvation of my one more, I need help in the area of finances, I need help because I'm carrying around this bitterness, I need help that the gospel would just saturate my heart. That's what the prayer is. And so there is something about the posture that we take that matters because we are not

we are not only spiritual beings. We are physical too. We have a soul and a body. And so we worship God not just with our mind and not just with our feelings and not just with our spirituality, but we also worship him with the posture of our body. And the Bible gives us a lot of instruction about how we can posture ourselves before the Lord. So this is why we invite you to come down front. And I think, listen, can you pray in your chair? A hundred percent, man. You totally can pray in your chair because God is omnipresent, and so he'll hear you from your chair just as much as he'll hear you in any other place. We don't have any kind of sacred space. Like, that it's actually not a thing in the new covenant, that the area right in front of the stage is no more holy than the area in the back

of the room. However, there is something about when your body moves, when you decide I'm going to leave this place and I'm going to go to that place and I'm going to kneel down before God, like I would kneel before the king. I'm just telling you there's something significant about it. This is why there's all kinds of posture instructions in the Bible. Like the Bible says, kneel down, the Bible says raise your hands, the Bible says lift your face, the Bible says open your hands, the Bible says lay on your face. I mean, there's all these kinds of things because the body sort of acts as a starter for the rest of us. And so when we invite you to pray, that's what we're inviting you to do.

It doesn't mean if you come to the altar, something's wrong with you. It actually means something's really right with you. That you're at this place in prayer where ultimately you're crying out to God, like the man in the gospels that sees Jesus passing by on the road. And he says, Jesus, son of David, have my mind. mercy on me. That's the prayer at the end of the service. God, I need your help. First Peter, chapter 5, verses 6 and following says it this way. I want you to hear these verses in light of the prayer time at the end of the service. Humble yourself, therefore,

under the mighty hand of God. So at the proper time, he may exalt you. That's what you're doing. You're saying, God, I've heard the message. And I know. that something needs to change in my life. You see, part of the reason I think the last 10 minutes or so, eight minutes, whatever it is, and our service is the most important, do you remember at the end of the sermon on the Mount when Jesus said, blessed are you if you hear these words of mine and put them into practice? So I would say, Church of 1122, blessed are you when you hear the words of the sermon when you hear the words of the song and you don't just feel differently or think differently, but you do something about it. You put them into practice. And so when we come forward and

pray, we are humbling ourselves. We are going and kneeling on an altar before the king. We're kneeling under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time, maybe Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday during your week, maybe when you get home to your wife, maybe whenever you bump into the world that he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. That God says in prayer, if it's important to you, it's important to me because you are important to me. So it doesn't matter how seemingly big or small the thing is you need to pray about, God says, bring it to me.

Look, dads and moms, don't you know this with your kids? I mean, don't you want your kids to, I know they can aggravate you, but God never gets aggravated by us, that he has perfect patience because he's a perfect father. And casting all your anxiety. So whatever you're anxious about, you should bring it to him in prayer. And the reason is because he cares for you. It says, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prows around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Earlier this week, I mentioned the parable of the solar, right? That the farmer goes out, he scatters the seed, and some of the seed lands on a hard place and a bird comes by and steals it away before it can ever get down into the soil. Jesus says that

bird stealing the seed is like when the enemy steals the word of God before it can pierce your heart. Especially at the end of a service, when you have just received the gospel and been with God's people and made much of the Lord, in that moment, the devil is prowling around like a roaring line in your head, in your heart. He's sitting in your car just waiting for you to get out in there so that maybe he can help you get frustrated with the parking situation and steal away everything that God wants to teach you. And so when we come before him in prayer at the end of a service, what we're saying is, Lord, would you seal your words upon my heart that I might put them into action? It says, resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of sufferings are being

experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. This is why you come to the altar at the end of a service. This is why you kneel down and you humble yourself and you pray. Why? Because in Christ, he himself,

that's Jesus will. Here's some results of your prayer time. He will restore you. Maybe there's some broken things in your life that need to be restored. He will confirm you. Maybe there are some directional decisions that you need to make that week and you don't know what to do. You don't know if you're supposed to go left or supposed to go right.

And in this prayer time, he will confirm you. He will strengthen you because you cannot make it on your own power. in this prayer time is you saying, Heavenly Father, I need your help. I can't make it on my own power. And he will strengthen you and establish you. That means if you fall down, he'll pick you back up and set you on your feet. To him be dominion forever and ever. And then he says, amen. That means, may it be so. And the reason that we can come boldly before our Heavenly Father in prayer and bring all kind of requests is because of what Christ has done for us. Tim Keller says, what kind of boldness must a three-year-old have to walk into the bedroom

of a king and demand a glass of water? I can tell you the kind of boldness. The three-year-old has to be the child of that king. And you and I, because of the cross of Jesus Christ, that's how we get to boldly approach God in prayer. sometimes I think we're too wimpy in prayer, sometimes I think we're too formal in prayer. God already knows everything we need before we ever even utter it. In fact, the Bible says that it's the spirit of God that actually helps us pray.

That's why God knows the words that we're going to say before we're ever going to say them. So the words aren't super important. I mean, nobody can hear them anyway, right? The music's loud, the bass is in your face. But when we go down and we kneel before God and we say, God, I need help. I need to be strengthened. I need to be established. I need to be confirmed.

I need to be restored. I need for you in a miraculous way to take the words that I have just processed with my ears and my brain, and I need you to sink them down into this heart level because blessed is the man who hears these words of mine and does them. Not just thinks about them, not just praise about them, but does them.

But the prayer time is that moment where we marinate in the presence of God before we leave, before we get distracted by all the things that come in our life. And we say, God, I cast all my anxieties upon you because you care for me. And the reason we can do this with boldness, Hebrews chapter 4, verses 14 and following says this, since then we have a great high priest, talking about Jesus, a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,

Jesus, son of God, let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness. That's what this means. If Jesus Christ, the son of God, the great high priest from heaven, if he thought it was important to get alone and pray and ask the Father for help, then who in the world do you think you are, to think Jesus needed help, but you don't. And see, he can sympathize with our weakness. In other words, just like Jesus, just like you have some things that you're anxious about. And so God says, cast all your anxiety upon me because I care for you. There are some things

that Jesus was anxious about. And I know the Bible says, be anxious for nothing. But the way we are to be anxious for nothing is by prayer and supplication, make our request known to God. when Jesus is in the garden, he is pouring out his soul at the altar because he knows the next thing that God is going to call him to do, he's going to need God's help. And so he sympathizes for us in our weakness. He says, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin.

So no matter what your prayer request, Jesus knows, Verse 16, let us then, with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. You see, in the temple system, there was a little room called the Holy of Holies. We talked about this in Leviticus 16. Only the high priest could enter on the day of atonement after he had made sacrifice for the covering of his sin. He had to kill a bull and a goat and a lamb and change clothes and take a bath. There's all kind of stuff. and then he went into that room to make atonement for the nation of Israel one time a year, and they'd actually tie a rope with bells around him, because if he was unholy,

if he didn't do it right, then the holiness and the righteousness of God would strike him dead in that moment, and they would listen, and if the bells quit ringing, they would drag the dead priest out, and then the JV priest would get elevated to varsity, and then he would go in and finish the drill. But when Jesus died on the cross, and he says, to Telestai, it is finished, it means, that the sacrifice has been made. That the high priest, Jesus himself, was the Lamb of God who was slain for the forgiveness

of anyone who would believe. And in that moment, when that happened, historically speaking, this is not metaphorical, this is literal. When Jesus says it is finished, an earthquake hits Jerusalem. And it goes right down the middle of the temple,

and there was a curtain that separated the Holy of Holies, the presence of God, from the courts, from the people of God. And in the old covenant, you could not just walk into the throne room of God. You'd be a dead man. But through the blood, not of lambs and goats, but through the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ,

the curtain is torn from the top to the bottom. And we, his adopted children, are invited to, with confidence, drawn near to the throne of grace. the next time you attend a worship service. And honestly, whether you're attending online or you attend in one of the facilities, and we say, hey, we respond to the gospel by singing, let's sing and bringing, let's bring, and pray. Then humble yourself.

Come and kneel before the God in the universe, but you kneel with great confidence because he is your heavenly father. And just like a kid, ask their dad for help. You ask your heavenly father. he will hear your prayers. Let's pray. Our good and gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we take it for granted so often that we are invited to come to you with boldness, with confidence, with humility, to cast all of our anxieties upon you, and all means all. So Lord, we cast our work anxieties and family

anxieties and financial anxieties and health anxieties. anything that has us stirred up, God, we bring them to you, the maker of heaven and earth, God, that we believe and trust that you're a good dad, you're a good father, and you've still got the whole world in your hands. And so, God, when we pray, Lord, I pray that you, by the power of the spirit of God, would give us a boldness to come to you with great confidence, like a child comes before their father and says, Dad, I need help. We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.