"Prayer: The Multifaceted Tool" - A Sermon

A sermon by Josh.

Audio and transcript.

In the first year of the Covid Pandemic I learned the value and power of habits, how they shape us and keep us on track, how they give us purpose, and how they form and reform us. During that first year of the pandemic I struggled specifically to keep praying. I prayed in the beginning for a while, I fought the apathy but eventually… I just stopped. I got laid off from my job at Boston Pizza, school was shut down, church was shut down, I couldn’t see anyone other than my immediate family. I started to not care about everything in life. The days blended together, there was no reason to wake up in the morning, I started to fall asleep at 5 AM and woke up at 2PM. In middle school this would have sounded amazing. This was my dream. Do what I want, eat what I want, I don't have to leave the comfort of my house. I didn’t realize what happens to your mind when you have no purpose, no patterns, and no habits. In reality it wasn't that I had no habits, it was that I had made a habit of doing nothing, and that proved destructive.

Prayer as I mentioned was one of those habits I stopped practicing. At first I thought it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was because I had this perception that prayer is a tool, a spiritual telephone to get things from God. A way to get what I need, from the one who could get me anything. Don’t get me wrong, I would pray for good times and joy, for strength in the hard times for family members and friends, for new moments of spiritual growth, for wisdom and humility and courage. We should pray for those things. Prayer is there for us to ask our God for what we need from Him. Prayer is there for us to cry out to God when we mourn and when we are broken. But the passage today presents an aspect of prayer that I was missing. It's a beautiful and elegant feature in this spiritual act that I think has been lost to me and many others, and this sermon series, Holy Habits, reminds us of this aspect of prayer. Here it is.

Prayer is not JUST a tool to ask for stuff from God, it's not JUST how we cry out to him in our brokenness and pain, or praise him in our joy, but it's ALSO a method for the disciple to be unified with the LORD in will and action… prayer is transformative, it conforms the prayer into the image of Christ. In our passage today John teaches us this aspect of prayer. So, if you have a bible follow along, or if you have a phone please use that. The passage today is 1 John 5:13-16.

“I write these things to you. Who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence in approaching God; 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 what we asked of Him.”

John opens by explicitly presenting the purpose of this passage.

“I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence in approaching God…”

So right away he addresses his audience and the purpose, this passage is for you the congregation of Immanuel, me, and you James, Ruth, and Kaleigh. Everything in this passage is for us. If you are a visitor or have not professed your faith in the name of the Son of God, we here invite you to do so, because this is the hope you can expect from a confidence in Christ, why?

“So that we may know that we have eternal life, this is the confidence in approaching God.”

I thought, when I was struggling with prayer during the beginning of the pandemic, I thought prayer was about talking to God and telling him how I feel, and about what I want. But John is telling us something else about prayer, Prayer is all those things, but here John is telling us that implicit with every prayer there is the reminder of God’s gracious promise of eternal life. That when we pray, we are confident in the promise of eternal life, that when we are willing to pray to him, or cry out to him, it's because we actually believe that it works. By praying, you are professing your faith, your confidence that God is faithful.

The word for confidence here is a profound choice on John's part and it's really enlightening to the nature of the confidence we have in our prayer, in the Greek the word is Parresia, which means all out-spokeness, frankness, bluntness, and simple assurance, boldness, and conviction.

John uses this word a few other times in this short book and they will help us see why its profound, so in chapter 2:28

“And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be bold and unashamed before him at his coming.”

Or in chapter 3:21

“Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have a conviction before God.”

And lastly chapter 4:17:

“This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.”

The same confidence that allows us to prepare for Jesus, the same confidence that we have to stand before God on judgment day, the same confidence to be before the living God, is the confidence that we can bring before God in prayer. This confidence in our God is why Paul tells us to never cease praying, 1 Thessalonians 5:17.

“Pray without stopping”

Pray always, whenever you can, pray, pray. Pray open to God, let your heart be exposed to him. Don’t try to hide anything from him, you can't anyways. When we can pray with this kind of openness to our God, it means that we are opening our hearts to him. Where for so many years we have tried to cover our sins in shame, because we felt we would face the wrath of God for our sin, We can now open our hearts to our Redeemer and be confident in the promise of eternal life. Be persistent in prayer, don’t hold back, and never stop! John goes on to say: “this is the confidence in approaching God; that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us.” When we pray according to the will of God, we receive what we ask for. When what we pray is not according to his will. Then we won’t receive what we ask for, but we receive what his goodwill is

Sometimes we think of prayer as a conversation with the divine and in many ways it is. We have talked about the Holy habit of listening to Jesus and today the habit of talking with Jesus. It’s important to note, the Habit isn’t called Talking TO Jesus. It’s Talking WITH Jesus. These habits are not a conversation where we listen through a reading of the Word and then respond in prayer and worship. Prayer is the conversation! Prayer isn’t a one sided human effort. It’s a collaborative grace where we speak with our savior to the Father. We speak with him according to his will. And by the power of the Holy Spirit those prayers rise, and when we can’t say the words that our souls can’t express in conscious words, His Spirit speaks for us knowing that our souls are groaning for our God.

Romans 8:26-28

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts and knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

These two passages blend beautifully together. Where John says he wrote to believers so that they were confident in God's promise of eternal life, Paul says that all things work for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Where John said that if what we ask is according to his will then he hears us and we will receive that of him. Paul says that when we in our weakness don’t know what to pray, the Spirit of God intercedes on our behalf and prays in accordance with God’s will for us.

Whether we pray in accordance with God’s will, or we don’t God’s good and faithful will is what we get. Blessed if you do, Blessed if you don’t. Now you are probably all thinking to yourselves, if God’s will is what I get either way, then why Pray. Because John is trying to tell us this. Prayer is not JUST a tool to ask stuff from God, it's not JUST how we cry out to him in our brokenness and pain, or praise him in our joy, but it's also a method for the disciple to be unified with the LORD in will and action

Paul’s tells us to never stop praying because when we pray over and over and over again in repetition we form patterns and in pattern we form a habit and in doing it again and again we are faced with that Faithfulness, with that confidence, with that promise of good will and eternal life. When we pray over and over again we come close and make contact with that incomprehensible good will, and we start to live in it, instead of trying to get what we want, we start to pray what he wants, we start to pray for that good will, we start to pray for that promised land and we start to be more like Jesus, crying out to his father the night he was betrayed

“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.”

When Jesus cried out for help he new that the help was not in getting what he wanted but rather the help was in God's will. Our prayers and actions and our praises start to sound like this, like our LORD'S prayers. Jesus poured out his pain and fear and terror to his Father, but let all of that go knowing that his Fathers will was good, and being confident in the promise of eternal life for him and everyone who would believe in his name like John wrote, Jesus is unifying his will with his Fathers.”

Now all that being said, What do we today, do with this, how does this affect our daily worship and prayers, how does this affect how we talk with Jesus. Or how should this shape how we live out this holy habit. Now it's important to remember that the effects come through repetition which forms habit. And there will be moments where we fall out of Habit like I did, but remember that the Spirit prays for you even when you don’t

Okay, there are 4 ways this habit should affect us:

1. It should affect our mindset. When we go into prayer, we don’t have to go in half hearted because we are not sure that we will get what we request of God. We can go into praise and prayer with the assurance, and confidence that when we open up our hearts to God that we will receive that blessing of eternal life, according to his will, for us because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and we believe that he is Faithful.

2. It should affect what we pray for. When we pray we can start to pray for what is actually good, and what is according to God’s will. Like Jesus we can openly praise God and express our fears, joys, sorrows, anxieties, and petition God for our hearts desires but we will additionally pray that God’s will be done and not ours. As we continue to pray and form a habit, we will start to see and understand more clearly what the Father’s will is.

3. This should also affect how we behave towards our church and community. When we are faced with the promise of God’s good will and of eternal life, we start to see God’s good will is not just for ourselves but for the whole body of Christ. We start to witness the power that the promise has on each other. As we communally praise God and pray with him we see the effect that it has on others. We see that God’s promises for us are for our brothers and sisters as well. And we started to pray for God’s will for them. We had the Prayer night on the 8th where many of us prayed for issues facing our church and the church at large, we prayed for leaders, and marriages, and mental health and political division. We opened our hearts to each other and God and it was good, and we left their confident that God’s good will would actually happen.

4. This should affect how we act in the world, when we start to see how the power of prayer and praising God works in our lives transformatively, we see the desire God has for the broken and lost. We start to think missionally towards the world, those who are not yet a part of that body of believers who profess the name of Jesus and therefore have the confidence to approach God. We start to work in accordance with God to pray for those who do not know him. And we start to work in accordance with God to draw them actively into the body of Christ

To end this off here are some practical examples of how we can live this out in our lives. In the Holy Habits companion guide that you all have, you will find 4 examples of how to practice the Holy Habit of Talking with Jesus. If you don’t, I am sure there are more you can grab probably from the office or the Sunday school desk. But I want to highlight the first two examples in the workbook, the first is an individual example and the other is a communal example:

1. Set an alarm or two on the day when you know you will be free, like a break or when you wake up, ect. When that alarm goes off, pray. I like this one because of the pattern it sets. Dedicating a time to pray to or worship God specifically for no other reason than to do so is huge and makes sure the practice is habit forming. Usually we attach prayer and worship to other activities. When we eat we will pray, when we go to bed we pray or when we start a meeting we will pray. But we just rush through a rehearsed prayer and move on to the task at hand. And though those prayers are good and habit forming. They rarely dig deep into the heart of the matter. When we set time for Prayer and worship alone, we can dig deep and work with the Spirit so that God actively forms our wills in accordance with his.

2. Get a community together to pray in an ongoing manner where the members rotate who they pray for. So everyone in the group is praying for someone and is being prayed for. In the Young Adults ministry we do this, it's called the Rotating Prayer Group. Any Young Adults can join at any time, and this aspect of our ministry was huge for others and myself during the pandemic. God helped me get out of my apathetic mindset about life and prayer because suddenly it wasn’t about me. It was about the community. The group still does it now as we are about to enter our second year of prayer. And it's been great.

There are more practical examples we could lay out and there are more in the book and really the habit is formed by repetition. Consistent repetition. And ultimately the hope is that we start to pray like Paul mentioned in 1 Thessalonians, without ceasing, because the more we confidently approach prayer as a means of grace to fuel our lives of faith the more we as disciples of Jesus, will be unified with Him in will and action. Let’s confidently pray together with our God!