Luke 5:12-16
I threw part of my lunch away this past week by accident. I looked for it for about ten minutes before realizing my mistake. It was because of busyness. Busyness can make us stupid. Have you ever been so busy that you grew nervous and apprehensive? Has busyness ever overwhelmed you to the point that you lost your ability to concentrate? Sometimes we wear our busyness like a badge of honor. But what if we become so busy that we begin operating out of our own resources instead of depending on God? Jesus' answer to busyness was paradoxical: he stopped everything and spent time with the Father in prayer (Luke 5:16). It was the same for stress--everything was crushing in--Jesus withdrew and prayed. Our tendency is usually to try and match the busyness with our own frenetic energy until we crash and burn. What if we tried to handle life like Jesus did? How would things be different? In this message we will look at the advantages that are ours when we become praying people.
1. PRAYER SETTLES THE ANXIOUS HEART (Philippians 4:6-7). "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Prayer is medicine for a troubled heart. Worry doesn’t change things, but prayer does. Worry is taking our trouble and magnifying every worse case scenario until we are fit to be tied. Worry is opposed to prayer as oil is to water. Ralph Martin wrote, "'Do not be anxious' is a negative command based on the idea that anxiety betrays a lack of trust in God's care and is a species of 'unconscious blasphemy' against Him (so O. Chambers)." Worry puts problems in our hands, but prayer puts them in God’s hands with His vast resources. As we learn to take our issues specifically in prayerful conversation to God, He miraculously and mercifully stills and quiets our minds with the assurance of His availability and ability.
2. PRAYER GIVES US ACCESS TO HEAVENLY INSIGHTS (Jeremiah 33:3, James 1:5). Prayer expresses a relationship. In a relationship people talk and listen. Few things are as annoying as one person always doing all the talking. Yet we do it to God all the time. An awesome premise of the Bible and tenet of our faith is that God speaks. Prayer is not just talking to God; it is also listening to God. This is a dynamic, supernatural relationship. God knows the end from the beginning. He can give wisdom because He knows what we don't and what we can't know without His help. God directs if we will go to Him (Proverbs 3:5-6). I am often astounded at what God reveals to me in prayer. He permits finite creatures to benefit from His infinite mind and knowledge. But He does this for His glory and for the advance of His Kingdom.
3. PRAYER KEEPS US TETHERED TO GOD. There was no risk of Jesus become uncoupled from the main priority of His life; He is part of the Godhead--God from eternity, but "in the days of His flesh," when He was voluntarily subject to many of the limitations of a human life, He "offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him" (Hebrews 5:7-9). Jesus demonstrated in His life here on earth, the need for constant, intelligent, intentional connection to the Father. John Foster, described by E.M. Bounds as a Baptists philosopher, wrote that he lived under the "conviction that religion consists very much in giving God that place in our views and feelings which He actually fills in the universe. We know that in the universe He is all in all." Prayer is working out and affirming that truth in the actual practice of our lives.
4. PRAYER SHOULD BE LIKE SECOND NATURE (Luke 18:1, Ephesians 6:18, 1 Thessalonians 5:17) - The body has involuntary functions that do not require conscious control. That is what prayer is supposed to be like in our lives--we do it naturally like breathing. It happens spontaneously like the rhythm of our hearts. "Men ought always to pray and never lose heart (faint, quit, give up)." "Pray without ceasing." Brother Lawrence (a renowned 17th Century Christian) wrote, "Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own. The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer. Prayer is nothing else but a sense of the presence of God." He is saying that prayer is not some special addition to our life (though we should have times especially devoted to prayer), but that prayer ought to be involved in all our activities all the time.
5. PRAYER REPLENISHES OUR DEPLETED RESOURCES. Prayer empowers us for ministry. Without a commitment to prayer, we cannot serve God acceptably. We will only have our flesh from which to operate. Prayer appropriates God's resources for His work. General William Booth (Salvation Army) said, "Work as if everything depended upon your work, and pray as if everything depended upon your prayer." Paul wrote, "I know that in me (that is in my flesh) nothing good dwells" (Romans 7:18). We need God's virtue appropriated again and again, and we find it in crying out to Him. Jesus taught in the model prayer that we must ask daily for our bread (sustenance) (Matthew 6:11). Jesus said, "I am the Vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5).
6. PRAYER FLOURISHES IN SOLITUDE. Jesus "withdrew to desolate places." "An uninhabited place," somewhere He could be left alone. He got way from the crowds and chaos and got alone with His Father. While we should be in constant prayer, we also need deliberate, focused times of prayer--times when we can be shut up alone with God. This takes discipline. It won't happen without us mastering our will. And that brings the conversation full circle: we have to decide who will rule in our lives--all the urgent immediate things, or Christ.
CONCLUSION - Thomas Fuller said, "Prayer should be the key of the day and the lock of the night." Just because a person may have gotten used to starting the day without prayer and routinely living by their own resources doesn't make it a good practice. Prayer is critical to a life of worship because it is the purposeful expression of our complete dependence on God. Prayerlessness is an unconscious expression of a self-directed life. It is a failure of discipleship, because it is not following the way of the Master, Jesus. We need God; we experience Him in prayer. We hear Him in prayer. He upholds us in prayer. He protects us in prayer. He provides for us through prayer. He encourages our hearts through prayer. He quiets our fears through prayer. He reveals hidden insights to us inprayer. He transforms us and those we pray for through prayer. He changes the world through prayer. Let's pray!
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