Prayer: How to be Sure of Results
Sermon
THE HAPPY HOUR
SERMONS FOR ADVENT, CHRISTMAS AND EPIPHANY (SUNDAYS 1-8 IN ORDINARY TIME)
Recently a newspaper ran a list of thirteen possible sermon topics and asked the readers to select the one on which they would most like to hear their pastor preach. There were only a few over 7,000 replies and 7,000 of them replied that the subject on which they would like their minister to preach would be "How to Make Prayer More Effective." The Bible tells us that this was the only request that the disciples made of Jesus. When they had to select among all the subjects upon which they would want him to speak, their only request was "Lord, teach us how to pray." That sounds a little ridiculous, since it comes from the disciples whom he had selected because they were good and religious men who had probably prayed all their lives in some fashion or another. Yet they wanted to know how to pray. That question comes not from the heathen but from the righteous. They did not ask Jesus to teach them how to pray in response to a powerful, moving sermon that he had preached on prayer. It was not the result of some clever, philosophical argument for the cause and effectiveness of prayer; nor was it as a result of some lectures He had given on the need and technique of prayer.
The Bible says that the disciples asked him to teach them how to pray because they saw in his life power and change that was wrought as a result of prayer. St. Luke writes that it came to pass that, as he was praying, one of the disciples came up to Jesus and said, "Lord, teach us how to pray. Preach a sermon on how to pray." They requested this because they had noticed that when he returned after going away to pray, there was something different about his life. There was a different countenance and attitude about him. They saw the effectiveness of it in his life. It was so obvious that they asked him, "Lord, teach us how to pray." They reasoned, "If it can do that for him, think what it could do for us! Maybe we are not praying in the proper manner." This passage struck me because, in a moment of honesty, I admitted that it really was a judgment of my own prayer life. How many times had church members asked me to teach them how to pray? And I had to be honest with myself. Perhaps the reason I had not been asked to teach praying was because my own prayer life was not effective enough that it made my congregation want to learn more about how to pray. In that rare moment of honesty, I evaluated the poverty of my own prayer life.
Everything you read says that people are praying less today than ever before. They wonder in the scientifically-explained world how prayer could have any effect. We have scientific explanations for almost everything. Surveys taken in the last few years, among church members and especially among clergy, show that they are praying less, and they feel guilty about it and have questions about its effectiveness in their own life. I want to talk to people like myself who, from time to time, have questions about the effectiveness of their prayer life. I do not want to give you any glib answers, but I do want to tell you how Jesus said that you can have 100 percent success in your prayer life - not 99 percent but 100 percent. You can always be sure, if you approach it this way, that it will work all the time.
I would like to call your attention to the passage from the fifty-fifth chapter of the Prophet Isaiah in which he is addressing the Hebrew children who find themselves in Babylonian captivity. They have been there now for over fifty years. There is hardly a survivor left who can remember what being close to God was like. There is hardly one still living who can remember vividly what it was like being in Jerusalem or near the Holy City. They had forgotten what it was like to be near God at Mount Moriah. They had been fifty years without any effective prayer life and communication with God, to the extent that they were not quite sure what it would be like - and not sure whether that was what they wanted. Now the prophet was saying to them, "Hey, the Persian king has now conquered Babylon. We prayed that God would answer our prayer and set us free that we might turn back to God, back to the Promised Land, and Cyrus is the answer to prayer. Now you have an opportunity to go back to a nearness with God. You can turn back to a relationship with him, back to Jerusalem, back to the Promised Land." But do not forget that they had been gone for fifty years. That was home ... they were natives. That made them original "old family." They had been living that lifestyle for fifty years and had been getting along pretty well without God. So, some of them wondered, "Well, why should I go out there in this strange wilderness trying this new kind of relationship with God when I am not even sure it is there? I have never been there. How do we know it will work and we can live there and once again be close to God in that Holy Place?
They had a lot of questions about it. But the prophet says, a new relationship is possible. This is how ne explains you can have that new relationship. Isaiah 55:10-13 cannot be studied or understood unless we also include verses six to nine in the reading. To those who are not quite sure it is what they want, to those who are not quite sure how you get it, to those who have perhaps never had it, he explains when you should pray.
I. When
Isaiah writes: "Seek the Lord while he is near. Call upon Him while he may be found," now what he is saying is that silence is the answer to prayer. We have prayer at our disposal, there is no use remaining in the same kind of condition in our life and family any longer. The time to start praying is right now! "Seek him while he is near." Do not say, "Tomorrow I am going to start trying to pray." Start right now! Do not say, "Tomorrow I am going to set out on a new journey to the Promised Land, back to a close relationship with God." No, you start it now! "Seek the Lord while he is near. Call upon him while he may be found."
"Found" and "near" imply that you can discover him. You are not going to discover him tomorrow but now. He is a living, a now God. You are not going to find him in the past. You are going to find him now, right now. He is saying that you need to draw apart from the world. Those are the graphic symbols of "found" and "near". You must respond now if you are to get out of the kind of lifestyles in which you are trapped.
Jesus says, "When you pray, get into your closet." Do you know what a closet is? We used to call bathrooms or outhouses closets when I was a boy, but that is not what Isaiah has in mind. A closet in the Bible was a dressing room off from the temple where priests changed their clothes. They disrobed to dress in order to enter the temple. They had to put on certain attire. It was the place where you stripped naked. You take off your $200 suit. You take off your $100 dress. You take off all your superficialities, all your pretense, all your masks, all your aggressiveness, all your success. You take it off and get down just like you were when you came in this world. You disrobe. You go in your closet where there is no pretension and you find him and he finds you.
We approach everything else the same way we do prayer. You have had an aggressive day at the office and you tell your wife you will meet her at the box office to attend a concert; but, if you go to that concert with the same kind of attitude and the same kind of technique with which you have approached the whole day, you are going to be miserable. If you go in there aggressively, you are not going to get anything out of it. You have to change your techniques. You have to go in there in a receptive mood, do you not? You have to go while allowing something to be done to you and for you through the music. You have to leave the world in which you are trying to do for the world and to the world, and allow the music to do something to you.
That is what prayer is! You go in that robing room and you disrobe and you take off that old, selfish kind of "pushy", aggressive, "go-getter" attitude. Most of us pray that way. We "go after it." We are aggressive people. "Lord, help me; do this for me." And we approach God totally that way. We live by the philosophy that the squeaking wheel gets the grease. So we assume that if we squeak enough and loud enough, the Lord is going to hear. We try to manipulate him.
Our church services in Greenville. North Carolina were broadcast on the radio. The angriest reply I ever got from that large radio audience was a letter from an unemployed clergyman who was home in bed. He wrote an extremely aggressive letter, responding to my sermon, one in which I mentioned something about the effectiveness of prayer. He said, "I tried it. I prayed, and God did not do all I wanted him to do and what I asked him to do." You could feel the hostility in that letter. But Jesus prayed, "Not my will but thy will be done," which is an entirely different technique.
I do not have a lot of regular time for prayer, but one such time I have is in the morning after I run six miles. There is one particular chair in which my wife will allow me to sit when I am still perspiring with a sweatsuit on. I sit there and read and pray. I am physically exhausted. That is the best time. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "As the physical becomes weaker and weaker, the inner man becomes stronger and stronger." What he means is that all this aggressiveness, this outward exterior, is weakened at that moment; the spiritual man has a stronger opportunity to take over. The barriers that you set up, the things with which you shield your soul, all the material aggressiveness of the world - when all of it is down, then you can spiritually relate. This is the whole purpose of the Indian religion's philosophy of yoga and the other physical disciplines that go along with prayer: Yu are subdued; the body, the physical, the material are set aside, that your spiritual and inner self might take over.
II. How Do You Pray
The prophet says, "Let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, that He may have mercy upon him; and to God, for he will abundantly pardon; for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways. As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts and my ways than your ways, saith the Lord."
Forsake your unrighteous thoughts. "Let him forsake his own way and his own will." That is the only way prayer takes place - when you surrender your will to God's will. This is the process of praying. Most of us, when we pray, have already decided what our problem is. Maybe it is one of your children. Maybe it is your job. Maybe it is your marriage. You decide what you think the answer is and you get down on your knees and pray, "God, grant this. Do it!" What you are really saying is, "Now, Lord, you do not know too much about your business, but I know best. Just do what I want." We ask him for the answer rather than give him the problem, because we think our answer to the problem is better than his answer to the problem. "Let the wicked man forsake his thoughts and his own way and will, saith the Lord".
Sometimes I talk so much that the Lord just does not have a chance to say anything. Do you ever do that? And he is trying to say something but he cannot get a word in edgewise. My wife bought me a hat to match a topcoat once, and I lost the hat in the airport in Chicago. I got home and it was still snowing and I needed a hat. I went to the haberdashers with whom I normally traded. They were Jewish men and close personal friends of mine. I had bought all my clothing from them for years, but they did not have a hat like I was looking for. So, I went to a different store, belonging to another Jewish gentleman. He had the exact hat for which I was looking. But, I had never traded with him and was a little skeptical about him. I always liked to bargain with people so I said, "How much will you take for it?" He said, "Try it on." I said, "How much will you take for it? What wears good with me is how much it costs." He said, "Do you like it?" I said, "How much is it?" "Put it on," he said, "Do you like it. Reverend?" I thought to myself, "I am going to get taken," but I put it on and I liked it. It was a perfect fit. I said, "How much?" He said. "It's yours. I want to give it to you." Boy, did I ever feel small! I almost disappeared.
That is the way I have been reacting to God, always worrying about what kind of deal I am going to make when he is trying to do something for me and I will not let him. That is the way most of us react. And then, too, when he says, "Let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts," it is not so obvious that we are always selfish. Some of our prayers are not obviously selfish. For example, we might pray for protection and security, which may mean for you freedom from worry about the future and your professional survival, when God might have a different idea about what He means by security. Or, you might pray for your children's success in school, when God's idea of what success for your children might be would be entirely different from what your idea might be. Or you might pray, "Lord, I'm lonely and abandoned," and you forget that Jesus was abandoned and lonely. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. But, here is the key: Isaiah 55:10-11.
III. Why
Why will prayer always work 100 percent of the time? Prayer that works emphasizes not your words but God's, emphasizing not your words to him (that is of no consequence), but his words to you. Let me share this verse from Isaiah with you. I think it is poetic.
For as the rain and the snow come down from Heaven and return not thither but water the earth making it bring forth and sprout, making seed to the soil and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not ever return to me empty, never. It shall always accomplish that which I purpose and in all things it shall prosper for what I sent it.
You and I put too much emphasis on the power of our words and too little on God's Word. God's Word will never return empty - never. Not my will but Thine be done. This is how you can have the assurance that prayer will always work - when you put your emphasis on God's Word. His Word always accomplishes that which he purposes. It never returns empty. Often when I pray, my words just come back empty. But, God's word never does. It accomplishes that which he intends. That is why the Lord's prayer ends with: "For Thine is the kingdom and the power." Thine: that is the whole answer to prayer. When the disciples said. "Lord, teach us how to pray," Jesus taught them the Lord's Prayer and ended, "For Thine is the kingdom and the power." That is where the success is: Thine. the submission and surrender to let him reign and his word succeed in our lives.
I went into our chapel a few weeks ago and there was a college girl, sitting by herself in prayer. I walked up to her and asked, "May I help you?" She raised up from her knees with a glow in her face and said, "Thank you, but I am being helped."
My word shall not ever return unto me empty. Whatever I prosper it to be, it shall be. Whatever I intended to accomplish, it shall accomplish. It shall never return unto me empty."
The Bible says that the disciples asked him to teach them how to pray because they saw in his life power and change that was wrought as a result of prayer. St. Luke writes that it came to pass that, as he was praying, one of the disciples came up to Jesus and said, "Lord, teach us how to pray. Preach a sermon on how to pray." They requested this because they had noticed that when he returned after going away to pray, there was something different about his life. There was a different countenance and attitude about him. They saw the effectiveness of it in his life. It was so obvious that they asked him, "Lord, teach us how to pray." They reasoned, "If it can do that for him, think what it could do for us! Maybe we are not praying in the proper manner." This passage struck me because, in a moment of honesty, I admitted that it really was a judgment of my own prayer life. How many times had church members asked me to teach them how to pray? And I had to be honest with myself. Perhaps the reason I had not been asked to teach praying was because my own prayer life was not effective enough that it made my congregation want to learn more about how to pray. In that rare moment of honesty, I evaluated the poverty of my own prayer life.
Everything you read says that people are praying less today than ever before. They wonder in the scientifically-explained world how prayer could have any effect. We have scientific explanations for almost everything. Surveys taken in the last few years, among church members and especially among clergy, show that they are praying less, and they feel guilty about it and have questions about its effectiveness in their own life. I want to talk to people like myself who, from time to time, have questions about the effectiveness of their prayer life. I do not want to give you any glib answers, but I do want to tell you how Jesus said that you can have 100 percent success in your prayer life - not 99 percent but 100 percent. You can always be sure, if you approach it this way, that it will work all the time.
I would like to call your attention to the passage from the fifty-fifth chapter of the Prophet Isaiah in which he is addressing the Hebrew children who find themselves in Babylonian captivity. They have been there now for over fifty years. There is hardly a survivor left who can remember what being close to God was like. There is hardly one still living who can remember vividly what it was like being in Jerusalem or near the Holy City. They had forgotten what it was like to be near God at Mount Moriah. They had been fifty years without any effective prayer life and communication with God, to the extent that they were not quite sure what it would be like - and not sure whether that was what they wanted. Now the prophet was saying to them, "Hey, the Persian king has now conquered Babylon. We prayed that God would answer our prayer and set us free that we might turn back to God, back to the Promised Land, and Cyrus is the answer to prayer. Now you have an opportunity to go back to a nearness with God. You can turn back to a relationship with him, back to Jerusalem, back to the Promised Land." But do not forget that they had been gone for fifty years. That was home ... they were natives. That made them original "old family." They had been living that lifestyle for fifty years and had been getting along pretty well without God. So, some of them wondered, "Well, why should I go out there in this strange wilderness trying this new kind of relationship with God when I am not even sure it is there? I have never been there. How do we know it will work and we can live there and once again be close to God in that Holy Place?
They had a lot of questions about it. But the prophet says, a new relationship is possible. This is how ne explains you can have that new relationship. Isaiah 55:10-13 cannot be studied or understood unless we also include verses six to nine in the reading. To those who are not quite sure it is what they want, to those who are not quite sure how you get it, to those who have perhaps never had it, he explains when you should pray.
I. When
Isaiah writes: "Seek the Lord while he is near. Call upon Him while he may be found," now what he is saying is that silence is the answer to prayer. We have prayer at our disposal, there is no use remaining in the same kind of condition in our life and family any longer. The time to start praying is right now! "Seek him while he is near." Do not say, "Tomorrow I am going to start trying to pray." Start right now! Do not say, "Tomorrow I am going to set out on a new journey to the Promised Land, back to a close relationship with God." No, you start it now! "Seek the Lord while he is near. Call upon him while he may be found."
"Found" and "near" imply that you can discover him. You are not going to discover him tomorrow but now. He is a living, a now God. You are not going to find him in the past. You are going to find him now, right now. He is saying that you need to draw apart from the world. Those are the graphic symbols of "found" and "near". You must respond now if you are to get out of the kind of lifestyles in which you are trapped.
Jesus says, "When you pray, get into your closet." Do you know what a closet is? We used to call bathrooms or outhouses closets when I was a boy, but that is not what Isaiah has in mind. A closet in the Bible was a dressing room off from the temple where priests changed their clothes. They disrobed to dress in order to enter the temple. They had to put on certain attire. It was the place where you stripped naked. You take off your $200 suit. You take off your $100 dress. You take off all your superficialities, all your pretense, all your masks, all your aggressiveness, all your success. You take it off and get down just like you were when you came in this world. You disrobe. You go in your closet where there is no pretension and you find him and he finds you.
We approach everything else the same way we do prayer. You have had an aggressive day at the office and you tell your wife you will meet her at the box office to attend a concert; but, if you go to that concert with the same kind of attitude and the same kind of technique with which you have approached the whole day, you are going to be miserable. If you go in there aggressively, you are not going to get anything out of it. You have to change your techniques. You have to go in there in a receptive mood, do you not? You have to go while allowing something to be done to you and for you through the music. You have to leave the world in which you are trying to do for the world and to the world, and allow the music to do something to you.
That is what prayer is! You go in that robing room and you disrobe and you take off that old, selfish kind of "pushy", aggressive, "go-getter" attitude. Most of us pray that way. We "go after it." We are aggressive people. "Lord, help me; do this for me." And we approach God totally that way. We live by the philosophy that the squeaking wheel gets the grease. So we assume that if we squeak enough and loud enough, the Lord is going to hear. We try to manipulate him.
Our church services in Greenville. North Carolina were broadcast on the radio. The angriest reply I ever got from that large radio audience was a letter from an unemployed clergyman who was home in bed. He wrote an extremely aggressive letter, responding to my sermon, one in which I mentioned something about the effectiveness of prayer. He said, "I tried it. I prayed, and God did not do all I wanted him to do and what I asked him to do." You could feel the hostility in that letter. But Jesus prayed, "Not my will but thy will be done," which is an entirely different technique.
I do not have a lot of regular time for prayer, but one such time I have is in the morning after I run six miles. There is one particular chair in which my wife will allow me to sit when I am still perspiring with a sweatsuit on. I sit there and read and pray. I am physically exhausted. That is the best time. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "As the physical becomes weaker and weaker, the inner man becomes stronger and stronger." What he means is that all this aggressiveness, this outward exterior, is weakened at that moment; the spiritual man has a stronger opportunity to take over. The barriers that you set up, the things with which you shield your soul, all the material aggressiveness of the world - when all of it is down, then you can spiritually relate. This is the whole purpose of the Indian religion's philosophy of yoga and the other physical disciplines that go along with prayer: Yu are subdued; the body, the physical, the material are set aside, that your spiritual and inner self might take over.
II. How Do You Pray
The prophet says, "Let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, that He may have mercy upon him; and to God, for he will abundantly pardon; for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways. As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts and my ways than your ways, saith the Lord."
Forsake your unrighteous thoughts. "Let him forsake his own way and his own will." That is the only way prayer takes place - when you surrender your will to God's will. This is the process of praying. Most of us, when we pray, have already decided what our problem is. Maybe it is one of your children. Maybe it is your job. Maybe it is your marriage. You decide what you think the answer is and you get down on your knees and pray, "God, grant this. Do it!" What you are really saying is, "Now, Lord, you do not know too much about your business, but I know best. Just do what I want." We ask him for the answer rather than give him the problem, because we think our answer to the problem is better than his answer to the problem. "Let the wicked man forsake his thoughts and his own way and will, saith the Lord".
Sometimes I talk so much that the Lord just does not have a chance to say anything. Do you ever do that? And he is trying to say something but he cannot get a word in edgewise. My wife bought me a hat to match a topcoat once, and I lost the hat in the airport in Chicago. I got home and it was still snowing and I needed a hat. I went to the haberdashers with whom I normally traded. They were Jewish men and close personal friends of mine. I had bought all my clothing from them for years, but they did not have a hat like I was looking for. So, I went to a different store, belonging to another Jewish gentleman. He had the exact hat for which I was looking. But, I had never traded with him and was a little skeptical about him. I always liked to bargain with people so I said, "How much will you take for it?" He said, "Try it on." I said, "How much will you take for it? What wears good with me is how much it costs." He said, "Do you like it?" I said, "How much is it?" "Put it on," he said, "Do you like it. Reverend?" I thought to myself, "I am going to get taken," but I put it on and I liked it. It was a perfect fit. I said, "How much?" He said. "It's yours. I want to give it to you." Boy, did I ever feel small! I almost disappeared.
That is the way I have been reacting to God, always worrying about what kind of deal I am going to make when he is trying to do something for me and I will not let him. That is the way most of us react. And then, too, when he says, "Let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts," it is not so obvious that we are always selfish. Some of our prayers are not obviously selfish. For example, we might pray for protection and security, which may mean for you freedom from worry about the future and your professional survival, when God might have a different idea about what He means by security. Or, you might pray for your children's success in school, when God's idea of what success for your children might be would be entirely different from what your idea might be. Or you might pray, "Lord, I'm lonely and abandoned," and you forget that Jesus was abandoned and lonely. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. But, here is the key: Isaiah 55:10-11.
III. Why
Why will prayer always work 100 percent of the time? Prayer that works emphasizes not your words but God's, emphasizing not your words to him (that is of no consequence), but his words to you. Let me share this verse from Isaiah with you. I think it is poetic.
For as the rain and the snow come down from Heaven and return not thither but water the earth making it bring forth and sprout, making seed to the soil and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not ever return to me empty, never. It shall always accomplish that which I purpose and in all things it shall prosper for what I sent it.
You and I put too much emphasis on the power of our words and too little on God's Word. God's Word will never return empty - never. Not my will but Thine be done. This is how you can have the assurance that prayer will always work - when you put your emphasis on God's Word. His Word always accomplishes that which he purposes. It never returns empty. Often when I pray, my words just come back empty. But, God's word never does. It accomplishes that which he intends. That is why the Lord's prayer ends with: "For Thine is the kingdom and the power." Thine: that is the whole answer to prayer. When the disciples said. "Lord, teach us how to pray," Jesus taught them the Lord's Prayer and ended, "For Thine is the kingdom and the power." That is where the success is: Thine. the submission and surrender to let him reign and his word succeed in our lives.
I went into our chapel a few weeks ago and there was a college girl, sitting by herself in prayer. I walked up to her and asked, "May I help you?" She raised up from her knees with a glow in her face and said, "Thank you, but I am being helped."
My word shall not ever return unto me empty. Whatever I prosper it to be, it shall be. Whatever I intended to accomplish, it shall accomplish. It shall never return unto me empty."
