Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. (Titus 1:4)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His Service, saying:
“Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you
will receive, that your joy may be full.”
Because it appears to be one of the only works that God has actually given us to do and has attached His promises to it, Prayer is always preoccupying Christians. Give a prayer. Take a prayer. Need a prayer. Make a prayer. Leave a prayer. Have a prayer.
And then there’s the endless bookshelves of how to pray. What to pray. When to pray. Why to pray. But most important for those authors, is who you have to turn yourself into, before you pray. You need to create a prayer space. You need to calm your mind. You need to stop. You need to change. You need to, or else.
As it so happens, my conference trip to Baltimore was a few weeks ago and there, they had a presenter who talked about this very thing: prayer. In fact, he is the same pastor who wrote hymn 616 in our hymnal and has a new hymn which we will sing later on today. So this sermon comes from that conference.
And the direction Pastor Reinhardt took, then, was that prayer is never private. You are never praying alone, solitary. Even when you are alone, in your room, your prayers are spoken, sung, groaned with the whole host of heaven, who are ever in front of Jesus, praying. You are never facing this life alone.
But that is not what false teachers say about prayer. They teach that not only will God possibly forget you if you forget to pray, but that the entire Church will disappear and it will be your fault. This teaching removes all of us from the Lamb’s Book of Life and it is a self-removal! “I forgot to pray”, “I don’t pray”, or “I don’t pray well” becomes for us the unforgiveable sin that finally leads us to hell.
Jesus says in 1 John 5, “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death” (v.16-17).
If we look for effectiveness in prayer from our own prayer life, “O Lord who can be saved?” We find no effectiveness, no answer, and no help. And when we are ineffective, we get frustrated. And when we get frustrated, we quit.
Jesus does not comment on our prayer life today, but simply says, “Ask”. He will come to you. He will come asking what your will is. Jesus, God-made-man, prays to you, asks you. God prays! And what does He pray?
“Hear O my people”, He prays in Psalm 50, “hear and I will speak and I will testify against you” (v.7).
Lord have mercy! He prays against us! He prays that we see our sin and own it. He prays that we see that our prayer life is in shambles, that our family life is in chaos, and that we are merely hanging on at the end of a frayed knot.
Repent. You have taken the Lord’s Name in vain, in your sin. Instead of calling upon it in every trouble, you curse and swear against your brother in the Lord’s Name. Instead of praying, praising, and giving thanks you have declared to your neighbor that God lies and decieves, because in your opinion asking, praying to God accomplishes nothing.
Will God hear me?
Yes. He hears and He wants to hear.
When He hears, will He want Good for me?
“Call upon me in the day of trouble and I will rescue you”, answereth the Lord (Ps 50:15).
The “yes’s” to these questions are all we need to know about prayer to move us to our knees with bowed heads and folded hands. “Ask” Jesus says and “ask” even Jesus does.
Jesus is our great High Priest who constantly prays even now and also during His life. He constantly gives us the example of going to pray whether it be in the wilderness or early in the morning or with His disciples. His final acts on the cross are those of prayer. “Why have you forsaken me?”, “Father forgive them”, and “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit”.
On the cross and in Gethsemane, Jesus knew His Father heard Him, knew He had only Good for Him, even though He had to sweat blood to get the answer to His prayer. The Father answers Jesus with His suffering and death on the cross. There are no two ways around that. Jesus’s answer was the cross.
But His prayer was not left in hell, where prayer does not reach God. He was raised. He was delivered up for our transgressions and raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). All answers from God are “yes” in Christ Jesus, and it is the life of Christ that is the answer to ours. “I have heard my people’s cry”, saith the Lord, “and am come to deliver them” (Ex 3:7-8).
In that justification, we believe the Lord and it is counted to us as righteousness and we know and have heard that “He hears the prayers of the righteous” (Pro 15:29). How can a sinner do such things? (Jn 9:16). How can a sinner pray such things? Satan said that about Jesus and now he says that to you. Don’t believe. You, a sinner, have been made righteous by the man Who became sin for you, having none of His own.
In the prayer of Jesus, we are prayed against and see our sin, but in the words of that prayer, we see our Savior, showing us His salvation, for us, which is the answer to all our prayers. The fact of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection being done for us, gives us all the confidence we need to ask our heavenly Father as dear children ask their dear father. We may not like the answer we get and it may hurt, but God answers for the best.
In Christ, we are adopted as sons, little Christs, and given an already completed life of prayer. This doesn’t mean that we can “not pray”, but it does mean we can be bad at it and still find forgiveness. It also means we can gladly hear, learn, and get better at it and still find mercy.
Prayer is not just a conversation you have with God when you’re lonely or need a shoulder to cry on. It is a conversation God is having with you and the whole Church. It is an act you have to prove to yourself that you still believe. And it is a work you are given to do to unite yourself to Christ and His Church in thoughts, words, and deeds.
For when that Our Father hits, not one faithful tongue is silent.
Alleluia..!
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