Sermon from March 9, 2008
Your flight to Chicago will go well, if your plane doesn't have mechanical problems, if your plane doesn't collide with another plane, and if your plan actually goes to Chicago and not to Cleveland. Your experience in BVBC will go well, if the church has a clear picture of why it exists, if your interaction with other Christians does not damage you, and if all is well inside your own soul.
I don’t insist on this – I could be wrong – but if all is well inside your own soul, your experience in a local church has a good chance of going well, even if the church is murky about why it exists, or if other Christians in that church damage you in some way. Because I believe this, I have dedicated this sermon series to seven habits of highly effective Christians.
If we pursue these seven habits, we won’t be looking for a church to entertain us; we will be looking for the Church to feed us and challenge us to form these habits. If we commit ourselves to cultivating these seven habits, it will revolutionize BVBC.
Last week, we examined the first habit of highly effective people – repentance. Repentance is not a one-time event. It is a habit. It is a habit for a lifetime because of our lifetime proneness to leave the God we love. Repentance calls us to confession, to say aloud in our prayers the names of the sins we confess.
Today, we consider a second habit of highly effective Christians – prayer. Let’s begin with Jesus’ encouragement to cultivate this habit. Turn first to Luke 18:1.
The Habit of Prayer
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. Always pray, and don’t give up. That sounds like a habit to me. And it tells the truth about our experience, doesn’t it? Don’t give up! Isn’t that exactly what we are tempted to do? We resolve that we are going to pray some time every day. We completely forget to pray on day three. We rush through our prayers on day four, and by the weekend our resolution seems like a bad dream.
Almost everyone who doesn’t live in a monastery feels like this. It’s just too hard. The pace of life is just too fast. Jesus anticipated this, and put this memorable parable into our heads to keep us going, when the going gets tough.
Verses 2-5 set the stage. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”
If I had made this parable up, I wonder if people would think I was irreverent. Jesus was saying in effect, “Go ahead! Wear God out with your incessant, repetitious prayers. It will get His attention, and He’ll give the justice you ask for.”
It’s easy to overlook two inferences from this parable that may encourage us in forming the habit of prayer. The first inference requires attention. Verse seven delivers the point of the parable: And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?
When you pray, how often do you think you have a right to get what you are asking God for? I long ago lost count of how many people get angry at God, because they didn’t get what they asked for. That’s a sermon in itself. Here’s what I want you to notice. Anytime we think we have a right to anything – health, relationships, security, job – we are talking about justice. Jesus did not promise we would get everything we asked for; He promised God would give us justice, as God understands justice.
That prepares us for the second inference: the widow didn’t hear from the judge for a long time. The judge put the widow off. He did it, because he didn’t fear God, and he didn’t care about people. God’s motives are different. I suspect that He puts off answering our prayers as a way of seeing what kind of faith in Him we have.
Doesn’t Jesus say that at the end of verse eight: “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Isn’t it lack of faith that makes us give up praying so easily? We just don’t believe Jesus. We don’t believe that God is willing to be hounded by our praying.
Praying in the Spirit
“So,” you ask, “what do I say, when I talk to God?” I’d like to answer that question first by starting in the last place you would expect, social drinking. Drinking beer, wine and spirits alone happens, but if it happens very much, it may be a warning sign of alcoholism. Happy hour, Super Bowl parties, wedding receptions, the old three-martini lunch, and wine and cheese parties are all social by nature. For millions of people these events bring great happiness, sometimes their greatest happiness, as they joke and tell stories with friends and shed the cares of their lives.
Being aware of this makes the Bible come alive in Ephesians 5:18-20. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Be filled with the Holy Spirit. We very piously quote those words and wonder why in our solitude we can’t seem to work up much enthusiasm. We have forgotten Super Bowl parties and wedding receptions. Being filled with the Spirit is preeminently a social event. That becomes clear in the next two verses.
Speak to one another (that’s something we do together, and here’s how we do it:) with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I mean no offense, but the apostle seems to me to be saying, “Come together as the church to sing and give thanks with the same enthusiasm with which party-goers belly up to the bar.” For millions of people, worship with their Christian brothers and sisters brings great happiness, sometimes their greatest happiness, as they sing and give thanks to God and shed the cares of their lives.
If that is not what we experience here, it is because we look forward to coming here with all the excitement of getting out of bed early on a cold winter morning and taking a cold shower, when the Spirit invites us to come here with all the anticipation of going to a party with friends.
And what, you may be impatiently asking me, does all this have to do with the habit of prayer? Did you know that for a long time in many churches Christians did not refer to this as a morning service? They called it Morning Prayer, not just because they said their prayers together, but because they also sang their prayers together.
Think about it for a moment. Nearly every song we sing together falls into one of the following categories. First, we sing directly to God, first person singular to second person singular. An example of that is the lovely chorus, “I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you. O, my soul, rejoice! Take joy, my King, in what you hear! May it be a sweet, sweet sound in your ear.” That is designed to go from our hearts straight to the heart of God.
Second, we sing to each other, as Ephesians says, and we sing about God, which is an act of praise. For example, we sing “He gives and takes away. He gives and takes away. He gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Blessed be His name!” This is prayer in the form of praise.
Third, we sing to each other, as Ephesians says, about our experience of God. For example we sing, “We have heard the joyful sound: ‘Jesus saves, Jesus saves.’ Send the tidings all around: ‘Jesus saves, Jesus saves.’” This too is prayer in the form of praise.
What we do here is not public entertainment; it is public prayer. The mystery of music engages our emotions, makes room for the Holy Spirit to stir within us, helps us to sing and give thanks to God. It makes it easier to form the habit of prayer. What may be lacking is the frame of mind that says, “I can’t wait to get to BVBC to be filled with the Spirit alongside my brothers and sisters in Christ.”
So, let’s not quench the Spirit by fault-finding. Let’s not grieve the Spirit by antagonism toward a fellow believer. Let’s be filled with the Spirit by singing and making music in our hearts to the Lord together, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
Now, look back to Luke 11:1. One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” Do you remember what Rafael Anzenberger said to us in February? He said, “We often try harder to do something instead of training wisely to do it.” The disciples’ request to Jesus was a request for training in how to pray. And how did Jesus answer them? He taught them what we call The Lord’s Prayer, and the Church has been saying that prayer for twenty centuries.
I suppose my first lessons in prayer came at bedtime when I was a boy. Invariably, my mother prayed with me. I am deeply grateful. Invariably, we made up the prayers out of our own heads and hearts. No prayer book lay on the nightstand. No psalm from the Bible was read or said or sung. The years that lay ahead would teach me that not everyone did it that way.
Catholics used written prayers, but did anything more need to be said? No doubt, Episcopalians and Lutherans used them too, but no one seemed to pay much attention to them in the Bible Belt of the Old South. Of anyone who did use written prayers it was said that their practice signified the presence of a dead religion. That conviction alone was enough to consign written prayers in any form to the trashcan.
Prayers, since they were not written, must come from the heart, spontaneous, Spirit-filled, and original to be the real thing, and the less ornate the better. A surprising number of people adhered to this idea in theory and practice, often with lovely results.
I was scarcely prepared for reality. It was something of a puzzle, as my adolescence gave way to young manhood, to kneel to pray in great anticipation, only to discover that I had nothing much to say to God, much less something spontaneous, Spirit-filled, and original. It wasn’t always so, but it was disturbingly often.
Then came my seminary classmate, Ray Feeck, with whom I painted school buildings one summer. I discovered one day, as we stood side by side on second floor window jacks, that he was an Episcopalian. I had never since the day of my birth knowingly spoken to an Episcopalian, and I certainly didn’t expect to find one at Dallas Theological Seminary.
Even more perplexing, he was a Reformed Episcopalian, a hitherto unknown species in the Protestant bestiary. Seven years later, on the way to Baltimore I took my family to find Ray in Haverford, PA, and asked him for a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. That began a quarter-century reeducation into the power of written prayers.
What finally unmade the assumptions of my childhood on this matter was praying with fellow Christians week in and week out in Baptist congregations. They prayed the way I had learned to pray. As I listened to them, I began to recognize patterns.
The people who prayed most faithfully and most fervently were predictable in what they prayed. Familiar phrases recurred, punctuating their prayers for specific people or circumstances. I do not find fault with that, and I would not try to change that.
But the cat was out of the Baptist bag. If people by nature expressed their aspirations to God in repeatable phrases and even whole clauses, might there not be expressions of spiritual devotion from the past that could teach us to pray? My experience with The Book of Common Prayer and other prayers answered with a resounding yes.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
So, here’s what I have to offer you. Look at Ephesians 1:16: I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . and the rest of the chapter is his prayer. Turn over a page to Ephesians 3:14: For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that . . . and the rest of the chapter is his prayer. They are examples of written prayers that can become ours.
If you have resorted to Yoga or some other form of Eastern meditation for relaxation, I think you should stop it and replace it with meditation on written prayers and scripture. Thomas Merton in his book on meditation teaches us to do this by “repeating the words slowly, thoughtfully, prayerfully in the deepest centre of one’s being, so that the (words) gradually come to be as intimate and personal as one’s own . . . feelings” (Spiritual Direction and Mediation and What Is Contemplation, 51).
None of this means that we dispense with spontaneous prayer. The opposite has been true in my experience. The Psalms and other written prayers inside and outside the Bible have given my faltering tongue words to utter to Almighty God; and as that utterance unfolded, the Holy Spirit has often loosened my heart as well as my tongue.
We will do this best, if we find an unhurried time and the same familiar place each day to pray and meditate. If you can’t find an unhurried time nearly every day, you might consider that your life is busier than is good for you, busier than God intends for your life. And don’t try to do too much. 10-15 minutes of focused prayer every day will over a period of years change your life into that of a highly effective Christian.
Then, Sunday by Sunday, let’s be filled with the Spirit and show Happy Hour some real joy. The Lord of joy calls us to come into His presence with Thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Let us for a few shining moments together lay aside our monotony and cast our burdens on Him and be glad from the low bottom of our hearts.
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