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THE LAST of the four basics of Church
life is prayer. It is the last in the list, but not
by any means the last in importance. And I believe that
lack of prayer is hurting our church.
When I was a young Christian and first began attending
the weekly prayer meeting, it was very different from
prayer meetings today.
Our little church had about 50 members. Wednesday
night was prayer meeting, with probably 20 attenders.
We opened in prayer, we sang a hymn, the pastor spoke
for about 20 minutes, we sang another hymn, and then
we had prayer for 50 minutes and ended with a hymn and
the benediction. There was no discussion. That was it.
Most churches these days have a discussion time,
and there is always a conflict over whether Bible study
or prayer takes precedence. Over the 20 years I have
been here, I have had people threaten to cease attending
the weeknight meeting because it didn’t have enough
Bible study, and others have threatened to cease attending
because it didn’t have enough prayer. And when I have
tried the old “give a talk” approach, everyone has become
edgy, because we don't live in an era when people like
listening to talks.
This is not just a problem at Marrickville. Most
churches have problems like this. But some can funnel
the prayer people into prayer cells and the study people
into Bible study groups. We have to make one group fit
all.
Well, today, I want to talk about prayer, because
They devoted
themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship,
to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
There are many stories
from wartime about units cut off from their main headquarters,
fighting on with few and fewer resources, unable to
call for necessary support, sometimes even missing orders
to move to a new location or even, in some instances,
missing the message that the war was over.
A church that doesn’t pray is like an army without
communications. Its uniforms might be pressed, its medals
might shine, but it is out of contact with its head.
A prayerless church is a dying church.
We read that the early church was devoted to
prayer, but we need to find out the details, and that
statement is very lacking in detail.
THE HOW OF PRAYER
So, first, how did they pray?
We know that these very first disciples were
almost exclusively Jews, so the easy answer is that
they used the prayers of the Temple and the Synagogue.
That’s typical of everyone. We like to cling to the
familiar.
The Jewish religious institutions had set prayers
for all kinds of situations. There was even a prayer
at one time for Jewish men who wanted to thank God that
they had not been born a woman!
But the early Christians didn’t only pray the
familiar Synagogue prayers. They had seen Jesus praying,
and they had heard his advice on how to pray, so they
had ways of praying when they were together, away from
Synagogue influences.
People always pray in different ways depending
on circumstances and fashions. Catholic, Anglican and
Orthodox churches use written prayers a lot more than
Baptists and Congregationalists and Pentecostals do.
The “prayer book” churches are more like the early Jewish
churches, churches which followed the synagogue worship
patterns. And the free prayer churches are more like
the gentile churches which had no tradition of following
set forms of prayer.
In Acts 3, you find Peter and John going up to
the Temple at the time of prayer when they brought the
healing power of Jesus into the life of that poor crippled
man at the temple gate named Beautiful.
On the other hand, when Peter and John were arrested
and faced court censure and warnings against preaching
in the name of Jesus, they returned to their people
for a great prayer time where nothing was set down,
but they all prayed together to the sovereign Lord,
pleading for his power as they continued to work in
his name.
It’s great if we can be relaxed about the how
of prayer, and just do however we need to. The fact
is that prayer has a certain form, that it can follow
the entire pattern of the Lord’s Prayer, or it can follow
just a part of it, and that, within those few limitations,
we have vast freedom, and that freedom is ours to use.
THE WHEN OF PRAYER
Then we must think about the “when” of prayer.
Once again, there is no real set pattern.
Jesus sometimes rose very early before sunrise
so that he could pray.
Peter and John went to the Temple at 3pm for
the afternoon prayers.
The church met for prayer when Peter and John
were under arrest, and it seems possible that they were
at prayer around lunchtime the day the two apostles
were brought into court.
In Acts 12, we find the church meeting around
midnight for special prayer for Peter when he was in
prison and facing probable execution.
So, as we saw in the “How” section of this sermon,
we also see in the “When” section that there are no
hard and fast rules. There seems to be a level of regular
and structured prayer, generally following synagogue
practice, but there were also special times of prayer
depending on the needs of the occasion. Form and freedom
again.
THE WHERE OF PRAYER
You are probably seeing the pattern by now. There is
no specific “where” for prayer, either. The early disciples
were most casual about such things. They prayed in the
Temple, they prayed in their houses, they prayed in
upper rooms, they prayed in dungeon cells, they prayed
wherever they needed to.
Once again, the form was that they prayed where
it was convenient to come together, and they had freedom
about all other aspects of the venue.
When John Wesley began preaching in fields, he
at first thought it was quite wrong to do any Christian
thing outside an official church building. Even when
he preached about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, it didn’t
strike him that Jesus was the first open air preacher.
It just seemed to him that churches were where religious
activities took place.
Well, Christians didn’t even have official church
buildings until about the third century AD — though
they seem unofficially to have knocked down walls in
houses to make it easier for a congregation of 30 or
so to gather and see each other. Mainly, they followed
Jesus’ pattern, praying privately and preaching publicly.
Sometimes I think that Church activities are
like the Lidcombe bus run.
When I was Secretary at Lidcombe Berala, we had
a strong Sunday School. It attracted new students. But
the Sunday School teachers often had to pick up new
kids, even though the Sunday School bus ran every Sunday
morning, often half empty.
We used to ask the Sunday School bus driver,
“Can you pick up so and so in Silverwater?” He’d think
for a while, and then he’d say, “No, I can’t really
go over into that area. If you asked him why it was
a problem to go there, he had an explanation, but it
never seemed really convincing.
One day, the bus had battery problems, and Fred,
the driver, asked Chris to follow him around in case
the bus broke down.
She came back puzzled. “Fred drove all over the
place,” she told me, “But he never made a right–hand
turn, only left–hand turns. Sometimes he went all around
a block instead of turning right down a side street.”
So she asked Fred why he did that. The story
came out. Years before, the bus had had an accident
while making a right–hand turn. Fred was determined
never to put the children at risk again, so he would
only go to places he could reach with left–hand turns.
It had become more important to keep turning
left than to go to the places where the kids were.
Churches often do things that used to work, and
now they don’t work any more. But the church can’t change
anything, because it has become more important to go
through the right forms than to achieve the right results.
The only form with the “where” of prayer is that
we should meet and do it. If 5:30 am Thursday morning
in a car outside Ashfield Station is the best place
to pray, forget Friday nights! Prayer is too important
to be left at the mercy of “we’ve always done it that
way”.
THE WHY OF PRAYER
We’ve asked “How”, “When”, and “Where”. Now it is “Why’s”
turn.
Our passage doesn’t say why. I don’t think we
really need to be told why we should pray. We pray because
people do pray. Prayer is one of the most fundamental
of human behaviours. Someone once said, “There are no
atheists in foxholes.” What he meant was that, when
people face extreme danger, they forget theories about
God, and they pray as though their life depended on
it.
And the early Christians prayed because their
lives depended on it, too. They didn’t pray for Peter
and John before the Sanhedrin because it was the Prayer
Day of St Peter and St John. They prayed for Peter and
John because these two leaders were in danger of execution,
and needed prayer.
They prayed because it was the right thing to
do. Not only did Peter and John go to the Temple at
the hour of prayer, they clearly prayed when others
prayed in the Temple.
Furthermore, they prayed because of the joy of
prayer. As they were together in prayer on the Day of
Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came on them in power. As
they were together in prayer after Peter and John were
arrested, the Holy Spirit came on them again in power.
There is great joy in receiving a touch of the
Holy Spirit.
And they prayed because Jesus taught them to
pray.
Jesus prayed when he was ministering to the crowds.
He rarely prayed over someone to be healed. He prayed
alone before he commanded healing into people’s lives.
He needed his Father’s power to heal the sick and drive
out demons.
Jesus prayed before he selected his disciples.
He needed the Father’s wisdom before he committed himself
to this bunch of people.
Jesus prayed in the Garden, as he submitted himself
to all that the Father willed for him, including crucifixion
and resurrection.
And even on the cross,
as he shed his life’s blood for you and for me, Jesus
prayed,
“Father, forgive them — they
don’t know what they are doing.”
“Father,
into your hands I commit my spirit.”
Maybe the most personal and poignant of all his prayers
on the cross was that great shout,
“eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Even at the moment when he felt totally abandoned and
forsaken by God; even when he felt the weight of every
sin in all of creation on his shoulders, he did not
break fellowship with his heavenly Father. It was agony.
It was terror of separation from the Holy God of Israel.
But he still talked to God in the midst of that pain
and horror..
And he taught us to
pray,
Our father in heaven,
may your name be kept
holy.
May
your kingdom come
and your will be done on earth just as it is in heaven.
Give
us today our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass
against us.
And
do not lead us into testing,
but deliver us from the evil one. Amen.
Seven simple points, but covering the main issues we
might want to pray about.
THE WHAT OF PRAYING
And that brings us to the “what” of praying. What must
we pray?
Really, it doesn’t matter all that much, if we
follow the basic principles of the Lord’s Prayer.
Our prayers are different from those of any other
system, because God is our heavenly Father, who has
made us his children in his only begotten Son, Jesus
Christ. We come as loved children to a loving Dad.
Our first responsibility is to adore him and
give him the glory due to his name.
Then, we can pray anything that extends the reach
of his Kingdom Rule through the Lord Jesus Christ. We
can pray anything that causes his will to be done on
earth as in heaven.
But we also have our own needs. Is it a genuine
need? Is it something in his will for our lives? Then
we can ask: “Give us today our daily bread.”
We pray for forgiveness, because every single
one of us needs it.
And we pray for deliverance from trials of faith
and from the inroads of the evil one, because we are
in a battle, and we can only defeat Satan in the power
of Jesus who died on the cross and rose again for our
salvation.
The rules are few, the results are many. Let
us pray!
CONCLUSION
There are just a few considerations.
Let’s pray both when it’s a set time, like Friday
nights or Sunday mornings, and when it’s just a time
when we come together. Good prayer is prayer that comes
out of a living relationship with Jesus, not out of
a set of rules and regulations. But we also need the
disciplines of regular prayer, or we will start forgetting
it altogether.
Our church needs prayer, because our church needs
revival. There are some demons that do not come out,
except by prayer and fasting. So, let’s clear the decks
and glorify the Lord!
AMEN
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