Prayer As Worship
Matthew 6:9-10
For this morning, I'm going to take a digression, if I might, away from our study of 1 Timothy and I'd like you to turn in your Bible to Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 and 10. This, of course, is a very familiar portion of Scripture known to many people as the Lord's prayer. It probably better would be titled the disciples' prayer. And the reason I'm taking a bit of a break from our study of Timothy is two fold, I think. One, it seems to me that we have been along time in Timothy, many months now, talking about ministry and the ministry of the church and the role of the pastors and leaders of the church and the servants in the church, the deacons, the deaconesses, and all of that. We've really been talking about the pragmatics of ministry.
And I think the Lord just impressed upon my heart that we needed to take at least one Lord's day and look back at the whole matter of worship. We don't want to be too pragmatic in the sense that we lose the focus of what we're all about, and that primarily is a matter of worship.
The second reason, not only was the sensitivity to balance some of the teaching about pragmatics along with the perspective on worship, but in my own personal life over the last year and a half or so, I have seen God answer prayer in more mighty and evident ways than ever in any other time in my life. And so I've been sort of concerned about this whole matter of prayer and evaluating my own prayer life and what prayer is really all about recently. We ran the series on the disciples' prayer on radio and had a wonderful response to that.
Because of those kinds of things on the positive side, I just felt that we ought to look back at the disciples' prayer and sort of regrip some of the great truths that are foundational in the matter of prayer that relate to worship. But not only was I motivated on the positive end, I was also motivated on the negative side as I often am. As I listen to what's going on in the Christian world, as I hear various preachers and teachers, as I read various books, as I try to sort of put my finger on the pulse, if you will, of what's happening in Christian circles, I see an ever increasing movement that all of us are probably somewhat aware of in this matter of the prosperity gospel and positive confession that is really very, very threatening to the purity and the sanity of the church. It seems as though television and Christian radio, Christian television, churches are literally getting more and more and more people who are buying into the fact that prayer is simply a way for you to get what you want...that God is obligated to deliver the goods to you.
I turned on the television last night, on came a man name Kenneth Copeland, you've probably seen. He said, "Write for this little book if you want to know how to get health and prosperity." And when someone doesn't have that it's because they haven't cashed their check in...that's what they advocate. It's all there for you. God has to deliver. He's put Himself in that position. All you've got to do is name it and claim it and it's yours.
The bottom line problem with this is makes a tremendous reversal in the role of God and man. The Bible teaches that God is sovereign and man His servant. The "name it and claim it" theology and the prosperity gospel teaches that man is sovereign and God is his servant. And we are in the demand position and the command position and God is in the role of the servant who must deliver.
Now admittedly we live in a very indulgent society. We live in a very self-centered and selfish society. We live in a materialistic society. That...the waves of that society have washed ashore on Christian theology. And the prosperity, health, wealth, name-it-and-claim-it mentality which says you demand from God and God has to give it is nothing more than a spiritual justification for self-indulgent sin...nothing more. That kind of praying is no praying at all, it is a perversion of prayer. In fact, it does what we are forbidden to do in Scripture, it takes the name of the Lord in vain. It is irreverent. It is Satanic. It is anything but biblical, anything but virtuous, anything but godly, anything but directed by the Holy Spirit.
And I think for us to understand what's going on, we need to sort of relook at this whole matter of how we are to pray. And the focal point of that comes in these words of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 6. "After this manner therefore pray, Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen, or so let it be."
When Jesus teaches us how to pray, and this is the model of how to pray, beginning and end of that prayer focuses on God...hallowing His name, praying that His Kingdom come, praying that His will be done. And then the few petitions that are listed there followed by "Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen." The focal point of the prayer then is on the glory and the Kingdom...the honor of God, the extension of His Kingdom. Everything has to fit into that context so that all prayer in a sense is controlled by the Kingdom, by the glory of God. And this, I think, is really basic to our prayer life.
In fact, in John 14, Jesus said, "Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son," John 14:13. Whatever you ask in My name, I'll do it that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Prayer begins and ends not with the indulgence of man, but with the glory of God...not with the building of my empire, but His Kingdom...not with getting what I want, but doing His will...not with the elevation of my name but with the hallowing of His name. Everything in prayer revolves around who God is and what God wants and how God is to be glorified. And that is the sum and substance of proper praying. And any praying that is self-consuming, that is self- indulgent, self-aggrandizing, that seeks whatever I want no matter what God wants, any praying that makes God have to deliver to me because I have demanded it takes His name in vain, sins violently against the nature of God and against His will and Word.
And when these people come along with this "name it and claim it" kind of praying and say that God wants you healthy, wealthy, prosperous and successful and they appear to be spiritual, know this...they are not spiritual for their preoccupation has not to do with the extension of the Kingdom and the glory of God's name but with the extension of their own empire and the fulfillment of their own desires. We must understand that. The error of this is not a peripheral error, it is an error at the very heart of Christian truth, namely the nature of God is attacked.
You go back into the Old Testament and pick out, for example, three prophets who were in dire situations. Starting in Jeremiah chapter 32, Jeremiah is in prison. He is trying to preach to a nation of people who will not hear. They want to shut his mouth. They are not interested in anything he says. Ultimately they throw him in a pit. They want him shut up. He has really no measurable success in his ministry. One of his prayers is given to us in Jeremiah 32 and I would like you to note this, at the end of verse 16 he says, "I prayed to the Lord." Here's his prayer, notice the absence of any personal requests.
"Ah, Lord God, behold Thou hast made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and outstretched arm and there's nothing too hard for Thee. Thou showest loving kindness unto thousands and recompenses the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them, the great, the mighty God, the Lord of hosts is His name. Great in counsel, mighty in work, for Thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings, who has set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day and in Israel and among other men and hast made Thee a name at this day. And hast brought forth Thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and with wonders and with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and hast given them this land which Thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey. They came in and possessed it but they obeyed not Thy voice, neither walked in Thy law. They have done nothing of all that Thou commandest them to do, therefore Thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them."
In other words, here is a man in great distress, a man in great loneliness, a man in despair in terms of ministry insofar as the people have not heard what he has said. But the preoccupation of the heart of Jeremiah is to extol the glory, the majesty, the name, the honor and the works of God. There is no preoccupation with his own pain. There is no preoccupation with his own circumstance.
In Daniel chapter 9, Daniel also in a very difficult situation, caught in the transition between two great world empires, representing a dispossessed people in a foreign land, cries out to God in prayer in chapter 9 verse 3, "I set my face to the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplication with fasting and sack cloth and ashes and I prayed unto the Lord my God and made my confession and this is what I said," and here is how his prayer begins: "O Lord, the great and awesome God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love Him and to them that keep His commandments, we have sinned," and on he goes. And again, the initiation of prayer comes with an affirmation of the nature and the glory and the greatness and the majesty of God. That is always the godly perspective...God, You're in charge, God, You are glorious, God, You are holy...whatever I pray then is prayed in line with that, that God may indeed be glorified.
Jonah who is in the middle of the belly of a fish, an absolutely inconceivable place, chapter 2 verse 7 says, "I remembered the Lord and my prayer came in unto Thee and to Thy holy temple," and here was his prayer, "I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving, I will pay what I have vowed, salvation is of the Lord," that's a funny prayer when you're in the middle of a fish. But the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited out Jonah. It was a prayer for the glory of God. It was, "Thank You, God, for who You are, bless You for Your salvation, Your delivering power." There was no pleading and begging. And there was no claiming, naming and claiming anything. Simply extolling the character of God. And that's the heart of what our Lord teaches us in this prayer.
Let's look at just those first two verses and the four initial elements of prayer that give us the focus on prayer as an act of worship. Prayer is primarily worship. It is godward, it is not to get for me, it is to allow God to be glorified. I have to see that in my prayers. My prayers are not primarily for what I can gain but for the glory of God.
First of all, God's paternity, that is that God is Father. "Our Father who art in heaven," this is the basis--by the way--of our boldness in prayer. We go to God because He is not our King only, He is not our monarch only, He is not our judge only, He is not our creator only, but He is also our father. And that beautiful expression gives us the sense of access and the boldness to come intimately into His presence as a son or a daughter would come to the presence of their own father.
Isaiah 64:8, "Now, O Lord, Thou art our Father, we are the clay and Thou our potter. We all are the work of Thy hand." That's the recognition. Lord, You made us. You gave us life. You gave us birth. You supply our resources. We belong to You through the link of common life through faith in Christ. We're Your children. And when I come to God in prayer, I come first of all to one who is my father. Very different than the pagans who came to a vengeful angry violent unfair unjust cruel jealous envious man-made deity whom they had to appease. We don't have to appease God, we come to our loving father.
And in Matthew chapter 7, do you remember verses 7 to 11? "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you and everyone that asks receives and he that seeks finds, and the one who knocks, it shall be opened." Why? Why is that so? Here's an illustration. "What man is there of whom if his son asks bread will he give him a stone? If he asks a fish, will he give him a snake? If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?"
In other words, our confidence and our boldness in coming to God with whatever is on our heart is based initially on the fact that He is our Father. He is our Father. This was a new revelation in many ways to the Jews when Jesus said this. They saw God as Father only in a national sense. "Our Father" is a very uncommon phrase in the Old Testament, it only appears 14 times. "My Father," that is an individual expression of a person to God as his personal father never appears in the Old Testament. If God is seen as father in the Old Testament, He is seen as the father of a nation, not an intimate loving father of an individual.
It's not until Jesus came and revealed God as the intimate loving Father that He really becomes one to whom we can say, "My Father." And the Apostle Paul says we can call Him "Abba Father" which means "papa...daddy," Romans 8:15, Galatians 6:4. Those are terms of endearment, terms of intimacy. And so He is our Father. Jesus called Him Father over 70 times in the New Testament. Every time He prayed He called Him Father, with one exception and that was the time when He was separated from Him on the cross bearing sin and then He said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" The intimacy was lost in the moment of spiritual death, spiritual separation. But Jesus comes back and says, "God is My Father and God is also your Father." He says that in John 20 verse 17...you remember the statement? He said this, "Touch Me not," to Mary, "I'm not yet ascended to My Father but I go to...but go to the brethren and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God." He's not only My Father, He's your Father.
So, in our prayers we are going to a God who is our Father, our loving Father. And we can go with a sense of intimacy. We can go with boldness and confidence as a child would go to his father. No fear is there.
This was news not only to the Jews who saw God as very separate and a Father only in a national sense, the Jews who wouldn't even name the name of God....whenever the name of God came along, they had a blank...they wouldn't even speak it. They were so distant from God and God had become so fearful to them. But you add to that the Greco-Roman world and the culture there and you'll find they had the same ideas. The gods that they created were gods who were absolutely beyond any concern with mankind. They..the Stoics, for example, famous philosophical group among the Greeks and the Romans, had decided that the essential attribute of God was apathea(?), that means apathy, that God was essentially apathetic, not in the sense of the English word, apathetic means indifferent. Apathea in the Greek means more than indifferent, it means incapable of feeling anything, without any pathos, without any feeling, without any emotion. And they said because man feels love and hate, because man feels joy and sorrow, because man feels contentment and anger, man is volatile and all the problems of life are bound up in man's ability to feel the range of emotion. Therefore God cannot be a victim of those things. So in order to set God apart from the struggle of man and make Him greater than man, He must be a God who is absolutely apathea, beyond feeling anything. And so the Stoics said God has not the essential ability to experience any feeling at all. But Jesus said that's just not true. You can go to Him as your loving Father and He responds because He cares. He is not passionless, emotionless or unfeeling.
The Epicureans set another attribute that they thought was the primary attribute of God and that was the attribute which is the word ateraxia(?). It means perfectly serene and perfectly calm. And it's the same idea. They said that if God were involved in the affairs of the world, God would be as upset as everybody else is. So for God to maintain His serenity, He must be absolutely incapable of feeling anything that would disturb His permanent state of calm. So they had postulated that God was some kind of a feelingless passionless emotionless serene personality that had no feeling at all, no matter what was going on in the world. And the Jews really felt that God was so far away they couldn't even speak His name. Jesus burst on the scene and begins to talk of the intimacy with which men and women can know God.
Two more modern examples I read about, Thomas Hardy who asked what possible use prayer could be to anyone, because when you pray, all you're praying to is...and he said this, "The dreaming dark dumb thing that turns the handle of this idol show." For him God was some dreaming dark dumb thing. And Voltaire's final verdict on life was "a bad joke, ring down the curtain, the farce is done." And H.G. Welles(?) in one of his novels painted a picture of a man who was defeated by the stress and strain and tension of modern life. His only hope was trying to find fellowship with God and the man said this, "I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with the stars." God's unfeeling, indifferent.
Albert Einstein was interviewed on one occasion. He was asked if he believed in a God. He said there is definitely a cosmic force that's created things. But he said we could never know Him.
But that's just not true. That's just not true. God is not emotionless. God is not utterly detached. God is seen to us, I believe, in Jesus Christ to carry all the passion that could ever be carried...to weep, to know sorrow, to know joy, to know pain, to know all of human emotion and thus He is a loving Father who understands what His children endure. And we go to a God who does not need to be appeased, but who embraces us as His own. That settles the matter of fear. That settles the matter of fear. I'm not afraid of God because Jesus Christ has made me acceptable with God, I'm not afraid of Him, I'm His child now. He's adopted me into His family.
You may have read the most significant of all Greek legends, supposedly, is the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus was a deity in the pantheon of gods of Greece. And in the days before man possessed fire, they said life was very difficult, no fire, no warmth...no cooking and so forth. So in pity one day, Prometheus decided to take fire out of the realm of the gods and give it to men as a gift. So Prometheus brought fire down and gave it to man on earth. And Zeus, the king of the gods, was absolutely furious that he would do that. He wanted to keep man in a very low and humble state and not have fire. So he took Prometheus and he chained him to rock in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. And he was chained to that rock, you may have heard of Prometheus Bound, and during the day he was suffering from the exposure to the elements, heat, the sunlight, so forth. And at night, the cold of the night. And beyond that, Zeus was so furious with Prometheus that he sent a vulture to tear out his liver. But it kept growing back and every time it grew back, the Greeks said the vulture came and tore it out again.
And you say, "What's the point of all that? Who wants a God like Zeus?" That's typical of the ancient kind of gods. They are vengeful, they are jealous. They're angry. Typically all across the world, false religions with false gods have deities that must be desperately appealed to to appease their anger. That's typical of all cultures...where there are false gods. But God is our Father. That settles the matter of fear.
It also settles the matter of hope. It also settles the matter of hope. Things will change because a loving father will do what a loving father needs to do. If we ask Him for bread, He won't give us a stone. If we ask Him for a fish, He won't give us a snake. But whatever we ask, He will do that for His loving children, if it fits within His will. That settles the matter of hope. We can live in hope in this world because we know our God is a loving Father. It also settles the matter of loneliness. We may not have a friend in this world as we would like to have a friend, but we have in Him a friend that sticks closer than a brother. We have in Him a Father who will never leave us or forsake us. There is an intimacy of love that takes away any loneliness. A bel