Sweet Hour of Prayer

SERMON: 2007-09-02--sm0731--sweet-hour-of-prayer SOURCE DURATION: 00:32:30.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidates 3 through 15 transition into structured, lyrical content (hymn/song), marked by repeated phrases like '# Sweet hour of prayer #'. Candidate 2 is the last segment of spoken sermon material before this musical transition. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the start and end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:00:56.280-00:01:01.160, 00:30:39.400-00:32:26.480 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: start, end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:01:01.160] [CUT] I want to begin the end this morning by showing you just a little video clip, it's a take-off on a US telephone commercial. Take a look at this. For English, say yes. Yes. For security purposes, this phone call will be recorded. To continue, please say yes. Yes. Please state your password. I ain't no hullaback girl. Please repeat. I ain't no hullaback girl. Please repeat. No. No. I don't know. Yes. No. I think you said "magically delicious." Was I correct? No. Where to? I'm going to shoot in resident. I think you said "I'm going to shoot the president." Please hold while your call is traced and the proper authorities are notified. Sometimes you just want to get straight through. That's why there's prayer. Prayer. Live richly. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:01:01.160; resume after this marked segment] Prayer, I think you'll agree with me, is a remarkable thing. On the one hand, it is so simple. A child can do it. And on the other hand, it is so complex that you can be a seasoned veteran of the faith and still not exhaust the full possibilities of prayer. And here in these verses that we've read together from Matthew chapter 6, we have Jesus teaching us about prayer and teaching us both negatively and positively. And in the time that we have this morning, I want to look at each of these beginning as Jesus does with the negative. And the first thing I want us to note is that prayer is not about impressing people. And that is, of course, to be setting sin to the Pharisees. For Jesus introduces the passage this way. "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray, standing in the synagogues and on the street corners, to be seen by men." A hypocrite is a person who pretends to be something other than what he really is. And the Pharisees and the teachers of the law made a great show out of prayer. As a matter of fact, they couldn't wait to get to the synagogue. They couldn't wait to get to the temple. No, they made a show of praying on the street corners. But the reason was not because they were so devoted to the Lord and because they were so passionate about prayer. No, it was all about playing to the crowd. Or if you prefer, praying to the crowd. And Jesus says in this passage, don't be like that. Prayer is not about impressing people. Now, you and I, we look at a passage like this and we look at these Pharisees and we are likely inclined to shake our head and to say, well, thank God, I'm not like one of those Pharisees. But let's be careful. Let's be careful not to exonerate ourselves too quickly because that spirit of Phariseism, that spirit of praying to the crowd is never far from any of us, is it? If you've ever found yourself in a situation where you've been called upon to pray in public, then you will know how easily we are conscious of the people around us, aren't we? And how we turn the words over in our heads, hoping that we don't look too foolish and that our prayers will come out sounding just right. And if maybe we've learned a gift of prayer and people have commented on our ability to pray, maybe we secretly take pride in the fact that we know how to string these words together in a way that makes it sound so good. And how many times haven't all of us been in situations where in conversation with other people, we try to impress people just a little bit with our spirituality? You know, last night as I was deeply in prayer for two hours, this is what the Lord God showed me. And the other day, while I was reading my Bible and I just so got caught up in reading my Bible, I couldn't quit. And just a little bit. We're hoping that somebody will be impressed by our super spirituality. Jesus says it's not about impressing the crowd. Well, some of you here, you say to yourself, that's not me. I mean, if anything, I lean the opposite direction instead of wanting to impress people with my prayer. I don't pray at all in front of other people. And that's not about impressing people, because you see, if on the one hand we impress people by trying to pray nicely or trying to appear more spiritual than we really are, the reverse is equally true, isn't that? How many times hasn't it happened? You're at work with your friends. It's lunchtime. You bring out your lunch bucket and really, you know, you ought to thank God for your food. But all your friends are sitting there. And how are you going to get around being embarrassed by praying in front of them? And so at best, you scratch your eyebrows. At worst, you just dig in like everybody else does because, well, you don't want to stand out. Isn't that playing to the crowd? Or how many times hasn't it happened? You've got company over for dinner. And this is particularly true, I think, if you're a new believer and you're just trying to establish some Christian disciplines in terms of devotions or prayer at meal times. And it feels kind of funny to be praying in front of your friends. And so, well, this time I'll just pass it by and the Lord will understand and we'll all just dig in. And we deny our relationship with the Lord Jesus. And how many times doesn't it happen in all of our lives that we are just so self-conscious in the presence of other people? That it's people who set our agenda and not the Lord God. I'll never forget how this came home to me powerfully a number of years ago. My two sons, David and Michael, and I were visiting with some very high powered media executives in Toronto. They were showing us around their establishments. Very impressive. And as part of the tour, they bought us lunch. And they bought us lunch in this really swanky place. When you have male waiters dressed in tuxes, you know the bill is going to reflect that. And I was glad I didn't have to pay it. But here we sit with these people. And I know the meal is about to be served. And I'm sitting here thinking to myself, now how am I going to do this? Because I've always tried to teach my children to pray before their meals and to not deny the Lord, regardless of the situation in which they are. On the other hand, here we have these high powered people that are buying the meal. And how am I going to pull this off? I know that I'm going to pray. Am I going to just do it quietly so that nobody sees? And I know that my sons will be watching me. Or I'm going to pray out loud, or let these other folks in on the fact that I'm praying. I don't know if you've ever find yourself in that kind of situation, but I was starting to sweat. And the meal was getting closer and closer until suddenly it dawned on me, here's what you need to do. And so I asked these people who were treating us to dinner, would it be okay with you if I said grace? And you know, our North American culture is still sufficiently religious that that's really not an issue. And they were glad to allow me to do that. The crisis passed and I heaved a sigh of relief and breathed a prayer of thanks that I got through that situation without compromise. But you know how easy it is to play to the crowd. And Jesus says prayer is not about impressing people, neither is prayer about finding the right formula. For notice again how Jesus goes on in verse seven, when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Two things that are implicit in what Jesus says in that verse, I believe the first is this. It is hard to get God to hear you. And secondly, because it is hard to get God to hear you, the key to getting heard is to develop the right formula to learn how to do it just right. And at stake here is a human tendency to reduce our relationship with God to following particular structures and forms that we become comfortable with. And so in our tradition, many of us, we've learned to say grace before we eat our meal. If you come from a Dutch background, you might still want to say grace at the end of the meal. We do that at our house. You pray maybe before you go to bed. Maybe when you get up in the morning and hopefully on Sunday, you know, you drag your body out of bed and you try to make it to church. And if you're part of the Roman Catholic tradition, you'll go to mass, however, frequently or infrequently that becomes your custom. And you might pray the rosary with whatever frequency or regularity. If you're a Muslim, you'll stop your work five times a day. You'll bend to the ground, face east, and you'll say your prayers. Now, hear me well and carefully. There is nothing wrong in having structured in regular times and forms of prayer. I'll talk more about that a little bit later this morning. Jesus himself, we're told in the Gospels, went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as was his custom. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. And if every Sunday morning you got to sit and think, well, I go to church or will I not go to church today? The chances are more often than not, your bed will be more comfortable than it is to get to church. And so that's where you stay. And if every time before you pray, you got to sit down and figure out, well, do I want to pray now? Do I feel like praying? Yes or no? The chances are more often than not, you will not pray because there will be a thousand and one things to distract you. There is something to be said for structure and there is something to be said for form. The problem is, many times the form becomes more important than the substance and long after people's relationship with God has cooled down or has disappeared, the form has a life of its own. And so we may not have a relationship with God at all, but we still go through the motions of prayer, even though we're no longer connecting with him or hearing him. We still go to church, we sit through services, but we no longer allow him by his word to touch our lives or to change them. And we may still study scripture, but we do so no longer just to get to know God better or to find out more closely what it is that he wants for us. No, rather it becomes ammunition to be able to engage in the latest theological debate and hopefully we can wean. One of my favorite stories, and a lot of you have heard me tell this, is the story of the three preachers who were having a debate about the posture of prayer that they believed God honored the most. And one preacher said, "Well, you know, when I read scripture, I see people raising their hands and opening their eyes and lifting their heads, and I believe that's how God wants me to pray." Well, the next preacher said, "When I pray, I've read in scripture how God wants us to kneel, and so I kneel and I humble myself in that way before God." The third preacher said, "Well, you know, when I pray, I lie prostrate on the ground because I read in scripture that God honors a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and I think that's how God wants us to pray." Well, as they were having this discussion, there was a telephone repairman close by, and he said, "Pardon me, gentlemen, without trying to be presumptuous, it seems to me," he said, "the best praying I ever did was the time I was hanging upside down from the telephone pole, and I think God really heard me." It's not about the form, it is about the substance, and Jesus says, "Prayer is neither about oppressing people, nor is it about finding the right formula." That's the negative, and then he goes on and he talks about the positive, and he says, "Positively, prayer is first and foremost cultivating a relationship with God as my Father." Verse six again, "When you pray, pray to your Father," and then later on in verse nine, "This then is how you should pray, 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.'" Sixteen times in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes reference to God as our Father. And for God to be our Father was a mind-blowing experience and teaching to the people of his day. As a matter of fact, I think it is very difficult for us to appreciate coming where we're coming from, what a radical notion that would have been to the contemporaries of Jesus. Because remember, the Lord God, Yahweh, was so holy that a believing Jew would not even take his name upon their lips. He was so holy that he dwelled in glory and unapproachable majesty. They had a whole system of tabernacle and later on temple worship to keep a holy God from destroying an unholy people. Here comes Jesus and he says, "This God, who dwells in unapproachable light, in unapproachable glory, who no man has ever seen nor can see, this God, through faith in you, has become your Abba, Father, your Daddy." And even as a child has an intimate relationship with his Father, being fully known, being able to communicate, sharing back and forth, knowing that his Father loves him, his Father protects him, his Father will provide for him. Jesus says, "That's what God is like as your Father in heaven." And rather than having to pound on heaven's doors to get heard, and rather than having to jump through many hoops, by faith in me, you have direct access to God the Father. Because scripture teaches that through him, both Jew and Gentile, have access to God the Father by one spirit. And prayer for the Christian today is not trying to placate some distant foreign deity, trying to figure out how am I going to avoid being exposed and getting clobbered by him. No, prayer for the believer in Christ is cultivating a relationship with God. Or as a child we enter into the Father's presence and the Father shares his life with us and we have a two-way communication. It's no longer us just talking to God, it is also God talking to us. That's one of the privileges of being a Christian. As one of the hymns puts it, "Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer that calls me from a world of care and bids me at my Father's throne, make all my wants and wishes known." Now having said all of that, I'm realistic enough to know that not all Christians experience that level of intimacy all the time. As a matter of fact, for most of us our experience is a lot like how Larry Lee many years ago as a preacher described it. He said praying is a lot like working for the power company. He says sometimes you dig holes and sometimes you plant poles and sometimes you string wires and every so often God throws the switch and suddenly there is a surge of heaven's power and your life is forever changed because you have connected with the living God, the creator of all of the universe. Think about it, the God who made this vast universe as we sang a few moments ago in one of the songs. This God longs to enter into the most intimate of relationships with you and with me. He knows the very hair on our head and is more anxious to enter into a relationship with us than we can even begin to imagine. And if you've never experienced that kind of closeness, if there haven't at least been moments in your life where you felt God is throwing the switch and I'm having this connection with God on high, then you need to go back and you need to review your relationship with Jesus because unless you've come to faith in Christ, repented of your sin, turned your life over to him and have received the Holy Spirit, you have no biblical right in that sense to call God your father. God is a father to all of creation in the sense that he brings life to everything there is, but he is father in this special way only to those who have become his children through faith in Jesus Christ. And if you're not clear on that or if you're not certain about that, there's lots of people here that can take you by the hand and lead you into that relationship because the Bible says God's Spirit will bear witness with your spirit that you're a child of God. Prayer is cultivating a relationship with God as our father. And because it is cultivating a relationship with God of our father, that relationship says Jesus needs to be cultivated in private. Notice again verse 6, "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen. And then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." Some translations say will reward you openly. "When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father." Now let me say at the outset that verse does not mean that Christians ought never to pray publicly or gather in groups to pray together out loud. I say that because there are some people who would twist that passage to mean that. I'll never forget years ago pastoring a church, the wind of the Holy Spirit swept through the church, lots of people got caught up in renewal, their lives were changed, they began a meeting together for Bible study and for fellowship and for prayer, and they were learning how to pray out loud before each other as scripture teaches. And almost immediately among some folks the rumor began to go around that all these people were doing was showing off, they were like Pharisees praying in the street corner because doesn't scripture say go into your room or into your closet and close the door and pray to your father who is in heaven? Well, that's a misapplication of the passage. I say that because there are many passages in scripture that talk about God's people gathering for public prayer and praying together. It's not the function of praying out loud before each other that Jesus is addressing in this particular passage. No, he's talking about playing to the crowd and praying for all the wrong reasons. And he is saying whatever our public life is going to be before God, it needs to be rooted in private prayer with God. Every Christian needs to be rooted and grounded in this personal relationship with Almighty God who through faith in Jesus has also become our father. Now that has some practical implications. It means, first of all, that there needs to be in our lives a time of prayer. I cannot believe how many Christians live off the spirituality of other Christians. They have to be spoon fed. Somebody has to chew their food and somebody has to do all the praying for them. Now, that's OK when you're a baby in the faith. These two children that we baptize today, they're totally dependent on their caregivers for life. And if they stay that way, there would be something very unhealthy about those children because part of growing up is that you learn how to look after yourself. And part of growing up as a Christian is that you learn to carve out space in time to cultivate that personal relationship with God. Statistics on that are not terribly encouraging. While the majority of Christians would profess to pray, the average prayer they pray is less than five minutes long, which is not to say that prayers have to be long to be meaningful. Sometimes, like that telephone repair man, the best prayer that you can pray hanging upside down is, "God, help me." That's about as good as it gets. But you know what I'm trying to say? Examine your life this morning. If we spend half as much time seeking the face of God in prayer as we do making sure that our bodies are fed, watered, and cared for, the spiritual vitality of Christian community would immediately increase with an incredible surge. Nobody is going to do it for you; you've got to learn to do it yourself. And because Jesus lives in you by the Holy Spirit, if you're walking after the Spirit, there will be something inside you that just as you get hungry physically and thirsty physically, there will be moments in your life where you get hungry and thirsty spiritually, and above all, that is a time to listen to your heart and to say, "Lord, what are you telling me? What are you asking of me? How can I cultivate my relationship with you?" Not only ought it to be personal, but it ought to also be in a fixed place. Now, that's a very interesting thing because on the one hand, Scripture teaches that you can pray everywhere. It's one of the geniuses of New Testament theology. We can have a relationship with God anywhere. But in this passage, Jesus says, "Go into your room." And that would seem to imply, does it not, something of a fixed place where we bow before God and where we cultivate this relationship with God Most High. Jesus says, "Find a place where you can draw a part that will help you communicate and connect with God." Now, that can be just about any place. In my own prayer life, I do most of my praying on a personal level in our bedroom lying flat on bed. Now, sometimes that's counterproductive and I fall asleep, as you can imagine, but I've known people to sleep in a whole lot of other positions, so I've learned to make peace with that. But maybe for you it's when you're out jogging or driving the car or what other activity you engage in, whatever it is that works for you. Do it and stick to it because even if most of the time it feels like you're just digging holes or planting poles or stringing wires and it doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere, every so often God will throw you a switch and you will have a moment of transcendence when God meets you and your life will be forever changed because you connected with God and God connected with you. A fixed place and then, of course, a place that's private where we can shut out all distractions Jesus says, "Go into your room and then close the door." What's the greatest hindrance to prayer for most of God's people? It's our distractions. We are so busy interacting with the world that when we take a quick prayer here or a quick prayer there, we don't feel like we're getting anywhere. And one of the reasons retreats work well for God's people and why times of solitude sometimes can work so well is that if you can leave all that busyness behind, dial down so that you get in touch with your own soul and with your own needs, then you can begin to reach out to God and not only tell him what lives inside your heart, but also hear from him. And it takes significant discipline to be able to tune out the world. People often say, "Well, when I try to pray, "my mind goes all over the place "and I get all of those distractions." You know what the answer is to that? You pray about the distractions because the distractions are part of what lives in your heart, and you'll never get to the bottom of that unless you can surrender all of these to Jesus. The point is, doesn't matter how you do it, doesn't matter where you do it, what really matters is that as part of a growing Christian, we learn the discipline of spending time with God because we are cultivating a relationship that is the most significant and meaningful relationship in all the world. I knelt to pray, but not for long. I had too much to do. I had to hurry and get to work, for bills would soon be due. So I knelt and said a hurried prayer and jumped up off my knees. My Christian duty now was done, my soul could rest at ease. All day long, I had no time to spread a word of cheer, no time to speak of Christ to friends. They'd laugh at me, I'd fear. No time, no time, too much to do. That was my constant cry. No time to give to souls in need, but at last the time, the time to die. I went before the Lord. I came, I stood with downcast eyes, for in his hands God held a book. It was the Book of Life. God looked into his book and said, "Your name I cannot find." I once was going to write it down, but never found the time. Bad theology. Bad theology. We're saved by grace through faith, not because we pray, but you get the point. God longs for you and me to enter into a relationship with you. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:30:39.400; remove through 00:32:30.000] # # # Sweet hour of prayer # # Sweet hour of prayer # # That calls me from a world of fear # # And bids me and my Father strong # # Make all my wants and wishes true # # In seasons of distress and grief # My soul has often found relief, And oft escape the tempter's slur, By Thy return, sweet hour of prayer. Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer, Thy wings shall my petition bear, To Him whose truth and faithfulness Engage the waiting soul to death. And since He bids me seek His grace, Believe His word and trust His grace, I'll cast on Him my every care, And wait for Thee, sweet hour of prayer. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:32:30.000; resume after this marked segment]