When Prayer Is Hard

SERMON: 2007-09-02--sm0732--when-prayer-is-hard SOURCE DURATION: 00:42:42.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.90 APPROVED: false REASON: All candidates (0-15) consist of repetitive lyrics ('blessed be your name,' etc.), which are characteristic of a hymn or worship song, not spoken sermon content (benediction, prayer, exposition). Therefore, the entire visible segment is non-sermon material. Since no preceding sermon content is available in the provided candidates, and I must select an index, I am selecting the final candidate index as required by the output format, although it represents music. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:39:04.740-00:42:41.120 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I said last Sunday that, on the one hand, prayer is so simple that a child can do it, and on the other hand, it is so complex that even a seasoned saint cannot exhaust all of its possibilities. The reason for that, of course, is that prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is conversation with God based on our relationship with Him as our Heavenly Father. The Scriptures teach that when we repent of our sins, put our faith in the Lord Jesus, God becomes our Father, we become His children. He gives us what the Bible calls the spirit of sonship, and the spirit of sonship not only then enables us to communicate with God, but also enables God to communicate with us, and prayer becomes a two-way conversation. And just as an earthly child can go to its father with all of its needs and wants and longings, enter into his presence, share his needs, share his joys, know that he's loved, looked after, protected, and provided for. So the Christian, through faith in Christ, similarly has confidence and boldness of access to the very throne of the universe. I don't know if you've ever thought about this or thought about it very deeply, but it's an incredible privilege that God provides us with through faith in Jesus, and that's why Jesus, when you read these verses in Matthew chapter six and in other places in the gospels, makes prayer sound and look so easy. He says, "Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him." And in the next chapter, he spells it out even in more detail when he says, "Ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you for everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks the door will be opened." Jesus makes prayer sound very easy. That having been said, most of us will have experiences in life that doesn't always seem to match up, because isn't it true that we don't always find prayer that easy? I have to admit to you this morning, in all honesty, that in view of what our family has gone through in recent years with Michael's illness and other challenges that we have faced and in some ways continue to face, prayer has not always been easy. There have been seasons where I have found it exceedingly difficult to pray, where heaven seems like brass. The telephone line is not only busy, sometimes it feels like it's disconnected altogether. And I'm willing to bet there's a good portion of us here who at least at some point or another in life have had similar experiences. Yes, there are moments when prayer is entering experientially into heaven and you know that God is there and you know that you're connecting, but there's those other times, and sometimes the latter more than the former, when you wonder, "God, are you really there?" I found it very interesting that after I had sort of felt led to speak on this this morning, magazine, the most current issue of last week as its cover story has a story on Mother Teresa, the secret life of Mother Teresa, newly published letters reveal a beloved icon's 50-year crisis of faith. And the article is based on a new book that has just been published, and it's called Mother Teresa Come, Be My Light, and it confirms rumors that have been circulating since about 2003, that despite her public persona, Mother Teresa's interior life was plagued with many questions and many doubts and much pain, as a matter of fact, for the last almost 50 years of her life, she had to walk by faith and not by sight, having been robbed of virtually every sense of God's presence. Let me give you just a couple of her quotes published in this new book, part of correspondence to her spiritual advisors, "I am told she says that God loves me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. I utter words of community prayer, she says, and try my utmost to get out of every word of sweetness it has to give, but my prayer of union is not there any longer. I no longer pray." And except for a five-week period in '58 and '59, where the amazing presence of God came back to her, the last time before that that she experienced his presence was at her call to the work that she would do in India, a call that she responded to wholeheartedly. And you say, "Lord, what happens here? Why is that the interior life of a woman who has noted the world over for her great deeds of charity in your name?" Bring it close to home, you look at your own life, and while hopefully the periods of confusion aren't anywhere close to what she went through, the fact remains that even for some of God's choice as saints, there are those moments, are there not? And as I said a few moments ago, the telephone line to heaven not only seems to be busy all the time, but periodically it seems to be disconnected altogether. And so I want to talk with you a little bit about that. Why is that, and more importantly for our consideration this morning, what biblically speaking can be done about it? What do you do when prayer is hard? Well, let's begin by looking at what scripture says are some of the possible reasons. The first is always the issue of unconfessed sin. Isaiah 59, one and two, "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dulled that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have made separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, so that he does not hear." The psalmist puts it this way in Psalm 66, 18, "If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened." If prayer is conversation with God based on relationship, then it stands to reason, does it not, that when that relationship is compromised, our prayer is affected. And so throughout scripture, one of the first questions that God's people always need to ask when they cannot connect with God is, "Lord, is there in my life unconfessed sin? Is there some cloud that has appeared in our relationship for which I am responsible?" It's like any earthly relationship. Sometimes between a husband and a wife, or parents and their children, or two friends or two co-workers, something happens, trust is broken, covenant is broken, and hearts start closing off to each other, and you begin to withdraw. You may carry on outwardly, normally, and you still talk to each other, perhaps, or maybe not, but the air is chilled and the intimacy is lost. That's what happens when sin separates us from God, because on the one hand, our guilt makes us want to hide, like Adam and Eve did, and on the other hand, God is saddened and the spirit of God is grieved, and he withdraws. And so then a coldness develops, and for that reason, though unconfessed sin is by no means the only reason why sometimes God seems to be so distant, the place for us always to begin is to say, "Lord, are you trying to flush out unconfessed sin in my life? Is there a place where I have broken covenant with you? Is there a place I have broken covenant with people? Is there a place where the broader community has broken covenant with you?" Because it's not always individual sin. Sometimes it's communal sin, and the biblical antidote to that, of course, is repentance and confession. Scripture says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The good news of the Gospel is that our only right of access to God the Father is through the righteousness of Jesus, because even when we aren't aware of sin and even when we think we're doing pretty good, God's standard of holiness is so high that still all have sinned and fall short of his glory. And so the only reason we ever have boldness of confidence into God's presence is because of Jesus. And when sin accumulates and that communion gets broken, then the remedy is to repent. It's to confess. The word "confess" means to agree with. It is to say with God, "I've wandered away. I've been wrong. I have offended you. Please forgive me. Please help me do better." The promise of Scripture is we're never more righteous than we are, but we have confessed our sins and we have been cleansed from all unrighteousness. That's why keeping a short account with God on issues of sin is so important in terms of walking with him and remaining in fellowship with him. So there's always the question of, "Lord, is there unconfessed sin in my life?" But then there's also a thing called a season of darkness that sometimes comes upon even the choicest of God's children. It was St. John of the Cross, the Spanish 16th century mystic, who first coined the phrase "the dark night of the soul." And the dark night of the soul refers to a season where God will sometimes take his choicest children through a period where he withdraws every conscious sense of his presence in their lives. It can last for days or weeks or months or years. In the case of Mother Teresa, as I pointed out a few moments ago, almost 50 years. And it has a lot of components to it and it can be occasioned by a lot of different things. It can be occasioned by physical pain or suffering. We live in a fallen world. God makes his rain fall on the just and on the unjust, the sun to shine on the evil and on the righteous. And while generally we look at that in the context of God pours out his blessing on evil people as well as on righteous people, the opposite is true also. There are times when even God's children are not necessarily immune to the disasters or the troubles that come upon the world. Almost every summer you will hear of accidents taking place on the highways and not uncommonly involved in one of those accidents will be a busload or a van of kids that are going to a Christian camp or that are going to a Christian event. Earthquake in Peru a couple of weeks ago, Pisco, over 500 people died. Of those 500 people, 200 were believers gathered in a church celebrating a particular event. And you look at those kinds of things and you say, "Lord, how can I square this?" With your promise of provision, your promise of protection, fact of the matter is God not only promises to avert all evil for his children or he promises that he will turn it to our good. Sometimes there is a greater purpose that God has that we don't yet understand. But when you're in the middle of that, it's little consolation and little comfort. It just hurts and it hurts a lot. Humans are not immune to hurt. Sometimes it has an emotional component. We get overwhelmed in our feelings. We get confused in our minds. Our hearts get discouraged. We get depressed and we experience intense feelings of loneliness. Mother Teresa, for all her busyness, experienced intense feelings of being all alone. And sometimes those feelings are occasioned by circumstances that are stressful, our resources are exhausted and we're just down on life. But sometimes those deep feelings come from deep places within, often traumatic places where we have been wounded and God is bringing us to life and in bringing us to life, he's taking us back to places of pain that need to be flushed out so that we can be healed. And again, small comfort when you're in the middle of it because all you feel is the pain. And then there is often a spiritual component, spiritual desolation. I believe that God's people can handle almost anything as long as they know they're in the will of God and God's presence is right there. But one of the painful things that often happens when you're in the midst of physical and emotional turmoil is that God's presence at that point is not to be found and you cry out with the psalmist, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and darkness overwhelms you and you begin to wonder, "God, are you there?" You begin to wonder, "Am I even a Christian? Does God still love me? Have I committed the unpardonable sin?" And the interesting thing biblically is that while yes, sometimes sin can contribute to this situation, as we said earlier, and we need always to be open to having it pointed out to us, we always have to be open to repenting and confessing and having it forgiven. Fact of the matter is that not infrequently this dark night of the soul, this spiritual desolation has nothing much to do with sin. It's part of a deeper mysterious process that God takes us through. And so I find Psalm 44, 17, and 18 very interesting. All this happened to us, says the psalmist, having listed all the woes his nation has just experienced. All this, he says, has happened to us, "Though we had not forgotten you or been false to your covenant, our hearts had not turned back, our feet had not strayed from your path." Be careful, both in judging yourself and in judging other people, that you don't become one of the friends of Job who thinks you've got it all figured out, why somebody is going through what they're going through. You may be right, but you may also be wrong. God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Now what happens when we go through seasons of darkness like this, whether a day or a month or a year or many years, is that we are confronted, I think, by two temptations in particular. Now listen carefully. The first temptation is simply to give up on God altogether. Somebody gave me to read a copy of Dwayne "Dog" Chapman's book, "You Can Run, But You Can't Hide." Some of you recognize him, I gather. He's got a program on A&E. He's a bounty hunter. It's not a book I greatly recommend to you. It's pretty rough, though. This guy claims to be a Christian, in fact. The name Dog is God backwards and came from his mother or his friends because he was such a religious kid. His mother was a godly woman who raised him in the faith, took him to church and so on, and taught him this, that God would always protect him. Now you've got to be careful what you teach your kids, because what happened? He's in grade seven. He gets the snot beat out of him by a gang of kids who mock his faith. He tells them, "God doesn't want you to do this." They tear his Bible in half. They leave him bloodied and wounded on the pavement, not only physically, but also in his heart. He goes to school, tells the vice principal what had happened to him. Vice principal doesn't believe him. And so his heart breaks. Something hardened inside him, and that was the beginning then of a downward spiral into drugs and alcohol and into sexual promiscuity that he's had to fight all his life, and that ultimately ended up with him behind bars for a murder that he and his gang were instrumental in committing. The world is full of men and women whose naive notions, magical notions if you will, of who God is, disappointed their hearts, and their response was to say, "Well, I can't believe that you're there." And they become atheists for all practical considerations, because they live as if God's not there. There's always the danger of following the advice of Job's wife, which is to curse God and die. And the second temptation that we face in those moments of darkness is to look for comfort outside of God. The book of Jeremiah said many years ago, "They have forsaken you, the true and living fountain, and they've hewn out cisterns for themselves." And we can all identify with that. God's not there to meet the deep needs of my soul. He seems to have abandoned and forsaken me, and so what will I do? Well, I've got to find help and comfort elsewhere, and so I start entering into illicit relationships. I start making partners with those who don't really share biblical values. I turn to drugs and alcohol and sexual addiction. Has in fact become the end product of this longing to get rid of this pain in my soul that I don't know how to identify. And I believe one reason the Lord sometimes places us in these seasons of darkness is to flush out what lives on the inside at the core of our being. Will we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, or will we curse Him and will we die? Ultimately, you will recall that was the issue in the book of Job. Job was a man who was amazingly blessed of God. The devil comes to God and God asks him, "Have you seen my servant Job? How he serves me wholeheartedly?" And the devil throws his challenge in there. Anybody would serve you if they were blessed the way that you're blessing him. Take away what he's got and we'll see what lives inside. And the whole story of Job then unfolds to demonstrate whether or not Job will love God. Not because God is blessing him and he feels good about it, but simply because God is God and he deserves our worship and he deserves our praise. Sometimes it's unconfessed sin, sometimes it's simply a season of darkness, but there will be times in your life and in my life where prayer is hard. We find it hard to connect with God and we wonder, "Now what do I do?" So how do we handle it? Well biblically speaking, we need to learn to stand on the truth. The truth of scripture, Ephesians 6.14, "Stand firm then with a belt of truth buckled around your waist." One of the most liberating experiences I've ever had in my own life was one of the early stages of my Christian life. The Lord took me through what in retrospect was about a two and a half year period that I think I could legitimately call the dark night of the soul. And one of the things I learned in that darkness was that how I felt had no bearing on the truth. I couldn't feel God, I couldn't see him, I couldn't connect with him. It felt like darkness was enveloping my soul in its deepest places and its deepest levels and suddenly adorned on me with revelation that no matter how I felt about things, truth was still truth. God is still on his throne. He still rules over all the universe. In Christ he's still my Father. In Christ he still loves me. In Christ he has committed himself to blessing me. In Christ I am his child and he will never abandon me. In Christ he hears me, whether I think he's hearing me yes or no. In Christ he takes my groanings, my inarticulate groanings that I cannot even express. And the Bible says the Holy Spirit intercedes for me. As a matter of fact, you know, one of the things that we learn in the Christian life is our effectiveness in life and ministry is often totally unrelated to how spiritual we feel or how much we think we are aware of God's presence. I remember Keith Green, a lot of you know Keith Green many years ago before he died in a plane crash. In a concert, as hard, cold as anything, walking by faith, playing music to the Lord, saying, "Lord, now this isn't going anywhere. It's getting to the front of the stage and it's just dropping down." Gave an altar call. People touched by the scores and he said, "Well, thank you, Lord. That was clearly you and not me." But I think sometimes the Lord puts us in those places just to show us that the transcendent treasure belongs to God, not to the earthy vessel in which the treasure lives. We need to learn to stand on truth. And I would recommend that if you ever find yourself in those places of darkness, those places of testing, go back to scripture. Find a number of promises where God promises his blessings to you in Christ. And then stand on those blessings, come hell or high water, and declare this is the word of the Lord. That's how Jesus fought the devil in the wilderness with his temptations. It is written. Then we need to stand in hope. Jesus 10-23 let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess for he who promised is faithful. I've learned over the years that as long as we can see light at the end of the tunnel, it is amazing what we can go through and put up with. Take away hope and people perish and they give up. And the hope of which scripture speaks is not just the power of positive thinking. It's not just, well let me try to psych myself up and pretend a reality that I cannot see. Now hope in scripture is the conviction based on our relationship with Jesus, that God who has begun a good work in us and in renewing creation is going to bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. Hope is the conviction that dark this season may be after the darkness comes the light. Hope is the conviction that tears may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. And though this trial seems to go on forever, and though it seems like I cannot reach out to God and God is no longer interested in me, there will come a time when God will turn the tables and He will again show His face and He will bring about His blessing. A lot of critics when they read the book of Job, they say the ending of the book of Job is unrealistic because Job gets back double of everything that he had lost. And they say that's just not how it works in the world, but they don't understand that for those whom God loves and who are called according to His purpose, God makes all things work together for the good. And if not in this life then in the life to come, nobody who has put their hope in God is long term going to be disappointed. And one set of verses that often speaks to me when I go through those periods of doubts and questions and difficulty is 1 Peter 5, 10, and 11 where God says through Peter, "And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore, establish, and strengthen you to Him be the dominion forever and ever." Notice the verbs, "He Himself will restore, He will establish, and He will strengthen you." To restore is to put the broken pieces back together. If you've ever gone through extended illness or emotional turmoil or spiritual warfare or conflict, you will know that when that lasts long enough, what it does is it breaks something deep on the inside. You lose sight of who you are, you lose sight of your direction, you lose your confidence, you wonder, "What good am I and what good is life?" And you begin to spiral down. And part of God's grace in Christ is that when God has broken what needs to be broken because it was put together wrong, His promise is to start putting it back together. He restores what is broken. That's the whole emphasis of the gospel. He gives us a new start and a new beginning. And one of the things that I pray to God I will never seem to be excited about, as you know, is when I see that process happening in the lives of other people as well as I'm privileged to experience that to one degree or another in my own heart and my life. He will restore, says Peter, not only, but He will also establish. That is to say, He not only puts the pieces together, but He helps us to regain our equilibrium. If you've ever gone through times or seasons of testing where all of life is falling down around you, then you know that life becomes extremely uncertain. You're always looking over your shoulder. You never know where the next blow is going to come from. That again is why people spiral down in hopelessness and despair. Jesus not only starts to put us back together, but He restores our inheritance. He establishes us, He brings back, as He did to Job, all the things that had been taken from us. He helps us to rediscover purpose and identity and direction in our lives. And then He not only restores, He not only establishes, but Peter says, He strengthens. Strengthen the weary hands. Strengthen the weak knees, says Scripture. God by His grace comes along in the power of the Holy Spirit and He pours out upon us His life and His strength and His ability. And out of the ashes of our chaos and the ashes of our brokenness, new life emerges for the glory of God, resurrection life. Resurrection life that nobody can touch, nobody can tear down, nobody can take away from because it's been tested by fire and it has survived the fire by virtue of God's grace in God's life. After you have suffered a little while, says Peter, the God of all grace who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. Tell me if that isn't an incredible promise and a word of hope for God's people. [applause] So we stand on truth, we stand in hope, and then we need to learn to walk it out faithfully. Hebrews 1036, you need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised. Things like Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul lasting for 50 years is seized upon by atheists and agnostics as proof positive that believers are deluded. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the two top sellers in recent weeks in the Toronto Star list of non-fiction books are both books which challenge everything that you and I and other Christians around the world believe. The first book is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. He is an evangelist, if you can believe it, for atheism, and the second book is God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. They seize on this and they say, "See, Christians are just deluding themselves. If even the holiest of the holiest cannot have a relationship with God, then everybody else is just living in an imaginary world." What they don't understand is that quite the opposite is true. Because you see, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. As the story of Job illustrates, anybody can love God when it feels good and there is a reward. Don't ever think that the greatest height of your spirituality is when you are in your prayer closet and the power surges and you're connecting with God and you come away charged and fully ready to engage life. Don't ever think the greatest height of your spirituality is when you sit here and you receive the good things of God's house and you're stirred in your soul and you say, "Yes, I want to follow you." Those are wonderful experiences, never to be minimized, always to be embraced gladly. But they're not the epitome of spirituality. The epitome of spirituality is when darkness has enveloped your soul. When everything inside you says, "Lord, what am I doing this for?" When everything inside you says, "This is costing me my everything." When then you still say, as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Nevertheless not my will, but yours be done." That is the epitome of spirituality. And it's when Mother Teresa, ten years into her suffering, had a discerning counselor who told her, "Number one, you cannot change your feelings. Number two, it's not your responsibility. Just because you don't feel God doesn't mean He's not there. And number three, you've asked to share in the sufferings of Jesus. And maybe this is the answer to your prayer to take up your cross and follow Him that she began to understand there was purpose to what she was going through. Now there may be all kinds of other explanations and there may be all kinds of other reasons, but the point is the epitome of spirituality was not when she heard the voice of Jesus call her to this ministry and she said, "Yes, Lord, I will follow you." The epitome of spirituality was when she carried her cross faithfully to complete the mission that had been entrusted to her by Jesus. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm not saying that it's wonderful to experience darkness so that we ought never to be afraid of the darkness. I'm just saying that if faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, our faith is tested at those moments when we see the least and feel the least and yet can receive God's grace to say, "Lord, I will follow you wherever you lead me." Now we stand at the start of a new church season. The programs are going to gear up. A lot of us are going to be involved in a lot of ministry next Sunday morning, Lord willing. We're going to have commissioning and kickoff for kids up and we're going to launch a new DVD that Trevor Crowe has put together to equip us for outreach. And I'm hoping and praying that as the year progresses, there will be many seasons where we experience the sweet mercies of heaven, where with joy and with gladness we can step into the fray knowing that God is with us and we can see God move and we can see the powers of darkness pushed back and we can see the kingdom of God come in glory and in power. But I would be surprised if some of us at some point or another didn't find ourselves in the kind of place where we say to ourselves, "I wonder what I'm doing here. I wonder where God is. I wonder why things are so hard. Maybe I'm on the wrong track. Maybe the whole church is on the wrong track." And yes, we always have to be open for what the Lord will show us in places where we miss the mark. But don't just assume that because there is darkness in your soul or the line to heaven seems to be busy and you can't get through, that God isn't there, that He isn't hearing you and that He isn't pleased with you. We walk by faith. We stand on truth. We stand in hope and we seek to fulfill and to discharge the mission that God has placed before us, knowing that when all has been said and done, the less reward we get into here and now, wonderful and precious as that is, the greater will be the reward in the [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:39:04.740; remove through 00:42:42.000] age to come [CUT]. [music] Blessed be your name in the land that is plentiful, where your streams of abundance flow, blessed be your name, blessed be your name when I'm found in the desert place though I walk through the wilderness, blessed be your name. Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name. Blessed be your name when the sun's shining down on me, when the world's all as it should be, blessed be your name. Blessed be your name on the road marked with suffering, though there's pain in the offering, blessed be your name. I'll sing you for I'll turn back to praise, when the darkness closes in Lord, still I will say, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name. You give and take away, you give and take away, my heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be your name, blessed be your name, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name. Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name, blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:42:42.000; resume after this marked segment]