Preparing to Plant - Learning to Pray
Matthew 11:27-30 says, "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
About 2600 years ago, the king of Babylon issued a decree, that for thirty days, no one was allowed to pray to anyone except him. Anyone who broke his command, would be thrown into a den of lions. When the prophet Daniel found out about this command, he went home, went to his upstairs room, opened the window, got down on his knees, and prayed to God.
For the prophet Daniel, prayer was such an integral part of his life, that he would rather die than not be able to pray for even one day.
How would you respond if you were told that you couldn’t pray for 30 days? And more to the point, what difference would it make to your life if you couldn’t pray for 30 days?
We want to make prayer an integral part of our life at Covenant City. And so in this article, we’re going to be looking at two things: “why we pray” and “how we pray.”
1. Why We Pray
a. Because we should pray
One reason many of us pray, is that we know we should. And that is an important reason to pray. There are numerous places in scripture that tell us that we should pray. For example, in 1 Thessalonians, Paul writes, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)
Jesus himself modelled this teaching in his own life. Luke 5:16 says, "But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray." (Luke 5:16)
We should pray. In fact we should pray without ceasing.
The apostle Paul tells us that we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. These spiritual forces will do anything to get what they want, and so we need spiritual armour to fight spiritual forces. And one of the key pieces of armour is prayer
As we prepare to launch Covenant City, we all need to pray because the evil one doesn’t like church plants. This is not to scare us, because the evil one is no match for our God. But it is to say that we need to pray. We need to pray, and we need to get others to pray for us.
b. Because God answers our prayers
Another reason many of us pray is because God answers our prayer requests. James writes this, "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit." (James 5:16-18)
We want to be clear that God does not always give us what we pray for. But he also calls us to pray because prayer does work. And in his wisdom there are some things he chooses only to give us if we fervently pray for it.
Covenant City’s short history is already testament to this. We must not take for granted what God has miraculously and graciously given us so far. God has given us a staff and elder team, a launch team, many wonderful volunteers, and even a church building to meet in! I believe that a big reason God has given all these things is because people have been praying with us and for us.
The reasons for prayer we've covered so far are important. However, there is one more reason to pray that many of us tend to overlook.
c. Because we want to be with God
In Matthew 11:28, Jesus says, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
Jesus doesn’t say “follow me”, he says “come to me." Jesus is not just someone we follow, he is someone we are to go to, someone we are to be united with. And he tells us why we would want to go to him, verse 29, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. "
Often we don’t want to go to Jesus because we have misunderstood what he is truly like. Often we view God as a VIP we need to impress, and are perhaps a little intimidated by. And therefore, we don’t really enjoy spending time with him.
We pray to him because we know we should, and because we need something from him, but not because we want to be with him.
In Matthew 11:29, Jesus gently corrects us by telling us what he is truly like.
First, he tells us that he is gentle. The idea of gentleness is the idea of humility and meekness. God wants us to know that he is not easily upset. He is not quick to anger. He does not lash out at us when we make a mess, or start looking at his watch when we stumble over our words. Even though he is the most important person in the world, he has all the time in the world for each of us.
And he is not only gentle, he is also lowly. God tells us that he is lowly because he wants us to know that we can approach him. Dane Ortlund puts it this way,
“The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible. For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ.”
God wants us to know that we can approach him, because he wants us to approach him. Jesus is not just gentle and lowly, he is gentle and lowly at heart.
This is the only time, in the entire Bible, that Jesus tells us who he is at heart. In the Bible, the heart refers to the very center of a person’s being, the deepest essence of who a person is. And Jesus says that the very center of his being, the very core of who he is, is gentleness and lowliness. God is not a VIP to impress or keep our distance from, he is the saviour who wants us to come to him.
And not only that, Jesus invites us to come to him. He doesn’t invite us because he wants something from us, but because he wants to give us rest.
The idea of rest here doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do as Christians. But it does mean that even as we work, our souls are at rest because we are in fellowship with a gentle and lowly saviour. Dane Ortlund again,
“All Christian toil flows from fellowship with a living Christ whose transcending, defining reality is: gentle and lowly. He astounds and sustains us with his endless kindness. Only as we walk ever deeper into this tender kindness can we live the Christian life as the New Testament calls us to. Only as we drink down the kindness of the heart of Christ will we leave in our wake, everywhere we go, the aroma of heaven, and die one day having startled the world with glimpses of a divine kindness too great to be boxed in by what we deserve.”
Prayer is how we commune with the living God. It’s how we behold his goodness. It’s how we respond to his greatness. It’s how we savour his grace. It’s how we embrace his rest.
The problem with only praying because we should is that prayer becomes a task to do rather than a privilege to delight in. And the problem with only praying because God grants our requests is that God is reduced to a person we ask things from rather than a saviour we want to spend time with. It is only when we hold all three reasons together that we start to plumb the depths and wonders of prayer.
So, this summer, as we learn to pray, let’s start with who Jesus is. Meditate on these verses from Matthew 11. Remind ourselves everyday that Jesus is gentle and lowly, and he invites us to go to him so that he might give us rest for our souls.
2. How We Pray
a. Through faith in Jesus
Matthew 11:27 says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
This verse reveals that the only way we can have a relationship with God is through faith in Jesus. We cannot know God apart from faith in Jesus. Therefore, we cannot pray to God apart from faith in Jesus.
We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, and it is only through faith in Jesus Christ who died for our sins that we can have a relationship with God. Prayer is not through strength or intelligence or eloquence but only through faith in Jesus. Therefore, the only soil that a healthy prayer life can grow in is a humble dependence on Jesus.
b. By responding to what God has revealed
We also pray by responding to what God has revealed. Notice how Jesus calls for a response in Matthew 11:27-30. He calls us to respond to his gentleness and lowliness by coming to him and receiving rest from him.
That’s how it is with prayer. Prayer is a two-way conversation between us and God as we respond to what God has revealed. And therefore, the depth of our prayer life grows hand-in-hand with the depth of our knowledge of God. Tim Keller put it this way,
“All prayer is responding to God. In all cases God is the initiator – “hearing” always precedes asking. God comes to us first or we would never reach out to him. Yet all prayers are not alike or equally effective in relating to God. The clearer our understanding of who God is, the better our prayers. Instinctive prayer is like an emergency flare in reaction to a general sense of God’s reality. Prayer as a spiritual gift is a genuine, personal conversation in reply to God’s specific, verbal revelation.”
One of the reasons our prayer lives become all about ourselves and what we want is because we don’t know much about God and what he wants. A question we should ask ourselves is, “if someone were to base their view of God purely on your prayers, what would their view of God be like?”
How we pray reflects our view of God and why we pray to Him. If prayer is a response to what God has revealed, our prayers must come to reflect the totality of what God has revealed, about himself, about us, and how we are to relate about him.
This doesn’t mean that every prayer needs to be 20 minutes long. But it does mean that if we were to take stock of all our prayers across a period of time, it should be more than just a list of things we’ve asked God for.
As we get ready for our September launch, our task is to work on our prayer lives. And we have four areas of prayer we want to work on, which can be summarised as ACTS.
Adoration (Psalm 33, 34, 42, 65, 67, 84, 100, 111, 112, 113, 117, 150)
Adoration means praise. We praise God in response to who He is. Praising God is different from thanking God. Praising God means praising him for who he is, apart from what he has done for us.
Praise is often the aspect of prayer we’re most unfamiliar with, which is why I’ve listed a few Psalms to give us language we can start with to praise God. Learning to praise God doesn’t mean you have to use your own words. You can start with using the words of Scripture, and asking God to help you make them your own.
Confession (Psalm 51, 1 John 1:8)
Confession means confessing our sins. 1 John 1:8 reminds us that if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. As we confess, we must also remind ourselves of the assurance of God’s forgiveness.
Thanksgiving (Philippians 4:6, 1 Thessalonians 5:18, Psalm 103, 138)
We thank God for what he has done for us, making it a habit everyday to recognise and respond to the gifts that God has blessed us with.
Supplication (Matthew 6:11 – 12, James 4:2b, 1 John 5:14)
Supplication means bringing our requests to God. God invites us to bring all our requests to him. One way we can grow in this is in bringing requests not just for ourselves, but for others too.
Prayer isn’t always easy. Sometimes prayer will feel rich and easy, like the wind is in our sails. Other times we will feel like we’re sinking, and God seems so far far away.
As a church, we want to spur each other on to persevere in prayer and persevere in coming to Jesus. We want to learn to pray because we should pray. We want to learn to pray because God answers our prayers. And we want to learn to pray because Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart, and it is from him and him alone that we find rest for our souls.