“God
is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. Amen.”
Probably
a prayer that you learned early in life if you grew up with church in your
childhood. We learn to pray at an early
age and we teach our children to pray as soon as we can. We said a prayer of confession, repentance,
and faith as we began our relationship with Christ, the “sinner’s prayer” as we
call it. Prayer is the first spiritual
discipline that we pick up on. We’ve done
it most of our lives, we believe in it, we know that we that should do it. The concept isn’t hard to grasp, the practice
isn’t hard to learn, yet a solid prayer life is so difficult to have. Speaking honestly, I’ve struggled with
prayer. Part of my profession is praying
for others…yet in no way do I believe that I’m a professional at it. Sometimes I drift off and ramble in my
prayer. Sometimes I try to shape my
prayers with exaggerated and eloquent speech.
Sometimes I have no idea what to pray.
And shamefully I admit that sometimes I don’t want to pray and just
don’t pray. I’m hoping I’m not the
only one! I also don’t think that I’m the
only one who wants a rich prayer life. I
want to see the Lord answer my prayer. I
want Him to be pleased with my prayer life.
I want prayer to be a serious and vital part of my life.
Something Jesus said about prayer caught my eye recently and I want to share with you some things I thinks Jesus wants us to understand about this simple and powerful spiritual discipline.
Matthew 7:7-11
7) “Ask, and it will be given
to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8) For
everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who
knocks it will be opened. 9) Or which one of you, if his son asks him for
bread, will give him a stone? 10) Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a
serpent? 11) If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to
those who ask him!I’ll discuss some thoughts about this passage over the next couple weeks, but let’s start with this…
Prayer is Born Out of a Need
“ask,
seek, and knock”
The
most basic reason that we pray is that we need something. You ask for something you don’t have. You seek for something because you don’t
possess it. You knock on a door because you want what is on the other side of
the door. There are a lot of reasons we
pray: thanksgiving, praise, adoration.
But the most basic reason is that we have needs. There things in our lives that we cannot do
on our own, otherwise we would not have to ask, seek, or knock
Prayer
admits at least 3 basic things about our need:
·
It Admits Our Weakness – we usually pray because a need has risen in
our lives that either too intense for us to bear with sanity or because the
solution and answer is out of our power and hands, we cannot do it.
·
It Admits His Power – that He can supply what we need
·
It Admits His Control – things and matters are ultimately out of our
control. Prayer confesses that He is in
control.
Some
of you are facing a need in your life that you cannot handle on your own. Your power is insufficient, you’ve done all
you can, but it’s out of your control.
Prayer is the solution to your dilemma.
·
Here’s what I’ve often thought when I get to a dilemma where I tried
everything I can, but realized things are out of my hands: “Well, ya should have gone to him in the
first place and maybe you wouldn’t be where you are!”…maybe this is true, but
I’m not sure it matters to God as to how you got to him, but that you have
finally brought it to him.
·
Prayer is transaction of the offering of your need to a God who can
supply all your needs.
We
have a need, and we have a God who can, who wants to, and who will meet that
need if we ask, seek, and knock…
The
Bible is full of examples of talented, faithful, mighty people who did
incredible things for God but also deeply needed and used prayer. Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Elijah,
Daniel, etc. Great men with great needs,
who at some point in their journey realized their weakness, his power and his
control.
Bottom
line is this: we are people with lots of
real needs. Things that we can’t do,
questions we don’t know the answers to, and necessities that we cannot
get. That’s why we pray, because we need
him. We are weak. We need a powerful and able God to intervene
in our chaos and mess. We need his
help. We need what only he can
give. Things are spinning out of our control,
but they are not out of his control. He
is in control. So, ask, seek, and knock. Jesus
tells us to, he encourages us to, he want us to!
