How To Pray

Delivered June 10, 2012  Video

I John 5:14-15; Matthew 7:7-12

                This summer I am preaching on suggestions that you have submitted. One suggestion I received was about prayer – how to pray, what to ask for, and what to do when God seems far away. This is a big topic that could be a whole series of sermons, but I will do my best to tackle the main issues this morning. I am going to address the topic under five types of prayer.

Richard Foster wrote a book entitled Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home. If you are interested in learning more about prayer, this is a great introduction. In this book he lists 21 different types of prayer. In my opinion that is a bit too detailed – at least for a sermon. Most writers will list four or five basic types. Even Foster feels the need to divide his 21 types into three categories – moving inward, upward, and outward. I will mention five basic types of prayer.

I. The first is Praise, also called Adoration. That is how we start worship every Sunday morning. Our first hymn is a hymn of praise. For me this is the most natural and instinctive form of prayer. It is born of awe and wonder. When I stand on a mountain summit or the edge of the Grand Canyon or on the seashore or stare into the starry heavens on a clear night, I am overwhelmed by the wonder and vastness of the natural world. It naturally produces in me praise for the Creator of this universe. I experience God powerfully in Nature, and I think that most people do. Many who don’t connect to church, religion and communal worship feel this sense of the power and presence of God in the natural world. It drives me to worship God, to praise God, to honor God without any ulterior motive. I am not trying to get anything from God. It is simply glorifying God for being God. This feels like pure worship to me. As far as how to do it, it can’t be contrived. Just let your heart and the Holy Spirit lead you into the presence of God.

II. The second type of prayer is Confession, also called Expiation, Contrition or Repentance. This is one step beyond praise. If we are in the presence of God for very long, then we become aware of ourselves in relation to God. We become aware that God is holy and we are not.  The prophet Isaiah had a vision of the holy God in Isaiah 6. He hears the seraphim singing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” Then his immediate reaction is to say this: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.” This is the natural human sense of sin and unworthiness in the presence of a holy God. This is the impetus behind all religion. There is an innate sense of separation between us and God. There is an Otherness to God. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth spoke of God as “wholly other.”

What do you do with this sense of sin and unworthiness? This is where you get different religious approaches. There is a strong movement these days in our country and the world against acknowledging any sense of sin. They will talk about mistakes or crimes or things not being helpful, but they don’t like the idea of sin or guilt. They say it is too negative; they think it is unhealthy and unnatural. They say that the real problem is not that we are sinners, but that we believe in the concept of sin. Therefore many people will now deny the reality of sin. They say that if we get rid of the feeling of sinfulness and guiltiness, then everything will be alright. They say that there is no such thing as sin; it is all in our heads, and we should never feel guilty. Guilt is a waste of time; just change your mind about it, change your thinking, reject the concept of sin, and everything is alright.

That seems a bit Pollyannaish to me and a denial of reality. It is like putting makeup on cancer and saying everything is okay. The gospel says that sin is real. It is not a psychological hangup or a spiritual misunderstanding. Sin is real; it is serious and needs to be addressed. It is addressed by confession of sin and receiving the forgiveness of God. With this experience of forgiveness we can leave guilt behind. Confession deals with sin in a very open way. Confession is being completely honest with God. The very first step in Alcoholics Anonymous and all the twelve step problems is admitting you have a problem. If you don’t admit the problem, you can’t get anywhere in recovery. It is the same with sin and our relationship with God. If we deny that there is a problem of sin, then we can’t take the first step in the spiritual life. The apostle John says, “⁸ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

III. The third type of prayer is Petition or Supplication. This is asking God for something. If it is for ourselves it is normally called petition; if it is for someone else it is called Intercession. This is probably the most common form of prayer. In fact the most frequent word for prayer in the Greek NT means simply “to ask.” This is the type of prayer where we run into problems because we ask and we do not receive. The problem of unanswered prayer seems to fly in the face of biblical teachings. Jesus says in our Gospel Lesson, “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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” John says in our Epistle Lesson: “¹⁴ Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. ¹⁵ And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.” Jesus says in the Gospel of John “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it." In our Gospel Lesson Jesus even goes on to say, “ ⁹ Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, being 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!”

But that is not the way it seems to work in our lives! We ask and many times we are not given. We pray and our prayers don’t seem to be answered. And the more we pray these prayers, the further away God feels. And we begin to wonder if God hears our prayers, if prayer is just a waste of time, or even if there is a God that hears our prayers. Preachers and theologians give all sorts of reasons for unanswered prayer. They say it is because we don’t ask in faith or we don’t ask according to his will. James says, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

People come up with other reasons to explain unanswered prayer. Some say that God always answers prayer. It is just sometimes he answers yes, sometimes no and, sometimes wait. People say that God doesn’t always give us what we ask but always what is best for us. Others will say that God works in mysterious ways – that his ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts. They say that we can’t understand why God does not answer some prayers, but we must trust that he is doing what is best for us. These are all different ways that we can explain why God does not seem to answer our prayers.

I wish I had some better answers for you that explains unanswered prayer. When I was younger I had the answers. When I was a young Christian one of the first teachings I gave at our college Christian fellowship was on how to get what you pray for. I had it figured out. I am much more ignorant now than I was forty years ago. My answer now is that I do not know. But I keep praying. I keep asking for healing for people. Sometimes they are healed and sometimes not. I ask for the resolving of problems in people’s lives, in my life and my family and in the world. I don’t worry about the answer any more. I leave that in God’s hands. That is how I have resolved it. I accept what is. I can’t figure out the problem of evil and suffering: why God allows bad things to happen – especially to children, to the innocent and helpless. The theological and philosophical answers I have studied don’t satisfy me any longer. But I keep praying because that is all I can do. If we believe there is an all-powerful benevolent God, then we will ask him to do things. I will leave the answers to God.

I will tell you my approach of this topic of petitionary prayer. I don’t think prayer is about getting God to do what we want him to do. I think that is the basic misunderstanding about prayer as petition. Prayer is not magic. It is not knowing the secret formula of just the right words with the right motives and the right faith and asking in Jesus’ name and presto, we have the answer to our prayers. Prayer is not getting God to change his mind or to do something that he would not do otherwise. It is not getting God to do us a favor because we have been good and faithful. It is not somehow having the proper spiritual technique or expertise to maneuver God to do our will. Prayer is about God getting us to do his will.

Prayer is not about changing the will of God. It is about discerning the will of God, praying according to the will of God, and doing the will of God. The apostle John says in our Epistle Lesson: “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. ¹⁵ And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.” The key phrase here is “according to his will.” Jesus says, ““And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it." The important phrase is “so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.” Prayer is not about us; it is about God – the will of God and the glory of God. Petitionary and intercessory prayer is about us surrendering ourselves and our will to the will of God.

Unanswered prayer can therefore be seen not as a problem, but as the best answer to prayer. Perhaps the best thing that can happen to us spiritually is for our prayers not to be answered. As long as we try to get God to do what we want, we are on the wrong track. We are living an illusion - the illusion that we know best or can be in control, if we just get this prayer technique figured out, that if we can master the art of prayer, then we can get what we ask for. Sorry, if that is true, I don’t know how to do it. In my experience God will do what God wants. We can get angry at God for not doing what we think he ought to do, or we can surrender to God and let God be in control of the world and your life. That is the real purpose of prayer – to get us to do the will of God and be the answer to prayer.

IV. The fourth type of prayer is Thanksgiving. This follows naturally upon what I have been saying. If everything is working out according to the will of God - if even what we perceive as evil, bad, and wrong, is somehow God working out things for good - then we can honestly thank God for all things. The apostle Paul says, “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” If we get to this point of really being able to give thanks in all circumstances (as another translation renders this verse) then we have come to the point of true faith.

V. The fifth type of prayer is Contemplative Prayer. I have saved the best type of prayer for last – Contemplative prayer. We can also call it Communion with God or even Unitive prayer. This is where I spend most of my time in prayer. I don’t spend much time giving God advice on what he ought to do. I don’t spend much time telling God what is going on in my life. I figure he knows. God is omniscient. He is not going to learn anything from me. He even knows all my sins. It is important that I acknowledge them and repent of them, but I don’t spend a lot of time there either. I don’t spend a lot of time talking at all. God knows what I have to say before the words are on my tongue. When you know someone really well you can finish each other’s sentences. When you have been married for thirty or forty years, you know each other’s thoughts. That is the way it is with God. God finishes my thoughts before I finish thinking them. The psalmist says, “O Lord, You have searched me and known me.² You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off.³ You comprehend my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways.⁴ For there is not a word on my tongue, But behold, O Lord, You know it altogether.”

I spend most of my time simply being in the presence of God. I can do that at any time and in any place. I think this is the purpose of prayer. The purpose of prayer is to develop intimacy with God - knowing God, loving God, having fellowship with God, friendship with God, becoming one in heart and mind and soul with God. Jesus prayed this for us. He prayed for us on the night before he died, “Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me,^[b] that they may be one as We are…. that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” This is what prayer is about. We come from God and return to God. And while we are here on this earth we are to know God and make God known.