Sermon 47
A Sermon by James Cooke on
Sunday 19th November 2006-11-19
At St John
the Baptist Wonersh
Personal
devotion: Prayer (19/11/06)
Today
we’ve come to the last in our little series on personal devotion. Ian spoke on the why and how of a regular
quiet time. Colin showed us where Bible
Reading fits in to the picture, and today I am going to be talking about the
role of prayer. I need to say
straightaway that I don’t find prayer easy.
We tend to think, don’t we, that if prayer is meant to be tapping into
the power and wonder of Almighty God, then surely we should all be experiencing
times of overwhelming joy each time we pray.
And yet, it doesn’t often seem to be like that, does it? For much of the time, our whole being seems
to rebel against the very idea of prayer, and when we do eventually try
praying, we are beset by distractions – either outward, such as the phone
ringing – or inward, such as wandering thoughts, and after a few minutes our
time is up and we don’t seem to have achieved very much. That’s when guilt begins its ugly work in our
souls and it’s easy to beat ourselves up because often God doesn’t seem to be
near us. Many people, not surprisingly,
just give up the unequal struggle and say, “I’m just not the praying type” or
“I have big problems with prayer”. Of
course, there are intellectual problems, too – “Why should we pray when God
must already know what we need?” I’m
afraid I haven’t time to tackle that one this morning, so do chat to me
afterwards if that’s something that troubles you. But there’s also another reason for the
difficulties some people have in personal or private prayer, and that’s to do
with our personalities - for example whether we’re introverts or
extraverts. If you’re an extravert
you’ll get your energy from being with other people and so for you, private
prayer may be especially difficult. I
guess the answer then might be to get together with 1 or 2 others and pray with
them. Prayer partnerships or prayer
triplets are what they’re called. You’ve
probably guessed if you didn’t know already that I’m not an expert on
personality, but it’s wonderful that Ruth Fowke who’s here today is an
expert - she’s even written a book about it.
This is it – it’s called Personality
and Prayer. You can borrow it if
from the church library in the Selwyn Room if you think it might help you. However, whatever your personality and
whatever your preferred method of prayer, v 16 says it all: Let us then
approach the throne of grace with confidence and find grace to help in time of
need. God is longing for us to have
the confidence to approach him in prayer
Talking
of books, here’s another one I’d like to recommend to you. It’s called “Drawing
Near to God” by Mark Stibbe and it’s built round a model of praying which I
call Praying through the temple. Margot
and I read the book 3 or 4 years ago and preached a series of sermons on Sunday
evenings based on it. The reason we did
that was because we both found the way of praying it describes so helpful, so
refreshing. It’s based on some of the
features of the first Jewish temple – Solomon’s temple - which was built in
about 950BC, but sadly destroyed about 400 years later. Many attempts have been made to build models
of the temple, based on the dimensions given in 1 Kings 6, and this is one I
rather like. My house is a house of
prayer, Jesus once said, so how appropriate if it can still be used
as a stimulus to our praying.
You
have to imagine the priest on duty at the temple each day arriving at the gates
– the gates of thanksgiving. Do you
remember the words from Psalm 100 – Enter his gates with thanksgiving
in your heart. Then he would move
through the gates into the courtyard (Enter his courts with praise). At the far end of the court of praise there
were some steps and at the foot of the steps was an altar (not shown in the
model), the altar of sacrifice, where he would offer blood sacrifices for the
forgiveness of sins. He would then climb
the steps to the building at the back – the
These
4 places where the priest would stop and pray are an amazing visual aid for our
prayers, and I would like now to pause for a few moments at each place and see
what we can learn which will enrich our praying. But there’s something important we need to do
before we begin and without it we can easily run into the buffers when we pray. It’s a bit like taking physical exercise –
often the first bit is the most difficult, getting those creaking bones moving,
but once you get going it often becomes easier.
It requires self-discipline and it’s also very important to get warmed
up properly beforehand. The most
important act of warming up is to ask the Holy Spirit to help us to pray. Remember that the Holy Spirit is none other
than God himself and he, more than anyone, can help us in our weakness. Quite simply, we can’t pray to God without
help from God. So, before we start let’s
make a point of asking him to fill us with his Spirit to help us to pray.
1.
And so, the priest arrives outside the gates.
I hope you can tell from this rather imperfect drawing that the gates
were a work of art, and seeing them would have lifted his spirits and started
the process of thanksgiving. Jesus, of
course, practised thanksgiving himself – the best known examples are when he
broke bread and gave thanks for it – at the feeding of the 5000, the last supper,
at Cleopas’s house in Emmaus. And yet,
for us it’s easy for the act of thanksgiving to feel forced, unnatural. That’s why it’s so helpful to have a verse
like this one to help us to base our thanksgiving on. Out of the fullness of God’s grace we have
all received one blessing after another. One blessing after another! Do we really think like that, or are we
always concentrating on the negative things that we experience? But what are these wonderful blessings that
we’ve all received from God? Stibbe in
his book, suggests 6 things to focus on, when we give thanks to God. Of course we won’t thank him for all these
things every day, but maybe we could choose one each day. The first is spiritual blessings, primarily
that we have a relationship, a friendship with God through what Christ has done
for us – easy to say, but what an amazing God we have that he wants to be
alongside us to love, help and encourage us.
Physical blessings – for our health, and for the times
when we have experienced healing.
Emotional blessings -
anything which brings joy to our hearts, a kiss, a sunset, a
compliment, whatever it might be. For
those of us who still have any intellect left, we can give thanks for
intellectual blessings – anything that stimulates our minds. Then, there are Material blessings – even the
poorest person here has food, homes and enough to live on. The last of the six is relational blessings –
our families and the friendships we enjoy.
2.
So, having thanked God for all his wonderful provision the priest at the gates
would move into the big, open courtyard – the court of praise. In Psalm 100 when it says Enter his gates
with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, it sounds as if those 2
things, thanksgiving and praise, are two different words meaning the same
thing. But that isn’t the case. You see thanksgiving is all about what God
has done for us. Praise is about who
God is – what he’s like. We think about
the qualities of God and praise him because he’s good, because he’s loving, because he’s compassionate. The big question, though
is this: how can we praise God? – it doesn’t come
easily or naturally to us. Stibbe
suggests a number of ways we can do this, but there are two that I’ve found
particularly helpful. One is to use
Bible passages such as the psalms to help us.
Ps 145 is a good example. Here’s
an extract from it coming up on the screen to show you what I mean: 8The Lord is gracious and
compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. Praise you Lord, we might say, that even
though I’ve made such a mess of things, yet you are so gracious and forgiving
to me, and your love is constant.
The
other suggestion is to use the names of Jesus.
Stibbe has a list of the different names of
Jesus in the Bible, an A to Z running to nearly 6 pages! For example, our Hebrews passage (ch 4 v 14) mentions three of these names: Great High Priest. The Jewish high priest acted as kind of
intermediary, bringing the people to God and God to the people. But now Jesus is the great high priest,
enabling us to come to God. Jesus – I’m
sure you know the word means Saviour - you shall call his name Jesus, for he
shall save his people from their sins, the angel told Joseph at the birth
of Christ. And Son of God – Paul in 2
Corinthians explained what this name means when he said that God was in
Christ reconciling the world to himself. How amazing that the creator of the universe
should come into the world and die in order to bring us back within the fold of
his love!
So,
we can praise God for who he is, but why should we? What’s the point? Well, there are lots of reasons, but may I
suggest two? The first is that praising
God is good for us. As we look up and
focus on God and away from ourselves, it puts us into the background and God
into the foreground. That can only be a
good thing. And the other thing it does
is to prepare us for the next stage on our prayer journey, and that’s
confession. God’s greatness can only
remind us of our sinfulness.
3.
The priest in the temple is now moving through the court of praise towards a
great brass altar. On the Day of
Atonement the high priest would take some blood from a bull and a goat and
sprinkle it over the altar, known as the altar of sacrifice. Then he would take a live goat and placing
his hands on its head, he would confess over it the sins of the people of
There
are 2 important thing to stress at this point: the altar of sacrifice is a place of
sincerity. In other words, saying sorry
without intending to stop sinning makes a mockery of confession. True confession always involves change – a
change of mind, a change of heart and a change of behaviour. In our minds we need to accept that what
we’ve done is sin and is therefore serious; in our hearts we need to reach the
point where sin is profoundly distasteful to us, and in our actions, our
behaviour, there will be an observable change – others will notice. The second thing is this: the altar of sacrifice is a place of
scrutiny. It’s really helpful reading
through the 10 commandments from time to time and measuring our lives against
that standard; there’s one, though, that
often gets overlooked, the 2nd. You shall not make for yourself
an idol . . . you shall not bow down to them or worship them. In Moses’ day idolatry was a visible
phenomenon, but today it’s much more hidden – hear are a few to show you what I
mean: food, shopping, clothes, DIY, sport,
mobile phones, computers, alcohol, drugs,
chocolate. But there are 3 idols which
seem to grip people more than the others.
I’ve seen more Christians fall away or become little more than nominal
because of one of these and they are (I’m sure you’re on the edge of your
seats!) money, sex and power. More than
any others these three can force us on to the slippery slope of a destructive
lifestyle. Time spent at the altar of sacrifice will be well spent if we take
time to confess our sins in these areas.
4. Finally the priest makes his way into the
large building at the back of the temple compound – the
The
first is by the golden table of shewbread. On it there were 12 pieces of bread
representing the 12 tribes of
The
other visual aid in the
I
have been aware ever since I started preparing this sermon that there is so
much that could be said about prayer, and that there are so many things that I
have left unsaid, so many questions that you may have that I have not touched
on, or things that I’ve hinted at and left unclear. But my aim has been to show that it is
possible to have a shape, a pattern, to our praying. You don’t need to pray through the temple to
have a thriving prayer life, nor will using this method necessarily make your
times of prayer more fulfilling. But,
hopefully, the four things I’ve mentioned today will often feature in our
prayers. Thanksgiving to God for
all that he has given us and done for us.
Praise to God for who He is.
Confession for the times we have allowed other things (like
money, sex or power) to become idols in our hearts, and Supplication –
when we ask or seek or knock at the gates of heaven, praying about our own
needs and the needs of others.
Prayer.