1 Lent 07 C

Sermon Series on “The Mystery of Prayer”

Part 1:“The Mystery of the Nature of God and Prayer”

This Sunday begins a Lenten sermon series which I have entitled, “The Mystery of Prayer.” I call it a mystery because there is so much we don’t understand about prayer, and as soon as we think we have figured out all that there is to know about prayer, something happens to cause us to have to rethink our view of prayer.

In the coming weeks I am going to be speaking about the Mystery of Answered Prayer, the Mystery of Unanswered Prayer, the Mystery of the Will of God and Prayer, and the Mystery of the Methods of Prayer.

I’m convinced that the reason why we don’t pray more often is because we are confused about what prayer really is. Oh, we have a vague notion of what it is, but we have experienced such varying results from prayer that we remain a bit perplexed by the whole subject.

Perhaps your idea of prayer may be the same as an overweight businessman who decided it was time to shed some excess pounds. He took his new diet seriously, even changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he arrived at work carrying a gigantic coffee cake. All his coworkers scolded him, but his smile remained cherubic.

“This is a very special coffeecake,” he explained. “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and there in the window were a host of goodies. I felt this was no accident, so I prayed, ‘Lord, if you want me to have one of these delicious coffeecakes, let me have a parking place directly in front of the bakery.’

“And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was!”

If you are confused about prayer or uncertain as to whether it really works, may I suggest that you stick with me over these next few weeks as we explore different aspects of prayer?

Today I want to begin by speaking on the subject “The Mystery of God’s Nature and Prayer.”

One of the biggest problems we have with prayer is not related to prayer itself, but to the God to whom we pray. Because so many are confused about who God is, they are confused about what God can and cannot do, what he wants and does not want to do.

This confusion comes about because of our limited human understanding of God. As a result we can make the mistake, for example, of a woman who approached G. Campbell Morgan and asked him if it was all right to pray about little things. He responded, “Madam, can you think of anything in your life that is big to God?”

J. B. Phillips wrote a book one time entitled “Your God is Too Small.” The premise of the book is that we have such a limited view of who God is and what God can do that we limit our prayers to and expectations of God.

In order for us to unlock the mystery of prayer we must start with getting a better understanding of the nature of God. Because it is impossible to comprehend all we would want to know about God, we can only get glimpses into the nature of God by looking at how God reveals Himself in Scripture.

One aspect of God’s nature we glean from Scripture is that God is eternal. He exists not only in space and time, but also outside space and time. As a result God would by nature know the past, present, and future of this time and space world in which we live since He lives in eternity.

Another aspect of God’s nature is that he is omni-present. The Bible describes a God who is everywhere at the same time. There is no place where God is not present.

"Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there; if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you." (Psalm 139:7-12)

This is not to say that God’s form is spread out so that parts of Him exist in every location. God is spirit; He has no physical form. He is present everywhere in that everything is immediately in His presence. At the same time He is present everywhere in the universe. No one can hide from Him and nothing escapes His notice.

Another aspect of God’s nature that we often forget about and that is that God is omniscient. The word omniscient means “all knowing.” God is not a giant man in a white beard sitting on a throne in heaven. While that is metaphorically how God is described in the book of Revelation, he is described that way only so that we can apprehend in a human way the majesty, power and glory of God.

The gospel of John in chapter four tells us, as I just mentioned, that God is spirit. The essence of God is spirit. That is why God has created us with a spiritual nature. We are created in the image of God in the sense that we have a spiritual nature like God’s spiritual nature. Our spirits are simply housed in our bodies. That is why Jesus said that we must be born again of the Spirit. We must have a spiritual rebirth in order to have a relationship with the God who is spirit.

Someone came up to me one time and said, “I like to pray to the saints because that way my prayer can get through to God, because God is so busy with all of the prayers that are brought to him, that I want my prayers to have a special entrée into God.”

In essence, this person was saying that God was not capable of hearing and knowing all of the requests that are brought before him. The Bible describes God as being able to count all the stars and to know the number of hairs on our heads (perhaps a harder job for some than for others). Matthew 10 reminds us that God knows when a sparrow falls to the ground. Jeremiah 1 says God knows us before we were born. Psalm 139 exalts the knowledge of God. Hebrews 4:13 tells us, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.”

Matthew 6:8 reminds us that “…your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

Pastor David Hocking tells the story of a woman who was full of worry, and it was affecting her family and relationships with other people. He first noticed it in her prayers. In the home Bible study which she attended, they would often pray aloud – it was a learning time for all of them. When she prayed, her material needs were prominent, and she continued to repeat herself, displaying a great deal of nervous energy and frustration. When Hocking asked her about it, she expressed great disappointment with prayer itself, since she had rarely seen God answer any of her prayers. After calming her down, Hocking read Matthew 6 to her. He said this, “When I finished and looked up at her, she was crying. I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘Why pray, when you can worry?’ I started to correct her, and she stopped me and said, ‘I know how it goes. My problem is not trusting the Lord – He obviously knows all about my needs.’ She was her own best counselor. God’s peace began to control her in the days ahead, and she seemed like a different woman. Her confidence grew as she began to focus on the God who knows, rather than on the needs she had.”

You may say, “Okay, that’s all well and good. But sometimes when I read the Bible to get an idea of prayer as it relates to the nature of God, I read things like this:”

—"I the Lord do not change." (Malachi 3:6)

But then:

—"My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused." (Hosea 11:8)

Is this a contradiction? Does God change or doesn’t he? Those two statements, both recorded in the Bible as the words of God, frame a major theological dispute. I could marshal other verses that clearly present a changeless God, and balance that list with an even longer list of passages that show God changing his mind.

Truth to tell, we want some of both: a trustworthy, dependable God we can count on and yet a God who allows himself to be affected by us. What we conclude about this issue may well determine how we view the utility—or futility—of prayer.

Origen was the first Christian writer known to mull over the paradox of praying to a God who does not change: "First, if God foreknows what will come to be and if it must happen, then prayer is in vain. Second, if everything happens according to God's will and if what He wills is fixed and no one of the things He wills can be changed, then prayer is in vain." Origen came down on the side of a changeless God, concluding that God from the "foundations of the world" could see in advance all that a person would freely choose, including the contents of their prayers.

Many philosophers followed along the same track, one laid down by Aristotle's notion of God as the "First Unmoved Mover." Immanuel Kant, for example, called it "an absurd and presumptuous delusion" to think that one person's prayer might deflect God from the plan of his wisdom.

Calvinism, with its emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God, likewise shifted the emphasis of prayer from its effect on God to its effect on the pray-er. As Matthew Henry put it, "It is true, nothing we can say can have any influence upon him, or move him to show us mercy, but it may have an influence upon ourselves, and help to put us into a frame fit to receive mercy." The devout Jonathan Edwards questioned whether petitionary prayer had any effect. He wrote, "God is sometimes represented as if he were moved and persuaded by the prayers of his people; yet it is not to be thought that God is properly moved or made willing by our prayers"; instead, God bestows mercy "as though he were prevailed upon by prayer."

As discoveries in science provided explanations for phenomena that people had always considered part of providence, modern sons and daughters of the Enlightenment saw less reason for prayer. The natural world became more predictable, apparently less subject to the whims of God or those who prayed to God. Thomas Hardy described God as "the dreaming, dark, dumb Thing that turns the handle of this idle Show." Kurt Vonnegut mocked the Serenity Prayer in his book Slaughterhouse-Five:

GOD GRANT ME
THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,
COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
AND WISDOM ALWAYS
TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim, in that book, could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Arguments by philosophers and cynical novelists alike, however, collide with the portrait of God in the Bible, that of a personal being who listens attentively to prayers and responds. Jesus gave flesh to that portrait, and the disciples took up praying right where Jesus left off, asking God for such things as physical healings, liberation from prison and safety on missionary journeys. Paul interceded for churches constantly, and did not hesitate to make personal, specific requests.

The world's most famous prayer, the Lord's Prayer or "Our Father," Jesus gave spontaneously in answer to his disciples' request for teaching. Introducing it, Jesus acknowledged that God already knows our needs in advance of our prayers:

“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This, then, is how you should pray.”

Philip Yancey said once, “For Jesus, God's sovereignty is no deterrent but a positive encouragement to pray. We do not have to work to gain God's attention through long words and ostentatious displays of religiosity. We don't have to convince God of our sincerity or our needs. We already have the Father's ear, as it were. God knows everything about us, and still God listens. We can get right to the point.”

"Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible," wrote Jacques Ellul, a modern French philosopher who could not avoid the Bible's clear statements that God acts in history in response to prayer. Indeed, the great hopes of the Old Testament—Abraham's family, Joseph's ascendancy in Egypt, the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, the victories of Joshua and King David, deliverance from Assyria and Babylon, the rebuilding of the Temple, the yearning for Messiah—all found fulfillment after God's people had cried out in prayer.

Throughout, the Bible depicts God as being deeply affected by his people. God "delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love." Yet, as the prophets tell, at times God feels loaded down with the nation's sins, wearied by disobedience. God's patience reaches an end point: "For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant."

The mystery of prayer and the nature of God is rooted in our human attempts to understand the God who is beyond our comprehension. We know God is eternal, all-knowing, omni-present – present everywhere at every moment, and that God is changeless in his nature. However, knowing these things reminds us that we do not know how God can be eternal, omni-present, and omniscient. We trust in the divine Word of God, the Bible to have accurately revealed what we need to know about the nature of God. Because we can trust what scripture says about God we can trust that He knows our needs before we ask Him. At the same time, the Bible makes it very clear that we are to ask for the things we need and for the needs of others.

The Bible does not hesitate to suggest that our prayers make a difference to God and to the world. How that is possible remains a mystery. Next week we will look at the mystery of answered prayer.

Until then I would urge you to think about, meditate on the nature of God. Raise your scope of who God is and you will raise your expectations related to prayer.

If you have not yet come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ then your prayers will be greatly hindered. The Bible says that we have access to the very throne room of God through our faith in and relationship with Jesus Christ. I would urge you today to turn from everything you know is wrong and turn your life over to Jesus Christ. Allow him to become the ruler of your life and then watch as he begins to unlock the mystery of prayer for you.