It is a biblical truth that God’s heart is for
the world. God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son. God
demonstrates that His heart is for the world by sending His Son to a people
who love the darkness of sin and bring them into the glorious light of His
grace, love and life.
God’s heart is for the world: 1 Timothy 2:4
says, “God our Saviour wants all people to be saved and to come to a
knowledge of the truth.” 2 Peter 3:9 “He is patient with you, not
wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
And He has asks us, calls us, commands us to join Him
to have that same heart, a heart of love for a world that is deep in the
darkness of sin.
As we think of our part in the task of missions around
the world we need to realize that God wins people through people. You’ve
heard it said that God has no hands but our hands; God has no feet but our
feet. And if God is going to win people out of darkness and into the light
of his grace and love and mercy then it will only be done through us.
This morning I want us to think of how we can
participate with God in bringing people out of darkness into light. I’d
like to suggest that the first thing we need to do is pray. It seems so
simple, it seems so basic that I’m almost ashamed to have to preach on it.
But it remains that prayer is the means that we are able to unleash the
power of God to work in people’s lives.
Let me say that again - prayer is the means that we are
able to unleash the power of God to work in people’s lives.
In our discussions about prayer we often will
say that prayer is powerful and effective, but that’s not exactly true. God
is all powerful – prayer is the key that unleashes God on the world.
Prayer is like a clutch. The clutch engages the engine. To be sure,
without the clutch the engine is not engaged, but it does not drive the car
to speeds of 10, 20, 50, 100 kilometers per hour - the engine does that.
The clutch merely engages the engine.
And so prayer - it is not powerful. God is all
powerful. Prayer merely engages God, enables God to act.
I know it sounds like a contradiction to say that God
is all powerful but prayer enables God to act. If He is all powerful then
He doesn’t need prayer to enable Him to act … unless He is the one who wrote
the rules. If in His sovereignty He says, “I will only act as I am asked,
as I am invited,” then He still remains sovereign.
And so it is that in His sovereignty God has declared
that we are able to shut Him out – through our lack of prayer – or we can
bring Him in through our prayers.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Abraham’s
prayer for Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18. I find it interesting that one
of the first prayers in the bible is a prayer of intercession. It could be
said that the prayer of intercession is prayer at its highest. And in
Genesis 18 we have a great example of what it looks like.
As we think about participating with God in bringing
people out of darkness and into light, from the power of Satan to God there
are four lessons that we learn about intercessory prayer from Abraham’s
prayer in Genesis 18.
The first lesson is be daring.
Don’t you think Abraham is bold? Don’t you think
Abraham is daring in this prayer, almost bordering on impertinence? As you
read this conversation don’t you think, “How dare Abraham push his request
like that? Having received his first answer from the Lord that He would not
destroy the city for the sake of 50, was he satisfied? No. How dare
Abraham go on down to 10?”
But what a wonderful model! Clearly we are called to
dare in our prayers. Do you dare ask God to do that which only He can do?
As I think of my own prayers and review them, I think if God wasn’t so
gracious and patient He would be so bored with my prayers – they bore me!
Always the same, for health, for safety, for peace, a life free from
conflict. Boring.
We need to remember that with God nothing is
impossible. As we learned last week, even the irreversible is possible.
When was the last time that you really dared as you
prayed. Lord save this person, but not only this person, but her husband as
well, and not just her husband but her whole family, and not only her family
but her neighbours. Let’s pray daringly, asking God to do that which only He
can do.
Second, pray specifically. Abraham is very
specific in his prayer. Will you sweep away the city if you are able to
find 50 righteous people there? Then 45, then 40 and all the way down to
10, very specific.
What I want us to avoid is the general blessing
prayer. It’s a sweet prayer but it really is a sign of laziness. You the
know the prayer – it says, “Lord bless everyone at Markham Baptist Church”.
But it really is a sign of laziness – I mean, what you
do want them to be blessed with? More children? Puppies? (Don’t pray that
for me!)
The reformer Martin Luther used to say, we must be
honest with God and we must be perfectly clear when we talk to Him, we must
tell Him exactly what we want.
You know the Blue Jays fan who wanted desperately for
the Blue Jays to win and sent up a prayer of great urgency. “O Lord, let
there be a home run.” And remarkably, very quickly a home run was hit and
scored … but it was for the opposite team! And in the silence afterwards as
the applause had died down, he heard a voice from above say, “Be
specific.”
As we pray for others to come from darkness of sin and
into the light of Christ pray for specific people, pray for specific
opportunities for you to share your love for Christ. Pray for specific
events that the eyes of their heart might be opened to the grace of Jesus
Christ. Pray specifically for situations in their lives might be used for
God’s glory.
The third lesson here is pray with a spirit of love.
Indeed true love always gives of itself and this type of prayer is giving of
oneself. It takes the needs of others and makes them your own. It is the
type of love Abraham had for Sodom. He hadn’t even been to the city; he
didn’t know any of the people in that city except for his nephew Lot. Yet
there he is praying for this city - why? Because he had a love for them.
Abraham’s prayer did not come from a sense of calling,
or faithfulness to duty. If it were any of these he would have stopped long
before he got God to agree to the number 10. No, Abraham demonstrates a
deep seated compassion for the people of Sodom and it was that love that
compels him to pray.
Richard Tanner used to be the pastor of the Anglican
church called The Church of the Messiah on Avenue Road and Dupont.
It probably is most famous for being the church right across the street from
the Hare Krishna temple on Avenue Road. Richard Tanner tells of how his
people used to pray for the people of the Hare Krishna temple across the
road from them. Some of the prayers as they began to focus their prayers of
intercession on them contained phrases such as “Lord, show them the error of
their ways.” Or, “Lord, confound their attempts at proselytizing,” or
“Lord, deliver them from Satan’s hand.” And all of those prayers could be
justified and there is truth in those prayers but Richard Tanner says, “the
motive from which they come is a very unloving motive, it is a very
judgmental motive.”
But Richard Tanner says that early one Saturday morning
during one of their prayer meetings the tone changed completely. Someone
began to pray, “Lord, thank you that you have caused our neighbours across
the road to hunger and thirst after righteousness, they are so much like us.
Lord, thank you for putting that hunger into them as you did in us before we
came to know your Son Jesus.”
Another prayed, “By our love for them may Jesus be
proclaimed. May they see by the way that we care for them and the way that
we reach out in small ways that Jesus is in their midst and loves them
too.” Together they thanked God for the community that the Hare Krishna
shared together. And they prayed that through God’s love for them and in the
context of their coming together as a community they might come to know the
source of all love - Jesus.
Tanner concludes, “It isn’t so much that we stopped
praying or that we were praying in a terribly different way for these people
across the road, but our motive was different. It was no longer because,
‘We had the truth and they didn’t and they better shape up.’ But now it was
because the Holy Spirit was teaching us to love them.”1
There is an old hymn that goes, “Come down, O love
divine” And the Holy Spirit is described as divine or holy love. We need
to pray that God would kindle in us a fervent love for the world around.
Pray lovingly, pray daringly, pray specifically, and
the fourth lesson is pray with perseverance. Abraham was persistent.
Do you know the parable in Luke 11 that Jesus tells
that speaks of a man who has a late night visitor drop in on him and he
doesn’t have any food in the house. All the stores are closed so he goes to
his other friend’s house to borrow a loaf of bread. There he is banging on
his friend’s door and you can imagine the man of the house leaning out his
bedroom widow and saying, “What is it?” “I need a loaf of bread.”
“Can’t it wait till morning?” “No, I must have it now
for my friend has traveled a long way and is hungry.”
“Well he’ll just have to wait til morning when the
shops open, because we’re all snug in our beds and I’m not getting up right
now. Good night.” And with that he puts his head back in the window and
goes to bed.
But the man at the door doesn’t leave, he continues to
knock at the door and Jesus says, “I tell you though he will not get up
and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s
persistence he will get up and give him as much as he needs.”
Do you see? This is a prayer of interecession. The man
comes to the door, asking for bread for another person. And the punch line
of the parable is that you must keep knocking, keep on asking.
Now all sorts of questions arise at this point. Why
doesn’t healing come to one prayed for and not the other? Why is this
person protected from danger but another is not? This person responds to
the gospel and is converted, but that person continues to reject Christ.
The only answer to these questions is that we don’t know. We don’t know,
but I do know that we give up too easily in our prayers.
We must remember Abraham’s persistence. We must
remember that Moses prayed for forty days and forty nights to stop the wrath
of God against Israel. Elijah repeated his prayer seven times before rain
clouds appeared on the horizon. Daniel had to press his case for three
weeks before he was answered and blessing came.
Be persistent. Is it because God is hard of hearing?
No. It is because God want to tease us? No. It is that we are wearing God
down? No.
We need to be persistent in our prayers for two reasons
– one, we show God that we are genuinely concerned about the people for whom
we pray and we are submitting our concern to His will. And second, I
believe that when we pray we are joining the battle that we learn about in
Ephesians 6. There is a battle going on the heavenly realms for the souls
of men and women of earth, and Satan will not give up his ownership of souls
easily. So we need to persist in our prayers to bring God into situations.
One of my favourite books about prayer is entitled,
Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala, Pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle in New
York. In this book he tells how God has called him and his congregation to
prayer. He tells of how after years of blessing and amazing growth of the
congregation and the many outreach projects that they had begun in the inner
city, Jim Cymbala was faced with a daughter who drew away not only from him
and his wife, but also from God.
There were many nights when they had no idea where she
was. As the situation grew worse he tried everything – pleading, scolding,
controlling, but nothing worked. She just hardened all the more.
Eventually she left home and began to live a life that most parents dread
for their children. Jim tried everything until finally God got Jim’s
attention and said to him, “Call upon me in the day of trouble and I will
answer you.”
And so he began to pray. But it wasn’t until one cold
night in February that someone in the church prayer meeting said, “Pastor we
have to pray for Chrissy together. We have to stop this meeting and pray
for your daughter.” And so they did. With one voice the people of
Brooklyn Tabernacle called out to God on Chrissy’s behalf. Jim was in
tears.
32 hours later, on Thursday morning, while Jim is
shaving, his wife bursts through the door and says, “Chrissy’s here.” “
“Where?” “Here! Go down and see her.”
And so he went, and as he entered the kitchen there she
was on the kitchen floor, rocking on her hands and knees sobbing. Jim went
to her, knelt down and they hugged, she was crying and he was crying and she
was saying how sorry she was. Then all of a sudden she pulls back and
says, “Who was praying for me?”
He said, “What do you mean?
“I mean,” she continued, “who was praying for me? On
Tuesday night who was praying for me? In the middle of the night, God woke
me and showed me I was heading toward this abyss. There was no bottom to it
- it scared me to death. I was so frightened. I realized how hard I’ve been,
how wrong, how rebellious. But at the same time it was like God wrapped His
arms around me and held me tight. He kept me from sliding any further and He
said, I still love you. Who was praying for me dad?”2
My friends, when we come to God in prayer we do not
come as some beggar to the back door looking for table scraps. You and I
come to the front door of the king’s castle, we are ushered into the very
throne room itself where angels bow down with veiled faces and we come
before the king of Kings the earth is His footstool and the heavens are His
throne. All might all authority are in His hands.
How should we pray for others? Daringly, specifically,
lovingly, persistently.
Copyright MBC and Rev. Dr. Tom Cullen -
April 2009
-
In a message delivered by Richard Tanner at the Billy Graham School of
Evangelism, 1990.
-
Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Zondervan Publishing House, 1997) 59-65.
