09 Mar From anxious to amen

• Our species has been through a lot over the past few years. We’ve had more than a few curve balls thrown at us and different twists and turns that we’ve had to navigate through, and if we’re really honest with ourselves the reality is that for many of us our faith / relationship with God has taken a real beating
• Due to:
  • Disconnection – from people in general but from other believers specifically, from corporate worship environments, from the gathered church – maybe you’ve only recently started to get back into the rhythm of this. Connection paradox – feeling connected but isolated/alone. The exponentially expanding array of connections tends to become overwhelming. We find ourselves spread so thinly across so many connections that we can rapidly lose the ability to deepen our relationships with anyone.
  • Distraction – in the hyper-connected digital age in which we live, staying focused on one thing feels like an impossible feat. The buzz of a notification, the temptation of an endless feed, or the “ding” of an email arriving — all conspire to fragment our attention. Our ability to concentrate is slipping away – and this includes our ability to focus on God; to prioritise your relationship with Him and seek His kingdom first above all else. “One thing I ask” – we’re not good at that
  • Disappointments – the gap between expectation and reality. You thought your life would turn out differently, you thought you’d be further along, you thought God would come through, you thought XXX would pay off
• If you feel any or all of these things:
  • Firstly, rest assured that you are not alone! I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t feel this way
  • Secondly, the fact that you’re here tells me you’re wanting to do something about it. Maybe you’re not even consciously aware of that!
• If you are feeling this way, what you need the most is a re-igniting of your faith; for the Holy Spirit to blow on the embers of your faith until it’s a raging, roaring bonfire again
• So let me introduce it this way. Illustration: I have been married for 13 years (my marriage will officially be a teenager) in November this year (and 3 kids) and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the key to any successful relationship is communication. When a relationship is deteriorating, the first thing to suffer is communication, and conversely if a waning relationship is ever to be rekindled the first thing that needs to come back is communication – just need to start talking again
• In the same way, if you want to reignite your relationship with God, this is where it has to start. In other words today is all about prayer

READ Philippians 4:4-9

Three initial things I want to point out about this passage

1. This passage applies to everyONE

• How do I know that? Well this passage begins by talking about anxiety. And the word for “anxious” in the original language is the word merimnáō which is a catch-all word best translated as “concerned, to have care or to worry”. The idea inherent in this word is of an individual attempting to carry the burden of the future by themselves and expressing a level of concern about things over which one has no control
• I’d be surprised if there was anyone in the room who COULDN’T relate to this
• And Paul is addressing an anxious audience and saying that the antidote to your anxiety is prayer. Or more specifically, to transform each anxiety into a prayer. Every anxiety that you have can be repurposed into a prayer. He seems to be suggesting that the more anxious we are, the more we tend to pray…but that the effect of praying more, is that our anxiety starts to dissipate and diminish
• As to exactly how this happens we’ll unpack in a moment, but if this is actually what Paul is suggesting, then I think everyone alive on the planet right now stands to gain from praying and from taking heed of this passage

2. This passages applies to everyTHING

• Paul talks about praying “in every situation”. So not only is prayer relevant to EVERYONE it’s relevant to everyone about EVERYTHING. There is no situation about which prayer has no relevance or cannot make a material difference or impact.
• As Corrie ten Boom once said, “Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.” If prayer can’t help the thing, then the thing isn’t even considered a thing

3. This passage is a COMMAND 

• The tense of this passage in the original Greek is “present imperative”, which means that it isn’t just an exhortation or an encouragement or something optional that would be nice to do if we decide to do it. It’s emphatic; a command
• Effectively the Apostle Paul is saying, “just stop it. Stop being anxious. Stop worrying and I do not under any circumstances give you any allowances to worry about anything”.
• It’s pretty strong, right? It’s pretty black and white. And maybe we can find this tone naive at best or even offensive at worst. “That’s all well and good for you to say Paul, but I’ve got ___________ [insert whatever your situation is here]”.
• Two things I’d say to that:
  • Firstly, Paul wasn’t exactly on a vacation when he wrote this letter. As a matter of fact he was literally sitting in a jail cell whilst penning these words, so he’s not speaking from a position of privilege or entitlement or being in some super spiritual “third heaven” and out of touch with the common person
  • Secondly, the passages that are hard to stomach are the ones we need the most – we don’t approach scripture like a buffet, picking and choosing the verses we like and conveniently ignoring the rest. The portions of scripture that are difficult to digest are the very ones we need to press into more

So if this passage about prayer truly does apply to everyone and everything and is a direct command…why is it so hard to pray?

• There’s a simplicity to this passage – it’s not abstract or ambiguous as to what Paul is talking about – but if you’ve ever tried to apply it in your life, you’ll know it’s anything but. Very rarely have I met anyone who feels like they’re just crushing it at prayer
• So what I want to do is to be super practical:
  • Firstly, I want to give you a simple guide around HOW to pray
  • Secondly, I want to arm you with some practical strategies to enhance and protect your prayer life
  • Thirdly, I’ll end by getting after some of those internal blockages preventing us from really getting immersed in prayer

How to pray – P.R.A.Y.

Press Pause

• In order to START praying we first need to STOP – not just physically, but to slow down the pace of our soul and be engaged and present with God, the one we are talking to
• We’ve all been in conversations where the person you’re talking to is physically present but it’s so clear that their mind and attention is elsewhere. They’re distracted, preoccupied, looking over your shoulder trying to get out of the conversation with you to talk to the person in the room they really want to talk to
• So as we come to God in prayer we need to eliminate the noise and the distractions in our lives, and the way to do that is by pausing. “Be still and know that I am God” the Psalmist says (Psalm 46:10). Take a moment to slow everything down. Pay attention to your breath, to your heartbeat, to your surroundings
• Doesn’t have to be long, but it is a crucial part of the process

Really Rejoice

• In Luke 17:11-19 we read the story of Jesus healing 10 men with leprosy but only one came back to Jesus. It says that they were healed “as they went” (v 14) – in other words, there was a time delay between their prayer request and the answer to prayer (v 13). It’s only as they were leaving their time with Jesus and heading back home, that the healing came. And because of that delay, they forgot to give Him the due honour and gratitude that He deserved
• 1 in 10 – 10%. I wonder if that ratio has changed? So often we forget to rejoice in the things that God has already done or blessed us with. We fail to give due honour to God when He does the very thing we asked Him to do not long ago
• There’s a type of rejoicing that is tokenistic, done out of duty and obligation. Get beneath that and ask the Spirit to bring to your mind and attention the things that you can be thankful to God for in your life
• Expressing our gratitude is a great place to start our time in prayer – we are to “ENTER his courts with thanksgiving” (Psalm 100:4)

Actively Ask

• Paul says, “present your requests to God”
  • Firstly, the word “request” – in other words, ask! And the word “request” is very deliberate – not demands, not ultimatums, not “I claim it by faith” etc. A request
  • Secondly, “present” the requests – in another translation it says to “let your requests BE MADE KNOWN to God”. In other words, be specific, articulate it – not just “bless my life” or “change me”. Tell him clearly what it is that you need. Important to note that it’s less about informing God about something that He doesn’t already know, and more about making ourselves aware of the specific areas in our life that are in need of an intervention from God. A way of humbling ourselves before the Lord and reminding ourselves of our need for Him
• Don’t just ask for big things, ask God for the small things as well. If you only ask God for the big things you are creating less room and providing fewer opportunities for God to do the miraculous in your life
  • Illustration: flybuys story
  • I’m going to pray for my flybuys balance AND global issues – it’s not either/or
• I don’t know if I can necessarily make a theological case for this, but certainly I have a growing body of anecdotal evidence that God will very often give a quick “yes” to the needs and requests of new Christians. And when I think about it from a parenting point of view it makes a lot of sense
  • Illustration: I have three kids ranging in age from 6 months to 6 years and it’s fair to say that the needs and requests of my 6 month old daughter are different to those of my 6 year old son. The range of needs of my 6 month old (at least the ones she’s conscious of) I could probably count on one hand, and if you rewind even earlier in her life she effectively had only one request: MILK. And when that cry for milk comes, Jess and I as her parents aren’t having to deliberate whether or not we say YES to that request. It’s a simple answer! She’s asking for something, and we’re saying yes. Well Jess is saying yes, I have nothing to offer in that department (believe me I’ve tried)
  • But of course as you grow older your needs evolve and become more complex. And whilst being a good parent to a newborn means saying YES to their every request, being a good parent to a 6 year old actually means saying NO to some of their requests…and to say YES to their every request at this stage of their life would make me not a good parent but a bad and irresponsible one
  • That transition is a difficult one – when a child starts hearing “no” or “not yet” for the first time and how they respond to that. And it’s a difficult transition. But the hope is that as they pass through that difficult phase they’ll eventually get to a stage where they can handle a no
• And the same is true of us spiritually in our relationship with God. I’d say it this way

Yield Your Yes

• And that’s really what this last letter is about
• What you might call the “prayer of relinquishment”. The Bible is full of this type of prayer, the most notable and dramatic being the one prayed by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42)
• The one essential feature of the prayer of relinquishment is STRUGGLE:
  • Jesus struggled in the garden to the point that He sweat drops of blood,
  • Abraham struggled as he relinquished his son Isaac
  • Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego struggled as they prayed: “even if he doesn’t” and stepped inside the blazing furnace
• The struggle is between our surface desire to control our own fate and future, and our deepest desire to trust God completely. And when the struggle is over and we finally relinquish, what we are doing is fully and wholeheartedly agreeing with God that His way is altogether right and good. We loosen the grip on our own tiny visions for our lives, in exchange for the far greater reality that He has in store for us

Practical strategies

Be both organised and organic

• Set a time and a place, have a list – build it into your daily/weekly schedule, diarise it, set an alarm in your schedule – all of these things help
• But also: keep it organic and “pray as you go” – how else is it possible to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). More akin to breathing. It’s an ongoing conversation so keep it going. Not just about one big prayer at one point in the day but lots of smaller prayer throughout the day
• It’s both/and not either/or – you want to have both a ROUTINE of prayer and a RHYTHM of prayer; quality AND frequency
• Similar in my relationship with my wife – not just date nights and not just the everyday, but both – that’s what makes a rich and real relationship

Pray with others

• Though we might fail to notice this in our hyper-individualised age, the Bible often assumes that God’s people will pray together. Clearest example: the Lord’s Prayer starts not with “MY Father in heaven” but “OUR Father in heaven”
• There is so much power in praying together that cannot be found in praying alone. Encouragement, unity, stirring faith, operation of the gifts of the Spirit – to name a few
• Praying together was an important rhythm of the early church. Time and time again, the book of Acts reveals that the first Christians were often all together, devoting themselves to prayer. They prayed together in the temple and in their homes, when they were sick and when they were filled with the Spirit, at mealtimes and in times of persecution

Engage your creativity

• If I asked you to sit in a white blank room and pray for an hour that would be difficult
• Prayer doesn’t just have to look and sound one particular way! Get creative with your prayer life
• Make prayer tactile and sensory! Engage the five senses and the entire person – that’s what the ancient cathedrals were all about, creating environments that facilitate prayer by stimulating and engaging our senses
• Some examples:
  • Hold a rock in your hand and praise God for being our rock and our salvation
  • Pick up a nail, rub it between your fingers and reflect on the price that Jesus paid for you on the cross
  • Put salt on your tongue and get thirsty, and then pray the words of Psalm 42 – “as the deer pants for the water so my soul longs for you”
  • When you’re at the gym lifting weights on the bench press, imagine that each plate represents one of your children and every time you lift that barbell off your chest, lift up your children to God
  • When you’re boiling the kettle to make yourself a cup of tea, instead of scrolling through your phone or doing something else, stand there and watch the water boil, listen to it, and pray that God would heat up your relationship with Him
  • When you’re driving and you’ve got Apple Maps on and it’s telling you where to go, ask God for direction in your life and wisdom in making decisions

Pray where you are

• Understanding your season of life and its unique challenges is important, and being realistic around that – but also we mustn’t wait for some ideal time in the future when I’m “less busy” before we really start to pray. Because then we’ll never start. Life will not hand you an opportunity to pray, you’ve got to be proactive and carve out the time yourself
• Matthew 14 – famous story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, but immediately after what we read is that He “dismissed the crowd…[and] after He dismissed the crowd he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray” (vv 22-23). In other words He didn’t wait for them to leave, and He also didn’t wait for another opportunity when there were less demands on him. He told them to leave and then He went to pray. If you are waiting for a more convenient time or an easier stage of life to pray you will never do it. You have to withdraw and retreat in the midst of the madness
• Jon Tyson: “stop trying to escape your life thinking that God is somewhere else. Anywhere can be turned into an altar of encounter”
• I want to end with a story to show you what this could look like
• Illustration: Susanna (Wesley)
  • Born in 1669, the youngest of 25 (!) children
  • Daughter of a prominent minister in London and then ended up herself marrying a minister by the name of Samuel when she was 19 years old
  • Went on to have 19 children but 9 of them died in infancy, including two sets of twins. Another was accidentally smothered in the night by a nurse. One of their children was crippled, and another couldn’t talk until he was nearly 6 years old. Not to mention that Susanna herself was chronically ill for most of her life
  • Her husband was not particularly well received by his congregation, in fact they hated his preaching so much that on two separate occasions members of his church burnt their house down. They lost everything, twice. Not only this but someone slit their cow’s udders so that they couldn’t get any milk, killed their dog and burned their flax field
  • And not only was her husband Samuel not a particularly good minister but he was also terrible with personal finances, and once had to spent several months inside a debtor’s prison
  • At home, he cared very little for domestic duties and so the job of working the gardens, milking the cow, homeschooling the children and managing the household affairs fell entirely on Susanna
  • Can we agree that Susanna’s life was complicated and difficult? Understatement of the century right?
  • And yet early in her life, Susanna had vowed to the Lord that for every hour she spent in entertainment, she would give the same to Him in prayer and the Word. With everything going on in her life this commitment becoming nearly impossible to fulfill and the thing she found hardest was getting any time alone in a house overflowing with children to spend with God. But she came up with a solution
  • She would bring her Bible to her favourite chair and throw her apron up over her head. And she advised her children that whenever they saw her with her apron over her head, it meant that she was in prayer and was not to be disturbed. When she was under that apron, she was with God, and there the presence of God came time and time again.
  • She prayed where she was. Now there’s one little detail I left out in the story
  • Susanna’s surname was Wesley. And out of those 10 surviving children she raised, two of them were called John and Charles. Maybe you recognise these names: John Wesley and Charles Wesley. John Wesley preached to nearly a million people in his day. At the age of 70 he preached to a crowd of 32,000 people all without any amplification. And his brother Charles Wesley wrote over 9,000 hymns in his lifetime, many of which are still sung today.

Discussion questions:

1. What struck you the most from the sermon?
2. What do you usually do when you feel anxious? How does prayer help deal with anxiety?
3. Look at the acronym P.R.A.Y. Which area(s) do you think you need to grow the most in?
4. What are some practical things you can do to improve your prayer life? Be specific
5. How does the gospel fuel prayer life?