AN INVITATION TO
COMMON PRAYER…
AND AN
EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
Stories of answered prayer can be both encouraging and
discouraging. On the one hand, we are inspired by the prayer warriors who
risked it all and prayed for the big stuff…and got it. On the other hand, we
look back at our own prayers and find it hard to point out the successes. And
we feel guilty.
George
Mueller (1805-1898) is one of those people whose stories have this dual effect.
Muller was an evangelist and the director of an orphanage that cared for over
10,000 orphans during his life. Muller was the kind of person who spent hours a
day praying.
One
evening he became aware that there would be no breakfast for them the next
morning. Mueller called his workers together and explained the situation. Two
or three prayed. "Now that is sufficient," he said. "Let us rise
and praise God for prayer answered!" The next morning they could not push
open the great front door. So they went out the back door and around the
building to see what was keeping it shut. Stacked up against the front door
were boxes filled with food. One of the workers later remarked, "We know
Who sent the baskets, but we do not know who brought them!"
These
are hard stories to take. They make us feel like we should pray for hours on
our knees but when we try, three minutes feels like an hour and we find we have
run out of things to pray. Frustration sets in and we allow defeat to steal
even our short prayer times from us.
The
Anglicans and Episcopalians have what is called a Common Book of Prayer. In it
are prayers for every occasion and time of the day and season of the church. It
is called Common because it is regular
as opposed to mundane. I am not
suggesting that we go out and buy one of these books for ourselves. What I am
suggesting is that we adopt the attitude of Common prayer and pray about
everything no matter how small.
And
rather than fret over the time spent in prayer or the success stories of the
Muellers, we receive the invitation from God to common prayer to pray to him
about everything. If we do this we will find that short, frequent prayers to
God will make life extraordinary.
James
concludes his letter with this invitation.
1. Pray in all circumstances
Christians are invited to pray about all situations.
James makes this very clear with two questions and answers. “Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them
pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise,” (13).
What
other conditions are there in life? When you boil life down to the basics you
are either happy or sad. So in short, pray in troubled times and pray in good
times. The word in Greek for “songs of praise” is where we get the word
“Psalms” from. So if you don’t know how to express your joy, read a Psalm out
loud that rejoices in God’s goodness.
Prayer
is simply talking to God. What happens when we pray day by day is that in
various ways we feel helpless. We are moved to pray every time the Spirit of
God, which is the spirit of prayer, emphasizes to us anew our helplessness, and
we realize how impotent we are to believe, to hope, to serve, to sacrifice, to
suffer, to read the Bible, to pray, and to struggle against our sinful desires.[i]
Helplessness
is not a bad thing, though in our pride we recoil from the idea of being
dependent. Where God is concerned, He who is the great source of all things,
why would we not depend on his goodness for daily needs?
So to
pray when we are in trouble is to admit our helplessness. To praise God in good
times is to celebrate his faithfulness to the helpless, giving us good times as
a reprieve from the troubled times.
Pray
about the big things and the little things. One writer said to pray like this:
“If it will glorify thy name, then grant my prayer and help me. But if it will
not glorify thy name, then let me remain in my predicament. And give me power
to glorify thy name in the situation in which I find myself.”
2. Pray when you are sick
Christians are especially invited to pray to God when
they are sick. James gets more specific in this element of prayer. The availability
of doctors or medicines in the first century was pretty slim. When Christians
got sick they could expect to lose wages and daily food, not to mention the
possibility of death. Perhaps they were in a context where prayer was the only
recourse.
There
were four parts to this occasion of prayer:
-
The elders were called to the sick person.
Family or friends would have called on the leaders of the church to come and
visit the person who may have too sick to come to them.
-
The elders do all the praying. It is not
expected that the sick person will pray; his or her task is to let them pray.
-
The faith is that of the elders. Prayer offered in faith refers to the
elders’ faith. Note that the sick person is not required to express any kind of
faith, so that “faith healing” is not about the patient but about the elders.
-
The elders pray over the person. This could
refer to the fact that the person is so sick they can’t get up. More likely it
means that the elders lay hands on the person after anointing them with oil.
The oil represents the Holy Spirit and the setting apart of the person for
healing by God.
This is
the only place in the Bible where we find this kind of instruction. It is a
limited reference to the act of believers praying for healing. Does that mean
we should disregard it? Not at all. Why wouldn’t we pray to God in our
sickness? Yes, go to the doctor. Yes, take your meds. But commit also this
illness to the Lord who cares for you. We have anointed several people with oil
in this church and we invite you to call on us as pastors and deacons to pray
for you.
3. Pray when you sin
Christians will be most effective in prayer when they
confess their sins to each other. James wrote, “If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your
sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed,”
(15b-16a).
Extremists
will go all the way and say that sickness is the result of sin, hands down. But
note the “if” in this verse: if they have sinned. Where confession of
sin is required is in cases where the illness is a direct result of sin. However,
there is no indication here that you have to go and search your past memories
for a forgotten or secret sin. The idea here is that the sick believer would
know full well what the nature of his or her sin is and should confess it. And
some illnesses are simply the consequence of living in a sinful world.
Confession
appears to have been a regular part of Christian worship in the early church.
Corporately, the church would confess that together they stray from God;
personally, it was encouraged to go to the person you hurt and confess your
sin.
In any
case, I have often wondered what confession would look like in a Sunday morning
service. Some of your sins and my sins are best not shared and only confessed
to God, for the sake of the body. But where we have sinned against the body
there may be a place for admitting this.
Confession
is the key to effective prayer. John said, “If
we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and
purify us from all unrighteousness,” (1 Jn 1:19). He also said that if we
claim that we have no sin, we make God out to be a liar. If you were God and
someone called you a liar, would you answer his request? Sin is like our
helpless condition – in fact, it is the cause for it – in that as we confess our
helplessness, we are really confessing that sin prevents us from doing good and
we need God’s help.
4. Pray when the land is dry
God listens to the prayers of the righteous person.
That’s what James wrote, “The prayer of a
righteous person is powerful and effective…” (16b). Many of us, including
me, would say that this leaves us out. But then James points to Elijah as an
example. Great (sarcasm), the hero of the OT. But wait, let’s look at Elijah
for a moment.
Elijah
was a legend by the time of James. The stories of his exploits are amazing. In
1 Kings we read how he marched right into king Ahab’s court and announced that
it would only rain when Elijah said it would. And there was a drought for 3 ½
years. During that drought he was fed by ravens; he then moved into the widow
of Zarephath’s house and the flour never ran out; he raised her son from the
dead; he called down fire from heaven to consume a water-logged (remember the
drought) sacrifice in front of 400 prophets of Baal.
And then
James makes a remarkable statement: “Elijah
was a human being, even as we are,” (17a). The truth is, as you read the
story of Elijah, you find that in spite of seeing God’s miraculous
intervention, Elijah was fearful, he doubted at times, and was depressed. He
was just a man. He had ups and downs, but he prayed and God answered.
The
other detail we must recognize in the Elijah story is the spiritual low of the
nation under Ahab. The physical drought symbolized the spiritual drought in the
land. Ahab and Jezebel worshiped other gods and provoked God by sinning
overtly.
Baal was
supposed to be in charge of the rains, so people wondered why Baal did not
answer their prayers. It caused the people to evaluate the power of their god
and the choice to go their own way.
Then Elijah
prayed. James wrote, “He prayed earnestly
that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half
years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its
crops,” (17b-18).
A wooden
translation of the Greek would be “he prayed with a prayer.” What that means is
that Elijah prayed earnestly. And if you go to 1 Kings 18:41-46, you will find
that he had to pray seven times for a cloud the size of a fist to appear. But
then the rains came.
We live
in a dry and thirsty land, a land spiritually impoverished because of its
ignorance of God. The land of our nation is dry. Christians are invited to pray
specifically when others do not. Elijah was just a man. George Mueller was just
a man. But they were people who prayed and prayed earnestly.
5. Pray when others sin
Finally, Christians are invited to pray for the straying
brother or sister who has fallen into sin.
These
last two verses are not really about prayer, but I think they could be. This is
really about going after the sinning brother or sister and bringing them back
to the truth of the gospel. The motivation is simple: “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from
death and cover over a multitude of sins,” (20). First, what we tend to
pass over is the fact that some people are going to hell for resisting God and
his forgiveness; Second, we can help them to know the truth that all their sins
can be forgiven.
I
believe that to go forth and approach a person in this state requires prayer.
We must pray that our own hearts are covered by the grace of Christ and that
this same grace will help us find the words to speak to the person.
George
Mueller spoke of his own prayers in this regard. He said, “I never give up. I
have been praying every day for 52 years for two men, sons of a friend of my
youth. They are not converted yet, but they will be. How can it be otherwise
when we have the unchanging promises of God?”
Mueller
was an anomaly in the Christian faith, I think. At the same time, why couldn’t
we rise up to the challenge of prayer? He was just a human being, as we are.
And you know people who need the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I invite you
right now to name them in your heart as a prayer to God.
Show me your faith
John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, had received from
the Lord some almost unbelievable answers to his petitions, and so he often
engaged in "large asking." In support of this practice he would
frequently tell the story of a man who asked Alexander the Great to give him a
huge sum of money in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage. The ruler
consented and told him to request of his treasurer whatever he wanted. So he
went and asked for an enormous amount. The keeper of the funds was startled and
said he couldn't give him that much without a direct order. Going to Alexander,
the treasurer argued that even a small fraction of the money requested would
more than serve the purpose. "No," replied Alexander, "let him
have it all. I like that fellow. He does me honor. He treats me like a king and
proves by what he asks that he believes me to be both rich and generous."
Newton concluded the story by saying, "In the same way, we should go to
the throne of God's grace and present petitions that express honorable views of
the love, riches, and bounty of our King!" We do honor to God by asking
him.
One
further thought about your prayers is needed. John in Revelation 8 had a vision
of our prayers (read Rev 8:1-5). Charles Spurgeon responded to this passage
saying, “At this moment I believe that God’s Church might have inconceivable
blessings if she were but ready, now, to pray. It would silence heaven to hear
our prayers. And the impact is far beyond your imagination. Bring your prayers
to God that he might set them on fire with Christ’s work – Then we will see the
Lord at work.
AMEN
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