Everything in prayer revolves around who God is. And what God wants. and how God is to be glorified. and any praying. That is self.
consuming that is self-indulgent Any praying that makes God have to deliver to me because I have demanded it. Takes his name in vain. Welcome to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Perhaps you've read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
In this classic American novel, Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. Imagine if someone could understand you that way, see the world exactly how you see it, understand life from your perspective. Thankfully, if you're a Christian, you serve a God who knows you better than you know yourself, and He always knows, and knows perfectly, what is best for you. Find out what that means for your prayers as John MacArthur continues his study titled Elements of True Prayer.
And now here's John. As I listen to what's going on in the Christian world, as I hear various preachers and teachers, as I read various books, as I try to sort of put my finger on the pulse, if you will, of what's happening in. Christian circles. I see an ever-increasing movement that all of us are probably somewhat aware of. In this matter of the prosperity, gospel, and positive confession, that is really very, very threatening to the purity and the sanity of the church.
Seems as though television and Christian radio, Christian television, churches are literally getting more and more and more people who are buying into the fact that prayer is simply a way for you to get what you want. That God is obligated to deliver the goods to you. The Bible teaches that God is sovereign and man his servant. The name it and claim it theology and the prosperity gospel teaches that man is sovereign and God is his servant. And we are in the demand position and the command position, and God is in the role of the servant who must deliver.
Now, admittedly, we live in a very indulgent society. We live in a very self-centered and selfish society. We live in a materialistic society that. The waves of that society have washed ashore on Christian theology. And the prosperity, health, wealth, name it and claim it mentality, which says you demand from God and God has to.
has to give it Is nothing more than a spiritual justification for self-indulgent sin. Nothing more. That kind of praying is no praying at all. It is a perversion of prayer. In fact, it does what we are forbidden to do in Scripture.
It takes the name of the Lord in vain. It is irreverent. It is anything but biblical, anything but virtuous, anything but godly, anything but directed by the Holy Spirit. And I think for us to understand what's going on, we need to sort of re-look at this whole matter of how we are to pray. And the focal point of that comes in these words of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 6.
After this manner, therefore, pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth. As it is, In heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread. and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom. and the power and the glory forever. Amen, or so let it be.
When Jesus teaches us how to pray, and this is the model of how to pray. Beginning and end of that prayer focuses on God. Hallowing his name. Praying that his kingdom come. Praying that his will be done.
And then the few petitions that are listed there. Followed by, Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. The focal point of the prayer then is on the glory and the kingdom. the honor of God, the extension of his kingdom.
Everything has to fit into that context.
So, that all prayer, in a sense, is controlled by. The kingdom. by the glory of God. And this, I think, is really basic to our prayer life. In fact, in John 14, Jesus said, Whatever you ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
John 14:13. Whatever you ask in my name. I'll do it that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Prayer begins and ends not with the indulgence of man, but with the glory of God. Not with the building of my empire, but his kingdom.
Not with getting what I want, but doing his will. Not with the elevation of my name, but with the hallowing of his name. Everything in prayer revolves around who God is. And what God wants and how God is to be glorified. And that is the sum and substance of proper praying, and any praying.
That is self. consuming that is self-indulgent Self-aggrandizing that seeks whatever I want, no matter what God wants. Any praying that makes God have to deliver to me because I have demanded it takes His name in vain, sins violently against the nature of God and against His will and word. And when these people come along with this name it and claim it kind of praying and say that God wants you healthy, wealthy, prosperous, and successful, and they appear to be spiritual, know this, they are not spiritual, for their preoccupation has not to do with the extension of the kingdom and the glory of God's name, but with the extension of their own empire and the fulfillment of their own desires. We must understand that.
The error of this is not a peripheral error. It is an error at the very heart. of Christian truth, namely the nature of God, is attacked. You go back into the Old Testament. And pick out, for example, three prophets who were in dire situations.
Starting in Jeremiah chapter 32. Jeremiah is in prison. He is trying to preach to a to a nation of people who will not hear. They want to shut his mouth. They are not interested in anything he says.
Ultimately, they throw him in a pit. They want him shut up. He has really no measurable success in his ministry. One of his prayers is given to us in Jeremiah 32, and I would like you to note this at the end of verse 16, he says, I prayed to the Lord. Here's his prayer.
Notice the absence of any personal requests. Ah, Lord God. Behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and outstretched arm, and there's nothing too hard for thee. Thou showest loving kindness unto thousands, and recompensest the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them. The great, the mighty God, the Lord of hosts is his name.
Great in counsel, mighty in work, for thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give everyone according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings. Who hath set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day, and in Israel, and among other men, and hast made thee a name at this day? And hast brought forth thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and with wonders and with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and hast given them this land which thou didst swear to their fathers to give them a land flowing with milk and honey They came in and possessed it, but they obeyed not thy voice. Neither walked in thy law, They have done nothing of all that thou commandest them to do, therefore thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them. In other words, here is a man in great distress.
A man in great loneliness. A man in despair in terms of ministry, insofar as the people have not heard what he has said. But the preoccupation of the heart of Jeremiah is to extol the glory, the majesty, the name, the honor. and the works of God. There is no preoccupation with his own pain.
There is no preoccupation with his own circumstance. In Daniel chapter 9, Daniel also in a very difficult situation, caught in the transition between two great world empires. representing a dispossessed people in a foreign land. Cries out to God in prayer. In chapter 9, verse 3.
I set my face to the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. And I prayed unto the Lord my God and made my confession, and this is what I said, and here is how his prayer begins: O Lord. the great and awesome God. Keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love him and to them that keep his commandments. We have sinned, and on he goes.
And again, The initiation of prayer comes with an affirmation of the nature and the glory and the greatness and the majesty of God. That is always the godly perspective. God, you're in charge. God, you are glorious. God, you are holy.
Whatever I pray then is prayed. In line with that. that God may indeed be glorified. Jonah Who is in the middle of the belly of a fish? an absolutely inconceivable place.
Chapter 2, verse 7. Says, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came in unto thee into thy holy temple. And here was his prayer: I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord.
That's a funny prayer when you're in the middle of a fish. But the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited out Jonah. It was a prayer for the glory of God. It was, thank you, God, for who you are. Bless you for your salvation, your delivering power.
There was no pleading and begging. And there was no claiming, naming and claiming anything. simply extolling the character of God. And that's the heart of what our Lord teaches us in this prayer. Let's look at just those first two verses.
And the four Initial elements of prayer that give us the focus on prayer as an act of worship. Prayer is primarily worship. It is God word. It is not to get for me, it is to allow God to be glorified. I have to see that in my prayers.
My prayers are not primarily for what I can gain, but for the glory of God. First of all, God's paternity, that is, that God is Father. Our Father Buart. In heaven. This is the basis, by the way, of our boldness in prayer.
We go to God because He is not our king only, He is not our monarch only, He is not our judge only, He is not our Creator only, but He is also our Father. And that beautiful expression gives us the sense of access and the boldness to come intimately into his presence as a son or a daughter would come to the presence. Yeah. Their own father. Isaiah 64, 8, Now, O Lord, thou art our Father.
We are the clay. And thou art potter. We all are the work of thy hand. That's the recognition. Lord, you made us.
You gave us life, you gave us birth, you supply our resources, we belong to you through the link of common life through faith in Christ. We're your children. And when I come to God in prayer, I come first of all to one who is my Father. Very different than the pagans who came to a vengeful, angry, violent. Unfair, unjust, cruel, jealous, envious.
man-made deity whom they had to appease. We don't have to appease God. We come to our loving Father. And we can go with a sense of intimacy. We can go with boldness and confidence as a child would go to his father.
No fear is there. This was news not only to the Jews, who saw God as very separate and a father only in a national sense. The Jews who wouldn't even name the name of God, whenever the name of God came along, they had a blank. They wouldn't even speak it. They were so distant from God, and God had become so fearful to them.
But you add to that the Greco-Roman world and the culture there, and you'll find they had the same ideas. The gods that they created were gods who were absolutely beyond any concern with mankind. The Stoics, for example, famous philosophical group among the Greeks and the Romans, had. Decided that the essential attribute of God was apathéa, that means apathy. That God was essentially apathetic, not in the sense of the English word.
Apathetic means indifferent. Apathéa in the Greek means more than indifferent, it means incapable of feeling anything. Without any pathos, without any feeling. Without any emotion. And they said, because man feels love and hate, because man feels joy and sorrow, because man feels contentment and anger, man is volatile, and all the problems of life are bound up in man's ability to feel the range of emotion.
Therefore, God cannot be a victim of those things.
So, in order to set God apart, From the struggle of man and make him greater than man, he must be a God who is absolutely apatheia, beyond feeling anything. And so the Stoics said, God Has not the essential ability to experience any feeling at all. But Jesus said that's just not true. You can go to him as your loving father. And he responds because he cares.
He is not passionless, emotionless. or unfeeling. The Epicureans had another attribute that they thought was the primary attribute of God, and that was the attribute which is the word ataraxia. It means perfectly serene and perfectly calm. And it's the same idea.
They said that if God were involved in the affairs of the world, God would be as upset as everybody else is.
So for God to maintain his serenity, he must be absolutely incapable of feeling anything that would disturb his permanent state of calm.
So they had postulated that God was some kind of a feelingless, passionless, emotionless, serene. personality that had no feeling at all no matter what was going on in the world. And the Jews really felt that God was so far away they couldn't even speak his name. Jesus bursts on the scene and begins to talk of the intimacy with which men and women can know God. Albert Einstein was interviewed on one occasion.
He was asked if he believed in a God. He said there is definitely a cosmic force that's created things, but he said we could never know him. But that's just not true. That's just not true. God is not emotionless.
God is not utterly detached. God is seen to us. In Jesus Christ, to carry all the passion that could ever be carried. To weep. To know sorrow, to know joy, to know pain, to know all of human emotion.
And thus he is a loving father. Who understands what his children endure? And we go to a God who does not need to be appeased, but who embraces us as his own. That settles the matter of fear. That settles the matter of fear.
I'm not afraid of God. Because Jesus Christ Has made me acceptable with God. I'm not afraid of Him. I'm His child now. He's adopted me into His family.
You may have read the most significant of all Greek legends, supposedly, is the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus was a deity in the the pantheon of gods of Greece. And in the days before man possessed fire, They said life was very difficult, no fire, no warmth. No cooking and so forth.
So in pity one day, Prometheus decided to take fire out of The realm of the gods and give it to men as a gift.
So Prometheus brought fire down and gave it to man on earth, and Zeus, the king of the gods, was absolutely furious that he would do that. He wanted to keep man in a very low and humble state and not have fire.
So he took Prometheus and he chained him to a rock, and during the day he was suffering from the exposure to the elements, heat. the sunlight, so forth. And at night, the cold of the night. And beyond that, Zeus was so furious with Prometheus that he sent a vulture to tear out his liver. But it kept growing back, and every time it grew back, the Greeks said the vulture came and tore it out again.
You say, what's the point of all that? Who wants a god like Zeus? That's typical of the ancient kind of gods. They are vengeful, they are jealous. They're angry.
Typically, All across the world, false religions with false gods have deities that must be desperately appealed to to appease their anger. That's typical of all cultures. where there are false gods. But God is our Father. That settles the matter of fear.
It also settles the matter of hope. It also settles the matter of hope. Things will change because a loving Father will do what a loving Father needs to do. If we ask Him for bread, He won't give us a stone. If we ask Him for a fish, He won't give us a snake.
But whatever we ask, he will do that for his loving children if it fits within his will. That settles the matter of hope. We can live in hope in this world because we know our God is a loving Father. It also settles the matter of loneliness. We may not have a friend in this world as we would like to have a friend, but we have in him a friend that sticks closer than a brother.
We have in him a father who will never leave us or forsake us. There is an intimacy of love that takes away any loneliness. A believer can be without human resources and have the presence of God and be sufficient. Fourthly, it settles the matter of selfishness. Notice what it says: our Father.
And it says our Daily bread in verse 11, and our debts and our debtors and us into temptation and deliver us from evil. The point is that all of our praying embraces a family. We're not just alone in this. We have brothers and sisters who also are the children of God, and whatever we ask must embrace them as well. In other words, I'm not saying, God, give me what I want.
I want it no matter how it affects everybody else. I don't know how it is in your family, but in our family we try to do things for the children together. And if one of our children came for a request and wanted something particularly from us, we would perhaps feel right about giving that to that child only if we somehow were able to do something equal for the other children. There's a sense in which part of being a parent is embracing the fact that no child exists in isolation from the other children, but all are a part of a family. And so, my prayer life simply is not, I want this, I demand this, give me this, but my prayer life is: Father, you have a lot of children.
Whatever you think is best for me as one of those children, here's my request. It settles the matter of selfishness that he is our father, not just mine. It settles the matter of resources also in our prayer life. It says, Our Father who art in heaven, He's not bound to earth, He's not limited by the limitation of earth. We are used to a declining amount of resources.
We hear all the time that the natural resources of this world are diminishing, and that's true. We understand the law of entropy that things are winding down. That everything is moving toward disintegration. We understand what it means to use up something. You buy the box full, and in a week, the box is empty.
We understand that. You pour out the bottle and the bottle is empty. But in terms of spiritual and eternal resources, that doesn't even exist. There is the pouring out of all resources and the diminishing of none. No, I don't understand that.
I just believe that.
So, when we go to God with our need, the fact that He is in heaven, that is supernatural beyond the diminishing resources of this world, means the matter of resources is a settled issue. Whatever we need to receive from Him by His purpose is available. It also settles the matter of wisdom. Do you remember the line, Father knows what? Best And when I go to God as Father, I have to acknowledge that He knows best.
It also settles the matter of obedience. A father is to be obeyed. Even Jesus obeyed the father, and that's part of the father-child relationship.
So, when I pray, Our Father, what I'm really saying is, God, I recognize that I'm your child. I recognize that you love me and I have an intimate access to you. I recognize that you have absolutely unlimited resources which could be used at my disposal. I recognize that you have a family larger than myself who has needs. I recognize you're going to do what is best for me.
I recognize that I need to obey you. And I recognize that whatever you do, you know best. And that's how prayer begins. It begins with an affirmation of the fact that God is my Father. That means resources.
That means obedience. That's the heart of it. When we say our Father, we know we are not lost in the crowd. There's intimacy there. We're not pleading to some great sovereign deity somewhere who is apathetic.
but to a loving father. But we must recognize in praying to him as a father that he has a right to give us what he wants because father knows best, and we are responsible to obey him because he is our father.
So prayer begins then with the recognition in general that we're going to a loving Father with unlimited resources who knows best to whom we must obey. You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. John's current series is titled Elements of True Prayer.
Well, John talked a bit today about praying to God with boldness. Of course, that doesn't mean we're to be flippant or presumptuous when we come before God. Question is, how can boldness and reverence coexist? How do we resolve that tension? Here's how John answered that question.
Well, I think you tell them what you always tell them, and that is to follow what Scripture says. I think about this often, where James writes, the effectual. fervent prayer of a righteous person produces much. You have not because you ask not. And then what we're learning in Luke 11, be bold before the Lord.
At the same time, we come to Him in reverence. That's why, when the Lord taught us how to pray, He said, Start this way: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done. In other words, we start with deferring to God His holiness, His purposes, His kingdom, and then we say, Oh, by the way, forgive us and so forth.
So we don't get to the personal side until we've affirmed the divine side. That is the pattern that our Lord taught us in praying. You start out with worship and honoring God, And that's full hearted honour. Do your will, build your kingdom, glorify your name. And here are the requests that I am bringing before you that That I believe would bring honor to your name, and so I'm boldly asking you for these things.
I don't think trusting in the sovereignty of God and His divine purpose Hinders us from that boldness. And I think that is why the Lord, after saying the first part of the disciples' prayer, also said. to ask for forgiveness. Ask that the Lord will not lead you into temptation. Be bold about your prayer.
So that's a tension that we have to live in. Um we want to come before God humbly. submissive Willing to receive anything he would give us, and yet he says, Come boldly and pour out your heart. If that were not the case, Phil, then why would there be fasting with prayer? And why would there be prolonged prayer?
When there's a problem in our lives of really severe character, The most normal thing for a Christian to do is to Pray sort of relentlessly. And fasting comes along with that. I know that's occurred in my life. And that is driven by the fact that you trust that God hears and answers in a way that makes those prayers part of the plan.
So I think we have to see it that way. We give honor to God and then we pour out our heart. And in confident trust, believe that He will do what is best, but He will also fit our prayers into the doing of it. That's right, friend. And for even more help in cultivating a prayer life that pleases the Lord, You'll find useful resources on our website, gty.org.
along with thousands of free study tools. To see all that's there for you, go to our website today. Our web address again, gty.org. There you can watch Grace to You television, you can download any sermon from John MacArthur's 56 years of pulpit ministry, and you can read articles on the regularly updated Grace to You blog. At the blog, look for the series of articles titled, Steps to Successful Prayer.
It's a great supplement to John's current radio study. Lots of helpful step-by-step teaching designed to help strengthen your prayer life. All of that and much more is yours free at gty.org. And if you're grateful for this ministry, if John's teaching has helped you grow. or if someone you know has come to faith in Christ after hearing one of John's messages, we want to hear about it.
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Now for the entire Grace to U staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question. What's at the top of God's priority list? To find out what God loves most of all and what his passion means for your prayers. Join us tomorrow for another 30 minutes of Unleashing God's Truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.
