If I had an audience with the king, the first thing I should do is express my humility before the king and give him the honor that he deserves. And so when I enter into a conversation with the Lord, I begin the conversation with worship. I begin by expressing from the depths of my soul how I feel about His greatness and His majesty, His excellence. Do you have a prayer list, a place to keep track of prayer requests from family and friends?
If you consider all the areas of your life, this list can quickly grow. But interestingly, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, He didn't instruct them to begin their prayers with their needs. This is the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and we're spending several weekends with R.C. Sproul on the topic of prayer.
As a reminder, you can own this six-part series from Dr. Sproul for life when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. Last week, Dr. Sproul explained that he believed one of the reasons we so often struggle with prayer is because we don't know how to pray. Thankfully, the disciples were aware of this too, and they asked Jesus for help.
Jesus' answer is recorded for us in Scripture. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on a simple acrostic to help us in prayer and the need to express adoration in our prayers. It may be a strange thing to say, but I've had the opportunity to attend some of the most magnificent, wonderful, and moving funerals in my life. But of all the funerals I've attended, the one that I remember most vividly occurred many, many years ago in Pittsburgh when an Episcopalian priest died suddenly at age 42. And the occasion of his funeral, the entire priesthood of the diocese of Pittsburgh acted as the choir for that occasion.
And the cathedral was packed, every seat taken. And at the end of that funeral service, the concluding hymn for the recessional was, For All the Saints, From Their Labor's Rest. And I can still, I feel like I floated out of that church after that ceremony.
But I didn't have a dry eye during it because it was the funeral of a very close friend of mine and a comrade in ministry whose name was Don James. And he happened at the time of his death to be the executive director of an organization called the Pittsburgh Experiment. Now that was an organization that was founded by the late, great Sam Shoemaker. And the Pittsburgh Experiment was a ministry directed basically to businessmen, in which Sam Shoemaker tried to challenge businessmen in the city of Pittsburgh to a 30-day experiment of prayer, where he challenged men to pray just for 30 days about the biggest issues that confronted them in their businesses, in their marriages, in their personal life. And he also challenged them for a 30-day experiment to pray for their enemies, because Sam found that after 30 days, the people prayed every day for the well-being of their enemy, their hearts would melt towards other people. Well, on one occasion, Sam Shoemaker was addressing a group of businessmen, and this one fellow who was there in the crowd was an ex-Marine drill instructor who was a hard-drinking, hard-cursing and swearing, hard-living skeptic. And when Sam gave this challenge, this man blurted out a scatological expletive, expressing his disdain for what he had just heard about the power of prayer. And right in front of this honorable Episcopalian priest, Sam Shoemaker, this young guy, you know, gave this expletive. And Sam stopped right in his tracks and turned to that young fellow and came up to him and put his finger in his face and said, "'I dare you to do this for 30 days and come back here 30 days from today and say that it's what you just said it was.'" So, the guy said, "'All right, you're on.'" And in that 30 days, this young ex-Marine gave his life to Christ, and he became Sam Shoemaker's successor.
It was his funeral that I attended. What a warrior for the faith John Don James was as he continued the ministry of challenging men like himself all over the city to be engaged in just a 30-day experiment in prayer. What he was trying to do was to mentor people, to train people, not just say, "'You all ought to pray,'" but to give them a laboratory experiment of prayer, a clinical test to see what impact it would have on their lives. It's one thing for me to say to somebody, "'What you need to do is pray for 15 minutes or half an hour or one hour every day for the rest of your life.'"
That's too intimidating, but to ask people to pray for 30 days, to gain the experience as beginners with no great expectation of becoming, you know, spiritual giants in 30 days, then you can get people moving in that direction. Well, in our first lecture, I mentioned that I think our biggest need today when it comes to prayer is to learn how. And one of the simplest methods or techniques of prayer I've ever heard of and I've ever learned is one that uses the old acrostic, and I call this the ABCs of praying.
That is the first principles, the elemental structures of praying. That's why I use the term ABCs. I also use the ABCs because we're following an acrostic here using letters from the alphabet, and the acrostic is the famous one, acts, A-C-T-S. And let me remind you that that is not an instrument used to chop down trees. It is not the word acts. It is the word acts. And I do that by dedicating that to my homiletics in the New Testament.
So, let's remember that this is acts, like the book of acts in the New Testament. And the acrostic goes like this. The A stands for adoration. The C stands for confession. And the A stands for confession. The C stands for confession.
The T stands for thanksgiving. And the S stands for supplication. And I guess I can say that here we have an answer to my prayer that the meager amount of chalk that I've been given for this lecture has so far been adequate for my needs.
But let's look at these four elements. Now, I say these are the ABCs. This is a simple little guideline to help us remember the important elements that ought to be a part of all of our praying. And I also have to say to you and confess that I'm still at the ABC level, that when I pray, I still go through this acrostic in my mind as a checklist. I like to start all my prayers with adoration and then move to confession, then move to thanksgiving, and then move to intercession, supplication, whatever.
Now, after our first lecture, somebody in our studio audience asked the question that I thought was an important question and that should be discussed in a lecture. And this woman asked the question, what is the appropriate posture of prayer? Should we be on our knees? I had made reference to James the Just and Old Camel Knees from the New Testament, and I said, and she was asking, you know, are we supposed to pray on our knees? What is the acceptable way of praying? And when I answered her question there, I said at that time that I would bring this into the next lecture because I think this is something that strikes at a deeper issue with respect to prayer. Really, the question should be, what should our attitude be when we're in prayer?
Because posture, our physical posture, is linked to a particular attitude. And I mentioned to her that there's nothing magic or sacred about praying on your knees, but that historically there is a universal significance of a human person getting on their knees. It is a demonstrative sign of obeisance. People kneel before a king. They may kneel before a great warrior.
They kneel before someone for whom they have enormous respect. And so what could be more appropriate when we come into the presence of God than to show our submission and our humility before Him by getting on our knees? Then I went on to explain also that that's not the only posture that the church has known historically, even in Old Testament times, that one of the common forms or postures of prayer historically was by standing and not with having your eyes closed but gazing heavenward with your hands lifted up.
Now that idea of the upraised hands has been reconstituted and recovered in the charismatic movement. Some people are very nervous about that, but it has a rich history in the Christian faith of people expressing an opening of themselves as they look towards heaven. Those aren't the only two postures of prayer. We also see uniformly throughout the pages of Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, that when people come in the presence of God, Old and New Testament, they fall on their face before Him. That's going beyond kneeling but becoming prostrate before God on the deck. Now frankly, my personal preference, my personal preference, the way I like to pray is on my face.
And in fact, I told them a little secret. I said, what I like to do is kind of build my own little tabernacle. I like to find some low chairs or a low table.
I don't know why this is. I like to crawl under a table or someplace where I have a little hiding place beyond my face. I've got arthritis in my knees. I don't want to be thinking about my knees hurting while I'm praying. So I can be comfortable, but I can be on my face before God. I love that.
That's mine. But I'm not saying that that's a prescription for prayer. But I think it's important to ask the question, what is a good posture? And I would suggest one of these three or something else that you find meaningful. But again, why I'm taking the time for this is that though the whole prayer is not devoted to adoration, as I mentioned, the whole time of prayer should be in a spirit or posture of adoration. I also said after our class before, I said there are two things that we have to remember when we come into prayer that are absolutely fundamental to proper praying. And those two things are simple. The first one is we need to remember to whom we are speaking.
That's number one. And number two, we need to understand and remember who is doing the talking. That is, we need to remember who God is and who we are. I just talked to a man this week who has read the Bible through before and so on, but he's reading the Bible now from Genesis through Revelation with a view to two questions. He wants to read the whole Bible and just to concentrate on two things. And he said to me, the two things I want to see is what the Bible says about the character of God and what the Bible says about the character of me.
He says he's only about a fourth of the way through it, but he's already been overwhelmed. He said because the pattern is very, very clear about the goodness and the righteousness and the magnificence and the holiness of God, and the sinfulness, the inconsistency, and the disloyalty of human beings before him. I've told a story before of what happened when Babe Ruth was introduced to the king of England. He was to be granted an audience with the king, and he was instructed in the proper protocol, and he was told that when you walk into the chamber of the king that you are to bow, and he was told to address the king as your majesty, and so on. And after he went through all these instructions, Babe Ruth, when he was granted the audience, walked in the room. He didn't bow.
He didn't say your majesty. He just looked at the king of England and said, hi, king. And I remember when I read that story, how typically American it was. The same thing came home to me when I was in graduate school in the Netherlands and was sitting in a lecture hall. It was like a bowl, and there must have been eighty men in the room. I was way up in the top, wrung and way removed from the professor, and it was very warm.
There wasn't any air conditioning. I took off my sport coat. I put it over my armchair, and the professor stopped in mid-sentence from his lecture, and he looked at me with disdain.
He didn't know me from a cake of soap. He didn't know what my name was at that point, but he said this, would the American please put his coat back on? The American please put his coat back on. He didn't know who I was, but he knew I was American because he knew that only an American would have the audacity to take off his coat in a formal lecture situation.
I wonder what he would think if he would see students in the university and how they're addressed today in this country. But we have a reputation for being casual, informal, and with it for being disrespectful. We don't have the experience of learning the etiquette of the court. The word courtesy comes from the abbreviation of those two words, court etiquette. And we haven't learned the proper protocol for walking into the presence of a king. And sometimes you listen to Christians talk about Jesus as such a friend, that He's not just a friend in the sense of a loyal, trustworthy person who's committed to you, but like He's a chum.
It's very casual. Hey, Jesus, where are we going today? You're going to go to the beach. What are we going to do when nobody, no Christian in their right mind would ever relate to Jesus like that if He walked in the room? Because He is the Son of God incarnate.
He is the King of the kings and the Lord of the lords. And so the acts of prayer begin not only with an expression of adoration but with a posture and an attitude of adoration. Now so much of the time that we pray, we pray here. We bring our wish list to God.
We tell God what's on our hearts, what we want Him to do for us. And there's nothing wrong with bringing our request before God. Again, the New Testament makes it clear that we are invited to come into God's presence to make our request known to Him with thanksgiving.
We're told to do it always with thanksgiving. But we are invited to come and bring these requests. But it's like we can't wait to get to the request. And yet when we read the Holy Spirit-inspired prayers that are recorded in sacred Scripture, it's amazing how little attention is given to this and how much attention is given to the A. In fact, far be it from me, I mean nothing could be further from me than to correct the Lord Jesus in His teaching wisdom and in His pedagogy. But I am surprised when I read in the Scriptures in the New Testament that when His disciples come to Him and they say to Him, teacher, Lord, teach us how to pray, I'm really surprised by His answer.
It's certainly not the answer I expect, and it's certainly not the answer I would have given. But what He did in answering their question, He said, when you pray, pray like this, and we'll look at the elements of the Lord's Prayer and see what we can learn from that model prayer that Jesus gave His disciples. But what I expected Jesus would say when somebody comes to Him and says, teach me how to pray, I would have thought Jesus would say to them, you want to know how to pray? You want to learn to be articulate in prayer? You want God to give you a prayer language? Immerse yourselves in the Psalms, because the Psalms, for the most part, are nothing more than a collection of Holy Spirit-inspired prayers. And I find that people who immerse themselves in the Psalms have no problems saying what they want to say to God.
No problems acquiring a prayer language. That language is already there in the Word, where you're using God's words to speak to God. And you read the prayers of the Psalms, the Psalms of David, O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth.
That theme runs through the entire Psalter. We see it in Mary's prayer, my soul doth magnify the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. That in the Psalms particularly, you see God extolled, His greatness expressed in fantastically beautiful language. And you sense that the psalmist, as he's praying, is expressing reverence, honor, and adoration before God. And so, it's like if I had an audience with the king, the first thing I should do is express my humility before the king and give him the honor that he deserves. And so, when I enter into a conversation with the Lord, I begin the conversation with worship. I begin by expressing from the depths of my soul how I feel about His greatness and His majesty, His excellence. That's why I think it's a good thing to just, when you're in this phase of praying, that you think about the many excellencies of God. Think of His attributes.
Think of His character. Think of His being, and praise Him for who He is. That's what adoration is all about. And I have discovered this, that the more people advance in their prayer lives, the more time they spend here.
In fact, it's hard to get them to move from here. They want to spend all their time in adoration. It can be so easy to skip over adoration in our prayer lives, but when we remember to whom it is we are praying, our prayers can't help but increasingly be filled with adoration.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and I'm glad you're with us today. The simple acrostic you heard about today, ACTS, A-C-T-S, is practically explained in this series titled, Prayer. You can own this series on DVD, along with digital access to the study guide when you make a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
And while you wait for the DVD to arrive, you can stream the messages in the free Ligonier app and at ligonier.org. Study prayer and use what you learn to help others when you give your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. This offer ends at midnight. Today we considered adoration. Next time R.C. Sproul will help us think about the role of confession in our prayer lives. That's next Saturday here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.
