How to Pray

If Christ could make a complaint, it would be, my bride doesn't talk to me, because my bride has missed this opportunity for prayer and communion that I have established with them by virtue of my redeeming love. Prayer, it's a great privilege for the believer, but it's also a topic that can make us sweat just a little bit, as we each recognize that this is an area we would all like to grow in. I've said before that I don't struggle with prayer, I struggle with my priorities.

Well, on today's edition of Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul will be offering some advice and practical guidance to help each of us in the area of prayer. We considered Bible study yesterday, and today we're turning our attention to prayer. How do we keep our prayer time from becoming a grocery list of needs or wants? Why is it that we should prioritize prayer even as our days get fuller and fuller?

Keep listening as R.C. Sproul offers counsel to help each of us grow in the area of prayer. Today we're going to continue with our series on five things every Christian needs to know. We're looking at those five means of grace that are necessary for us to pay diligent attention to in order to grow up into full conformity with the image of Christ, and they are studying the Bible, prayer, worship, service, and stewardship. We've already looked at the business of studying the Bible, and so today we're going to turn our attention to prayer as a means of grace. And if you recall, when we looked at Bible study, the first lecture I gave to the question of why we should be engaged in Bible study, and then the second question was the practical answer to the question, how can we become effective in our study of sacred Scripture? And I'm going to follow somewhat the same procedure with respect to this question of prayer. In today's message, I'm going to look at the question of why we should be engaged in a disciplined prayer life. And I'd like to start with the teaching that we get from the Apostle Paul.

After Paul spells out the essence of the gospel in his letter to the Romans and defines for us the doctrine of justification, when he begins chapter 5 of Romans, he tells us the consequences or the results of our being justified by faith in Christ, where he says, being justified, therefore we have peace with God. And then immediately after that, he says, and we have access. He speaks of this access that we have into the presence of God.

With the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and that wall of partition that divided the people from the immediate presence of God had been done away with, so that now those who are justified by faith have permission to come into the presence of God, which is indeed a sacred privilege. Now, one of the most important metaphors or analogies that the Bible uses to describe that access root, as it were, is the metaphor of marriage that I want to look at with you today. In the 17th century, a Puritan divine from London who died at age 40 from tuberculosis, Edward Pierce, wrote a book entitled The Best Match. And the subtitle of that book, The Best Match, was The Soul's Espousal to Christ, in which Edward Pierce explores in a beautiful fashion and in a spiritual depth this relationship that we have with Christ that is likened to a human marriage relationship. And some of the things that I'm going to be saying today will be borrowed from this work by Edward Pierce. Let's turn our attention now to Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, the first two verses that we read there where Paul says, "'O that you would bear with me in a little folly, and indeed you do bear with me, for I am jealous for you with godly jealousy.'"

Now, let me just stop there for a second. When we think of jealousy, we think of a cardinal sin, a sin that is linked to envy and to covetousness and that is unbecoming a Christian. And yet at the same time, the Scriptures describe God as a jealous God. Now, God is never jealous of us, but He is certainly jealous for us. And when Paul now speaks of his having jealousy, he defines that jealousy as a godly jealousy, a jealousy for his spiritual children.

And here's how he spells it out. He says, "'For I have betrothed you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.'" Now, Paul's saying of his spiritual children, I'm jealous for you because you are the betrothed.

You are engaged to be married, and I have seen that you have been betrothed to your husband who is Christ. And this of course follows the metaphor of the church as being the bride of Christ. Now, Paul develops that even more deeply in his letter to the Ephesians when he gives instructions for marriage in the fifth chapter where he gives the responsibility of the wives to their husbands and so on. But then in verse 25, he gives the admonitions to husbands where he said, husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word, that He may present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So, husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies, for he who loves his wife loves himself. No one ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church, for we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. And then in verse 32, this is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church, that is referring back to the divine words, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is when he says this is a great mystery, but I'm speaking concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself.

Let the wife see that she respects her husband. Well, what in the world does this have to do with prayer? Well, I think what it has to do with prayer is simply this, that the mystery that Paul expounds is the mystery of the mystical union that takes place between Christ and His bride. And the essence of that relationship of mystical union is the relationship of communion and what prayer is and why it's so vital to the Christian life is that prayer is the channel of communication between Christ and His bride.

It's the way that we communicate with our Redeemer. Now, when we look at this image, we see several aspects of the relationship between the bride and the groom that adorns our relationship to Jesus. The first aspect is that marriage is seen involving a gift, a gift that people make of themselves to another person. In the standard marriage liturgy in the church, we have a segment of the wedding service where the bride is given away. This is the supreme donation of human experience where the minister says, who giveth this woman to be married to this man?

And usually it's the father who has escorted his daughter up the aisle who will respond for the family saying, her mother and I do, or I do, whichever the case may be. But the point is that in that element of the marriage service, there is this donation, this giving, this gift. And remember that when Paul talks about how husbands are to relate to their wives, he says that the husbands are to give themselves to their wives just as Christ gave Himself to the church. And so this union between the Christian and Christ is based on the first instance on Christ's gift of Himself to the believer. And not only does He give Himself, but the Holy Spirit gives the supreme gift by which the person is united to Christ, which is the gift of faith, so that the whole basis for our relationship to God is rooted and grounded in grace, in that which is not earned, not deserved, not paid for, but is a donation.

It is a gift. And the second aspect of this metaphor of marriage is seen in the idea of marriage as producing the most intimate kind of union that the Christian that any two human beings can have. Now, I realize that today the whole institution and structure of marriage is under attack widely in our culture, and many young people have dismissed the sanctity of marriage and just choose to live together without entering into this covenant relationship, entering into this bond. And yet we also see many young couples who have lived together, sometimes for years, finding this arrangement far from satisfying. And they'll come to the church and they'll say, we want to get married.

They want to take that extra step because that marriage takes them to a deeper dimension of union than they can possibly have just by a free arrangement of living together. But in any case, what we have in our relationship to Christ is what I've mentioned already as the mystical union between the believer and Jesus. In the New Testament Greek, there are two words that can be translated by the word in.

There's the Greek word en, and we would transliterate it by the letters en, en, or the word ice, which is translated into. And we might think that it's a small thing to distinguish between these two words for in, but they're very, very important. If you are outside of a room and you want to enter that room, you have to go through some threshold. You go through the door, and when you walk across that threshold, you are moving from outside the room into the room. And after the transition has been made, once you've walked through the door, entering into the room, now you are obviously in the room.

But to get in the room, you first have to move into the room from outside of it. And that's a simple distinction, but it's important because when the New Testament tells us to believe in Christ, calls us to faith in Christ, the word that is used there is the word ice, so that literally what the New Testament call is, is believe into Christ. And then we are told that once we do believe into Christ and embrace Christ, then we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is in reality Christ in us. And the mystical union is that once we are born of the Spirit and are given the gift of faith and move into Christ, then we are in Christ, and Christ is in us. This is the foundation for all of Christian unity, and we often overlook that because if I am in Christ and you are in Christ, then because of our both being in Christ and Christ in us, we are right now already spiritually united in Him. We may be at odds with each other as Christians. We may disagree with each other in our theology and all the rest. Nevertheless, we enjoy a transcendent unity by virtue of both of our spiritual unity with Christ. You know, one of the things I hear all the time in ecumenical discussions is that we are called to get organizational unity with other Christians because Jesus prayed in His high priestly prayer that they all may be one and so on, and we've got to help make Jesus' prayer come to pass. But in a very real sense, beloved, that prayer has been answered from the very beginning, because right now I already have a transcendent spiritual unity with every Christian in this world because I am in Christ, and they are in Christ, and Christ is in all of us. So the second dimension of this marriage is that Paul says that the mystery of human marriage is that when two people come together in the sacred estate of marriage and that that marriage is consummated, those two persons become in the sight of God one flesh, one flesh.

Now, that's so strange because when we see two people who have an individual identity and they get married, we still see two people with individual identities. Nevertheless, something has happened, something real has happened where those two have now become one in the sight of God. And so this union becomes the foundation for our relationship with Christ and the basis for prayer because the next step in real authentic marriage beyond the establishing of the union is communion. In fact, in the Latin, we have the word unio, and then we have communio, which is a union with. When we talk about communion, we're talking about communication that takes place between two people. And so we talk about the communion of saints, which is a communion they have with each other, which I've just been talking about.

But most importantly is that we have an opportunity to commune with Christ Himself, which takes place through the means of prayer. One of the biggest complaints I hear from people who are having trouble in their marriages is that they experience a breakdown in communication. And one of the complaints I hear more often from women than any other one is, is, my husband never talks to me.

My husband never talks to me. Well, in this case, if Christ could make a complaint, it would be, my bride doesn't talk to me because my bride has missed this opportunity for prayer and communion that I have established with them by virtue of my redeeming love. And fourth, the other dimension of genuine marriage in this world is that it involves mutual delight in each other and an ongoing persistent state of affection. See, it's not enough to pray because we ought to pray. And the Bible does say that Jesus gave the parable, the unjust judge, where He introduces by saying, I mean, the Bible says Jesus gave this parable that men ought always to pray and not faint. There is that oughtness. There is that duty.

There is that mustness of prayer that we're enjoying to do in the New Testament. But beyond the duty element of it, there is the delight of being able to be engaged in this kind of communication, that the wonders of marriage in the earthly world, the marriage in the flesh, is that two people who have an ardent, passionate affection for each other take delight in being with each other and in each other's presence. Can you imagine a courtship where there's never any communication? I remember Vesta and I, my wife, we went together for eight years before we were married, and six of those eight years we were in different schools, and so that we were communicating by telephone or by letter, and I wrote to her every single day during that time. And I called her every single night during that time, and she wrote me every day because we wanted to stay in profound communication. And I didn't write those letters because I had to. I wrote those letters because I wanted to, because I wanted to express to her my affection for her and my desire to be close to her and to be near to her, and so she wrote to me. Those were love letters, and that's what prayer is.

It's a communication of love between the bride and the groom, and so this is something that should be an element that provokes delight, and yet still we stumble and grope to find out how to be effective in this art of communion with the One in whom we already have a transcendent union. Many years ago I remember listening to a sermon by a minister, and he was giving us a detailed description of starving people around the world, and when he reached the crescendo point of his sermon, he leaned over the pulpit and he said, Now you people have to do something about this. And I remember walking out of the room feeling guilty but also feeling a little bit befuddled because I didn't know what to do. And I thought so many times that's what we do to people. We tell them you ought to do this, you ought to do that. We lay a guilt trip on them, but we never show them how. And I don't think there's any area of the Christian life where people are more weighted down by guilt than it is with respect to their prayer lives. You get a group of Christians together and you get them candid and you get them to open up, they'll confess pretty often that their prayer lives are not what they should be.

But the biggest problem I think that we face with this is a problem of really not knowing how to pray effectively. And you recall that in the New Testament community and during the ministry of Jesus, He had disciples who were so closely attuned to Him, they sat at His feet every day, they learned their theology from the Master's lips, and yet the one thing they still hadn't mastered was prayer. And so they came to Him and they said to Jesus, Lord, teach us how to pray. And that was the origin, of course, for the giving of the Lord's prayer as a model prayer.

I mean, the purpose of the Lord's prayer was not to give us a prayer that we would recite ourselves every day but simply to teach people how prayer should proceed. Now recently in the church that I pastor in Sanford, Florida, we had a guest come in for a whole day, actually a Friday evening and all-day Saturday workshop on prayer. Archie Parrish, a good friend of mine from Atlanta, came and gave us this seminar on what's called kingdom-focused prayer. And in this seminar together, we learned some basic principles on how to pray, and we became organized in the church, at least those who wanted to become organized, into what were called fire teams, four people joining a group with one leader. And each fire team meets together once a month for three months, but at the same time, it's to encourage each other to pray according to this pattern that we were taught, each day for fifteen minutes, preferably ten minutes in the morning, five minutes at night, for three months. And then the idea is after three months of this, then we go to the second level where we commit to pray for thirty minutes a day for three months, and then after that three months move up to forty-five minutes a day for another three months. And then the final three months of the year, we practice prayer for one hour a day.

In the initial stages of this in our church, we had forty people sign up, actually forty-four people sign up to be engaged in this process. One of the things that people do is that they commit to pray at every meal for the pastor and for the pastor's wife. So do you know what that means to me to know that the people in my congregation are praying for me every time they sit down at a table for a meal, praying for me and for my wife?

That's an incredible thing. And I thought, you know, if we could get this many people, forty-four people, fifty people, actually praying for one hour a day for the work and ministry of the church, I think we'll be the most powerful church that, you know, that you can imagine because the world is yet to see what happens when people get engaged in earnest prayer. Well, what do we mean by kingdom-focused prayer? Well, the first principle that we learned in this seminar was that instead of spending most of our time in prayer telling the Lord what we would like for ourselves, coming to Him with a grocery list, Lord, please give me this and please take care of that, and so on, the focus of our prayer is on the work of Christ and the work of the kingdom so that we begin to pray earnestly and specifically for the effective impact of the gospel in the world in which we live. And we look back at the model of the Lord's prayer, and you see that this is what Jesus did. When He taught His disciples how to pray, remember the first petition, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, that when Jesus instructed His disciples on how to pray, He told them that the priority of your prayers should be for the mission that I have given you, for the breakthrough of the kingdom of God. Remember He elsewhere said, seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.

Everything else will be added unto so that we pray with a focused priority that is the priority of Christ Himself, for the triumph of His kingdom, for the sanctity of the name of God, and so on. Now, as a practical guide for this enterprise that we're engaged in, Archie Parrish published a little booklet where he interacts in this little booklet with a little booklet that was published originally in the sixteenth century by Martin Luther. And Luther's book was entitled A Simple Way to Pray. And this booklet was written specifically to answer a question about how to pray by Luther's personal barber.

Can you imagine that? This fellow, who is one of Luther's oldest friends, his name was Peter Beskendorf, but he was known throughout the town in which Luther lived and worked as Peter the master barber. And so they called him Master Peter. And so just like the disciples, when they noticed Jesus going away into a quiet place, removing Himself from their midst and being engaged in earnest prayer, and they saw the connection between the power of Jesus in His ministry and His intense prayer and communion with the Father, so Master Peter there in Germany saw a link between Luther's extraordinary impact on the world and his prayer life where Luther would frequently, as a matter of discipline, spend four hours a day in prayer. And so Luther's barber said to him, Dr. Luther, can you teach me how to pray? And so Luther gave to his barber some simple suggestions which Archie then has packaged for us and we've passed on. And I've begun to practice and change the way I pray by following this procedure, which I think is just a marvelous way to pray.

And there's some basic, simple, practical suggestions that are involved in here. First of all, that you set aside time for prayer every day as a matter of discipline and try to do it at the same time every day. Otherwise, the crowding of your schedule will push it away and you delay it and you'll miss it. But the point is that you make time and you make sure that you have the opportunity to get alone, to get into a place of solitude, which is what Jesus did. It's what Luther did, which is what all prayer warriors do.

They go to a quiet place where they can concentrate their mind on what they're doing. And Luther, in teaching the barber how to pray, told him that you need to be in a quiet place so that you can concentrate on what you're doing. He said, it's just like your task as a barber. He said, the last thing I want you to do is have your mind wandering when you've lathered up my face and you take out that blade and start shaving me.

I don't want you to start wool gathering and end up slitting my throat. And he said, so you need to get into a quiet place. And then he also suggests that our prayers be out loud. They can be a soft whisper, but there's something about articulating your communication to the Lord aloud. Jesus, when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane, prayed out loud, even though He was by Himself to the Father. It's not something that God requires. This is just a practical tip, as it were, that Luther gives to his barber.

But it's the next part that I have found the most helpful. What Luther did and what he advised his barber to do was to pray through three things, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles' Creed. Now these are three things that many of us have already memorized. Some of us haven't, but we often use in the liturgy of the church on Sunday morning. Just about every Christian in the world has memorized the Lord's Prayer.

Not too many have memorized the Ten Commandments, but many have memorized the Apostles' Creed. But what does Luther mean when he says to pray through these things? Well, you begin your prayer by going through the Lord's Prayer petition by petition and meditating on each petition and then expanding in your prayer with respect to each petition. For example, as I said, the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, you know, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Now, on other occasions, I've told people the classic simple acrostic that we use to follow for prayer, the little monomic device using the word acts, A-C-T-S, where you follow that acrostic. A stands for adoration, C for confession, T for thanksgiving, and S for supplication. Those are the four elements that should be involved in every prayer.

Well, I combine that acrostic with Luther's method. I get to the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, hallowed be thy name. What are we asking for here? And I spend time focusing on that, praying to the Lord that our culture would come to an awakening of the holiness of God, so that instead of God's name being dragged through the mud or used in a flippant, cavalier manner, even among Christians, that the name of God would be considered sacred, that the name of God would be treated with reverence and with a sense of adoration. I mean, we could pray for an hour just about the ramifications of that first petition, and Luther would often do that. He said to his barber, sometimes I won't get through more than one or two petitions because my mind will be so engaged, and I'll become so fervently concerned about this element of the prayer.

And he said, that's okay. All we're looking for are pegs to hang our thoughts on, as it were, as we are engaged in focused prayer for the kingdom of God. So not only do I pray that God's name be hallowed and use that as a trigger for adoration, thinking about the holiness of God, His majesty, His greatness, His transcendent beauty, and so on, but I also can go on and confess that I have not done everything in my power to see to it that His name is hallowed, and then also thank God that His name is holy because He is holy, and I am greatly benefited and blessed by the reality of the holiness of God because it means that the One who is the Lord of heaven and earth is a righteous ruler. There's no corruption.

There's no shadow of turning in Him. And so my prayer of thanksgiving includes a joyous expression for the greatness of God's name. I mean, why is His name to be holy?

Because He is holy, and how we treat His name reflects how we feel about Him. And by reflecting on the sanctity of God's name, the flames of spiritual ardor are fanned in our souls, just in this one petition. And then, of course, you go to the next petition of the Lord's Prayer, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth. So that I think about the mission of the church, I think about my responsibility as a Christian to bear witness to the lordship of Christ, to His kingdom, and I think about the things that we're engaged in, in our local church or in the ministry of Ligonier or in the outreach of other ministries. And we begin to pray specifically how the kingdom of God can be enriched and strengthened by ministry activities and programs that we're engaged in or that we know about.

So we pray with specific reference to missionaries, for example, that we're supporting or other programs that we're engaged in for outreach of the kingdom. And you go right on through the Lord's Prayer, asking for your daily bread, you know, and your physical needs, and asking for forgiveness of your sins and for a forgiving spirit within yourself, all the way down to the Amen, where Luther says the Amen is very important because we're told to pray with faith. And the word Amen is a derivative from the Hebrew word for truth. And what you say at the end, Amen, is to say, this is true.

I'm committed to this. And I believe what I've just said to you, God. And Luther said, you need to speak that Amen at the end of your prayer and mean it as you are committing your prayers and your thoughts of those petitions to the Lord for His sovereign disposition of those requests. But that's only the first part, is the Lord's Prayer.

But you can see how that can easily take more than 15 minutes if you go through each of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer and focus your attention on them and expand it. Then the second thing is the Ten Commandments. And, you know, you can learn the short version of the Ten Commandments. You don't have to learn the long version where you can say, you know, I also have no other gods before me.

I'm not making any graven images, you know, and so on, right down through the list. And what Luther does is that he breaks these things into four parts. He said, the first thing I do, he says, I think about what the law is teaching me, the instruction that is to be found in each of the commandments.

What is it teaching me? And then I think in terms of how grateful I am that we have a God, again, the thanksgiving dimension is there for this law and what these laws do, honor Thy father and mother. Luther will then express his gratitude, not only for what his parents have done for him, but for what Prince Frederick, Elector of Saxony, who was his authority, did for him, what the government does for us. However, we need to be grateful.

You can subsume under that first heading. And so, you have the instructional dimension of the law, thanksgiving, confession. Any time I look at the law of God, I am provoked now in my soul to know where I have sinned and where my confession needs to be. And finally, you pray on that law in terms of kingdom focus again, where just like we prayed that the Lord's name would be hallowed, we'll pray that the world would be rid of idols, that the singular majesty of God will be so visible that there will be no other gods competing with Him. That focuses our prayer on the triumph of Christ. And so, you go through all of the Ten Commandments of that. If you're thinking about what to pray for for an hour, you can see how Luther could pray for four hours, just with those two.

And then, when he's done with that, with the Ten Commandments, then he moves to the Apostle's Creed. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ, Almighty Son, and our Lord, and so on, where each one of those things focuses your attention for your prayer life. And so, what you have instead of a willy-nilly, ad hoc, unorganized, wool-gathering process of praying, you have a biblical map to follow to focus your attention on your communication with the Lord. Now, there are other ways to enhance this, and one of the things we do in my Little Fire group is that I have the elders that I'm praying with memorize certain psalms, like we all memorize the first Psalm, the eighth Psalm. We're in the process of memorizing Psalm 51, which is, you know, the classic penitential psalm of David in his confession of sin, because it's a wonderful thing to be able, in our prayer, to address God with his own words. By memorizing a few psalms selectively, you have that at your disposal. When you want to praise God in language and in words that you know are pleasing to Him, you take that body of words from that which He has revealed to us in sacred Scripture, in Spirit-inspired prayers that are recorded for us in the book of Psalms. And so, that as well as the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles' Creed are all great benefits for us in prayer.

So, I think one of the most blessed men in human history was that barber in Wittenberg, who was instructed on how to pray by Martin Luther, who was a master himself in the discipline. The Bible tells us that now we have the opportunity to come into the presence of God, to approach His throne boldly. And yet, we have to be careful that we notice the difference between boldness and arrogance. Even though we are to come boldly into the presence of God, we are to come boldly into the presence of God. We are to come in a spirit of humility.

And again, in this case, the disciple is not above his master. And though this is an unspeakable privilege that we have to come before God, it's very important that we enter into His presence that we remember two things that I've pointed out again and again. The two most important things that we have to remember when we speak to God is that we have to remember who He is, and we have to remember who we are. And as long as we remember those two things, we will be in a proper posture and attitude of reverence and adoration as we engage in conversation with Him. I can still remember when my wife and I first heard Dr. Sproul teach on prayer, and him sharing those two things that we need to remember, who God is and who we are. My wife wrote those on the inside cover of her Bible, and it changed the way we approached God in prayer.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. We all need encouragement in the Christian life, and we all have room to grow in the disciplines of following Christ. In this series, five things every Christian needs to grow, considers five areas, Bible study, prayer, worship, service, and stewardship. You can own this series and study guide, plus we'll send you Dr. Sproul's companion book when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. Perhaps you'll listen to the series yourself and give the book to a friend or a son or daughter to help them grow. Request this resource today at renewingyourmind.org, and thank you for your support. Tomorrow we'll consider worship from a biblical perspective, so join us Wednesday here on Renewing Your Mind.