"With Christ in the School of Prayer"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's Word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that.

Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio. And now let's get to the Word of God. What Jesus wants to do in our passage this morning, what I want to do with you as we talk is I want to expand our understanding and our scope of what prayer is all about. Prayer has a much broader scope than just crisis intervention. So let's talk about that and see if we can challenge you to change your daily schedule to include more time for prayer because you understand better what God wants to use it for in your life.

Now let's look. Verse 1, one day Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he finished one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples to pray. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ was God wrapped in human flesh and if there was ever a person who ought to be able to make it without praying, it ought to be him. But when we read the Bible, what we actually find is that Jesus Christ was a man of prayer, that prayer was part of his regular routine and his regular lifestyle. And we can go through just the gospel according to Luke, chapter 5, chapter 6, twice in chapter 9 and on we go where over and over again we find Jesus praying. You can do that in all the gospel accounts. For Jesus Christ, prayer was not a duty, it was not an obligation, it was not a ritual, it was something he enjoyed doing, it was a way of life.

You say, Lon, how can you be so sure it was something all that enjoyable for him? Well, the answer is that why would these disciples come and say to Jesus, Lord, teach us to pray if his prayer life gave off the impression to them that prayer was cruel and unusual punishment? You know, they would say, oh, yuck, I'm glad he does that, glad I don't have to do that, let him do the praying, I don't want to do that stuff. But instead, his prayer life was so real and so vibrant and so exciting that they came to him and said, Lord, we don't know how to pray like that. Can you teach us how to pray like that?

That's a whole different dimension that we know nothing about. Well, in response, Jesus carries on a little prayer clinic here in the next 12 verses. And I want us to look at this, there are three things he does in these verses. Number one, he gives us some principles for how to pray. Number two, he gives us a promise about our prayer life. And number three, he gives us a guarantee about the answers we're going to get.

So let's look at this together. What are the principles for a powerful prayer life? Let's look at verse two. Jesus said, when you pray, say this, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive others who sin against us.

And lead us not into temptation. You say, well, not long, wait a minute, what happened to the rest of it? I mean, what happened to the, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever and all the other words. This is only half the thing.

Where's the rest of it? Well, it isn't here. You're thinking about the form of the Lord's Prayer Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount way back in Matthew's gospel.

As a matter of fact, it was almost two years before this that he did that one. And yes, it does have some different words. And yes, it does have some different expressions in it. You say, well, then how could this be? How could you have two different Lord's Prayer? I mean, when we stand in church to recite it, which one do we say? Well, now wait a minute.

Time out a second. I think it's really good that Jesus gave two different versions that had different words. Because what that means is that the words aren't magic.

Do you understand what I'm saying? So many places where maybe you've been and where I've been and around the world, people stand up and say the Lord's Prayer and they go through it like a mantra every single week. I'm calling. I'm in heaven.

I'll be there. And you know, we've got to be word perfect. And somehow many people think it's like a rabbit's foot or Aladdin's lamp, that if you rub it just right, it's going to produce all kinds of magical stuff from God. But you see, there's no magic to these words. It's the principles that these words are trying to teach us about how to put together a prayer time that really make the difference.

The words themselves are not all that much important. And so in giving us two different forms, what Jesus is really trying to tell us is that God wants you to take the principles that are in the Lord's Prayer and put them in your words, express them from your heart, speak them in your language. Talk to God like you talk to a friend on the telephone around those principles. He's not just interested in having you stand up and recite the Lord's Prayer by heart time after time after time. There's no magic in that.

You with me? Now, what are these principles that he's given us here in the Lord's Prayer? Well, there are four that I want to give you, and I don't have time to really develop them this morning. If you'll go up in the tape area, I have a whole series on the Lord's Prayer that I did a few years ago. Ten tapes, you can buy it. Say, ten tapes? You got ten tapes out of this? Absolutely.

And there's probably more. But you can go get the ten tapes and listen to them. I don't have time to give you more than just a real quick overview. But there are four words I want you to write down. You want to put together a prayer time?

Here are the four key words. Exalt, agree, confess, and talk. Exalt, agree, confess, and talk. Look at the prayer. Jesus says, hallowed be thy name.

That's what he starts with. He starts by exalting God first. By saying, Lord, may your name be lifted up. May your name be honored.

May your name be exalted. In other words, when Jesus tells us to pray, what he tells us is, don't start with our needs first. Don't start with our problems first. Don't start with what we want first.

Start with God first. That's where Jesus started the Lord's Prayer. And the reason for that is, as one commentator said, only when we give God his proper place will other things fall into their proper place.

Too often we rush in and we want to start talking about us, us, us, us, us, us, us. But we don't have perspective yet. We need to first think about who God is, and then that adds perspective to our prayer life. So you start with exalting God. Second, we agree.

You say, agree what? Well, Jesus goes on to say, next, your kingdom come. And he adds in Matthew's version, your will be done. In other words, when we go to prayer, we need to be willing to agree that we're going to submit to God's will before we ask for anything, that however God chooses to answer our prayers, if it's God's will that God answers with, we agree, Lord, we'll accept your will. We're going to tell you what we want, but we'll accept the will of God.

We're going to submit to you when we begin praying. Third is the word confess. Jesus says, forgive us our sins, for we're also willing to forgive other people who sin against us. Confession is very important.

Now, would you notice? We haven't asked for anything yet. Confession is very important because it keeps the channel between us and God unclogged.

It keeps it open. So God is free to respond to our prayers in the kind of powerful way that he really wants to. And you know what? You will find if you get down and you really do a humble and an honest and an authentic job of dealing with your sins and your shortcomings and where you let God down every day, you will find that other people and what they did to you wrong begins to look trivial compared to what you did wrong that day, and it makes it a whole lot easier to forgive other people. I find that Christians who have a very hard time forgiving other people usually are Christians who do a very poor job of examining their own life and confessing.

In light of all I examine in my life and do wrong, believe me, what people do to me is trivial by comparison. Fourth and finally, it's now time to talk to God. We've exalted God. We've agreed to submit to his will regardless of what he does.

We've confessed our shortcomings and cleaned out the channel. Now it's time to talk. And Jesus says there's two things you can talk about. You can say give me this day my daily need, my daily bread. You can talk to him about what you need for today. And Jesus says we can say lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. You can talk about tomorrow and the needs you have for guidance and protection tomorrow.

Those are very legitimate. These are the principles for putting together a powerful prayer life, the skeleton on which you can hang a powerful prayer life. Now there's one other thing I want to say before we leave the Lord's Prayer, and that is I want us to look at the very first word. Jesus started out by saying, what was the very first word out of his mouth?

What was it? Father. Now father is a word of relationship.

True? A word of relationship. Now why does Jesus start with this word father? Because he wants us to understand that prayer assumes this relationship exists. That without this relationship, prayer has no foundation.

That if you want to see God really respond to your prayers, you have to approach him on the basis of a relationship, and the relationship comes when you become his child through faith in Jesus Christ. I'm in the office on Tuesdays here and Tuesday afternoon is when I take appointments. If you call and say I want to see Lon, I want to talk about something, my secretary will say fine, he sees people on Tuesday afternoon.

And all Tuesday afternoon I go from one appointment to the next, usually half an hour at a time just meeting with people just like you. Now my secretary knows if I get a phone call on Tuesday afternoon when I'm meeting with people, I don't get interrupted. Why?

You say why? The answer is you came in to talk to me about something very important and it's not fair to you to interrupt you. So they take a message. I don't care who it is, they take a message.

Except, except for one group of people. And that is my family. If my family calls me and they need me, they have direct line. And I will say to you if you're sitting there, would you excuse me for just a second? I'll only be a moment and I really only will, but it's my family on the phone, I need to take this call. My family know they've got direct line. No, it doesn't matter what conference I'm in, doesn't matter what meeting I'm in, doesn't matter what I'm doing, if my family needs me, they've got a direct line to get me.

Now why is that? How come I'll take a phone call from my children and I won't take a phone call from you on Tuesday? The answer is they're my children and you're not. And I have a special relationship with them I don't have with you. I'm concerned about their needs in a way I'm not concerned about your needs.

I am concerned about your needs, but not like my children. Because that's a unique relationship. My point is friends, we in God are the very same way.

The very same way. If you're here and you've never embraced Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you are God's creation, but you're not his child. You're not his child. God's children, through faith in Jesus Christ, are people who have God's ear in a unique way that the rest of the world does not have God's ear. You say, wait a minute, Lon, are you saying to me that if I'm not a Christian, God won't answer my prayers? Is that what you're trying to tell me?

No, listen carefully. If you're not a Christian, God may answer your prayers. He may. He has that right and he has that option. But in the Bible, God never obligates himself to answer your prayers if you're not a Christian. He obligates himself to answer the prayers of people who are his children, but he never obligates himself to answer the prayers of people who aren't.

He may do it, but he doesn't have to. And so if you really want your prayers answered, then you need to embrace Jesus Christ and become his child through faith in Christ. And that's just one of the many good reasons to do it. If you're here and you've never made a personal decision for Jesus Christ, then everything else I'm going to say about prayer really doesn't apply to you until you make that decision and you've accepted Christ and become his child. I hope you'll think about that and I hope you'll do it. Well, let's go on. Those are our principles about prayer.

Exalt, right? Agree, confess, and then talk. Now, you say, all right, Lon, what if I do that and God blows me off and doesn't even listen to me? Well, that won't happen because of what Jesus says next.

Jesus says if you're a Christian and you pray, God will listen. And here's why. And he goes on to tell a story.

So what is this promise he gives? Well, it's found in this story. Here's the story.

Let me summarize it. A man went to bed one night. Everything was fine. All of a sudden, he hears a knock at the door. And it's a friend of his who just arrived in town about midnight, and his friend wants to come in. In the ancient Near East, hospitality was a sacred duty.

It didn't matter when people arrived or what was going on. You had to show them hospitality. Even today, if you're in an Arab's tent and you're his worst enemy, he's not allowed to do you any harm while you're a guest in his tent.

That hospitality is still paramount in the Near East today. So the man jumps up, but he's not ready. He doesn't have any food. So he runs next door to his neighbor. And the host says to his neighbor, hey, hey, you know that banana bread you baked today? I need some of it. I have somebody just got here.

Could I have some of that? And the guy inside the house says, what's wrong with you, man? It's midnight. Everybody's in bed. My kids are in bed. My wife's in bed. I'm in bed. You're going to wake up the baby.

Get out of here. But the host says, no, you don't understand. I've got to have some of that banana bread because I've got to entertain my guests. You've got to wake up and you've got to give me some of that banana bread. And the Bible says that even though the guy wouldn't get out of bed just because the guy was his friend, he ends up getting out of bed and giving him the banana bread. Now, it doesn't say banana bread in the Bible, but giving him what he needs because the guy kept asking and asking and finally he got up and gave it to him. Now, Jesus then finishes the parable by saying, look, look down with me at verse 9. He says, so I say to you, ask and it will be given to you. Speak and you will find.

Knock and the door will be opened to you. You see, the lesson of the parable is a lesson in contrast. Contrasting God and this next door neighbor. The point Jesus is trying to make is that God and the next door neighbor are very different. The next door neighbor was just a friend, just an acquaintance. He didn't really have that much interest in the needs of the guy who had had the friend show up.

God is our Heavenly Father who is deeply interested in everything that goes on in our life. There's a difference. Another difference is that the guy next door was putting his own needs first. He said, I'm in bed. My kids are in bed. I don't care about your neighbor.

Get lost. But God never puts his needs first. He always puts our needs first because we're his children. And finally, the next door neighbor, it was an inconvenient time for him, but there's never an inconvenient time for God to answer a prayer.

You see the difference? Jesus is drawing a contrast and saying that God is not at all like this reluctant neighbor and the point is if this host got this selfish, self-centered neighbor to respond at an inconvenient time just by asking him, how much more will our Heavenly Father respond to us since he's so different from that neighbor if we will only ask him? What have we learned this morning? Well, we got some principles about praying and we've learned God's promise. You pray as a Christian, God will answer. You ask and you will get, but you'll get according to what God knows is best for you to resolve the problem that you're concerned about. Now that's our passage, but it leaves us with the question, so what?

Let's see if we can answer that as we close. If I were to give you a three by five card and say, okay, I want you to write down the second half of this sentence. Okay, here's the first half of the sentence, you write the second half. The real purpose of prayer is you write the second half.

What do you think most people would write? The real purpose of prayer is, you know what I think most people would write? I think they would write, the real purpose of prayer is to change things, to change my circumstances, to make things different, to make things better, to change the kind of situation I'm in. Now does prayer work for that? Yes, it does. Is prayer good for that? Yes, it does. Does prayer change things?

You bet it does. James chapter five says the prayer of a Christian is powerful and effective and gives us the example of Elijah who prayed and it didn't rain for three years. I'd say that is what I would call a serious altering of the situation through prayer. Does prayer change things?

Don't tell me prayer doesn't change things. And I'm sure there are many of you who could tell me story after story just like this of how you prayed and God did something in your job. You prayed and God did something in your health. You prayed and God did something in your love life or in your marriage. You prayed and God did something with your children.

You prayed and God did something with your finances. God changes things in response to prayer. But most of us as Christians think that's the biggest and greatest purpose of prayer. It isn't.

You say it isn't? No. No, you see, my friend, the greatest purpose of prayer is not to change circumstances.

The greatest purpose in prayer is to change you. Do you remember when Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane? Everybody knows that story, I think. The Bible says Jesus went in and anguished. He was grieved. He was troubled. He was sorrowful.

He got on his knees and he poured out his heart to God and he said, God, God, if there's any way this cross can pass from me, let it pass. I don't want to go to the cross. I don't want the pain. I don't want the humiliation. I don't want the suffering.

I don't want the abuse. I don't want to go to the cross. When Jesus came out of the garden, he had a whole different attitude, didn't he? He came out of the garden at peace, calm, resolute, and quietly, in obedience to God, went to the cross for you and me. Something happened in the garden that changed the way Jesus went in to the way Jesus came out, that readjusted his will and his desires from not wanting to go to the cross to being willing to go without a complaint or without in any way trying to stop it. What happened in the garden that changed him?

Well, what was the only thing Jesus did in the garden? The only thing he did was pray. And friend, this is the greatest aspect of prayer. So often we go into prayer saying, my will be done. But you see, what God does is by the time we come out of prayer, we come out saying, no, Lord, that's wrong.

Your will be done. Prayer is the ultimate attitude adjuster, folks. It's what God uses to change our heart and our will and our desires and bring them in line with his master plan. Now, listen to me. You can't do that driving down the beltway in your car. You can't do that having devotions on the metro. You can't let God do that in your heart by getting down and saying, now lay me down and say, pray, Lord, my soul to keep and hopping in bed. For God to do that, it takes time. There are some things that just can't be rushed a la Americana.

And this is one of them. To get everything out of prayer that God has in it, you've got to spend some time for God to adjust you like that. And one of the greatest, I believe, shortcomings in 20th century Christianity is our prayerlessness, how little time we really spend alone with God, just us and God, so that God can do through prayer everything he wants to do in your heart and life. Say, Lord, I never realized all of that was in prayer.

Well, now you do. So now let me ask you, now what? What are you going to do about it?

Is it going to make any difference in your schedule? Is it going to make any difference in the time you carve out to be with God? Folks, prayerlessness is one of the greatest enemies you have in your life. A prayerless life is a powerless life. A prayerless life is a frustrated life. A prayerless life is a misguided life because you'll miss where God's going if you're not on your knees talking to him about it. A prayerless life is a vulnerable life. You don't spend time with God in prayer, and your conscience will get dull, and you will do things that you never thought as a Christian you were capable of doing, but you'll do them because with a dull conscience you're vulnerable. A prayerless life is a life full of anxiety and stress and conflict. God doesn't want you living that way. That's why he gave you prayer. But the quick fix, fly by, drive down the road prayer is not going to cut it, folks. It won't cut it. You need time alone with God where God can do everything in your heart that he wants to do.

Let me ask you a question in closing. How much time do you spend all by yourself with God every day? Say, you mean driving down a beltway doesn't count? Doesn't count. Riding on the metro doesn't count? Doesn't count. Praying while I'm brushing my teeth doesn't count? Doesn't count.

Oh. Going to church doesn't count? Doesn't count.

You, God, closed door, room all by yourself, on your knees, just talking and listening, no distractions, radio's not on, television isn't going. How much time? Say, Lon, I'm embarrassed to tell you. Okay, I accept that. It's never too soon to start, never too late to start. You can start anytime you want. So why don't you start?

You say, well, I never realized it was all that important. Well, that's the whole point of this morning, isn't it? God has some great things he wants to do in your heart, but he needs time with just you and him. I hope that as a result of being here this morning, you'll reexamine your time schedule and say, you know what? I need to make some time for me and God in here, not driving my car, not riding the metro, not shaving, not brushing my teeth, but just me and God where I can concentrate and we can be alone.

God help you do that. Heavenly Father, the Word of God speaks to the real needs of our hearts, and I pray this morning that you would take it and you would speak to the needs of each one of us here. Lord, what we need is time with you. We don't need more time at the therapist. We don't need more time on the phone bemoaning our fate to our friends.

We don't need to commiserate more. We need to pray more. And Heavenly Father, I pray you would forgive us as your children in the 20th century for how little we pray. Lord, we've got the quick fix mentality for everything, but teach us that the great men and women of God who made a difference didn't have a quick fix when it came to prayer.

They spent time with you. And I pray, Father, that many of us here would be willing to change our daily schedules to make sure we get the kind of time with you we need so that prayer can accomplish everything in our life that you want it to. Change the way we live by what we've heard here today, Father. I pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. You've been listening to So What with Dr. Lon Solomon. So What is an outreach of Lon Solomon Ministries. To listen to today's message or for more information, visit our website, lonsolomonministries.org. Thank you for your support. If you would like to contact us, please visit our website or call us at 866-788-7770. We hope you will join us next time when Lon seeks to answer one of life's most important questions, So What.