All Prayer (Part 2 of 2)

As Christians were commanded to pray at all times, in all ways, the problem is we want the answer to come in our time and in our way. So what happens when God calls us to wait and then to wait some more? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg encourages us to persevere in prayer.

Our study continues in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 18. Or petition or expression of needs, coming to God and acknowledging that it is entirely legitimate to ask, to knock, to seek. Indeed, he bids us do this. He bids us come and tell him exactly what's going on and where our concern lies and what we're really interested in.

And sometimes they're big things, and other times they're small things. Daniel in chapter 9 comes to God. He says, O my God, incline your ear and hear my prayer.

Delay not for your own sake, because your city and your people are called by your name. You see the significance of that? He's not concerned about himself. He's concerned about God and his glory. Learning to pray, enabled by the Holy Spirit and guided by the Scriptures, will inevitably focus our eyes on the gospel and the glory of God and the purpose of the church. It is a real tragedy, isn't it, when in conversation with those whom we love it has become entirely perfunctory.

In fact, instead of it being marked by variety, it is marked by monotony. And so I said to myself this week, I need to learn to pray. Lord, teach us how to pray. Teach me to pray when I walk along the road, when I lie down, when I get up. Teach me to pray groaning. Teach me to pray crying. Teach me to pray. It's a long time since we studied Nehemiah for the first time.

It was actually 1983. And when we began to look at that book together, we realized that the immediate response of Nehemiah to the condition of the people of God in Jerusalem was for him to sit down and to weep and then to pray. And his opening prayer is fairly extensive. But as we began to work our way through the book, we realized that he didn't always pray at such length. In fact, some of his prayers we would regard as what we refer to as arrow prayers—just fired it straight up immediately. And, for example, he, on one occasion confronted by the animosity of the folks who were against him, said, So we prayed to our God, and we posted a guard. Or when going to the king to make his request, he said, So I prayed to the God of heaven, and I said to the king.

There probably wouldn't be very much in that. It's just a silent prayer. Oh, God, help me. You see, often prayer is actually in the groaning and in the crying. You know, it's true that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. You remember when Isaiah, in the midst of his circumstances, he says, Oh, oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. There's a ton just in the oh.

Oh! God listens to our ohs. He listens to our groans.

In fact, we know that the Holy Spirit actually makes sense of our groans, so that we pray constantly, we pray variously, and thirdly, we pray perseveringly. All perseverance. To that end, keep alert, with all perseverance. In other words, we dare not be overcome by dreamy carelessness. The way in which the disciples were overcome by a kind of dreamy carelessness. Jesus had said to them, you remember, in the prospect of his death, Watch and pray, so that you do not enter into temptation.

And they did neither, and they found themselves in real difficulty. In many ways, what you have here is an echo of the words of Jesus, and also it is in keeping with what Paul said to the Ephesian elders, which is recorded for us in Acts chapter 20, before he took his leave of them. He said to them, After my departure there will arise fierce wolves who will seek to draw away people after them and draw them away from all that I have taught you about Jesus and about the gospel. And so he says, Keep alert! Keep alert! Stay awake! Be watchful! And it is the watchfulness which then is the key to the perseverance. Sinclair Ferguson, helpful as ever, says, Christ is building his church on territory that has been occupied by an enemy.

Alertness is always essential when living in a war zone. Now, in this matter of perseverance—and I think persevering in prayer is very, very difficult. It's very easy for me. It's a bit like an exercise program. When you go for your physical, the fellow says to you, or doctor says to you, and, How are you doing with the exercise? I say, Well, I have a burst of enthusiasm followed by periods of chronic inertia. And he said, Okay, I get that.

I'd have to say that that would be true in terms of prayer. Burst of enthusiasm followed by periods of chronic inertia. We used to have Jim Reeve's records in our home. My father played them on Sunday afternoon.

It was dreadful. He used to put a stack of them on—LPs—and he would fall asleep within two or three tracks. He never knew how horrible it was. But if you ever tried to turn it off, he woke immediately.

But one of his favorites was a Jim Reeve's record, that old country singer. And I can still remember Reeve's voice singing out, How long has it been Since you talked with the Lord? Since you told him Your heart's hidden secrets? How long since you prayed? How long since you stayed On your knees Till the dawn broke through?

So, you see, even my father was teaching me with his dreadful records, cuz then I would be ten, and now I'm sixty-six. So, fifty-six years after those dreadful Sunday afternoons, the voice of Reeve's mingles with the voice of Paul, mingles with my voice to your ears, so that together we might ask ourselves, What do we know about persevering in prayer? You see, one of the reasons that we're tempted to quit, to give up, is because we see no immediate response. And in our atomized world, our instantaneous world, this is a real difficulty. When you used to write letters across the Atlantic Ocean, it took five days to get there, a few days to be read and absorbed, and then a while before it came back to you. Well, you learned to wait. But now you want to see on your phone that it says, Delivered.

And then now you want to know why it is, that since it was delivered, you don't have any kind of answer. Surely this is why, in part, Jesus said to his disciples, I'm gonna tell you a parable. I'm gonna tell you a parable to help you with this, to make sure that you understand that you should always pray and not give up. And the temptation to give up often combines with the gap that exists between the prayer or the continual prayer and the period of time that is represented in the journey of our lives, where we don't see an answer.

Have you never prayed with the psalmist in Psalm 13? How long will you forget me, O LORD? Forever? How long must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?

How long are you gonna hide your face from me? You see, that's the cry of a persevering prayer. It's the cry of an honest prayer. Well, you say to me, well, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to explain the fact that God doesn't seem to answer?

What do you do in that situation? Well, you can either just give up completely, or we can persevere—persevere in the knowledge that God loves me, that God reigns over the affairs of the universe, and that God and his way are always best. Anselm, who was the archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the eleventh century, writes on one occasion, God does not delay to hear our prayers, because he has no mind to give, but that by enlarging our desires he may give us the more largely. I want it now. I want the answer now. I want to see this now.

I want this resolved now. And the Father who knows best determines that when it is resolved then, according to his time and his good purpose, the benefit to the prayer will be realized with a greater sense of joy, because of the weight. Similarly, but more colloquially, Spurgeon, in his own inimitable way, says, Some blessings are like ripe fruit in autumn, which falls readily into our hands. But for some blessings you need to give the tree a good shaking. And some of us have been shaking some of these branches for a while, have we not? Some of us are going to have to be content to trust God that he will fulfill his covenant promises and that should we not see it this side of eternity. We will, on the far side, realize that a God who loves us, a God who reigns, a God whose will is best, will fulfill his promises. And in that we continue. That brings us to the fourth and final all. All times, constantly. All prayer, variously.

All perseverance, unstintingly. All the saints, expansively or globally. Making supplication for all the saints.

Now, I looked at this again and again. I said it would have been so much easier if it had said some instead of all. Because then we could all have relaxed, you know, praying sometimes.

Oh, yes, I do, sometimes. And some perseverance, yes, and for some of the saints. Because there's a number of them I don't want to pray for. You see, it's natural, and it's entirely legitimate, for us to pray about our own personal needs. The Bible encourages us to do that—to bring the concerns of our own hearts and our own homes to them. But when we do so, and when we see prayer only, if you like, in that limited way, when we see prayer providing for, if you like, our personal benefit, then what we need to realize is that that is exactly the way the non-Christian views the notion of prayer. Unbelieving people, if they have any idea of prayer at all, they view it in those terms.

It's something that's like a divine ATM, that you can get stuff for yourself if you just go about it the right way. So it's all self-oriented. So when the Christian population appears only to be preoccupied in a very isolated way—even a church concerned only for itself—then we're not much different from those who have got no idea about the things that Paul is teaching us here.

No, what Paul is calling for his readers to do—and we're his readers—is to look beyond themselves to the needs of all the saints—all the saints. The very last new song that was recorded by the Beatles on the 3rd of January 1970—that's a long time ago, nearly half a century—was recorded without John Lennon being present. It was written by George Harrison, and there is a prize for the person who can tell me the title of the song. I Me Mine. I Me Mine. Harrison, influenced by his Hinduism, was addressing the issue of the ego. And the irony of it was that it was the very issue of the ego which was destroying the band. It was the fact that they were only concerned, actually, about I, me, and mine.

And of course, what happened? You will never be able to sustain community life on the basis of that kind of self-focus. And so I think it is legitimate to segue from there to say this—that our prayers, individually and corporately, will always languish and will finally stutter to a halt without two things. Number one, a God-centered perspective, and number two, a God-centered trust. So in other words, we are asking ourselves, What is God's plan for the world? What has God promised to do? Well, he has promised to put together a people that are his very own—from every tribe and nation and language and tongue and so on.

Therefore, we can legitimately pray to the end that many people from many places, both in our own immediate area and throughout the entire globe, will become the committed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. Why is it that in certain periods of history, certain areas of the world have been singularly blessed? Why is it that New England prospered as it did in an earlier part of our history? Why is it that Jonathan Edwards is buried over there on the East Coast? Why is it that so many influential people were there, and there was such a pulsating power of the gospel via Whitefield and the rest? And yet today there is very little evidence of it at all.

Why is it that mainland China has known such a significant growth under persecution? Well, why is it that around here, as I drive back and forth, some fields are fallow and some fields are already reseeded? I don't know. But I can find out if I ask the farmer. Because the farmer knows exactly what he's doing with his fields, and he has a plan that the average bystander will not be able to lay hold on without checking. So what is God doing in the world? We will have to ask him. We will have to acknowledge that if we're going to pray for all the saints, it's gonna force us to a radical shift in perspective. It's going to address us as Americans to stop seeing the world as spinning outwards from Washington, D.C., or as Brits from still clinging to some strange notion that we have an empire, and that it is entirely legitimate that this tiny cluster of islands known as the United Kingdom should be in the very middle of any map of the world, thereby suggesting what it was planned to suggest.

We are the center of the world. Didn't you know? I came across an old article in the BBC magazine. It's old, 2012.

I found it by happenstance. The article's heading was Why Modern Maps Put Everyone at the Center of the World. How, the writer asked, will the death of paper maps change the way we live?

A thousand years ago, Jerusalem stood at the center of the Christian worldview. Or if you lived in China, it was YouTube. But now it is a throbbing green dot on our phones. We no longer travel from A to B.

We travel from me to B. Because as soon as we bring it up, there we are, right at the center of it all. And you know that if you have used a GPS walking—for example, in a city like Chicago—you could walk three or four miles without ever looking around to see who is there or what is there or anything's there at all.

Because all you're doing is tracking in that way. Well, is the application legitimate? You can decide. The writer of that article said, concerning this, the law says historical, social, and monumental. I said to one of my grandchildren the other day, I met a couple, and one is from Syria, and one is from the Ukraine. And the girl said to me, Where are they? And I said, Well, I can show you on the globe in my study. And then she didn't say anything at all.

God, I know she was sitting there and goes, What is a globe in a study? And I realized, I'm in Neanderthal. But you knew that.

No, the application is clear—at least to me. The task assigned is unfinished—to reach the world for Jesus Christ. And the unfinished task will never be accomplished absent God-centered praying.

Without sincere, sensible, spirit-filled outpouring of our souls to God, asking him for such things as he has promised, we will remain in the doldrums. It's a challenge, isn't it? I find it such.

You're listening to Alistair Begg. This is Truth for Life. Alistair reminded us today that each of us has been given a task to reach the world for Jesus Christ and to pray that people in all nations will become his committed followers. That's our mission here at Truth for Life.

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You can click the image in the app or go to our website truthforlife.org slash donate, or if it's easier, call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening today. The Apostle Paul encouraged believers to pray for all people, but he also asked people to pray for him. If this seasoned apostle needed prayer, what does that mean for us? Find out as you listen tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.