Prayer Resolutions

resolutions: prayer

Jason Procopio 

We’re starting this year in a short series called “Resolutions”. In this series we’re looking at what we often call the “spiritual disciplines”. Simply put, the spiritual disciplines are those practices—like reading the Bible and prayer—which God gives us to help us grow in him. 

Last week we spoke simply about the Bible. We saw that God gave us a goal for our Christian lives, and he gives us his Word as the primary means to help us get there. But this relationship isn’t purely utilitarian; God doesn’t give us his Word just to get us to a goal. Instead, he establishes a relationship with us—that of a Father with his adopted children—and he gives us the Bible as (among other things) one the main means of nourishing the Father-to-children relationship he has with us.

But on its own, it is incomplete. If the Bible is one side of the coin, prayer is the other. Prayer isn’t simply utilitarian either. It is our side of the exchange which feeds our relationship with God. That’s why this message is the second part of a two-parter. The first part, we saw last week; the second part is today. 

Those of you who are like me probably listened last week and accepted it all pretty easily. I don’t really have a hard time reading the Bible, because I love to read in general, so falling into the Bible comes fairly easily. Where people like me get tripped up is very often the other side of the coin: it’s prayer.

Hearing the Word is one thing; responding to the Word is another.

Every time we open the Bible to read, we are faced with the most glorious truths imaginable. We come to know about the God who created us and sustains us. But he doesn’t teach us the same thing every time; again, his Word is not purely utilitarian. He gives us his Word, not mainly to give us what we need for today, but to allow us to know him, over the whole course of our lives.

So how does that happen? But how do we go from knowing about God to knowing God? How do we go from understanding what we read in the Word to feeling it in our guts? How do we go from knowledge to conviction?

God uses a lot of means to help this happen, but I would argue that God gives us two main ways.

The first is his Word, in which he speaks to us.

The second is prayer, in which we respond to him.

There are many others, including all the other spiritual disciplines we’re going to see in this series. But it starts with these two, and these two must go together—you can’t rightly read the Word without prayer, and you can’t rightly pray without the Word. 

So we’re going to do something a little atypical today. I have basically one point for this entire message. So we’re going to look at that point and go back over something we saw a few months ago in the Sermon on the Mount; then after the break, I’d like us to take everything we saw in the first half, and put it in action through a couple of case studies. 

Prayer Is for Knowing God (Matthew 6.9-13)

There are always three questions we want to ask when we come to the subject of prayer: What is prayer? How do we pray? Why do we pray?

The first question is easy. What is prayer? Prayer is talking to God. That’s it.

The second question is a little more complex. A lot of people will teach a three-point schema for every prayer, saying that prayer is adoration, thanksgiving and intercession. (Adoration is when we worship God for who he is; thanksgiving is when we thank God for who he is and for what he has done; intercession is when we ask God to do something because only he can.)

That explanation is very helpful—in nearly every prayer you see in the Bible, you’ll see some element of all of these, and we should use Scripture to help us know how to pray—but it can also be limiting. God never told us that if we speak to him and don’t include one of these elements, then it doesn’t count. It can also be limiting because it can tend to reduce prayer to a checklist. Adoration, check; thanksgiving, check; intercession, check. Good—done playing, now I can do something more fun.

We should think about how to pray; we should want to learn how to pray better. But I’d like to suggest that even more important than how we pray is why we pray.

If we’re clear on why we pray, we won’t have to push ourselves to learn to pray better. It won’t be a chore. If we understand why we pray, we’ll want to pray; we’ll want to learn how.

But if we’re not clear on why we pray, we leave one of the two most essential tools for the Christian life in our toolbox, collecting dust.

So I’m going to give a basic, foundational statement for why we pray, and then I’ll explain why I believe it. We can pray for a lot of things, and all of those things can be good. But underneath every individual prayer that we can pray or read in the Bible, there is a foundational reason why prayer exists in the first place, and it is this.

Prayer is not about getting things from God or saying things to God; prayer is about knowing God.

Let me give you an example of why I believe this. Open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6. We saw this text just a few months ago, in the Sermon on the Mount, so we’ll have to do a bit of a recap. 

In Matthew 6.9-13, Jesus gives what is often called “the Lord’s Prayer.” It is Jesus, teaching  his disciples how to pray. Let’s read those verses together:  

9 Pray then like this: 

“Our Father in heaven, 

hallowed be your name. 

10  Your kingdom come, 

your will be done, 

on earth as it is in heaven. 

11  Give us this day our daily bread, 

12  and forgive us our debts, 

as we also have forgiven our debtors. 

13  And lead us not into temptation, 

but deliver us from evil. 

So there are seven basic requests Jesus gives us in this prayer. The first three are entirely focused on God himself (hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done…), and the last four are requests for our needs (daily bread, forgiveness, protection from temptation and evil). 

During our series on the Sermon on the Mount, we saw that Jesus did not give us the Lord’s Prayer simply to give us something to say when we pray: he’s telling us what we need more than anything else. And every one of these requests—even those which deal with our needs—is focused on God. The first three are requests that God would show himself as God in the universe he created; and the last four are requests that he would show himself as God in our individual lives. How? By giving us what we truly need, and what only he can give.

Every last point of this prayer teaches us who God is and what he is like—in himself, and in relationship to us. This prayer is not mainly about getting the things we need, but about knowing who God is and what he is like.

If you’re not convinced yet, look at the context. In the verses that come just before the Lord’s prayer, Jesus is telling his disciples not to pray like those who don’t know God, using mantras and catchphrases and imagining that if they just say the right thing, God will listen to them and give them what they need.

Why does he tell them not to do that? Because God’s not that kind of God. V. 8: Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. God is a wise God, who knows better than you do how to take care of you; and God is a good God, who will always and only give you what you need.

So he’s saying, come to God in prayer as he is. 

Now obviously we’d like to do that, but what if we don’t know what God is like? Or what if we do know, but we don’t quite believe it?

Well, that’s why he gives us a prayer to pray, and not just a theology lesson. Jesus teaches us how to pray in order to give us a means of reforming our hearts to desire the right things. He teaches us to pray that we might learn what God loves, and train our hearts with the help of his Spirit to love the same things ourselves.

You see, once again, Christ invites us into this unthinkable, paternal relationship with the Father, and in that relationship, as we pursue that relationship, God convinces us that he really is a good Father. That he really does love what is lovely. That he really does take care of his children. That he really does love his children. That he really does deserve glory. 

It’s one thing to read those things on a page, to read the Lord’s prayer on the page. But that’s not what Jesus tells us to do. He doesn’t tell us to read the Lord’s Prayer; he tells us to pray the Lord’s Prayer: Pray then like this, he says. It is as we pray that we learn through the prayer Jesus taught us what our Father in heaven is like.

To put it simply, God changes our hearts through the conversations we have. As we listen to what he says in his Word, and as we respond to what he says—not by talking about the weather or our favorite TV show (though we can do that), but by talking about him.

Jesus gives us this prayer, not so that God might provide for our needs, or forgive our sin, or protect us from temptation. He gives us this prayer that we might come to know—not just in our heads but in our guts—who our Father in heaven is, and what he is like.

The point is this: God gives us the Bible to teach us to pray; and he teaches us to pray in order to help us know our God in our hearts as well as our heads. That’s how this relationship begins; if our Christian lives are a building that God is construction, the Word of God and prayer are the foundation which holds the whole thing up. The things we do in our Christian lives don’t stop here, but they always start here.

Case Studies (Psalm 103.1-14, Romans 8.31-39) 

So—God gives us the Bible to teach us to pray; and he teaches us to pray in order to help us know our God here (guts), and not just here (head). To not just know about him, but to know him.

That is why I believe that the most important element of prayer should always be the Bible—that’s where we go to learn how to pray. A lot of people get the cart before the horse here. They pray as if their goal is to tell God about them—about what they want and what they need and what they feel. Or when they pray, they’ll talk to God about himself, but because they don’t pray with the Bible, what they say about God is so vague as to be useless, or actually, objectively wrong.

God delights in us anytime we speak to him, no matter how limited or self-centered our prayers might be—but that kind of prayer doesn’t do us much good. It won’t get us very far. If the goal of prayer is to know God, our usual, self-centered prayers will get us no closer to that goal.

We need the Bible for that.

So I’d like to simply talk about how we do that, in two case studies. For the first, I’d like us to go to Psalm 103. 

While you’re finding it, let me just say that we all know how to do this. It’s not completely natural, but it’s not something that takes a lot of work. We do this all the time, in discussion with other people. One person says one thing, and you want to make sure you understood correctly, so what do you do? You reformulate what they said, to make sure you’re both on the same page. It clarifies things, and it helps you understand the other person better by putting it in your own words.

Praying the Bible is very similar. We go to a passage of Scripture, and we pray it back to God, reformulating it to help ourselves feel it differently, because we’re saying it in our own words.

As I was thinking about which examples to give today, I thought about the conversation I had with that brother I mentioned earlier—because I know he is far from the only person in this room who has had that experience. I know many of you have difficult relationships with your fathers. 

So for our examples, I want to look at two texts that we can pray to help us train our hearts to know that our Father in heaven is a good Father—not just a good Father, a perfect Father: the Father that even the best dads in the world can’t come near.

So the first example: Psalm 103.1-14. 

We start by doing what we saw last week: by reading the Word. We ask God to help us realize that as we reading, that’s the voice of our Father, speaking to us. (That’s what we saw last week.)

Then we read. And as we read, we don’t just read: we pay attention. We take note of what God says about himself, what he says about us. And we think about it. We reflect on it. 

You can do this however you want—I underline things and make notes in the margins of my Bible to help—but it is helpful to take some kind of note, to clarify your thoughts.

Psalm 103.1:  

1  Bless the Lord, O my soul, 

and all that is within me, 

bless his holy name! 

So David isn’t just writing a song; he’s encouraging his own soul to bless God, when it might not want to. And he doesn’t just want to praise God with his mouth or with his mind; he wants to praise God with everything in him.  

2  Bless the Lord, O my soul, 

and forget not all his benefits, 

3  who forgives all your iniquity, 

who heals all your diseases, 

4  who redeems your life from the pit, 

who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, 

5  who satisfies you with good 

so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. 

Our Father forgives us, even though we don’t deserve it. Our Father preserves us, healing us from sickness in this life, and when he decides to take us to himself, he gives us perfect healing and eternal life in him. He pulls us up from the darkness in which we found ourselves, and crowns us with faithful love and mercy: he adopts us as his children and treats us as his sons and daughters. Our Father gives us good things, and whatever our Father gives us is good; when we know that what we have is good (no matter how it may feel), we are renewed, invigorated, refreshed. When you know that everything you are getting is a treasure, you see the things you have in a different way.  

6  The Lord works righteousness 

and justice for all who are oppressed. 

7  He made known his ways to Moses, 

his acts to the people of Israel. 

Our Father’s heart is peace for the hurting and justice for the oppressed; and we know this, because this is how we see him deal with his own people in the Old Testament. When they are oppressed, he fights for them. When they are hungry, he feeds them. When they are lost, he guides them. It is the same for us.

8  The Lord is merciful and gracious, 

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. 

9  He will not always chide, 

nor will he keep his anger forever. 

10  He does not deal with us according to our sins, 

nor repay us according to our iniquities. 

Our Father knows what we deserve, but that’s not what he gives us. We deserve punishment for our sin. We deserve wrath for our rebellion against him. But God’s wrath is slow, and it is not forever. He doesn’t base his treatment of us on what we do, but rather on who he is: slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. 

11  For as high as the heavens are above the earth, 

so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; 

12  as far as the east is from the west, 

so far does he remove our transgressions from us. 

13  As a father shows compassion to his children, 

so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. 

14  For he knows our frame; 

he remembers that we are dust. 

Our sins, which kept us from our Father’s love, are gone. They were placed on Christ, who was punished for those sins, and on the cross, they died with him. Our sins could not possibly be farther from us than they are right now—as far as east is from west. And why? Because he considers us his children. He knows who we are; he knows that we are in need of him; and as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. 

So you see? All that is just reading and taking note of what the text says.

Now, we could simply close the Bible and say, “That was good.” (It’s hard for us to feel any different about Psalm 103.)

But we don’t stop there. We take all those things we saw, and we go back over them. We ask God to help us. (Don’t close your eyes; follow along with me in the text.)

Lord, I want my soul to praise you, to bless you, even when I don’t feel like it. I want everything in me to praise you. Please help me praise you. Help me to praise you for everything you give to me, which I don’t deserve. Thank you for forgiving my sin, for keeping me alive and promising me eternal healing in the new heavens and the new earth. Thank you for pulling me out of the darkness in which you found me, and crowning me with love and mercy. Thank you for the good things you’ve given me; help me to believe that because you are a good Father, the things you give me are really good things.

Thank you for always taking care of your people. Help me to trust that you will always take care of me in the same way. Thank you for your mercy and your grace, which I don’t deserve. You have every reason to be angry, because I have sinned against you. But you are good: your love is steadfast. Thank you for not dealing with me according to my sins. Thank you for removing my sin from me and placing it on your Son. Thank you for punishing my sin on the cross of Christ. Help me to believe that it is finished: that as far as the east is from the west, my sin is that far from me. Thank you for adopting me as your son, and for being my Father, a better Father than my own father could ever be; thank you for the compassion you have shown me, that I only find in you. Thank you for knowing who I am, for knowing that I need help…and for coming to my rescue.

 Let’s look at one more example, a shorter one. Go to Romans 8.31-39. 

This example is a little different, because the one we saw before was a psalm, and psalms are easy to use as prayers (many of them are actually prayers).

The book of Romans is a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Rome. So he’s not writing a prayer here; he’s teaching the Romans something. But the same principle applies. We read, knowing that even if this is Paul speaking to the Romans, this Scripture is inspired by God and profitable to us, so it is still the voice of our Father, speaking to us. And we take note of what we see—what he says about himself, what he says about us. We think about it. We reflect on it. Let’s read:  

31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, 

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; 

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

We read, we pay attention, and then we go back over them. We ask God to help us.

Let’s pray again:

Lord, as hard as it is for us to believe sometimes, I know that you are for us—and if you are for us, no one can be against us. Help us to believe this is true, to look at what you did to save us. You didn’t spare even your own Son, but gave him up for us; help us to believe that if you would do that, you will absolutely take care of us! 

Help us to know and to believe that no one can condemn us—you are the one who declared us righteous! Christ himself, who lived, died and was raised for us, he is praying for us at this very moment! Thank you for sending your Son and listening to his prayers. 

Thank you God for this glorious truth that your love is so perfect, so faithful, so complete, that nothing can separate us from it. Let us repeat to ourselves every day that nothing—not tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword, can separate us from your love. Thank you that no matter what comes against us—because these things may well come against us—in these things, we are more than conquerors in you, because you conquered FOR us. Thank you for this glorious truth, and help us to believe with our brother Paul that nothing—neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Can you see how different this is from just opening the Bible, reading the passage, then closing the Bible again? It takes more time, sure, but can you see how much better that is? How much more enjoyable? it’s not just riding the mechanical horsey at the supermarket; praying Romans 8 is getting on a stallion and galloping through the mountains.

Some texts are a lot harder to pray than others. Story texts are difficult to pray. The books of the Law are hard to pray like we just prayed Romans and the Psalms. But it’s not difficult to take note of what you learned about God in those texts, and pray to God in response to what we learned.

I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that every time we read the Bible, we should be praying it, and every time we pray, we should have the Bible in sight or in mind. (This is why Bible memorization is so helpful.) If we do one without the other, we’re riding the horse at the supermarket: moving, but not going far.

Because the goal, once again, is not getting what we want from God, but knowing the God who gives us everything.

So, brothers and sisters, read the Word, and pray the Word. Don’t just talk: speak to your own hearts through your prayers, as David did, and let the Holy Spirit teach your heart to love the God to whom we pray.

Proclamation (Resolutions)

resolutions: proclamation

Jason Procopio 

Most of you know me at least a little; you know I’m a naturally timid person. I always have been. That’s why I got into the professions I’ve had. I was an English teacher for almost ten years, and it’s the perfect job for a shy person to have, because you’re speaking about a subject you know well, in which you are competent and confident (qualities most timid people feel they lack), and there aren’t a lot of unknown variables, because it’s not a conversation. It’s a discourse: you get up front, and talk about something you know. It’s a way for a shy person to feel gregarious, at least for a while.

Preaching is similar. This isn’t really a conversation we’re having. I’m up here, and I’ve prepared what I’m going to say, and there aren’t a lot of ways I can be surprised. (It can happen, but it’s rare.) Pastoring is different—that is an aspect of my job that forces me to work on my social anxiety, and that’s a good thing.

People with social anxiety, like me, tend to be afraid of the unknowns: of the things other people might bring to the table that we’re not expecting. A question we don’t know how to answer; or an observation we don’t know how to follow up on; or what if they start talking about a subject we know nothing about, and we just stand there, nodding our heads like idiots and racking our brains for something to say?

It’s often hard to communicate to outgoing people what it feels like to be shy; but for Christians, almost all of us know what it’s like, no matter what our personality is. Because the kind of social anxiety people like me feel on a regular basis, nearly all of us feel when it comes time to share the gospel with someone.

One of the scariest things a Christian can do is to share the gospel with someone who doesn’t believe. We’re afraid that they’ll think we’re fools, that they’ll reject us or make fun of us, or…we don’t even know what. We’re afraid of the unknowns.

And so because we’re afraid, most of us don’t do it. We just don’t say anything. Or when we do—if we find ourselves cornered, and someone who knows we’re Christians comes out and asks us a question about our faith—we answer timidly, almost like we’re apologizing. “I know it sounds crazy, but…”

Part of the reason we feel this way is that we don’t really understand what’s going on when we share the gospel. I grew up hearing that the reason we need to share the gospel is because if we don’t, then the people to whom we’re speaking might die without Christ. In a sense, this is true. The apostle Paul says in Romans 10.14:  

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

Someone needs to preach the gospel for us to be saved by the gospel. The stakes are very high.

At the same time, we know that God is sovereign over those whom he saves. I met Christ, in part, through the witness of a friend of mine named Jeremy, who shared the gospel with me. But it was God, not Jeremy, and not even me, who decided that I would be saved; if Jeremy hadn’t been there, I am convinced God would have sent someone else. Everyone whom God decides to save, he saves. 

Jesus said in John 6.37:  

All that the Father gives me will come to me...

EVERYONE. No one will be left behind. None of God’s children will miss that call. God doesn’t need us to save his children. If we’re not there to share the gospel with them, God will send someone else. And if he feels like he needs to, then God himself will do it. He’s done it before.

So if that’s the case, and God doesn’t need us to save his people, then why do we do it? Why the urgency to share the gospel?

It’s a difficult question to answer, but we find the answer—at least the best answer, I think—at the very beginning of the first letter of John.

Why the Apostles Shared the Gospel (1 John 1.1-4)

John wrote his letter to Christians in Asia Minor, probably to encourage them as they saw people leaving the church. At the beginning of the letter (which we’re going to read), he gives his “credentials,” so to speak. He reminds his readers that he, along with the other apostles, were witnesses to the ministry of Christ, and that they have received the mission of proclaiming Christ’s gospel to the world.

And in his introduction, we find out why he does it.

Let’s read: we’ll take it little by little. 1 John 1.1: 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—

So this is John’s experience with the gospel. He was a disciple of Jesus Christ (who is God, from the beginning). He and the other apostles heard Jesus speak. They saw him work. They touched him, like anyone who has spent a lot of time with a close friend. So they know that they’re not imagining these things. It wasn’t just one crazy experience that happened to them, but that they might have hallucinated. They spent three years with Jesus. They’re not making this up.

It’s easy for us to be jealous of their experience, isn’t it? We would love to be able to follow Jesus—the human man, Jesus—around for three years. We would love to know what he looks like, what his voice sounds like, what it feels like to shake his hand, or have him give us a slap on the back. We would love to see him heal someone, or walk on water. We read the stories in the gospels and we think, How GREAT would it be to see that!

So it’s easy for us to forget that we’ve experienced Christ too. 

Our experience is different than John’s—it isn’t physical, but spiritual. Paul describes this experience in several different ways. In Ephesians 1.18 he says that “the eyes of our hearts were enlightened.” Something happened in us, to give us eyes to see things we didn’t see before, to see the gospel as the truth rather than a fairy tale. He talks about “hearing with faith” in Galatians 3.2, and says that “faith comes from hearing” in Romans 10.17. We heard the gospel, and through that proclamation of the gospel, the Holy Spirit gave us faith; and now, every time we hear the gospel, we hear it through that filter—we hear it with faith. 

This work of the Holy Spirit in us produces a real and true conviction that these things are true. Just because our experience isn’t physical doesn’t make it less miraculous or less real. 

So we have to understand that even if our experience has been different from John’s experience, our witness of Christ is no less valid. He is talking about what he has seen and heard; and so are we.

V. 2 (John makes a kind of parenthesis of what he said before):

 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—

So this is really simple: what the apostles have seen, they now proclaim. They saw the message of the gospel—the message of eternal life which has been revealed through Christ—acted out before their eyes in the ministry of Christ. 

And now, they’re talking about it.

Why? Well, partly because Jesus told them to. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, we see Jesus tell them to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28.19-20). They’re talking about it because he sent them out to do so.

But that is not the only reason. (And that is what we often forget.) 

John actually gives two more reasons why he and the other apostles spend their lives proclaiming the gospel. We see the first one in v. 3.

3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 

Okay, so that’s reason 1: the apostles proclaimed the gospel that their hearers and readers might enter into fellowship with them, and into fellowship with God himself.

We’ve got to see that their mission is not purely utilitarian. They aren’t just trying to accomplish a goal. There is love at work here: they wanted those who heard them speak to be in the family.

And if we remember John’s gospel, we know that the love we see motivating the apostles here, we saw it in Jesus himself. Remember John 17? Jesus is praying with his disciples before his arrest, and he says (John 17.24):  

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

I want those whom you have given me to be with me, to see my glory, because my glory will make them complete.

He’s talking about fellowship, just as John is talking about fellowship in his letter.

The word “fellowship” can be difficult to wrap our brains around, even if we’ve grown up in church. It’s actually not that complicated—we’ve over-spiritualized the concept in the past—and it helps to know that the Greek word for “fellowship”, when it was used by unbelievers, outside of the New Testament, was most frequently used to describe the relationship between a husband and his wife. It’s talking about the sharing of our lives, intimate participation in one another’s life—sharing our goals, our struggles, our joys, our sorrows, even our destinies, with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We’ll come back to this in a couple weeks when we talk about community, but we have to see now that John proclaims the gospel because he wants to enjoy that intimate, familial relationship with those who are listening to him. And he wants them to enjoy that same relationship with God.

He is sharing the gospel because he loves the people who are listening, and wants them to enjoy God, and God’s people.

That’s reason 1.

Here’s reason 2, which I think is the fundamental reason, the reason behind the one we just saw—v. 4: 

4 And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. 

You could not ask for a simpler or a more convincing reason than this: the apostles proclaimed the gospel because they wanted to be happy. (Note that he doesn’t say that he and the apostles are writing these things so that your joy may be complete; they’re doing it, he says, so that our joy may be complete.)

This can be sobering for someone who finds sharing the gospel more a chore than a gift. We find ourselves not sharing the gospel because we want to stay happy—we don’t want to be scared, we don’t want to be embarrassed or humiliates—when in fact sharing the gospel will actually complete our joy, according to John.

So we have one main idea for today, which we see here and which we’ll come back to after the break. It’s very simple. Our joy in God fuels evangelism, and evangelism feeds our joy in God. 

The Virtuous Cycle of Evangelism

John says that he and the apostles share the gospel so that THEIR joy—not the joy of those listening, but the apostles’ joy—might be complete.

Our joy in God fuels evangelism, and evangelism feeds our joy in God. 

The question is, why?

Well the Bible isn’t shy about it: already, the consistent result of believing in the gospel is joy. Remember how Peter described it in 1 Peter 1.8-9?  

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 

Or the way Jesus described it in Matthew 13.44:  

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 

When we hear the gospel and believe in the gospel, we receive a treasure. We receive the greatest gift and the greatest news in the history of existence. Joy is the only appropriate response to believing the gospel and receiving the gospel.

We can rest assured that John and the apostles knew this joy well. We see it in them in the beginning of the book of Acts (Acts 2.46-47): 

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. 

Their joy was infectious. It drew people to them, like moths to a flame. 

But, John says, their joy—the joy of their salvation—wasn’t complete on its own. It needed something else to complete it. To be complete, the reason for their joy needed to be shared. 

4 And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. 

It may sound strange to us, but we understand what he’s saying if we put it in a different context. Say, a couple tries for ten years to have a baby, and finally, after all this waiting, they receive the news that a baby is on the way, and it’s healthy and everything looks great. What is the first thing they want to do? They want to tell the people they love. Why? Because they’re happy, and talking about what makes them happy increases their happiness.

Or say you were diagnosed with cancer, and you’ve gone through treatment, and much earlier than expected, the doctor comes in and says the latest scans are completely clear. Not a single spot detected. Miraculous remission. What do you want to do? You want to call everyone you love, right away, to tell them your cancer is gone. Why? Because you’re happy, and talking about what makes you happy increases your happiness.

This is what John says, and this is what we see consistently in people who share the gospel with other people. If they share the gospel because they’re happy in the gospel, then talking about the gospel that makes them happy increases their happiness. 

Find a person who shares the gospel a lot, and you’ll likely find a happy person. Let me just give you an example (I didn’t tell her I was going to do this, and I don’t want to embarrass her, but it’s just too good an example to pass up). Anyone who knows Mariya knows that she is almost always happy. Like, to the point where it’s almost annoying, because that’s what we all want, and we all want to know how she does it. I noticed something about Mariya pretty quickly—nearly every conversation I have with her, when I ask her what she did this week (or even this morning), almost every time, her answer starts like this: “You know, I have a neighbor who’s not a believer, and this morning I was talking to them about Jesus...” “I have a friend who’s not a believer, and this morning I was talking to them about Jesus...” “I met a guy on the bus, he’s not a believer, and we started talking about Jesus...” 

Funny, isn’t it? One of the happiest people I know is also constantly telling other people about Jesus.

The gospel should make us happy, brothers and sisters, and our happiness in the gospel should make us want to talk about the gospel, and talking about the gospel that makes us happy increases our happiness. Especially if you finally see someone respond. I think that’s what John is getting at when he says that he is writing these things that his joy, and the apostles’ joy, may be complete. He knows that if he shares the gospel, the Holy Spirit will use the gospel to bring people to faith. 

And there is no greater joy on this earth than seeing that. It is the culmination of everything that gives us lasting joy. Not only do we have the good news of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, who took our place so that we might be saved… Not only do we get to talk about this good news, that makes us so happy, with others… To see them experience that same joy along with us, to look at someone who was once an acquaintance and be able to call them brother or sister… There is no greater joy than that, because that joy will last for eternity. 

Joy in God fuels evangelism, and evangelism feeds our joy in God. This is why we talk about the proclamation of the gospel as a spiritual discipline. Few things feed our love for Christ more than telling others why we love him.

Application

Now here is where a lot of us go wrong. If we have been saved by the gospel, then it’s likely that everything we’ve just seen, we know already, at least in theory. If we haven’t ever heard it explicitly said, then we know it instinctively, because one day we met Christ too. We heard the good news of what Christ did for us; we realized the state we were in, and the sin that had separated us from God, and the grace of God to send his Son to live our life and die our death, so that we might be reconciled to him. We know the joy we felt when we received this good news, and put our faith in Christ, and repented of our sins, and realized that those sins were gone, crucified on the cross with Christ two thousand years ago.

So it’s not hard for most of us to believe that being allowed to participate in someone else’s salvation would bring us joy too. 

But still, it doesn’t seem to be quite enough for a lot of us.

It’s often hard for us to remember the joy we once knew, and to want to feel it again. It was a long time ago, and things have happened since then; life has gotten hard. We vaguely remember the joy we felt when we first met Christ, but not quite enough to really believe it’s worth the trouble of sharing the gospel in order to see that joy grow. 

So if we’re going to actually do what God calls us to do and speak without shame about the best news, so that our joy may be complete, we’ve got work to do.

That’s where we’ll end today: just three quick points of application. If we want our joy to be complete, we need to feed that joy.

The first way we do that is simple (so simple we almost forget it): be obedient to your Master. Nothing will rob you of your joy more quickly than sin. There’s a reason why, in David’s prayer of confession in Psalm 51 (perhaps the most famous confession in the Bible), David prays, Restore to me the joy of my salvation. His joy was robbed when he sinned against God. Nothing blinds us to the good news more quickly than forgetting we have received it, and acting like we don’t belong to God. Nothing desensitizes us to the joy of our salvation more quickly than not living out that salvation in practice. So if there are areas of sin in your life, confess that sin to God and to someone else, and work to put it to death. Living in obedience won’t solve all our problems, but that’s where we start.

Secondly, dig deep in the spiritual disciplines, to remember who God is, and what he has done. Read the Bible, and do it regularly—pray in response to what you read there—worship God when you’re alone and when you’re together. Spend time with your heavenly Father, and let him encourage you. If you never spend any time with your family, it’s likely there won’t be a lot of joy when you go home. If you never spend time with your heavenly Father, is it really surprising that you don’t feel the joy of your relationship with him? Don’t give up if you lack joy; dig deeper. The solution is right in front of you, in the Word of God you’re holding, and in the family you’re surrounded with. Read, pray, worship—spend good time with your loving Father.

And lastly, share the gospel in fellowship with others. The best way to believe that sharing the gospel brings us joy is to…share the gospel, and see that it brings us joy. It can be intimidating, to be sure…so thankfully we’re not alone. Spend time with your brothers and sisters in Christ, and share the gospel along with them.

We have an evangelism team here at Connexion, and we hesitated to call it that because we didn’t want anyone to think that since the evangelism team is sharing the gospel with others, we don’t have to. We didn’t want anyone to say, “Cool, they’ve got that covered.” That’s not what they’re there for. 

The evangelism team exists so that no one has to share the gospel alone. If you don’t know how to do it, that’s okay—watch them, and listen to them, and learn from them. See that it’s not nearly as frightening or as difficult as you’re making it out to be. God doesn’t call the evangelism team to make disciples; he calls all of us to make disciples. And it starts here.

We have received such good news, and a great joy that comes with this good news. But our joy will not be complete until we share it with others. If that was true for John and the apostles, it is certainly true for us.

Prayer 2021 1

pastoral prayers 2021: knowledge

(ephesians 1.15-23)

Jason Procopio

Welcome to 2021! I almost hesitated to bring up the fact that 2020 is finally over, because it feels like it’s already a cliché—I’m going to be one of the thousands of pastors around the world saying the exact same thing on this first Sunday of the new year: talking about how 2020 has been such a difficult year for all of us as individuals and for all of us as a church, and so on. But it needs to be said, because we can’t divorce ourselves from our context and act as if everything is as it was—it’s not.

This has been a difficult year. It has brought all of our churches face-to-face with a lot of challenges no church has ever faced in quite this way before. Just one example: for years I have resisted doing a livestream of our services. We refused to go down that road because we knew full well that if we did that, people would find it easier and easier to skip coming to service and just watch online. And we are and have always been convinced that watching the service online is not the same as being here, physically present with the body of believers. If the only exposure you’re getting to the body of Christ is through your computer screen, watching other people worship from far away, that’s not church. That’s not how we are called to interact with the life of the church.

And then the confinement hit. And the confinement hit for a good reason: I have never understood Christians who were angry at the government for enforcing a confinement on us. Given the challenge before them and the priorities of taking care of public safety, I completely understood that decision. But it presented us with a challenge: how do we—people who are firmly against the principle of “online church”—maintain the life of the church when we really and truly have no other possibility but to do church online? Especially when we don’t have our own building, and the space we rent for our services is closed to us, what do we do? How do we live as the body of Christ when the members of that body are spread out, physically isolated from each other?

This past year, in large part thanks to technology we didn’t have just a few years ago, we have at least begun to find temporary solutions to that problem. We have seen prayer meetings multiplied, to care for one another and pray for the church and our country during the week. We have seen more people reading the Bible with one another, because Zoom makes it a lot easier to speak face-to-face (even if it takes some getting used to). I have had more pastoral meetings in the last four months than I usually have in a normal year—again, because Zoom made access to one another much easier. 

I am grateful for the way most of us have reacted to these challenges. We’ve discovered that even though it’s much more difficult, and it’s not ideal, it is possible to continue living the life of the church in this strange context. We’re hoping that this year things continue to get better, and that we can all get back together—adults, kids and babies—under one roof, to worship together at the same time. It’s not a sure thing that this will happen right away, but we’re praying it happens sooner rather than later.

But here’s the thing: even if that happens, the fundamental problems of the life of the church will not be resolved. The deepest problems the church is facing today are not logistical or technological in nature. People have been so distracted by our immediate problems—like not being able to meet in our common space—that we have begun to forget that the real challenges facing the church are the same problems the church has always faced, since the very beginning.

I felt this with particular force during the three weeks I took off from preaching last month. I spent a lot of time speaking with people and thinking and praying about not just where the church is today, but what challenges we as a church have faced over the whole of our six and a half years, since we planted the church in September 2014. 

During those three weeks, I spent a lot of time thinking about you all. I know most of you in some capacity—many of you, I know very well; others, I know less well. And that’s okay. In a church our size the pastor can’t be expected to know everyone well. But whether I know you well or not, I spent nearly all of my time thinking about you. And I came away from that time with a couple of key conclusions.

Firstly—and this was both a little surprising and really encouraging for me—I realized that I genuinely and truly love you all. It surprised me, not because of you, but because of me: I’m not a person who loves easily, so I can see God’s work in my own heart when I realize that my love for you is absolutely genuine. Whether I know you well or not, I felt the weight of your presence in this church, and the fact that for whatever reason, God has placed you under my care for the moment. And I am very glad he has. 

And secondly, because I love you, there are many things I want for you in the future. I’ve been able to put a finger on some very specific desires I have for all of you—desires of what I want to see God do in you and for you and through you. A large portion of my time during these three weeks was given to thinking about how we can help provide you with some of these things.

During that time, several times I found myself returning to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians—particularly to two specific passages, in which Paul prays for the Ephesians. 

They caught me off guard every time, because those prayers informed and echoed my own desires for you. So as we begin this new year, I thought we could begin with two weeks which will be intensely personal for me: two weeks in Paul’s prayers for the Ephesian church. It is personal because these are the prayers I prayed for you most often during my time away; and it is especially appropriate because they will also serve to introduce the universal week of prayer, beginning next Sunday (December 10th).

So that was a very long introduction to explain why we’re doing what we’ll be doing for the next two weeks. With all that being said, please go with me to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, to chapter 1, verses 15 to 23.

15 For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. 

Let’s start at the end. Paul prays a certain number of things for the Ephesians (which we’ll see in a moment), and he makes it really clear that he has absolutely no doubt that God will answer his prayer. We can see his confidence in v. 19-23, where he tells the Ephesians what God is going to put behind his answer.

Power (v. 19-23)

He prays that God would bless the Ephesians (the end of v. 19), 

according to the working of his great might.

This week we watched The Prince of Egypt with our kids for the first time in a while. And as always, what most impressed everyone is that scene at the end when Moses thrusts his staff into the Red Sea and in a massive gust, the waters rush away and part, and form two huge walls on either side. It’s an awesome (and surprisingly accurate) depiction of what actually happened at the Red Sea, which we see in Exodus chapter 14.

This is what Paul’s talking about when he talks about the working of God’s great might. It is the power to rule over all elements—natural and spiritual—to do what he wants to do.

And Paul gives specific examples of God’s might at work in recent history. Through God’s might, Christ was raised from the dead. Through God’s might, Christ was glorified; he ascended into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of God. Through God’s might, Christ was given all rule and authority and power and dominion—the authority of God himself to rule over absolutely everything in existence. And through God’s might, Christ was established as the head of the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

God’s work in Jesus Christ was, and still is, the most incredible flex in history—God made man, living a life as a simple carpenter, becoming an itinerant minister, being accused of blasphemy and crucified in God’s city…and then being shown to be the Ruler of all rulers, the Power of all other powers, Lord and God over all things.

Paul brings all this up because he knows that this is the incredible strength God will put to work to answer this very specific, very personal prayer. It’s almost too much—like using a nuclear power plant to light up a single light bulb. His point is that these things he is praying are certain to be answered positively by God because he is putting all of his power and might to work to do it.

And that is very good news for me as a pastor, because it fills me with the same confidence: that when I ask God to do this same work in you, I can be 100% positive that he will do it. You aren’t less important to God than the Ephesians were; you aren’t less legitimate children of God than the Ephesians were. God loves you as much as he loved them; he wants the same things for you as he wanted for them. What a blessing for a pastor, to know that God loves you so much that when I ask him to do these things for you, he will certainly do it.

So with the weight of that confidence behind Paul’s prayer, what does he pray for the Ephesians? What do I pray for you?

Gratitude (v. 15-16)

Firstly, I simply express my gratitude. V. 15 again:  

15 For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers...

I know it can seem like a stretch to say that whatever Paul prayed in this text, I can pray for you, but it’s not. When he says “for this reason” at the beginning of v. 15, he means, because of everything he just said. 

What did he say in the previous verses (v. 3-14)? He simply laid out the gospel. He talked about what God did in Christ Jesus to elect us,  to adopt us, to save us from our sins, to bring us to new life, to make us like Christ, to reveal himself to us and to give us his Spirit. Everything he said in v. 3-14 is also true of every one of you who has faith in Christ, because this is how God saves people.

So the obvious response to all of that—to everything God has done for you, for the faith he has given you and for the love for one another he has produced in you—the only appropriate response is gratitude. 

I feel this gratitude acutely, because I have seen God do this in you—in Eglise Connexion—over the last six years. I have seen him take some of you who didn’t know him, and cause you to be born again. I have seen him save you. I’ve seen him save you even when you weren’t particularly looking to be saved. 

I’ve seen him take those of you who were already Christians before coming to us, and deepen your faith and your knowledge in him. I’ve seen you grow in holiness, in your love for one another and your patience with one another (not least of all, I’ve seen you grow in your love and patience with me!). 

One of the things I love about my job is that as a pastor, I am often uniquely positioned to hear your testimonies—to hear the stories you tell of how God is changing you and causing you to grow. I am so thankful for what he has done in you all over the last six years. And seeing his work in you in the past gives me confidence that he will keep working in you in the future. Which is why at the end of v. 16, Paul continues by saying that he remembers the Ephesians in his prayers.

So what does he pray?

Enlightened eyes (v. 17-18)

Firstly, he prays for enlightened eyes. V. 17:  

...17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened...

So this is the first basic work God does in us when he saves us: he opens the eyes of our heart. This “heart seeing” is difficult for us to wrap our minds around, because it’s not something you can easily analyze or measure—it is something that happens not just in our minds, on the level of our intellect, but also on the deeper level of conviction and instinct. It’s like what happens when you listen to a magnificent piece of classical music, like Vivaldi’s Concerto n° 4 in F minor, from the Four Seasons: you can analyze it if you try, you can know the theory and the technique behind it, but when a piece of music is truly masterful, you feel it in your guts. 

God knows full well—because he made us—that the most effective way to push us toward a certain response is not only through our heads, but through our hearts. We choose to act not when we think we ought to do something, but when we want to do it. 

So he doesn’t settle for one type of knowledge or the other; he doesn’t choose between heart-knowledge and head-knowledge. He reveals himself to us through his Holy Spirit, by opening our minds to see the gospel as truth and not folly, and by opening our hearts to believe and desire it: he opens the eyes of our hearts.

And this is what Paul prays for: he prays for this kind of knowledge—knowledge that doesn’t just reach our minds, but which stirs our affections, which moves our hearts and souls and gives us a full and deep conviction of these things.

But what are “these things”? What is the content of this knowledge? It’s very specific.

Hope (v. 18)

He prays in v. 18:  

18 ...having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you...

This may be the single greatest burden I feel for you as your pastor: that you may know the hope to which God has called you, not just in your minds but in your hearts. That is why this prayer is so essential to me personally. 

Because I know for a fact that much of the pain we feel in this world is heightened because we are unable to look up from our circumstances and keep our eyes fixed on the hope of the grace we will receive for all eternity. 

Paul doesn’t give a lot of explanation of this future hope in this passage, because he doesn’t need to: if we just keep reading (as we should do), we would hear him explain it to us in very simple and very clear terms. Look just a little further down the page, to chapter 2, v. 4-7:  

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that [and this is the key verse] in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Our hope is that for all eternity, God will continue to show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness. What does kindness from God look like? We have abundant examples all over the Bible. God’s kindness means rescue from danger; it means protection from harm; it means healing from sickness; it means the absence of everything which caused us pain—no more sickness, no more violence, no more poverty, no more death; it means a clear and unfiltered vision of his glory. And so much more—we could list God’s possible graces to us for all time and never get to the bottom of the list.

And our “hope” in this future grace is not what we usually think of as “hope” (as in, I hope the vaccine puts an end to Covid). This hope is a certainty, because it has already been secured for us. In a very real sense, Paul says, we have already been raised with Christ and already seated with him in heaven—our seats have been saved, our places at his table are assured.

We could talk for hours about what this hope in future grace changes for us on a practical level; let me just mention one thing. I have spent more time in pastoral counseling this year than in all of the previous years of the church combined. This has been an incredibly difficult year for many of you, for a lot of reasons which had nothing to do with Covid. Many of you suffered the pain of sin in your own lives; suffered the consequences of other people’s sins; suffered from illness and loss and anger, both just and unjust. Many of you actually suffered because you are Christians. And in that respect at least, this year is not unusual. The Bible tells us to expect suffering—both in general, and particularly because of our faith.

And I honestly don’t know how you’re going to meet that suffering head-on and honor God in it if your hope isn’t firmly anchored in what is to come after the suffering. The two greatest assurances we have in our suffering as Christians is—firstly—that none of our suffering is wasted in God’s hand, that he uses every pain and every loss for our good (Romans 8.28); and secondly, that whatever we are suffering is infinitely smaller than the glory that is waiting for us (Romans 8.18). 

As Christians, we will struggle, and we will suffer; and we will not be able to stand under the weight of that struggle if we don’t know—firmly and intimately—the hope to which he has called us. So this is what I pray for you, every day: that you may know the hope to which he has called you. That every pastoral counseling session might end in an affirmation of the hope you have in Christ, might anchor you more firmly in what is waiting for you, not just in what you see right here and now.

inheritance (v. 18)

That’s the first thing. The second thing Paul prays is that his readers would know (v. 18c):  

...what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints...

Now it would be easy to imagine that in this phrase, Paul is simply repeating what he had just said before, but in a different way. What is our hope, if not our inheritance? Paul mentioned our inheritance in the previous section of verses—he said in v. 11 that 

11 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will...

So our promised inheritance is an absolutely wonderful truth and promise for us. This inheritance is what we will receive from God because we are in Christ. In a very real way, being in Christ is like a marriage—this is why the church is called “the bride of Christ” on multiple occasions in the New Testament. When a husband marries his wife (not taking into account things like prenuptual agreements), everything that belongs to him, he now shares with his wife. 

When we are in Christ, we receive the promise that everything Christ has, he will share with us. Eternal life and eternal health and eternal happiness in his presence; the reign of the kingdom of God with him, in the new heavens and the new earth… Everything Christ received for having conquered death and taken his place at the right hand of God, he shares with us. This is the inheritance we have been promised, and in v. 14 Paul says we have been given the Holy Spirit as a “seal”, or a down-payment, of this inheritance.

So these things are wonderfully true. But they are not what Paul is talking about at the end of v. 18. 

Pay close attention to the words he uses. Whereas in v. 11 and 14, he very clearly speaks of our inheritance in Christ, in v. 18, he prays that we might know what are the riches of HIS glorious inheritance. Not our inheritance, but his—God’s. 

This makes total sense if we think about it. How strange would it be if we received an inheritance in heaven, but God himself didn’t? He’s the one who did all the work. He’s the one who bought us, who saved us, who kept us, who transformed us. He’s the one who executed his plan of salvation, from beginning to end. It wouldn’t exactly be equitable for God to receive nothing, while we receive everything.

So if our inheritance is everything which Christ obtained through his life, death and resurrection, which he shares with us, what is God’s inheritance? Paul says it right there in the verse, praying that the Ephesians might know what are the riches of his glorious inheritance—where?—IN THE SAINTS. 

This is one of the hardest truths to accept and to believe: WE—the saints, the people of God—are God’s inheritance. 

This is not a new concept in the Bible. In the Law of Moses God said that this was his intention—in Deuteronomy 4.20 he told the people of Israel,  

But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.

Nothing changed between then and now. God always intended his inheritance—his great joy and reward for his work—to be his own people. He gives us everything, and in return, he gets…us. His people. His church, made perfect, freed from sin, seeing his glory and enjoying his glory forever.

And the reason why Paul prays this for the Ephesians, and I pray this for you, is because it is so incredibly hard to accept. If we are God’s inheritance, it seems an awful lot like he’s getting the short end of the stick here, doesn’t it? He goes through all of this pain and effort and toil…to get us? Like, has he seen us? Does he realize how small we are? How imperfect? How difficult? How inconsequential?

One of my heaviest burdens for you as your pastor is the knowledge that many of you think far less of yourselves than God does. 

Now, I’m not talking about positive thinking, simply trying to bolster everyone’s self esteem by saying, “No in fact, EVERYONE is awesome!” The Bible has a much more realistic view of who and what we are. It says that in ourselves, under our own power, because of our sin, we have become futile in our own thinking; our foolish hearts are darkened; claiming to be wise, we are in fact fools; we exchange the glory of God for images of beasts (Romans 1.21-23). Under our own power, we are in fact dead (Ephesians 2.1). So I’m not saying those things aren’t true; they absolutely are.

What I’m saying—and what is amazing—is that even though all of these things are true about us, God loved us ANYWAY. He loved us when there was nothing inherently lovable about us. He loved us so much that he sent his Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life (John 3.16). And through his love, he has taken the futile, unlovable things that we are, and made us new. Made us alive. Made us HIS.

But I know a lot of you don’t really believe that God sees you like that. In your head, sure, you believe it; but in your heart…not so much. A lot of you feel that God tolerates you, but that he doesn’t really like you. So I pray, along with Paul, that you might know the riches of God’s inheritance in you. We—God’s people—we are not a poor inheritance. God is not getting short-changed in us. The prayer is that we might know the RICHES of his inheritance—that it is a beautiful thing for God to receive his redeemed and holy people; and that we might realize the depth of his affections toward us—no matter how we might feel about ourselves today.

God doesn’t love you because you’re good. He doesn’t love you because you’re talented, or moral, or efficient; he doesn’t love you because of anything good you could give to him (everything good in you came from him anyway!). He loves you because you are HIS. For you other parents out there, you understand—I love my own children way more than I love yours. It’s not that your kids aren’t great; I know they are. But they’re not my kids. I don’t love my children because of anything particularly exceptional in them; I find my children exceptional, and I delight in them, because they’re mine.

Brothers and sisters, we are his. And God delights in us because we are his. He loves us because we are his. We are what God will enjoy forever—us, the bride of Christ, made forever pure and holy, the product of his grace, the result of his great mission, seeing and enjoying his glory. And I desperately pray that you would believe that.

Power, again (v. 19-23)

Lastly—I pray with Paul that you might know (v. 19)  

what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe...

Here we come full circle, and return to where we started. I can tell you guys that God intends all of these things for his people. But you won’t really believe it—won’t really rest in it—unless you understand that God puts to work all of his infinite power to bring these things about. That the greatness of his power toward us who believe, the greatness of his power put to work for us, is immeasurable. 

I pray this because I know how cynical we tend to be. We look at the situation around us—the problems of our own sin, or of the world we live in, or of the obstacles other people have thrown in the way of our progress. We look at all of the roadblocks, and we simply don’t have enough imagination to believe that God will ever get us over those things. We can’t see past the tunnel to the light at the end. And so we despair. We sink into depression. We give in to our cynicism. 

This is normal—the psalms are filled with examples of people feeling these same things, expressing these same doubts—but even if it is normal, it isn’t right that we should feel this way. Because the power God puts to work in us and for us is immeasurable. It is the power he put to work in the life, death and resurrection of Christ; the power which Christ himself now wields as ruler of all things, as head of the church. It is the power that God has always had, and which assures that he will fulfill his mission. He will accomplish his plan. 

So I pray that you would believe it. That you would feel the incredible assurance of God’s power to bring you where he wants you to be. That you would know the depth of his delight for you, because you are his children, and we are his people. That you would know that what is waiting for you is far greater than what is burdening you today. That you would know your God.

Prayer 2 2017

prayer: Listening > Speaking

Psalm 19

Jason Procopio

Last week we began a short series on prayer. During this time we’re going to be thinking about what it means to pray, how to do it well, and how to integrate it into our lives—not as a religious activity we do, but as an integral part of what it means to be a Christian. Last week Arnaud preached on “the Lord’s prayer”—this prayer that Jesus taught us, which shows us not only what to pray, but in what disposition of heart we should pray. Now I don’t know if you noticed this, but the Lord’s prayer is a sort of summary statement of all that the Bible says about God—that his name is glorious; that he is King, not only of our lives, but of the entire world he’s created and of all of heaven; that he gives his children all they need for life and godliness; that he graciously forgives our sins and teaches us to imitate that forgiveness; and that he is over all and in all. The prayer of Jesus is so powerful because it summarizes the testimony of Scripture about God.

And that’s why today I’d like to go to Psalm 19. I’d like to go there because Jesus’s prayer reflects the truth of Scripture, but the truth is that many of us, when we pray, we do so detached from the testimony of Scripture. We don’t take into account what God says about himself, but rather tell God things about us: what we need, what we want, what we hope for. But that is not what prayer is—that, if anything, is only a very small part of what prayer should be. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to have an important discussion with a young child; often my conversations with Jack are frustrating (to say the least). I say:

“Listen buddy, I need to tell you something important.”

“Look Daddy, I have a lightsaber!”

“That’s great, but listen for a minute—”

“And it’s blue and there’s a red thing on top that spins!”

“Hang on a second buddy, I need you to listen for one minute.”

“Why do dogs go pee-pee outside?”

Prayer is not a speech—it is a discussion between us and God. Prayer is not speaking—it is responding to what God has said before. We cannot claim to be praying if we haven’t listened to what our Master has said to us; all we’re doing is speaking at him, rather than speaking with him. God speaks to us, and invites us into discourse with him; so in order to pray rightly, before we speak, we must listen. That’s what this psalm is about. In this psalm David is going to tell us two ways in which God speaks to us; and then he’s going to pray to God to learn from what he has taught. Let’s go with him.

1) Creation As God’s Voice (v. 1-6)

1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, 5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. 6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. 

It’s fairly easy to see the point here: the first way that God speaks to the people he has created is through the things he has created. There’s not a single person in the whole world who hasn’t felt this. We have all seen a beautiful sky. We’ve seen stars at night, and we’ve seen the clouds and blue sky in the day. We’ve all looked at that and been overwhelmed by its beauty, even if only momentarily. And if we’ve been to school, we know the complexities of what goes into that: the immensity of the universe—how the stars that we see are several million light-years away, which means that the light we see when we look up at those stars is actually light from several million years ago; it’s just taken it that long to reach us. 

We know why the sky is blue: because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. In the same way, when the sun sets in the west, the sky looks red because the particles of dust and pollution and water vapor in the atmosphere reflect and scatter more of the reds and yellows than they do the blue. Every sunrise and sunset, every blue sky, is mind-bending stuff, and we’ve all witnessed it.

As David wrote his psalm, he was writing from a time in history before science had made these awesome discoveries—but that doesn’t matter, because he describes how we have all experienced these things. The sky definitely looks like a tent for the sun; the sun, when it rises, is so big and bright that it’s not a stretch to see what he saw: the sun…comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. We have seen the truth that the sun’s light is so extensive that nothing is hidden from its heat. Even if our brains know the physics of it all, our hearts tell us an even bigger story: when we look at a sunset we are awed in a way mere physics cannot account for. 

That awe we feel, whether we know it or not, is wonder at the glory of God. All of creation, all of physical science, is telling a story of the One who made it and who sustains it. This is why the apostle Paul said we are without excuse—we have all felt wonder that is bigger than simply being impressed with the complexity of physics. That wonder we have felt is God, speaking to us, saying, “This is what I’m like! This is how great I am! I made all this! I sustain all this! When you look at a sunset, and are amazed at the beauty of the sunset, it’s not really the sunset you’re marveling at: it’s me.”

God speaks to us all through nature. The things he has created—the movements of the planets and the sun and the moon and photosynthesis and the intricate workings of the human body—these things are all ways God makes his voice heard, declaring his glory to every human being alive. 

But we must all see that even here, there are limits. These things tell us that God is big, that he is mighty, that he is powerful. But they don’t tell us anything about his character. They don’t tell us anything about his intentions, except to say that he intends, at least for now, to keep it all going. They tell us he created all these things and sustains all these things; but they don’t tell us why he does it. For that, we need something more. And fortunately, he gave us something more.

2) The Word As God’s Perfect Testimony (v. 7-11)

7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; 8 the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; 9 the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. 10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. 11 Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. 

God did not leave us with vague feelings of awe at who he is: he told us all we need to know about himself. And he did it in such a way that as we learn about him, we learn everything we need to know about ourselves. God spoke to the people of Israel first and foremost through his Law. This is all David had at the time he wrote this. The Law was the list of rules God gave to the people of Israel through Moses. This Law was the way he communicated his perfect character to the people of Israel, saying, “This is what I’m like, so you must live like me.” God’s Law was then completed through the written history of Israel, the works of wisdom (Psalms, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes), the written works of the prophets, and the writings of the New Testament. These works fleshed out the Law, showed the point of the Law, and gave us the testimony of how God completed the Law and fulfilled it through the person and work of Jesus Christ. So for us, today, as we read these things, we know that whatever David said about the Law of the Lord is also true of the written works that completed it.

Let’s look specifically at what David said: 7 The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. What God has revealed about himself revives us and comforts us. It reminds us of who he is, and stirs our hearts to know him as he has revealed himself in his Word. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. What God has revealed about himself teaches us and educates us; it enlightens the most feeble-minded among us, makes it so that even a child who knows the Bible can be wiser (in all the ways that really matter) than a 60-year-old professor who doesn’t. 

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; 9 the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. This is something many of us have a hard time understanding: why a law, a set of rules, would do anything but hinder our joy. Because that’s how we view rules in our culture, isn’t it? We see rules handed down by authority figures as suspicious: they are there to keep us from being happy, to keep us submitted and in check so that authority can continue to abuse us. But that is not what the Law of God is like. The commandments he gives are there to bring us into the fullest joy possible for us—and it makes sense, since he is the one who created us. 

My dad is fairly handy, so he’ll always try fix things himself. My brother and I went to a movie last week,  and as we were leaving the cinema his car broke down, wouldn’t start. So my dad came (we thought, to give him a jump), and when that didn’t work, he ended up trying to mess around with the fuses of the car. In so doing, he inadvertently shattered a perfectly good fuse, so that not only would the car not start, the wipers wouldn’t work either! If he had simply read the instruction manual, he would have immediately seen what to do. (To his credit, he ended up figuring out the problem and fixing it.)

God’s commandments are like an instruction manual written for a new machine: if you want the machine to work properly, follow the instructions. The “machine” in question here is us; he created us, and gave us instructions on how he made us and how we are to work. So his commandments and precepts really do rejoice our hearts and enlighten our eyes, when we take the time to learn them and follow them. He really does know better, and we really can trust him. When we respect him, when we fear him as our Creator, we know him as righteous and learn what it means to be righteous. And this is way David continues by saying:

10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. 11 Moreover, by them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. In other words, David is echoing the sentiment of every human heart that says, “I want to be happy!” This is a good desire, a right desire. God knows that we want to be happy; he put that desire in us! And he told us how to achieve it! We try to find happiness in a myriad of disappointing ways; our Western culture is constantly throwing at us new ways to be happy, new things we need to be fulfilled. But ultimately, we are happy when we know God as he is. His Word tells us who he is, and so it is more valuable for our happiness than gold, sweeter than honey, more tactile than any smartphone, more useful than any new toolbar on a Macbook Pro. (Have you seen the new interactive toolbar on the new Macbook Pro? It’s awesome. I got to play with it while we were in the U.S. And there’s a part of me that so loves that kind of technology that I think, “Nothing can be better than this!” So false.)

In God’s Word, he tells us who he is; he tells us what he is like; he tells us how he made us; he tells us how to be happy; and he tells us that if we follow what he has said, if we trust in what he has told us, if we have faith in the plan of salvation he accomplished through the death of his Son, there is great reward. This always blows my mind. God gives us his Word so that we can know who he is; he gives us his Son, to pay the penalty for our sin; he gives us faith by his Spirit, so that we might believe all that he has said; and then he rewards us for the faith that he has given us. What an amazing God, to reveal himself to us in this way!

So David has just laid out for us the beautiful fact that God speaks to us through his Word, which tells us all we need to know about him. And so now, David will respond. Faced with the knowledge of the perfect righteousness of God as revealed in his Law, how does David feel? What is his reaction? His reaction is to recognize that he is a sinner, and that he needs grace from a sovereign Savior.

3) david's response to god's word (v. 12-14)

12 Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. 13 Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression. 14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

This is incredible. Though David doesn’t know how, he has faith that somehow, God will fulfill righteousness for him. After proclaiming the greatness of God’s law, he shows his trust that this law will somehow transform him—to the point that even those sins of which he is unaware today will be dealt with.

You see, he’s not asking God to show him how to make penance for things he has done, and that he is aware of. It’s not as if he’s saying, “Lord, I have done ________—I'm sorry, I'll make it right.” He’s saying, “When I look at your Law, and see how holy you are, I see how painfully wicked I am: there are sins in my heart I’m not even aware of! How could I ever make amends for those things? How could I ever be good enough to make up for them? I can’t! So I need you! I don’t know how you’ll do it, but in your mercy, please declare me innocent!”

This was a remarkable leap of faith for David, because he was writing from a time before the Messiah had come, before Jesus Christ had lived a perfect life for him and died the death that he deserved. But we know this is precisely how God can declare us innocent even of those sins of which we’re unaware. Jesus lived our life, and died our death, so that God can now look at our record of sin, and see that all of it has been paid for! Justice has been done; the slate of our sins—past, present and future—has been wiped clean. 

So now we can, in full knowledge of how it all works, pray with David, “Forgive me of these sins! Protect me from sin! Make me more like you, so that I can not only be innocent in your sight, but really and truly resemble your Son! Please, Lord, guide me by your Word, so that my words, and my thoughts, and my actions, might be pleasing to you, my rock and my redeemer.”

4) Prayer: Listening > Responding

Brothers and sisters, this is prayer. David has modeled it for us. He listens to God’s voice in creation; he listens to what God has specifically revealed about himself in his Word; and then he responds to what he has heard. And we desperately need to hear this, because most of us will do one (or even two) of these things, but neglect the others. 

Some of us listen to creation—in other words, we see the world around us, we see our lives and the lives of our friends and colleagues, we see creation in all its glory, and we feel no awe of God for it. We see the things that are corrupted in creation—we see violence and hate and injustice, and we simply write off all the beauty as a happy accident. We don’t let the amazing things we see drive us to ask, “Might there be something behind all this? Why are things beautiful? Why are some things ugly? What’s behind the beauty? What’s behind the ugliness?” The Bible gives us answers to all of these questions. But we don’t want to listen.

Some of us listen to creation, and do see God there. So we pray to God. This is good. But for many of us, it is woefully incomplete. It’s incomplete because we jump straight from our lives and what we see around us, to speaking to God. And the inevitable result is that our prayers are profoundly self-centered: “Lord, give me this! I don’t understand this! Why am I unhappy? Why am I unsuccessful? Please give me a family! Please stop the pain! Please look at me!” We talk and talk and talk to God, never stopping to ask ourselves what he might be saying to us. 

And if we do wonder what he’s saying to us, weirdly we seldom actually open the Bible to find out, or we’ll do it in a way that’s foolishly random. We’ll hop from verse to verse, from passage to passage, reading whatever floats our fancy that day, and we’ll be confused when whatever we’ve read isn’t all that helpful. While all the while, God’s saying, “I gave you a book. I didn’t do that on accident. If you want to understand a book, you need to read the book, not random snatches from random pages.” Is it any wonder we can’t make sense of this book when we haven’t read the whole thing? If we try to pray without being patient and persevering in the knowledge of this book, our prayers always end up being off-base and self-centered: they are always, “Lord give me what I want!” rather than, “Lord give us this day our daily bread.” They are always, “Look at me, love me, help me!” rather than, “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

(If this is the case for you, don’t worry. Some of you are new Christians, and simply haven’t had time to learn about the whole Bible—this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pray the best you can, at your level. But know that our prayers must be based on what we see in this book, and as we persevere in our knowledge of the Bible, as we grow in knowledge and in faith, our prayers will inevitably become more and more centered on him, and will honor him more and more.)

Some of us are different: we love the Bible. We pour over it verse by verse, line by line. We played a game at our Christmas dinner, where we wrote the names of Bible characters on Post-Its and stuck them on our heads, then had to ask questions to guess which character we had. Some of those names were pretty obscure. But there are those of us who know them all. We can rattle off the genealogy of Cain in our sleep. But here’s the thing: far too often, we don’t respond. We read what God says about himself, we’re intellectually stimulated…then we say, “That was great!” and close the book, and move on with our lives. And the end result of this is that none of it means anything. None of it makes any difference. We keep on being just as selfish, just as prideful, just as unhappy as before. We’ll keep on trying to be fulfilled by a million other things, all the while not realizing that the one thing we need to be happy is the one thing we know so well.

Brothers and sisters, prayer is a conversation. God speaks to us through his Word; and we respond to him in prayer, in the light of what he has told us. We CANNOT pray without the Bible. Have you ever anticipated a discussion you’ll soon have with someone, and rehearsed what you want to say there? Most of the time that discussion never happens, or it doesn’t happen the way you anticipated—so your little rehearsal didn’t make any difference. Well, praying without the Bible is merely rehearsal for a conversation we’ll never have. 

Let us go to God’s Word in prayer, asking him to reveal himself to us there; let us respond to God in the light of what he has told us there; and let us apply what we have read and prayed for to our lives, and see that God is always speaking to us, applying his Word to our hearts in the most unlikely of circumstances. This is how God designed prayer to work: it’s a two-sided discussion. So let’s listen before we speak.

Prayer 3 2017

Prayer & Fasting

Ezra 8.21-23, Matthew 9.14-17

Jason Procopio, March 5 2017

There is a practice which has been part of our faith since the very beginning (and even before, when it was practiced by the Jews), and which is intricately linked with prayer. It is one that we are all familiar with, that we’ve all heard of (for various reasons), and yet that most of us don’t fully understand. This practice is of course the practice of fasting. If I were to ask you, “What is the one Christian practice that you would remove from the equation if you could?” the vast majority of you, if you were honest, would probably say either tithing or fasting. 

As we know, fasting is generally defined as depriving oneself of food for a fixed amount of time. And before we go too far in expressing our distaste for the practice, we have to remember that fasting isn’t universally disliked. Gandhi made fasting an integral part of his political career. As we all know, there are certain diets or health regimens that require fasting, and there are people who could speak all day on the health benefits of fasting. The illusionist David Blaine once fasted for forty days and nights, surviving on nothing but water (while hanging suspended in a glass box from the bottom of the London Bridge), and scientists tripped over themselves to study his body after he finished his fast. In addition, nearly all religions which have ever existed include some kind of fasting ritual; their reasons for doing so vary wildly, but it’s always there.

If you’ve grown up in church, you’ve surely been subjected to a time of enforced prayer and fasting: those times we dread all year long, because we know we’re going to feel terrible, and we don’t even really understand why it is we’re doing it. What we don’t want to do today is simply imitate a ritual without getting to the bottom of it. So the question we’re asking today is not whether or not fasting is a good idea in general, or why one would choose fasting above more traditional methods of doing whatever it is they want to do. Our question—and it’s an important one—is this: Is fasting a Christian thing to do? And if so, why? Why on earth would God take pleasure in his people depriving themselves of food? And what is the link between prayer and fasting?

There’s a lot we could say about this, but one of the best clues is found in the book of Ezra, in chapter 8; the second is in Matthew chapter 9. So we’re going to do something unusual today and look at more than one text, to be able to get a fuller picture of not only the point of fasting along with prayer, but also what makes Christian fasting particular and different.

1) Fasting: An Act of Humility (Ezra 8.21-23)

Just a bit of backstory to set up this passage. The capital city of the people of God was the city of Jerusalem, but in the 6th century B.C., the people of God are exiled to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar.  Then, about fifty years later the King Cyrus of Persia overthrows the Babylonian king and takes over the lands he formerly occupied. And in 538 B.C. Cyrus issues a decree declaring that the Jewish people can now return to their homeland. The first six chapters of the book of Ezra tell us the story of the first wave of exiles returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple of Solomon. Then, in chapters 7-10, we see the second wave of exiles coming home about 50 years later, led by Ezra the Priest.

So our passage picks up just as they are about to leave. Ezra has just been given permission by King Artaxerxes to return home and reestablish the Mosaic Law in Jerusalem. Now apparently Ezra has spoken at great length to the King about the God of Israel, telling him that God is a mighty God who is more than able to protect his people from harm; so the King sends Ezra on his way, free to go and be protected by his God. But this creates a tiny problem for Ezra, in that he’s got a long road ahead of him; he’s traveling with a large group of people, and there will be various obstacles and enemies on the road. And although he does believe what he told Artaxerxes—that God is a powerful God who can completely protect his people—he hasn’t yet asked God to do so.

And so, starting at v. 21 of chapter 8, we see Ezra encourage the people to ask God for help. 21 Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. 22 For I was ashamed to ask the king for a band of soldiers and horsemen to protect us against the enemy on our way, since we had told the king, “The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.” 23 So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty. 

Now there is one sentence here that is key to understanding why Ezra proclaims not only that the people should pray, but that they should fast. We see it in v. 21: Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. Ezra declares that the people will deprive themselves of food for a time, and ask God for protection on the road; and this fast is declared that we might humble ourselves before God. 

Everyone who has ever prayed knows that they need God. This is one of the main reasons we pray in the first place: to ask God for something we can’t do for ourselves. But I’m sure you’ve all had this experience before—let’s say you need to find an apartment, and quickly. So you pray: “Lord, please let me find an apartment quickly.” And then what do you do? You go to work: you put together an immaculate renter’s profile for the owners; you go visit every bank in town to try and find the loan which will be the most advantageous to you and attractive to the owners; you visit real estate agencies and make phone calls and work your tail off. 

Now, these things you do aren’t bad; they’re necessary and good. But if you’ve ever looked for an apartment, you know the state of mind you’re usually in when you do so, especially if you’re pressed for time. Most of us going through this experience are bent over backward with stress and worry about it. Most of the time it’s not industriousness or work ethic that drives us to work as hard as we do, but fear—fear that if we don’t get everything just right, we won’t find an apartment on time.

Do you see the problem in this scenario? We’ve prayed to God to ask for help because we know that God can do something we ourselves are incapable of doing, and that he knows what is best for us. But although we know that’s true, we don’t completely believe it. If we believed it, we wouldn’t be worried! We would do the work we need to do, but we would do it because it’s the right thing to do, not because we doubt God’s abilities to help us. Most of us pray, then work our tails off in fear that God might not come through: our work is not obedience to God, but a way of providing ourselves with a safety net in case God doesn’t come through.

So fasting, in this context, is a way to help us humble ourselves before God, to not work in this way. Fasting is a way of expressing with our bodies our spiritual dependence on God, of helping us to feel dependent on him and to not just know intellectually that we are. Fasting helps us to feel that dependence in a keener way than before. Our stomachs ache for food, and we realize, Lord, I need you THIS MUCH, and more. As much as my body feels that I need food right now, I need you even more! And that kind of prayer honors God: that kind of prayer does not try to manipulate or strong-arm God into doing something he doesn’t want to do, but comes to God with open arms and an open mouth, saying, “I need you, Lord! Fill me! Help me!” That kind of prayer humbles us before God, because we don’t merely acknowledge with our mouths that we need God’s help, but allows us to feel with our guts that we need him. 

And what is the result here? v. 23: So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty. The Bible never says that fasting will automatically make God answer our prayers the way we wanted; but it does seem to incline his heart to act on behalf of his children in a particular way. The best example I can think of to explain why this is the case is, once again, an example about my son. Jack is five, and he is determined to do most things himself. I see he’s doing something wrong, and I say, “Here buddy, let me help,” and he is convinced that he knows better than me how it should be done. So I let him do his thing. But eventually he realizes that no, in fact Dad was probably right about this, so he’ll inevitably crack and say, “Daddy, I can’t do this; can you help me?” And because I love him, and I enjoy seeing him grow in humility (it’s a hard thing to admit you need help, after all), I don’t hesitate for a second to help him and give him what he needs.

When we humble ourselves before God—not merely verbally, but when we feel in our hearts and in our guts that we need him—God is inclined to come to the rescue of his children, because that humility honors him, and helps us grow. 

That’s the first key. But there’s a question we need to ask: Is there anything different about Christian fasting? There are multiple passages in the New Testament which talk about the reality that now that Jesus has come, Christians are no longer obligated to submit to rituals and rites to earn God’s favor, like the Jews did (including fasting). And this is true—to my knowledge there is no explicit command in the Bible that Christians fast. So when a Christian fasts, what is different about his fasting? How do we fast in a way that doesn’t try to manipulate God into giving us what we want, but that honors him?

2) Fasting: A Hunger for What We Have Tasted (Matthew 9.14-17)

For this, we need to turn to Matthew chapter 9. In this chapter, we find Jesus in full “breaking-down-the-Pharisaic-system” mode. The Pharisees were religious leaders who followed the Law of Moses to the letter: they observed every ritual, kept every law. And everything Jesus is doing goes against what they say is right. Just a few verses above our passage, in v. 9-13, Jesus has just called Matthew, a tax collector—one of the vilest occupations imaginable in that society—to be his disciple. And when the Pharisees see this, they’re shocked and outraged to see that Jesus is eating with these terrible people, and calling them to follow him. To which Jesus responds in v. 13, I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. This was mind-blowingly counter-cultural.

And it is in this context that the disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus with a question in v. 14: 14 Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 15 And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. 17 Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

Here’s what he means. The Jews fast to express their longing of something that hasn’t yet been fulfilled. They’re still waiting on the fulfillment of God’s promises, including coming of the Messiah. For the Jews, it’s an ascetic practice meant to show their devotion and their allegiance to God’s plan. The fasting of the Jews is the old wineskin, the old cloth—the old way of doing things.

But now, Jesus says, the kingdom has come! The old wineskins and the garments have been replaced with new ones, never before used or seen! The old way of doing things has been replaced by a far better one! They no longer need to long for the coming of the kingdom—the kingdom of God is here! They no longer need to long for the coming of the Messiah—the Messiah is sitting right there with them! We are no longer waiting expectantly for his arrival; he is here, we have seen him and know him!

And yet, Jesus does say that it won’t always be exactly as it is now (v. 15): The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. After his death and resurrection, Jesus ascended back into heaven and sent his Holy Spirit to fill his disciples and empower them to proclaim the kingdom of God all over the world. So soon, he says, he will be taken away from the disciples, and THEN they will fast. So yes, they will fast; but their fasting won’t the same as the Pharisees’. In some ways it will be similar, but in one massive, fundamental way, it will be radically different.

Christian fasting is similar to the Pharisees’ fasting in that it is expectant—it does express a longing in us. Jesus promised that when the time was right, when the gospel had gone out to all corners of the earth and all of God’s children had been called to him and given new life, that he would return. He will return, and establish his kingdom here on earth. As he says in Revelation 21.3-4: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” This will happen. This is what the children of God are waiting for; this is what we are longing for; this is what we our expecting. When we fast, our hunger expresses our longing for this time when the kingdom will be fully realized, completely fulfilled.

But at the same time, Christian fasting is wildly different from the Pharisees’ fasting, because the hunger we feel when we fast is not a desperate, painful hunger: it is a satisfied hunger, because the kingdom of God has begun. The Messiah has come, and we have seen him. We have been given a foretaste of that wonderful day. 

Until recently, we would travel back to America nearly every Thanksgiving to celebrate the holiday with my family. (For the last three years we’ve spent Thanksgiving with all of you.) If you don’t know Thanksgiving, it’s basically an excuse to eat insane amounts of amazing food we only eat on that day. Every time we would go home for Thanksgiving, I had a strange experience of going back to my childhood, and it always started with the smells. My mom begins cooking the Thanksgiving meal at around 5:00 in the morning, and as the morning progresses the smells—these very particular smells that I’ve known all my life—gradually fill the house. We don’t usually sit down to eat until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, which means we spend a lot of that time really hungry. It’s tempting to go into the pantry and grab a Twinkie or a Pop-Tart (or any number of unhealthy snacks) to calm our appetite a bit, but we don’t, because we know what’s coming. We’ve had this meal before, and we know it is so much better than the Twinkie in the pantry. And so not in spite of our hunger, but precisely because we’re so hungry, we wait: we stay patient, because we know that what’s coming will satisfy our hunger far better than anything else we could find to eat.

When we fast as Christians, we feel hungry, but our hunger is not desperate; ours is a satisfied hunger which says that we have seen the Messiah, we have tasted his graces, we have seen his glory, and we want more. We feel the stirring in our stomach that says it’s mealtime, and we turn that feeling to God and say, I long for you like this. I desire to see your glory this much. 

John Piper wrote a wonderful book on fasting called A Hunger for God (which goes into the subject far more than I have today), and in this book he says, “We have tasted the powers of the age to come, and our fasting is not because we are hungry for something we have not experienced, but because the new wine of Christ’s presence is so real and so satisfying. We must have all that it is possible to have. The newness of our fasting is this: its intensity comes not because we have never tasted the wine of Christ’s presence, but because we have tasted it so wonderfully by his Spirit, and cannot now be satisfied until the consummation of joy arrives.”

3) three questions

There is much more that we could say about this, but rather than go further for today, let me ask you a couple of self-examination questions.

First of all, think about how you pray for something that is important to you, and what happens afterward. Ask yourself this: After I pray, do I feel anxiety over the idea that he might not act? Do I attempt to do God’s work for him, just in case? If so, consider fasting: when we fast, we humble ourselves before God, allowing ourselves to not only verbally admit our dependence on him, but to feel that dependence. And that humility both honors God and helps us to trust that he really is in control, that he really is powerful to act, and that whatever it is he does really is the best thing—even if it’s not what I wanted in the first place.

Second question: Have I tasted the joy of knowing Christ? Do I delight in his grace day after day? Do I have joy in knowing him? It’s amazing how many Christians find this difficult. If I were to ask how many of us have a hard time with this, most of us would probably raise our hands. In some respects it’s to be expected: we live in a fallen, corrupt world and are confronted with pain and anger and sin every day. It’s hard to feel joy in a context like that. So we need help. We need something to pull us out of ourselves and remind us of what we have in Christ, and how much better he is than all the things we so badly want on this earth. If you have a hard time delighting in God’s grace, if you have a hard time feeling the joy of knowing him, then consider fasting: when we fast, we express our satisfaction with what we already have in him: whatever it is I hunger for, God, you are so much better!

Last question: Do I long for the day when his kingdom will come? or do I rather long for pleasure in this life? Most of us rarely think about heaven, partially because it’s a little abstract to us, but mostly because we’re so preoccupied with this earth that it doesn’t even occur to us to think about the new heavens and the new earth. But we should be longing for them; we should think about them often, because that’s where our hope lies—our hope is fixed on that day when Christ will make all things new, and we will be like him, and we will live with him on this earth, perfectly renewed, and we will rejoice in his glory forever. Whatever we could find in this earth, no matter how legitimate that pleasure is, pales in comparison with the pleasure of knowing him forever (cf. Ps. 16.11). If you find it hard to long for that day, if you are preoccupied with the pleasure of this world and this life (even if that pleasure is legitimate), consider fasting: when we fast, we express our longing for what is to come—we feel the ache of whatever we have given up, and we say, Lord, I long for you LIKE THIS. I need you LIKE THIS. I hope in you LIKE THIS.

4) A Call to Fast

So as we conclude our series on prayer, this week I would encourage you to join me in fasting. And let me be clear: it doesn’t matter what you fast. In the Bible, people generally fasted food—but it wasn’t always necessarily all food. We have examples of people fasting specific foods, like those who took a Nazirite vow and abstained from wine or other fermented drinks. We also see Paul, in the New Testament, encourage married couples to occasionally abstain from sexual relations, in order to devote themselves to prayer (1 Corinthians 7.5). The English pastor Martyn Lloyd Jones said, “Fasting if we conceive of it truly, must not . . . be confined to the question of food and drink; fasting should really be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some special spiritual purpose. There are many bodily functions which are right and normal and perfectly legitimate, but which for special peculiar reasons in certain circumstances should be controlled. That is fasting.”

So it doesn’t have to be food, and if it is, it doesn’t have to be all food. But it should be something of which we’ll feel the lack. I occasionally go on an entertainment fast, during which I watch no TV, no movies, etc. I feel that (probably more than fasting food!). It should be something we feel, because the point of fasting is to remind us that whatever it is we’re giving up, whatever it is that hurts us to give up, God is so much better. 

So please pray and consider fasting this week. This afternoon we’ll have a prayer meeting, during which you’ll be given specific things to pray for during the week. Let’s humble ourselves before the God who has given us all things through the life, death and resurrection of his Son; let’s not only acknowledge, but feel our dependence on him; let’s remind ourselves, through what we’re giving up, of what we’re waiting for. Let’s feel more keenly, in our guts, the desire for that wonderful day, when Christ will return and make all things new.