Foundation for Living #7
November 20, 2005
And this is the record that God has given to us eternal life, and this life
is in his Son. He that has the Son has life; and he that has not the Son
of God has not life. 18He that believeth on him is not condemned:
but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in
the name of the only begotten Son of God.
For there is no other name under heaven
given among men, whereby we must be saved. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that
not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works,
lest anyone should boast. 38 For I am persuaded that neither death
nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor
things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created
thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord. 36 For of Him
and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory
forever. Amen.
Scripture
teaches that at the point of faith or trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, every
person who does so is saved. Sin is no
longer an issue in terms of eternal salvation.
Our salvation is secure for all eternity. Nevertheless, we continue to sin. We still have a sin nature, and when we sin
it breaks fellowship with God, grieves the Holy Spirit and quenches His
sanctifying, or spiritual growth ministry in our lives. Therefore it is necessary for us to recover
from that sin and the procedure is a grace procedure based on 1 John 1:9, if we
simply confess, admit, or acknowledge our sins to God the Father, and at that
instant we are forgiven cleansed from all unrighteousness, that includes sins we did not know
were sins, or forgot about, and the sanctifying ministry of God the Holy Spirit
continues and our progress in the spiritual life is maintained. When we study the word of God, it is under
the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit.
He is the one who helps us understand what is being taught, He is the
one who stores the doctrine in our souls, and He is the one who brings it
to mind so that we can apply it when the times are correct, when it is
necessary. We always begin with a few
moments of silent prayer to make sure we are ready to study the wore, use 1
John 1:9 if necessary.
Father, we thank you that You
are a God who has loved us from eternity past and from eternity past You
provided a perfect plan, whereby we could recover from sin, that we can be saved through the provision of
a perfect sacrifice, our lord Jesus Christ.
And that You provided a spiritual life for us. You provided Your word for us. You revealed
Yourself to us, and You have given us all the information we need to live our
life in a way that honors and glorifies You.
Father, the Scriptures are our guide, our path. Scripture says that Your word is the lamp
unto our feet, and a light unto our path.
It is in Your light that we see light.
Father , we pray now, as we study Your word this morning, that we might
be willing to submit to the teaching of Your word, that God the Holy Spirit will challenge us with what Scriptures teach,
that we might make these principles a priority in our life. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen
Last week we continued a new
section of our basic series. We have
gone through basics related to God, to salvation and to man, which I call Foundation
for Life. In this part of the series, Foundation
for Living, we have covered the foundational spiritual skills, which are laid
out in Scripture, that every believer
must master in order to advance spiritually.
They are confession of sin, which we mentioned briefly this morning, walking by means of God the Holy Spirit, the faith rest drill, mixing faith
with the promises, principles, procedures in the word of God, grace orientation, aligning our
thinking to the grace of God, so it affects how we relate to others, doctrinal
orientation, where we make the word of God a priority in our life. Those are the foundational spiritual
skills. On top of that we have certain
responsibilities and duties. We are all
priests and have priestly duties.
1 Peter 2:5 you also, like
living stones, are being built into a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to
offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
This is foundational; we are a holy priesthood and this is the
training session. For those of you who
have been here on Thursday night for our Hebrews study, you know we are being
prepared today for a future ministry with our Lord Jesus Christ when He returns
at the second coming and He reigns during the Millennial Kingdom. During this
time, we return with Him, in resurrection body, and we become that cadre
that rules and reigns with Him. We are
the administrative team, and for the fist time in many of your lives, you are
going to use bureaucracy in a positive sense, because we will be ruling as
kings and priests. Our training for that
is part of our priesthood today. There are two basic elements to our priestly
ministry that we are developing in terms of this basic series: the first has to do with prayer, and the
second has to do with Bible study. That
is a further development on doctrinal orientation. When we go back and look at the role of the
priest in the Old Testament, a priest did a number of different things. He was responsible for the teaching,
communication, copying and preservation of the word of God. That is vital. He was also the one who operated as a
representative of the people. Each
individual believer in the Old Testament could not come before God
individually, there had to be a representative. That priest was the intermediary, or the
mediator between God and man. In the
church age, the Old Testament priesthoods, the royal priesthood of Melchizedek,
the Levitical priesthood, the patriarchal priesthood, have all been set aside
now. In the church age, every believer
is a priest. Every individual has a
right to go directly to God; this is part of our priesthood. Jesus Christ is out high priest, seated at the
right hand of God the Father. He is the
one who continually intercedes for us, and as a result of understanding His
priesthood, in Hebrews 4:16 we read, Let us therefore
come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to
help in time of need. This is a foundational promise, a prayer for
each of us that we have direct access to the throne of God, but when we come we
have confidence; we can come boldly to the throne of grace. When we look at some of the prayers in the
Scripture, in the Old Testament, but especially in the New Testament, we
recognize there is a way to come before the throne of God with
confidence and with boldness. We have
direct access right into the presence of God every time we pray. But we have to understand what prayer is and
also what prayer is not. Part of what I
will do today and next week is look at some of the myths and misconceptions
about prayer, because there is a lot of funny teaching that goes on about
prayer. The first time I ran into this,
this sounds kind of absurd to some of you, but I was teaching my first semester
at what used to be Houston Bible Institute, now it is the College of Biblical Studies,
some 20 years ago, and the first night of the first class I taught, there was a
lady who came out during the break, and said, ‘I am having a hard time
understanding some of the things you are saying. To me, God is like a coke machine; you put in
your coins, push a button and you get what you want.’ I had never heard anything like that before,
she had never heard anything like what I was teaching before, and that was the
last time I saw her in class. She apparently did not understand what grace and
the Scripture is all about. There
are so many misconceptions in what I call popular Christianity today. And it is not just today, there has always
been a pop religion view in any culture, at any time down through history. There are ideas that just of get out there,
and people pick them up, and you here trite little clichés like cleanliness is
next to godliness, everything will work out, just believe. Believe what? These
little sayings you hear from people, they sound like they could be biblical,
and sometime there is a grain of truth in there, but they are wrapped up in
some error. We have to separate what is
true about prayer, from what is false about prayer. The only authority for us in understanding
prayer is the word of God. Before we get
too far along, let’s get a definition of prayer. This definition is developed from looking at
a number of passages in Scripture. Prayer is the grace provision of the royal
priesthood, whereby the church age believer has access and privilege to communicate directly with God. Let’s break this definition down phrase by
phrase.
Prayer is a grace
provision. To understand prayer, you
have to understand grace. Grace means it
is an undeserved privilege. We do not do
anything to deserve the right to go before God as fallen sinful creatures. God has given us this freedom, this privilege
of direct access to Him. It is a grace
provision of the royal priesthood, and that is what every believer is. We saw that back in 1 Peter 2:5, We are a holy priesthood. In verse
9, we find out that we are a part of the
royal family of God. It is a royal priesthood. We are priests under the High Priesthood of
the Lord Jesus Christ. What is His priesthood?
It is after the order of Melchizedek in the Old Testament, who was a royal priest. This is a grace provision, of the royal
priesthood. That is who we are. You may not feel like royalty, you may not
think much of aristocracy, but that is who we are as church age believers. There is no believer in all of history who
has the privilege and all of the blessings and rights that you and I have as
church age believers. There will never
be another dispensation where the every day ordinary believer has all of the
rights and privileges that you and I have.
We are royal aristocracy. So prayer
is that grace provision of the royal priesthood whereby the church age believer (that is us) has access and privilege to communicate
directly with God. That never
happened before in history, it was always through an intermediary
priesthood. But today we have a
mediator, and in 1
Prayer is the grace provision of the royal
priesthood whereby the church age believer has access and privilege to
communicate directly with God. The
purpose of this communication is to acknowledge our sin, to express adoration
and praise to God, to give thanks, to intercede for others, to convey our
personal needs, petitions and to conduct intimate conversations with God. Now those are different components of prayer
we will see as we develop this study. Each
of those can be part of one prayer, where
we go through all of those at the same
time or any individual part of that can be a prayer in and of itself. There can be prayers of confession, such as
Psalm 51, which a confession prayer. It
can be a prayer of praise; it can be a prayer just giving thanks ; it can be a
prayer of just intercession for others.
Any one of these can be a prayer in itself. It can be long or short; it can be just
bullet prayers while you are driving down the freeway. There are times at work and there are
examples in the Scripture many times where you have something happening. We saw this couple of weeks ago in Genesis
where the faithful servant Abraham is sent by Abraham to find a wife for
Isaac. When he is coming to the well
there in the Padam Aran and
he is not sure who is going to show up, or how to really spot the woman that
God has in mind for Isaac, or how to identify the right one, he prays and he
sets forth certain conditions, ‘this is what I am looking for’. As soon as he Rebekah
comes to the well, and she responds so graciously to give him water and to feed
the camels, it says he bowed his head in worship. He was giving thanks, it was not a long term
thing, it was not something he spent thirty minutes doing, but he immediately
stopped and gave thanks to God in the midst of the flow of events. So, prayers can be short or they can be
long. As I developed this, first I
wanted to do this in an hour, but it is going to take a couple of sessions to
do this. I want to talk about the
priority of prayer, the prerequisite of prayer, the principles for prayer, some
promises for prayer, and the procedures for prayer. That is going to take two or three weeks, but
prayer is so important we need to spend some time on it. First of all we need to recognize that prayer
is part of our priesthood. It is part of
the priesthood of every believer and the role of a priest is to represent man
before God, and we represent ourselves to God. We come before His throne of
grace and we have access to His throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace
to help in time of need, as we have seen in Hebrews 4:16 which is one of the
great promises for prayer in Scripture.
And in the context of Hebrews 4 that we have been studying on Thursday
night, we see that this is part of that warning passage that goes from about
3:6 to 4:16, that grow out of the last part of Hebrew 2, and the first part of Hebrews
3 which is focusing on the spiritual
life and it is an outgrowth of what the writer of Hebrews says about Jesus
Christ learning obedience through the
things He suffered in His humanity. And that qualified Him to be our High Priest,
and because He is qualified to be our High Priest, when we go through
difficulty, suffering, and adversity, we can come to Him because He has been tested
in all points as we are, yet without sin, therefore, because He has gone
through every category of adversity, we can come boldly before the throne of grace, and find mercy in time of
need. That is the point, that we are
challenged and encouraged to continually
come before Him and this is part of our priesthood and spiritual
growth. Prayer is not what I identified
as we went through the five basic spiritual skills. Why not?
Because prayer utilizes many of these spiritual skills. Prayer is based on faith, related to grace
orientation For prayer to be accurate, to be heard, we have to have doctrinal
orientation. It is not a spiritual
skill, it combines spiritual skills so we come before the Lord and present our
prayers and petitions, based on faith, based on believing that prayer that is
brought before the Lord in faith, believing we will receive, we understand
grace, we understand doctrine, it pulls all these things together and makes
that prayer accurate and more effective.
As James says in verse 5 The prayer of a
righteous man avails much. Prayer is part
of our priesthood, and as such, prayer is to be a priority in the believer’s
life. It is to be near the top of our
scale of values as we think about what goes on in our day to day planning and events;
prayer is to be a priority. It is our
communication life line to the Father, and it is to be a priority. Just as Bible study is to be a priority. In Bible study God is speaking to us through
His word. In prayer we are fulfilling the other side of that communication in
talking with the Father. Prayer is to be
a priority. I find that too often today,
prayer just somehow slips aside, or we have a superficial prayer life. This is
true for all of us. We don’t give it the
attention that Scripture says we should.
As we have seen many times the example for the spiritual life of the
church age is Jesus Christ. Think about
this. We know that Jesus Christ is our
role model, He is our example. Again and
again in Scripture we are told to look to the Lord Jesus Christ, He is our
example. In His spiritual life He
modeled for us all the principles and procedures that are to be part of our
spiritual life. His spiritual life was
not based on the same principles as Old Testament believers, His spiritual life
was based on His relationship with God through God the Holy Spirit
Prayer was a priority for Him. Think about this. If Jesus Christ is
undiminished Deity, and true humanity, united in one Person forever, the basic
definition of the hypostatic union, and if He is sinless, He is impeccable, He
has no sin, He was not born with a sin nature, He did not receive the imputation
of Adam’s original sin, He did not commit any personal sins; in His deity He is
omniscient, He is omnipotent, He is omnipresent, but He is not relying on any of his divine
attributes for his spiritual life, so if
He is in this situation, and He, in His humanity is praying to God as much as He
did, and He is sinless, and He is true humanity, then how much more should we
be spending time in prayer, when we have a sin nature, we have a more intense struggle in some ways in
sanctification , in our spiritual life
because of indwelling sin, how much more is it incumbent on us to spend time in prayer. Let’s see what the Scripture says about the
Lord Jesus Christ in terms of His prayer life.
Matthew 14:23 And when He had sent
the multitudes away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. Now when
evening came, He was alone there. This happens many times in Scripture, where He has
been ministering to the crowds, He has been teaching the multitudes or the
disciples and He leaves and gets away by Himself to pray. Why?
So He can avoid distractions, relax and have time alone to refresh
Himself in His soul, and He focuses on prayer.
He goes up for awhile, it isn’t for five minutes. There is a sense here that He is taking several hours to go pray. It is not something quick. He makes a point to go away by Himself. Matthew 26:39, this takes place when He is
getting ready to face the cross. He is
anticipating what is about to happen and He goes off by Himself, and He tells
the disciples to watch and pray. He goes
a little further into the Garden of Gesthemene so He
is by Himself. And He fell on his face and prayed. 39Going a little farther, he fell with his
face to the ground and prayed. This is a posture we often see in the Scripture related to prayer, now
it strikes some of us as being a little too religious, to get down on our
knees, to fall on our face and pray. But
this is something you see again and again in Scripture. In Genesis we talked about Abraham’s faithful
servant, that after he discovers Rebekah and God
reveals her to him, he falls down and
worships. This is the posture of
prayer. I am not saying that there is
something mystical or magical or
significant about getting on your knees, or falling down on your face, but this
is a posture we do see over and over and over again in the Scripture. There is nothing wrong with this. What it is doing is putting ourselves
physically in a position of humility and authority recognition when we are in
prayer. I don’t know about you, but I
feel awkward doing this. I remember the
first time I heard somebody talking about this and I decided to try it for
awhile. It is not part of our culture to
do this. It is very much a part of the
Eastern culture to be much more outward in their emotional expression. In the Middle East and Mediterranean
countries, they do not think anything of raising their hands in prayer. And you hear that in the Scripture where they
raise their hands in prayer, and the Jews did that with their palms up. It is not the one handed thing you often see
today, I don’t want anyone to really see me do this, or I want to make sure
everybody knows I am praising God. But this was more cultural, so I don’t think a lot
of this is necessarily prescribed. This
is not a prescription for making prayer more effective, that you need to prostrate yourself, lie down on
the ground or kneel, but there is nothing wrong with that either. What we see again and again in Scripture is that there is this physical posture that
goes along with prayer. I think that
part of that is that during times of significant pressure and prayer there is a relationship between the
adversity that is being faced and the physical posture of the one praying. Another passage in Mark1:35 :
35 Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He
went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed.
Principle number one: in order to
have an effective prayer life you are going to get up at four in the morning and
go prayer. I am not serious here. You don’t derive that principle from the Scripture. However it is interesting how many morning
people there were in the Scripture. For
those of you who are night owls and
bats, you just can’t understand that. As
I was doing a study on this, how many
times in the Psalms, it says that the Psalmist rose up early in the morning to
pray. And the Lord, early in the
morning, long before daylight, He goes
out, because this is the time when things
are not happening. The phone is not
ringing. People are not coming by; you are not already immersed in the daily
schedule. It is a time you can set aside apart from
distraction, that is really the principle.
What ever your daily schedule is, when you find that time, whenever it
is. Some folks, when it gets to be ten
or eleven at night, do not really want to go to bed, but the phone is not going to be ringing, the kids are asleep, it is
a time when they feel like they can concentrate and focus the best. My time is in the morning. If I had my druthers, I would be getting up
at five o clock every morning. I get up
about 5:45am, but I would be getting up at five every morning, and it is that
time between five and ten in the morning that I am my most effective. I think that is the principle that under lies
this, to figure out, in terms of your own body clock, when you are at your
sharpest. When you can focus the best
and concentrate the is the time for you
to set aside to listen to the word, to study the word and to pray. This should be a daily thing for every
believer. Whether it is thirty minutes
or fifteen minutes, I know there are
times when we get so busy. I remember
back when Dan Ingram was in his first couple of years in seminary, he was
saying, I don’t have time to listen to a
whole tape, I said, then listen for ten or fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, you grab that time. On the drive to school, you have a full
schedule all day, we live very busy lives, we sometimes try to do too much, we
try to grab this big chunk of time, thinking,
I need 45 minutes or 30 minutes, sometimes we just cannot grab that
time. So you take fifteen minutes and do
what you can, and make that count. Make
that a focal point. Jesus gets up a long
time before daylight, goes out to a solitary place where He prays. Where there
are no distractions, where you can focus on prayer. That was a priority in the Lord’s life, and
again and again. Luke 5:16 says 16 So He Himself often withdrew into
the wilderness and prayed. He got away from everything, He made time. There is a principle here. Sometimes in life it is important for you to
just take time to go somewhere, to a state park, a city park, wherever you can
where you are alone, where you are away from your husband, wife, kids, work, and
you can take a half a day or a whole day, just so you can focus and be
refreshed about whatever is going on in your life. Take time to pray, to read scriptures. There was a time when I had a place or
opportunity to do this , years ago I would go to Camp Peniel
for a couple of days when nobody else was there. I would spend the time reading the scriptures, praying and
thinking about what I was doing, where I was going, what I was teaching, what
needed to be done once or twice a
year. Now I go to Kiev to do it. That is one of the reasons I like going over
there with Jim. This year I am teaching
the spiritual life, which I have taught three time, the power points are all in
Russian, I have my notes, I teach about
three hours every morning and about four other times, but the rest of the time
I don’t have anything else going on. I
go back to my apartment, there is nobody there, no television, no telephone,
and I get a tremendous amount done. I
read, spend time praying, and it gives me an opportunity to just focus on what
has happened during the last year, what are my personal goals and objectives
spiritually, what are the goals for the church, what I would like to do and see
happen in the coming year, where have I just missed it, it is a great opportunity. Even though there is a lot of teaching going
on and I am doing a lot while I am there, for the most part of every day, I do
not have any distractions. It is a
tremendous time for me to refocus and be refreshed. There are different ways you can do it. There is no set pattern. Not everybody is the same. When I first went to seminary, it seemed like
every body was giving set ways to do things, and it was always ways that did
not work for me. Whatever works for you,
to get away and to refocus, reading Scripture, listening to tapes, prayer. I am not saying this is something you do
every week, but maybe once a year, just to refresh and refocuses Luke 6:12 Now it came to pass in those days
that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to
God. Now
that that is concentration. That is
focus.
Luke 9:18
18 And it happened, as He was alone praying, that His
disciples joined Him, and He asked them, saying, “Who do the crowds say that I
am?”
So He is again alone praying,
not just ten, fifteen minute prayers, but spending the whole time praying. How do you spend a night praying? One way I think you can do it is reading
through the Psalms and using them as your own prayers. To do that you have to read through the
Psalms on a regular basis, identify Psalms that are personally significant to
you, where the Holy Spirit is using your life, things of that nature. Luke 9:28 Now it came to pass, about eight days after
these sayings, that He took Peter, John, and James and went up on the mountain
to pray. Here is
a picture of corporate prayer, not just individual prayer, lets get together
with other believers and pray. Now some
of you are saying, now doesn’t Scripture say that wherever two or three are
gathered together in My name there am I in the midst of them. We will find out that has nothing to do with
prayer, it is not a prayer promise, in fact, it has to do with church
discipline and the excommunication of an unrepentant sinner in the
congregation. Where two or three are
gathered together in My name, those two or three are witnesses against the
offending believer.
In Acts 2: 42, we see the same pattern develop
in the New Testament church, at the very beginning. . 42 And they continued steadfastly
- this is the Greek word proskartareo, which means to be steadfast, faithful, to persevere,
something that becomes a weekly, daily habit pattern, - in the apostles’
doctrine and fellowship,- that is what
they are focusing on. But the way this
is structured in the Greek, you do not have four things, you have two things. They focused on doctrine and fellowship, that
was their priority for the local church.
What is fellowship? Getting
together and having coffee and cookies after church, going out to Sunday brunch
after church with other believers? No, fellowship
is defined by the next two phrases, breaking of bread, which is communion and
prayer. The Lord’s table and
prayer. Who do you have fellowship with
in the Lord’s table? God. Who are you having fellowship in prayer? God.
That is what they
were devoting themselves to, study of the word and fellowship with God. That was their priority, and fellowship with
God involved two things, communion and prayer.
Prayer was a function and priority in the body of Christ, and in the
corporate meeting of the church. Prior to this we find out that there were five
thousand people who came to know the Lord on the day of Pentecost. So this is not talking about some small house
church group of believers, this
is talking about that large group of brand new believers in Jerusalem right
after Pentecost. And they are devoted in
prayer. That means they come together
corporately, as believers, to pray. Now this is one of the sad things, in most
churches, when you have prayer meeting, as we do on Tuesday night, two or three
men, and two or three ladies show up, and this is really sad, because this is
supposed to be a priority of the body of Christ. It is not a priority to just show up at Bible
class at 8 o’clock. Prayer is a
priority, the corporate prayer, the meeting of believers in the church. In 1
Father , we do thank you for this time to be
reminded of the importance of prayer in each of our lives, not only personal ,
private prayer, but also the corporate prayer of the body of Christ. That we
should be a church known for being a praying church, people who are devoted to
prayer, to continuously giving ourselves to prayer. That prayer is recognition
that we are dependent upon You, that Your grace provides for us. It is a recognition and an expression of our
faith and dependence on You. Trusting You to provide for us on a regular basis. Trusting You to guide and direct us as a body
of believers. Father, we thank you that
we have access to you in prayer, because Jesus Christ tore that veil in the
temple, He opened a path to direct access to You by His work on the cross. There He paid the penalty for our sins. We pray that if there is anyone here this
morning who is unsure of their salvation, or uncertain of their eternal destiny,
that You would take this opportunity to make the gospel clear to them through
God the Holy Spirit. All have sinned and fallen short of
the glory of God, but the story does not end with us being condemned for sin,
it goes on to indicate Your love and grace and that You provided a perfect salvation for us, and
it is not dependent in any way on who we are or what we do. No matter what we do in life, no matter what sins
we may have committed, the issue is not our sin, the issue is Jesus Christ. Right now, right where you sit, if you have
never trusted Christ as your Savior, this is your opportunity to do so. The instant you put your trust in Christ
alone, God the Father, in His omniscience knows when you
have trusted and in and at that instant you receive the imputation of Christ's
righteousness, you are declared just, you receive eternal life, you are born
again, you enter into the family of God and you can never lose that salvation..
This is your opportunity to do so. Father,
we pray for us as believers that You
challenge us with Your word, the importance of prayer, to continue steadfastly
in prayer. That we might be a people
known for our prayer lives, that we depend upon You , and express our
petitions, our thanks, our love for You, our praise for You in every thing that we do, we pray this in the
name of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.