Going Vertical: Why Pray

This week we’re are starting a series called Going Vertical and it’s about prayer.  It’s a six-week series on the mysteries of prayer.  We’re going to find out about prayer.  We’re going to find out about what the Bible says about prayer, what it is, how we can pray, how we can pray for ourselves, how we can pray for others, how we can listen to God, and how we can develop a strong relationship with God through prayer

This passage is from Matthew 6:5-15.  To read it now, click here.
 
 
 
To start off with this week, I want to take you back to 1952, on the campus of Princeton University, a doctoral student asked this question of Professor Albert Einstein, “What is left for us to do a doctoral dissertation on?  If we want to do original research for an original dissertation, what subjects are left?  Einstein thought for a minute, then he said, “Find out about prayer.  Somebody must find out about prayer.”
 
Today, we’re are starting a series called Going Vertical and it’s about prayer.  It’s a six-week series on the mysteries of prayer.  We’re going to find out about prayer.  We’re going to find out about what the Bible says about prayer, what it is, how we can pray, how we can pray for ourselves, how we can pray for others, how we can listen to God, and how we can develop a strong relationship with God through prayer.
 
Now, as we start, I have a confession to make.   I don’t always pray like I should.  Sometimes it’s difficult to pray.  Sometimes I just don’t feel like praying, and I want to skip it.  Sometimes I want to pray but my mind keeps wandering, I’m just so distracted by different things that I don’t feel connected with God.  Sometimes I wonder if God is even listening to my prayers.  Sometimes I get to the end of the day and I realize that I haven’t prayed at all that day.  Can you relate to some of that?  I think we all can. 
 
But on the other hand, there are those times when I do feel connected to God.  When I feel God’s presence.  When I talk with God and I know he’s listening. And I am listening to what God is saying.  And I know that God is with me every step of my day.  These are the good days.  My goal, and I hope it’s also your goals, is to have more of those good days in prayer, than the bad days of prayer.  I want to get better at praying, and that’s really my hope for all of us with this series.  That we all might find something that will make us better at praying, more effective in our times of prayer.
 
The Bible talks a lot about prayer. And we’re going to look at a couple of those passages today.   The first one we’re going to look at is Colossians 4:2, and it says, “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.” 
 
How do we live that out?  How do we devote ourselves to prayer?  As we start out, I want to give you a working definition of prayer.  There are a lot of definitions out there, some very complex and very difficult, but I want to give you a very simple definition that we can work with.  Here it is, are you ready?  Prayer is talking with God.  That’s all it is.  Prayer is talking with God.
 
So how do we do that?  How do we talk with God?  What methods of communication can we use?  Can we pick up the phone?  Can we send Him an email or text Him?  Can we message Him on facebook?  Can we FaceTime on our iPhones, or can we Skype with God?  These are the ways we communicate these days, isn’t it?  But none of them will work with God.  So we’re going to look at what Jesus has to say about prayer.  We’re going to look at our reading this morning, to see what Jesus can tell us about prayer.  Matthew 6 is part of what is known as the Sermon on the Mount.  During the Sermon on the Mount, he spends a good portion of his time talking about prayer.  So that will be the bulk of what we look at today.
 
If you have your bible with you, open it to Matthew 6:5.  We’ll flip around a little, but Matthew 6 will be our home base this morning.  You’ll see that Jesus starts off what He has to say about prayer with these words, “And when you pray…”  He doesn’t say, “if you pray” or “should you ever need to pray”.  It’s assumed that we’re all going to pray.  Right.  We can’t be followers of God without ever talking to God.  We have to pray.  So today, as we look at why we should pray, we’re going to look at what happens when you pray. 
 
In the notes, I’ve used an acronym using the word PRAY so we’ll be able to remember.  The first letter is P, when I pray, I PROVE that God exists.  When we pray, it proves that God exists, at least to us, right.  It proves that we believe in God, it proves that we believe He exists.  It proves that we believe he can help us.  If we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t pray, right.  
 
There was a study done recently that showed that 90 percent of the people in America believe in God.  At least they believe in a God.   That same study showed that 50 percent of the people pray regularly.  Regularly may mean different things to different people, but they pray.  And when they pray they show that they believe that God is real and that He can help. 
 
We have an intrinsic belief that there is something more out there.  Almost everybody believes that.  Praying shows that we believe that.  It proves that we believe that there is something more.  That there is a God out there listening to us. 
 
Also in Matthew 6:5, Jesus says, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on street corners to be seen by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.”  If we pray so others will see, we’re just showing off.  We’re hypocrites, and we know that God despises hypocrisy.  He wants us to pray, but he wants us to pray for the right reasons.  Showing off, praying for show, trying to impress others, that’s not the right reason. 
 
Prayer isn’t about flowery language, or getting people to notice you or be impressed by you, prayer is about connecting with God.  God has made a promise to us in Scripture, He says, I want to know you.  He promises he will show himself to us.  Look at what it says in Jeremiah 29:12-14, “‘Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.  You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord.”
 
There is another great Einstein quote out there, he said, “God is not playing dice with the universe.”   Let me paraphrase just a little, God isn’t playing hide and seek with the universe, either.  God wants to be found by you.  He’s waiting to be found by you.  He’s not hiding.  He’s not going to make you jump through all these hoops.  God wants to have a relationship with you, He wants to be found, and the way that we find Him is through prayer. 
 
So if prayer is the way to connect with God, and it proves that we believe in God, it’s also the way to reconnect with God.  So the second item in our acronym is that when we pray, we reconnect with God. 
 
Getting back to Matthew 6, we see this, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”  Some of us might have a problem with this idea of God as Father, because our earthly fathers weren’t what they should have been.  But you need to think about the ideal earthly Father, the perfect earthly Father.  We can have that – in God.
 
HOW OFTEN DO I NEED TO RECONNECT WITH GOD?  That’s easy, we need to connect with God daily.  Think of your marriage relationship.  Imagine if you didn’t talk to your spouse for months, what kind of relationship would you have?  Not much, right?  We need to communicate daily in marriage; we need to connect with God daily, too.
 
The theologian E.M. Bounds once said, “If God is not first in your thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the remainder of the day.”  That’s why prayer is a daily thing, we need to reconnect with God every single day.  If we’re going to live a life that pleases God, we need to reconnect with Him every day.
 
The next letter in our acronym is A – when we pray, we ADMIT our dependence on God.  When you think about it, prayer is admitting that we can’t do it our own.  Lord, I can’t do this on my own, help me.  I need your strength, I need your caring, I need your provisions, I need healing, I need you.  I want you.  You are God and I am not.  I want you in my life.
 
One thing that I sometimes hear about prayer, and maybe you’ve wondered this, is that if God already knows what we need before we ask, why do we have to pray?  And I think Jesus address this in our reading too.  In verses 7-8, we see, “And when you pray, do not keep babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”  
 
So if God knows what we need before we pray, why do still have to ask Him?  That brings us to a great truth about prayer that we really need to understand.  We don’t pray for God’s sake, we pray for our sake.  God didn’t create prayer for Him, He created it for us.  That’s something we need to understand.  Prayer was created because we need it.  We need prayer.  God doesn’t.
 
The truth is, God will not move in your life, unless you pray.  You need to admit to him that you need him, that you trust Him.  You need to knock on that door.  In Matthew 7:7, we see another valuable lesson on effective prayer.  It says, “Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”
 
When we pray, God is going to open doors that have been previous closed to us.  God, when we pray, is going to give us blessings in our lives.  God is going to give you opportunities that you won’t get when you don’t pray.  And when you do pray God is going to give you the strength you need to do what He has called you to do.
 
Back to Matthew 6, There is another part of that verse I want to touch on, too.  Jesus told them not to use flowery language, don’t use big words, don’t babble or go on and on.  Just tell Him what you need.  He already knows what you need, He just wants to hear it from you. Sometimes, we don’t know what we should be saying, so we just start rambling.  We keep talking and talking, because we really don’t know what we should be praying for. 
 
Sometimes, if you don’t know what to pray for, if you don’t have the words, try just adding silence to your prayer time.  Don’t feel the need to keep talking, don’t think it’s all up to you.  Sometimes when you are quite in your prayers, you hear God talking to you.  I don’t mean you hear a booming voice from the room, I mean that ideas will come to mind.  Things begin to occur to you.  You begin to hear from God.  If prayer is communicating with God, we need to give God time to speak, too. 
 
This brings me to the last point, the last letter in our acronym, Y.  When we pray, we YIELD to God’s will.  We yield our will to God’s will.  During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met with a group of ministers for a prayer breakfast.  At one point a minister said, Mr. President, let us pray that God is on our side.  Lincoln’s response was, “No gentlemen, let us pray that we are on God’s side.”
 
You see the ultimate goal of prayer is not to try to bend God’s will to our will, but to try to bend our will to God’s.  To mold us and shape us, to make sure that we are right with Him.  We pray in the Lord’s Prayer that God’s will be done.  In prayer, God shapes us and informs us of His will, so His will can be done, starting with us. 
 
We’ve all had times when we prayed for something very sincerely, maybe even for a long time, and never got it.  And then you realized that wasn’t really the best thing, and you were glad you didn’t get it? God knows us better than we know ourselves.  He knows what we need better than we do.  Maybe sometimes when we ask for something, we should be asking what He thinks we need.
 
Jesus sincerely wanted to do God’s will.  In Mark 14:36, we see, “‘Abba, Father,’ he said, ‘everything is possible for you.  Take this cup from me.  Yet not what I will, but wat you will.’”  Can we pray that way?  Can we pray each day that God does what He wants, not what we want?  Trusting that He really does know what’s best.
 
In closing, let’s just think about why we should pray.  Because when we pray, we Prove that God exists, at least to ourselves; we Reconnect with God; we Admit that we need Him; and we Yield to His will.  If you need any of these things, and if you’re anything like me, you need all of these things every day, then PRAY.  PRAY every day!