June 21, 2015 A.D., by Pastor Ben Willis
June 24th, 2015Luke 6:12-19 [NLTse]
12 One day soon afterward Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and He prayed to God all night. 13 At daybreak He called together all of His disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles. Here are their names:
14 Simon (whom He named Peter), Andrew (Peter’s brother), James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, 15 Matthew, Thomas, James (son of Alphaeus), Simon (who was called the zealot), 16 Judas (son of James), [and] Judas Iscariot (who later betrayed Him).
17 When they came down from the mountain, the disciples stood with Jesus on a large, level area, surrounded by many of His followers and by the crowds. There were people from all over Judea and from Jerusalem and from as far north as the seacoasts of Tyre and Sidon. 18 They had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases; and those troubled by evil spirits were healed. 19 Everyone tried to touch Him, because healing power went out from Him, and He healed everyone.
Sermon
Nowhere in Scripture does Jesus say, “You should pray.” We merely hear Him telling us how, when, where, and for what to pray. (He also tells us how not to pray.) The Lord Jesus makes the obvious assumption that those who follow Him will pray. And after all my years of ministry I am convinced that if Christians spoke to God more consistently, and if we heard God speaking back to us more consistently, that we would follow Him more closely and backslide into our old sins less readily and not be so easily tempted away from Him by the attractions of the world, as so many are.
But the truth is that many do not pray consistently, and many do not hear from God consistently. A friend of mine told me that the Lord once confided in him, “My people don’t pray. So all I can do is look at them trying to do My work for Me.”
Why do we need to pray? We need to pray because God wants us to put aside our passions and ambitions and learn to build the Kingdom of God from Him using the means of grace He has provided us in His Word and prayer. He wants us to put aside our self-reliance and learn how to rely on Him and His power. He is inviting us to create new things in cooperation with Him: But those things are in His mind. We have scarcely dreamed of them!
We need to pray because God Almighty wants us to realize the shallowness of what we have been able to build with our own hands and to recognize that only by means of prayer and fellowship with Him can we create anything worthwhile or enduring.
Anyone here ever heard of Martin Luther? Martin Luther lived during the 14- and 1500s and was the father of the Protestant Reformation. It was probably one of the most corrupt and self-destructive eras of European history. Unless you were of the nobility, human life had little worth. Wars were commonplace. Sexual wickedness was so widespread that it had even pervaded the monasteries. Political strife was so unsettling – even in the church – that there were three popes wrangling with each other for control of the Roman Catholic Church.
By God’s grace Martin Luther sensed the desperation of his times and God showed him the answer. Luther wrote:
Open your eyes and look into your life and the life of all Christians, particularly the spiritual estate, and you will find that faith, hope, love, obedience, chasteness, and all virtues are languishing; that all sorts of terrible vices are reigning; that good preachers and prelates are lacking; only rogues… are ruling. Then you will see that there is a need to pray throughout the world, every hour, without ceasing, with tears of blood, because of the terrible wrath of God over men…
A lot of historians talk about the Protestant Reformation as a doctrinal debate, not as a spiritual awakening or prayer movement. But Luther, the father of Protestantism, saw prayer at the heart of everything – that without prayer, nothing enduring or good could happen.
He wrote to his friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon:
Whatever aspect matters may assume, we can achieve all through prayer. This alone is the almighty queen of human destiny. Therewith we can accomplish everything, and thus maintain what already exists, amend what is defective, patiently put up with what is inevitable, overcome what is evil, and preserve all that is good.
The Lord Jesus assumes we will pray for the same reasons He prayed: To grow close, intimate, and into one-ness with the Father; and, to have God’s guidance and empowerment for our work each day.
In our morning’s reading we get a glimpse of the Lord Jesus being caught up in extraordinary communion with the Father. That short phrase, “He prayed to God all night,” reveals a deep, mystical intimacy with God. And yet such mystical communion between Jesus and the Father was not an end in itself but the beginnings and source of actions that began shaping God’s purposes on the earth.
Through that extended, disciplined, and intimate prayer time Jesus received the guidance and empowerment He needed to know which leaders the Father had chosen for Him to be His apostles: All who were needed to set in motion the Father’s plans for bringing salvation to the human race.
In the life of Jesus, again and again, we see that His times of prayer are, yes, times of encouraging fellowship with the Father, but they also always lead up to decisive and dynamic action, preparing Jesus for the work the Father has called Him to, and setting in motion the spiritual and human forces that, together, will establish His future.
The same is true for us. the Father calls us to prayer, and the Lord Jesus assumes we will pray, in order to draw closer and grow more intimate with Him, while at the same time giving us the direction we need for the day’s work and to prepare us to receive the empowerment we’ll need for it.
We must decide to pray as a part of our decision to follow Jesus Christ. Once having made that decision and sticking to it even in the midst of distractions and enemy diversions, you will be amazed how often prayer begins to come spontaneously. You may even begin to be surprised at the discovery that you can, through the Holy Spirit, “pray without ceasing”. More next week!