Do you ever wish you were better at praying? I do!…Maybe we’re overthinking it. Maybe we’re making prayer harder than it needs to be. Maybe, a great prayer is simply, “Help!”

TRANSCRIPTION

Walk-up Song: Help! By the Beatles.

Help!  Great song!  And a great prayer!  Help! In fact, I pray this prayer more than any other.  Help!  Isaac Singer said, “I only pray when I’m in trouble; fortunately, I’m always in trouble.”  How many of you identify with that?  Me too.  And when I’m in trouble, this is my prayer: “Help!” 

Do you ever wish you were better at praying?  I do!  When Jesus’ disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, Jesus gave them what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.”  It’s a prayer marked by its brevity and simplicity.  Short and simple.  Which makes me wonder…Maybe we’re overthinking it.  Maybe we’re making prayer harder than it needs to be.  Maybe, a great prayer is simply, “Help!”

Today we’re going to talk about this prayer, take a look at some examples in the Bible, and then practice it.  We’re going to pray some “Help” prayers for ourselves and others.

Offering:

One of the prayers we’re going to talk about in this series is “Wow!”  And here’s a wow moment: last weekend you gave over $90,000 to the work of Spring of Hope. 

1. “The first great prayer”: Help!

In Anne Lamott’s thoughtful, honest and often funny book, Help, Thanks, Wow: the three essential prayers, she calls this “the first great prayer.”  Help!  It’s the first great prayer because it’s what most of us think of when we think of praying.  What is prayer?  We ask God for help.  Pete Greig, in his wonderful book, How to Pray: a Simple Guide for Normal People (highly recommended), writes:

Prayer means many things to many people, but at its simplest and most obvious, it means asking God for help.

Prayer means many things: thanksgiving (Michael talked about that last weekend), worship, surrender, praise, lament, even complaint.  But at its simplest and most obvious, “the first great prayer” is asking God for help.  Help!

I’ve listed some Bible references on your outline—these are only a sample of prayers for help—I could have filled up the page.  This prayer is everywhere in the Bible.  Let’s take a look at a few.

Exodus 2:23 The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.

When the Israelites were in slavery in Egypt, they cried to God.  Help!  And He did.  God sent Moses and delivered them.  What do you do when you’re enslaved, addicted, trapped, stuck?  Cry for help! 

Later when the Israelites were escaping Egypt, Pharaoh sent the Egyptian army to destroy them, and they cried for help again.

Joshua 24:7 But they cried to the Lord for help, and he put darkness between you and the Egyptians; he brought the sea over them and covered them.

God heard their cry for help and set a dark cloud between them and the Egyptian army and then split the Red Sea and led them through to freedom.  What do you do when you’re about to be overwhelmed?  Cry for help!

After they reached the Promised Land, the Israelites began to stray from God, and foreign armies invaded and conquered them.  Time and again, they cried for help. 

Judges 6:6 Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help.

God heard this cry and raised up an unlikely leader named Gideon who led the people to an unlikely victory over the Midianites.  The invading army was “like a swarm of locusts, impossible to count.”  Gideon gathered an army of 32,000 men but God whittled it down to 300—so they would know that it was God who delivered them, and not themselves.  Help comes in unlikely packages! 

Daniel prayed this prayer when the Persian king, Darius gave an edict that anyone who prayed to any god other than him would be thrown into a den of lions.    By the way, do you know the difference between you and God?  God never thinks He is you!  Darius evidently didn’t understand that: “Everyo