Well, a vast amount of ink has been spilt on the great subject of prayer. If you go into any Christian bookshop up and down the land, there’ll be a whole section on prayer. Because we find it difficult, it’s not easy.
We know it’s important, but are we people who invest in time with God? Do you enjoy prayer? Do you love prayer? Do you love spending time with God? My colleague, Steve, is an evangelist based up in Perth, who was in a church recently, not dissimilar to this church, where a Christian of many years standing said, Steve, I don’t really pray. And Steve said, why? And he said, because I can’t understand prayer. So I don’t.
And you think, do you need to understand it? I mean, I don’t understand what consciousness is, but I don’t sleep 24-7. I have no idea how my laptop works, but the PowerPoint seems to be okay this morning. I’m not sure we need to fully understand every mystery around prayer to engage in it.
And certainly in our text today, the Lord Jesus Christ has given us two parables, which don’t give us unlocking deep mysteries around prayer, but do encourage us to get on with it, to engage in it, even when there are mysteries around it. The Lord focusses us this morning on the practise of prayer, even if it is difficult. Do you pray? Do you pray diligently, sporadically, passionately, coldly? Did you used to pray, but have got a little cold? The famous author, the late Timothy Keller, interviewed lots of pastors as they were dying, and he found that their two greatest regrets were that they didn’t spend enough time in prayer, one, and with their family, second.
Dying pastors at the end of lifetimes of ministry looking back say, the one thing I would have done differently, to spend more time with the Lord in prayer. And so in these two parables that we’ve had so nicely read for us this morning, Jesus isn’t calling us to prayer as some kind of horrible works, or some kind of irksome duty that we have to do. He’s actually talking about engaging our hearts with Him.
The privilege the gospel gives us is access to God. We often think about the exclusivity when Jesus says, no one comes to the Father except by me, but we don’t often enjoy the privilege of saying, in Christ I can come to the Father. There is an exclusiveness to that, but also what an extraordinary privilege there is too, that God saying, you can come to me.
Prayer is of course life giving. You know when the Apostle Paul says, everything is a surpassing loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Everything else is a complete loss.
It’s a waste of time, it’s like manure, it’s dung. All my life achievements are a waste of time compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Yeah, we know Him, we see Him through a glass darkly now, but we have a foretaste of what’s to come.
We get to speak with God, we get to be with God. This is the most unspeakable privilege, and God offers it to sinful human beings like you and I. In Christ we can come to the Father, and it’s where in fact we are most truly alive. This world is stacked full with many blessings and good things from God, but I don’t think any of us are any more truly living than when we are in the presence of God.
And a congregation, a church, a group of people in God’s presence can in fact become almost like a lightning rod conducting the blessings of God down to earth. History is silent about a revival that didn’t start in prayer, but yet a church in God’s presence can be a lightning rod for God’s blessing. Prayer is life-giving, it’s also extremely difficult.
I was intrigued recently, the Evangelical Alliance put out a survey last year. They did some detailed interviews with people who are new Christians, and it was called the Finding Jesus Report. They interviewed I think about 200 Christians, people who had come to faith in Christ as adults, and they asked all sorts of questions about where were you before you came to Christ, and what did you believe in, and how did you come, how did you first hear the gospel, and it was very interesting things.
They said, what was the most significant thing for you in your journey to putting your faith in Christ? The best two answers, the Bible and prayer. Later on, what are the two things you found most hardest as a Christian? Guess what? The Bible and prayer. So the two things we find most life-giving are also the most difficult.
They present a challenge for us this morning. So this morning I’m not going to try and explain prayer to you, or present a clever thesis that unwraps the mystery of prayer. What we’re going to seek to do, as I challenge you and challenge myself, is to obey what Jesus said about prayer.
We need Christian people today who really love God, who really pray, who really worship Him, who really experience His presence, who believe in His truth, and can intercede for this lost world. And that’s why we turn to these two parables that Jesus told in Matthew 11 and Matthew 18. Before we go into them, we have to sort of point out that these are parables, not allegories, if you know the difference.
Well, an allegory is one of those very clever stories when every part of the story represents some other truth, like the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. You know, every single part of that represents a different part of the truth. A parable, on the other hand, tends to communicate one spiritual truth, and the rest is the narrative that makes it work.
If you try and allegorise these parables, you are going to be in big trouble, because the unjust judge, he wants the woman to go away. He’s not welcoming her. Both stories, you have someone banging on the door persistently, who is our model for prayer, and someone on the other side of the door who just wants them to go away.
Now, Jesus wants us to know that we are supposed to bang on the door of prayer relentlessly. He’s not asking us to get a picture of God from these texts. Well, where’s God in this text? Well, that’s Jesus telling the story.
And what does it say? I tell you this story so that you will pray persistently and not give up. So Jesus is saying, I’m the Lord, I actually want you to come to me. I am not like the unjust judge.
Jesus is saying, I want you to come and keep coming to me consistently and persistently. Pray and not give up. So don’t try and allegorise the parable.
If you start reading God in as the unjust judge, you’re going to be all over the place. That is not our picture of God. So this is how I want to do it.
I want to draw back from the text to start with, and think about who God is. This God who says, I want you to pray to me persistently and consistently. And then we’ll dive into the text to see how we should respond to this God.
What kind of God do we find here in the text? Well, he’s not awful and mean like the unjust judge. He is quite the opposite. I love that phrase in one of the songs we had this morning about God being beautiful.
You just spot that in the hymn. The first time I heard the idea that God was beautiful was a Keith Green song in the 80s. And the first time I heard it, you know, oh Lord, you’re beautiful.
And I thought, oh, Americans, they’re so kind of gushy, aren’t they? We don’t go there, do we? Is God beautiful? I said that to one of my American friends, and they said, well, you think we’re emotionally incontinent. We think you’re emotionally constipated. Too gushy.
We don’t go there. And then, I think it was last year at the FIEC conference, they were preaching on the Good Shepherd. And they unpacked the language, and they said a good translation would also be that Jesus is the beautiful shepherd.
Beautiful. The Lord is incredibly attractive. You know, that the very best of the love that we have in this world, Christian marriage, is supposed to be, at its very finest, a glimpse of Christ in the church.
And yes, we deride some modern songs and say, oh yeah, those terrible Jesus is my boyfriend lyrics. Yuck. But we mustn’t also forget that he is our husband.
That we are the bride of Christ, and the love and marriage here is supposed to point to a deeply passionate relationship between God and his people. He’s won our hearts, not just our minds. We love him, and he is morally beautiful.
Glorious. Every piece of beauty that we find in this world is but a signpost to the true beauty of God. That’s why he’s littered this world with the Kulin Mountains, and the Cairngorms, and waterfalls, and the sea, and the cry of a newborn baby.
Littered this world with things of beauty, all pointing to the true beauty of God. That’s why prayer isn’t a dreadful duty. It’s the highest privilege of mankind.
That we can enter into the throne room of the living God, where his beauty dwells. How can you and I enter into the presence of a God like that? It’s quite extraordinary, and quite wonderful. And we meet this God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
One God in three persons. And we bow before him in his glory, and his majesty, and his perfection. God is love, and that perfect love that exists between those three persons.
Father, Son, and Spirit. And there’s that extraordinary promise in the New Testament that describes Christian people like you and I in Christ as partakers of the divine nature. Is that not the most extraordinary phrase in the New Testament? How can you and I be partakers of the divine nature? How can the living God say to people like you and I, come in? When we know we deserve to be thrown out.
But in Christ he says, come in. You can partake of the divine nature. That is an extraordinary phrase.
So let’s think just for a minute about God as our Father. Because immediately in these preceding verses before that parable, we have the Lord’s Prayer. When Jesus tells us to pray, our Father who is in heaven.
My wife and I did a parenting course a few years ago. We’ve got three kids, several of whom have been an interesting experience parenting. They’re great.
But parenting is a challenge, right? So we did a parenting course. And the most challenging thing on that parenting course was a diagram. We discussed it in couples.
And they put this diagram up and asked you to sort of explore your own parenting. What parenting style do you have? And you can see that the axes are warm to not warm, firm to not firm. And of course there are all sorts of different parenting styles.
Those who are not warm and not firm are absent parents, negligent parents. But God’s not that kind of Father. We don’t serve the God of the deists who set the world spinning into motion and cleared off.
That’s not our God. He’s here. He’s actively engaged in his world.
Other parents are warm and not firm. All cuddly, all present, spoiling their children. No boundaries, no discipline.
I once saw a kid on a plane running up and down the aisles and they couldn’t take the plane off. And the pilot, the captain came out and said, Will you get your child to sit down? And the parents were mystified about the idea of telling a child anything. It was all presents and toys and games but no discipline whatsoever.
But that’s not our God. I was reading Jeremiah yesterday. The God who judges the nations.
This is not our God. He’s not all just dispensing toys and things for us to enjoy. He’s the living God who we had better listen to because he has all glory.
The opposite extreme is the caricature of Victorian parenting. Firm and not warm. That is authoritarian parenting.
Cold, distant, savage, harsh. Always on your back. Always criticising you.
And equally, that is not a picture of God, our Father, who we approach this morning. Because God is also the one who, you know, when the prodigal comes down, the path comes running to him and throws his arms around him and says, Kill the fatted calf. We’re having a party.
My son has come home. This is our God who, though he has all glory, though he judges all nations, is also incredibly warm and engages us with his love. God, of course, is the authoritative parent.
Because he is both absolutely in control and full of glory and yet throws his arms around his children. This is our Father. Rejoice with trembling, Psalm 2 says.
Rejoice, why? Because his arms are open. Tremble, why? Because he is the living God. And anybody that doesn’t tremble before him is a fool.
Rejoice with trembling. Enter into the embrace of God in prayer. This is our God.
We pray to the Father. This is a picture of John F. Kennedy in the White House at the height of the Cold War. This was really the most powerful seat anywhere on Earth.
From there he could control the nuclear weapons. He could launch nuclear attacks. He controlled all the countries across NATO.
All the telephone lines in the world connected there. That’s the centre of power on this Earth at that stage in the early 1960s. I’ve covered up the bottom of the picture, but let’s reveal the bottom of the picture.
That’s his son crawling around under the desk. This is the kind of access we have to the throne room, not of this world, but of the whole cosmos. The living God says, you’re my children.
You can come. In fact, Jesus tells us to pray persistently. He says, I give you this parable so that you pray persistently and don’t give up.
Yes, he has all authority, but yes, he says, come to me. We are called to pray to the Father. Jesus says consistently, but we’re called to pray through the Son.
How can people like us approach the living God? How can you and I with our sins and our faults and our follies and our mistakes and our brokenness and all the things we’ve got wrong approach a holy God? How can it be that you and I can come and God will listen to people like you and I? The answer is because we come through the Son. We approach God the Father in Jesus Christ the Son who takes away our sin and gives us his righteousness. He shares the intimate relationship he has with the Father with us.
That’s why we can come to the Father. That’s why we can approach. That’s why prayer in the Bible is always to the Father and through the Son.
Because it’s the Son who gives us access to the Father. John Calvin wrote this most beautiful illustration of that. He said, imagine if you were standing before a crowd of thousands of people.
And of course this was in the days before amplification, he wrote this. And he said, and you try to sing to them all, but your voice is poor and thin and weedy and you can’t get projected and you can’t be heard and it can’t get out. But then you are suddenly joined on stage by the world’s greatest opera singer with this enormous voice who begins to sing the most amazing melodious tune and the tune fills the stadium and goes out into the streets outside.
And then he says to you, sing with me, sing with me. And you blend your little weedy voice in with this great opera singer and together your song travels out and fills the stadium. And it’s his picture of prayer.
He says, on your own, do you think your voice can reach the heavens? Of course not. But Jesus says, sing with me. And you and I can speak to God.
And our thin, weedy, puny voices that are not fit to be heard in heaven are carried heavenwards by the Son. This is the gospel in action. You see, the gospel is in action not just the moment you became a Christian, but when you kneel down to pray.
It’s that same gospel that gives you access to God the Father. He says, come, come and speak to me, to the Father, through the Son. But let’s complete the picture.
He also says in Scripture, we pray to the Father, through the Son, but in the Spirit. We pray in the Spirit. Something happens in us and to us when we come into the presence of God.
The Holy Spirit stirs our hearts. He pours petrol on the fire. He groans within us, in fact, sometimes.
I was deeply struck by what the great Martin Lloyd-Jones wrote about this in his commentaries and sermons on Ephesians. He describes in the passage on Ephesians about praying in the Spirit an experience he had of someone on whom the Holy Spirit came when he was in a prayer meeting. Let me just read you a few words from Lloyd-Jones.
He says, praying in the Spirit, anyone who knows anything of this experience will know exactly what it is, but how difficult it is to put into words. And if Lloyd-Jones can’t find the words, I don’t think anybody can. He says, I can look back by the grace of God and I thank him for it.
Two public prayer meetings in which I was present when this presence of the Spirit was experienced in an exceptional manner. I shall never forget them as long as I live. A prayer meeting started one night at 7.15 in a church in South Wales.
It was a hot summer’s evening on a Monday night. Two men had taken part in prayer. Then a man stood up whom we all knew so well, an unimportant man, not a gifted man by any means, a man whose prayers could be stilted and formal and dry and even discouraging.
He began to pray and suddenly something happened to him. The whole man was transformed. His voice deepened and he began to pour out one of the most eloquent prayers I’ve ever heard in the whole of my life.
And he lifted up the entire meeting, myself included. Every one of us was in the Spirit, in the realm of the Spirit. And on the meeting went, one after another praying.
Men and women who I’ve heard on other occasions praying were now praying as I’ve never heard them pray before. Language, thought, everything was perfect. And the warmth and freedom and liberty were remarkable.
On and on it went until 10 minutes to 10. We’d forgotten time. We were in the realm of the Spirit.
We were in eternity. Time did not matter. Nothing mattered.
This is what you get in revivals and we were given a taste of it. And this is the thing which the Apostle Paul is exhorting us to in Ephesians. Formal prayers are not sufficient.
The world and the church being as they are today, we need this praying in the Spirit. We need to lay hold of God to give Him no rest and to use those dramatic, expressive words of the prophet Isaiah, and you will never lay hold of Him unless you are in the Spirit. This is the kind of prayer that the Lord is inviting us to.
Pray to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. We need to be hungry for this. Have you ever glimpsed that? We had a small glimpse of that, nothing like that, but a small glimpse of it in Perth in February.
Our pastor had called us to 21 days of prayer and fasting for the life of the church. And then at Solas, there was a girl who had contacted us because she had been going through our website and had all sorts of questions about the Gospel. So we sent her a Bible for her Christmas present and she began to read it and came back with all sorts of questions.
And then we arranged for her to go around and meet a Christian. This was in the north of England. And the night she was meeting that Christian, we had a prayer meeting in Perth and something happened and we were praying for her and we almost felt something shifting.
And we almost said, we think she’s home. We think something’s happened. There was a sense of the Spirit in the prayer meeting.
And then I phoned my boss Andy to say, I think something’s happened. He said, we had a similar experience in Swindon praying for the same girl. And then she emailed the next morning to say, I brought my boyfriend.
He thought he was a Christian until last night. And then he said, I’ve realised tonight I’m not a Christian. And they both put their faith in Christ that evening.
But we felt something happen in the prayer meeting. And I’ve no explanation for that. I’ve got no detailed theology.
But I know the Holy Spirit was at work. And it didn’t leave me with lots of answers. But it left me very, very hungry for more of that.
Now, that is not to dismiss or diminish the value of prayer meetings when it’s hard work. Because sometimes prayer is hard work. But are you not just hungry to pray to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit? Like Lloyd-Jones describes in that text.
This is the God we pray to. So that’s pulling back. To say, who’s the God who invites us in? Now let’s draw down into the text and tell us how we should approach this God.
How we should approach Him. Well, the persistent widow we have here. We are told we should pray like her.
Because she banged and banged and banged on the door until she got what she needed. It says there. And Jesus is telling us that prayer could be prevailing, wrestling, perseverance, seeking God.
And prayer is personal. We live in an impersonal world. We’ve shifted our purchasing from the high street.
When you go in and you buy your stuff from someone you know over a counter. To clicking an anonymous machine on a screen. But prayer is not like that.
We don’t click our orders into God anonymously and then wait for the delivery. We need to engage with the Lord face to face. To seek His face.
It’s more like mining your own gold. And then in the other text did you see that with a midnight friend. He was told that he’s going to get what he needed.
The bread in this case. Because of his shameless audacity. Did you spot those words in the text? Shameless audacity.
I love those words. I tell you, even though He will not get up and give you the bread because of your friendship. Yet because of your shameless audacity.
He will surely give you as much as you need. So the Lord Jesus is commending us to come before the Father with shameless audacity. How should we pray? Cringing and scared? No.
Vague and nonchalant? No. Formal and ritualistic? No. With some vague woolly spirituality? No.
Undemanding and distant? No. We should come before the throne of God Himself with shameless audacity. Lord, help me to pray.
Lord, it’s a struggle this morning. Send your spirit and help me to pray. I need your help.
And keep going. Jesus encourages us to be a bit of shameless audacity. I wonder if we’re just sometimes a little bit too polite in the wrong way, if you know what I mean.
Holding God in massive respect obviously. But Jesus says, press in. Lord, send revival.
Lord, come back soon. Lord, save my friend. Pray and don’t give up.
And there’s that beautiful picture you have towards the end of the Bible. A prayer being pictured as incense drifting up from the people of God before His throne as a fragrant offering. Now, I know literal incense isn’t a very Greenview thing.
I’m not suggesting literal incense. What I’m talking about is that beautiful picture you have of those prayers rising up from God’s people into His very presence. God’s house must be a house of prayer in which we persistently and consistently press into God for what we need.
And of course, you know when Jesus went into the temple and it wasn’t a house of prayer, He tipped the tables over. He said, no, this is a house of prayer. Well, you and I, we should be part of a house of prayer.
Now, obviously in the old covenant, the one place where heaven touched earth was in the Holy of Holies, in the temple. And that’s all gone because the true temple is the Lord Jesus Christ where heaven touches earth, where deity meets humanity. The one meeting point when it all comes together is in Christ Himself.
And Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to be a house of prayer, my friends.
And I just wonder when I look at my own life, if Jesus wants to come in and tip over a few tables and say, priorities, Gavin. What are your priorities? Is spending time with me your priority? I think Jesus wants to turn over some tables in my heart. I wonder if that’s the same for you.
Maybe your church, and I have shamelessly audaciously nicked your church logo and put it on the screen there, just to ask you, is your church a house of prayer? Or does the Lord want to come in and turn over a few tables like He needs to do in my life as well? Jesus says, don’t hold back. It’s prayer before the living God, to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit that shakes the earth, that has ushered in every revival in the history of the church since Acts 2 to the present day. It’s prayer that makes demons tremble, that makes devils flee.
It’s prayer in which salvation breaks out and church grows, the kingdom comes. It’s prayer during which people will see the glory and indeed the beauty of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let me tell you about two people I know who model this wonderful, shameless audacity.
There was one man in the church where I grew up whose son was a bit of a prodigal and he’d gone astray. And this man, prayer meeting after prayer meeting, would start to pray for his son. And people would tut and roll their eyes and say, oh, there he goes again.
But do you know what? He was in tune with our text this morning. He was banging on the door saying, Lord, give me what I need, save my son. And he did not stop praying for his son for the whole of his life.
Shamelessly audacious, like our text. Persistent banging on the door, like our text. Wonderful.
And there’s a man in my church in Perth who lives in a village way outside Perth where there’s no gospel church. And you don’t need to prod him for more than about 10 seconds before he’s pleading for a gospel church in his town. And again, some people will tut and roll their eyes, but I love his shameless audacity.
Lord, bring a gospel church to my village. Lord, raise up a work in my village. Show the people in my village your church, your people, your truth, your gospel, your son.
And you can’t stop him when he wants to pray because the Lord has put this kind of thing on his heart. Because if we read that parable on its own, it sounds a bit like hard work. Which is why we drew back to say, have you seen the glory of God? Have you glimpsed him? Have you seen his majesty? Have you stood before the empty tomb where Christ walked out and conquered death itself? Do you know he’s coming back to put this rotten world right? Who would not want to be in the presence of a God like that? Who would not want to share his gospel with a broken world for which there is no other hope, no plan B, no second route? It’s Christ or nothing.
It’s Christ or loss. It’s heaven or hell. It’s glory or loss.
Would you not talk about a world like that? We need to bring this world before a God like that because he is the only hope for this city, this town, this country, this world. Christ alone is the hope for this world. Let’s approach him in his glory and his beauty and his majesty.
And how about a bit of that shameless audacity that we’ve been talking about? I want to maybe suggest four things that we can pray about this morning as we go forward in persistence and shameless audacity. The first is our country. And so as we cover the length and breadth of the country, it’s really interesting in the moment we are at at the moment with the loss of new atheism and people all over the place on a deep search for truth and meaning and hope.
And we know that they will try every false alley and Christ is the only answer. We need to be praying for our country at the moment. Somebody said that our country was drowning in new atheism and they’re all starting to come up for air.
Whose hands are out to lift them and show them Christ? Well, we need to be praying for our country at this particular moment. And I know that all the Quiet Revival stuff has had a big sort of big discussion about stats and data sets and all the rest of it. But as we travel up and down the country, we find people who are deeply ignorant of what the Bible says and deeply hungry for answers.
At a postgraduate seminar recently, our director, Andy Bannister, was chatting to some postgrad students. And one of them turned to him and said, you Christians read the Bible, don’t you? And he said, yes, we do. And he was starting to rehearse all his different apologetic answers for different objections to Scripture.
And then he waited for the question, you Christians read the Bible, what is it? A postgrad student, literally the question was, what is it? So we are currently painting on a canvas of almost total ignorance, but yet openness to discuss Jesus like we’ve never had before. Now is the time to intercede for our country. God could do remarkable things.
God can do remarkable things. And he needs people here who are going to step up with some persistence and some shameless audacity to intercede for our country because nobody else can. Why? Nobody comes to the Father except through me, Christ says.
That means the only people in our country who can intercede for it are those with unfettered access to the throne room of God. That’s the church. That’s the body of Christ.
Now is the moment to pray, I think, for our country. And what about our rulers? The king who is wanting to water down the covenants he made before God in his coronation this week to defend all faiths with some pernicious legislation coming down the road in the coming parliaments. Pray for rulers.
Pray for leaders. They are lost. And our country is like sheep without a shepherd with some very dangerous legislation being planned.
Only the church can stand in the gap and pray for our nation. I just finished reading Jeremiah last night where God judges not just his own people but all the different nations of the earth in the last five or six chapters there. I need to pray that God will have mercy on our nation.
God will respond to wickedness. And as you look even at the history of our country, it will either be in judgement or with a blessed revival when he turns vast numbers of people back to himself. We need to step into that moment.
And be people who pray for our country. I was at a wedding on Friday. And I saw two very typical things.
One was the groom, a new Christian. Very happy to talk about his faith in front of all his non-Christian friends. A young lad who has come to Christ in the last few years.
And then someone sitting next to my wife who has walked away from the Christian faith when she was in her twenties. And that’s very typical around the country. Many, many young people coming into the church.
But isn’t there a whole generation of prodigals out there? People who have heard something of the gospel but have walked away. People who know something of who God is and have rejected him. People who are in the far country, in the pigsty, whose lives are falling to bits.
They don’t know where they are. They don’t know where they’re going. They’re without God and without hope in the world.
And what’s Jesus’ attitude? Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the shepherds. How I long to gather you under my wings. But you weren’t willing.
Oh, isn’t it the moment for us to pray? Not just thanking God for the new Christians who are coming into our churches. In Perth, we don’t know where to put them. We haven’t moved them out of the room because there are so many young people coming to Christ and being baptised.
Glory to God! But what about the generation before? That prodigal generation, those many decades of church decline and growth. You know, loss of growth, church decline, people who have walked away. Will you step up this week? You have a prayer meeting this week.
I love the thing on your slide, by the way. It said, the gospel is the only answer. This week is our prayer meeting.
I mean, perfect. But will you pray for that lost generation? And then finally, what about your city? I hope you like that photo I got, which symbolised Glasgow. I thought that was magnificent.
And which Scotland has taken around the world in the last few weeks as well. The traffic going on their head. But what about the state of your city? And if your city is to be one back for Christ, it will happen as missionaries and evangelists and pastors go around and share the gospel.
But the sea change will happen here in the prayer meetings. You know, the Hebridean revival didn’t break out in Lewis when the evangelists went out. It broke out in the prayer meetings.
It broke out when people prayed relentlessly, month after year after year, until God came down. You know, oh, that you would render heavens and come down, Isaiah says. Shouldn’t that be our prayer, not just for our country, but also for your city as well? Persistence and shameless audacity.
My pastor in Perth is Brazilian, and he’s got a very interesting story. He was kind of converted in the major revivals that took place in Brazil, a lot of it amongst the Pentecostal churches, and he was converted out of folk Catholicism. And when he came to Scotland, one of the local ministers in one of the established churches said to him, our policy here is managed decline.
And his eyes nearly burst out of his head. He said, never heard anything so outrageous in all my life. The book of Acts, managed decline? Are you kidding me? No, we will call a prayer meeting.
We will pray and fast until we see normality restored. What’s normality? I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. That’s reality.
That’s the truth of Scripture. That’s what he’d experienced in Brazil. That’s what he’d read in the Scripture.
So he calls us to pray. And what happened? Well, it wasn’t revival, but ones and twos started to come to Christ. We saw a sea change in what was going on, because he called us to prayer like we’d never done before.
Let’s just backtrack one. Lack of prayer. That is the biggest delusion of adequacy.
If you don’t pray, you think you’re adequate. Well, forget that. You realise how out of your depth you are.
Just cast yourself on the mercy of God. And this is the God to whom we cast ourselves. God the Father, the living God, the God of all glory, who stands above it all, and will judge the living and the dead.
It’s the living God who allows us to come to him through Christ. Everything that we need provided for on the cross that we’re about to celebrate in communion. Christ shed his blood for us so that we could come to God.
All our sins removed, and the inexhaustible riches of Christ given to us. It’s all here in bread and wine, pictured for us. We come to God, the Father through the Son, and he’s here by his spirit amongst us.
He makes it real, he makes it live. Not just in our minds as good doctrine, but he sets our hearts on fire. He gives us that sense that he’s here with us.
His spirit testifies to our spirit that we are the sons of God, it says in Romans. You get that sense of God throwing his arms around us and saying, You’re my people. And what a privilege it is for us to come to God.
And we have access. Let’s not squander that access. But let’s be people of prayer.
Because no one else can. It really is up to the people of God. Amen.
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