Prayer – JOY LIKE SWORDS

Prayer of Adoration: You Don’t Need Anything

CALL TO WORSHIP – Revelation 5:12b-13

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (ESV)

PRAYER OF ADORATION

Lord God,

To you, and you alone, we lift up our souls. Not because you need us to do so. We praise you for you need nothing.

You don’t depend on anything for your existence. You don’t need bread or water. You don’t need oxygen or an atmosphere. As creatures who are wholly dependent upon you, we marvel that you are self-existent and self-sufficient.

Father, Son & Spirit, we recognize that you don’t need us. You weren’t lonely without us. We praise you that for all eternity you have been giving yourselves to one another in perfect divine love and fellowship.

Lord God, the fact that you did not need to create us yet freely chose to do so reminds us of how bursting with love you are.

We stand in awe that you choose to delight in us and rejoice over us. We praise your great name for you have set that name upon us as your sons and daughters.

We present ourselves to you as living sacrifices. Father, we offer our words and thoughts, our actions and attitudes, our sitting and our standing, waking and sleeping to you in praise.

We worship you, Father, through Jesus Christ the Son who rules and reigns with you and the Spirit. One God. World without end, and Amen.

Corporate Prayers (8/16/2020)

PRAYER OF ADORATION

Holy Father,

We bless your name this morning for you have blessed us in Christ. In Christ we know that every spiritual blessing is ours. You are the God who forgives sin and pardons the sinner. You are the one who has removed our sin from us as far as the East is from the West.

And you are our Father—for you have adopted forgiven sinners into your family to be your daughters and sons—to be joint heirs with your only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

You have made us a chosen people—a royal priesthood, a holy nation that we might declare the praises of the one who has called us out of darkness into your marvelous light.

So, Father, inhabit the praises of your people. Help us to attend to you without distraction—and as we worship you outwardly with our mouths—give us the grace to worship you inwardly with our hearts as well.

We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit; one God, world without end.

Amen.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

1 John 3:19-20

¹⁹By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; ²⁰for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.

Father,

Today we confess the sins of our speech. Your Word tells us that our tongue—even though it is small, can cause incredible damage. Just like a spark can cause a forest fire, one word of bitterness or contempt can set our homes, our office, our world ablaze. And we know that we have all stumbled in our speech this week. None of us is perfect.

Father, we confessed that we have spoken harshly to our family when they have disrupted our comfort.

We confess that instead of building up others and giving grace to those who we’ve spoken with—far too often corrupt and destructive talk has come out of our mouths.

We confess that we haven’t been quick to listen and slow to speak. Instead, we have exalted ourselves and talked over or past others who needed to be heard.

Father, we confess our own hypocrisy. We praise you and then turn around and curse or ignore or mistreat those who are made in your image.

We also confess that we live in a nation that has normalized sinful speech. Boasting, mocking, and lies surround us all day long—so we cry out to you to convict us and heal us in Jesus name.

Along with the sin of our speech, we also confess the sin of our excuses. We’ve blamed our sinful speech on everything except our sinful desires. We’ve said the reason our speech has been so insensitive and exacting is because we’re tired, or hungry, or because we were mistreated first.

But as people of your Word we know that our mouths only speak out of the abundance of our hearts. And we know that we will give an account on the day of judgement for every word we speak. And, most importantly, as your children—we know that you have not spoken harshly to us. You have spoken words of peace and promise to us in Christ.

So, Father, help us now, to keep a short account with you. Help your church lead the way for our nation in confession and repentance. Hear us now, as we confess our individual sins to you in silence.

Pause

Father, thank you that you do not deal with us according to our transgressions—and you do not repay us according to our iniquities. Thank you for hearing our prayer and help us now to make our only boast the cross of Jesus Christ that the world and its sinful speech might be crucified in us.

In Jesus name we pray… AMEN.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

¹⁶“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

John 3:16-17

If you have placed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and look to him alone for the forgiveness of sins—then in Christ, your sins are forgiven.

This is the good news. Thanks be to God.

Getting into Narnia

“No,” he said, “I don’t think it will be any good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coats. You won’t get into Narnia again by that route… Eh? What’s that? Yes, of course you’ll get back to Narnia again some day. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.” -The Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

You must strike a difficult balance in your devotion to God. Psalm 1 tells us to meditate upon God’s Word day and night. In other words, the devotional life depends upon a routine method of experiencing God: meditation. On the other hand we know that our encounters with God never happen exactly alike.

One evening I meditate and the Spirit speaks. The next morning my heart is cold, cracked, and callused. Almost nothing has happened. I’ve only slept. How could I sense God’s love so deeply and 9 hours later feel a million miles from him?

One Sunday the prayers and songs of the church break my heart and drown my sin in grace. Next week I worship, but there’s a height or depth my heart isn’t reaching as it did before; or the effort required seems to have doubled.

You never get into Narnia the same way twice. When the Spirit of God gives you a moment of piercing clarity and assurance just be in the moment. Don’t try to remember how you got to that moment. Don’t try and replicate the moment later. It won’t work. Do your daily meditation as the Scripture commands and wait. Gather with the church to sing, pray, and wait. God’s presence, the high assurance, only comes by his grace, not our effort.

5 Scripture Passages I Wish Every Christian Knew: Romans 8:26

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. – Romans 8:26

We do not know what to pray for. We never know what to pray for. Paul tells us that the Spirit helps us, not in our weaknesses, but in our weakness, singular. We aren’t people who mostly have it together with a few weaknesses. We are weak. That is a definitive word on our current fallen condition. Part of our weakness is that we do not know what to pray for.

We do not know the will of God. We do not naturally love and desire what he loves and desires. We are weak. Our prayer is weak, small, distracted; a candle blown out by the slightest breeze. Even the deepest prayers offered by the godliest saints are weak.

But, the Spirit helps us. The Spirit knows the will of the Father. He naturally loves and desires what the Father loves and desires. He’s strong, all encompassing, a blazing fire no flood and quench. I hope you can take the same encouragement from this verse that I do.

If you want to go back and read other posts in this series just click the following links:

Galatians 3:2-7

Hosea 2:16-23

John 5:18

Equip Notes on Meditation

Last month I taught at a discipleship event on the topic of meditation. Below is a link to a PDF of my slides from the event. I admitted freely in the talk that I’m indebted to Tim Keller for his thoughts and research on the subject. Consider going to his ministry resource site, gospelinlife.com, and purchasing his series on meditation. Don’t be surprised when you hear anything that sounds familiar.

Meditation

Sensing the Scriptures

I’ve had an ongoing conversation with a handful of church members about meditation on the Scriptures. We’ve been talking about how we practice meditation, what it is, and how we can increase in the blessing it brings to us. We all agree, as do many Christians throughout history, that meditation moves from merely reasoning the words of Scriptures towards sensing the words.

Just as we have 5 physical senses, taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing that we use to live in and experience the world around us, inwardly our imaginations possess those same qualities.

If I asked you to think about your mother’s voice you can hear it. She doesn’t have to be in the room with you, but you hear her speaking. Her voices lives inside you.
Remember, when as a kid, you walked barefoot outside in the height of Summer? You’re running down the line of woods near house and the sweetness of honeysuckle washes over you. Following your nose, you locate the vine overflowing with white and butter-yellow blossoms. Carefully pulling the stem, that one drop of nectar hits your taste buds.

In meditation we imaginatively use our senses, much like we do in remembering, in order to contact with and hear the text.

In Bible study we de-contextualize and isolate texts. We dissect words, relationships, structure, and meaning. We stand over and above the text as interpreter. We bring our questions to the Bible ask it to answer us. We reason with the text. Our rational capacities engage, and the result is knowledge and understanding.

In meditation we see, taste, touch, smell, and listen to Scripture. We sense it. The Word becomes our guide as we sit under and beneath it. We don’t ask it questions, as much as it addresses us and calls us to answer. We sense the text. We descend with the mind, down into the heart. We laugh, smile, cry, gasp, and wonder. Truth becomes light. Law becomes pain. Grace issues forth into song.

Jonathan Edwards left us an example of what it means to sense the Scriptures:

I very frequently used to retire into a solitary place, on the banks of Hudson’s River, at some distance from the city, for contemplation on divine things and secret converse with God: and had many sweet hours there. I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy scriptures. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.

He’s reading the Bible, but he’s being touched, and handled. Looking at words on a page he senses his interior person pulsing with harmonic vibration in response to the Word. The words taste sweet, yet in them he also submits to a superior strength pressing against him. Every sentence deserves the attention to detail given to a mouthful of wine, wonders beyond wonders available to the patient and perceptive. Meditation is participation in the living world of the text.

Prayer and Distraction

We can’t focus.

It’s a mental quality that was lost in the last century, and it’s killing our prayer. Gavin Ortlund sympathizes with us and offers 7 pieces of advice for combating distraction in prayer. Here’s one I found helpful:

If all else fails, if distraction keeps seeping in, keep circling back to the gospel. I often find it helpful to pray with this kind of framework:

Lord Jesus, this is where I would be without you: __________.
Lord Jesus, this is where I am now with you in my life: __________.
Lord Jesus, this is what you went through to do this: __________.

If the gospel is anything, it’s inexhaustible. You can go back, and back to the well for more. This might even be a good practice to do once a week in a prayer journal. Writing it out will help you remember and reflect on it throughout your day. Read the rest of Gavin’s post at The Gospel Coalition, and post your own thoughts on combating distractions in prayer.

The Poverty of Prayer: Sermon by Dr. Richard Gaffin

^“26Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ²⁸And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

“We never know what we ought to pray for.” That’s what the text literally says. We’re ignorant. What is Paul trying to teach us here? And, what hope is there for our prayer life? Dr. Richard Gaffin from Westminster Seminary walks us through the text:

Listen to the entire sermon here.