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Prayer

From the Series: Ritual
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: November 29, 2009

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Transcript

NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH

November 29, 2009

Rituals: Prayer

Mark Batterson

This weekend, we continue our ‘Ritual’ series. Welcome! A lot of our congregation goes to the four corners of the earth to visit family because hardly anybody is from DC! We know there are some who come to visit here so thank you! If you are family, friends, hanging out here, thanks and welcome.

What an awesome series! This weekend, we wrap up our ‘Ritual’ series. We’ve talked about everything from Sabbath to tithing to communion to confession, baptism, altars. The whole point of the series has been this, let’s not forget why we do what we do. It is easy for sacred rituals to become empty rituals. So what we’ve tried to do is talk about why we practice some of these things. Can I just say as we close out this series what a joy it has been to see so many of you put this into practice immediately? I think by the time we are done, we’ve talked about seven rituals, and it’s tough to put seven things into practice, but so many of you have put boundaries in place to begin practicing a Sabbath more conscientiously. So many have started to tithe and give God that first ten percent. A lot of NCCers got baptized a couple of weeks ago, and this week, I think some of you have made some altars. We’ve celebrated Thanksgiving and this weekend we wrap it up talking about the ancient ritual of prayer.

If you have a Bible, turn to Philippians 4. We could go to a lot of different places, there are a lot of different Scriptures for prayer, the Lord’s prayer; and there are different origins of prayers in the Old Testament, amazing prayers, but this one is one of my favorites so we are going to use it as our springboard. Philippians 4:4

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I love this! This may rank as one of my favorite in the Bible. What makes it so amazing in part is where Paul writes this letter from. Ya know, it is easy to say rejoice, but Paul is writing from prison in the 1^st Century. This is not where you want to be. Circumstantially, there is not a lot for Paul to rejoice about.

Laura and I a couple of years ago, visited Rome for an anniversary trip and we visited the prison where Paul was reported to be in prison. I don’t know if it was hot season or cold season, but there wasn’t any AC or any heat, it was a dark cellar, and that’s with them making it nice for tourists to visit. This was not the place that you want to be, so it just adds weight to his words, the fact that he is writing from such difficult circumstances. I think what it reminds us of is this, how you feel is really not a function of your external reality. How you feel is an extension of your internal reality.

A couple of years ago, I read a study, Northwestern University Psychologist, Vicki Medveck [?] did a study of Olympic medallists and she discovered that bronze medallists were quantifiable happier than silver medallists. That doesn’t make sense because in every instance, the silver medallists beat the bronze medallists, they ought to be happier than the person they beat. What they found is that it really was a function of focus. See, the silver medallists tend to focus on the fact that they could have won gold, so focusing on what they could have done produced discouragement or dissatisfaction. The bronze medallists, on the other hand, focused on the fact that they came this close to not winning any medal at all and it produced feelings of gratitude. Here’s the way we say it in my family, we have a core value. I repeat this to our kids more than any other value we have – your focus determines your reality. Your focus determines your reality. I mean, verse 8

Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

If you think about things that are pure, you are going to move toward purity. If you think about things that are good, you are going to move toward goodness. If you think about things that are just, you are going to move toward justice because your focus is going to begin to determine your reality. When Paul said to rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice, in other words, let’s make sure we are focused on the right things. So that is really what Philippians 4 is about. I think prayer then becomes the vehicle to get there. It’s not the only way, worship totally changes your perspective too doesn’t it? When you begin to worship, you being to interrupt your focus on yourself and your problems and what’s wrong with you, and you remind yourself of who God is and his love and his mercy and his grace and it begins to change your focus and your perspective. But I think prayer is a powerful mechanism. In fact, jot this down, in the context of this chapter, it sure seems like prayer is about emotional management. We have all these ranges in motion that we feel and prayer is a way we can manage those; it’s a way we rejoice. We produce those feelings of gratitude when we pray, but let’s go into this next verse. Verse 6

Do not be anxious about anything,

Talking about this emotion of anxiety, which really is uncertainty about something in our future or something we can’t control, it’s a form of fear, something we are worried about it because we can’t control it.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Easier said than done, right? Don’t be anxious about anything? But in everything by prayer and petition? Those are big words, anything and everything. I want to suggest that anxiety is really a gift from the Lord. For example, none of us like to feel pain. Pain is not fun. I played in our Turkey Bowl on Friday, I felt some pain in my left calf as I was defending. I came up lame, hobbling. Is there a person that likes pain? But thank God for pain! If you didn’t feel any pain, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. So pain is a tremendous gift because it forces you to take care of those things you need to take care of. Anxiety is a form of emotional pain. There is something that is unresolved, something that needs to be put in the Lord’s hands through prayer. Same with guilt, thank God for guilt because it forces us to confess and repent and get right with God. What I want to say is that he more anxiety you experience, I think the more potential you have for prayer IF you channel those feelings of anxiety into prayer. What happens for many of us is we just accumulate feelings of anxiety, we accumulate and accumulate until our spirit is so cluttered with things that we are anxious about, that we don’t have any clarity in our lives, prayer is then the way we process those emotions and get in the place where we put it in the Lord’s hands.

I Peter 5:7, jot that down, Cast your cares upon Me, for I care for you. That’s another way of saying, and I like the image here, growing up, our family would go fishing. I was born in Minneapolis, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, I think there are actually more than that, so if you don’t have a fishing rod, something’s wrong with you. So we’d go fishing, but I wasn’t much of a fisherman, to be honest. We’d go onto vacation every year, and I turned everything into a contest, so we’d have a fishing contest, and I never won! I didn’t have the patience, I never really cultivates the skill, specifically the casting skill. I don’t even know what the call this stuff, the rod the reel and then this thing on the back, what is that thing? When you are casting your bait, you take your rod, and hold it back like this and hold in that thing, and at the right time, you’ve got to release this thing and it will release your line and your bait will be cast out there, but if you don’t release the thing, at this point right here, the hook will go out and then circle back. What I’m trying to say is, I think I caught my dad and my brother more times than I caught fish! I was not good at it, I didn’t get it. I wonder if that’s how a lot of us pray? Cast your cares up on Me, then we hook ourselves because we can’t release it. We are control freaks. We want to solve the problems ourselves. Prayer takes trust. When you cast your cares upon the Lord, you are telling Him that you trust Him. If you cast it, what happens is that anxiety is replaced, and we’ll get there by this peace that passes understanding. It will be a peace that you can’t even explain, but somehow the anxiety in your heart is replace by this peace in the midst of circumstances that have not changed. You begin to experience the peace of God.

I think that none of us like to be in that place where we are experiencing anxiety, but here’s what I’ve learned; several years ago as we were getting ready to launch our fourth location, we really felt specifically like the Lord told us to go to Georgetown. We felt like Georgetown was where God wanted us to launch the next location. I remember it distinctly. What I remember is that the door to the theater was closed, we couldn’t get a foot in the door. It was weird, like God saying He wanted us there, but their people were saying we can’t be there. So who are we going to listen to, God or the theater management? I remember we continued to turn that stress and anxiety and we began to pray, we did prayer walks, we prayed over that situation. By the way, so cool, it turned out that the manager of that Georgetown theater had managed the theaters at Union Station and loved us and it opened that door for us to be able to step, and God is doing some wonderful things at our Georgetown location. I look back and think it’s because we prayed through. You keep channeling that anxiety and stress into prayer.

Let me come at it from another angle. Some of you are in circumstances that you don’t want to be in right now. What I want to suggest is that maybe you are in those circumstances because God wants you to pray through those circumstances. Parker is our oldest child, and here’s how I think. Parker is our oldest child and when he was a baby, we didn’t know what it was like to have a baby. I figured it would be challenging, the crying and changing diapers and things like that, but we weren’t prepared for colic. If you’ve had a child with colic, it’s like a medical mystery. The bottom line with colic is that for six or eight months, almost every waking moment he spent crying. When our other two kids came along, easy! We got the hard one out of the way first. We finally figured out that running bath water was the only thing that would calm him, maybe that’s what you needed to get out of this message. But I look back and I’m so grateful, because that kid got prayed for. At 2:00 a.m. it is either scream or pray. There were moments when the frustration got the better of me, in the flesh, I couldn’t do it, but in the Spirit, I had a tremendous sense of destiny, for all my kids. Parker had colic and he got prayed for a little bit more that first year of life. So maybe the things that are producing the anger or the frustration or the anxiety, channel those things into a stronger prayer life. That’s what we need to do.

Let’s keep going. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. This is interesting to me, just on a theological level, God already knows what we want and need. He knows what our requests are, before a word is even on our tongue, He knows what you are going to say. He knows what you are going to feel before you feel it. So what’s the point? Why present our requests to the Lord. I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them, on a human plane, when I was in graduate school, I minored in counseling psychology. Let me say up front, if you’re thinking you need to set up counseling with Pastor Mark, you really don’t want to do that, because if you come to me for counseling, you are going to need more counseling to undo what I did. I did the program and I wanted to come out of that and sit in a counseling session and be the oracle of wisdom and be able to solve everybody’s problems; that I would sit there and listen for 50 minutes and come up with a profound one-liner that would change people’s lives forever. But what I’ve learned is that I very rarely have the capacity to say anything even remotely profound. It was more like, wow, you’ve messed up! Good luck with that! It wasn’t really my thing, I wasn’t really good at it. And that makes me so grateful for the people who are really gifted. There is a point here, what I found is that it wasn’t about saying something profound, it was about profoundly listening, listening in a profound way, showing that I really wanted to hear what they had to say. What I found is that the less I talked, the better off the whole thing went, because it is the talking cure. It really is about people talking about what they’re feeling. They need to talk out some of what they are feeling. I think it can be therapeutic. Sometimes it’s just speaking that thing.

Gaston Bachelard [?] asked a profound question: what is the source of our first suffering? I haven’t really fully thought through this but I think it is a very interesting answer that he gives. “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak, it was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.” I don’t know, I think that’s something you have to think about. I think there is some truth to that, and I think prayer is the talking cure. God already knows what you want and need. It is important for us to be able to process and verbalize what it is we want and need and desire from the Lord. I think most of us have no idea what we want. We don’t have much of a prayer life because we have no idea what to petition the Lord for. But once upon a time, we could do this. The reason I know that is because Christmas is around the corner. This week, two Christmas lists magically appeared. Parker and Josiah, with the most detailed list. I was so impressed, what a list! I’m not getting them all that stuff but it was so detailed, they know exactly what they want. The word ‘requests’ is a very specific word.

A few years ago, I read something: don’t pray vague prayers. I always held on to that, because I think vague prayers are cop-outs. When you pray a vague prayer, you can’t really tell if God answered it or not. Sometimes we don’t have enough faith to be specific for the things God has put in our hearts. Like, what if He doesn’t answer it, it might shake my faith, so we just play this conservative and pray vague prayers that are meaningless. I’m not saying that you always know what to pray for, but when God puts something in your heart, here’s the great irony about prayer, I think prayer starts when we ask the Lord what He wants us to pray for, first of all. What are the petitions and the requests? This is not about a genie in a bottle. This is not about putting our selfish desires out there for God to fulfill every whim and wish that we have. In fact, the truth is, our prayer life has very little to do with our circumstances and far more to do with our character. It is not about where we are at or what we are doing, but who are we becoming? Prayer is the means whereby we become that person that God wants us to be because He begins to help us get perspective on ourselves as we begin to pray. So here’s a thought, maybe one practical implementation, I think it would be so cool if a lot of NCCers started a prayer journal. I brought one. I haven’t always done this, but when I’ve done it, it has been awesome. This is one from two years ago. This week as I went through here, wow! One of the things in here was simply, ‘God, give us a footprint in Georgetown.’ And it was so cool to see that prayer on paper as a mile-marker, because most of us, by the time God answers our prayer, we have forgotten that we even ask Him for it. So we fail to give Him the credit that He deserves. So maybe get a prayer journal, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. What a wonderful ritual to go at the end of the year, to have a marker for the things we are believing God for.

Verse 7: And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Everybody take a deep breath and let it out. I do this all the time, my definition of the sovereignty of God, take a deep breath and let it out. When you pray, it is a way of saying, ‘God I can’t control this. This is now out of my hands. I’m going to take my hands off of this thing and put it into your hands.’ I’m talking about everything. I’m talking about my kids. As a parent, there is a temptation to maneuver and manipulate and control, but they are not mine and I need to put them in the Lord’s hands. December 22, my next book releases in book stores. Here’s the thing, you work so hard, get up so early in the morning, writing is so hard for me, but I know I’m called to do it, so I do it, and we have a core value around here, work like it depends on you, pray like it depends on God. Here’s what I love about December 22, it is out of my hands. I can’t control it. I talked to one of our prayer team members this week who has helped me pray through this book, because there were some spots where I thought I might need to give up on it. I’m so grateful for those prayers. What I love about it is that I can’t control it, so I take a deep breath, and by prayer, I place it in the Lord’s hand. Then the peace of God begins to fill my heart. That feels pretty good.

I’ve been living this for the last month. It was about a month ago that we got the news about Union Station closing its door. I had a mixture of grief and anxiety. I tried to immediately come up with solutions, and there is still a level of anxiety but we’ve got some ideas. We are going to cast some vision in a couple of weeks. I think the Lord is opening some wonderful doors for us. I have gotten hundreds of emails and phone calls, I have a lot of pastor friends, we read blogs, things like that, and let me tell you, we are so prayed for! They ask how we are doing, and I almost feel bad saying it, but I feel great. We’re doing great! This is exciting. I have the peace that passes understanding. Don’t tell me this one little thing is outside the sovereignty of God, that God can control all else except this situation, ya know? That’s how we tend to do our lives, but God is bigger than that. So aren’t you grateful for the peace that passes understanding? Here’s the thing, most of us want the peace that passes understanding, but we want to bypass the mechanism whereby we get there. But we can’t do that, and there’s a reason why it says ‘in everything pray, petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Then the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus.’

Let me close with this. My next book, in the acknowledgement, I just felt on a whim that I should dedicate it to my grandparents. I don’t know where that came from. One day I was talking to Laura and I felt like this one needs to be dedicated to my grandparents. It says, ‘To my grandparents, Elmer and Alene [?] Johnson, your prayers outlive you.’ I felt like that was in my heart. I’ve shared this before, there have been so many moments in my life where the Holy Spirit has been the answer to my prayers of my grandparents. Prayers are being answered right now. I think we are so unaware. I think one of the most exciting things is going to be when God does a connect the dots between our prayers and the answers to those prayers that we have no earthly idea. All I know is this, our prayers outlive us. When you pray, you are putting that thing in the hands of God and you never know how or when or where and it usually isn’t how or when or where we prayed for it, but God answers those prayer.

Billy Graham said, “Heaven is full of unanswered prayers for which we have failed to ask.” I want to challenge us to be people of prayer. I don’t know where your prayer life is at, maybe survival or some of you might be thriving in prayer, but I think this is one of those ancient rituals that we need to grown into. Here’s what I want to say, because I love you and believe in you, my hunch is that there are some people right now beating yourself up because you aren’t praying as much as you know you could or should. Ok, let’s flip it around, is there anybody here who feels like they prayed too much this year? No! So I think all of us feel like we don’t measure up, but that’s not the motivation whereby to seek the Lord. We need to seek the Lord because what a wonderful privilege we have to be in conversation with the Almighty Creator of the universe who is always attuned to our prayers. Let’s pray together.

Father, thank You. You hear us right now, not just our verbal words, but there are electro-chemical-signals firing across right now and you know exactly what we are thinking. There are feelings in our hearts, some of them unprocessed, that we can’t even pin down but you hear our groaning, as the Psalmist said. Those nonverbal things that we can’t even put into words, You know those things. Lord I pray that right now You would help us to grow into our prayer potential, Lord that we would take some steps in the direction of better conversation with You. You love our voices, You long to hear our voices, even when we’ve messed up, even when it’s just because we need You, You love our voices, You want to hear our voices. Lord I pray that You would help us grow into that capacity. Lord right now for those who are anxious, situations in their lives, occupational, financial, relational, something out of their control, God I pray that they would learn to cast that care upon You, and Lord right now I pray for the peace that passes understanding to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, Amen.

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