Dr. M. Taylor Bach Psalm 148 Luke 11:5-13 Homiletics Magazine had a cute story of a little four year old boy who asked his parents if he could say the blessing before the family meal on New Year's Day. His parents thought that would be fine and instructed him to go ahead. He began thanking God for his friends  Jimmy, Bob, Dave and Mary Jane. Then he thanked God for his family, “God bless Mommy and God bless Daddy. God bless Aunt Betty. God bless Uncle Jack. God bless my cousins,” (and he named each one of them by name). Finally he got to the food. “Thank you, God, for the turkey. Thank you for the dressing. Thank you for the salad. Thank you for the dessert.” Then there was a long pause. And he looked at his mom and said, “If I thank God for the broccoli, won't he know I am lying?”

Jesus said, “Unless we become like little children, we won't enter the kingdom of heaven.” There is an innocence about little children, and authenticity about little children like this story shows. It is that innocence and it's that authenticity that apparently God wants, especially in our prayer life. What is prayer? We've talked about it often. It is conversation with God. God really prefers us to be like an open naïve trusting little child when we go to him in prayer. We are to just open our mind and heart to him, and pour out our concerns. He already knows them but apparently it is for our value to say them to Him. In this He can enable us to grow and thrive. He wants us to pray for others so that others also grow and thrive or their problems are dealt with. This seems definitely to be the will of God. Jesus constantly prayed. In fact, His Father was always on His mind. When He fed the 5000, before He blessed the bread and the fishes, He prayed, and then was enabled to feed the 5000. At the Last Supper, the Apostle John records magnificent prayers of Jesus for His immediate disciples and then for the whole church in general and for the unity of all followers. So clearly, it is the will of God, the will of Christ, the will of the Holy Spirit, that we learn how to pray as disciples and we learn how to pray in a very real and authentic way. The intensity and the authenticity of our prayers are what seem to count.

Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek Church which is one of the mega churches had some interesting insights into this. First of all, he did a remarkable thing this past year. He checked with his congregation to see how they were doing. His questionnaire showed that though they had brought all these people in, none of them had really embraced the Gospel; none of them had really embraced a prayer life. Some had, a few, a remnant maybe, but he was shocked to see that the authenticity and the quality of prayer life simply wasn't there. It was humbling on his part to make that public. I have to admire him for coming forth and saying, “My congregation is not yet where it ought to be in its spirituality, in its ability to pray to God.”

He gave an outline of some insights about prayer I want to share with you. The first thing he said is, “If the request is wrong, the answer to the prayer will be 'No'.” Let's think about that for a moment. Are there examples in the Bible where the request to God was wrong? I am thinking of the time when the apostles were to travel through Samaria and the Samaritans said that they had to purchase a permit to go through that land. They did not have any money. They couldn't purchase the permit and they were furious. So they turned to Jesus and said, “Well, why don't you just call down fire and burn them up.” That was inappropriate and the wrong request. Jesus said, “No. We are going to love these people. Even though the Samaritans are the avowed enemies of the Jewish nation, we are going to love them.” So here they made an inappropriate request and the answer was “No”. There was another time in the Bible  you might remember this one, too. Remember when Peter, James and John went up on the mountain of transfiguration where Jesus showed to them that He was God. He transformed Himself into His Godly vision where He became more radiant than light and whiter than snow and they saw His divinity. When that apparition was finished, they made a prayerful request. “Master, let us build a shelter here in your honor and we will live on top of this mountain with you and give honor and glory to God all the time.” Wrong request. What was Jesus' answer? “No. We've all got to go back down the mountain, go out to the people and you can share with the people who I am, that you know that I am the Messiah, that I am the Son of God. When I give you the signal, when the timing is right, you can make that known. We've got work to do at the foot of the mountain. We are not just going to stay at the top of the mountain.” So His answer was “No”.

The second thing that Bill Hybels identified is timing. Clearly an example that I just gave, the timing was wrong. The ministry of Jesus had not been completed. There was much more work to do. So sometimes when we ask for something in prayer, we don't get it because our timing is wrong. A helpful example of this may have occurred to you this Christmas if you have children or grandchildren. Did any of them come to you and say, “Mom or Dad, or Grandpa or Grandma, can I open my presents early?” Or “Can I open two of them? How about just one present early?” Sometimes kids will beg but their timing is wrong. They are not supposed to open their presents until Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. The similar thing is with God. We may ask for something and He may sincerely want us to have it and want to give it to us but the timing is off. So His answer is, “Not yet. It will happen, but not yet.” I pray for growth of this church. His answer in my first eight years has been, “Not yet.” But it seems now the answer is, “OK”. His timing is better than my timing because I would have just had the place fill up rapidly. But guess what? We wouldn't have been ready for that, would we? We wouldn't have had the structures in place. We wouldn't have had the church leaders primed for this and so God is apparently going to do it gradually. His answer to my prayer was, “Not yet.” But it is a real prayer and I think it will happen. We had some moderate growth this year for the first time in the eight years I have been here. So “not yet” but it is coming.

The next thing Bill Hybels said is that sometimes when you pray, you are wrong and when you are wrong, God says, “Grow.” When your timing is off, God says, “Go slow.” When your request is wrong, God says, “No”. But now the issue is & is there something not right in your life? Are you doing something immoral? Are you having wrong thoughts? Are you not authentic? Are you not like a little child just trusting God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind? Are you not using your mind? We are to use our mind when we pray. “Love your God with all your mind, soul, strength and heart.” So we may not have things exactly right in our lives as we are praying. Let's say that at work you are spending a whole lot of time surfing the internet and Instant Messaging friends rather than doing your work. That would be stealing time from your employer. Or let's say that you're involved on Wall Street and you have a greedy heart. I am convinced that the reason we have the economic problems that we are having right now is because of the greed of our nation. There was an interesting report on television the other day asking who the biggest oil dealer in the United States was. Instantly I thought of Exxon, or BP or CITGO. They said, “No. The biggest oil dealer is Morgan Stanley bankers.” Yes, they own the most oil facilities. They own the most storage tanks and in order to create profit for their investors, they have driven up the cost of oil on the commodities market. So our economy collapsed because of greed. When the price of oil was driven up, none of us could afford it. Businesses began to collapse and it was all because of greed. So when these persons who are in charge of those kinds of things prayed, were their prayers likely to be answered? No! Money became their idol, their God. When our heart is not right, when we are doing something evil, when there is sin in our life, then the answer also will be “No”. We are not going to have prayer answered until we grow spiritually, until we repent. What is repentance? Repentance is simply telling God, “I am sorry.” We preach repentance frequently but it doesn't have to be a complex prayer. It can be a simple prayer. As you go to bed at night, you can say, “God, I am sorry for the ways I have offended you and offended my family today, or offended my co-workers today. Will you forgive me? Will you grant me your grace? Will you allow me to try again and purify my heart? Will you give me the grace to grow so that my prayers can be answered?”

One Biblical scholar said, “How can you have certainty that you are going to heaven?” And one of his criteria for knowing that you are going to heaven with certainty is that your prayers are answered. So if you have prayers answered, you can be sure that God is listening to you. You might think as I used to think &”Why would God listen to me? He's the Lord of the cosmos.” The Psalm that Shelley read this morning, Psalm 148, is a cosmic prayer where all of creation is praising the Lord. As we think about that, doesn't it make you feel tiny? Doesn't it make you feel small? It does me. I think, how in the world could God listen to me and with 6 billion people in the world, why would He listen to my prayer? But Jesus said He even knows how many hairs you have on the top of your head. He is that interested. Then if He takes care of the birds of the air and the flowers in the garden, He's going to take care of you. I don't know how God does it. What kind of super mind God must have that He can sort out all the prayers of all the people. That has to be an incredible miracle and yet, the promise is that God can hear your prayer and can respond. You are so important to Him that He would send His Son to become a human like us so that we could know He understands every one of our needs. He became present in a human body and had the exact same needs that we have. He had crises like we have crises. He had persecution like sometimes we have persecution. He suffered. He had to forage for food as He became a roaming preacher. He experienced poverty. He said, “Foxes have holes but the Son of Man has no place to lay down His head.” So He knew our conditions so that we know that we can go to Him and He understands us. This is a mystery. How God does all of this is beyond our comprehension. It is incredible that it can even be true but it is. And that is one of the amazing promises of the Bible. God listens. He really listens and cares about our individual needs.

Every morning now since I've become so aware of the importance of prayer, I've made an effort to pray for various intentions. Right now I have thirty nine people on my prayer list. Some of them are those of you who said, “Tay, will you pray for me?” So you may be on my list. It is a good list to be on by the way. So I have individual people that I especially pray for, but then I pray for our whole membership as well. I pray for our church's growth. I pray for our church's finances. I pray for the ministries of our church. I pray for each of the leaders of our boards and committees. I do that daily. I pray that all of us will be in Christ and that we will have strength and can do things in Christ. I get more personal with my prayers. I pray for my wife and me, for the enhancement of our marriage and that I become a better husband and can be more attentive to her and her needs. I pray, too, that God will eradicate anything in my personality that might make me an unworthy leader. I pray for the leaders of our nation. I pray that the new administration coming in will be successful in dealing with the nation's crises&the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, war and all of those things, and I want to invite you to take your prayer life seriously, too, and pray for these same things. God wants that of you. He expects that of you. In I Timothy 2, Paul makes this admonition. I love the word admonition. An admonition is kind of a warning or a demand or a command, and he said, “Pray for all kings and leaders of the nation.” We don't have a king, but we have a president. Therefore, we are admonished to pray for our president. We want everyone to pray for the new president coming in and all of his cabinet and everyone that is involved in government. The word “leaders” also includes church leaders as well. We want you to pray for all church leaders. That is the word of Paul which is the inspired Word of God.

Ultimately, why do we pray? We pray because it creates a relationship with God and that is apparently what He wants. We also pray kind of selfishly because Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing.”