We are in week seven of our series on the spiritual disciplines, Beholding: Disciplines for Imagers. This morning we are going to look at maybe the most common, maybe the most well-known discipline of them all: prayer. And because it is the most well-known, in some ways it is the most difficult to talk about. It is the most dangerous for us in the sense that we assume we already know what it is. And I am not sure that is the case. So I want to dive into the deep end this morning, right into one of Paul's simple little instructions about prayer. Are you ready?
16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Right. Does that sound like your prayer life? Give thanks in — what's it say? — all circumstances. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. What does that look like? What does it even mean? Is it possible? If one of the pastors came and said, "Here's what you need to do — just pray all the time," I don't even know what that means. I want to start to unpack that together this morning.
I think most of us have a complicated relationship with prayer. We believe it matters. We know we should do more of it, and we feel vaguely guilty about the gap between what we actually do and what we think we are supposed to do. My favorite quote on prayer comes from the comedian Lily Tomlin. She said, "Why is it that when we talk to God, it's called prayer, and when God talks to us, it's called schizophrenia?" We have this strange relationship with prayer culturally. People who don't truly believe in God in any way, shape, or form — something bad happens, and they throw out, "Oh, thoughts and prayers." We have now made our thoughts equivalent to prayer, and there is this whole weird thing around that. What does it mean? Oh, I'm just throwing it out into the universe, going to see what happens. But I am not sure that in the church we have a much better grasp or understanding of prayer than the surrounding culture does.
I think we have inherited a cultural model of prayer in the church that, at its core, is really difficult to distinguish from wish fulfillment. Prayer as wish fulfillment. I am not sure how much our prayer differs from rubbing a lamp to get a genie to give us what we want. We identify what we want, we bring it to God, and in the church we have to bring it with faith — sufficient faith — and then when God is suitably impressed with our faith, He'll deliver. And so if we don't receive what we asked for, we either lacked sufficient faith, or we asked for the wrong thing, or God has some mysterious plan we don't understand. We either continue on in this transactional method of prayer — and in fact that kind of transactional prayer has been fully developed into a terrible theology, the prosperity gospel, the name-it-and-claim-it approach, using the name of Jesus as some sort of magic incantation that makes God give us what we want — or we just quietly stop praying very much, because we don't want to deal with the reality of asking and not receiving. The transactional approach to prayer at its core simply doesn't work. And so what happens is we either blame ourselves — I must not have enough faith, I'm not good enough, God doesn't love me — or we blame God. You didn't give me what I wanted. You didn't show up. You didn't fulfill your end of the transaction. Either way, it's bad.
Here is the good news for you this morning. The problem doesn't lie with prayer, or with you, and it certainly doesn't lie with God. The problem is our misunderstanding of what prayer is, what prayer is for, what prayer does. And family, I want to tell you it is so much better than what we've inherited. It is so much better than a transaction, a bartering, a negotiation between us and God.
I have had a complicated relationship with prayer in my life. When I was first grabbed by Jesus — and that is the way I prefer to say it, because when I look back at it, it was way more Him than it was me — I didn't just want to be a Christian, I wanted to be a great Christian. I was all in. That's part of my personality. I went to Bible college immediately. And in my dorm, up on the third floor, was a guy who prayed every morning for three hours. And I thought, "That's what it looks like. That's what I need to do." Now, if you know me, I am not a morning person. He started at four in the morning. He invited me to come up and pray with him, so I went at four o'clock and I prayed for a good twelve minutes before I was drooling on the floor. And then I'd wake up and he'd be praying, and he'd give me a look, and there was just this weird sense of shame and guilt. Like I'm not praying right. I'm not praying enough. And it turns into: What's the right technique? What are the right words to say? What's the right posture? How long do I have to pray? All this pressure. I turned prayer into a burden, into an obligation, one that I never felt I was very good at but that I had to give a go at anyway. I don't think I'm alone in that.
My guess is that many in this room have a frustrating relationship with prayer. My hope is that we can get a proper understanding of prayer together this morning that would set us free from seeing prayer as a burden and help us recognize it as the true blessing, the true gift of God that it is. God doesn't ask us to pray because He gets something out of it. He calls us to pray because He loves us and He knows that we need it. And that changes everything.
I have been trying to root and ground all of these disciplines in creation, because that is how I see and think about them. These are God's gifts to us to enter into the new creation that Jesus has made available. So when we think about the creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, Genesis 1 is a landmine of a text, right? People fight over it. We have major battles between people, churches, and theologies about what this text is doing and what it is saying. For me — and it is something I have said over and over again for the last several years — the Bible is written for us certainly, but it is not written to us. So if we try to read Genesis 1 in our cultural context, in the genre of history or science or narrative, and try to make it tell us something it may not be trying to tell us, it gets confusing. When we read Genesis 1 in the ancient Near Eastern context in which it was written, it is actually very simple and clear what it is doing. The story of Genesis 1, laying out creation, is a temple-building narrative, following the pattern of all sorts of other ancient Near Eastern cultural narratives. So what is being communicated in Genesis 1 is that God is creating the heavens and the earth to be His dwelling place.
We live in this cultural dichotomy where we think heaven is where God is and earth is where people are, and we have somehow turned the gospel into an escape from the earth — believe in Jesus, and after you die you float off to some place called heaven and be with God there. But the story of the Bible is actually the opposite. God has made all of it for Himself, and God's purpose is to dwell in the heavens and the earth. The end of the story of scripture is not us escaping the earth to go to heaven. The end of the story, if you actually read it, is the heavens once again being reunited to the earth as they were always intended — God coming to take up residence in the midst of His creation, with His creation. That is the story. And that is the story of Genesis 1.
When we look at Genesis 1 going into Genesis 2 through that lens, I think it makes really good sense of a part of the story that confuses a lot of people — the end of the story, day seven. It is in Genesis 2:1-3.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
I think most of us read this as something like this: for the first six days God was really busy making and creating and speaking and causing things to happen, and on the seventh day He needed a nap. Now, I am pro-nap. Jesus took naps — it's in the Bible, I've read it. But this idea that what's happening on the seventh day is a kind of letdown — you have creation and creation and creation, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's very good, and then we get to day seven, which is the ultimate climax, and it's like, "Oh, God just came and rested." That is not what the text is telling us. In the ancient Near East, in the temple narratives, the seventh day is the climax. It is the day, after all of the work of creating and building and structuring the temple has been completed, that the deity comes and inhabits the temple. When the text says that God rested, it is telling us that God comes and inhabits His creation. He comes to dwell with His people. The resting was the dwelling. It is the final completing act of the temple's creation.
So what Genesis is telling us in the first two chapters is that the heavens and the earth were created to be God's dwelling place, and on day seven, God moved in. Let me say it this way: on day seven, God moves in and establishes His kingdom. Kingdom is one of those churchy words we talk about a lot, but very often we don't stop to think about what it actually means. I like Dallas Willard's definition: a kingdom is the range of one's effective will. Simply put, a kingdom is where what the king wants happens. So in Genesis 1, as God creates the heavens and the earth — all that is — and He moves in and dwells in it and inhabits it with His people, God's kingdom is the reality where God's will is done. And in Genesis 1 and 2, that is everywhere.
So what Genesis 1 and 2 is laying out for us is that at the beginning, at creation, how many kingdoms were there? One kingdom. Whose will was done? God's will was done. That is what God's kingdom is — the place where God's will is done. At the end of the creation narrative in Genesis 2, God has moved in, His kingdom is established. There is one creation, one kingdom, one will governing everything. God's imagers are made to participate with Him in that kingdom. Adam is not given his own little kingdom. Eve is not given her own little kingdom. They have will, but their wills perfectly align and integrate into God's kingdom.
What Genesis is saying is: this is what we were made for. We were made to exist in communion with God. The picture of Adam and Eve dwelling in the garden, in the temple, in God's presence, walking with Him in the cool of the day, conversationally, enjoying His presence, and then participating in the work — naming the animals, serving, tending the trees and the garden, doing God's work in God's kingdom — that is what we were made for. We were designed by God to function within His kingdom, within His will.
Which makes what happens in Genesis 3 all the more terrible. The fall is a choice not to align the will to God's will. God says, "Don't eat it." The snake says, "You should eat it." The woman looks and thinks, "That looks good, and it will get me something God isn't giving me." So she takes it, and mute Adam standing right next to her takes some as well. And what we have is essentially the shattering of the single kingdom. No longer is there one kingdom. Now you have God in His creation, which was designed to align with His will, but Adam and Eve have said, "We don't really want to be part of that kingdom. We'll make our own." And the rest of the story of the Bible — and it is the story and narrative of our lives — is the story of kingdom conflict.
How many times do you think to yourself, "Why don't people just do what I want them to do?" I say it out loud all the time. The world would be so much better if everybody just did what I think they should do. This is the fundamental challenge. This is the fundamental sin of Genesis 3. God, I don't want to align to Your will. I've got a will that's going to get me where I want to go better than where You're going to get me. So we start with creation as a single unified kingdom where God's will is done, and the fall is the shattering of that — the creation of these little mini-kingdoms that you and I live in and try to control every single day.
Adam and Eve, who had enjoyed continuous communion with God in His kingdom, when they chose to live in their own kingdom, were removed from God's kingdom. Cast out of the garden, the path blocked by a terrifying angelic guardian — all of that happens. There is this separation. God allows them to exercise their will and go in a different direction. But they don't get to choose the consequences. You want to live in your own kingdom? Have at it. Oh, but there are also going to be some challenges along the way — the earth is going to be really difficult to work with, there will be power struggles, and by the way, there is going to be a spiritual conflict between the serpent and you. Have at it.
So let me say it this way this morning and frame it to bring us back to the context of prayer. We were not made to visit God. We were made to dwell with Him, to work with Him in His kingdom. I want you to grab onto that with everything you have, because it changes and shapes the way we think about prayer and the way we think about our relationship with God. Because we live in a world that is structured and divided. I've got my work life. I've got my playtime. I've got my obligations here. I've got to go to church on Sunday. We separate everything into categories. And even when we say we're going to put God first among those categories, we're still missing the boat. God is not something we are meant to come and visit for an hour on Sunday morning, or for a little prayer time in the morning. Whether you recognize it clearly or not, your soul actually hungers constantly for the presence of God — nonstop, in your DNA. The problem is we try to fill that hunger with all sorts of other things that, if we are honest, satisfy us for a brief moment but leave us feeling worse afterward, because nothing compares to being who we are truly meant to be: people who enjoy the presence of God, who abide with Him, who dwell with Him, who work with Him in His kingdom. It is what we were made for.
So prayer — I want to suggest this morning that prayer is the discipline that allows us to reenter the communion we were created for. It is the relational reality of Beholding God, not as a transaction to get something from Him, but as a tool to get Him — to experience Him, to encounter Him. It is what we were made for. It is hardwired into our purpose.
Prayer is the most relational of all the disciplines. It is not a transaction we use to get something from God. Prayer is the tool God has given us to get God Himself — to experience Him, to encounter Him, to know Him and be known by Him. So let me frame it this way: prayer is the gift of God by which we bring our kingdom — the one we fight so ferociously to preserve and protect, the desire we have to control and dictate how things go and what is good and what is right — prayer is the gift God has given us to take these little kingdoms we have been selfishly building for ourselves and integrate them back into God's kingdom. We take the reins of our effective will and we submit them to the range of God's effective will. That is what prayer is. And it allows us to experience that for which we were made.
So with all of that in mind, I want to go back to a text we have looked at twice in the last few weeks, Matthew chapter 6. We looked at this text in the sermons on fasting and on generosity. In Matthew 6, Jesus lays out teaching on three disciplines: fasting, prayer, and giving. Before we go there, I want to say this. The Sermon on the Mount is, well, a sermon. We tend not to read it that way. We tend to read it as a collection of sayings — oh, this is Jesus' teaching on murder, this is Jesus' teaching on lust, this is Jesus' teaching on anxiety. But this is not some random collection. When you actually look at it as a whole, there is a theme, there is a building, there is a reasoning to it. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is teaching about life in the kingdom of God. That is what the Sermon on the Mount is about. So with that in mind, let us listen to what Jesus says about prayer. And again, before we go there — you all know this. Even if you have never been to church before, you probably know these words, the Lord's Prayer. And again, the more we think we know something, the more dangerous it is that we are actually assuming we know it. So try to hear Jesus' teaching on prayer like you have never heard it before. Listen to it within the framework of the kingdom.
9 Pray then like this: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
First, notice again that prayer is assumed, just like the other disciplines in Matthew 6. When you fast, when you give, when you pray. "Pray then like this" — He doesn't say, "Pray this." I am not saying it is wrong to pray the Lord's Prayer word for word, but that is not really what Jesus is doing here. He is giving us a template for understanding how prayer functions. And we have this incredible propensity to turn anything into an idol, right? We will take the Lord's Prayer and just fire it off whenever we are in trouble or when something hurts or something bad happens. Like, "God, look, I said the Lord's Prayer." Jesus is not giving us a magic set of words where, if you say them in the right way, the gates of heaven open up. He says, "Pray like this." He establishes a pattern.
"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name." When we read the word "heaven" here, we think geography, we think distance. We think heaven is a place somewhere far away. But the Jewish conception of the heavens was not that. The hearers of Jesus as He said this — "Our Father in the heavens" — were not hearing "God who is distant." I love Dallas Willard's translation of this: "Our Father ever near us." God dwells in the heavens, which is a different type of reality than the earth, but it is not distant — it is different. So the fact that God is in the heavens does not mean He is far away. When we talk to God, we are not trying to get His attention across some vast distance. It is: God, You are right here with me, though You are in the heavens. May Your name be hallowed. In the Jewish conception, the name of someone represents their worth, their value, their honor, their reputation. So what Jesus is saying is that when we come to God in prayer, we need to recognize that God is with us — He is right here — and there is nowhere we can go that God is not with us. And we need to enter into prayer with the realization that God is God and we are not, of the incredible distinction between the Creator and the created.
And then we get to this line that frames everything so differently: "Your kingdom come, Your will be done, here on the earth as it is where You are." We have already established that our Father is in the heavens. May Your name be respected. May Your kingdom come, Your will be done right here where I am, just like it is right where You are. This is a prayer for the reintegration of the heavens and the earth. Jesus is saying: when you pray, you come to God and ask to enter into His kingdom, to enter into His will, so that the way we are living our life here and now begins to resemble what we were ultimately created for, and what existed in the beginning — one kingdom, one will, one life integrated.
This is not a prayer asking God's kingdom to start. "Your kingdom come" — as in, let's get this going, God. God's kingdom is from everlasting to everlasting. The reality is we have rejected God's kingdom in favor of going our own way. What Jesus is offering is the opportunity to reenter, to reintegrate, to resume our position, our identity, and our role as God's imagers in His kingdom. This is the exact opposite of how most people see prayer. We tend to think prayer is getting God to do what we want. Jesus says prayer is how God helps us to do what He wants. That is a world of difference.
"Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." As I read this and think about it in the context of Genesis 1 and 2, the creation, God's kingdom, and what happened at the fall, I cannot miss the connections. Jesus is saying: when you pray, understand that true provision comes from the hand of God. True completeness, true rightness, true forgiveness — which we all know we need — comes only from the hand of God. Jesus teaches us to pray because the battle we find ourselves in is not just with ourselves. There is an enemy, and there is evil, and it is real, and it exists, and it seeks to devour us, and we cannot protect ourselves from it, but He can. This prayer is functionally: Jesus, take me back to Eden. Bring me into Your kingdom. Let my experience of life and reality be what it was always created to be, within the bounds of Your will and the reality of Your kingdom.
And all of this is in the framework of Matthew 6, where Jesus says: don't do these things as a performance. You don't fast, you don't pray, you don't give for the approval of people. And you don't do it for the approval of God, either. It is not transactional. God doesn't owe you something because you fast or pray. A transaction requires two legitimate parties — two legitimate kingdoms. We are here living in our little kingdom, God is there in His kingdom, and we come and say, "Hey God, I'll do this if You do that. If You make my kingdom go a little bit better, I'll spend a little time in Your kingdom. I'll do a little of Your will if You help me out with mine." The reality of that is so ludicrous when we break it down. God in no way, shape, or form is going to entertain building up your kingdom. That is the problem. Your kingdom is the very problem Jesus came to rectify. It is not transactional. It is a beautiful gift and invitation.
This is why, when you read through the Gospels, the common refrain of the ministry and teaching of Jesus is simple and consistent across all four. After John was arrested:
14b Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."
Now, if you spend enough time in American Evangelicalism, we would expect this verse to say something like: Jesus went around announcing that if we pray and confess our sins, He will forgive us, and after we die we don't have to go to hell, we get to go to heaven. But, funny enough, Jesus didn't go around saying that. So maybe we should pay attention to what Jesus actually said. What Jesus actually said, going around declaring, is: "Hey, God's kingdom is once again open to you as an option. It is at hand." Why is it at hand? Because the King is here. The kingdom is where what the King wants happens. Because the King has now come to take up His role and reintegrate and reestablish the kingdom of God for everyone everywhere, the kingdom is available. So Jesus goes around saying, "How are you doing living in your own little kingdom? Not working out? Would you like to come home? Would you like to be who you were made to be?" And He says, "The kingdom of God is at hand, so repent." Turn around. Go a different direction. Change your mind. Stop exerting your will and return to the will of the One who made you for Himself. Repent and believe in the gospel. Jesus' offer was the kingdom. Come back into the will of God. Come back into the kingdom of God. Come back into living your life here and now where what God wants is what you want. This is why Jesus declares in Matthew 6:
33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
We keep trying to fix our lives, tweak a little bit here, tweak a little bit there. It is like modern medicine, right? You go to the doctor with one symptom and they give you a pill. You start taking that pill and now you get a whole other set of symptoms, so they give you another pill. Before you know it you have thirty bottles on the counter and your body keeps reacting. We are just dealing with symptoms. Sometimes that is what we do spiritually. I will try a little prayer here, a little fasting there. But the invitation of Jesus is to leave your kingdom and come into His. Jesus didn't come to fix your world. He came to bring you into His. And that is not somewhere else. That is here and now.
This word for "seek" the kingdom, in Greek it is ζητείτε — zēteite. It is a goal word. It is in the present imperative, meaning it is not a one-time seeking but a constant, governing orientation of your whole life, your whole existence. Every day, in every way — what are you to seek? What are you to aim at? What is your goal, your hope, your focus? Jesus says, stop seeking all these other things. When you seek God's kingdom, when you seek God, those things begin to find their place. Not because God comes and makes your kingdom pretty, but because you enter into His.
Jesus, in His final sermon — the upper room discourse of John 14-17 — puts it this way:
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
The Greek word for "abide" here is μείνατε — meinate. It means to remain, to dwell. And again it is a present active imperative — a continuous action. It is where you live. It is how you live. Not fragmented. No dual citizenship. The invitation of Jesus is not just to believe some facts. It is certainly not an invitation to live a certain type of moral life or perform religious duties and obligations. The invitation of Jesus is to dwell with Him, to connect to Him, to be what we were made to be: people who are in the presence of God. He says, you will never bear fruit unless you abide in Me. Too many of us want to be the vine. And until we get to the place where we realize that all the time we spend trying to be the vine, we just break things — that is when we come to the humility that says, "You know what? I am good being a branch."
And look at verse 7, because this is one of those verses that really messes people up on prayer:
7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
Now if we hear that through a transactional understanding of prayer — as most do — we think: I'll abide in Jesus a little bit, and then I can ask for whatever I want. Name it and claim it theology. But only if you don't want to listen to what Jesus is actually saying. Because the abiding here is critical. If and when you abide in Jesus — if you take up your place in His kingdom, if you seek His kingdom first, if you align yourself to it, if you integrate your will and your life and your kingdom into His kingdom — what are you going to ask for? His will. Your kingdom come. Your will be done. This is not a blank check. Prayer is not wish fulfillment. Prayer is will alignment. I want to say that again. Prayer is not wish fulfillment. It is not the mechanism by which we get God to do what we want Him to do. Prayer is the mechanism by which God helps us to do what He wants us to do.
And let us be honest: that is hard. Because I want what I want. And so do you. We are wanters, aren't we? Any other control freaks in the room? We desire things to go a certain way. We think we know what is best. We have been trained that way. We are really, really good in this culture at radical independence and individualism — building our own kingdom and asking God to bless it. It is really, really hard to submit our will to the will of God. It is really, really difficult to align and integrate our life here and now into the life of God. But that is what Jesus is offering. That is what God is asking. And that is what prayer is for.
Thankfully, God knows how difficult this is. And again, I have to say this: the disciplines are not things we do in our own strength to impress God or earn something from Him. They are the gifts of God that He has given us so that we might become who God made us to be. So look at Romans chapter 8, verses 26 to 27:
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. 27 And 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.
We do not like to admit our weakness. But nobody in this room can deny it either. We are not nearly as strong as we would like to be. We are not nearly as wise as we pretend to be. Nobody in this room is nearly as put together as we present ourselves to be. And so this opening line — "the Spirit helps us in our weakness" — I love it. And I love it when Paul just says the thing out loud: for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Who here wants to admit that? I don't even know how to pray sometimes. I don't know what to say. All the time. As a pastor, I get to be with people at the best of times — the best seat in the house at every wedding I do, faces and little moments I get to see that nobody else sees, I get to be there when babies are born. I get to be there for the good stuff. But I also get to be with people at the worst times of their lives. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have walked into a living room, walked into a hospital room, and something gets dumped on me, and I have nothing. I don't even know how to pray about this. You don't have to be a pastor to have that reality. You just have to live in a broken world, which we all do.
Not if you struggle with prayer — when you struggle with prayer. When our will doesn't want to submit. When we desire what we shouldn't and don't desire what we should. When we don't have the wisdom and we don't have the words. The Spirit shows up and helps. But of course He does. Back up a couple of verses:
22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
Creation groans. We groan. The Spirit groans with us. The same Spirit who hovered over the watery wild waste hovers over us — calming us, drawing us into the order, the life, the kingdom of the God who has made us for Himself. Paul is telling us that God meets us in our weakness to help. And that word there for "help" — the Spirit helps us in our weakness:
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.
That word for "helps" is a big Greek word: συναντιλαμβάνεται — synantilambánetai. Say that ten times really fast. The first part, syn, is Greek for together. The second part, anti, means from the other side. The main verb, lambano, means to take hold of or to grasp. So when Paul says the Spirit helps us, the word means to take hold of something together from the other side. It doesn't say the Spirit does it for us. It says the Spirit does it with us.
I was selling a couch on Facebook Marketplace — it is absolutely miserable, I hate it. I get twenty people a week calling me and then ditching and never showing up. So somebody called and said they'd be there at four o'clock, and I had nobody to help me, so I dragged this big couch out onto my driveway so they could load it into their truck. And then they didn't show. At seven o'clock they texted, "Oh sorry, we got another one." So I had to go back out in the dark and drag it all back into my garage alone. And I thought, it would have been really nice to have somebody to help me lift this. That is the image, right? You have something you have to lift on your own and you can't do it — and the Spirit helps. He gets on the other side and together you lift it up. Is that not amazing? That is what God wants to do. Prayer is not something you pull off on your own. The Spirit helps us in our prayer.
I heard this story when I was a kid and I have never forgotten it — it's how good stories go. It's the story of a little mouse who had to get across a river. When he came up to the river, he saw a crocodile in the water. He tried to sneak past, the crocodile saw him. He tried to make a little boat out of a leaf, the crocodile saw that too. He just couldn't get across. He didn't know what to do. And then his best friend came along — an elephant. The mouse said, "I've got to get across." So the elephant put down his trunk, the mouse scurried up and sat on top of his head, the elephant stepped down into the water, the crocodile turned and started coming — and then the crocodile saw the elephant, and the elephant just waved his tusks, and the crocodile left. The elephant got the mouse safely to the other side, set him down on the ground, and the mouse turned to the elephant and said, "Boy, we sure showed him, didn't we?" I love that story. Every time I go to prayer I think: I'm going to do what I can, but I need the big guns. The Spirit helps us in our weakness. He carries the weight with us.
And then look at what happens in verse 27:
27 And 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.
The mind of the Spirit becomes our mind. Our wills become aligned. Our lives are integrated into the kingdom of God. As we go into prayer and the Spirit comes and helps us, and sometimes we don't even have the words and we just have this groaning — the Spirit is there, and He draws us into the mind, the heart of God, into the will of God. And that means something really important. Prayer is not a transaction between an isolated self and a distant deity. Prayer is the creature — us — being drawn into the conversation that has been going on within the Trinity from before the foundation of the world. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit have been in communion from eternity. When you pray, you are not interrupting that communion. You are being invited into it. The kingdom that was ruptured at the fall — the integrated communion of the image-bearer with his Creator — is being restored in prayer.
So with all of that in mind, let's go back to where we began:
16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
If we look at prayer from a transactional perspective, "pray without ceasing" is simply impossible. If prayer is primarily something you do — if prayer is the words coming out of your mouth — then pray without ceasing doesn't make sense. In fact, if you pick up a lot of commentaries they will say, "Well, Paul clearly doesn't mean pray without ceasing. He just means pray a lot." It's hyperbole. And maybe it is, but I don't think Paul is looking at prayer transactionally. I don't think Paul would simply define prayer as the moments where we are verbalizing something to God. Because prayer is that — but it is more than that. If prayer is communion with God, the integration of our life into His, then it is much more than just the event of talking to God. It of course includes the times we set aside to talk to God. But it is about learning to see all of our life within the framework of the kingdom of God. Communion with God is not something we are to experience only when we are formally praying. We can learn to do everything else in life in a prayerful way, in communion with God. I don't pray in the morning and commune with God and then go do life alone. That is how most of us look at it. That is not how scripture looks at it.
The best book I have ever read on this is The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence was a seventeenth-century Carmelite monk who spent most of his life working in the kitchen of a monastery in Paris — scrubbing pots, cleaning, all the stuff that has to get done. After he died, the other monks collected his journals and letters into this book. And he writes:
The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees.
He had to learn that over a long period of time. But what I hope you can see with me this morning is that prayer is and can be an event, but prayer is also a posture — an attitude, an orientation, a will. This is what Paul means by "pray without ceasing." This is what Jesus means when He says, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is available" — seek first the kingdom of God. It is the invitation to bring all of our life into communion with God. Every part of it. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are designed to be with God. We are not made to visit Him. We are made to dwell with Him. And so the times and events of intentional prayer are what allow us to experience that communion as a reality throughout the entire day. You will never pray without ceasing if you don't pray at the beginning.
And notice how Paul ends verse 18:
18b for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
To rejoice always, to pray without ceasing, to give thanks in everything — this is the way we align our will to God's will, align our life to God's life, integrate ourselves into the kingdom of God that Jesus has made available for us. That is what prayer is. Prayer is the act of will alignment. The Spirit aligns our will to God's. The Spirit integrates our life into God's. Your kingdom come, Your will be done in my life.
So what do we do with this? What am I calling you to? I am calling you, as Jesus did, to pray. And I am inviting you, as Paul did, to pray without ceasing. Which means we have to choose it. We have to build it into our life and we have to grow into it. We have to set aside time intentionally to commune and communicate with God. I think starting the day with that kind of intentionality is absolutely vital — not always easy, and sometimes it feels impossible, but starting the day with that pattern of prayer: God, You are with me. May Your name be first in my life. May everything I do today be according to Your will. May my reality look like Your reality. May I look to You for my provision. May I trust in You for my forgiveness. And may You protect me from the problems and powers all around me that are way too big for me. We have to start that way; otherwise I don't know how we live that way.
But starting is not the same as checking a box and then going to do life without Jesus. We never say it that way, but that is how we actually do it. Okay, I had my morning quiet time, so now I'm going to go do it. If you are really devout, maybe you stop and pray again at lunchtime. Maybe in the evening as well — the three-times-a-day pattern is all throughout scripture, and at the time of Jesus it was being developed in Second Temple Judaism. After the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, when people could no longer go to the temple, it became this regulated rhythm of three times a day. And that can be an incredible gift. But if we do it because we think we are supposed to, that is where the disciplines get tricky — we can turn them into an idol, something they were never meant to be.
But the idea makes sense. I start my day with God, I check in, I evaluate. And then — as I go through the day. Lord, I'm walking into this classroom, help me be the student You want me to be. God, I'm walking into this meeting, help me love my neighbor. All along, everywhere we go, we can live with a sense of communion with God, because it is what we were made for. The intentional events of prayer are what train us to experience that communion as a living reality throughout the day.
I want to call you not to see prayer as a box to check, as an event you do and then fundamentally live your life alone. I want you to see prayer as a gift of God to open your eyes and your heart to the reality that you are actually never alone — that the God who made you for Himself is always present, and that because of the work of Jesus as Messiah, as Savior, as King, you have been invited to take your place once again in the family of God, in the kingdom of God. And prayer is the gift of God where that becomes a reality for us.
So church, pray. Pray like everything depends on it, because it does. Pray because God has gifted us the ability to be what we were made to be — God's imagers, who receive His glory and reflect it back out to His creation. We are not meant to visit God. We are meant to dwell with Him. That is what prayer is for. Amen.
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