time in an average prayer meet ing and you will discover that from 75 to 95% are for material needs! When we pray for our church, it is for the mortgage payment; when we pray for our missionaries, it is for a new truck needed on the field; when we pray for our brothers and sisters, it is that they may be delivered from gall stones, varicose veins or some other physical ailment. I don’t want to be misunderstood. It is not wrong to pray for mortgages, trucks, gall stones or varicose veins, but such praying reflects an almost complete obliviousness to the real problems. Your phurch has more serious problems than mortgages. Your missionaries have far greater needs than trucks. Your brother has greater needs than gall stones! We are engaged in a titanic spiritual struggle with “principalities and powers” un der subtle satanic direction. We need to ask the Father to open our eyes! We need to be made aware of our real problems! We need spiritual knowledge and dis cernment. We need spiritual strength. We need to grow in love. Perhaps we need to ask for ,our eyes to be opened so that we can be increasingly aware of our real problems! Certainly the basic mo tive for prayer is a sense of de pendence and an awareness of need! Thus it logically follows that until and unless we see the real needs, we will not meaning fully pray for those needs. After instructing the disciples with regard to the types o f issues for which they were to petition the Father, Christ immediately gave the parable of the importu nate friend (Luke 11:5-13). In this parable the Lord teaches us the manner in which petitions are to be voiced. He advocates that petitionary prayer be voiced with a driving urgency of a man beat ing on a friend’s door at midnight in almost shameless effrontery! The man in the parable was in trouble. Crisis pervades the en tire scene! This is the mood in which effective petitions are to be
ings of the Lord will reveal that no personal need is too great or too insignificant to escape the sphere o f legitimate petition. We are addressing a Heavenly Father whose concern for us reaches even to the numeric quantity o f our head hairs! Dare we think any thing too trivial? We are ad dressing a God who upholds the universe! Dare we assume any thing to be beyond His power? Yet, having said this, it be comes evident both from the mod el prayer and from the practices of the New Testament that prayers were voiced for signifi cant issues. To pray for obvious trivialities is in a sense like ap proaching the president of the United States with an assurance from him that any legitimate re quest would be granted and then asking him for postage stamps! Christ set forth prayer in graphic terms of driving, earnest, almost desperate petition. It a lso becomes abundantly clear that Biblical praying essen tially should be for spiritual is sues! This is not because prayer for material needs is wrong. That they are not is evidenced by the fourth petition, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But man’s real problems are in the realm o f the spiritual! Thus five out of the six petitions are for spiritual reali ties. All of Christ’s petitionary praying centered in the spiritual. Paul, when praying for believers, always prayed for their spiritual needs. By way o f example, the apostle, in praying for the saints at Colossae, voiced seven petitions (Col. 1:9-12), and all were for their spiritual needs. No doubt there were financial problems in that church; no doubt there were physical needs in that church, but Paul saw their real needs as spir itual ! How different all of this is from current prayer practice. Lis ten to the prayer requests next
and desires supremely to give us “good things” (Matt. 7:11). Next, it is self-evident that prayer is essentially petition. It is not basically praise, adoration or thanksgiving (these things legiti mately can be in c lud ed in prayer) ; it is asking the Father for things! We say this because the model prayer Christ have His disciples (i.e., the Lord’s Prayer), is 100% petition! After the brief word of ad dress to the Father, Christ launched into six model petitions. In fact the whole lesson is on how effectively to ask God for things. The pious-sounding notion that petitionary praying is selfish is revealed as a complete fraud when studied in the light o f the New Testament. When Christ prayed, He petitioned almost without exception. When He taught prayer, His lessons always assumed a petitionary mo t if. Christ never taught thanksgiving, praise, or adoration but He did teach us how to ask! His six model petitions fall into two obvious groups. The first three petitions center around the out-working o f God’s program. Thus it is self-evident that much of our prayer effort should center in this area. This would include such things as petitions on be half o f our local church, our pas tor, missionaries, evangelistic endeavors, etc. To me the most amazing thing about these first three petitions is that they all are petitions for things that are providential certainties! God’s name will be hallowed! God’s kingdom will be hallowed! God’s kingdom will most certainly come, and ultimately God’s will most certainly will be done not only in heaven but also on earth! Why then pray for such things? Yet a study o f the prayers of both Paul and Christ will reveal that such was unquestionably their prac tice. Why we do it I know not, but certainly we are instructed to pray for such matters. The final three petitions cen ter around the believers’ own per sonal needs. A study of the teach
26
THE KINO'S BUSINESS
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker