Introduction

Today we are continuing our series on prayer which Tuck kicked off last week. The opening verse is from Matthew 22:36-38:

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.

Last week we learnt that prayer is saying to God: “God, Here I am”. So essentially prayer as about us connecting with God. Today we are going to build on that message, specifically looking at whom is the Lord to whom we pray to. We are also going to look at the attitudes in which we approach God in prayer and little bit on how to pray. This will set up the rest of the sermon series.

Prayer – Connecting With God

Prayer is “Connecting with God”. I like this phrase ‘Connecting with God’ because I work with telecommunications and Nokia’s famous tagline is “Connecting People”. Prayer is an important way to communicate with God and build our relationship with Him in the process.

As Christians we all profess to have a personal relationship with God. God is not a figment of our imagination, He is not a pie in the sky in the sweet by and by, He is not a fictitious imaginary figure that we conjure up in our mind. He is a real person. As I have related in an earlier message - God is someone you can relate to, someone you can communicate with. As you know, in a relationship there needs to be communication - and two-way communication at that.

In my job at StarHub, I work in product management. We come up with new ways to communicate more effectively (and make more money in the process) - whether it’s by voice, email, SMS or instant messaging. Now the basic principle of communication is that it involves both a sender and a receiver. A sender from which a message or information originates and a receiver who successfully receives the message. And because communication is two-way, I also have to be able to receive feedback in a language that I understand from the person I am speaking to.

When it comes to God, one of the things that He has given us is worship. When we come to him in worship, we are seeking God. We are looking to open our hearts and speak to him. As we lift our hearts up in song, some of us can sense the presence of God in the place. We are not only communicating, we are also in commune with him.

It is the same with Prayer. Prayer is one of the main ways to we can connect with God and develop our relationship with Him. As we have read in the opening passage, the Bible tells us that we are called to love God first and foremost. As with any healthy relationship, especially one built on love, there has got to be effective and healthy communication. We need to connect with the person that we say we have a relationship with. And so God has given us prayer as one of the tools in which we can use to connect with him.

Prayer has been programmed into the very fibre of our being. I was reading survey results in the guide from the Alpha course. It says that three-quarters of all people in the United Kingdom in the secular world admit to praying at least once a week. And these are the “secular” non-Christians. So we are talking about prayer as something programmed in us, something in our DNA, something given to us.

There are so many forms of prayer: thanksgiving, praise, adoration, intercessory prayer, confession, etcetera, and we will touch on these in the coming weeks. It is important to know the various ways in which we can pray. A big part of prayer is supplication or asking. As you desire to gain a closer relationship with God and line your will with His, you will see that many of your prayers will begin to be answered. And that is how we build a deeper relationship with God.

This is not something just for New Testament Christians. As Jorg mentioned earlier, Jesus prayed a lot in his ministry. Three times in Matthew Chapter 6, before the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus told his disciples: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites.” Jesus says when you pray, when, not if, but when you pray.

There are many occasions in the Bible when Jesus drew away from the crowd to pray. Right at the beginning of his ministry in Mark Chapter 1, he woke up early, before dawn, to pray. He wanted to seek the face of God. In the midst of his ministry after feeding the five-thousand, Jesus withdrew at twilight to pray. At the peak of his ministry, he would pray through the night. Before his crucifixion, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was praying. And on the cross, while he was being crucified, he was still praying. Right through his ministry, Jesus was praying and that was how he built his relationship with God the father. And that is how we need also to build our relationship with God.

So who is the God to whom we pray?

When we come to God in prayer, we are not just connecting with God the Father, we are connecting with all three persons of the Trinity.

Firstly, prayer is to God the Father. The first words of the Lord’s Prayer are: “Our Father in Heaven”. And as we have learnt two weeks ago, God is a loving Father and he has drawn us into an intimate relationship with him, that we can call him Abba Father. So prayer should be intimate to our heavenly Father. And He’s is not just our Father, He’s is our Father in Heaven. He has heavenly power, He is Elohim, He is Creator God. In a throwaway verse in Genesis 1:16, it says “He also made the stars”. Hundreds of millions of stars in the universe. And such is his power.

Christian writer Andrew Murray wrote:

“The power of prayer depends almost entirely upon the apprehension of who it is with whom we speak.”

So when we pray are we praying to the Creator God of the Universe? Or are we praying to someone that we have created and conjured? Someone that we invented and put into a box on our own. Or do we pray to someone that is far more powerful than the universe He created and yet He is there with us when we pray.

Secondly, prayer is through Jesus Christ the son. In Ephesians 2:18, Paul speaks:

“For through him – Jesus – we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.”

And in John 15:16, Jesus says:

“The Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.”

We have no right ourselves to come to God and ask for things, expect that we are justified and made righteous through Christ in His name, as stated in the verses from Ephesians and John.

That is why we end our prayers with “in Jesus Christ our Lord” or “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. It is not a ritual, but an acknowledgement of the fact that we can only come to God through Jesus. We have learnt that through Jesus’ death on the cross, the barrier between us and God has been removed. He is our great High Priest. And that is why there is such power in the name of Jesus.

Thirdly, prayer is by one’s spirit. As in Ephesians 2:18, it is by Jesus that we have access to the Father by one’s spirit. I sometimes find it hard to pray, and I’m sure I am not alone in this. Sometimes we are in situations in which it is difficult to pray or we don’t know how to pray. And thankfully, Paul says, the Spirit intercedes for us. Romans 8:26:

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.”

There are a few ways to interpret this verse. In the Charismatic or Pentecostal traditions, it is believed that the gifts of the Spirit are poured out on every believer. And each and every believer can receive these gifts. And one of the evidences of baptism in the Holy Spirit is the ability to pray in the Spirit or in tongues. Now let me explain this in a bit more detail as there are some people who are not from the Charismatic or Pentecostal traditions.

I myself don’t come a Charismatic background. I grew up in a very traditional, very conservative Presbyterian church. When I came back to God in 1997, it was in a traditional Methodist service and a then a friend introduced me to City Harvest. There, I had the shock of my life. The first service I attended, people were praying in the spirit in unknown tongues and at first it really spooked me out.

As a child I already had a very bad experience with tongues. My parents brought me to this rally when I was 12 so that we could be filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered to speak in tongues. Well, during the rally, there was an altar call and I went forward, not entirely understanding what was going on. I was led into a side room where people started praying fervently for us. They said, “just move you tongue very fast, and you will receive it, it will come.” Well, I can tell you it didn’t. And that incident put me off the revelation of tongues for a very long time.

At City Harvest there is a segment of the service where they speak in tongues. Whenever they did that I would pray using my understanding. This went on for about two years. Then one day, I had a revelation that the gift of tongues was available to anyone who believed and who would receive it. So I asked God to receive this gift. I felt the Holy Spirit say – in His quiet, still voice in the middle of all that commotion – to “speak forth”. I opened my mouth and I was able to speak in tongues from that moment onward. It is a faith action for me. But praying in the spirit is no substitute for praying in understanding. But when it is difficult for me to pray, praying in the spirit really helps encourage and build up my spirit-man.

So prayer is to God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son, and by One Spirit. We engage the entire trinity when we pray.

So now that we understand what prayer is and to whom it is we pray to, how should we pray? Earlier we talked about the need for two-way communication in a healthy loving relationship. So prayer needs to be “bi-directional”. It has two components, in my “telco” language, it is the “upstream” and the “downstream”. In prayer we call it the “seeking” and the “experiencing”.

Prayer – Seeking God

Firstly, the seeking. How do we seek God? 2 Chronicles 7:14 states:

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face”.

 Here we see that God wants us to seek his face. He is not a figment of our imagination, we can seek him. Prayer is first and foremost, seeking God. 243 times in the Bible, it is written that God has asked us to seek him, to seek his face. In Psalms 14:2 it says that:

The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.

So God is looking down on us today to see if there are any of us with understanding, if any of us are wise. Because if you are wise, the verse says, you will seek God. And if you seek God, you will share with him the inheritance in his Kingdom. In Psalms 69:32:

The poor will see and be glad, you who seek God, may your hearts live!

The word “live” here literally means to “be revived”. So why do some Christians lose their revival? Why do some Christians close their connections with God, fall away and lose their close relationship with God? It is because they have stopped seeking God.

What is the secret of continual revival? It is seeking God. Pastor Yong-gi Cho pastors the largest congregation in the world – one million members. We have less than a hundred members and have a number of problems, I can only imagine the things he deals with. Of these one million, 70 per cent are first time churchgoers. His ministry over the last twenty years has caused some one million people to come to know God and come to Christ.

What is his secret? Well, we have a book in our library, written by Pastor Yong called ‘Prayer: the Secret to Revival’. Pastor Yong attributes prayer as the sole purpose that he is experiencing revival in Korea.  He would get up before dawn and prays four to eight hours a day, seeking the face of God. He has something that we need to learn – that prayer is the secret of revival.

Finally, Psalm 105:3-4 says:

“Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice. Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always.”

The verse asks us and tells us that when we seek the Lord we will find the strength of the Lord. There are so many weak Christians, can’t pray, can’t overcome problems, can’t withstand temptation, can’t make a stand on life situations, worry about persecution, can’t trust God for finances, for health, for career problems. Why are they weak? Because they fail to seek his face. They fail to pray.

So everyone just say: “Prayer is seeking God!”

So if God is calling out for us to seek Him, if God is drawing near to us, if prayer will bring blessings and revival and strength, and build our relationship with God, why don’t more people pray? Why don’t people want to seek him?

It is because prayer takes something out of you.

Seeking God requires you to pay a price, it draws something out of us. To many people, it is almost too big a sacrifice. Why? In the Telecommunications world, we learn that to have effective communication, you have to speak the right language, or use the right “protocol”. A protocol is the equivalent of an attitude. The reason people find it so difficult to seek the face of God is because it take three things in our “protocol”, or attitude to seek God.

Firstly, it takes devotion. Proverbs 8:17 says:

“I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me.”

So what is devotion? Devotion is a great love for God. If you don’t love God, you won’t want to seek Him. If you are only worried about what He can provide, what He can give and what you can take from Him, then you don’t love Him for who He is.

The verse says I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. People reading it might find something wrong with it, isn’t God’s love always available? Well yes, for the non-Christians, it is.

God loved us first before we loved Him. Otherwise, how can a sinner be saved? How can we come to know Christ? So for a sinner, His love is unconditional. Romans 10:13 writes:

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

For the sinner, His love is freely available, anytime is a good time to receive Christ. But when you receive Christ, you will come to a point in your Christian walk when God will ask you where He stands in your relationship with Him. Is your relationship with Him a religious one built out of systems and structures? Or He is just some kind of eternal Santa Claus always ready to bail you out of trouble? Or is your connection with God a genuine love-relationship where you love God for who He is and not just for what He can provide?

To illustrate this, let’s look at the Song of Solomon (a.k.a. Song of Songs). The Song of Solomon is a very sexual, erotic book. Here God is pictured as a Prince who was fallen head over heels in love with a young girl. So in love was this Prince that He courted her, dated her, doted on her. He bought her gifts, supported her, encouraged her, motivated her. But it came to a point in their relationship when the Prince had to know if this girl was really in love with Him or the His provision. So one night the Prince withdrew himself to see if she would follow Him. And eventually, she did.

God loves all of us, He has given us His son to forgive us our sins by His death on Calvary’s Cross. He has already given us His best. But now He needs to know: do you really, really love Him?

If you love God only for what He can do for you, then you will stop loving Him when He doesn’t give you what you want. When the healing doesn’t come, God I hate you. When the money doesn’t come, God I am mad at you. When the relationship doesn’t work out with you and your partner, God I am angry at you.

Why? Because you don’t really love him for who He is. You don’t remember him when everything is well, when your life is peaceful or when you are busy with life. When someone has a need, you will see them in church all the time, crying before God, praying. But when things are going well and we are busy with life, most people have no time to seek God.

Many people are not faithful when distractions come. They have no more time for God. And we have many distractions in our lives today: I have a mahjong session. I’ve got a new computer game with very few save points. I have a new boyfriend. My new job is a killer. Rollerblading with the guys is on Sunday.

So once you may have been excited for the Lord, ready to seek him, but you were never really in love with Him. Love needs to be the mark of our relationship with God. It takes Devotion - a great love to seek God. And that is why many people don’t seek God, because it takes something out of us. It takes a great love for him.

The second attitude is written about in Proverbs 8:17, which says:

“that those who seek me diligently will find me.”

Proverbs 7:15 says:

“So I came out to meet you diligently to seek your face and I found you.”

And many of us know this, Hebrews 11:6:

“But without faith it is impossible to please God, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him.”

So the second attitude that I would like to share with you is that seeking God requires Diligence. What is Diligence? It is simply, plain hard work. So why do so many people not want to seek God? Because it is hard work! Jesus woke up very early to pray. Pastor Yong prays for four hours or more a day!  That’s hard work.

And finally we come to the third attitude, a Dying to self. There is an interesting passage in Exodus 33:1 where Moses is about to enter into the promised land:

“Then the LORD said to Moses, “Leave this place, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt, and go up to the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I will send an angel before you and drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”

So Moses and the Israelites are right at the edge of the wilderness about to step forth to their promised land, a land of milk and honey, a land of abundance. And God tells them that he has kept His promise and delivered them from Egypt. He has held up his end of the bargain so they can go ahead, they could have it, but God was not going with them, for they did not love Him.

Let me ask you this: what is the difference between the Christians and non-Christians? Well some people, like my friends in City Harvest, will say, “Christians will walk in prosperity”. Yes, they can. But there are many people in the world who are more prosperous than Christians are. Or they go: “Christians can walk in good health”. Yes, but there are healthy non-Christians as well. Or they may state: “Christians teach good Godly principles so that they have happier families”. Well, I know of non-Christian families whose husbands love their wives and whose partners love each other and they have children who are better managed than Christians.

So what is the difference?

God says you can have it all. The promises, the bundance, the prosperity, the blessings. You can have it all. So what is the difference? Let us look at Exodus 33:15-16:

“Then Moses said to him, ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?’”

In this passage of Scripture, Moses tells God that there is a difference between them and the people of the world, and it is having God’s “presence”. Otherwise what is the difference between a church and a country club? Or our church worship theme and a secular pop band? The big difference is that we have the presence of God. Moses says that if God did not go with them, he had rather not go.

It then gets very interesting in verse 18, when Moses turns around and says, “Now show me your glory”.

I have learnt that the presence of God is generally everywhere - He is omnipresent. But the manifested glory of God, that is, his tangible presence is not always everywhere. I have seen God’s glory manifest for myself. When God’s glory comes, there is joy, liberty and healing. There is deliverance. People cry, they are touched. Some people may call it emotionalism, but I came back to God in 1999 in the altar call for just one person, I felt God’s glory and I cried buckets uncontrollably. But yet I had the peace of God in my heart.

Moses asked God: “please, let your glory come with us. Show me your glory”. And God replied in Exodus 33:19- 20:

“And the LORD said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’”

So there is a price to see God. The verse says that to see God you must die. At the end of the story, Moses saw God’s face, and he was the only person in the Old Testament to see God’s face and live. And why’s that? He was willing to pay the price. He was willing to die to self. He was willing to completely surrender himself. Luke 14:27 says:

“If anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

So what does it mean to carry the “cross”?

The cross is the place of crucifixion, the place of death, where we hang out pride, our successes, our titles, accolades and our life. You hand your life to God and say “God I surrender. For me to live is Christ, to die is gain. For the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith. The son of God who loved me and gave his life for me.”

If you want to seek God, it requires you to take your pride, your rebellion, your selfishness, your self-centredness, your personal agendas and crucify it on the cross of Jesus Christ, and you must say: “Lord I am no longer the same man, the old me died on the cross with Jesus. I want to live for you.”

So if you want to seek God, it is going to take something out of you; it is going to be a sacrifice. It will take Devotion, Diligence and a Dying to self.

So now that we know what are the “protocols” for communication, what then should the content of the “message” be? How then do we seek God in prayer? How do we pray?

Here I go against the Charismatic or Pentecostal traditions. Ask any Charismatic or Pentecostal follower how they pray and they will tell you that they speak in tongues. So taken with the spirit, they can pray for hours and hours in tongues, feeling all macho, but at the end they are exhausted and all they have done is built up their spirit man, but no message was sent. God wants to know, “what are they really trying to say?” Somewhere along the line, we have to go from praying in tongues to praying with understanding.

Praying in tongues is great, but too many use tongues as a security blanket. We hide behind tongues and are afraid to come to Him to pray with understanding and build our relationship with Him. I think Paul said it best when He wrote: “I thank God I speak in tongues. But I thank God I speak in understanding as well.”

So how do we learn how to pray in understanding? During the Holy Communion, we recited the Lord’s Prayer. It is how Jesus himself taught the disciples how to pray. Matthew 6:9-15:

“This, then, is how you should pray,
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
 your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
For yours is the power and the glory, forever. Amen”

This prayer can be summed up into four categories into the mnemonic, A.C.T.S.

A is for Adoration - praising God for who is and what he has done.

C is for Confession - asking God forgiveness for what we have done wrong.

T stands for Thanksgiving - for health, family, friends and all your blessings.

And S is for Supplication - asking for things. Praying for self, for friends or for needs in the world.

And ACTS is also a good sequence to use when we pray. But sometimes like myself, when you get into the flesh, we go SATC (Sex and the City). We start with the supplication first, followed by everything else. So when you have a billion things running through your head and you want to learn to pray like Jesus did, remember this pattern: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication.

Prayer – Experiencing God

So the “protocol” and the “message” form the “upstream”, the first part in our communication with God. But the problem is that too many people end there. They pray using A.C.T.S. with Devotion, Diligence and Dying to self and then the communication ends. But it shouldn’t end there. Effective communication is bi-directional - we need to listen as well.

So, prayer is also experiencing God – the “downstream”. Throughout the bible, we see that God speaks personally and individually to his people.

He shared with Abraham His covenant, He shared with Samuel secrets that even Eli the High Priest did not know about. He shared with David the anointing and the kingship to come. He shared with Paul in the deserts of Arabia the Revelation of Heaven. God speaks. But how do we hear the voice of God for ourselves?

Psalm 46:10 states:
“Be still, and know that I am God.”

The word ‘know’ here means ‘experience’. God is not a pie in the sky or a photo of your partner in your wallet that you forget about and take out to kiss once in a while. What kind of relationship would that be? In a relationship you must be able to experience him or her, not just to kiss a photo every once in a while.

In the Amplified Bible, the words ‘be still’ means to let go of all our burdens, anxieties, worries; let go of everything that clutters our mind. Now a lot of us, myself included, find it so very hard to ‘be still’!

When many of us go to God in prayer, we seem to be continually asking for help for this and for that, crying “Help Me! Help Me! Lord! Provide! Provide!”

Or if you’ve heard someone from the Charismatic circles pray, it’s also a frenetic unending cry: “Father Lord God! Father Lord God! Father Lord God! I need your divine intervention! Father Lord God! I need your strength! Father Lord God! Father Lord God!”

And you know what God’s reply: “Shhh! Be still and experience me as God!”

God wants to commune with us, but if we are, the whole time pointing at the devil and binding it, speaking in tongues, rattling off a list of tasks for Him, how are we going listen to Him? You don’t need to put on a show for God. God isn’t going to be impressed by how loudly we pray or how high we can jump up and down, like the 45o prophets of Bael. On the mountain where Elijah stood, God said in 1 Kings 19:11:

“The LORD said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”

Here Elijah is seeking the face of God and God says: ‘My presence is about to come’. And look what happens:

1 Kings 19:11-13
“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’”

So we see God speaking to Elijah, “come to the mountain to seek my face”. Moses had to do the same. Jesus entered the wilderness and David sought the green pastures. Why these places? To get better coverage, a better signal? No! These places were quiet and isolated, away from distractions.

We read here that God was not in the wind, or the earthquake or the fire. He was not in the noise. Sometimes Pentecostal Christians can get caught up in the noise and excitement and think that that is God’s presence. But where was God? The verse says He was “a still small voice”. It was a delicate whispering voice.

To seek God, you have to be in a quiet place. That is why it is called “quiet time”! God was telling Elijah, “Shh, be still and know that I am God. Here I am, what do you need?”

So when you want to experience God, the time and place is very important. You have to make the effort go somewhere quiet, and pray where there are no distractions. Before daybreak, before you sleep, when you are able to listen and be near to God.

Closing

So in summary, let us all say together:
Prayer is connecting with God.
Prayer is to God the Father.
Prayer is through Jesus Christ the Son.
Prayer is by One Spirit.
Prayer is seeking God.
Prayer is Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.
Prayer is experiencing God.

How many of you want to love the Lord more and more each day? How many of you want to have a deeper relationship with God? How many of you want more of God’s strength and blessing? How many of you want to be in a state of continual revival? Then you got to pray!

So now I’ve done the talking. Today there won’t be an altar call, but we are going to practice these principles of prayer ok?

Today we are going to do something different. We are going to break up into groups of 2 or 3 and we are all going to practice praying together.

There is a time for personal prayer, but we need to come together to pray as well! 

Matt 18:19-20
"Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them."

Take five minutes – everyone come together – let’s pray for one another and agree. No prayer list – but let’s spend some time praying for FCC this morning and pray using the principles that Jesus taught us: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.

Let’s exalt his name, confess the times when we haven’t been good witnesses of His love, give thanks for this Church, the people and the provision and pray that God will build His church!