Gooding, David: 2 - The Practice of Prayer

And so thank you once more for your kindness in inviting me to address you on these two occasions. Thank you also for the topic that you have proposed that I deal with on both occasions, that is the topic of prayer. In your great, uh, uh, kindness, you allowed me to choose what aspects of prayer I should deal with on these two occasions. And if by the time this session is over, I have not dealt with that aspect of prayer that you would dearly love me to have dealt with, then I can only offer you my apologies in advance and advise you you get a better speaker on the next occasion that you consider the topic of prayer. Anyway, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you and us all as we now read his word. Two passages will suffice to introduce our evening meditation. The first is Psalm number two. Psalm number two. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. Then will he speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, as for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree, and you will notice as we read how dramatic this psalm is. We have listened to the opening words of the psalmist, then we have heard God Almighty. Now we are to hear the Messiah himself speaking to us. He says, therefore, in verse seven, I will tell of the decree. The Lord said to me, you are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Now at the end comes the advice inspired by the Holy Spirit through the psalmist. Now therefore, O kings, be wise. Be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you perish in the way. For his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all those who take refuge in him. And for our second passage, we read that part of the New Testament where this psalm is. It is the Acts of the Apostles and chapter four. Acts of the Apostles, chapter four and we begin at verse eighteen. and we're breaking in upon the remarks of the chairman of the Sanhedrin in ancient Jerusalem. They have recently arrested the apostles, and now they are charging them that they should no longer speak to the people in the name of Jesus. We shall hear the charge and what the apostles did when they heard it. This is Acts four then in verse eighteen: So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. Peter and John answered them, whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. And when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding no way to punish them because of the people, for all were praising God for what had happened, for the man on whom this sign of healing was performed was more than forty years old. When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and elders had said to them, and when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, why did the Gentiles rage and the people plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed. For truly, in this city, they were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. Now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. God grant us that same boldness to witness for the Lord Jesus through our reading of the prayer of the disciples in those early days. So then we come once more to the topic of prayer. And last week, you may remember, if you were here, that we listened first of all to the pattern of praying that our blessed Lord Jesus gave us, in which he exhorted us to get our values in right proportion, the things that we feel we really need, the valuable things in life. What may they be? Because we do show, don't we, in our prayers what things we think are most important. So our Lord u- urged us and exhorted us that when we pray, we are to put God's interests first, and then our interests second. And then we went on to study our Lord's teaching, how we ought to persist in praying for the gracious work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. All believers have, of course, received the Holy Spirit. The moment we trust the Savior, we receive the Holy Spirit who seals us and is the down payment, the guarantee of the glorious inheritance that awaits every believer at home with the Lord. But then, in the meanwhile, it is the desire of God that his Holy Spirit should go on working in our hearts. God invites our cooperation with his desire. We are to pray, praying for a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God, praying that the Holy Spirit will strengthen our hearts so that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith. And as our Lord exhorted us to pray for this ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, he assured us that our prayers will most certainly be answered, because our prayers can be based on the very character of God. If you being evil, he said, and all of us are, we're twisted, sinful because of the fall. Yet even people of that sort know how to give good gifts to their children, do they not? The majority do anyway. And if we, being sinful, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts as we persist in prayer? He encourages, guarantees that those who ask shall be given, and those who seek shall find, and those that knock, it shall be opened to them. So we spent mo- most of our time last week praying, learning to pray for ourselves. And that's not a selfish thing to do. We are commanded to do it for the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Tonight, I want to turn to another thing, our prayer that we might be capable and potent witnesses to the Lord Jesus in our normally hostile world. So now we think of our responsibility as believers in a world that does not grow more kindly to the name of Christ, rather the reverse. It grows more hostile in this part of the world to the name and the gospel of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. That is not necessarily similarly true in all countries. In countries long barred to the gospel, such as China and certain parts of India, now there are multitudes of believers. Where we live, whereas we live in the Europe that is largely growing hostile to the gospel. How shall we find the courage boldly to witness for the Lord in our day and generation? The early Christians we found in that passage from Acts, early on encountered, head on, the antagonism of the authorities against the preaching of the name of Jesus. Both the political power, the Romans, and more particularly the religious power in Jerusalem, the Jewish Sanhedrin, were angered by the preaching of Jesus. And the situation was that the apostles had just been used of God to do a notable miracle. A man that had been lame from his very birth and had never been able to walk, and had been placed on the temple steps by his loved ones, who thought, of course, that, uh, if people, the general public, were going to be generous, it might well be when they were going into the temple to worship, when they were coming out. So they put him on the temple steps, you see, when he was more likely to get some monetary aid from the worshippers going in or else coming out. And the apostles, who had no money to spare, gave him, in the name of Christ, perfect healing, and he rose up and, praising God, entered into the temple. And of course, the people thought this was magnificent, and they came around in their crowd. Presently, the religious authority arrested the apostles and charged them, and no, please notice what they charged them not to do. They didn't say, don't do any more of these miracles, please. No, no. They couldn't say that because all the crowds were rejoicing at a man who had been lame and was now made completely whole. They didn't forbid the early church to do social work, to improve the lot of the poor, to help in the healing process. No, and the world still doesn't. That's true, isn't it? The world is already to advise us, you Christians, you ought to love the poor and help the poor. So we did. What the Sanhedrin forbade the apostles to do was to preach in the name of Jesus. Why was that? Because these same authorities had had Jesus crucified. And now here were the apostles in Jerusalem itself, preaching that God had raised Jesus from the dead. And for the Sadducees, it was utterly intolerable. It challenged their worldview. Sanhedrin was largely composed of Sadducees, and Sadducees, they believed in God, they believed in religion, but they held there was no such thing as resurrection of the dead. They held that when a man dies, that's that, everything is finished. And to have these apostles under their very noses in the city of Jerusalem, where they had crucified Jesus, telling the people that God had raised him from the dead. Death is not the end of everything. Went completely against their worldview. When they arrested the apostles a second time, they said, what you men- mean to do, don't you, is to bring the guilt of Jesus's death on us. And you can see their logic. They had engineered his crucifixion. But now, if he were risen from the dead, and God had thus vindicated him and indicated to the world at large that this Jesus is the Son of God. The implications for the Sadducees that had condemned him were serious indeed. You mean to bring the guilt of it upon us, they said. The world we live in is not altogether different, is it? The world at large will exhort us Christians to give our pound notes and more to the poor and to the homeless, to engage in helping those that are psychologically damaged. And rightly so, they tell us. We are to do good to all men. What the world doesn't like to hear is preaching in the name of Jesus to the effect that Jesus has been raised from the dead, is the Son of God, and there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. And when we preach that Jesus is risen from the dead, and its implication that death doesn't end everything. When we die, that's not the end. A human being goes on existing, and that for eternity. And the implications are grave, aren't they? People who don't want to believe in God and prefer to think that death is the end of everything, begin to feel very guilty if you start preaching that Jesus is risen from the dead, and there's going to be a day of judgment. And so the Sanhedrin commanded the apostles that they were not to go on speaking in the name of Jesus. And we are to study this evening their response to that prohibition. They went to their friends, and they began to pray. It's interesting to see what they prayed for. They prayed for two things, that they should be given boldness to speak in the name of Jesus, whatever the world said. And they prayed that God himself would intervene and vindicate the name of his son. That's what they prayed for. But you will notice that before they got round to making their request, they had what you may call a preamble to their prayer. In fact, in the text, the preamble to their request was five verses long. The request was only two verses long. Now, I don't know about you, whether you have listened to a lot of Christians praying or not. I have, in my long lifetime, heard hundreds of thousands of Christians pray. God bless every one of them. Not for me to criticize anybody's praying. Who am I to dare to criticize people praying to their God. Yet I have noticed sometimes that, uh, some dear men, when they pray in public, seem as if they are sort of engaging in a theological explanation of the doctrines, say, of justification, and telling God all about it. And I say to myself, well, that's very good indeed. I'm not quite sure. I think God already knows that, you see. Why would you preface what you've got to say by an exposition of the book of Exodus or something else like that, you see? Why not come straight to the point? Well, yes, but if I criticize in this way, I've got to explain what these people were doing. Before they asked their request, and there were only two, they first had a preamble to their prayer. I'd like you to notice it with me, what they said. First of all, you see, they directed their prayer and said, Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them. In other words, as they started to pray against the hostile prohibitions of the government. They allowed the Holy Spirit to fill their minds and fill their imaginations and fill their hearts with an overpowering sense of the reality of God. God, the supreme creator of heaven and earth. God, therefore the supreme authority. They are appealing against the religious authorities that are forbidding them to preach. They are appealing to the supreme authority. I find in my old age, if I may confess personal things to you, I was brought up with great emphasis on our blessed Savior as our redeemer. What a marvelous heritage that was for anybody. But not so much on the study of God. And in my old age, I've come to love Isaiah for what he has to say about the wonders of God. And I find I have to adjust my mind and adjust my imagination to begin to take it in. Somebody brought me just the other day, uh, a book of photographs, the most recent photographs of the universe, and to go through its pages and to think of the light years, billions and billions and trillions of light years. The almost uncountable number of the vast galaxies and the millions and billions of stars and trillions in the galaxies. They are but the works of his fingers. Oh, that we spent a bit more time in prayer, allowing the Holy Spirit to get hold of our tiny minds and hearts and imaginations, and to fill them with the consciousness of the tremendous wonder of God. Read I- Isaiah chapter forty and you will find Isaiah talking like this. You worried about what the government will say or what the kings of the earth will say? It is he who sits on the circle of the earth, and the kings are but little grasshoppers to him. They've scarcely taken root, they've scarcely been planted, for what he blows upon them, and they disappear. It's beginning to look at things as God looks at them. We think, if we're old enough, of those great monsters that ruled the nineteen hundreds in many parts of the world. Stalin Stalin, and and Cezcyl. Ceausescu, and Enderhodger, and Pol Pot. Where are they now? Gone! Sudden collapse of Marxism was a phenomena, wasn't it? After all the years it seemingly held sway, ambitious to conquer the whole world, and gone. When we come to God, we come to the eternal. He is not impressed by the might, so-called, of the nations. And as I prayed in that practical situation, practical, they've got to go out on the street because the Lord Jesus had commanded them, and in the face of the prohibition had got to get up in the streets and proclaim Christ. In that practical situation, as is understandable, as they began their prayer, they let the Holy Spirit fill their hearts afresh with wonder and the majesty and the supreme authority of God. And then they let the Holy Spirit fill their minds with Holy Scripture. Now ask any believer you like, and they will tell you, or many of them will tell you, that in times of crisis, when things were tough, they'll say, there came a verse into my mind. Ah yes, ah yes. It's good to have the mind stored with Holy Scripture, isn't it? Because the Holy Spirit can then take what has now gone into our memory, and maybe we've forgotten it, and in the moment when we need it, bring it to our minds. Our brains are a little bit like computers, you know, and any computer expert will tell you, you can't get anything out until you put something in. I'm an absolute ignoramus on these things, not quite sure I know what a BlackBerry is, or why there are three MPs that we should all go buying, you'll see. But, uh, anyway, never mind that, you'll see, but I believe I'm right. You can't get any results out of a computer unless you put the raw material in. And I say it reverently. If we want the Holy Spirit to use his word in a moment of our need, we will be wise to put it in to the old computer of our brains, so that in time of need, the Holy Spirit can use it. And here are these apostles, and they are considering the situation where just recently, a few weeks before, the high priest and the chief priests, along with Pilate and Herod, Gentiles and Jews, had put their blessed Lord to the cross. You will say, they said to themselves, but you know what? The Old Testament prophesied that that's what they would do. They started in the presence of God to rehearse the words of Psalm chapter two. Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine again a vain thing and gang up against your anointed? That's exactly what they've done here in Jerusalem, say the apostles. And they see the point of Old Testament scripture, its inspiration, its prophetic power to establish their faith. The crucifixion of Christ was no accident. On man's side, it was part of man's malevolence, while on God's side, it was God's deliberate strategy. The people, as they pray, are letting the Holy Spirit comfort their hearts and build up their determination based on Holy Scripture. Marvelously good thing to know it, isn't it? So the Holy Spirit can remind us of it. And of course, they had read in that psalm to the marvelous triumph. God looked down upon man's puny efforts to destroy his son and raised him from the dead. And then the Psalm invites the Messiah himself to start speaking. And from the very throne of God, the Messiah says through the voice of the Psalmist, I will declare the decree. The Lord said to me, thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee. God himself, in spite of the rage of the heathen, had put his son upon his holy hill of Zion and enthroned him in heaven. All the wonder of the triumph. When we must go into the battles, oh, let us take the time in our prayers to allow the Holy Spirit to remind us that the biggest battle has already been won. The world gave Christ a cross, but God has raised him from the dead and seated him at his own right hand in glory. Away with the thoughts of defeatism. The one we serve is already triumphant in the glory. So now they begin to pray. Based on their refreshing, refreshed concept of the authority of the sovereign creator. Based on the inspiration and authority of God's word. Fulfilled prophecy. Based on the actual triumph in history, for it is a fact of history that the third day our Lord, uh, rose from the dead and on the fortieth day ascended into heaven. The other thing they began to think about was the fact of coming judgment. So the Psalm two declared. The thought of judgment to many minds is not very pleasant. Why does God threaten us, they say, with judgment? I don't know if it's a question of threatening you, is it? When Paul talked to the Stoics and Epicureans on Mars Hill. As part of his gospel message, he said, gentlemen, I can tell you this about God, that there's going to be a judgment. How does that strike you when you hear that? You say that's very gloomy. Now, of course it isn't. It's glorious gospel. What would you like God to do? To let all the world's cruelty, iniquity, filthiness go on forever? Is that you? What would you say about a God who let the world's cruelty, sadism, filthiness, and all the rest of it go on forever? You like that? I find my friends sometimes tell me, you know, David, they say there can't be a God. Oh, why not? You say there's a God, all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowledgeable, then why doesn't he stop evil? Why does he let evil go on? That's the question my friends have. The answer the script- scripture gives is that God is long suffering, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. You see, some people have a very simplistic idea of how to solve the problem of evil, you know. And put it very simply, it's like this. You get all the good people in one group and put them there, and then you get all the bad people and you put them there, and you take a big sword and you cut the heads off all the bad people, and then leave the good people. Simple that, isn't it? If God did that, which group would you be in? The Bible's answer to that is there is no difference ultimately. We've all sinned. More or less, less or more. And if God executed his judgment, and we got what we deserved, we must perish. God is long suffering, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and to faith. For that reason, when his son died at Calvary, God did not convulse our world with endless earthquakes or blot it out of existence. It has been long suffering to allow the gospel to go out in the name of that same crucified son of God, offering peace and salvation, free and for nothing, to those that are prepared to repent and accept the Savior. The good news is this, that evil isn't going on forever. God one day is going to deal with it, and deal with it at the second coming of Christ. And fortified by what Psalm two said about it, the early Christians now raise their voice in prayer, faced with this command, they shall not speak anymore of Jesus. They ask for themselves first. They ask for boldness to speak as they ought to speak. You will find, if you read Paul's request in his letter to the Ephesians, chapter six where he says, we we wrestle not against flesh and blood merely, but against spiritual wicked wickedness in heavenly places. We wrestle against the world rulers of this darkness. Pray for us. And what should we pray for? Pray that I may be given words to speak suitable for the occasion and boldness to speak it. I need to ask those two things. How to speak sensibly to a godless world in terms that can make sense to them, and boldness to do it, or I am the world's worst coward. You mustn't suppose that Great Britain is always going to be well disposed to the gospel. You'll notice what things are already happening, won't you? Two universities in the United Kingdom have banished the Christian Union because they wouldn't let ungodly people be on their committee. Now we have to be very careful, so they tell us, what we say about homosexuality. These are but the beginnings, the thin end of a wedge. Presently, you will not be allowed to say publicly that Jesus is the only Savior. There is no other name given under a- a- among men under heaven whereby we must be saved. He is the way, the truth, and the life. And when one church, so I hear in Britain, had a evangelistic campaign and they put a banner outside their church, Jesus is the way, the local authorities told them that would be the last time they would be allowed to put that banner out. It would offend other religions. We need wisdom, don't we? But we do need boldness. And we can pray, secondly, as they did, that God would intervene and vindicate the name of his dear son. Oh, what a marvelous thing it is when we come as servants of God into the presence of God and survey what we are pleased to call our work for him and aware of all its faults and failures, its clumsiness, and I wish I'd said something else, all those types of things, the unevenness of our behavior, to realize that our request before God shall be granted not on the ground of our merit. I can argue before God. Oh God, look upon the face of your anointed. Consider, please, consider your dear Son and his infinite merit. There is no blessing, Father, that you could outpour upon mankind that would be too big and go beyond the merits of your dear Son. Look not upon us, look upon the face of your dear Son, and use us fragile vessels to vindicate the name of your Son by the power of your spirit when we attempt to preach his word. If we can thus pray, does it mean we shall always be victorious? Does it mean that the authorities will never persecute any believer because they can pray this prayer, this kind of prayer? Well, no, it doesn't mean that. These self-same authorities imprisoned James and imprisoned Peter. When they imprisoned James, they saw how it pleased the Jews, so the Gentile authorities, so they wanted to keep the Jews quiet, put another Christian in prison. That helped to, to settle, uh, the other religion in the city, which was Judaism. James, uh, Peter, the church prayed for him. He was released. James, they executed with a sword. We must face the same possibilities, mustn't we? For the battle is real. I confess to you how small it has made me feel in my own estimations, as in the years gone by and presently today, I sit down with believers who have been persecuted for Christ. I remember way in the 70s, when Franco was still in operation, I used to go to a Bible camp in Spain, where in the summer the young people went round the villages giving out tracts, selling Bibles. That was illegal, really, but the government, Franco was getting old, and the government turned a blind eye. On one occasion, they even had tent meetings in the city of Zamora. That was quite illegal, but they didn't ask permission, you'll see, so they managed to get away with it. At the place where the camp was held, there was a local assembly, and I remember vividly one Sunday morning, there came to that, uh, breaking of bread a senior Christian, Señor Audelino was his name. He had been a civil servant, was betrayed and slandered by a younger man whom he himself had trained and promoted. And Señor Adelino found himself in prison, in the prison in that very town where we were breaking the bread. He told us how when he was put in prison, how the women would come in the morning with their gifts of bread and food for their husbands or brothers or uncles. There were big ropes hanging down at the gateway, and on the ropes were hunks of human flesh. Where the men had been beaten. They never knew, when they came of a morning, whether their loved one would still be alive. Señor Adelino told us how he was in the cell with ungodly men. And every now and again, they were meant to come out into the surrounding grass-like, uh, court, where there was a big building erected, and on the top a kind of a glass house, where the mass used to be said every day. And the prisoners all had to come out, and of course, when the host was elevated, they had to bow down. And Señor Audelino wouldn't compromise his conscience and bow down. He said every night the door would open of the cell, it would be the guards, you and you and you and you come out and load them onto a lorry, take them down to the river and shoot them dead. And he said at the end of the breaking of bread, my brothers, in the cell with those prisoners, I used to teach them the gospel and taught them choruses and get them singing the gospel. He said, brothers, they were the happiest days of my life. I tell you, there was not a dry eye in that assembly that morning. And afterwards he took us round the old prison where he had been imprisoned. We work in Ukraine. I asked one good man, senior man, under the bad days, were you persecuted? You personally? He lifted his hand and said, they broke my fingers. And then he told us how they used to go across the border to Poland, where it was easier to get Bibles, and their city was not all that far off the border. And of course, in Poland, they would get Bibles. They would tear the covers off and then put the bulk of the Bible inside the tires. They took the tires off the car and put the Bibles inside, you see, and put the tires back on again and drove them back into the Ukraine, three of them in convoy with special pr- uh, plans laid if they were stopped by the security forces. To sit by men like that, to think how feather bedded we have been in these countries, has made me feel very often exceedingly small. We should not ask for persecution, should we? But it's good to get in training before the persecution comes. And who knows how much persecution we may yet have to face in our beloved United Kingdom, as the government brings in more and more rules and tells the church what they mustn't say publicly as they preach the gospel. So God teach us to pray, like the early Christians prayed, that we may be given boldness. And as we speak, feebly as we do, God would intervene by his spirit and vindicate the name of the Lord Jesus. Shall we pray? Our Father, as we pause a moment and consider the wonder of thy being, as we consider the wonder of thy gift in Christ and the triumph of his resurrection and ascension. Now we ask, Lord, seeing he has given us this responsibility to witness for him in this hostile world, that thou will give us wisdom and words suitable, and above all, boldness to speak for him wisely, but without compromise. And O God, show our world, we do beseech thee, in its hardened ungodliness, the reality of the person of Christ, the reality of his resurrection and his present life. So bless thy word now, we pray, as we thank thee for it, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.