Anchored to Prayer

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Welcome friends. My name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. If you are new to South in the last three or four weeks, I’m a complete stranger. So it’s great to be back with you. Thank you, Chad, for reading. The word for us a little funnier than I’d hope to really put the pressure on this sermon.

Here we go. We’re in a series. Called Anchored, which is designed around this concept. Everything changes in the summer. Now for some of you, you may say, actually, my summer routines somewhat stay the same, but programs close here. Some of the community changes. If you have young kids, maybe it involves road trips.

It involves all sorts of visits to different places. Even just kids not being in school makes a big difference. And so somewhere you might ask a question that, that looked something like this. Where did the routine go? What happened? We’re picking up things that, that just are new to us, or at least they’re new.

This year or a few years ago when my wife and I were on a road trip with our kids, we adopted a mantra that we’d seen flying around on the internet. And this is what it looked like, preparing for a road trip, reminding ourselves, we are not enemies. The children are the enemies. I’ve gotta be careful ’cause there’s one of them sat here today and they’re not usually here, so I’m just like, eh, little should have planned differently for this whole thing.

If the question is that we begin with is what, where is the routine? Maybe a follow up question is, what do we do while it’s gone? Do we just just hold on and survive? Or other practices that we can pick up in different seasons that might enable us to flourish even in a season that’s just a little different.

And so this week we’re looking at this idea anchored to prayer. H How does prayer become this powerful tool in the midst of a different season? One that keeps us steady, keeps us on this journey with Jesus. And when we look across history, there’s people that have found prayer to do exactly that in all seasons.

Now, there’s just a chance that if you’ve been around this church thing for a while, you might say something like, I got this prayer thing I picked up really early on that’s that it’s important and so I started doing it well. That’s great. Because you know the, some of us that struggle with prayer and you’ll be on, on board.

You’re like, yeah, we absolutely need to talk about this. And then the, some of us perhaps that there are in the midst of finding prayer, just a little bit difficult. We’ve got some questions about the whole process. P prayer is not an easy thing. There’s a reason that Jesus first followers sat with him and said, Jesus, teach us to pray.

And give us some insight on how to do this really difficult thing. You are having a conversation with a divine being that you’ve probably, I’m gonna say probably never seen that you’ve probably or possibly never heard speak audibly. At least back to you. There’s a whole bunch of things going on that make it a challenging thing.

In 1936, George Mueller and his wife Mary, started their orphanage program. They began by inviting 26 local orphans into their home. They quickly had to change their plan as the neighborhood complained a lot. Oh, which when you think about 26 kids entering into a small neighborhood makes a little bit of sense.

And so they bought some land and began building. They built their first home for 300 children, and in the years that passed, they built another four homes for 1200 children all together. During their time in ministry, George as the primary fundraiser, raised 1.3 million pounds in 1890, which is the equivalent of $250 million today, and he never asked anybody for anything.

He simply told people what they were up to and people responded Of that $250 million. He gave all of it away and died in a modest home with a modest income. This is one of many stories around George Mueller and how prayer worked for him. The children are dressed and ready for school, but there is no food for them to eat the house.

Mother of the orphanage informed George Mueller. George asked her to take the 300 children into the dining room and have them sit at their tables. He thanked God for the food and he waited. George knew God would provide food for the children, as he always did. Within minutes, a baker knocked on the door.

Mr. Mueller, he said last night, I could not sleep. Somehow I knew that you would need bread. This morning, I got up and baked three batches for you. I will bring it in. Soon. There was another knock at the door. It was the milkman. His cart had broken down in front of the orphanage. The milk would spoil by the time the wheel was fixed.

He asked George if he could use some free milk. George smiled as the milkman brought in tanned large cans of milk. It was just enough for 300 thirsty children. George Mueller is a man that typifies that, that demonstrates the passage that we just heard Chad read. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation by prayer and petition with Thanksgiving, present your request to God.

We can picture George Mueller sat down at the table waiting patiently and as the seconds tick by his confidence that God will provide does not change. Because he believes he has prayed and his heavenly Father will answer his prayers. We see this kind of. Person operate all over this beautiful kingdom of God within which we are just a small park.

This is my friend Vare out in Romania in a small park called bho Region. Vare some years ago just in, started inviting elderly, homeless people into his home. He started with three or four. He now houses 300 of them. He once told me that every time I see the food come in, I tell the people that cook it.

Don’t tell me how much we need. If I don’t know, I can believe that God will provide, but as soon as I know, I start to get a little worried. I. He’s someone that believes God provides because he said he would. And then there’s my 7-year-old Jude who said this the other day after my 2-year-old cut his foot on some glass.

Don’t worry dad, Jesus will heal him. He heals everybody to Jude. It’s just that simple. God does that kind of thing. And yeah, that story’s far from universal. Perhaps you would say you struggle with that idea. And I would say at times as a pastor, even I struggle with that idea. Prayer. It used to be believed was good for you regardless of what you believe.

But now recent studies have started to suggest something else. This is a Baylor University study. What seemed to matter most around prayer, they said was the type of attachment the praying individual felt towards God. According to the Baylor study, those who prayed to a loving and supportive God, whom they thought would be there to comfort and protect them in times of need, were less likely to show symptoms of anxiety related disorders.

Symptoms such as irrational worry, fear, self-consciousness, dread in social situations, and obsessive compulsive behavior. Then those who prayed but did not expect God to comfort or protect them. Hold onto that for a moment, ’cause we’ll come back to it. Because some of us may say we have reasons to question whether God will comfort and protect us.

This is a video that’s been flying around Christian Instagram and there is such a thing recently.

As you can imagine, the response to this prayer has been mixed. Mostly it’s been picked up by people who want to critique him, who want to talk about why he is wrong, and yet I think would be wrong if we didn’t stop for a moment and feel the emotion of that. This is someone who believes he has done exactly what George Mueller did for 60 years.

He’s asked and his feeling is God, where were you? Have you ever done that? Have you ever prayed for something that you felt like you needed desperately to happen and then you were left with this answer? God, where were you in that? Is prayer a firm anchor 0.1 that can get us through the most difficult times?

Or. As it is according to the gentleman we just heard, is it an uncertain anchor 0.1 that we can’t rely on always to give us what we think? We need e every year my wife and the kids go fishing up in Minnesota. We go out on the boat, the beautiful lake that we’re lucky enough to have family members that own and occasionally the waters will get rough and so we’ll throw down anchors next to the place that we’re fishing, usually near a rock pile where the fish tend to gather.

And then usually, or often we’ll find in those moments. We think we’ve anchored to a firm point and suddenly the boat is drifting over the rocks and we begin to get concerned that we’ll get landed on those rocks with no hope of escape. This is what this gentleman is feeling about prayer, this sense that, oh, something didn’t happen that I long to happen.

Can you and I anchor in prayer or is he right? There’s a few things that I think maybe any uncertainty we have around prayer come from not critiquing these, not critiquing you, not critiquing me when I enter into these moments, but just talking about them for a moment. Our uncertainty about prayer may result from as cynicism a sense that we tried it, a sense that, God, we wanted you, we desperately needed you to deliver and you didn’t.

That’s maybe one of those ideas. May, maybe there’s a third one and it’s this, our intellectualism a sense that maybe I have a sense of how the world works. I know how these things know how things happen. I know that the universe is kinda like this thing that’s been around for a long time and I’m uncertain about God’s role in that.

Maybe we’ve entered into this intellectual process and started to believe that we know more. Than people like George Mueller that spent all his life devoted to prayer. Or maybe just this last one, our westernism. Our westernism tells us a few different things. It tells us the one, we’ve got other options.

First port of call when you get sick is where it’s the doctor. Not God. We have things that can fix it. If we’re short of money, where do we go? We go get a loan, we put some more on a credit card. We do all sorts of things before we would ever think about going to God. And then we’re always, I think so certain about what sort of things God might provide for us.

We think that we might need the extra thousand square foot on the house, so we pray for that. We pray for a lottery win. We pray for something that will give us some kind of significant wealth. We pray maybe for things the other parts of the world would class deeply unnecessary. It’s that wonderful scene in Bruce Almighty where Bruce is given the role for a moment of God and he has millions of people pray to win the lottery.

And so he simply says yes to all of them. And then they spend the rest of the movie complaining about how they won the lottery and received only $17. We start to see how all of our prayers might interact and cause a distinct problem if there was simply lots of yeses. All of those things lead to some sense of anxiousness, maybe some sense of uncertainty around prayer.

We’ve tried prayer and started to say I dunno if that works. As I told, I was told it would work, and maybe the answer is what we were told about Prayer is wrong. Or at least the message we picked up about prayer is wrong. Richard Rohrer, a Catholic thinker, contemplative, says this, we Western people are goal orientated consumers, and we can’t imagine doing anything that won’t get us something.

It means that our wirings are towards praying for lists, asking God to do things for us, to make things happen. Yeah, each of these kind of thing, three things we talked about, they lead to uncertainty around prayer and get this. This is why I think, especially if we only value prayer for its production.

We’re production people. We want something to happen. We want to make something work for us. And as we’ll see is that may not be what prayer is about at all. At times, I would say, and maybe you might say that we’ve treated prayer like a button to be pushed. I had this moment when I was maybe three, four years ago when my gallbladder went out.

I was in just deep pain for days and finally went to the hospital far later than I probably should have. I got there and they finally gave me some medication, and I had this moment where I felt like a warm blanket had been placed over me, and everything felt okay, and then they put me in a room with a button and they said, anytime you feel too much pain, press the button.

And so I pressed the button. Apparently I pressed the button a lot because eventually someone walked in and said, that’s it. You’re done. There is no more button for you. The thing that had brought me the greatest joy at that moment in my life, the thing that took away all the pain was taken from me. My feelings about the button and the people, if I’m honest, that gave me the button, were entirely dependent on whether I hit the button and whether it worked.

And I think sometimes that little story is indicative just a little bit of how we might treat prayer. Here’s the flip flop of that. Here’s where I think the story of scripture goes when it talks about prayer in the scriptures as a whole, prayer is valued for presence more than it is for production.

That doesn’t mean that production doesn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that prayers aren’t answered. In actual fact, the people that I know in all sorts of places in the world say it’s answered remarkably and often. But in the scriptures, the thing that is most valued is that in prayer, the God of the universe is present.

With you. Check out these few examples of that. This is Exodus 33, a guy called Moses speaking. The famous 10 commandments have been delivered on a tablet, and now they’re about to walk into a promised land, but the people have caused an awful lot of trouble, and so God says this in the moment that they’re about to continue their journey.

Then the Lord said to Moses, leave this place and you and the people you brought up out of the land of Egypt and go to the land that I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And when I said, I will give it to your descendants and I’ll send an angel before you and I will drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hitite, parasites, hives, and Jebusites go up to a land flowing with milk and honey.

And God says to Moses, go, and everything you need will be given to you. Anything you can want will be done for you. But I will not come. I will not deal with these stubborn, stiff-necked people. Otherwise I might destroy you on the way. This is God just feeling his emotions, feeling. Some of that sense of a long car ride with kids, something like them, and this is Moses’, response to God.

If your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here for how can it be known that your people and I have found favor in your site unless you go with us. How else will be distinguished from all the other people on the face of the earth? Moses is given a choice between God being present and everything he asked for been done for him, and he says, I choose the presence every single time.

This is his request. Psalm 84. This is David, the writer of the Psalms. How lovely is your dwelling place? Lord Almighty, my soul yarns even faints for the courts of the law. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. No requests, just presence. How about Jesus in his teaching us to pray? Where does it begin?

Sure, we get to requests, to daily bread, to forgiveness, to all sorts of things like that, but where do we begin with our father in heaven? Presence, relationship. That’s what seems to matter. When we think about what we want in prayer, there’s something about that idea that I think resonates with us on a human level.

I tell, talked about the angst of road trips, but truly road trips have brought me some of the great joys of my life and I’ve got to take multiple of them. We just, Elena sat there and my second daughter, Gigi, this is them when they were cute and easy traveling from Michigan to New York. This is all of us headed off to, I think Minnesota, me and the three oldest ones.

This is me and Elena last year at the famous Buckys. Getting some, we didn’t get brisket, we were there. And every time there’s been moments in that trip of angst, moments of frustration. But what I love about those trips is that even when we’re in the middle of nowhere driving across South Dakota where there’s nothing.

But Wal drug and a few cows, I’ve had this sense that they feel safe. Now, if I’d simply said to them, go and I’m gonna make some calls, go and I call a hotel, you’ll have somewhere to stay. Go and I’ll tell. I’ll tell some people to watch out for you. Go and any trouble, call me. I’ll call the police.

Would they have felt safe then? I could have made a way for them, done all the things that they felt like they needed, but really, I think what makes them feel safe, if they’re honest, it is simply that I’m with them on the journey. My capacity to protect them will change. My age will increase, my strength will go, but right now, they feel that my sole job is to make sure that they are okay to be with them.

Isn’t that what we really want in amongst all the things we want, the answers we think we need, isn’t that what we’re looking for? Watchman Knee, the famous Chinese Christian who planted some of the first underground churches in China who suffered for his faith under the regime there said this. I must first have a sense of God’s possession of me before I can have a sense of his presence with me.

Prayer is about knowing that God owns you, even if sometimes he doesn’t, may not be very happy with what he has in his hands. Some sense that you belong to him seems crucial. Jacques Philippe said this, the Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things, sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world, but he never leaves us deprived of what is essential, his presence, his peace.

And all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to his plans for us most beautifully in prayer, that God of the universe chooses presence. And that’s, I think, the heartbeat of the passage that Chad just read. Sure. It talks about let everything you need be known. Ub, submit all your requests to God but look at the surrounding words.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again. Rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all the Lord is near. Now, I agree with a bunch of commentators, translators on this passage. This is a fairly poor translation, and so if you have a text in front of you, I’d encourage you to just put a note. Next to it and just add something that looks something like this.

Something that I think is the heartbeat of the passage. Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again. Rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near soul. You don’t have to be anxious about anything. The two are connected. God is presence present, and so your anxiousness gets to change.

It begins with the idea of presence before it talks about what God might do. So you do not have to be anxious about anything, but in every situation by prayer and petition with Thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and equally importantly, the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Does that passage promise the answer you want Never does. Never says that God will give you the lottery ticket. Never says God will give you the extra thousand square feet. Doesn’t say those things, but it does say that he will be present with you and his peace. We will guard your hearts or whatever the situation and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding.

We will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Ken Sugi Matsu pastor up in Vancouver said this, our plague is not something separate from our spirituality. It is a sign of the presence of God in the world. I’ve often been surprised by the number of fellows of Jesus who believe that God is more present with them in times like this than he is on a road trip to somewhere fun, to enjoying their family in creation, to exploring the beauty of the mountains.

And yet the reality is that we’re presented in scripture is that God is present you with you no matter what you are doing. He’s with you. He’s for you. It’s a lesson that I at times have forgotten myself. Not long ago, I was meeting with a spiritual director talking about some of the weight of the role as a pastor.

Some of the things I was experiencing as a person who’s just jumping into that second half of life, and she reminded me just of this beautiful, simple truth that has just stayed with me since that moment and amongst everything I think I’m doing for everybody else. She said this, you. Other, the one God wants to be with you are the one God wants to be with you.

That’s the beauty of prayer. The God wants to be with you. This is what I think the heartbeat of scripture is. Prayer is not a button to be pushed. It’s a relationship to be pursued. That doesn’t mean the button doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean that when we ask God doesn’t answer, but it does mean the first core of prayer is relationship is to pursue God in relationship.

So having been through all that, what now then do we do is always, usually a, is usually a really good question around scripture. A couple of ideas for you before Aaron and the team come. Richard Foster said this, and so I urge you carry on an ongoing conversation with God about the daily stuff of life.

Just begin to talk to God in the midst of the good things you get to experience. I was walking my dog this morning just having a conversation with God about how much I had not appreciated the beauty of everything I see around me. It’s just beginning to pull God into all sorts of normal, everyday things, not setting aside time for prayer, but being prayerful at all times.

Brother Lawrence, famous writer around prayer said this for him. The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer. Anytime was able to be used for God in prayer. It was just open at all times. Second idea is this, maybe some of you might put your hand up and say, feel like there’s some healing that needs to happen in me.

Maybe you felt like you needed God to show up in prayer at a particular point. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you felt like you needed an answer. Maybe it wasn’t there. I. Maybe you carry around this sense that, God, you have not been the protective father that I needed, and that’s hard to get over. Imagine yourself perhaps for a moment in what might look like a prayer therapist’s office.

Maybe you’d sit with that person and let’s say, tell me what it means for you to be a son or daughter of God. And maybe you’d be able to really quickly give them a beautiful theological opinion that describes the fact that because of Jesus’ death, you are now a child of God. And they might say something like this sense that you know what that means.

Sounds like you have a really deep theological closeness to God, but practically, maybe that’s distance. Practically, maybe it’s hard for you to be close to God because of that experience. I think the invite for you is to come into God’s presence and experience healing, is to come into God’s presence and have him speak to you as a beloved son and daughter to remind you of whatever has been in the past, he’s present for you.

Now, there’s a story that I wanted to share if I had time, and I do. So that’s good. And I was gonna share it even if I didn’t. That’s just the reality. This is from a wonderful book called Miracles and Other Reasonable Things by Sarah Bassi. His story is about her father, who has come to know Jesus through a beautiful physical healing, and now is sick again.

And it’s a story of how he processes the way that prayer works and God’s. Answering or not answering of his prayer. God was running out of time to heal my father the way he thought he should be healed. I worried about his unanswered prayer. As much as I worried about his injured heart. I worried that he was going to lose his God even if he kept his life because the guard he knew was disappearing like steam on a mirror with every resolute step towards surgery.

Tomorrow they would break his sternum and spread wide his ribs and cut into his heart. They would pull veins up away from his legs and move them to his chest. He might die. He might not recover. He might not wake up. He might be completely fine no matter how much we grinned and tap dance through the evening.

The specter of his mortality sat beside us on a hospital bed patiently waiting to be acknowledged. We did not acknowledge the fear. We felt the grief of his freckled chest. One. We all knew as intimately as our own bodies being broken open. We did not acknowledge the possibilities. We were tireless, tirelessly positive until my face ached from smiling, and I expected Churchill to tell us to stand down from carrying on so calmly.

We said goodbye cheerfully, like we were expecting a picnic the next day. We had no idea how to behave, how to be in this unfamiliar story, but God did not heal supernaturally.

Together we will speak of the promises of eagles while he’s grounded in one hospital bed after another. For men like my father, men used to caring for others, priding themselves on being the provider. The rock, the gentle administrations of his family are almost too much to bear. He can hardly bring himself to receive my sister’s care after his surgery, my arm to lean on while he walks in this hospital gown down the hall at the pace of the sick, my husband shoveling his driveway for him.

His anger at his body for this betrayal will be palpable, sometimes directed at us, but somehow we will know that he isn’t angry at us for this. He’s angry at his body, and perhaps even angry at God. I will play his favorite prayers of renewal and strength over him and mean every single word with my heart, and I will believe for him what I cannot believe for myself anymore.

We will become reacquainted with the mercy of weakness, the blessing of receiving the slow walk towards wholeness that doesn’t skip over the suffering, brutal experience of healing. Cracking open of his ribs to the light so his heart could be mended for surgeries. The therapies, the months of mending will take root, but there will be sadness to this even.

None of it will go the way he thought it would go. He thought that his healing would look more like the soaring eagles into renewal. Instead, he will scrabble and fight March and suffer towards wholeness. He will keep healing slowly, but he will not be the same as he was before. We all see that his body recovers better than he was the year before, before the surgery, but something in his core will be different.

His heart was broken and the mending nearly killed him. His body will return to strength, his color will return, his energy will return, but something about God has been reset along with his bones, and he will have his own questions over this suffering. He will wonder where God was in the pain. He will think that if it weren’t for the love that filled him and surrounded him and sustained him, he wouldn’t have bothered.

He will learn what it is to hear your own heartbeat and know that is a miracle. He will learn what it means to love God and to endure unanswered prayers and unexpected grace for suffering. He will begin to understand the miracle of healing is wider. And more expansive than it was 30 years ago.

When God dared to heal, he dared God to heal him one prayer night. He will learn what it means to pray on the other side of a strange and beautiful and ordinary miracle. Wherever you have been on your journey with God, his longing for you in prayer is not to do things for you, but to be present with you.

When you have presence, you’ll find out like George Muller, Muller did that you have everything that you will ever need, and sometimes bread will turn up. Unexpected milk carts will break down at the front door and God will answer those prayers. But even when he doesn’t, he’ll be present with you just the same.

This is Paul Lee Miller, a wonderful writer on prayer. Many Christians haven’t stopped believing in God. We’ve just become functionalists living with God at a distance. We view the world as a box with clearly defined edges, but as we learn to pray we’ll discover that this is my father’s world because my father owns everything I can ask, and he will listen and act since I am a child.

Change is possible and hope is born. Begin with presence, but don’t forget to ask God for what you need. Prayer is not a button to be pushed. It’s a relationship to be pursued. God, wherever we are in our prayer journey, some of us knew stumbling along in faith, some of us a long way into this journey. Some of us having seen prayer after prayer answered, some of us asking perhaps after 60 years where the answers to prayer have been.

Thank you that for each person here you are present, whether we know it or not. Help us to become aware of your presence in prayer. Pursue relationship with you. Amen.