Sermon: When God says No

Sermon: “When God says ‘No’”
Part 4 of a sermon series on prayer
Sunday, August 22, 2010
by Matt Kennedy

Last week we learned that as followers of Christ we’re given the privilege to call Jesus’ Father our Father. And we saw that he’s not a distant, removed, uninvolved or uninterested father but a father who delights in his children and who loves to hear our prayers and to give not just what we need but what is best and what is good.

The problem is that we are not good. In fact in verse 13 of our text Jesus says that we are evil. He’s pointing to our fallen nature, the truth revealed in many texts—Psalm 51:5; Romans 1-3;  Ephesians 2:1-4—that we are conceived and born with hard hearts, turned from God and toward the self. God didn’t make us that way; it’s the result of Adam’s sin that we, as his offspring, have inherited. Because we are fallen, our perception of what is “good” is skewed. We do not know what true “good” is. We know what feels good. We know what we like. We know what seems good and we know what our culture considers to be good—but while we have glimpses of the true good in all of those things we do not know it or seek it.

How do I know that? Well Paul tells us in Romans 3:11 “no one seeks God”. God is the “the” good. If everyone knew what is good and sought it, then everyone would seek God. But no one does. Instead, says Paul, “all have turned aside and become worthless.”(12) So, that being true, we cannot assume that what we perceive to be good is always truly good. 

Why am I belaboring that point? Because one of the most frustrating aspects of prayer is to ask for something we believe to be good and not get it. To seek something good and not find it. To knock and have the door remain shut. And frequently when that happens the response is to doubt that God is there, that God cares, that God is powerful enough, or, even worse, to doubt the goodness of God.

So I have a dear believing friend who is terminally ill. I know that Jesus healed many people and that still today, God heals. Jesus promises that whatever I ask for in his name he will give me (Jn 14:14). Jesus promises that when you ask you receive. And so I ask, and I pray, and cry out to God for my friend. And my friend dies. How can I reconcile what I read in Luke 11 about our loving Father who wants to give his children good things, the best things, and the seemingly purposeless suffering and death of my friend?

The only way to make sense of that is to agree with scripture that my understanding of what is good, what is best for my friend, best for me, is skewed; to trust that God loves my friend infinitely more than I do and that somehow in God’s perfect wisdom it was good, it was best, for my friend’s soul that he experience suffering in the body and then to be welcomed into heaven. I come, in other words, to the point where I submit what I perceive in my limited and fallen understanding to be good to the revelation that “God works all things together for the good of those who are called according to his purpose.” (Rom 8:28). God knows what the best is. I don’t.

Jesus found me when I was 24 years old. Recently I found an old notebook with lists of things I was praying for at that time. They weren’t bad things. A girlfriend. Money. A new car. A better job. Now at that time I tended to treat women as objects and to go out and drink way too much. But very soon after my conversion, I went through a long period of time when women just weren’t interested in me. I couldn’t figure it out. I prayed and prayed. And I was making less money so I couldn’t go out like I used too. So there I was,  brand new Christian, with a drinking problem and a sin issue with sex, praying to my Father for money and a girlfriend. “What’s wrong with God?” I wondered. Why isn’t he answering my prayers? Maybe I’m not praying with enough faith? I went to see my pastor at the time. He didn’t know everything I was struggling with but in the course of our conversation he pointed me to the book of James and this passage: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4:2-3 ESV)

Oh.

God is my Father. He will only give me good things. When you pray for something you believe to be good and you don’t get it, the assumption has to be that God in his wisdom knows that you are not ready for it, that he has something better, or that you are desiring or wanting something that will hurt you…that you’re asking for a snake and he wants to give you bread, a scorpion and he wants to give you a fish. It took me years to understand that when Jesus says I’ll give you anything you ask in my name…he’s not saying: “Add the phrase ‘in Jesus’ name’ to your prayers and I’m magically bound to give you what you want.” To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray for things that are consistent with his name—in accordance with his will.

We don’t at first understand what those things are, but as you mature in Christ   and your knowledge and understanding of scripture increases, your understanding of God’s will grows deeper.

Come to the Father with anything you desire. But as you grow up in Christ, your desires will change. That’s what the Holy Spirit does. He aligns our wants with his will. And one of the chief ways he does that is through prayer and the Lord’s prayer in particular gives us a picture of what cleansed and holy desires look like.

The first two petitions lift our desires and turn them away from self-centered, self focused wants to prayers for greater things: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.”

When you are new in Christ it’s all about you. What can Jesus do for me today? How can church serve me, feed me, give me what I think I need? That’s fine. Newborns need to be fed. But as the Holy Spirit makes us more like Jesus, we begin to see that we’ve been grafted into a living body, a living people, who’ve been given a much bigger and better purpose than having various felt needs met. God is bringing glory to his name and establishing the kingdom of his Son and he’s using me and you to do it. Satan and his demons are being cast down, the spiritually dead are being raised up, sin is being cleansed, the lost are found, the lonely given a name and a family, the hungry fed.

God uses these first two petitions to move us so that we want these things. I think we all know that we should want them, but they’re not usually the things that keep us up at night. God’s Spirit working in us as we pray changes our longings so that more and more your wants become intertwined with God’s will. Praying the Lord’s prayer is like putting on your dad’s shirt when you’re three years old. Its way too big for you. But, you grow into it. As you pray, “hallowed be your name, your kingdom come” God works through your prayer to accomplish these things and he works in you so that you truly begin to long for his name to be hallowed and his kingdom to be established.

And then something very strange begins to happen. How you pray shapes how you live.

You may as a newborn Christian, yell at your wife, or complain to your friends about your husband or disobey your parents. But soon you realize that people are watching and drawing conclusions. “Some God…I don’t follow Jesus but I treat the people I love a lot better than that guy.” And so as Paul says, far from being hallowed, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (Romans 2:21-23). But as you pray regularly for God’s name to be hallowed rather than blasphemed, you become increasingly aware that the way you live your life is a sermon to the world about God. And increasingly you want your life to preach the truth. And so you work on changing some things around, and God works in you, and you pray with more and more passion and what you pray comes, to more truly characterize how you live.

If, likewise, you pray for God’s kingdom to come, to be made present on earth as Jesus instructs us to do, you’ll begin to desire the coming of the kingdom and to live in accordance with that desire.

Here’s the classic definition of the kingdom of God:  “God reigns when/where human beings voluntarily devote and submit themselves to be governed by him, placing their bodies, souls, minds, lives, futures under the yoke of his will as revealed in his word, and renounce all desires opposed to it.” (paraphrase from John Calvin’s harmonization of the synoptic Gospels) The kingdom of God comes in three places: 1. the human heart, 2. the body of believers. And 3. in the world.

The kingdom of God has come to my heart. But there are parts of me that rebel against God. So when I pray ‘your kingdom come’ I pray that God will tame, quell, heal, those parts of me that are not under his government. And as I do I find that I truly want to be rid of them. I want to change.

The kingdom of God is present in Good Shepherd. But there are still footholds of rebellion and resistance. So we pray for the coming of God’s kingdom here—that in every way Good Shepherd will conform to the word of God so that what is taught from this pulpit, what is said at coffee hour, what we say to each other and think about each other, what we do with the money God’s given us, what we spend our time on as a church will more perfectly reflect a people under the yoke of Christ, under his Lordship. And as we pray that God works in us to make that a corporate desire and the life of this body changes.

The kingdom of God is present in the world. Whenever and wherever believers meet together to hear his word, to partake of his sacraments, the kingdom is made present. The kingdom is present in millions of congregations around the world but it’s not everywhere. The world is still in rebellion against God. Millions of people worship false gods. Millions of people live in open rebellion against the law of God. Human governments, which were given by God to protect human life,  preserve the good and restrain evil, oppress the poor, neglect the sick, starve the hungry, kill the unborn and imprison the innocent. And so we pray for God’s kingdom to come. We that individual people and families and nations and governments will repent, surrender, and come under the gentle and loving Lordship of Jesus Christ and submit to his good and perfect law.

And as we pray that prayer, God’s Spirit works not only to accomplish what pray for but to move is to long for it and to drive us out into the world to do what we pray be done.

Application/Prayer

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