Sermon: Steadfast in Prayer

Sermon by Matt Kennedy
Colossians 4:2-4
Sunday July 17th, 2011

You can listen to/download the mp3 audio here

Last year I lead a Christian ed series on spiritual disciplines. I read a lot of books about prayer and learned many helpful things. At the same time I came away from that study feeling like a really bad Christian.  The authors of the books I read seemed so spiritual, their lives bathed in enriching, fulfilling prayer.

I often feel the same way after prayer meetings with other pastors. God seems to talk to them all the time.  I mean, God definitely communicates with me and sometimes he’s extremely clear—usually when I am about to sin or in the middle of sinning—but I don’t have this ongoing give and take conversation with him that others seem to have.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very disciplined. I pray regularly.

And I can see how God has used prayer to change me and change the people and circumstances around me.

In fact, if you look down at verses 3-4 where Paul asks the Colossians to pray for him, you’ll notice that Paul, scripture in general, assumes that God uses the prayers of his people to change circumstances, to open hearts, to give clarity of speech; that God uses my prayers and yours to change the world, to move hearts, and he uses my prayer to change me.

So, it’s not that I find prayer ineffective. It’s just that I find it very hard. It’s hard to concentrate. It’s hard to feel like anything is happening.

I rarely feel a strong connection to God in prayer.

I know that God hears every thought before I think it (Psalm 139:2) and knows every need before I need it (Matt 6:32) and every request before I request it (139:4). And I know that the Spirit helps me in my weakness—that when I do not know what to pray for, the Spirit intercedes for me with groanings too deep for words. And I know that he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit who dwells in me, and that the Spirit intercedes for followers of Jesus according to the will of God (Romans 8:26-27).

All these truths are true. And I’ve seen miracles. I’ve seen God use prayer to open doors where doors didn’t’ even exist. But because I don’t regularly come away from prayer with a sense that I’ve been in real communion with God, it’s easy for me to get discouraged. It’s easy to enter into prayer without with a real expectation that God is there and active and moving in my life.

There is, in other words, often a sense of futility about prayer.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

The New Testament anticipates that frustration.

“In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” (Luke 18:2-5)

What is Jesus’ point in that parable? We’re told explicitly in verse 1. Jesus told this parable “to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.”

Jesus knows you. He knows me. He knows that we’re weak and easily discouraged in our prayers. So he says don’t quit.

Don’t let your emotions rule your prayer life.

Pray and keep praying and don’t stop praying.

How different God is with his children than I am with mine. When Aedan wants something he asks and asks and asks—he’s the most persistent child we’ve had. I feel for his future wife. And when I’ve had enough I tend to lose my temper and I say, “Back off! If you ask me one more time I am going to destroy you.”

But God is an infinitely better Father than I am. God says, and he says it over and over again, come to me. Keep coming to me. Don’t stop. I’m not the unjust judge. I hear you. I’ll act on your behalf. I’ll do what is good for you—if you ask me for bread I won’t give you a snake. Know that, even when you can’t feel it. 

So to the Colossian church Paul writes, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”(4.2)

The phrase, “continue steadfastly” means in Greek: “continue steadfastly”.  It’s in the imperative—that means it’s a command. Pray and keep praying.

So why is this command necessary and why is it hard to keep? Many people, myself included, associate the presence and power of God with a movement of the heart. So when I’m moved by worship, when I’m on a spiritual mountaintop, I say, “God is here. This place is filled with the Spirit. I can feel him.”

But since that experience is rare and fleeting not daily, you can begin to experience prayer as a lonely exercise of the will rather than a true communion with God.

So the problem is that we associate God’s presence with our experience of God’s presence—and when we do that we look in the wrong direction.

The bible more often associates the movement of God in your life—the filling of the spirit—with decisions you make. A decision to be obedient in an area of your life in which your emotions and passions are drawing you in the opposite direction is a “Spirit filled” decision. A decision, for example, to forgive when every fiber in your body screams out for vengeance is a “Spirit filled” decision—a decision God’s Spirit has moved you to. How do I know that?

Here’s one example among many biblical examples of the same principle. The author of Hebrews prays this for his readers: May the God of peace, “equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” (Hebrews 13:21)

That prayer, and there are many like it, assumes that Doing what God wants you to do because he wants you to do it, is God working in you. You would not have the power to do his will on your own. You do his will because the God of peace has equipped you to do it. You do what is pleasing in his sight because he is working in you. The prayer in Hebrews 13:21 assumes that obedience itself is an indication and tangible manifestation of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

So you’re sitting there laboring to pray even when you don’t feel like it and feeling condemned and alienated from God because you’re not experiencing anything—and yet ironically all the while what you are doing, laboring in prayer, is one of the clearest tangible evidences of God’s power in your life.

A decision no matter how difficult on your part to be steadfast in prayer even when you feel nothing—is the power of the Holy Spirit in your life. God is at that moment changing your mind and moving your will and conforming you to his Son.

The call to pray steadfastly, day after day, is then, like so much of the Christian life, a call to work out your salvation with fear and trembling because God works in you to will and to work for his good pleasure (Phil 2:12)

Okay let’s keep moving.

What does it mean to be “watchful” in prayer? The word translated as “watchful” could also be translated “alert”. Peter uses the same word when he warns us to watchful for the devil who prowls around like a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). The word is the same word we get the name “Gregory” from and it often—and I think this is the case in Colossians 4:2 given Paul’s concerns in vv3-4—carries a hint of threat.

To be watchful in prayer is to be tuned in to threats—threats to you and to the church and to the spread of the gospel.

Threats come from the flesh—the fallen nature, the temptations of the world, and the devil.

Satan is real and he hates you. He hates your family. He hates the church. He wants to pull us down. He wants you to stay home. He wants you to complain. He wants you to gossip. He wants you to lust. He wants you to be unforgiving. He wants you to despair. And he uses the world around you and your own flesh, your weaknesses and passions to bring his desires to fruition. And he uses your sins to destroy others around you.

Here’s how. How many like gossip? If you love to get some tasty information and pass it on, our enemy will do all he can to set as much savory sweet knowledge about other people in your ears as he can. If you’re not watchful over your own tendency to gossip, you’ll swallow that lure and be hooked every time. And when you do, you’ve not only set yourself in a bad place but you’ve damaged the Body. You’ve hurt other people. Do you see how this works. God works all things for the good of those who love him…Satan seeks to use all of your weaknesses both to hurt you and kill the Body of Christ.

How many here love to share the gospel with non-Christians? Satan hates the gospel. He hates it when individuals and congregations act on the mission Jesus gave his church. So he does everything he can to encourage you and me and us not to do it. He uses resentments to divide us. He uses a love of comfort and a fear of risk to hobble us. He uses our individual sin issues to impede and impair and infect other people to the church body weak and inactive.

He wants us to be petty, small, angry, comfortable and proud in Jesus’ name.

So we must be watchful. Do you know where you are weakest? Do you know your deepest temptations? Do you know which conversations you need to avoid, which websites you ought not to visit, which thoughts you ought not indulge? Examine yourself and offer those weaknesses in prayer to God. Ask him to protect you, strengthen you, give you his grace not only to resist but to overcome them not only for your sake but for the sake of those who are bound to you forever in the Spirit.

And watch over us in prayer as well.

How many here have a parish phone list? Use it as a prayer list. Take a page a day and pray for everyone on that list. If you know specific needs or problems, pray for them. If not pray that God will protect, bless, and draw each person closer to his Son Jesus Christ. If you don’t know whether someone on that list is a believer, pray that God will move that person to trust in Jesus Christ. 

To be watchful in prayer is to stand on the walls of your heart, to stand on the battlements of the church, and to scan the high places and the valleys and when we see weakness, temptation, division, rebellion, when we see opposition to the spread of the gospel—we pray because God uses prayer to defeat Satan, spread his kingdom, and to make his people holy and obedient.

Finally, Paul adds, pray with thanksgiving. Being thankful in prayer means observing and recognizing God’s grace.

Inhale and exhale. Given the fact that you and I have sinned against God about 20 times since we woke up this morning, we shouldn’t be able to do that. That’s grace. He gives you food. He gives you money. He gives you clothes. People love you. God came himself to live and die in your place and take away your sins and he rose from the dead so that you and I would never taste death. We can go to him whenever we desire and he hears us. He’s promises never to forsake us.

Those are all general things, let’s get specific: We have a place to worship four times the size of our last place and a congregation to worship with twice the size it was three years ago in direct answer often unconfident and unbelieving prayer. I’ve seen in my personal life, and if you think about it you have too, God answer prayer over and over again in miraculous ways.

What do think happens when you make a daily habit of recognizing that? Let me just give you a few things that happen to me:

For me, I’m a lot less envious. I should be dead. Instead, I have a family and a home and a job and I’m going to heaven when I die and one day I’ll rise again. When I make a habit of seeing that I’m less prone to complain to God, less likely to look at what some other pastor has and say, why can’t my church be that big?

I’m happier, seeing my life—even the difficult parts and the parts that mean pain—as coming directly from the hand of my father who loves me—I find pleasure in what I have and meaning in pain.

Finally, I pray more. Thankfulness remedies my emotional deadness. I may not feel like prayer is accomplishing much. But when I look at what God has actually done through prayer, I’m motivated to pray.

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