“God-Centered Prayer”
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God-Centered Prayer
September 2, 2010
by Rev. William “Buck” Day
I want to invite you to follow along with our Scripture. If you’d like, you can take the red pew bibles and turn to page 430, if you would rather follow along in your pew bible you are certainly welcome to do that. We are going to be looking at the very beginning of the book of Nehemiah, a good book about how God uses Nehemiah to bring back the people to Jerusalem. So we start at the very beginning of the book of Nehemiah. I invite you to follow along either in your pew bibles or on the screen, as well. (Nehemiah 1:1-5) God’s word for us today!
The words of Nehemiah, son of Hacaliah. In the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, while I was in Susa the capital, 2one of my brothers, Hanani, came with certain men from Judah; and I asked them about the Jews that survived, those who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem.
3They replied, “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.”
4When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.
5I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments…”
Then as you see, his prayer continues, but we are going to stop right there. Would you join me in prayer?
Lord we thank you that you are the God who knows us, who is intimately involved with our lives. Lord we ask that you would by your Holy Spirit within each of us quicken our minds to hear what you have for us that we might grow closer to you as a result. In your name. Amen.
Well a young man had just finished his Bible study at church on a Wednesday night and he was thinking about what they had been learning. The pastor had been teaching about how to hear God speak. He went out with some of his buddies that were a part of that study and they were talking about how God had led them in many different ways over the course of their lifetime. He thought, “You know, I wonder if God would ever speak to me?” Did you ever have that thought? As he was finishing up with his buddies, he got into his car and he was driving home and he just said, “God if you still speak to people, will you speak to me? Will you speak to me and I will do my best to try to obey.” He was trying to live out the words of the prophet Samuel, when Samuel was just a young boy and he said, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:9)
As he was heading home, he had this thought to buy a gallon of milk. He thought, “What? I don’t need milk.” And he kind of just brushed it off, but the thought continued. He thought, “Lord, this is a little crazy. I don’t know if this is you speaking or just something in my mind; I don’t know.” But the thought wouldn’t leave him. So he thought, “O.K. I will stop and get a gallon of milk, I don’t need it, but if it is you calling Lord I want to be obedient to that; and if not, then I have some extra milk and I will use it anyway.” So he got his milk and he was pretty proud that he had done what he thought God was leading him to do. He got in his car and he was driving home. He drove past a street and he got the urge to turn there and he went, “This is crazy. I am just going to continue driving.” He drove a couple more blocks but the thought just persisted and he thought, “Lord, this is getting weird.” He turns around, goes back to that street, turns down the street and he says, “O.K. Lord, I turned, just like you wanted me to.” He drove a couple more blocks and he felt the nudges to pull over to the side of the road. He looked around and there were some small houses. By this time it was getting late and most of the houses were dark. He thought, “Oh Lord, what are you doing?” He goes, “This is crazy God. I mean, I want to be obedient, but what am I doing here? These people are all asleep. I don’t want them to get mad at me.” And yet he felt this nudge to go across the street and take this milk to this house that was all dark. As he opened the door, he goes, “Lord, I know the people might be really mad but I am going to do it. What I am going to do is I am going to go up to the door and I will knock and if no one is there, I will drop the milk and I will run.” So he went up to the door and knocked on the door. He heard a voice yelling “Who is it? What do you want?” Oh-oh! Before he could turn and run, a man had opened the door and he was not too happy. He says, “What do you want?” So the man just took the milk and he held it out and he said, “Here, this is for you.” At that point the man took the milk, he turned and he ran down the hallway yelling something in Spanish. All of a sudden there was a woman who came and took the milk and headed towards the kitchen. The man came back holding a baby with tears running down his eyes. He said, “We were just praying. It has been a tough month. We ran out of money and we needed milk for the baby and we didn’t know what to do so we were praying that God would provide money.” And you hear from the woman in the kitchen, “We were praying for an angel to bring milk. Are you an angel?” At that point the man pulled out his wallet and took out all the money he had in it and gave it to the young father, turned and walked back to his car with tears running down his cheeks.
So the next time you see a gallon of milk just remember, God speaks. God continues to speak.
I put this verse on your study sheet. I think it sets the table for us tonight. It says “Prayer does not fit us for greater work; prayer is the greater work” The story of this young man is as much about the transformation of his obedience and him becoming closer to the Lord as it is about answered prayer. For the truth is that God does speak today. God still speaks, he has never stopped speaking. The God who spoke to Moses at the burning bush is still speaking today; and more importantly, I think, God wants us to hear him. God wants us to hear him so that we might be changed just as that young man was in the story, for he has things to say to you and to me, things that if we hear them we will be changed for the good.
I think the catch for too many of us however is that we have what might be called spiritual wax in our ears and it blocks our ability to hear God. That spiritual wax is really all the worldly noise that bombards us each and every day. That noise takes lots of different forms and it is probably different for all of us but it has the same function—it blocks our ability to hear God. It can be simply the busyness of our lives and just being running around like so many of us do. Maybe it is the intoxicating draw of the media and entertainment and how technology is just beginning to consume more and more of our lives. Perhaps for some of us it is simply just the desire to compartmentalize our lives, to have all our little different buckets where we live because it is just easier to manage that way and they never have to interact with each other. Or perhaps it is simply for many of us, I know, it is just an unwillingness to be still, to be quiet. That is a scary thing for many of us.
And the truth is that God does in fact want to be heard. God does want to be heard but he will not compete against the noise in our lives. He wants to empower us, he wants to direct us, he wants to use us. All too often we are not listening; we are not listening, so we need a little spiritual ear care, if you will.
So what we want to do today is to look at a process and kind of work backwards with the end result being able to hear God better and one of the pieces that lead us to that point where we can hear God. What needs to be in place for that to happen? To do that, to start that process, we need to start with something that is true about God one hundred percent of the time. It is a known unchangeable fact about God. It is stated in many places in Scripture but I think perhaps most clearly it is stated in James 4:6 which is really just a quote from Psalm 138 and it says: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. God wants nothing to do with those who think they have got the world by the tail. He wants nothing to do with those who want to see how much they can get out of the world and the world is simply there for their taking and there to serve them. In fact, I think God, in fact, even battles against that. Rather, God wants humility. When we are humble, he will respond one hundred percent of the time to give blessings and kindness.
David writes in Psalm 51 right after the prophet Nathan had called him out for his affair with Bathsheba. He says, “God wants a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, God will not refute.” God will not turn his back on those who have a broken spirit. I think it is important for us to be clear what a broken spirit really is. If we think about a broken spirit in terms of our world, we say, “Man, the person’s spirit has just been broken.” We usually use the word crushed, right, maybe. It is someone who has been crushed and who has been broken and who has been beaten down to the point where they are devastated and have no hope. We think about people in our world like that. We potentially could say that many people on the Gulf Coast over the last half dozen years could easily have a broken spirit, using that term; but thinking of a broken spirit in that kind of thinking is not a biblical understanding of a broken spirit. A person with a broken spirit from a biblical point of view is someone who is bruised and who is broken, but broken in the right places and not completely broken so that it results in humility and there is not a loss of hope. The hope remains. And when a person has a broken spirit they don’t carry anger with them. They don’t fear punishment. They don’t have a lowered self-esteem. They simply know that they can not exalt themselves. There is nothing within them that is to exalt. And a broken spirit opens the door towards true piety. A broken spirit is really what James was talking about when he says “humility”.
God wants us to have a broken spirit. And a broken spirit is a prerequisite for hearing God. And then if we are going to back up another step beyond that then, a broken spirit begins with a restored view of God. Let’s move to that text and let’s see how that plays out. If you want, open your bibles because we are going to look at verse 5 right here. Nehemiah has been in service to the King of Persia. He has raised himself up. He has been raised up to a point of high level service to the King. He receives word through his brothers that things are not going well back in Judea, in Jerusalem in particular. The people are hurting and the city is in pieces, basically, is what we read. And Nehemiah’s response is to sit down and weep and mourn over those events and he does it, it says, for days. Think about that. When was the last time that something broke you to the point where you just simply had to stop and weep? The text also continues and it says that he fasted and he prayed for four months. This is the beginning of his prayer that he was praying during that time, and that is what I want us to focus on. Look at how he describes God in verse 5. He starts with calling God, LORD, all in capitals; and, if you remember, we have talked about that— that is God’s personal name, that is the name Yahweh. So he is saying, “LORD, I am going to call you by your personal name because God you are the one I know personally, Yahweh.” Then he continues, he says, “You are the God of heaven,” in other words, he is saying God you are the maker of everything I see. You are the one who spoke it into existence. Then he says, “You are the great,” and great here is referencing God’s enormity, how big God is, the magnitude of God; that he is bigger than the universe that they could see and the universe that we know of God is bigger than that. That is what he is referencing there. Then he says, “You are the awesome God” and here he is talking about how God in his power and in his might is to be feared. He is totally other than you and I. Then he says, “You are the one who keeps the covenant in steadfast love with those who love him.” He is saying you keep your covenant of love. You are not going to abandon us, he is saying in this prayer.
This is the start of Nehemiah’s prayer. He is focusing on God, first and foremost. Now think about that for a minute. He has just learned his homeland has been destroyed, his people are a mess and what does he do? He starts praying praises to God. In this prayer there are over forty-four references to God whether it be by name, by character or by pronouns. What Nehemiah is doing here is he is praying a God-centered prayer. He is not focused on the needs. He is focused on God.
Now take a moment and think about your own prayer life. When there is a need that is brought into your life, what’s the first thing we pray? God, help me with this. God, I need this. Isn’t it? All too often I think our prayers point to us rather than God. I want to give you an experiment if you daring enough to try. Take something that will record your voice— whether it be a voice recorder, whether it be a tape recorded, whatever it is; maybe it is on your computer, what ever it might be— and set it up to record your prayers. Then just pray as you normally would. Then go back and listen to it. Go back and listen to it and listen for the focus of the prayer. Is it focused here, in my little world, or is it focused here? Now let me just add a little caveat here. I am not saying that we shouldn’t ask God for things. That is called supplication. That is what we are supposed to do. But all too often that is where we start rather than that is where we end. If you have heard the acronym A.C.T.S., adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, which is asking God for the things that are on your heart. We start with the “S” all too often. What I am saying is we need to start with the “A”.
Then what I want you to do is to go back and begin to start to pray beginning with praying by focusing on God, put God at the center of your prayer; pray his attributes, pray his character and as you do that I think you will find that harder than you think; because we have this tendency, I think, to slip pass the “adoration” piece and go to either the “thanksgiving” or the “supplication” piece. One of the things I do in groups sometimes is when we get together to pray I’ll say, “O.K. let’s pray, let’s start by praising God for who he is.” Then I sit back and listen and inevitably I am always amazed that we start by saying, “God we praise you for this. God, thank you for this.” And all of a sudden it just morphs into “thank yous”. Think about this. What is the difference between these two phrases? I praise you God for your grace or I thank you God for your grace? What’s the difference? Thank you is about…we say thanks when we receive something, don’t we? All of a sudden, it is very subtle, but all of a sudden you see how we shifted the focus. So what we want to do is to say “I praise you God for your grace. I praise you God for your mercy. I praise you God for your compassion. I praise you God for your Son.” That is adoration. That is what Nehemiah is praying here.
And when we focus on God-centered prayers there are a couple things that will happen. One is that we will realize the bigness of God. We will understand God’s power and his sovereignty that will begin to bubble up within us. And as God gets bigger, guess what? Our problems get smaller. God is able to handle our issues— the things that are on our heart— much more easily. God gets bigger when we pray God-centered prayers.
Another thing I think we can say about God-centered prayers is as we raise the level of our prayers, our faith raises to the same level. Our big and powerful God can do amazing things and our faith increases as the levels of our prayers increase. One other thing, when we pray God-centered prayers, when the focus is on God and not on us and we continue in that focus, what happens is we become people of worship. Our prayers become worship to the “Maker of heaven” so that we can join with all of heaven that continues to sing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty; the whole world is filled with his glory.” We can join that chorus that goes on in heaven. Hearing God, getting the spiritual wax out of our ears if you will, begins right here, begins with a broken spirit. I should say a broken spirit leads us into you, God. A broken spirit comes from a restored view of God and a God-centered prayer helps us to hear God more clearly.
So I invite you, what’s on your heart today? Where do you need to lift up the things that are on your heart before God? I invite you to do that as you start with God-centered prayers and see what happens.
Let’s pray.
God, thank you that you are a God who is faithful to us and Lord we come before you and we give you praise. We give you praise because of who you are. You are the God of the universe and you interact with your creation on every level. Praise and glory to you, O God, now and forever! Amen.