Prayer and Alignment with God

...music. I think we don't need a sermon anymore. It's fantastic. Really wonderful. So Mr. Thomas made reference to the fact that things were going to get really excruciating in here in half an hour. I'm hoping he wasn't talking about my sermon. But I guess I'll leave that for everyone else to judge in a few minutes' time once I get going.

So I'm going to steal a bit of a chapter from Mr. Thomas' playbook and let you know. I won't necessarily call it a series, but I've been thinking about dwelling on the topic of prayer over the course of the next few messages that I give. And so I wanted to start into that today and talk a little bit about that topic. Now, not surprisingly, where I want to start is in Matthew 6, which is probably to most people in the Christian world.

The most popular, most well-known prayer that they've heard. So let's start in Matthew 6, and we'll read verses 5 through 13.

Matthew 6, verse 5. Jesus talking says, When you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly I say to you, they have their reward.

But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, don't use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, don't be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him. Therefore, in this manner, pray.

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

Now, I'd like to focus maybe on a bit of an unlikely place here as we start the message today, and that's in verse 8. Verse 8. And where it says, Your Father knows the things that you have need of before you ask Him. So the natural question coming after a line like that is, why in the world do we need to pray? If He already knows what it is that we need. And what is the purpose for prayer?

Verse 9 says, and in this verse we should hone in on the word, therefore. What does the word, therefore, mean? It means, as a result of the things that I've said, as a result of what you see beforehand. In this case, it says, pray in this manner. So I'd like to look at the Lord's prayer through this lens of the fact that God knows the things that we need before we ask Him. And as a result of that fact, we're supposed to pray in the manner that's shown in the Lord's prayer. I think we all understand the Lord's prayer is meant as an outline. It doesn't say, pray these exact words. It's really given to us as a model, as an outline for how we should pray. And as we look through that prayer, we look through each of the lines and each of the clauses in it. I think it's very interesting to see where those lines, where those elements are directed. Especially as we think about the fact that we should pray in this manner because of the fact that God already knows what we need. And what I'd like to see is how much of the prayer is focused not on us, but on God. It starts with, our Father in heaven hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And it wraps up again at the end of the prayer, saying, yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Approximately half of this prayer is focused on God, His purpose, His kingdom and His greatness. And we're supposed to pray that way because God already understands what we need. What I'd like to talk a bit about today is the fact that a reason for us to pray is to get in alignment with God. Now, prayer is a big topic, and so I'm not saying this is the only reason, this is the only dimension of it, because there are many different reasons that we pray. And depending on where we are in life, the trials that we're dealing with and so forth, obviously God understands and knows the fact that we're going to pray heavily about the things that are on our minds. But as we step back, we think broadly about prayer. I want to focus today on the fact, especially as we look at this model prayer, that one of the major reasons for us to pray and to pray in the way that we do is to get in alignment with God. Now, alignment can mean a lot of different things. I know we've got a few car enthusiasts here, one in the back who's rebuilding his old car that he had as a kid. And alignment has to do a lot with the tires on your car, right? And the wheels and how they're aligned, if you own a vehicle. I don't know how many of you have owned an all-wheel drive vehicle, but I had a friend when I lived back in Colorado who had one. He let his car get out of alignment. And when that car was out of alignment with a four-wheel drive vehicle, all four tires went bad within a few thousand miles, because that car was out of alignment. Now, we think of alignment in a corporate sense. We're dealing with different people who are working on different teams.

Often the boss will talk about the fact that I need to get my team in alignment with where I'm going, which means that they need to send the message down, they need to talk about exactly where they're going, what the strategy is, where everyone fits in that strategy, so every part of that corporate team is focusing and moving in the same direction. We see the same sort of thing happen with sports teams. And when a team isn't playing well, like the Cavaliers the first half of this season, people wonder, is everyone in alignment? Kevin Love looks droopy on the bench. Is he unhappy and not meshing well with the rest of the team? Is everyone aligned to the same purpose? Is someone playing selfishly? Is someone else not playing the part that they're supposed to and trying to be something within the team that they're not supposed to be? Alignment is incredibly important in all of the different things that we do. And in our Christian lives, alignment and being aligned with God's purpose, His plan and where He's going, is critical to our lives. Turn with me, if you will, to Psalm 46, verses 8 through 10. Psalm 46, verses 8 through 10 will focus here on a key verse that tells us more about getting in alignment with God. Psalm 46, verses 8 through 10.

Psalm 46, verses 8 says, Come, behold the works of the Lord, who has made desolations in the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two. He burns the chariot in the fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. And it's there in chapter 10 that I want to focus. If you read this entire psalm through, you'll see that it takes a turn in verse 10. The verses ahead of that are a prayer of David. But in verse 10, it actually shifts, and it's God speaking, and God saying, Be still and know that I am God, and giving that instruction to David, as though that's coming into his mind as he's praying and as he's writing these words. Looking at Barn's commentary, focused on the words, Be still, it says that the word used here is from the Hebrew word, rafa, which means properly to cast down, to let fall, to let hang down, to be relaxed or slacken, especially the hands. So you think of a fighter, somebody who's grappling with something, and you think of the tension and the stress as you're fighting with something. The command here is, Be still. Let your arms drop, relax, and be still, and know that I am God. That's what God is saying. It's employed in the sense of not making an effort, not putting forth exertion, and would express the idea of leaving matters with God, or of being without anxiety about the issue. Compare it to Exodus 14, verse 13, the commentary continues, where it says, Stand still, in this case talking to, I believe it was Joshua, and see the salvation of God. In this place, the word seems to be used as meaning that there was to be no anxiety, there was to be calm, confiding, and a trustful state of mind in view of the displays of God's divine presence and power. The mind was to be calm in view of the fact that God had interposed and shown that he was able to defend his people when surrounded by dangers. So in the balance of this short message, let's think of two words just to keep in mind as we go through the rest of it. One of it, one word is yieldedness, being yielded.

And the second is simply time. Yieldedness and time. Now, when we reflect on our society today, it's really not about yielding, but rather about seizing the reins. Again, when you think of that word to be still and how it means just let your hands go slack. But in our world, it's all about seizing the reins, isn't it? It's about being in control. It's about being the master of your own fate. And when we think about alignment, when we're not thinking about how our mind is thinking, the direction that we're going, we're going to tend to go in the way that the society around us is going. And the areas that seem to influence us the most are filled with this idea of self-promotion and self-determination. Think about entertainment. Think about sports. Think about politics. What's it all about? Why am I better than you? Don't diss me. This is my house. You have to respect me when you're here. It's all about the control that the individual has. And people want to make a name for themselves, whether it's in politics, at work, in any group that they're in. They want to be seen. They want to be recognized. They want to be known as the one who can take control. And sometimes even violent behavior happens when somebody feels like they've been disrespected. If I remember Aaron Hernandez, who was the tight end for the New England Patriots. He's serving a life prison sentence now without parole. He said that he killed two men because they spilled a drink on him in a bar. And it was disrespectful to him, and he couldn't take it. I'm sure there were more motives than that, but that was at the heart of it. Kanye West recently put out a song called I Am God. And I'm not going to play the song, and I'm not going to read the lyrics, because they're not really appropriate for this sort of a venue. But according to an interview that he did in W magazine, his song I Am God was inspired by a serious disc from a major fashion designer named Hedy Slimane. A few days before the Paris Fashion Week in autumn 2012, West was informed that he'd be invited to a widely anticipated runway show only on the condition that he agreed not to attend any other shows. So the next day I went to the studio with Daft Punk and I wrote I Am God, West says. Because it's like, yo, nobody can tell me where I can and can't go. I am the number one living and breathing rock star. I am Axel Rose. I am Jim Morrison. I am Jimi Hendrix. You can't say that you love music and then say that Kanye West can't come to your show. To even think they could tell me where I could and couldn't go is just ludicrous. It's blasphemous to rock and roll and to music. Now, Kanye West seems to think that he's relatively important, and his other quotes that he's made and his other actions would pretty much go along with that. Now, none of us claim the title of being the world's greatest rock star, so this doesn't necessarily impact us directly. But how is it that we view control in our lives? How much do we have this attitude amongst ourselves individually as we think about our lives? I'm going to take control. I'm going to go where I'm going to go, and nobody's going to stand in my way. This idea started in the Garden of Eden. If you'll turn with me to Genesis 3.

Genesis 3, a very familiar passage here in verses 1 through 4. As Satan comes into the Garden of Eden, he's talking to Eve in this case, after the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life were there, and Adam and Eve received certain instructions about what they were to eat of and what they were to do. And in Genesis 3, verse 1, it says, The serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

And he said to the woman, As God indeed said, You shall not eat of every tree of the garden. And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.

Then the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

As we've heard talked about many times before, this is really the genesis of the approach to life that mankind, as a society, has. In the idea that we don't need something outside of ourselves, we don't need God to tell us how things should be, we've got the control, we've got the power, we've got the say-so over our lives, and we're going to direct the way that it goes.

This continued on if we look at the Tower of Babel, when everyone got together and tried to build this tower, most people think the idea of that tower was to try to reach up into the heavens.

And then when we think of the time of the Flood, and how it talked about people before the Flood, doing all of these things that came into their minds, no consideration for God's way or God's law.

If we're honest and look at our lives within this world, so much of it is about having control and having independence.

Especially when we think of our American society, we rightfully take pride in our Independence Day on July 4th as a country, and we pride ourselves as people and as individuals in our independence being probably our greatest value.

When we look at the way that we view different things going on in society, the welfare state and things like that, so much of the dialogue in this country is about being independent and being able to drive your own fate. And while in one way that's a good approach, ultimately I think we all know that we are dependent on God.

But as a society and as people, one of the things that we do is we build these shelves around ourselves to wall ourselves off and to insulate us from the fact that we are dependent. If we're cold, we turn up the heat. If we're warm, we turn on the air conditioning. If we need to go to the store, if we're hungry, we get in the car and we go to the store. What are we removed from? We're removed from the cycle of the seasons. If we're removed from whether there's a bad harvest or a good harvest, we're removed from all of these things that God has set in place within nature as the environment that we need to live in and to learn some lessons from as we live in it. And so we build these things up around us and we create this illusion for ourselves that we're in control of life and we can drive the way that things go. And in a split second, that can change. So anyone who's been in a car accident before or seen a sudden health emergency happen, we know how quickly we're stripped naked of those things that we've layered on top of ourselves in this illusion that we're in control. And in those moments of clarity, we suddenly realize that we are completely powerless and we're here at the mercy of God. And that's something that we need to understand and think about on a daily basis. Turn with me to James 4. James 4. Talking again about this attitude. James 4, verses 13 through 16. Understanding our need and our reliance on God. James 4, verse 13. Come now you who say today or tomorrow will go out to such and such a city. Spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit. You don't know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It's even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that. But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So this recognition that it's God who drives our lives and has ultimate control over our lives, and whose will and his direction we understand, need to understand, is something that needs to be in the forefront of our lives. So as we look at our prayers, coming back to this topic then again of prayer, one of the things we have to ask ourselves, and I'm speaking to myself as much as anyone, as I'm having to dig in and for my own good look at this topic, how much time do we spend in our prayers explaining to God why he needs to follow our will? And how much time do we spend in our time before God contemplating and praying for his will, as the master of the universe? I want to be careful here because God does want to hear from us. He wants to hear what's on our minds. He wants to hear our real thoughts. But at the same time, we need to understand what it is that we're driving towards and what we're trying to develop as our relationship with God matures. And just like as a parent, we like to hear from our children. When our children are two and three years old, we love to hear them just chatter away, don't we? And they babble and they talk about whatever nonsense is coming along, and it's fantastic and it's cute. Now if a 25-year-old comes along and is doing the same thing, we don't really look at it the same way, do we? And that's part of the idea of maturing in the way that we speak to God, and understanding and moving forward and acknowledging His will instead of always trying to drive our will forward. For the next passage in this sermon, I'd like to turn to Garth Brooks. If you'll give me just a moment.

All right. Second special music for the day. I think that helps to make the point. I think we can all, I certainly can, I can't speak for all of you, but I can certainly, as I reflect back to less mature times, just six months ago or so, of praying prayers of that sort, right? God, just, this is what I want. Why don't you just give it to me? And I promise I'll do all of these other things. I think this song is such a poignant way of pointing out the fact that as time goes by and as we understand and see that stream, that flow of what God has planned out, it works and He's out for the best for us and our ultimate good. And the more that we can come in line with His will, the more we'll be happy and developed and spiritually fulfilled in the long term.

Let's talk a little bit more about time now, moving on from the idea of yieldedness. And we'll turn to Hebrews 8, Hebrews 8 verses 3 and 4.

I'm always amazed when I hear about and see some of the things technologically that mankind did a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. You know, you hear about the pyramids and how they're perfectly aligned in order to follow the rising and the setting of the sun. And how much mankind knew about the movement of the heavens, about mathematics, about building, so many years ago, before any of the technologies and computers that we have today ever existed. And it's a factor of time.

Man, back then, didn't have a lot to do in terms of entertainment. When it was dark, you had a candle at most, you didn't have lights, you could do everything you otherwise did or would want to do. And a lot of time was spent thinking and contemplating, looking at the heavens, observing things that were going on, talking and exchanging ideas and thinking through problems.

And I think at a depth that we're not even capable, probably, of doing today, most of us. Hebrews 8 is some of the outgrowth of this in verses 3 and 4. This is a quote from the Psalms where David wrote, When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you've ordained, what is man that you're mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?

So what David was saying is that as I sit back and I contemplate, I look up at the heavens and see the stars at night looking up into the sky. How incredible and how vast that is. It makes him wonder, why is it as man that you have an interest in me?

Psalms are full of the time that David took in meditating on God and thinking about him, thinking about his way, thinking about what was in his own mind and in his heart, thinking of the creation that God had put together. Jesus Christ as well took time to flee the multitudes. He went out and he found quiet. When he did that, he was usually in nature. He was up on a mountain or he was out by the sea.

He could see through the things going on around him, could think about God, his greatness and the things that he created. Sometimes it's more effective even to think about it in modern terms. I'd like to read a short passage from a book. There's a book by Philip Yancey called Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference? I'll read just a page and a half from that. Again, really saying the same thing David said, but in different, perhaps more modern words.

To climb a 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado, you need an early start, as in 4 o'clock in the morning early, but you need to limit coffee intake in order to avoid dehydration. You drive on chassis slapping rutted roads in the dark, always alert for wildlife, gaining elevation to somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 feet where the hiking trail begins.

Then you begin the hike by wending your way through a forest of blue spruce, lodgepole pine, and douglas fir on a trail that feels spongy underfoot from fallen needles. The ground gives off a pungent smell of decay and earth. You walk beside a tumbling creek, silvery white, and the pre-dawn moonlight gets burbling, the only sound, until the birds awake. Around 11,000 feet, the tree is thin, giving away lush meadows, carpeted, and wildflowers.

The sun is rising now, first casting a reddish alpine glow on the mountain tops, and then dropping its rays into the basins. Bright clumps of lupine, fireweed, columbine, and Indian paintbrush dapple the open spaces, while plants with more exotic names, monkshood, elephant's head, bishop's cap, chiming bell, marsh marigold, cluster near the water's edge.

You follow the creek up the basin, skirting cliff banks, until a climber's trail veers off to zigzag up the grassy shoulder of the peak you've chosen to climb. By now, your heart is racing like a sprinter's, and despite the morning chill, you feel sweat under your backpack.

You take a water break and head up the steep trail, forcing yourself to gut it out. The dawn chorus of birds has begun, and you're startled by a flash of indigo, bright as neon, as a flock of western bluebirds suddenly catches the sun's rays. The high-altitude wildflowers have shrunken into miniature versions of themselves. To really see them, you must stoop to their level, practicing what the locals call belly botany. Marmots, the alpine cousins of woodshucks, waddle to their lookout posts and whistle reports of your progress to their colleagues higher up. Down below, as you look, you see something, a tiny dot just at the edge of timberline.

No, it's two dots. Animals are merely rocks. One spot moves. Can't be a rock. A marmot? Size is too hard to judge up here. The second dot looks red. Could they be hikers?

You glance skyward, searching for signs of the thunderstorms that roll in before noon. If they are hikers, they're flirting with danger, starting their climb at least three hours too late. You watch the ant crawl progress as the tiny dots edge up the trail. And then it hits you. From this vantage point, three hours ago, you, too, were a dot like that, a speck of human life on a huge, hulking, weather-creating mountain that has little regard for it. You feel appropriately small, almost insignificant. You get a tiny, fractional glimpse of what God must see all the time. One of the Psalms describes thunder as the voice of the Lord who strikes the earth with flashes of lightning. We know, of course, that lightning occurs when a positively charged streamer rushes up from the ground to meet a negative charge at the bottom of a cloud. A hundred times a second, lightning strikes somewhere on earth. And I, for one, do not believe God personally programs each course. I have, however, been caught in terrifying storms near the summit of a mountain. With my ice axe humming and my scalp tingling, squatting with feet close together so the charge won't circuit through my body, spaced far enough for my partner to lessen the odds of us both dying, counting the seconds between bolts. Then, too, I get a glimmer of my true state, a helpless, two-legged creature, perched on the skin of a molten planet.

I live in daily hope of getting my life under control. At home, I left a desk covered with to-do lists, study the manual for my bulky printer, unclog pine needles in the gutter, unstick the toilet, change snow tires, check on my sick neighbor. Maybe if I take a day off, I'll have time. On the mountain, one bolt of lightning, splitting a rock on a nearby peak and exploding against my eardrums, exposes any illusion that I am ever in control. I can count on the moment before me and nothing more. Let me know how fleeting is my life, prayed one psalmist. A mountain storm thunderously answers that prayer. The priorities of my life crack apart and slide into a new place. Time, time to contemplate, is what I'd like us to think about briefly here as we wrap up today's message.

Again, if we think about the flow of what's happening in our society, Mr. Thomas gave an apt description last week about what our society teaches us, right? Have an addiction, find some way to become numb to everything going on around us and to ignore it. And what I'd like to add to that is don't think. When you get in the car, turn on the radio. Listen to sports talk or talk radio or whatever it is. When you get home, before you can stop and think too much or talk to anyone, turn on the TV and get plugged into that. And so often in life, if we talked to the people around us and we'd probably observe our own selves, we move from one input to another input and then get on Facebook. You know, Jesus Christ questions whether he'll find faith on the earth when he returns. I guess the one thing we can say is people who use Facebook have a lot of faith. At least my friends do because it seems like every crazy article about the latest health fad or political fad. Everyone has faith that whatever is written there is true. But we're plugged into this stuff 24-7, aren't we? How often do we have time to think and to contemplate, to reflect on the things going on in the world around us, to reflect on ourselves? Time is such an important element in going through these things and ordering things in our mind and understanding what it is that God is trying to do and how we fit into it. So as we conclude, let's turn back to Psalm 46 and again read verses 8-10. Psalm 46 verses 8-10.

So take this down to a very granular and very practical level as we look forward to the week and the weeks ahead. The challenge I'd like to give everyone to think about is these two things in terms of yieldedness and time with the backdrop of prayer against it. First of all, prayer. We know we need to do it. So I encourage everyone to think and look at our own lives. Are we making the time that we need to for prayer? When we pray, are we considering these elements that are talked about in the Lord's Prayer? The greatness of God, His kingdom and the need to come, His will, and the fact that the kingdom, the power and the glory is His forever. And are we praying those things to get our mind aligned and oriented towards the power of His will? And secondly, time. My challenge to myself as well as to all of you is find time, even if it's five minutes a day to start with, whether it's getting in the car and electing not to turn on the radio, and take that drive to work or that drive home, and just think as you're driving instead of taking the inputs, or instead of turning the TV on for that extra 15 or 20 minutes, take some time to sit back on your porch or on your balcony or whatever you have, look at the trees, look at the grass, watch the birds going back and forth, watch the deer eating your garden, and think about God and what He's put together and take that time. God is indeed great, and He's there to help us and to listen to us at all times, and as we mature in prayer and think about His well-being done, we can be even more effective in our spiritual lives.