It’s Time…To Pray
Luke 11:1-4
February 13, 2005
First Baptist Church, Wilson, NC

One day Satan sent an e-mail to his staff. He wrote: "We can’t keep Christians from going to church. We can’t keep them from reading their Bibles. We especially can’t keep them from forming a direct relationship with Christ, and once they gain that, our power over them is broken.

"So, LET them go to their churches. Let them have their covered dish dinners. BUT, steal their time, so they don’t have time to develop a relationship with Jesus.

"So my followers, this is what I want you to do. Distract them from their Savior. Keep them busy in the non-essentials of life. Tempt them to spend, spend, spend, and to borrow, borrow, borrow. Drive them to work 6-7 days a week, 10-12 hours each day, so they can afford their empty lifestyles. Keep them too busy to spend time with their spouses and with their children. Keep their TVs and VCRs and CDs and DVDs and PCs going constantly in their homes, so they can never hear the still, small Voice.

"Pound their minds with the news 24 hours a day. Flood their mailboxes with junk mail, catalogs, sweepstakes, and every kind of newsletter and promotional. Keep skinny beautiful girls on the magazine covers and hunky handsome men too, so that husbands and wives will pressure each other to look perfect all the time.

"Even in their recreation, let them be excessive, so that when they return from their recreation or their vacation, they are exhausted. And when they meet for spiritual fellowship, ensnare them in small talk and gossip until they leave with troubled consciences. Why, soon they will be working on their own strength and sacrificing their health and their family. It will work."

Well, that was the e-mail from Satan to his minions. How did I get it? I got it from our Chairman of Deacons. How he got it I have no idea…

It is true: part of the satanic strategy is busy-ness. It is also true that the church has gotten caught up in this incessant drumbeat of busy-ness. After all, some say, the pastor’s job is to keep everybody busy and everybody happy. But that is a precarious state in which the church rolls busily from one crisis to the next, nervously comparing itself to the church down the road, compulsively and competitively trying to do what other churches are doing. Whenever a church feels that it has arrived at some crossroads or crisis, its first impulse is to get busy and do something, anything.

But do you remember what Christ did whenever he came to a crossroads in his ministry or a crisis in his life? Jesus would do nothing … at first. Jesus would stop, and wait, and pray. In grade school our teachers taught us that if we are on fire, then don’t run around in a panic spreading the flames, just "stop, drop, and roll." In the Bible, our Lord teaches us that when there is a crisis or an emergency, then just stop, drop, and pray.

That is not our natural impulse. It is like driving a car on a slick road. When the tires start to slip off the road, our first impulse is to jerk the wheel in the opposite direction. But we learn to turn INTO the skid, and thus we regain control. When our lives are going into a skid, when a time of decision comes in our lives, we have to resist the urge to take impulsive action, but stop, and drop to our knees, and pray.

Remember how Christ would do this. The gospel of Luke shows this again and again:

• In Luke 3 it was when Jesus was praying that the Holy Spirit came upon him. (3:21-22)

• Luke 5:16 remembers how "he would withdraw to deserted places and pray."

• When he came to the crucial choice of who his disciples would be, "he went out to the mountain to pray." (6:12)

• It was one day when Jesus had been "praying alone" that he asked them who they thought he was, and Peter made his classis confession: "The Messiah of God." (9:18)

• It was when Jesus went up on the mountain to pray that the Transfiguration took place. (9:28)

• Jesus met the test at Gethsemane with prayer — If it’s possible Father, let this cup pass. Yet not my will, but yours. (22:40-42)

• He endured the test of the cross with prayer, "Father, forgive them…Father, into your hands I commend my spirit…" (23:34, 46)

At every turning point of his life, Jesus stopped and prayed.

And anyone who would dare to follow Jesus will do the same: at every turning point of our lives, we stop and pray. Then when we rise from prayer, our actions will not be compulsive or desperate. When we rise from prayer, our actions will come from that center within ourselves where we have sensed the Spirit and the will of God. That is the way for every individual follower of Jesus. And that is the way for us followers together as the church of Jesus.

WHENEVER THE CHURCH FACES A CROSSROADS OR A CRISIS, its way is not more activity, but to stop, to pray, and to wait on the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Martin Luther began each day with at least an hour of prayer. But on days that he knew would be very busy: four hours.

When our church met together on two Saturdays in January last year to seek God’s vision for our future together, we did more than just brainstorm together, we made sure to pause at each crucial point, and before we went any further, we prayed and listened and were still before that still small voice of God’s Spirit. When Daniel Vestal began his book It’s Time: An Urgent Call to Christian Mission, he did not begin with a list of things every church should do right now. He spent time focusing on our spiritual formation and our life of prayer first, and then he focused on the mission of the church second. He knows that a church that is not grounded in a deep inner life of the spirit will wither and die like a cut flower. A missional church is built on a foundation of prayer and spiritual discipline.

So when that mixture of danger and opportunity called crisis does come, we do not panic, we do not jerk the steering wheel. Rather, we listen to God in the center of our being, in the still small voice. In any crisis, at any crossroads, it’s time to pray.

PRAYER AS LISTENING TO GOD

We Baptists have usually defined prayer as simply talking to God. It’s not complicated, it’s just talking to God. But if that’s all we say about prayer, we miss something else very simple and very profound: prayer is simply listening to God, too. In fact, prayer is probably more listening to God than it is talking. Last Sunday I eavesdropped on the Adult IV Men’s Bible Study Group. Dr. Roger Bullard was telling a story about Mother Teresa:

I know that it not very logical. But to me it is very powerful.

What it is, is contemplative listening prayer. It is praying without a list, so we can hear what is on God’s mind, so we can hear the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ on prayer comes through in The Lord’s Prayer. It is so brief, in Luke only 38 words. That leaves a lot of time for listening!

Listening prayer is often a prayer of relinquishment, a prayer of letting go. As we listen and pray to God, we let go of our anxiety and competitiveness and compulsion. As we listen and pray, we let go of trying to measure our worth by our achievements. As we listen and pray, we can even let go of our addictions and our ambitions, our fiery temper and our acid tongue.

Listening prayer is thus emptying prayer. And as we are emptied, we find that we now have room to receive what God wants to give us. We now have room to receive the love of God, the free, unconditional love of God. When you listen to God long enough to hear God’s love for you, then success is no longer the quantity of your achievements; success becomes the quality of God’s love that has been given to you and that rests in you. What is true for individual Christians is true for the church. A successful church is not so by sheer quantity; a successful church is so by the quality of the love in the midst of its common life.

I think it can be particularly hard for a Baptist to learn listening prayer, because we are so good with words. We are not a silent people. When I once spent three weeks in silent prayer on a retreat with the Quakers at the Pendle Hill Retreat Center, they were amazed that a Baptist was among them. But every morning, the first thing we would do after breakfast was to gather together for 30 minutes of silent listening to God. Unforgettable. I was delighted to learn this week that one of our many women’s Bible study groups was given the challenge one week to spend thirty minutes in silent listening prayer. Powerful. Once you have that kind of experience, you want to find ways to build moments and hours and days into your life when you separate yourself from the rush and the noise to be alone with God. You want to make it a part of your life as regular as eating and sleeping, because you find that you need that time just as much as you need food and sleep. As the prayer of our Lord teaches, we need the forgiving love of God as much as we need our daily bread. We need time with the still, small Voice that tells us we are fully known and still fully loved. Here is what prayer really is: it is learning to listen to God tell us of God’s love for us.

-- Douglas E. Murray