[Machine transcription]
Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. Hallelujah! In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear saints, our gospel lesson takes us to Monday Thursday same place we were last week, the week before next week even Thursday on Ascension.
We’ll be listening to the Lord Jesus’ words from Monday Thursday to His apostles there and he says to them that I’m leaving and you’re not coming with me.
And so he’s equipping them for that time when the Lord Jesus is at the right hand of the Father and that we are here below.
Now, here’s the first thing that we need to think about.
And it’s mainly this: Why doesn’t Jesus take us with him?
I mean, why?
I think the apostles would have asked that question.
Lord, if you’re going, could we come with you?
Jesus says, well look, I’m going to prepare a place for you so that where I am there you can be also in the way you know and I’ll come for you and there you’ll be with me forever.
But not now.
It’s not time for you to go yet.
The Lord Jesus ascends into heaven but he leaves us here below.
And why?
What does He do that?
Why does He leave us in this fallen world to be to be chased after by the devil, to be afflicted by all of the troubles of this world, to be beaten down.
In fact, Jesus had said earlier to the disciples, he said, hey, those who arrest you and throw you in prison and those who kill you are going to think that they do a good work so that the Lord’s Christians have this assignment to be driven around the world and afflicted and run around and troubled in every way.
In fact, at the end of the verse, and we’ll get to this in a little bit, Jesus says, in this world you’re going to have tribulation.
So why has Jesus left us here?
Sit around and complain about it.
Kind of wallow in self-pity.
We can drown ourselves in our tears or kind of walk like we’re in some sort of funeral procession, moaning until the last hour comes.
Jesus has no illusions or delusions about how hard it’s going to be.
But that’s why he promises help.
And that’s why he on this day gives us these beautiful instructions that you need to pray.
He knows that you cannot withstand all of the devil’s assaults and attacks by your own strength, by your own efforts.
That’s why Jesus says I’m going to send the Helper, the Holy Spirit.
And that’s why you need in fact your only recourse and protection is prayer.
But listen to what Jesus says when he says to pray.
He says look, you haven’t asked anything in my name, you ask now the Father in my name and he will answer you.
So that did you get this in the text?
So that your joy might be full.
We think at least I think i shouldn’t project my ignorance onto you all.
So I think that fullness of joy is what’s waiting for us in eternal life.
Fullness of joy is what’s coming when the Lord Jesus returns and throws the devil into the lake of fire and makes all things new.
Fullness of joy is on the other side of death and the grave.
That’s where fullness of joy is, but that’s not what Jesus says.
Pray and the Father will answer your prayers and your joy will be full.
That’s an amazing promise.
So we want to think about this because really, this is what Jesus is saying.
Is that our life here below is, well, two reasons.
Number one, so that we might speak and serve one another with the love of God, and so that we might speak to God and make known to him our desires, our needs, and our wants, that we would be people of prayer.
Now, the devil assaults our prayers.
And I’ll just confess to you that I was reading Luther’s commentary on these words and I just can’t get it out of my mind.
And so this sermon is basically going to be me retelling you what Luther said about it.
But I think it’s really profound because he makes this point that the real spiritual battle begins as soon as we try to start praying.
And the devil is there to assault us and to try to block and prevent us from praying in every way that he possibly can.
And those strategies that he uses are really threefold.
The devil tries to distract us from prayer, the devil tries to get us to stop praying by despair, or the devil tries to convince us that prayer’s useless.
The first is distraction.
And we’ll consider how the Lord Jesus gives us what we need to fight against all three of these.
But the first is distraction.
And you know how this goes is that you set aside a time to pray and something else comes up.
Or you sit down to pray and there’s something more pressing.
Or you want to pray, but something is always capturing your mind or your imagination and dragging you away.
Or even if you start praying in the middle of it, you’re thinking about something else or making a shopping list and you’re like, oh, I’ve started praying and now I’m doing something different.
The devil is always at work trying to turn our attention away from the gift of prayer.
And Luther says, if you haven’t realized this, then you should just try it.
You go, try to pray sometime and you realize how the devil will assault us with this distraction.
I know, and I think this is part of it.
I was thinking about it myself is that there’s a lot of things that I’m called to do that if I didn’t do you all would probably notice.
Like, if I didn’t show up to preach some Sunday, you know, be looking around and where’s pastor?
Or to teach a Bible class, where is the guy?
Or to go and visit or to sit at a staff meeting or to do this.
And this is the same thing for us.
But one thing that people don’t notice is that if we neglect our prayers, you just don’t see it.
You just don’t notice it.
And I think that’s probably the same for all of us, you know, if you didn’t show up for work or if you didn’t do that homework assignment that you’re getting graded on or if you didn’t finish that task that had to do with the project that you were working on at work, if you didn’t do that thing then people would notice but if you neglect your prayers it can go unnoticed and so the devil is always saying, well look, you better pay attention to this first, you better finish this thing first, you better do this first.
Jesus says he’s impressing onto our hearts that there’s nothing that comes before this work of prayer.
It is what we need first and foremost.
In fact, Luther gives this advice.
He says we should try to go to sleep praying the Lord’s prayer and we should try to wake up praying the Lord’s prayer so the devil has no chance to sneak in there and to delay it and put it off.
In fact, if you could wake up halfway through the Lord’s prayer that might be ideal so that there’s no space for the devil to come in and put it off.
Now how do we fight against this temptation to distraction?
Probably twofold.
Number one, we remember our desperate need for prayer.
We remember that our help is in prayer alone.
We remember that if we were to try to manage this life by our own strength, then it would all come to nothing; that we have a desperate need for the Lord to come and help.
And then the second thing is the promises that God gives: “Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver you.”
The Lord promises to hear our prayers.
Ask and you will receive.
Knock and the door will be open.
Seek and you will find.
This is how the Lord Jesus gives us this promise.
So our need and the Lord’s promise help fight against the devil’s distraction.
[Illustration]
The second assault on prayer that the devil uses is our own unworthiness.
Some of you might know this really well.
When you go to pray and the devil comes along and throws into your own imagination, how dare you?
How dare you?
I know what you’ve done, he says.
I know what you’ve said.
I know what you thought.
I know what you want.
I know how unholy you are.
How dare you go to stand before the Lord in your sin?
It’s like walking into a wedding and you’re just wearing rags.
The devil tries to make us ashamed.
He tries to use our sin against our prayers.
Now, we need to go straight at this because when the Lord Jesus commanded us to pray, it’s not like he forgot that we’re sinners.
In fact, specifically in the text Jesus goes on to say, look, in a few minutes all of you are going to abandon me.
You’re going to each go to your own homes.
I’m going to be left alone, but I’m not alone.
The Father is with me.
In other words, Jesus knows the weakness of our sinful flesh.
Jesus knows that we are un holy and un clean.
Jesus knows that we are unworthy to stand before him and ask him anything at all.
He knows that you’re a sinner.
And still he says pray.
And so we have confidence.
And it’s a twofold confidence.
Number one, we have the command to pray.
So when the devil says, who are you to dare to go before the Lord and pray?
We can say, well, I don’t know.
All I know is God commanded it.
All I know is that the Lord said, remember, do not misuse my name.
And that means that we fear and love God so that we call upon him in every trouble and pray praise and give thanks.
The Lord commanded me to stand before him and offer my petitions boldly.
And we stand to pray, and here’s this is really important, not in our own name, but in the name of Jesus.
If we were to go before the Lord because of our own worthiness, because of our own value, if we ever try to stand before the Lord with like a resume in our back pocket, our list of good works to make a way there.
We are, of all people most to be pitied.
We do not pray because we are worthy to pray; we pray because the Lord commanded it.
And then this question comes up: How can we unworthy sinners go to stand before the Lord?
How can we possibly do that?
And the answer is only in Christ.
You are holy saints, not because you’ve done everything you ought to do by the commandments, but because Christ has done everything in your place.
And all of your sins and mine, which are many, all of them are forgiven.
They’re not held against you.
You’ve been washed; you’ve been cleaned.
You’ve been justified and sanctified.
You’ve been delivered.
So the blood of Jesus and the Holy Spirit in your own conscience is giving you this boldness to stand before the Lord, not again in your own name or by your own righteousness, but by the name and through the command of my Lord Jesus.
This is what we have to say to the devil: I’m here because my Lord Jesus commanded me to be here.
I’m praying because my Lord Jesus commanded me to pray, and He’s my confidence, and He’s my worthiness.
So we take the second assault of the devil, and then there’s a third.
This is where the devil tries to convince us that our prayers are useless.
And I think this comes in two different ways.
The first is, well, the Lord knows everything, so what help does He need from you?
Like, why does you telling the Lord what you need help?
He probably knows it already.
But remember how the Lord Jesus taught us to pray the Lord’s prayer: Your Father in heaven knows what you need even before you pray.
Therefore pray, Our Father who art in heaven.
God’s knowledge doesn’t prevent our prayers.
God’s knowledge is the purpose of our prayers.
God’s knowledge is why we know what to pray.
He tells us pray, Our Father who art in heaven.
And the other way that the devil tries to assault the uselessness of our prayers is he says, Well look, you’ve been praying for that thing for a long time and the Lord hasn’t answered it.
So that means He probably doesn’t answer prayer.
You’ve been praying for this thing that you want most of all, for years and years, and the Lord hasn’t answered that prayer.
So prayer must be useless.”
Now let’s remember two things:
First, every prayer starts as an unanswered prayer.
If you’re asking God for something it’s because you don’t have it yet.
So every prayer starts as an unanswered prayer and remains an unanswered prayer as long as God wants it to be for your own benefit.
And the second thing is that the Lord when He teaches us to pray is teaching us that He takes our prayers and edits them for us so that they arrive at His ears perfect.
This has to do with what Paul said in Romans 8, where he says, we don’t know how we ought to pray, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us.
My professor and Pastor Davis told me I had to preach this again from the first service, so you get to hear the story again.
My professor, Dr. Kleinig, he’s an Australian professor, and he talks about prayer in this way.
It’s so funny because he talks with like relish when he got his first electronic typewriter.
And it was like some innovation in the 1960s, it must have been.
And he thought it was magic because he was really bad at spelling, but all of a sudden he had a typewriter that would correct his own spelling.
And he would sit there and mistype words and the little computer would magically correct it.
And he thought that he was just like, oh, he was ready to fly to the moon.
He was so excited about this technology.
And he says, that is exactly how the Lord Jesus treats our prayers.
Is that we pray in the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus takes our prayers and he does like a theological spell check.
He corrects them.
And he perfects them.
And he presents them to God as perfect prayers, just how they are supposed to be.
So that they’re received by the Father as this perfect gift of the perfect petition, just the right exact thing.
So we don’t know always what to ask.
But the Holy Spirit groans in words that we can’t even understand for us and the Father hears those prayers and he answers them.
How beautiful is that?
And part of that shaping of prayer is the Lord’s Prayer itself that Jesus tells us the very words to pray.
So that we don’t need to wonder for just example.
We don’t pray, “Hallowed be thy name,” if it be your will.
Because we know it’s God’s will for His name to be hallowed.
We don’t have to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread, if it be your will.”
Because we know it’s the Lord’s will to give us our daily bread.
So in the Lord’s prayer, we are given by God this picture of what a prayer ought to look like and with that we can fight against the devil who is always busy chirping on the uselessness of prayer.
Okay, so the devil tries to distract us.
He tries to remind us of our unworthiness.
He tries to argue that prayer is useless.
But all of this we set against all of these arguments, the need for prayer, the promise for prayer, the command for prayer, and the very words that the Lord Jesus gives to us in the Lord’s Prayer.
And with this gift of prayer, the Lord Jesus starts to deliver to us this fullness of joy that he promised.
Now that takes us to the last verse of this text.
And it’s precious.
It’s one of those verses that we should have tattooed on our mind.
John 16, verse 33.
Jesus gives us this promise.
He says, Be of good cheer.
In this world you will have tribulation.
But in me you will have peace.
Be of good cheer.
I have overcome the world.
Now we live a life.
What’s the way to think about this?
We live a life in two places.
We live a life in this world.
We have homes and jobs and neighbors and family and friends and obligations.
We have digestive systems and we have diseases.
We have afflictions and troubles.
We have bank accounts and flat tires and all the troubles of this life.
And even more than that, we are the Lord’s Christians, which means that we are the target of the devil’s affliction.
And that means that in this world you will have trouble.
I want you, whenever you have trouble in this world, I don’t know if it’ll happen this week, maybe not, maybe next week, you’ll have trouble.
Whenever you have trouble, I want you to remember that this is according to the Lord’s promise.
He says, in the world you’ll have trouble.
But that trouble is not to overwhelm us or to captivate us, or even to define us.
Jesus says: “In the world you will have trouble; but in Me you have peace.”
This is our second life.
It’s the life that we live not in this world, but the life that we live in Christ.
Peace doesn’t come from the world.
Peace comes from the Lord Jesus who by His death and resurrection made peace between heaven and earth.
And it’s in Him, in His blood, in His death and resurrection, in His seated at the right hand of the Father, in His promise to send the Holy Spirit, in His grace and mercy, that we find peace.
That the world is overcome, that the devil is overthrown, that even our sinful flesh is put aside, and that we find peace that passes all understanding.
It’s not the peace that the world gives; my peace Jesus says: My peace I leave with you.
And this is the fullness of joy that the Lord has for us.
We live this life of trouble and weakness but we pray.
And the Lord hears our prayer.
The Lord answers our prayers.
The Lord delivers us.
The Lord is with us.
Until He takes us at last to the new heaven and the new earth where joy and bliss will never end.
So may God grant us this.
Well, may God grant to all of us the spirit of supplication that we would be filled with the Lord’s joy and that we would know His peace and that we would find our protection always and only in the Lord’s gift of prayer.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake! Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Christ is risen.
He has risen indeed.
Oh, my!
© BF-WATCH TV 2021
© transcript Emily B.
© BF-WATCH TV 2021
Oh!