Oh, well, you know, I have to say it from my own mouth. This church hosting the NEC was amazing. You guys were fantastic. If you did volunteer, my own bravo to you. It was so amazing. You guys were the most hospitable. We had the red carpet rolled out for us. If you're part of the volunteer team, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. And I am saying that with a little sweaty palm, because we're going to have to do it in 2028 because we're bringing the NEC to AV next time, so you guys can come and invade our territory. And we will host it for you next time, unless the rapture takes place, and then we will just scrap the plans altogether. We'll let the non-Christians deal with it. I think they'll just cancel. How about that? So, yeah, NEC in 2028, if there is a 2028 for us, we'll be up in AV. That stands for Aliso Viejo. Yep.
Hey, in the last service, you know, Pastor Bobby is bringing up all these pastors. He brought up his brother in the last service, and he made a few jokes about how he did not look like his brother, and it's hard to believe that that's his brother, and as I was sitting here watching all that, that made me think about me and my brother, because my brother also is a pastor who's busy preaching this morning in another place. And I thought if I brought my brother up on the platform, you would not believe that he's my brother. Now, I won't say more than that, because there are lots of thoughts in my mind that you don't want to hear, and I don't want to have to apologize for. I don't think he's ever looked like my brother, or I never really wanted to claim him as my brother, but we grew up here, not far from here, at Bellflower Boulevard and Atherton, across kind of catty corner from Cal State Long Beach. And, you know, typical, you know, little tiny house, one bathroom. You know, living in that little home, being typical, you know, Long Beach kids, and he was into watching a lot of television and movies with war in it, which now, as I'm saying it out loud, makes a lot of sense as to why I got beat up a lot as a child by my brother. But it was a lot of war, you know, whether it was, civil war movies or westerns, where they're shooting each other, or World War II movies. All that war, war, war, war, is just he was watching that all the time. I, on the other hand, didn't care to sit there and watch a lot of TV. I was out building ramps for my bike to jump over trash cans. Anybody back in the day do that? And, and I would come in if Evil Knievel was going to jump over some busses or something, then I was going to come inside and certainly watch that. Wired World of Sports. Any old timers remember that? What was that Saturday afternoon? I would watch that, mostly just for the intro, right? The agony of defeat, that's when I would lean in. Nobody, okay? Young people, look it up. We got free Wi-Fi, check it out. It was what we did.
And occasionally we would play a few games together, and the kind of games we played when we were kids were the kinds without any rules, and the one that we did a lot was we had a little tiny trash can full of army men, those little green plastic army men, and we would dump those out on the backyard concrete, and we'd play like we were choosing teams for kickball, and we would separate them all one by one and choose our teams. Well, I'm always going to choose the one with the most formidable weapons. So, I wanted the guy with the big bazooka over his shoulder, and I'd pick those that looked like they were the most imposing, and I'd see him reach for the guy that had that backpack with the little antenna on his backpack, and I'd say something, 'You're so stupid, right? Like, that's so dumb. Oh, you want that guy double backpacking? I'm going to shoot him so fast, and, you know, that's dumb. And then, of course, when you call your older brother dumb, he's quick to say, 'You're so dumb, and 'You're so dumb because you don't even know what this guy is. I say, well, you're right, I don't, but I don't need to, because I'm going to shoot him anyway. And he says, well, this is the radio man, you don't understand the radio man, this is our com guy. If we don't have a communications guy, right, your whole army is going to be hung out to dry. If you don't have a guy that's communicating with the headquarters, we don't have somebody talking to the commander. Our army's not going to know what to do. Now he's taking it way too far in his imagination, because all we're going to do is take rubber bands and paper clips that we break in half and shoot each other's army. And whatever we did, we had some, you know, M 80s from Tijuana, or whatever. We'd blow each other up, but whatever we would do with our army men to blow each other up, it was just, you know, in his mind. He had to have the communications guy. Now, today, if I ran. Into a situation like that, and my wife can attest to this, I will always say things when we fall into situations, and that kind of line comes out of someone's mouth or out of my own mouth. I'd say that'd make for a great sermon illustration.
I do say that a lot, at least twice a week, because when you talk about a little army man with an antenna and a backpack, and that's your communication, man, and your army is hung out to dry if you're not talking to the headquarters and the commander. I'm thinking that's a great sermon illustration, because at a prayer conference, right, talking about prayer, nothing could apply better than that. And there are a lot of Christians thinking they got a great Christian life, and their prayer life stinks, and they think they're doing well, and they're not. They're not doing well, like the intro of the book that we handed out this week, and if you didn't get one of those, certainly should get one of those. I'm not trying to sell books. Even if you can't afford one, we will give you one if you can't afford it. But this book on prayer that a lot of us contributed to, I wrote this page and a half intro. And I start talking in the very first paragraph about the fact that if someone tells you they got a great marriage, but they never talk to each other, they don't have a great marriage, right? You'd agree with that. And so, you can say you have a good relationship with God, but if you're not doing as the psalmist says, pouring out your heart to God regularly, you don't have a good relationship with God. Remember, Christ says in John 15 that he is the vine, right? His Father is the vinedresser, and you are the branch. And if you want to bear fruit, you better abide. It's a weird little Greek word, abide, to remain, meno in Greek, a word to hang on, to be tightly connected.
How are we tightly connected to Christ? Well, there are lots of things involved in that. I assume he doesn't go on to explain it in the passage, but certainly we know you're not going to have a tight relationship with anybody unless there's a lot of talking. If you're not talking a lot, now God has talked to us, and he's given us a pretty big book, right? 66 Books in this library of conversation that he's having, but he wants us to come and talk to him, and he says, "You’ve got to pour out your heart to me, I want you to say things to me. He's given us the Psalms. The biggest book in the Bible is a song book. 150 Songs, and a lot of those are really heartfelt communications to God, where the psalmist is pouring out his heart to God and saying, here's what I'm feeling, here's what I'm thinking. And this is very important that we do this, and if we don't do this, we're, we're in really big trouble. We don't have that connection to God. And we can say we're out there doing the Lord's work and fighting for the Lord, and we're salt and light in the world, and we're trying out there, we're trying to be out there like putting on the armor of God, doing all this, but we are not really connected the way we should.
And we think we're bearing fruit, and it's plastic fruit, we're not bearing fruit because we're not abiding in the vine. Now I can say all that, and for a lot of people, you can slump back in your chair if you're a real Christian and say all that does make me feel guilty, makes me feel guilty, and I get that. I get that. I read books on prayer, and it makes me feel guilty, because I think I know I should pray. There's no Christian in this room, probably no non-Christian in this room, that walks in and says, well, you know, I didn't even know there was a prayer, I didn't even know we should pray. I don't know anything about this. Everyone knows about prayer, there's nothing complicated about the concept, and everyone knows if you're a Christian that you should pray. And everyone's heard people talk about prayer. And so, it's not about the knowing, it's always about the doing when it comes to prayer, and we can feel guilty that we don't pray enough.
This conference was not about trying to induce guilt, you know. This sermon right now is not about inducing guilt, and I'm not going to open up a passage and try and dump a bunch of information out there and say, hey, here's more information to make you feel guilty. It's not really about information; the hope is transformation. We'd like to transform your habits, we'd like to transform your actions, so that you are pouring your heart out to God more often. And even if we're just taking some small steps in that direction, we'd say that's a victory, because we'd like you to continue to build on that. We want you to talk to God more. That's what we need to do. So, don't look at it like, oh, I got slammed, I felt guilty, all that. We want God's Word that the Bible says is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. It should get down to start with a little conviction. I get that we're going to feel convicted, it's going to start to deal with the thoughts and intentions of our heart, but I want us to leave today saying I've heard some things, and I've seen God's word reveal some things that kind of give me some rails to move forward on. I know where I should be going in my prayer life now. If you were at the conference at the end of this week, this weekend, you hopefully have heard a lot of things that have been helpful, but today I just want to kind of put it all on a rail and say here's what we want going forward. And I want to have a kind of prayer life that we want to aim for, and something that can be sustainable, some kind of things that we're going to shoot for in our prayer life.
So, open up God's Word. A very short passage of Scripture, just three verses, Colossians, chapter 4, verses 2-4, and let's see if we can't pull out of this, God's words. Of course, I know Paul's writing this to a bunch of Christians, but it's God's Word. Every passage has two authors, it's God and the prophet, or the apostle, in this case, the apostle Paul, writing not to pastors. This is not a pastoral epistle, this is just a regular set of Christians in a city called Colossi, and he's writing to them, and he's telling the rank-and-file Christians, hey, you guys got to pray. And the way he tells them to pray is super helpful for you and I as we move out of this weekend thinking about our prayer lives. So, let me read it for you with a little bit of commentary, and then we'll try to pull some things out of this that can really help to transform our prayer patterns. Colossians, chapter four. Put your eyeballs on this text, and let me read it for you.
“Continue steadfastly in prayer.” Now, that phrase, “continue steadfastly” translates one Greek word. And “steadfastly” is probably not a word you used this morning before you went to church, probably not a word you used this week, right? That sounds kind of antiquated. Steadfastly.This is in an old translation, the ESV that I'm reading from, but still we want to try to update this a little bit in our minds. We'll get to that in a minute, but we need to understand that word and the thrust of that word. But even reading it, I think you get the idea of something that needs to be a regular part of what we're doing. Prayer needs to be a regular part of my life. It means more than that, but let's at least start with that in our head. And then it says, “being watchful in it,” and even that - that's kind of churchy, isn't it? Churchy word, “watchful”. Have you used that word? Maybe if you work on a boat or something, but I don't know. Watchful, it's not a word we use all the time, but you've heard it in church, right, Matthew chapter 26, Jesus is there, he's got Peter, James, and John, they're in the Garden of Gethsemane, he's about to be betrayed by Judas, he's going to go to the cross, and he says, hey, Peter, James, and John, I'm trying to have you pray with me, but you keep falling asleep, right? And he uses this phrase, "Can't you watch and pray? And it's the same Greek word, "watchful, here in Colossians, chapter 4, verse 2, as he uses over there in Matthew 26. And it's very important that it relates to something about how I pray that I'm not dozing off. And then he says, “as you're praying with thanksgiving.” So, this is all about prayer, continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in prayer, and do your prayers with thanksgiving, so that's the kind of praying we want to have. And then he says, 'Hey, as long as I'm talking about you praying, he says, here's what I want.
At the same time as you're doing all that, pray also for us now. Pray for us. And so it goes, Paul and the people that are with him, that God may open to us, a door for the word. Now, Paul loves this phrase. He uses it a lot in his writings. Now, you know this isn't a hard metaphor to understand. This is an opportunity. I want an opportunity for me to say the things that God has said in his Word, in the Bible. Right now, he's dealing with the written Word of the Old Testament, not 39 books of the Old Testament, to declare the mystery of the Christos of Christ. That's the Messiah, right? The Messiah in Hebrew, or what we transliterate, the Messiah. So, the Old Testament is filled with prophecies about the coming Messiah. Well, Christ came, Christ, that's the Greek word, Christos, and the Messiah has arrived. The Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth, born in Nazareth, and he fulfilled all the Old Testament prophecies, he's calling him the mystery. Now that's a Greek word itself that we transliterate. Mysterion is the Greek word in the Greek text, that transliterates, not translates, but transliterates into English mystery, and it doesn't mean like Sherlock Holmes needs to figure this out. A mysterion simply means in the Old Testament it wasn't so clearly laid out that everyone could have looked in the Old Testament and seen a clear technicolor high definition 4k picture of what it looked like, but clearly in the rear-view mirror they saw what it was, and it was a mysterion. It wasn't clearly laid out with every detail, but there was no missing it once it came, so I need to declare all the stuff in the 39 books of the Old Testament, because the New Testament was being written as he's writing this. “[O]n account of which I'm in prison.” This is one of the prison epistles, right? Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon. These books were all written from prison. At the end of the book of Acts, he's under house arrest, and he's writing these letters, and he says, "Here I am in prison because I keep talking about Christ of Nazareth, Jesus of Nazareth, being the Christ. And the Jews, have gotten me in trouble with the Romans, and now I'm in prison, but now that I'm in prison, I want to make clear this message about who Christ is, who Jesus is. Make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Anyone's going to talk about Jesus ought to make it crystal clear who he is.
Okay, all of that commentary, but that's the text we need to make sense of this. Let's start in verse 2. Very simply, see three things, but this is all about the kind of prayer life we need to shoot for. So, let's put it this way, number one: “Aim for this kind of prayer life.” Life, let's give it a title, and now let's give three categories to this, starting with the first one. Now, before I give you the first one, let me start with the word itself, which isn't going to be the way we write down the heading, but it will get to it. Okay, so here's the word - it's a compound word in the New Testament Greek language, and the only time I like to talk about Greek word, not the only time, but the time I usually talk about a Greek word is when the Greek New Testament word is a compound word with a preposition, because whenever there's a preposition, which is a word you might remember that relates to some kind of spatial connection, right, like under or over or next to or beyond or inside or through. Well, this is the word toward pros toward, and then it's the word strength, “toward strength,” that's literally the word that's here, and it translates in our text in terms of the grammar and how it's put in the language. “Continue steadfastly.” Now it's a hard translation in my mind, and I'm not sure if I were on the committee, I would have voted for that translation, but the word itself is your prayer life should be a kind of prayer life that's toward strength. Okay, what does that mean? I like to put it this way, it's a muscular prayer life, and if it's a muscular prayer life. What kind of prayer life is that? Okay, let's put it this way. If I'm there at work or with some of the cool dudes at church, and all they talk about is their Iron Man thing they're going through, or they're going to do this marathon, or whatever. That's the kind of conversation I want to start making jokes about, because I want to distance myself from that as quickly as possible, because I have no interest in doing any of this, and I want to kind of make clear if I can joke my way out of it, or talk my way out of it. I want to make clear I have nothing to do with that, and hahaha, you know, and just, you know, I'll talk about donuts and Del Taco. You can talk about biking for hundreds of miles and swimming for whatever they do. I don't understand any of it, but they, they're going to talk about it, because you know, if I were to, they're in the middle of their training, and they got their watches that do all this stuff, and you know they're putting their infusions in their body, or whatever they're doing. I don't know what they're doing, but they're ready to do something that is muscular, right? And if they say, Pastor Mike, why don't you do this? Well, they've long since given up on saying that sentence, but if they used to, why don't you go, why don't you train with us for this? Okay, the reason I don't want to train with them for this is because if I were to try to train with them, they would realize after about, I don't know, seven 800 yards of trying to train with them, I would want to stop for a meal or a snack, at least I won't have the ability to persevere, right? I don't have the wherewithal to persevere. I'm not going to bike for hundreds of miles and run for whatever a marathon. I don't even know what an Ironman is, but you have to be iron to do it, and I'm made of flesh. I can't do it. You can become iron, you can do it, and I can make jokes about it, and you go do it. I'm going to just be me, and I'm not interested, because I don't have the perseverance to do it. Okay.
Toward strength praying, let's put it this way. Here's the heading. What we're looking for is a “Persistent praying.” That's what I want me to aim for. Persistent praying, of course. I'm coming out of a conference on praying. What kind of prayer life do I want? I want a persistent praying. That's the kind of praying where I might have a life that is abiding in Christ. I have a good relationship with Christ because I'm always talking with Christ. How am I going to persistently praying if I got a strong kind of praying, a muscular kind of praying? Because if you're strong, you can keep going. If you're strong, you can keep doing it if you're strong, right. It's going to be a regular thing. You can run a long way if you're strong. You can bike for a lot of miles if you're strong, right? If you're not strong, you can't. So, I need a muscular kind of praying that's going to keep me going. Now, Daniel in the Old Testament, right? He had a muscular kind of prayer life, did he not? And a muscular kind of prayer life plays itself out in a prayer life that was persistent, persistent prayer life. And in Daniel, chapter 6, it was clear that he had a persistent prayer life, because when his envious friends, and you know what envy is, it was a kind of anger and hostility, and a kind of bitterness they had toward Daniel, because he excelled in favor past them, and so they're always looking for a way to tear him down. That's what envy is, being embittered toward someone that's got advantages you don't have, or some kind of thing that they get that you don't get to have. Well, as he excelled past his contemporaries, they said, let's take him down some way. And in an ancient Near Eastern culture, it was easy, just like it was even in the Roman cultures of ancient days, to make the king a deified person, and a deified person. You could say, well, in our nation, in this case, the Medo-Persians, let's just make sure that no one can pray to anybody but you, O King. And, of course, Darius goes, that's not a bad idea. I kind of like that. So, let's make that the rule.
And they realize this here: Daniel's got a muscular prayer life, and he’s persistently prays. He always prays. He's praying every single day. So, let's make a law that no one can pray to anybody but you, King. And he goes, sure. And you might remember the old line, right? According to the law, the Medes and Persians, because it couldn't be revoked, and so he signs this into law. And sure enough, then they go think him out by saying, hey, they take their iPhones out, they record him praying up in his upper chamber with the windows open, praying toward Jerusalem, because, of course, he's still a captive in a foreign land in Mesopotamia. Even though Babylonians took him into captivity, now it's the Medo-Persians, and he's thinking about his homeland that was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and he wants to go back, and he's praying for Israel to rebound, and all that, but every day, I said three times a day, he is praying, he's on his knees, and he's praying, he's got a window open toward his homeland, he's praying, praying, praying, praying consistently, persistently, it's nonstop. He doesn't have a prayer life like you and me, who just comes and goes, and the conference, it's up and up, sermon, it's up, and then it's down, and then I get busy, and I'm not praying. He has a muscular prayer life, which means a persistent prayer life, and sure enough, that's what gets him thrown in the lion's den, and certainly I'll remember that. Please, when you think about Daniel and the lions, then don't think about the miracle of him, you know, not getting eaten by lions. Think about what got him there, and what got him there was a persistent prayer life. And they knew one thing: we can catch Daniel in praying, because he prays all the time. That's what we need. We need a persistent, habitual, regular, consistent daily prayer life. All right.
The next thing is “watchful”. That word I told you is found there in Matthew 26, verse 41, and in that passage you might remember the verse in front of it when he says, you know this, you need to pray. Be watchful in your praying, “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” The verse in front of it, he says, “Jesus came to his disciples, and he found them sleeping, and he said to Peter,” he said, could you not watch with me for 15 minutes? Do you remember that passage? You could not watch with me for 15 minutes? Anyone remember that passage? Is that what your translation says? I was reading from the Mike Fabarez translation. What's your translation? Say one hour. Oh, you’ve got the godly reverential translation. Okay, well, I'm not going to buy that translation. That one's too convicting for me. Peter's just a fisherman. Fifteen minutes is enough. An hour. When was the last time you prayed for an hour? You mean you're going to get a rebuke from Christ if you didn't pray for an hour? You know why you wouldn't pray for an hour, because you're not “watchful”. That's a long time to pray, man. When was the last time you set a timer and said, I'm going to pray, let's see if I can pray for an hour. You can't pray for an hour, because what he goes on to say in the rest of verse 41:26. He says, you can't pray because you're not watching. And then he explains why you have to watch. Here's the reason you have to watch, he says, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” That's the rationale why you need to watch. Okay? The rationale is, the spirit is willing, but flesh is weak.
If I said to you, wouldn't it be great for you to have a better relationship with Jesus? Only Christians say, yes, I want that. And if you want that, then you know the way to get that is to abide in Christ, and to do that be good if you had a really vibrant, consistent, muscular prayer life. Now, if you want that, well, then do it. Why don't you just do it? Well, because the flesh is weak. Now, I know you think you have ADD. Can I just tell you, you don't have ADD unless you have ADD, but you don't have ADD. You do not have attention deficit disorder. You don't have that. You have what Jesus says right here, you have S W F W, that's what you have, if you want initials for it, because everyone loves an initial diagnosis. You have S W after the Spirit is Willing and Flesh is Weak disorder, that's what you have, and that is you want to pray, but your flesh goes don't want to do that. If you want to know what that feels like, and kind of condense that into a simple thing. Let's all go on a diet today, so you can look really good for summer. Okay, let's just do that. You just eat really well, matter of fact, no more sweets, no more. Just let's get chiseled, let's get ready, let's just do that. No more of that bad food, okay? Now let's just say I decide that this morning that'd be great. You know what? When I look in the mirror, the spirit is willing. Yeah, sounds great. When I try to button my pants, the spirit is willing. But then when Christa B makes those cookies and says here's some milk, the flesh is weak. When I drive by In-N-Out Burger, flesh is weak, and they say, do you want to make that a double double? The flesh is weak. I want what I want. The flesh is weak.
Now, why is the flesh weak? Because of Genesis, chapter 3. Genesis 3, Jesus said this simple statement. “The triune God said it.” Jesus was all part of this. He said, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Adam and Eve make a moral choice. They rebel against God's standard, and God said, “Cursed is the ground because of you,” cursed is the ground because of you. Now, here's the problem. He was born right, not of his mother's womb, he was born out of the dirt. God says he created man out of the dust of the earth and breathed in him the breath of life. Now, what is Adam? Well, he's made of God's spirit, but he's contained and enmeshed in the dirt. So, when God says, "Cursed is the ground because of you,” right? He's made of the ground, so not only is the fusion ball called the sun cursed and is now dying, the stuff he's made of, the minerals, the bio, you know, the proteins, the enzymes, everything in his body now is cursed, and he begins to die biologically, so he is everything about your body is against what God wants, and God is all about life and godliness, and your body is not about life and godliness.
There are, as Peter said, passions of your flesh that wage war against your soul. Here's what your flesh does not rebel against, scrolling through TikTok? Do the algorithms figure it out what you like, right? I bet you could spend an hour flipping your thumb until it gets really tired through Instagram all day long. You could say, 'I didn't even believe I spent an hour. I just spent a whole hour looking at this. You can go on YouTube and watch cat videos for an hour. Some of you, and well, I can't believe it's been an hour. Few of us in this room can spend an hour in prayer. I can't believe I spent an hour in prayer. So, where did the hour go? Your flesh is going to fight every ten minutes, every five minutes of that. You just need to know you’ve got an enemy. So, therein comes the word “watchful”. You're going to have to be watchful. Let's give that a word. Okay. The first one was, you’d better have “Persistent Praying.” What you're going to need, what this turns into is the goal is what kind of life am I? Prayer life, am I wanting number letter B?
Number 1, letter B: “Undistracted praying,” to be alert in my prayer life, right? To be watchful in my prayer life is to say, God, please, I want to achieve an undistracted praying. I want to be prayerful without distraction, and that means I'm going to have to set up my prayer life without being distracted. I can't have my flesh determine when I quit praying. My flesh is going to cooperate with all kinds of things, but not this. And, by the way, you’ve got two other things we don't have time to talk about, but you’ve got the world, which is never going to help you with this, and you’ve got Satan, that would love to short circuit your prayer life. But I'm just dealing with your flesh this morning. It does not want you to pray, so you need to be watchful. What does that mean? Alert, what does that mean? That you aim for an undistracted prayer life. Jot these two references down. Let's start with this. Mark, chapter 1, verse 35. Mark, chapter 1, verse 35, it says, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed.” That's Jesus. Went out “to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” Okay, this is a statement about Jesus setting up his prayer morning. Okay, look at the things in this rising very early in the morning. What's unique about being very early in the morning? Why didn't he go out at 10 in the morning? Because at 10 in the morning, the day has started for every merchant, every farmer, everybody along the road is going to be walking very early in the morning, just like if I said, hey, let's drive up the 405 at three in the morning, or let's drive up the 405 at 830 in the morning. Those are two different experiences. He gets up very early in the morning, and he knows why he wants, an “undistracted prayer life,” and part of it is very early in the morning, while it's still dark. Okay, that's not just describing photons. I mean, he's talking about something that really is going to help him under the cover of darkness, find a place where there will be no distractions. No one's going to say, hey, there's Jesus, let's go talk to him, and he's not going to be distracted by whatever it might be. Oh, what a beautiful sunrise. Let's just pull out my iPhone, take a picture of that. That's not going to happen. He is going to be undistracted. And then he departed. What is that? He didn't take his twelve disciples with him. He's not going to be distracted. He's going to focus. Yes, and then he says, “to a desolate place.” That's kind of redundant, but there's going to be nothing or no one there to distract him. You know what that spells being watchful. Being watchful, you think watchful is waiting, you know, wanting something. No, watchful is just the opposite. It's what your parents taught you, if you grew up in a Christian home, to pray. They said, shut your eyes and fold your hands. That's being watchful. Do you understand what I'm saying? Undistracted, don't fiddle with things, shut your eyes, so you're not looking at things, that's what it means. You need to have an undistracted prayer life.
Same thing in Mark, chapter 6, verse 46, “After he'd taken leave of them, he left them, and he went up to a mountain to pray.” Okay, with all that said, let me say something that sounds contradictory, but it's not either or, it's both. And in my prayer life, and I'm saying this based on what it says in the book of Acts, it's not just that this is the solitary way to pray, because this is a narrative, this is a description, not a prescription. But the description is not a bad way for us to say, I want to start doing some of that, and you should do some of that. Find an undistracted place in an undistracted time with undistracted surroundings and pray. Let's try that. That might help you be “watchful” in prayer, which means “undistracted praying.” But now I'm going to say something that sounds contradictory. There's one thing that can help you stay undistracted, and that is sometimes praying with some people. When you pray with some people, and we had a seminar on that here at the conference, you should go on to equipconference.com and look this up. It's going to be posted on Tuesday. And learn how to pray with other people, because here's something that normally happens when I pray with other people. I have meetings throughout the week. I pray every week with some guys, and pray multiple times with these other people. I've yet to fall asleep praying with other people. I've yet to say, you know, I think I'm done, guys. I'm out. I'm out. Peace out. That's not what happened. I stay till the end.
Okay, there's a lot of things that happen in a prayer time with other people where I'm not, I'm not just wafting in and wafting out. Starting at a particular time, I'm going to be there until we're done. It's helpful. It's going to keep me undistracted. I'm not saying it's a guarantee. I think it's both, and by the way, and I don't want to put too many teeth in this but just jot this one down for your homework. Revelation, chapter 3, verses 2 and 3. There is something here about waking up, and this is the concept here of being watchful.
I mean, Jesus is in this text, and this is a postcard from Christ, saying to the church at Sardis, if you don't get strong, if you don't wake up, whatever you have, you're going to lose it. And I think some of us are in the precipice of maybe losing some things, some privileges, some opportunities, if we don't get our prayer life together, if we don't strengthen what remains, if we don't wake up. That is the concept there. That is the same Greek word, wake up, it's the word to be undistracted. All right, last one. This one is not hard, not going to take a lot of time for this, but what's the third thing? “Thanksgiving”. You know, that's not hard to understand. Let's put it this way, grateful praying, I want persistent praying, I want undistracted praying, grateful praying, which, if you look all through the Scripture, you find this everywhere. Every time we talk about prayer, just about every time we see this thanksgiving coming, even in the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6, “Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Right, that old phrase, even that, if it's about worship, the kernel and nub of worship is thanksgiving.
You know that to worship God is to be crediting God with the credit that is due him. And the credit that is due him is that he's the giver of all good things. So, it's always about thanksgiving. Think about Philippians, chapter 4, “Don't be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving.” It's always about that thanksgiving, thanksgiving, thanksgiving. You ever have those times with your kid, maybe, when you've had a rough day at work, and you give your kid something, maybe it's his birthday, maybe it's just whatever you plan to give him something, maybe it's just giving him dinner, and you're hacked off from some problem, and you get that ingratitude of an eight year old or a twelve year old, and you think, what have I raised here, this little ingrate punk at my table. I mean, you think you may not say that, especially if your wife's there, but you think that, and you say to yourself, you know, you want to reach for the plate, or whatever you just gave me, and pull it back, and say, if you're not going to be thankful for that, I'm not going to give it to you. Is that only me that's ever done that? You've thought of it, though.
I think to myself, what if God, for just a minute, said to you, I'm not going to let you keep anything you haven't thanked me for. And since it's the 14th, let's just give you two weeks. The last two weeks. If, since the beginning of the month, he looks back and says, I'll let you keep everything you've thanked me for in the last two weeks. I wonder how you'd fare. Have you thanked him for your marriage? Have you thanked him for your kids? Have you thanked him for your home? You've thanked him for your car. How about the things in your pantry, or your refrigerator, your closet? What have you thanked him for? Your health? Have you thanked him for what? Have you thanked him? For God wants our lives to be absolutely just the garnish of our lives, everything that we're talking to God about. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's amazing what it does to calibrate our minds. It does something crazy to transform our minds, when, before we ever come to God with, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we start with saying, “God, you know in you we live and move and have our being. You give us life and breath and everything else.” You know, our distinctive here at Compass is to be reliant on prayer, and part of that is right in the center of it. It's all about thanksgiving, and if it's about thanksgiving, we know everything we have comes from him. Paul said to the Corinthians, “What do you have that you have not received?” And some of you are sitting here rolling your eyes at this, I know you are. You went to USC, you did the whole, you know, architectural school, and you rose up in the firm. You started at the bottom. You're so smart, you're so good, you're so competitive. You work late, you came early, you're so great, and you got what you got, and you got that house, you got that job, you got that income, you got that bonus, you got all the promotions, because you are so amazing.
So, you stand back like a lot of non-Christians and think, well, I may not say it in my small group, but I got what I got because I earned it. Jesus said to the people, right, the Triune God said in the Old Testament, in the book of Deuteronomy, when you go into the Promised Land and everything's going well for you, and you look at your flocks and they're big, you look at your fields and it's bearing fruit, you look at your wells and they're filled with water, you're sitting on your porch, you're looking at all that you have, and you're tempted to think, because of my strength, right, I've gained all this stuff. He says, don't think that you just remember this. He says, you're basically forgetting the Lord. He says, remember this, I have given you strength, right? I've given you basically the wherewithal to earn all that stuff. Because if God, for one minute, were to turn his back on you and just say, oh yeah, I know I'm the sustainer of all things, I give you life and breath and everything else, but I'm just going to, for a second, kind of just deal with the rest of the world, and all the angels, and all the population, all the universe, and I'm just going to just kind of, for a second, pull away from you, your brain would scramble, and you would cease to be able to do anything.
So, let's just be thankful for God giving you all that he's given you, and if that is to be the predicate, the foundation for all that you do in bringing your requests to God. I mean, it's going to transform everything, not to mention an hour of prayer. Oh, no problem. Remember that old song, “Count your blessings, name them one by one, count your blessings, see what Go.” Not bad for us to take a tally, a little inventory of all that God has done, and you could have an hour's worth of prayer material right there. Just tell him, thank you, God, I thank you for this, I thank you for that, I thank you for this, thank you for that. Grateful praying is very, very important. All right? What does he ask him to pray for? Verse 3. Go back to our passage, it's printed on your worksheet. Hey, if you're going to pray, he says, I’ve got some things for you to pray for. Look at verse 3. Why don't you pray for your health? Why don't you pray for your job? Why don't you pray for your kids? Why don't you pray for your marriage? Underline all that in verse 3. Do you see all that? Somebody in the back row got it. Is that there? No, it's not there. And by the way, if I were to say to you, pull out a card and write down your top five prayer requests that you feel that you should be praying for right now, go. I wonder about those five prayer requests. How many of them would be about you, or your marriage, or your kids? I think most of them would be about you and yours, if not all of them, because that's our tendency.
So, he says, I want you to pray not for yourselves. Why don't you pray for us? And you go, ah, what's the difference? He said, he's got selfish praying. No, no, no. I told you this is a prison epistle. If he's going to pray selfishly and say, guys, I just brought up prayer because I really need you to pray for me. Can you pray for me, please? He would then say this: Pray also for us, pray that we can get out of jail, because we're here on trumped-up charges. We shouldn't be in jail. He didn't even pray about him being in jail unjustly. No, no, pray that God would open for us a door to get out of jail. No, open us to us a door up for the Word. We want to declare the mystery of Christ. We’ve got a captive audience here. We’ve got people that can't get away from us. They can't even leave our little Bible study here in jail, on account of which I am in prison. I'm in prison because I preach the gospel. I'm not going to stop now. Verse 4, “that I may make it clear,” which is how I ought to pray. Okay, second half of this, real quick, which will be less than half. Don't do the math. Shoot for these kinds of prayers.
Number two: “Shoot for these kinds of prayers.” The first one here is “Outward Requests.” We need more outward requests, and we can compare those to inward requests or selfish requests. The mark of maturing prayer life is that you have more outward requests. The marks of a maturing prayer life is that you have your prayer list, list you have more prayers for other people, and the other people, even it's not just for their aches and pains, it's for more, it's for bigger things, as we'll see. I want you to be praying for others. Let's just start with that. There's nothing more Christ-like than for you to be caring about other people. Philippians, chapter 2 says that is what Christ is all about. That's what love is all about. Love is putting other people's interests before your own, and when you think about what church is supposed to be, which is not tuning in on a screen, it's about you coming and rubbing shoulders with people, having people in your life, and saying, I want to put their interests in front of my interests, I want to honor them above myself. That's really the essence of what church should be about. Then all of a sudden, of course, my prayer requests are going to be all about them. Doesn't mean you don't pray for yourself, and we've heard that from this platform in this conference, if you've come to it, and I'll just quote James 5, because I don't know that that was quoted from the platform, but it says, if anyone is suffering, let him pray.
There's nothing wrong with you praying for your suffering. If it worked this week, you cut your left hand off in the paper cutter machine, I give you permission to pray for that. You should pray, just pray it doesn't get infected. You can pray that I don't know if they can put it back on. I don't think they can, but you should pray. You should pray for good prosthetic. I don't know, you should pray, just pray. Pray that insurance covers it. Pray, just pray. You should pray for yourself. Absolutely, and you should ask people to pray for you. Should put it on the prayer list, if you have prayer list here this year. Pray, nothing wrong with that. It's right. I call it Archer's reflexive praying. It's the reflexive natural impulse to pray when you're suffering. The Bible affirms that, but beyond the reflexive praying of the crisis prayer, I want you to start methodically praying for other people, just more often, and that is the signs of a maturing prayer life that we pray for others. Yeah, I've got a lot of pains in my life, and I feel my pains more than I feel their pains.
You know, when Jesus was on a cross, dying in Luke 23, verses 33 and 34. He's flayed open, he's leaning his open wounds against a rugged cross with splinters in it, he's having to pull himself up to breathe, and all those Renaissance paintings you've seen of Jesus with that nicely placed scarlet silk robe, kind of covering his privates. Have you seen those paintings? Have you seen those paintings? They're not real. He had nothing covering his privates. He was completely nude. That was part of the shame, the shame of the cross. Had all these people, men and women, teenagers watching him naked, dying. He was beaten. Crown of thorns was to mock him. They had his undergarments there, they were rolling dice for, while he's trying to pull himself up to breathe. I don't know what your prayer life look like at that point? I'm not praying this because here's what he's praying; in the place of the skull, crucified between two criminals, and he said, “Father, forgive them, for they” don't know what they're doing. “They know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. I don't know. That's like someone else cutting my hand off and going, hey, how can I pray for you this week? Hey, can you pick the hand up, put it in a plastic bag as we go to that? I mean, what are you talking about? I'm not interested in your prayer list. I'm not here to pray for you, I'm suffering right now. Maybe that helps you understand passages like Acts 16. When Paul has been whipped, he's in stocks with Silas, and he cares about the other prisoners, and he's singing songs, talk about thanksgiving, singing songs of worship to God, which again is the kernel and nub and central hub of that is thanksgiving outward requests. We need that.
Our passage also says, when you pray for me, and when Paul says, pray for me, I don't mean me, I mean others in my life, he gets down to the real thing, the Word, right? Open the door for the Word to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I'm in prison. It's not about me; it's about those people. I want them to get the Word. I call them “Missional Requests,” outward requests. And missional requests, outward requests could be that you're just going to lean into your list of people in your church that have all these problems. Ethel's got cancer, Jim lost his job. Right, Bob has got, you know, broken foot, and over here, you know, Brenda is going in for this tumor to figure out if it's cancer. You could pray through that all day long, and I'm not saying you shouldn't, because James 5 gives us precedent for that, no problem. But if that constitutes the totality of prayer life, we're not praying the way that we should. We're supposed to shoot for these kinds of prayers, missional prayers, and our mission, if you don't know what it is, go to Matthew 28. It's to “make disciples of all the nations,” and to make disciples is to see their names written in the Lamb's book of life, so that if you were in prison trying to have people open a door for the Word, you'd want them not to go to the real prison. The real prison isn't the one with bars that you may get, you know, furloughed out of, you may make the end of your term, and they may let you out. You could go get paroled out, maybe in seven years. There's no getting paroled out of the lake of fire, as contrary as that may be to the YouTube videos you watched last month. There's no getting paroled out of the lake of fire, so people are going to be put there. Not everyone's going to have the same experience. That's another sermon. You're going to be judged according to what you do. It's going to be more bearable for some people in the lake of fire than it is for others. They're going to be put there in physical bodies that are going to be impervious to death and aging, and when you're there, you're stuck there. So, if you and I go to prison today, let's say we start in the Orange County jail. We go up the I-5. We all get put in jail. If we're in jail, we don't have our liberty, and we have a chance to share the gospel with someone. God can use us to put their name in the Lamb's Book of Life. And then they will never go to the lake of fire, and they will never hear, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” They will be welcomed into the kingdom, where Christ will say, “Enter into the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” You will free them from prison, a prison that, if they were to go, they would never get out of. Do you think that's more important than Brenda's tumor screening? Yes, it's way more important. Bob's lost job, way more important. Should I pray for those things? Of course, I love them. I pray for those things. I pray for those things if those things were happening in my life.
But do you see, your prayer life is not just really judged in terms of maturity, whether your prayers are inward or outward, they're also marked by how many of these are missional prayers and how many of them are temporal prayers. Are they eternally important? Are they just important whether or not I'm going to do okay this week, or this month, or this year. By the way, the open doors that Paul is praying for, and because he's praying for it, he often saw them. 1 Corinthians 16:9. When he sees them, I think it's because he's been praying for them. He says a wide door for effective work has opened to me. Or 2 Corinthians, chapter 2, verse 12, “We came to Troas to preach the gospel, even though a door was opened to me in the Lord.” He sees the open doors. Acts 14:27, “We arrived and gathered the church together and declared all that God had done, and how the Lord had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles.” He's praying all the time for open doors. I just dare you to pray a missional prayer. Tomorrow morning, you start praying to open some doors for the Word. Let me be able to talk about importance, the mission of the church, to make disciples. I want to pray that I could make some disciples this week. You start praying that God's going to show you when the doors open. Wow.
Lastly, this one's clear, and I'll use the word “clear” because that's what he says, “that I may make it clear,” verse 4. Let's call them “Clarity Requests.” Clarity request. Because when it comes to our mission, there's nothing Satan wants more than for our verbiage to not be clear. I grew up in a church not far from here, and while I think there's plenty of good preaching from the pulpit, there were a lot of things in the track rack in the lobby that didn't even come close to codifying and articulating the gospel. There were tracks about making Jesus your friend, there were tracks about asking Jesus into your heart, there were tracks about having some kind of security and having a more fulfilling life. I never read tracts about putting your trust in the finished work of Christ. I never read tracts about repenting of your sins. I never read tracts about what the problem of sin was. I never saw it, and I looked. And all I'm telling you is, looking back on it, when I became a real Christian, I thought to myself, where's the gospel? It wasn't clear, and sadly, I went through years and years and years at that church, and I mean, I get it. I was dead in my transgressions and sins, and there were people getting saved there. I'm not saying they weren't. It wasn't a cult, but I am telling you, there wasn't a lot of clarity in the gospel.
Do you know what Satan would love is for churches like this to get somehow lulled into a place to where we get someone in this room and we're not really clear about what the gospel is. The church I went to, we used to have buses, we had a bus bar and a lot of busses, and we use those buses instead of leasing buses, we'd use those just to get up to camp, and of course I'd go to camp in junior high and try and sit in the back where all the cute girls were, and when I got back there I'd realized what a mistake that was to sit back there, because they all spoke in Pig Latin to each other, and they were always giggling and pointing and saying things I hated. You know why they spoke in Pig Latin each other? Obviously, because they didn't want us boys to understand what they were saying. And a couple of the guys were sharp enough to start to figure this out, but about the time we figured out what they were saying, they would switch to some other Klingon language or something, and we could never keep up with them, clearly they were smarter than we were, but the reason they didn't want us to know what they were saying, and they come up with all their dumb languages, is because it would embarrass them if they knew what we knew what they were saying, right? They didn't want us to know what they were feeling and thinking, and who was cute, and who wanted to go out with who, or whatever. It would embarrass them. Do you know why we as a church and a set of churches, we're at risk of being unclear about the gospel because we're embarrassed if the world starts to get under our skin. We're embarrassed to tell the truth about sin, about hell. It's happening right now in the evangelical culture about judgment about Christ being the only way. How clear can Christ be? “I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Acts 4:12.
There's no name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. You're going to be at work around the water cooler, and someone can say, you can't believe that Christians really think Jesus is the only way. We're going to be unclear if we're embarrassed, right? If you're biting in the vine and you're praying and praying and praying, I hope you'll have no problem praying for clarity. Be clear. I know prayer is hard. I get it. I’m not here to make you feel guilty. I just want to give you something to aim for, and I want you to shoot for the kind of prayers we've talked about - outward, missional, clear prayers about clarity.
You've all heard of John and Charles Wesley. I hope they changed the 18th century world. They changed Europe first and came over here to America and changed a lot of that. John, the theologian, Wesley, the hymn writer. Their mom, many of you have heard of, I'm sure, Susanna Wesley. She raised not only John and Charles, but she raised a bunch of kids. She had 19 children, a bad marriage, a house that burned down twice. You should read a little bit about her. She had it hard. She's a Christian mom who was a woman of prayer. You think, how in the world do you have time to pray as a mother of 19? Well, you're going to have to work hard. You're going to have to work hard to have any undistracted times to pray. You know how she tried to achieve undistracted times of prayer. She'd take her apron, you can read her story, and she'd put it over her head, stand there in the kitchen. Now you have got to be around your kids, so they don't, you know, cut each other's hands off and bonk each other in the head, or whatever. But she'd sit there in the darkness of her apron with her eyes closed, praying. And, of course, you want to talk about outward praying. She'd pray, she'd pray for the world, she'd pray for the state of the church, she'd pray for her kids to make a difference in the world. And God answered those prayers. Her two sons were, I mean, they were quarterbacks in all of this, they did amazing things, they affected a whole bunch of other people, not to mention just what they did themselves, and God used their prayers to do amazing things, God used her prayers. I just wonder, what would happen if you and I got serious about praying the way that she did. Got creative about how to be undistracted in our praying.
We worked hard to be persistent and grateful. I know there's a lot we can complain about. I think, the bane of the church today is that we find ourselves complaining all the time just about everything. I commission you to pray. I want us to do that. I’m not here to make you feel guilty. I want to motivate you. I want God's Word to empower you. I trust this weekend has fueled you to work harder, and may God's grace empower you to be men and women of prayer. Let's pray.
God, let us in this world that desperately needs the mission, the great commission of the church, to be effectual in Orange County and around the world to happen and to be fruitful. Let us be a part of that by first being very devoted to prayer, having a muscular kind of praying that persists day in and day out. So, let this be a priority. I know our flesh is going to push against it; Satan is going to push against it. The world's never going to help us, so we need to go to you. We need to lean into our converted hearts that desire that kind of praying. Do this for us, God, in a way that we've never seen before. Move us to the next level of spiritual growth. Let us be more of what you know we can be, as we rely on you. And as you work within us, sanctify us, strengthen us, do good things through us. We pray that the world might be a place where Christ is exalted, the gospel is made clear, and the churches are strengthened. You promised to make the church an unstoppable force. Let us be a part of that. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.