Worshipful Prayer

In this part of the sermon: Martin reviews previous studies on prayer, reiterating that prayer must be governed by God's Word and engage all biblical dimensions. He introduces the idea that all forms of…

Pastor Blaise's illustration of a child bringing a bouquet with weeds to a parent, and the other parent lovingly removing the weeds, is used to explain how the Holy Spirit purifies our prayers, making them acceptable to God.

and secondly, the Holy Spirit is the great enabler for our conscious weakness, in this area of prayer. We know not how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself. And then that beautiful illustration that Pastor Blaise gave us last Lord's Day, of the child who brings in the bouquet to his parent, to his daddy, and before he presents it to his daddy or his mommy, with all the weeds in it, the other parent lovingly extracts all the weeds, so that all that is presented is the pure, beautiful, fragrant flowers. And so, the Holy Spirit, who knows the mind of God, weeds out of, takes the weeds out ...

3:15 - 4:00 Read in full sermon

The point: Before you start praying, stop and remember who God is and who you are in relationship to Him.

Martin quotes John Newton's hymn, 'Thou art coming to a king. Large petitions with thee bring,' to emphasize the need to consciously recognize the greatness of God before praying.

I don't want to put the words in your mouth. It ought to make us stop if just for half a minute. And before we start blabbing on about this and that in our prayers, to ask ourselves, do I recognize the God to whom I'm coming? That's the emphasis of Mr. Newton's hymn.

15:24 - 15:49 Read in full sermon

The point: Continually allow exposition, study, and assimilation of Christian truth to enrich your prayer life by deepening your knowledge of God.

Martin recounts an individual's realization that the devil is 'God's devil,' meaning God controls him. This story illustrates how a deeper understanding of God's sovereignty profoundly impacts one's prayer life, especially regarding deliverance from evil.

Because the more you know of the being of your God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the more meaning there is when you say, My Father who is in heaven. Like the person who came to me several years ago when for the first time it dawned on this individual that the devil was God's devil. That is, that he was at the end of God's chain. This person always had, didn't realize at the time, a thoroughly pagan notion.

16:52 - 17:20 Read in full sermon

The point: Grow in the awareness of the wonder of your relationship to God as adopted into His family, avoiding cowering in fear.

Believers cowering in the woodshed like runaway slaves, instead of enjoying the warmth of the living room, illustrates how some Christians fail to embrace their adopted relationship with God as Father, hindering their prayer life.

Some of us still grieve God because we cower in the corner of the woodshed like a runaway slave who's just come home. When the living room and the warmth of the fireplace is there available to us and we have a name tag on our seat, reserved for us, and there we are cringing out in the woodshed, wondering if God's going to come around the corner and smash us. Our Father! After this manner, pray ye, our Father.

19:17 - 19:47 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: To organize the various dimensions of prayer, Martin introduces the metaphor of the 'hand of prayer': a full hand bringing something (praise, worship), a defiled hand needing…

The metaphor of the 'hand' (full, defiled, empty) is introduced as an organizational tool to help remember and engage in the various dimensions of prayer: bringing something to God, needing cleansing, and seeking gifts.

I don't care about the aesthetic part of mixed metaphors. In trying to organize this and make it helpful to you, I was racking my brain to try to find out something that would pull together the various dimensions of prayer so we didn't need to remember these five or six or seven or eight, nine different pieces of the pie, but we could remember something very simple that would help to bring all of them together. Now, I would like to suggest that if you think of the hand as the instrument of prayer. Now, you don't pray with your hand.

20:55 - 21:27 Read in full sermon

Driving home: There's a defective view of who God is in all of us!

The analogy of a shining gold Rolls Royce turning heads compared to a beat-up Ford illustrates that when God is seen as commonplace, there is no 'holy oohing and awing' in His presence, explaining the lack of true worship.

There's a defective view of who God is in all of us! The defective view of who God is in His character. You never saw anyone oohing and awing on Bloomfield Avenue. If just, you know, one or two-year-old beat-up Ford, Chevrolet goes driving down a lane, down through, but you let a spanking new shining gold Rolls Royce come through town and every head is third.

46:32 - 46:54 Read in full sermon