September 14, 2003

This morning I want to share with you about praying and want to use the life of Moses as one who learned to pray, and as he learned to pray, God could truly use him in a great and powerful way. I want you to think a few moments about your life of prayer. It tends to be one of those things that people assume, “Well I am guilty. I don’t pray enough. I don’t pray that well.” You miss the point, if that is the case.

God takes us where we are in the life of prayer and it is one of the greatest means of grace, of getting to know the Lord and His love and really changing your life and the lives of those around you. Moses certainly discovered it and I hope and pray that you will make that discovery of what it means to really practice the discipline of prayer. That means that, sometimes and in some ways, prayer is natural. We see beautiful scenery and we just praise God, but other times it is just shear work and it doesn’t come that naturally, especially praying for others.

In Exodus, chapter 17, the children of Israel have experienced a great victory, coming out of Egypt into the promised land, and that they are across the Red Sea. And in chapter 17, water from a rock has come, but then they have to deal with the Amalekites. And so we find here, it says:

This past Spring I received a box of books, getting ready for my first residency in the Doctorate of Ministry program, and I have to admit, at first I was shocked that I had gotten that many books, and these were thick books. And I didn’t go straight to the theology books, the ones which were more difficult intellectually, although I thought they all were challenging. I went first to Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor, because I was more hungry for the spirituality. That’s what I felt the need for. But in some ways this book wasn’t that easy. Oh, the problem wasn’t that I didn’t understand it; the problem was that I did understand it, but in some ways it was an ouch when I would read it. It had one little chapter that talked about the “unbusy pastor.”

It begins by saying, “Whenever I get a letter to the ‘busy pastor,’ I have just gotten to where I throw it away.” He says, “I know that that title is tempted to be flattering, that we are supposed to feel sorry for the pastor who visits and does all these things, and all pitiful,” but he says, “It’s really not a compliment. We need to see it as like an adulterous husband or an embezzling banker.”

Why is that? Why is he so strict about that? Because he feels that busyness is truly not the calling of a pastor of any Christian. Our calling is to be faithful. And the ouch came from two reasons. I guess at the time that I was reading it (it was right after Easter) and I felt I had been very busy. Two reasons people can be busy and like it. One is vanity. That is, that we like the reputation that we are busy. We go to a doctor’s office; it’s going to bother us if we see the doctor answering the phone and reading a book — “Oh, I’m glad you’re here!” No, we want a doctor, who, when you go to their office, they are busy. I took my daughter to the doctor about a month ago and they told us, “Well, it going to be a two-hour wait. He’s behind.” And then this woman came out and said, “You’all just hang in there. You’ll make it.” And that’s the kind of doctor who you say we don’t mind waiting for. You do want that doctor who everybody wants to see. Not that they are vain. I told Mickey Lewis that. I don’t mean doctors are vain. But we need them. But sometimes we like that reputation. We are busy.

A second reason that we like busyness is that we are lazy. I mean, really, we just don’t want to do the hard work of praying and planning to make sure that what we are spending our time on is doing God’s work. We’d rather just do those things that maybe we would like to do, but it makes us look like we’re busy people. It reminds me of the story about a Methodist preacher who looked out the window and he saw Jesus.

And he didn’t know what to do, so being a Methodist preacher, he called up his district superintendent, and he said, “What’s the matter?”

“Well, Jesus is outside the window.”

“Are you sure it’s Him?”

“Yes. It’s Him. I mean, the beard and everything. It’s Him.”

“Well, what’s He doing?”

“Well, He’s just looking at me.”

“Well, how does He look?”

“Well, He looks very lovingly. It was just like right out of the Bible. But I know it’s Jesus. What should I do?”

And after a long pause, he said, “ Well, look busy.”

That’s the way we tend to think, that when all else fails, God wants us to be busy. But what we need to be is faithful. And one of the best ways to make the distinction, and let’s face it, Jesus was busy: We want to be sure we are busy with God’s will.

Elizabeth Elliott is a great writer and speaker and a phrase of hers that has captured my attention is, “There is always time to do the will of God.” Now, there is not always time to do everything that you think you need to do or to meet everybody’s expectation under the sun. But there will always be time to do the will of God. And one of the best ways to deal with that is with a life of prayer.

There are four Ps I want to share with you today that I see from the life of Moses’ pilgrimages of prayer. And the first one is that he had a plan for prayer. Moses knew that the Amalekites were coming. The Amalekites were certainly outnumbered, so they were trying to come against the ones who were straggling along — the children, the older people — and they had to defend themselves. And so, he had a plan. He was going to send Joshua, who he knew was courageous and a leader, and basically take a militia army and defend them.

But he did, definitely, have a plan. Moses: some of his background. Some of you know the story: Moses was one of those children who was miraculously saved in the river Nile, grew up in the palace, raised by Pharaoh's daughter, so he had the best of schooling, the best of the wisdom of Egypt, but he felt a sense of sadness that his people, the Hebrews, were slaves. We see that Moses certainly did have a temper that got him in trouble at times. He killed an Egyptian who was abusing one of the Israelites. It was found out; he fled. The next forty years he spent in the wilderness. What happened in the wilderness? What happens when you have had a defeat or setback? He learned to pray. He learned to know his God. When the time was right, there was a burning bush that said, “Moses, I want you to go and set my people free. And he followed that call. Moses was not ready for that call. (Tape change)…..

…..Years ago he {Max Lucado} was very convicted that he was simply too busy doing good things and convicted that God wanted him to learn to pray and to pray more, and so he read a bunch of books on prayer. He preached about prayer; he taught about prayer. And then, as he says, he did something very radical: he prayed. In his book, Too Busy Not to Pray, he says that one of the disciplines that he learned that helped him is the practice of journaling, that you actually get a little notebook, and yes, you do take time to be quiet before the Lord. You listen. You praise Him. But you write out your prayers.

I tried that some recently, and I at first, was very resistant, but I find out that it does help, just the discipline of just being quiet, and actually just writing some things about praying makes quite a difference. Do you have a plan for praying? If you use something like The Upper Room, an excellent devotional guide, you will have the devotional; you will have a scripture; you will have the thought for the day; you will have a written prayer. You can make it five minutes or you can make it ten or fifteen minutes. If you will take the time, you can just let that be a springboard to not only pray for your family and some of the needs that you know of at work or at school, but you can let it go with you throughout the day.

Joshua certainly had a battle plan when he went to the battle of Jericho and it wasn’t primarily a military strike strategy as it was, “We’re going to march around the city once every seven days. On the seventh day we are going to march around seven times.” It was a prayer strategy and the walls came down. Have a plan. It makes quite a difference. Moses had a plan.

Then he also had a place that he prayed. Do you have a place where you go? That’s what you do. I pray and I talk to the Lord. Moses said to Joshua,

“Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. (That was his plan) Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."

He’s too old for the draft, but now he can pray. And he is up there and he is going to raise his hands in prayer. They are going to be able to see Moses. It is going to inspire them that he is lifting them up in prayer. And it is more than (certainly we pray for our troops) but today we are praying for people because we are in a spiritual battle. People oftentimes have a smile on their face, but they are struggling, as we all do, and we are praying for them.

Jesus certainly had a place to pray, didn’t He? He went out early in the morning to pray. Sometimes he didn’t want them to know that place because He wanted some privacy in His praying. But He would go to the Garden of Gethsemane and pray and struggle as we do when we are praying to know God’s will. One of the prayer warriors of a church I served, her driveway was her prayer place, and she said, “Especially this week, I have been wearing that driveway out. I have just walked back and forth and paced and I have prayed.”

Some revelations I have had over the years, is it was a discovery to me that you could actually pray in the car. I thought that in the car the radio had to be on, but you can survive; you can turn it off and talk to the Lord, and sometimes that is my best place to pray. I have a prayer chair, or pray when I am jogging or walking. Just so you have a place that — when I am there — I talk to the Lord. It is special.

Joe Harding was a preacher out in Seattle who was visiting a leader in evangelism in the Methodist Church. It was over in Korea and the Koreans had a tremendous emphasis on prayer. All the biggest churches in the world were in Korea. And they were noticing their new building that they had (like we have this wonderful Christian Life Facility) but there were a lot of rooms, and he was asking, “Now, what do you do in that room?”

And they said, “Well, those are our prayer rooms.” And he said, “Well, do you use them as meeting rooms, or Sunday School, or Bible study, or Youth?”

“No. No, in those rooms all we do is pray.” Think of that. That there in Korea the priority is that in those rooms that’s all we use them for. You pray when you go into there. Do you have a place when you go there you have a meeting with God?

And third, it was a priority. For Moses, he had learned the hard way that he didn’t want to just leap before he looked. He really wanted to pray before he leapt. For Moses, his arms were growing weary. He began to catch on that when his arms were up, they were winning the battle; when the arms got tired, the Amalekites were winning.

So, Aaron and Hur said, “We can do something about that.”

So they pulled up a chair, they raised his hands, and Moses, as you can tell, has become quite a prayer warrior, because he prays until sunset. He is praying all day long, and we can get intimidated about that. But just be inspired about that, that Moses really took intercessory prayer seriously, lifting people up in prayer, and they were victorious.

What a difference it makes when we lift people up in prayer and help them to overcome whatever it is that they are having to deal with. That happens when prayer becomes a priority for us. It’s not just something we squeeze in. It’s not something we do if, “Well, if it’s come to that, I guess all we can do is pray.” No, it is a priority. We come to the Lord and talk to Him.

David Wilkerson (you may have read his story or seen it in the movie, The Cross and the Switchblade) was an Assemblies of God pastor, I believe in West Virginia, and he was convicted that he liked TV just a little bit too much. It was the best way he unwound. Nothing against television, but he was watching for two hours before he would go to bed at night, and he became convicted that, really, he could make better use of his time and he felt he needed to pray.

And he thought, “Well, maybe if I give up the television I’ll have time to pray.” And so, he put a fleece out before the Lord, before he makes such a radical commitment. He offered to put the TV in a newspaper ad to see if someone would like to buy it. He put it at kind of a high price. Well, wouldn’t you know, the Lord took him up on it and someone wanted to buy it the next morning. Called him up and said, “I’d love that TV.”

So, the TV is gone, so he has to start praying. And he began to read the Bible, just read it. He began to pray. And he could tell: something special is happening. And that happens when prayer becomes a priority. But then, he noticed one night that there was a — I think it was a Time magazine or Life magazine — and he felt, “No, I don’t need to pick up a magazine. This is a Holy time.”

But he felt really compelled to go over and look at this magazine. On the cover were these young boys, a gang. They had gotten into trouble in New York City. And he felt the Lord speaking to him, “I want you to go to New York City,” (a preacher from West Virginia) “and minister to them.” He went there. He was not well-received at the trial. But that was the beginning of Teen Challenge. You see, people’s lives are changed when prayer becomes a priority, when you take time to be with the Lord. Daniel — for him it was a priority — it didn’t matter what the edicts were. He would take time to pray.

Jesus says two attitudes we need to have when we come to him in prayer. In Luke, Chapter 18, he told two stories. One is of the man who prayed, “Lord I want to thank you. I am not like other people. I fast. I tithe. I am not like this sinner over here, this tax collector.”

When prayer is a priority, it’s not an opportunity to be self righteous and feel like, “Thank God, I am better than everybody else.” No.

But then there was another one who prayed 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

And that is what Jesus said. When we pray, it is admitting our need of Him. It does not mean we are saying we are such terrible people. No. We are humbling ourselves before Him and saying, “Lord we need You, and we honestly pray…”

We need that attitude. And then, also, He talked about a widow and a judge. The widow kept coming to the judge day after day, after day, after day for justice. And finally the judge said, “Alright, ma’am, you can have your justice.”

What Jesus was commending was that persistence. When we pray, we don’t give up, saying, “Well I prayed for that for a whole week… or a month.” Especially in praying for people to come to Christ, it can take years. But it is well worth it. There are some answers to prayer that are not going to be easy ones. And really, it’s a compliment that God has put it on your heart to be praying about it, and He knows, for whatever reason, that you will pray. But it becomes a priority, and you pray.

And the last P is people. That is, what you have here is a particular type of prayer and it is praying for people. Moses is praying for these courageous warriors, going into battle for the first time, and he is lifting them up to Almighty God, knowing that there is more than a battle going on here. It is: God is wanting to do a work on His people of faith, and He is wanting to demonstrate to the world what people look like when they really trust God, and love Him, and obey His commandments, and He is lifting them up in prayer.

Three ways that we pray for other people: One, we certainly pray for people who are ill, have a physical illness. Richard Foster was a great help to me in this. When he talks about healing prayer he said that one day he was asked to go to the home of a young lady who was ill. Her name was Julie. I guess she was ten or eleven years old. She was sick and he recruited her little brother because he knew that, for one, children have a child-like faith, and especially in praying for the sick, they don’t ask lots of questions. They just take it straight to Jesus and pray.

So, he gave him a little bit of instruction and said, “Now here’s what we are going to do. We are going to go in and pray for your sister who is ill, and we are going to put our hands on her and I am going to put my hands on yours, and we are going to imagine Jesus lovingly putting His hands on our hands and praying that these germs, or this, whatever, are going to leave your sister, Julie, and she is going to get well.” He understood that, and so they went in and prayed and —Julie was well the next day.

That doesn’t always happen that quickly. But with the healing prayer, what you do is, you quit worrying about giving God advice about how to heal the person, or when to do it, or how fast to do it. You just come to Him confident that, He is our Creator; He created this body, this person; He loves them far more than we do.

The least we can do is just pray and intercede on their behalf that God is going to touch them. That’s what intercessory pray for healing is all about. We also pray for people who are having a hard time. There are a lot of people who are struggling. I heard a story of a teacher who was praying. No, she wasn’t praying out loud, but she was praying silently. She had emotionally handicapped children in her class and she one little boy who at times, for whatever reason, would just crawl under his desk and assume this fetal position. But, as she walked around, she would just pray. She just bathed her classroom in prayer. And then, in a little bit, that boy would get up back in his desk.

One day she was talking to him and said, “Can you imagine a time when you were really happy?”

He said, “Yes, I won a race and people were clapping for me.”

She said, “Well, the next time that happens, you just imagine those people cheering for you as if you were in that race.”

She is praying for him; she is loving him; she is trying to get him to see himself as God sees him. We pray for people who are having a difficult time, and that can include yourself, and that’s fine.

We also pray for the healing of families. Families are under a spiritual battle attack today and it can be very discouraging. We pray for them. We pray for marriages; we pray for every single relationship. Tony Campolo, if you have never heard him, is a very dynamic preacher, speaker, and he can tell great stories, and this is a good one. He talks about going to preach for a Pentecostal Convention in Pennsylvania and the brothers wanted to gather around and pray for him before he preached. They got around him and put their hands right up on his bald head and he said, “The longer this went on they got louder and longer and, you know, my head started hurting They were starting to press in on me. And then they started praying for this guy named Alfred. They said, ‘Lord, you know Alfred. Alfred has left his family and his three kids. And you know, Lord, he lives down there at the silver trailer…’”

And Tony Campolo said he felt, “You know, I almost told them, ‘The Lord doesn’t need directions. He knows — whoever this is — He knows where he lives.’”

And he was kind of irritated about this, but finally they quit praying, and they had been praying, “Lord, help him go back to his family.” So, he went and preached and said his goodbyes, got on the road and about two miles down the road he picked up a hitchhiker. After they had talked for a little bit and gone a couple of miles he said, “What’s your name?”

He said, “My name is Alfred Staltwitz,” which is a hard name for me to remember, but Tony Campolo certainly recognized that name. It was like, “This is the man they were talking about. This is the man we prayed for.”

So what does he do? He gets off at the next exit and he turns back around and starts going the other way. And Alfred starts looking at him like, “Well, what are you doing?”

“I’m taking you back home.”

“Well, why?”

“Because you are leaving your wife and your children.”

And he gets real wide-eyed and so he sits kind of glued against the other side of the door. And then, he pulls right up to his silver trailer. “How did you know where I live?”

“Well, God told me.”

And so he goes to the door and his wife is so glad to see him. And then her eyes get real wide when he starts telling her the story.

And Tony Campolo, as he could do, said, “Sit down. I want to tell you people about Jesus Christ.”

And that young couple became Christians and that family was restored. We pray for people who are going through the need of healing. We pray for people who are going through a difficult time. We pray for families. We lift them up to God in prayer, knowing that God Almighty has the power and He can channel that power and change peoples’ lives.

The choice is ours. There is some busyness and some scheduling that is going to be difficult for you to change overnight. It may be ingrained habit. It may be just demands that your family and job have on you. But that time that you can actually start to bring to the Lord, I would bring it. If you can make that transition to having a life that, instead of distressed and fearful and overwhelmed, to a life of the peace of God which passes all understanding, you pray and receive his power. But you are also lifting other people up in prayer. I believe not only will it change your life, it will change the lives of those around you, as we take it to the Lord in prayer. Let us pray.