what’s stopping us?

don’t expect God will ever let you down

This coming Sunday I’ll be preaching the second sermon in our Next Steps series at Grace Church. This series represents my understanding from Jesus in the Scriptures for the essential practices he expects from his disciples; the essential steps we should pursue to grow one step closer to him, the Holy Spirit helping us all along the way.

So, what is the second step towards Jesus we are focusing on?

Talk to God.

(Or if you are a church-y kind of person: prayer.)

As we will for all eight sermons in this series, we’re going to hear directly from Jesus himself.
Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?
I mean, if we’re going to learn how to get closer to him, we might as well hear from the God-man himself.
So this Sunday we’ll immerse ourselves in his teaching near the end of his sermon on the mount:

7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
Matthew 7:1-11 (ESV)

To whet your appetite a bit, here’s some insight from N.T. Wright on this teaching from the Messiah:

…for most of us, the problem is not that we are too eager to ask for the wrong things. The problem is that we are not nearly eager enough to ask for the right things.

And ‘the right things’ doesn’t simply mean fine moral qualities (though if you dare to pray for holiness, humility or other dangerous things, God may just give them to you). It means the things we need day by day, which God is just as concerned about as we are. If he is a father, let’s treat him as a father, not a bureaucrat or dictator who wouldn’t want to be bothered with our trivial and irrelevant concerns….

Of course, as we become mature children we will increasingly share his concerns for his suffering and sorrowing world. We will want to pray for it more than for ourselves. But, within the kingdom-prayer that Jesus taught us, as well as praying for God’s will to be done on earth, we were taught to pray for what we ourselves need here and now.

So: what’s stopping us?

We may well say that we’ve tried it and it didn’t work. Well, prayer remains a mystery. Sometimes when God seems to answer ‘no’ we find it puzzling. And people have always found it strange that, if God is supremely wise, powerful and loving, he shouldn’t simply do for everybody everything that they could possibly want. But, as Archbishop William Temple famously said, ‘When I pray, coincidences happen; when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.’ Some of the wisest thinkers of today’s church have cautiously concluded that, as God’s kingdom comes, it isn’t God’s will to bring it all at once. We couldn’t bear it if he did. God is working like an artist with difficult material; and prayer is the way some of that material co-operates with the artist instead of resisting him.
How that is so we shall never fully understand until we see God face to face.
That it is so is one of the most basic Chrisian insights.

So: treat God as a father, and let him know how things are with you! Ask, search and knock and see what happens! Expect some surprises on the way, but don’t expect that God will ever let you down.

I hope to see you Sunday!