03.10.06
Prayer in the Shorter Catechism (1) The Place of Prayer
Read: Matthew 6:5-15
Ask any Christian and he or she will tell you that prayer is one of the hardest elements of their faith - it is one of the hardest things to keep doing. There can be many different reasons why it is so difficult - in-discipline, unbelief, over-busy-ness and so on. But I think one of the reasons we don’t pray as we should is that we don’t really understand prayer and why it is so important to our Christian lives.
That is why I want to take the opportunity over the next few meetings to try and drive home to us the centrality of prayer to the Christian life. There are many ways I could do this, but what I want us to look at is the wisdom of our fathers on the matter of prayer. If you remember, I spent some weeks last year looking at Q.89 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism which talks about how and why we should read the Bible. A few questions on we come across the question we, at times, all ask - Q. 98, “What is Prayer?” To which our fathers wrote, “Prayer is an offering up of our desires to God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of His mercies.” What I want to do today is to take a broad brush look at the foundations of this doctrine of prayer in the Shorter Catechism, hopefully helping us to see prayer’s centrality in the Christian life. I want therefore to pass through three stages:
[1] The Place of Prayer
The origins of the Doctrine of Prayer in the Shorter Catechism are to be found in the earlier section, from Questions 20-28, regarding the redemption which the Lord Jesus won for us on the Cross at Calvary. And the question is, what exactly has His redemptive work achieved for us - or to put it another way, in what does our salvation consist and how is this salvation applied to us as Christian believers? Again, I want to pass through three stages in this argument:
a. The Benefits of Redemption - Questions 32 to 38 list for us the benefits of our salvation. They can be divided under 3 sub-groups:
i.. In this Life - Questions 32 - 36 deal with the benefits which come to us in this life of our being redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ. They include justification, adoption, sanctification and all the benefits which flow from these three great achievements - the benefits of an assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of grace and perseverance to the end. These are those benefits which come to us in this life as a result of Christ’s saving work.
ii. At Death - Question 37 deals with the benefits which come to us at death as a result of Christ’s redeeming work. The Shorter Catechism tells us that “the souls of believers, are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection.” All this comes to us as a benefit of Christ’s death on the Cross.
iii. At the Resurrection - Question 38 deals with the benefits which come to us at the resurrection as a result of Christ’s saving work. The Shorter Catechism says, “at the resurrection, believers being raised up in glory, shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity.” Again, what a future lies in store for us as a result of our Saviour’s dying and rising again from the dead.
And so all these benefits are ours. On the side of a bus this week I saw an advertisement for the Alpha Course, and it read, ‘There must be more to life than this!’, and that’s true - according to the Shorter Catechism there is far more, but there is also far more to death and far more to the resurrection than just this. We, as Christian believers, are the most privileged and wealthy people in the world!
b. The Agent of Application - How though, do these benefits come to be ours - or in other words, how does the work of Christ upon the cross benefit us? Question 30 of the Shorter Catechism tells us - ‘The Spirit applieth to us the redemption purchased by Christ, by working faith in us, and thereby uniting us to Christ in our effectual calling.‘ In other words, faith, and that a gift of God, is the agent by which we are united to Christ and the benefits of His salvation flow down to us. Think of it like this - God wants us to receive His salvation blessings, but our fists are clenched and our hands are closed. So the Holy Spirit gives us faith to receive them - it is as if the Holy Spirit unclenches our fists and opens out our hands wide to receive so that God can pour down His salvation blessings upon us and we can benefit from His redemptive work.
c. The Means of Application - the question now is, how does the Holy Spirit work faith in us - by what means does He unclench our fists so that we can receive? The answer is given to us in Q.88 of the Shorter Catechism - ‘The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.‘ In other words, it is through these three means, three ordinances (that means things Christ has commanded), that faith grows within us and that we are enabled to receive all the benefits Christ died to give us - the Word, the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and through Prayer. So see the centrality of Prayer to the life of faith - it is through Prayer that our faith grows and that our ability to receive the benefits of Christ’s redemptive work - justification, joy, peace, holiness, eternal glory - it is through prayer that all these things come to us. If we do not pray, we shall not receive these things, but in the measure that we do pray, we shall receive. So I hope all of us can understand the centrality and importance of the task of prayer.
[2] The Purpose of Prayer
So what does prayer do? What contribution does it make to our life of faith? There are four distinct stages here:
a. The Path of Conviction - through prayer, we are convicted of our sins. Remember, at base, prayer is talking to God - and when we talk to anyone, we begin to see ways in which we have offended them and let them down. So prayer forms the bedrock of the conviction of our sin, a conviction we need if we are going to see our need for Christ. Remember the Highland Kitchenmaid and what she prayed, “Lord show me myself“, and then “Lord, show me thyself“. It was through prayer she came to an awareness of her sin.
b. The Path of Conversion - through prayer, we are converted - we are taken from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of Jesus. Most of us, if not all of us, prayed at the moment of our conversion - bearing in mind that the faith we have is a gift from God and that we cannot boast. God heard that prayer and saved us from our sins through the work of Christ on the Cross.
c. The Path of Assurance - through prayer we are confirmed in our faith - it is through prayer that God gives us an assurance of our faith in Him. It is through prayer that we realise that we do, in fact, have faith in the Lord Jesus. For one reason or another, some Christians will struggle with assurance and they may have to pray long and hard for God to confirm them in their faith, but it will come - through prayer.
d. The Path of Growth - it is through prayer that we grow in our faith. If we do not pray we are doomed to remain spiritual babies our whole lives through. And yet, read the biographies of the great saints of old, men like Hudson Taylor, William Burns, Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray McCheyne, and you see how central a place prayer occupied in their Christian growth and discipleship. Prayer is the pathway to Christian growth and maturity.
These are just four of the ways in which prayer contributes to our Christian lives - there are a thousand others, but I am becoming more and more convinced that prayer is not the least we can do for the Kingdom of God, but the most we can do. It was through prayer, both his own and the prayers of his supporters, that Hudson Taylor was enabled to win so many Chinese for Christ; it was through prayer that the great New England revivals of the 18th Century took place - prayer changes everything because prayer first and foremost changes us.
[3] The Pattern of Prayer
Having settled the place and purpose of prayer according to the definitions provided by our fathers in the Shorter Catechism, at last we move on to Q. 98 - ‘What is prayer? Prayer is an offering up of our desires to God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.‘ Over the next few meetings I want to more fully explore this wonderful and memorable definition of prayer, but just as a kind of taster I want you to notice the three distinct elements of prayer mentioned in this definition. I’ll take them in order, but I think the Westminster fathers saw them as elements of prayer and not to be prayed in this strict order.
a. Petition - ‘prayer is an offering up of our desires to God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ.’ Prayer is first and foremost petition - it is a lifting up of our desires to God, those things we really want to see happen.
b. Confession - ‘with confession of our sins’. How we need to keep short accounts with God! And prayer is the place where we confess our sins and shortcomings to God.
c. Thanksgiving - ‘and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies’. In prayer, we do not merely pray for things, but we thank God for answered prayer. We are often so ungrateful to God for His tremendous mercy to us in so many different ways - but if you read the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, its so different - thanksgiving is interspersed with petition time and time again.
So there we have a very broad brush introduction to the Westminster Shorter Catechism Doctrine of Prayer, but what I want to urge upon you is not only that you know this doctrine, but that you put it into practice in your lives - brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ - pray. AMEN