19.10.06
Prayer in the Shorter Catechism (2) Prayer Made Only to God
In a world of increasing fragmentation and suspicion, what is one of the things which every human being has in common; something every Homo sapiens does every day? The answer is pray. In fact, as a species we should not be called Homo Sapiens - the man who is wise, but Homo orans - the man who prays. Given that prayer is something every single person in the whole world does everyday, what does the Bible, as understood through the lens of the Shorter Catechism, have to tell us about who we should pray to? After all, when I say everyone prays, I do not say that everyone prays to the same god - some pray to themselves, urging themselves on to better performances in their work or leisure; some pray to false gods, others kneel down at the altar of their possessions and family to pray. But what about us, to whom do we pray? We are given the answer in the Shorter Catechism A.98 - “Prayer is an offering up of our desires to God“. For prayer to be true prayer, its primary ingredient must be that it is offered up to the God of the Bible - not ourselves, not the gods of the other religions, not the god of materialism or ’spirituality’, but the God of the Bible.If you remember from last time, we were discussing together the place of prayer in the life of the Christian, and we saw that rather than being a luxury, prayer is an absolute necessity for us. It is through prayer that we, as Christians, are being dealt with by God and given everything Jesus died to provide us with. Without prayer, there will be no awareness of these things in our hearts and minds; our behaviour will be un-transformed and un-renewed and we shall know nothing of the power of God working in and through us. But what then of prayer - I’ve already said tonight that the primary ingredient of true prayer according to the Shorter Catechism is that it is offered up to God, how can we understand this and what difference does this make to our day to day lives as Christians? I want to try and answer these questions by asking why should we pray to God, and to Him only? As I see it, there are three reasons:
[A] Only God is to be Worshipped
Joel 2:32 tells us prayer is part of religious worship - it is part of the worship we owe to God. In Matthew 4:10, when Jesus is being tempted in the wilderness, He answers Satan by saying, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.” Put these two verses together and what they are telling us is that prayer to God, and to Him alone, is integral to our religious lives. Now why is this important? Well, if you remember back to Exodus 20, to the Ten Commandments, you have the first commandment which says, “You shall have no other gods before me” - God is to be first in our hearts, not money, not success, not Krishna, but God. But what is commonly neglected is that this commandment to have no one else before God is based upon God’s merciful and gracious acts of salvation towards His people. Exodus 20:1 tells us “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” In other words, having God as first in our hearts, and therefore praying only to Him and to no-one else, is a function of our having been recipients of His gracious salvation. To bring this into the New Testament, Romans 12 tells us that we are to offer our bodies as living sacrifices - living worship - but on the basis of what? The answer is given, ‘in view of God’s mercy‘. Just as we are to have no other God’s before Yahweh, and that on the basis of what He has done for us by saving us through Christ; and just as He demands our worship - we are to pray to Him and to Him only. No other God has saved us, no other God has given up His Son to die for us upon a cruel cross. Therefore, pray to no other God. What do the gods of this world give us - they are nothing but painted dust? What do the gods of other religions give us - nothing, we have to give them everything. But God, on the other hand, has given us everything and so worship Him alone for He alone is worthy of it - worship and pray!
[B] Only God is to be Trusted
This is a point rather like what we have said before, but approaching the matter in a different way. Why do we pray to God? Because we have faith in Him. Faith and prayer are inextricably linked, so much so that it is impossible to have faith without prayer, or to have prayer without faith. But in whom do we have faith? Who can be utterly trusted because He is utterly reliable and dependable? Again, is it not the God whose very name means dependability; and whose primary characteristics in the Old Testament are steadfast love and faithfulness?
The gods of the nations in the Old Testament were known to be changeable - you could never predict their mood. The gods of the Greeks were distant and removed - they played chess with the lives of the heroes and only came down to earth to satisfy their carnal desires. If there was sensual pleasure in it for them, they would easily stick a knife in your back. Similarly, as we go on in the Christian life, we find by bitter experience the truth of Jeremiah 17:5 - “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength.” We all here, even the most godly, are at best untrustworthy and undependable because first and foremost in our minds comes selfish self-interest. Rather, it is only God who can be utterly trusted - and therefore it is only to Him that we should pray - not to statues, not to idols, not to angels, not to saints and not to each other, but to God and God alone.
That’s one good reason why we should read Christian biography - I am at present nearly finished Hudson Taylor’s. We read them, not in order to eulogise and idolise a man, but in order to learn about how faithful and trustworthy God was in their lives - how God protected them, how God answered their prayers and gave them what they needed - how their colleagues and even themselves were frail and untrustworthy, but ultimately, God was utterly dependable. And that’s why we pray to Him and to Him alone - for He alone is absolutely true to His nature and faithful.
[C] Only God is Able
So far, we have asserted that there are certain things that God has done for us which merit our prayers to Him and to Him alone – He has saved us and shown Himself to be utterly reliable and dependable. But, the very fact that He has done these things in themselves, still does not, in totality, answer our question about why we should pray to Him and to Him only. I want to round up our studies in this point by seeing that in addition to God alone being a saving God, and a reliable God, our God alone is an able God – only He has infinite ability and power. And I see this working in three ways:
1. … to Know our Prayers – another way of saying this is that our God alone has all knowledge – He is omniscient. King David knew this full well when he wrote those immortal words in Psalm 139 – “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.” We human beings are, most of the time, not able to know the desires of the person sitting next to us – sometimes we even find it difficult to know what our own desires are – we are confused and panicking and we don’t know what we really want. But our God is all knowing – He knows our hearts and He knows the hearts of the people sitting next to us. Only God is able to know us so intimately. Others can only see what we are like on the outside – even our husbands and wives only see the tip of the iceberg of who we are, even though we may spend every waking and sleeping moment with them. But God, the God who formed us in our mother’s womb, knows us perfectly. What other God is like this? None. Furthermore, He not only knows your heart, He knows the hearts of every single human being who has ever lived or who is alive today – He knows their desires and their prayers – He is never overloaded with the population explosion because there is no limit to infinite knowledge. So don’t go saying, “He’s too busy to know about me”, because the reality is that He’s too great not to know you perfectly. And there are no mistakes with Him and therefore pray to God and to God alone.
2. … to Hear our Prayers – another way of saying this is that our God alone is present everywhere – He is omnipresent. Again, King David knew the reality of this when He wrote, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” The gods of the Old Testament nations were localised gods – gods of the mountains or of the seas, gods of a nation or of a people group – they couldn’t hear the prayers of a man on the other side of the world because they themselves weren’t there. But our God can. He can hear our prayers whether we are in Glasgow or Sydney, New York or New Delhi, the earth or in space. There’s no point praying to a god who can’t be in two places at one and therefore isn’t there – there’s no point in a person in Moscow praying to a God who lives in South America – but our God is everywhere and that means that He can hear the prayers made to Him from anywhere. Wherever you are, whenever you are, God can and will hear your prayers and the prayers of every other human being who seeks Him in Spirit and in Truth over the face of the whole universe.
3. … to Answer our Prayers – another way of saying this is that our God alone is all powerful – He is omnipotent. There is nothing He cannot do. We can pray all we like to mother earth to forgive our sins; we can pray all we like to a stone idol to forgive our sins – but they aren’t all powerful and cannot do what we ask of them. We can pray all we like to ourselves to get rid of the cancer, but at the end of the day we know that only God can do it. If I wanted my car fixed I would take it to someone who was able to do it – not to my 4 year old son. If I want an answer to my prayers – and this answer may not always be yes, sometimes it may be no because after all our God knows not only what we want but what is best for us – I do not go to a stone statue or to a sacred tree, but to the living, all powerful God. Only He is able to create the world and to sustain it from moment to moment; only He is able to make the sun stand still and raise His son from the dead – only He can keep our hearts pure and protect us from the evil one.
So pray to Him and to Him only because only He, and not any saint, or any statue, or any other god, or even the earth on which we live is able to know us, hear us and answer us.
I want to close this evening by asking whether it is proper to pray to Jesus and the Holy Spirit and not just to the Father. We say we must only pray to God, and that because of all the wonderful reasons I’ve listed, but does that mean we cannot directly address Jesus in prayer or the Spirit in prayer? Not at all - and this is something our Puritan fathers were fairly generous about. James Fisher asks, “May we not direct our prayers to any of the persons of the adorable Trinity?” He goes on to answer, “To be sure we may: for the Three-one God being the sole object of religious worship, whichever of the three persons we address, the other two are understood as included.” Our God is One and as such, we can pray to Father, Son or Holy Spirit for each is fully God. Charles Hodge, the Princeton Father goes even further; he writes, “In the New Testament, prayer is addressed either to God, as the triune God, or to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as distinct persons“. Just remember when you pray that you come through the blood of Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit - but you come to one God - a God who alone is to be worshipped, trusted and a God alone who is able. Next time we shall look at what it means to pray for things ‘agreeable to His Will’. And so, in the words of Jesus “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” AMEN