Prayer Meeting 19/4/2022

Bearing Our Soul In Prayer

Again, as we meet we are not just having a prayer meeting, heaven forbid we reduce it to that ‘easy to down-play’ a name. We are not having a prayer meeting, we are learning to bear our soul to the Lord and in so doing we will cry out to Him our prayers and petitions.

Galatians 4:6-7

⁶ And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out,  “Abba, Father!” ⁷ Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

Yet even though we are that, we do not always walk as that. In order for us to truly cry out Abba, Father, we need to put in some spade work each and every day, because we in the flesh are all going to put dirt on our spirit, as it were. Let me read a prayer from the ‘Valley of Vision’ book, its where I want to teach from tonight before we pray.

Valley of Vison prayer called ‘Heart’s Corruption’ Page 130:

Oh God, my Thy Spirit speak to me that I may speak to Thee. I have no merit, let the merit of Jesus stand for me. I am undeserving but I look to Thy tender mercy. I am full of infirmities, wants, sin; Thou art full of grace. I confess my sin, my frequent sin, my wilful sin. All my powers of the body and soul are defiled, a fountain of pollution is deep within my nature. There are chambers of foul images within my being; I have gone from one odious room to another, walked in a no man’s land of dangerous imaginations, pried into the secrets of my fallen nature. I am utterly ashamed that I am what I am in myself. I have no green shoot in me, nor fruit but thorns and thistles. I am a fading leaf that the wind drives away. I live bare and barren as a winter tree, unprofitable, fit to be hewn down and burned. Lord, do however have mercy on me. Thou hast struck a heavy blow at my pride, at the false god of self, and I lie in pieces before Thee. But Thou hast given me another Master and Lord, Thy Son Jesus. And now my heart is turned towards holiness, my life speeds as an arrow for a bow towards complete obedience to Thee. Help my in all my doing to put down sin and to humble pride. Save me from the love of the world and the pride of life, from everything that is natural to fall on man, and let Christ’s nature be seen in me day by day. Grant me grace to bear Thy will without repining, and delight to be not only chiselled, squared or fashioned but separated from the old rock where I have been embedded so long, and lifted from the quarry to the upper air, where I may be built in Christ forever.

Amen

What a prayer. What we get a picture here of, is a puritan prayer where the man who has been saved by grace still sees his own depravity, and knows that before he even pleads, or petitions, or cries out for anything or anyone, that he is first bearing his own soul to the Lord. 

James 4:1-6

¹Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? ² You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. ⁴ Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”? ⁶ But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: “God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble.”

Is it not the case that our prayers are often worldly, self-centred prayers? Even if they are for others, are they not full of worldliness in their nature? Often prideful prayers, or prayers that most commonly have little to no emotion or feelings. They are the worldly prayers James is talking of. Prayers that the starting point is more united with the world than God.

I have been studying Richard Sibbes for our meeting. The ‘heavenly doctor’ he is known as. In volume seven of his works he writes on ‘The Knot Of Prayer Loosened’. The message is from Mathew 7:7-10:

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 he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent?

Sibbes talks of many things, the confiscated prayers, the withheld prayer, God’s limitations. Some would say God has no limits. That, in fact, is not true at all, God will limit what He gives to us in prayer based on the request and the heart that is requested it. It’s not ‘whatever you ask for in my name’, it’s ‘whatever you ask for while having total understanding of my nature, and who you are in line with that nature’.

John 1:14

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

Matthew 6:33

³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

Here is a thought: we are way too quick in prayers to seek our needs before we even in fact seek Him. Sibbes says:

To come to God and seek oil and wine and the like, and in the meantime neglect the oil of grace, what a disorder is here.

He adds:

If this now be crossed it is not because he would put thee off without hearing but he would teach you a better way to speed.

Sibbes uses the word ‘speed’ a lot, which I love considering how we speed through prayers usually. Sibbes is saying it’s not that He doesn’t hear, but He knows we truly have way more pressing things that are way more important for the good of our soul. Therefore, it’s not that He doesn’t hear us, however, He is responding by not responding, in order that our first response in the first place is correct. Surely then to pray any prayer that first is not one as one with a humble spirit, is but to pray a prayer saying ‘mine, and not thy will be done’. Sibbes again says:

A cold prayer has but a cold answer: that man is but a mocker of prayer that would have God to hear him when he hears not himself.

We must then surely hear the groans in our own heart and first bring that, else our prayers are indeed nothing but self-indulgent, ignorant prayers, that have not first captured who we truly are, or more importantly whom we are lifting our prayers to. John Bunyan wrote:

The best prayers often have more groans than words

Forgiveness

We are commanded to forgive others. We are commanded to pray for those who persecute us, or hate us.

Mathew 5:44

⁴⁴ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,

However, we must apply the same rule of thumb, we must first truly look into the depths of our soul first. Lifting up enemies to prayer is always easier than looking at how we are effected by that offence. To earnestly pray for our enemies, we must first wrestle with our own flesh and find if there is anything unclean in us.

Psalm 139:23-24

²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me, and know my anxieties;
²⁴ And see if there is any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.

The NASB uses ‘hurtful’ rather than ‘wicked’, the ESV: ‘grievous’ way in me. Before we pray for enemies, let’s learn all we can first about our own hearts.

Thanksgiving

When we give thanks, and we do so with thoughtfulness, we won’t rush our thanksgiving but be full of gratitude for the level of forgiveness we have received. And due to that, we won’t, as Sibbes says:

…cause to speed on in our suits… (pursuits)

Would our prayers not pause and reflect with much gratitude and sobering if we were to remember all we have been forgiven for? Are they not the prayers we pray with complete forgetfulness of who rescued us?

Perseverance

Sibbes says:

We tempt Him to ask for that we labour not for.

He adds:

As we pray so, our endeavours must second our devotion.

How often do we ask in prayer for the healing of others, or for enemies, or favour in a thing, yet we do not endeavour in our own hearts to forgive, or to help the hurting, or to prepare for the things we seek Him for. We ask Him for things that we have meagre compassion over ourselves. Surely then the most effective prayers the ones we are already most in line with the compassion of Christ?

John Owen:

It is not easy to conjecture how men pray, or what they pray about, who know not the plague of their own hearts.

Surely then what we pray for and how we prayed would change dramatically when we pray with a humble heart, who knows it’s own corruption, yet God so rich in mercy saved us. Owen writes in his work on the ‘The Spirit’s Work As To The Matter Of Prayer’:

The part of the work of the Spirit in supplication in believers, enabling them to pray according to the mind of God, which of themselves they know not how to do.

He adds:

When this is done, when a right apprehension of sin and grace, and of our concernment in them is fixed on our minds, then have we in some measure the matter of prayer always in readiness, which words and expressions will easily follow, through the aid of the Holy Spirit be necessary thereunto also, as we shall afterwards declare.

In short, Owen writes:

Men will not be led beyond their own light.

Our first port-of-call therefore when we pray must first be our own souls, and their state. Jesus Himself first prayed for Himself in John 17, then the disciples, then all who would believe. We should not think it strange to start every prayer with first bearing our own soul. Before we enter into any requests, we must endeavour to search our own hearts.

Owen writes on organised prayers, or as he calls them: ‘directory’, and how in them we cannot neglect the importance of preparing our hearts also. Else we will still pray without having the right understanding, or heart to that which we are praying. To think we have no concern in our spirits and heart for that which we chose to lift up to Him.

Okay, let us pray. First for ourselves, and how we are at times anything but holy or act worthy. Then we can move onto praying for others and things.