Prayer Meeting 3/5/2022

The Flesh’s Unwillingness To Desire Prayer

Well, as I have been saying each week, this is way more than a prayer meeting. We are learning to bear our souls to the Lord. We are learning how to bring ourselves into the deepest intimacy with God. Last time we spoke of how corrupt our own hearts are and how, when we pray, we must first recognise that in order for our prayers to become purer.

James 4 tells us when we pray we do not receive it because we pray out of our own selfish ambition. I then spoke about Richard Sibbes and how he wrote of the withheld prayers; the confiscated prayers and the likes. It’s not what we simply ask for in His name but what we ask with a total understanding of God’s nature, and who we are in line with His nature. We need to seek Him and who He is before we seek things.

Sibbes, as I mentioned, talks of ‘speed’, meaning God wants to lead us to a better way to seek Him, to commune with Him, to communicate with Him, to be intimate with Him. Surely that’s our desire in our relationships. We want authentic conversations, we want them to be honest and integrous, we want them to be genuine, we want the conversations to be open, and real, and vulnerable, we want them to speak clearly; to be able to articulate with clarity. Not with our rants, but with clarity in thought and awareness.

Those are the greatest relationships we have. Not shallow fake ones, where we bear not, nor do we desire to spend much time in those relationships, or we shouldn’t as believers. Believers who don’t want deep, real, meaningful relationships, will also have a shallow prayer life. I was always amazed at those who would have these long-winded prayers, yet they couldn’t have a conversation with a brother or sister, or capture a thought. How can we who can’t capture our thoughts be authentic in prayer?

They called them ‘intercessor prayer warriors’. I remember someone told me about a woman in my first church and how she was an amazing intercessor prayer woman, and I should get her to pray for me. I remember saying to them that I sat with her one day and she could barely look at me and say hello, never mind pray for me.

Sibbes writes:

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

Again Sibbes says:

We tempt Him to ask for that which we have not laboured.

Which leads me to tonight. Where I want to talk about: ‘The Flesh’s Unwillingness To Desire Prayer’. Let me read a prayer, this time from ‘Piercing Heaven, Prayers Of The Puritans’, page 30, from 18th century minister and teacher Philip Doddridge. The prayer is entitled
‘Awake My Sleeping Heart’:

Oh injured, neglected, provoked benefactor, when I think but for a moment of Your greatness and goodness I am astonished at the indifference in my heart. I blush and cannot lift my face before You. I have played the fool and made a significant blunder, and yet this foolish heart of mine would make having neglected You for so long a reason to keep neglecting You. Every one of Your rational creatures should be in all duty and love for You. Each heart should be full of a sense of Your presence. A desire to please You should swallow up every other desire. Yet You have not been in my thoughts, and faith: the end and the glory of my nature, has been so strangely overlooked. I know, if it matter, rest here – I perish. Yet I feel, in my perverse nature, a secret reluctance to pursue these thoughts. I am prone to lay them aside for now and even to dismiss them entirely. Mu mind is perplexed and divided, yet I am sure that You who made me knows what’s best. So I ask that You will, for Your name’s sake, lead me and guide me. Do not let me delay until it is forever too late. Pluck me as a brand out of the burning, break this fatal enchantment. Let me finally come to the place where I am not tempted to wish You never made me, or that You could ever forget me; the place where I fail to recognise my best hope and perish. Oh God, let me hear and obey You. Let Your grace teach me the lesson I am so slow to learn, and let it conquer the strong opposition in my heart. Hear these broken cries for the sake of Your Son. He has taught many other who are just as stubborn as I, and He is also from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.

Amen

Again tonight, as we learn how to pray, I will draw from the writings of the 16th century Cambridge ‘heavenly doctor’ Richard Sibbes, in his writings on a subject he entitles ‘I have put off my coat’. I suppose we could also call it: ‘I’ve washed my feet’, as I use that statement more than the other for reference, as you will hear as I go through this.

Sibbes states:

It is not an easy matter to bring the soul and Christ together into fellowship.

He adds:

The flesh knows that a near communion with Christ cannot stand with favouring any corruption, and therefore the flesh will do something but not enough.

The flesh knows the moment we enter into communion with Christ in prayer and study, that it won’t be long before it’s slashed and has no power. So as it knows that, we seem to just do a tiny bit, we nearly commit, we say we are going to. It’s our flesh’s way of staying in control so it won’t lose.

Sibbes uses maybe an unusual scripture to depict this half-hearted attempt or excuse to prayer and devotion, from the Song of Solomon, or some know it as the ‘Song of Songs’. It’s basically a love song, back and forth with his first wife, and the dialogue is mostly from these two people. It is a poem of love, and the challenge of love, and is full of wisdom. Why would it not be its Solomon after all? However, I don’t have time to go through a full introduction, but just to give any of you who don’t know the context a heads up.

The scripture Sibbes uses is chapter 5:3-6 and this is the woman speaking, ‘the Shulamite’,
as she is called in this. Again for time sake, she is simply Solomon’s wife, his first wife, before he rebelled and I think over well over 600 wives he had.

Song of Solomon 5:3-6

³ I have taken off my robe;
How can I put it on again?
I have washed my feet;
How can I defile them?
⁴ My beloved put his hand
By the latch of the door,
And my heart yearned for him.
⁵ I arose to open for my beloved,
And my hands dripped with myrrh,
My fingers with liquid myrrh,
On the handles of the lock.

⁶ I opened for my beloved,
But my beloved had turned away and was gone.
My heart leaped up when he spoke.
I sought him, but I could not find him;
I called him, but he gave me no answer.

Sibbes uses this because it’s very fitting in how we can be so lazy in our relationships and find shallow excuses. I’ve taken my robe of how can I put it on again?. I have washed my feet how can I defile them? She tells us she could hear her love at the door, she wanted him, yet she could not draw herself away from her flesh and her comfort to open the door, so she made excuses as to why she could not get up and open the door.

Oh brothers and sisters is this not describing us to a tee? When we know we need to pray, when we need that intimacy, when we ought to stop doing what we are doing, which is satisfying our flesh, and get up and open the door. So she makes excuses, she reasons within herself why she must not go to the door. She can sense that he is so close, she has everything in her to honour him and lavish him with love and affection, but she still tells herself, I’ve washed my feet and can’t get them dirty again.

Eventually she gets up but he has already left. He waited not any longer. The moment was lost. We can make excuses, because we think that gets us off the hook. Some even as feeble as ‘I have just washed my feet’. Why? Because our flesh doesn’t want to admit that its fighting against the Spirit. So rather than say no, it says ‘I can’t at the moment. Give me five minutes, wait till this is finished. I will when in a little while’. Yet that time comes and goes, and we lose all urgency.

Oh how feeble are our excuses? I’ve spent time washing my feet, I don’t want to have to get up and do it again.

Sibbes writes:

Take heed of that favour that snares us.

Take heed to the comfort and to the excuses that ensnare us. ‘I’m already clean enough based on what I’ve already done’, we could say she is saying. ‘I’m already in a good place. I’m fine, I’m satisfied’. All these things stop us opening the door.

Sibbes again:

Oh but I will lose my pleasure…

Meaning for me to get up, is to walk away from my pleasure; what’s feeding my flesh. She took her relationship for granted, she thought ‘I don’t need to make effort. I have what I need’. How many stop seeking God when they feel satisfied by man? One thing I do every week on a Sunday night is spend at least half an hour studying, because it’s in those times I don’t want to rest on my laurels.

How many, if I asked, have listened back to the prayer meeting recordings? I won’t embarrass you. What is that but resting in what you have done? I don’t know about you but my prayer life and intimacy with Christ is not close enough that I think coming to a prayer meeting every second week and not re-listening to what was spoken is enough. In fact, I’m sure it is not, for any of us. Yet we will most likely sit with washed bare feet and wait till the last gasp, usually just before the next prayer meeting, before we dare to get up and open the door.

Sibbes writes:

Those that are young, their excuse is we have time enough later for these things. Others say the time is not quite yet where I must.

How true is that, how we move the must? The must is like elastic, we keep stretching it. Excuses kill relationships, none more so than the one with Christ. Solomon gives us examples of this in Proverbs, where even absurd excuses are used.

Proverbs 26:13

¹³ The lazy man says, “There is a lion in the road!
A fierce lion is in the streets!”

Create a false problem in our heads to justify why we can’t do something. Many do this all the time. ‘I can’t because, I would but. I really wanted to but it was out with my control. I would love to come to church but there are just so many horrible things happening. I can’t come out in case I get covid’. And the church accommodated that and still support the excuses, as if to say, ‘I understand you’re scared of lions’. The very next one is even better, as it ties in exactly to Solomon’s song.

Proverbs 26:14

¹⁴ As a door turns on its hinges,
So does the lazy man on his bed.

The lazy man turns and pretends to be sleeping, ‘don’t disturb me’, is his inward cry. Is that not what we are like at times? – ‘Don’t disturb me Jesus’. How many of us ignore truth when its told, as if we didn’t hear it, because it messes with our carnal desires? Our pride cries, ‘I’m not accepting that’. We see this with kids all the time, they pretend not to hear the instruction or the correction, why? Because they are not ready to give up what is bringing them satisfaction in the flesh, or even their flesh’s future satisfaction.
The non-acceptance of the instruction is to say, ‘I’m not giving up, I’m going to just turn on my bed and pretend to sleep’.

Ecclesiastes 7:29, another of Solomon’s wisdom books on how not to get caught up in worldly pursuits, or as John MacArthur says ‘human wisdom’.

Ecclesiastes  7:29

^29 “Truly, this only I have found:
That God made man upright,
But they have sought out many schemes.”

Only God can keep us on the right path, and keep us righteous, yet man seems to find ways to find his own means of manipulating his way out of that true joy.

Sibbes writes, when talking of the remedies to laziness:

First resolve not to consult with flesh and blood in anything.

Is this not what stops us? We almost are in a consultation with the flesh. We need to not listen to the flesh where spiritual matters and devotion is concerned.

Amen.