From the time we are toddlers until the end of our life one thing is often drilled into our heads, “I can do it myself.” Have you ever noticed that you never have to teach a toddler how to be selfish? Instead, we have to teach them how to share? Selfishness comes as factory standard equipment ever since the fall in Genesis 3. As bad as the lone ranger mentality is in the world, it becomes a major hindrance to God’s work in God’s children. We have to learn that we are dependent upon God for everything, or we will accomplish nothing of eternal value. In a passage pointing us to the new covenant, God tells Ezekiel how we can honor Him and obey Him like we want to. Ezekiel 36:27 says, “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.”
I don’t know about you, but I will speak for myself in saying, sometimes I get really frustrated because as soon as I think I have gotten victory over a particular sin, it shows its ugly head again. I often feel defeated and discouraged because I feel like I should be further along in spiritual maturity than I am. As painful as it is to say this, it’s not God’s fault. He desires to work in me and through me. He wants to grow me. That means that the blame is squarely on me. The thing about it is that it’s not as though I want to intentionally sabotage my spiritual growth and my relationship with God. The problem is this, I try to do it myself. I try to help it along, instead of trusting God to do it in His time and in His way. I wonder if I am alone in this? One of our problems is that we often do things in our own strength, but we attach God’s name to it. However, we often get frustrated when it isn’t going the way that we think it should. Then we want to blame God or we want to blame others. However, it is our fault because we never relied on God to do it. Sadly, many times we didn’t even seek God’s wisdom before we started doing something. We saw an opportunity, it looked good, and so we went for it. Our text shows us that if we are going to do the things of God, we must have His Spirit in us giving us His power to obey Him.
This is a call to prayer for God’s children. We must reject the surface-level, grocery list style of prayer that we are used to. We must instead learn to pray as Jesus prayed, and as He has instructed us to pray. We must learn to pray for the things that are near to God’s heart, and that will accomplish His will, and not necessarily give us the things that we want or what we think would be best. This requires us to daily surrender our will to God, and to die to ourselves daily (Luke 9:23). As contrary as it might sound, the key to accomplishing more isn’t working harder, it is praying more. I wish I could give you a simple formula for how to have Spirit-empowered, God-honoring prayers. However, being completely honest, I have never learned how to and so I’m struggling to learn it myself. It is something that God is really speaking to me about, and convicting me about it. It is something I am committing myself to study Scripture and pray more about. I will say that one resource that has been very helpful to me is a ministry called Strategic Renewal. It is run by Daniel Henderson. From studying the Bible and reading things that they have published, it has helped me learn to be fervent and God-focused in my prayer life. But it all starts with this, you must admit that not only can you not do it on your own, but that you don’t want to even try to. It is admitting our desperate dependence upon God. Then, get into His Word. If you want to learn how to pray like Jesus, then study Jesus’ prayers. Next, get around people who pray the way the Bible commands us to. Finally, just do it. I have come to a sad conclusion, we talk more about prayer than we spend time praying. We need to be intentional about getting alone with God and praying, but we also need to be intentional about praying as a church. While many people say that Jesus never prayed publicly, I think they are missing some key texts in the Gospels. The biggest proof that Jesus did pray in public with people around is in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. There, Jesus gave the disciples a model prayer. Notice in Matthew 6:9-13 the plural nouns. Prayer is meant to be both private and public. Let’s pray that God would teach us to pray better, and that we would trust Him to work in His time, for His glory, and for our good.
By His grace and for His glory,
Pastor Justin