Praying to Honor God

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Transcript:

Glad to be back with you tonight. If you’ll turn with me to Psalm chapter 86. Psalm chapter 86.

It was about a year ago that as I was praying on what to preach, where to go next, because I tended to, whenever I had my own pastorate and own pulpit, I tended to teach in series instead of just something here and something different next week. And so I would at least have topics for messages planned out a couple months in advance, and of course try to leave room for the Holy Spirit if he gave me another idea at the last minute. I was praying about this time last year.

What is it that we really need to hear? And I kept coming back to the idea of prayer, the idea of prayer. And everywhere I’ve ever pastored, people have come and talked to me, especially when I’ve taught a message here or a message there on prayer, and they’ve told me, I really feel like this is where I’m most lacking in my Christian life.

And I came to the conviction that in too many churches for too many of us, prayer is something we know we’re supposed to do, and we know there’s supposed to be power to it, but we don’t feel quite as comfortable with it as we ought to. We don’t feel like we do as good a job at it as we ought to. And I think I mentioned this a few months ago.

I do not expect you to remember the message, but I talked about prayer being a conversation with God. And part of the reason it’s so awkward and so formal is because when we try it once or twice, and it’s awkward and formal, we stop doing it. And so I really came to the conviction that prayer is something that we should spend time talking about.

And as I was studying on that, I came to a 20-part series of messages on prayer. We talked about prayer from August to December, basically. last year.

And I’m not going to give you all 20 of those messages, and I’m not going to give you all 20 of them tonight, certainly. But as I’ve been thinking about what to preach, and I don’t know about you, Brother Worthy, you may be different from me, but once I have a topic or a text in mind, it takes less time to actually put the message together than it does sometimes coming up with the topic or text. That seems to be the hardest part for me.

And as I’ve spent time this last week praying about what is it that I should preach on Sunday night. I kept coming back to prayer again. And so what I want to share with you tonight is one of these messages.

And over the next few weeks, we may talk about this some more. I don’t know that we’ll do it every Sunday night, but talk about prayer a little bit. And in particular, some of the reasons for prayer.

And what I mean by that, just to give you an example, to explain what I mean by that. When I moved to Arkansas, I was used to seeing my family on a very regular basis, an extended family on a regular basis. And I realized shortly after I moved there, I was kind of losing touch with people because I’m not in the habit of being on the phone all the time because I would see them regularly.

And I realized I was sort of losing touch with people in my family. And being a pastor, you know, the schedule is kind of crazy. It’s not the same thing going on all the time, and it’s hard to get in much of a regimented schedule.

and I realized about the only time I knew where I was going to be at the end of the week, by the beginning of the week, was Sunday night when I was headed home from wherever we’d gone to eat with people from church. And so I made it a habit of starting to call my grandparents on Sunday nights when I was headed back from town out to the house because I knew I’d be in the car. Usually we would have taken two cars to church and so I knew I’d be by myself and would have the opportunity to talk to them because I got to thinking, you know, from time to time I needed things and called my grandparents.

And I doubt they took it this way, but how would I like it if somebody only called when they needed something? And I love my grandparents and enjoyed the opportunity to talk with them. And I thought, what kind of grandson would I be if I only called them when I needed something?

No, I should call them because I want to talk with them, because I want to converse with them, want to spend time with them, even if it’s just over the phone. And as I started studying on the series on prayer and the reasons why we should pray and came up with, I think 10 of the messages were just on reasons why we should be so concerned about prayer. That kept coming back to mind, you know, that we do the same thing to God that so many of us do to family members.

We only call them when we need something. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with asking God for things as one of the messages deals with. But when we as Christians only go to God to get our grocery list filled, it means just about as much as when we only call our grandparents, our family members, whoever it may be, when need something.

If we only call them and we want them to do something for us, the relationship’s not going to be very strong, is it? And so I started looking at what does the Bible say about reasons why we should pray? Why should we be so concerned about this issue of prayer?

And one of these is from Psalm chapter 86, and I believe that we are to pray in order to honor God. Now, isn’t that a good reason to do anything that we do? Everything we do should be done to the honor and glory of God.

And if we can’t do it to the honor and glory of God, we probably shouldn’t be doing I like that verse. I used to jar salsa and sell it at the craft show at Southgate. And I put on the little labels that verse that said, Whatever you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.

Even mundane things like what we eat or drink, at mealtimes we should be honoring God. Now, I don’t know if God’s more honored by this food than that food, but we should honor God in everything we do. And if we can’t find some way to honor God, then we ought not to do it.

But in Psalm chapter 86, we see an example of David praying, not necessarily because he’s looking for something, not necessarily because he has a problem, but at least in this part of the verse, I mean in this part of the chapter, praying because it honors God. And we start in verse 6, and we’re just going to look at about five verses here. It says, give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer, and attend to the voice of my supplications.

In the day of my trouble, I will call upon me, for thou wilt answer me. Now, you notice just in these first two verses, he does say, give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer. Hear what I’m praying, Lord, and attend to the voice of my supplications.

Listen to the voice of my, a supplication is like a petition when he’s coming with requests to God. But in this passage, he’s not actually bringing those requests. He’s just saying, I believe and I understand that you are the kind of God who will listen to my petitions, who will care about my needs.

You know, not everybody in the world who prays to some God has a God they pray to who cares about them and cares about their petitions. And yet he recognizes here that our God is different. He will hear.

And first of all, you’ve got to be real to be able to hear something. Give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer and attend to the voice of my supplications. In the day of my trouble, I will call upon thee for thou wilt answer me.

And throughout this prayer, throughout these few verses here, he’s praising God for characteristics that God has. And he’s saying, in my day of trouble, I will call on me. He’s not just praying to God now because he has trouble and says, God, I need you to get me out of this.

I know I haven’t prayed to you in six months, but now I really need you, so come and help me. He’s praying to him now when he’s not in the face of trouble necessarily. And saying, I know that in my day of trouble, I will be able to call upon you.

And that you’re the kind of God who’s going to hear and answer my prayer. He says in verse 8, among the gods, there is none like unto thee, O Lord. Neither are there any works like unto thy works.

All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord, and shall glorify thy name. For thou art great and doest wondrous things. Thou art God alone.

And there would be a seeming contradiction here if we don’t understand how the Bible uses language again. He says in verse 8, Among the gods there is none like unto thee. And then at the end he says, Thou art God alone.

In verse 8 he is not telling us, And he’s not saying to God certainly that you’re one of many gods, but you’re certainly the best. He’s not here affirming that there are any other gods. You know, there are religions that teach that. Mormonism would teach there are many gods.

We may not even know how many gods there are, but we still just worship the one. Or three, depending on how you categorize it. There are these many, but there’s only one that we worship.

Or three, again, because they don’t believe in the Trinity. He’s not saying here, there are many, many gods, and you just happen to be the best out of all of them, out of all these real gods who do exist, and so we worship you. When he says, among the gods, there is none like unto thee, he’s not here admitting that Baal is real. He’s not admitting that Asherah, a few weeks ago, if you’ll remember, I talked about the people who worshiped trees.

They were praying to the goddess Asherah, if I remember correctly. He’s not saying that Asherah was real. He’s not saying that Molech was real, the one that they would sacrifice the children to. He’s not saying any of these are real and that God is just the best out of all of them.

There are no other gods. The Bible makes it clear. These are all figments of somebody else’s imagination.

It’s either the God of the Bible or it’s made up. What he’s saying here, though, is in the minds of the people, all of these things that are worshipped, these gods are only real in the minds of the people. And yet out of all the other gods, the other false gods that the world can imagine up, None of them even compare to who you are.

I can’t remember who it was. Some famous writer, I guess, so famous I can’t remember his name, who said that in the beginning God created man in his own image and we’ve been returning the favor ever since. Well, there’s some truth to that because man likes to imagine God the way he wants him to be.

And yet, even in our vivid imaginations, mankind makes up all of these deities to worship. There are thousands and thousands just in world religions alone to say nothing of the false gods that exist in people’s minds, even in this country, when they say, well, my God would never do that. And they think they’re talking about the God of the Bible when the God of the Bible is distinctly opposite from what they’re talking about.

Well, my God would never tell me I couldn’t do that. My God would never act that way. Well, then, I don’t know what God you pray to, to quote what my mother has told people before.

In all the imagination that people have when they come up with these deities, in all the things that they think, if I had a God, what would he be like? And they come up with all of these attributes and all of these powers and all of these things. All of these things combined that the gods of the human imagination have, they don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the power and the might and the majesty of who our God is.

We can stack all of the gods that are worshipped in the minds of men, Put them all together on a scale on one side and put our God on the other side and he’d win every time. And David here is praying and saying when he says, Among all the gods there is no like unto thee. There is not a single false God in the human imagination who has anything to offer compared to who our God is.

And so for that reason he’s able to say then in verse 10, For thou art great and doest wondrous things, thou art God alone. He’s not just the best out of many. He is the one and only.

And all the worship and all the belief that are thrown by people and all these other false gods do not change the fact that there is one eternal God. One true and living God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The one who sits in heaven and watches over mankind and judges all of humanity and sees all of human history as though it was a blink of an eye. He’s the only one. And throughout this prayer, throughout this passage here, David merely is repeating, as he’s praying to God, I shouldn’t say repeating, he’s making a list here of some of the attributes, some of the praiseworthy attributes that God has.

That he’s the only one. That he’s incredible in power. He’s done wondrous things.

That he’s so great that all the nations will come before him and worship. And we live in a time when it’s becoming more and more trendy, if I can use that word, to question God, to mock his word. But we’re reminded all through scriptures, all through the scripture, that one day all of the tongues that have mocked will confess him as Lord.

All of the knees that have refused to bend through the centuries will one day bow. Now, I hope they’ll bow before it’s too late. But he says, there’s nobody like you, God.

There’s nobody who does the things that you do. And yet we see in verses 8 through 10 this powerful portrait of God, but we see also in verses 6 through 7 a God who cares about us. And we can look at the Islamic religion and Allah.

And by the way, even though some of you may have been here when one of the missionaries came and spoke at the district meeting in Winningwood a few years ago and talked about Islam. And he shared with us that there is no other name for God in Arabic but Allah. And so Arab Christians use the term Allah to refer to the God of the Bible because it’s the word that they have in their language for God.

But the Allah of Islam and the God of the Bible are not the same God. If I can say that emphatically to you today, don’t let the news media confuse you on this. They are not the same.

They are not the same. But we could look at the Allah of the Quran, the God of Islam. And in their view, he’s incredibly powerful.

In their view, he controls everything. In some Muslim view, there’s not even free will necessarily. God just controls everything and orchestrates all of it.

Every choice that’s made comes from him, and he orchestrates it. And so in their view, you’ve got a God who is incredibly powerful, but not a personal God who really knows his creations, who’s really involved with the thoughts and the hopes and the fears and feelings of his creatures. And in contrast, we see in the God of the Bible, right here in verses 8, 9, and 10, a God of unspeakable power.

There are not words. We can only hint at his power using our powers of language. It’s not completely describable by human tongue how powerful God is.

And yet in verses 6 and 7, a God who, in spite of his unspeakable power, loves and cares about his creations. We see here a praiseworthy God that David looks at and says, you know what, in this time of prayer, I’m just going to praise you and honor you because you’re worthy. Guys, what’s wrong with spending time in prayer to God just because we want to honor him?

I’m not saying don’t go home tonight and pray for the things you need. He tells us we can do that. I’ve been puzzled.

I’ll read stories about people like John Wesley, incredible Christians who would get up so early in the morning and spend four hours in prayer. I read a passage, I think it was John Wesley’s biography, where he said as he got older, he began to feel laziness creep in because he was staying in bed until five. And then he was only praying for four hours when he started the day.

And I, are you kidding me? Is that supposed to be some kind of sick joke? I can pray my little heart out and run out of things to say after 30 minutes.

Well, maybe it’s been because I’ve been too focused on me. I could list all of the praiseworthy attributes and spend time praising God in prayer and never run out of things to say. I can’t tell you how many lessons I’ve taught over the years where we go back through biblical history and I taught through the book of Nehemiah on Wednesday nights in Arkansas.

And it seemed like every other night we came to a point in the book of Nehemiah where they were just publicly getting together and making a list of all the incredible things that God had done for them. If we start listing the attributes of God and the things that we can praise Him and honor Him for, What’s wrong with letting that drive our prayer life a little bit? What’s wrong with going to God in prayer and just saying, Can I spend some time?

You may not talk to God this way. That’s okay. But can I just spend some time telling you how great you are for a little bit?

Would that be okay? Now, you may phrase it a little bit differently. But what’s wrong with going to God in prayer because we want to honor Him?

Four things to share with you very quickly, and I will try to do them very quickly. We see in this passage that prayer honors God, not just because of the things that we share, not just because of the things that David shared, but the very act of prayer is an act of submission to God. Prayer honors God because it’s an act of submission to Him.

Do you realize that when we go to God, even when we’re just going and asking Him for things, we’re not coming at that from a position of strength, of dictating terms. Sometimes we will see that portrayed on TV when characters on shows will pray and they’ll start to bargain with God. I am in no position to bargain with God and neither are you and neither is anybody else. God does not owe us a thing.

When we start to realize God is not obligated to us for anything other than to keep his word, and that’s more of an obligation to himself. God’s not obligated to us for anything. It changes how we approach him.

When we go to God, we are bowing the knee physically or figuratively. We’re bending the knee and coming to God in submission and saying, Would you please grant me this? Would you please do this for me?

Or saying, I’ve messed up and I need you to forgive me. Or can I just tell you how great you are? When we come to God in prayer, there is something inherently submissive to that.

And we see that in the very first verse, in verse 6, where David comes and says, Give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer. He’s almost begging. I can almost hear David’s voice begging in this verse.

Listen to me, please, and attend to the voice of my supplications. As I said earlier, supplications are like a petition, but there’s something more to that word. There’s more of a desperation.

There’s more of a need behind that word. Because I can go march down to the governor’s office with a petition, and if I think I’m bad enough, I can tell her, this is what you need to do. I wouldn’t do that.

But there have been people who’ve done that. Petition can be done in a spirit of arrogance. Can be, not always.

Supplication is quite a bit different. And just by the very act of prayer, we’re humbling ourselves before God. We’re acknowledging that he’s superior to us and that we’re in submission to him.

And by doing this, we realize, we show that we realize it is our sovereign God who decrees and commands things, and we are the one who bring our petitions to him. So prayer honors God because it’s an act of submission. Second of all, prayer honors God because it acknowledges our dependence on him.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the first one. By praying, we acknowledge the fact that we need God and his provision, that we’re at his mercy. He says in verse 7, In the day of my trouble, I will call upon thee, and thou wilt answer me.

Now David was not a weak man. David had armies. David had generals.

David had chariots. And when he had nothing else, David had that slingshot that I wouldn’t have worn. I can’t figure out how to work one of those, but evidently he was deadly with it.

David was not a weak man. And yet David said, in my day of trouble, he doesn’t talk about trusting in his horses, doesn’t talk about trusting in his chariots. He said, I will call upon you and I know you’ll hear me.

We acknowledge that when it gets right down to it, it doesn’t matter how many chariots and soldiers we have. It doesn’t matter the money we have. It doesn’t matter the power we have.

It doesn’t matter how much control we think we have over our lives. We are completely and totally dependent on God. And there are times in life when we have to go through seasons of trouble to get to that point of being reminded of that fact, that we are utterly dependent on him.

And what I see in my Bible is that breath is the result of God breathing into us. What I see is that God holds our hearts in the palm of his hand. What I see is that God is responsible for every beat that my heart makes, every breath that I breathe is a gift from God.

And God doesn’t have to strike me down to get rid of me. All God has to do is stop letting that happen. I’m dependent on God for every heartbeat and every breath.

I’m dependent on God for the even seemingly bigger things too because we often take those for granted. And when we pray, we are acknowledging our dependence on God. If we weren’t dependent on Him, we wouldn’t be asking Him for things.

Third of all tonight, prayer honors God when we praise Him for His nature. When we praise Him for His nature, and I’ll go ahead and give you the fourth point at the same time and then talk about both of them together. Prayer and fourth of all is prayer honors God when we praise Him for His blessings.

Two very different things here. And they’re both important. But we get so hung up on the second one of praising God for his blessings.

When we praise God, so many times when we talk about who’s got a testimony, and there’s nothing wrong with this, what we hear is this is what God has done for me. Guys, we ought to praise God for what he’s done for us. How ungrateful are we if we don’t?

We should praise God for the things that he’s done for us. In Psalm 86. 10, David said, For thou art great and doest wondrous things, thou art God alone.

He praises God because he has done these miraculous things that only God can do. And so we want to honor God by praising him for his blessings. When God has prospered me and my family, I ought to praise him for that.

Even in the times I don’t feel quite so prosperous, there are things, even if I have to just go back to that heartbeat and that breath and that’s all I’ve got, I’ve still got some blessing that he’s given me to be able to praise him for. But we ought to go back and praise God for the blessings he’s given us. We ought to praise God for the things he does for us.

But there’s something even more important, I think, here. Because I’ve said for years, and I still stand behind the statement, that if God had never done anything for us, if God had never given us any bit of blessing, he would still be deserving of all of the honor and praise and glory that we could give him just by simple fact of who he is. He’s worthy.

So we also want to honor God by praying and praising him for his nature, for who he is. A friend of mine taught several years ago, and this has always stuck with me, He was teaching about love and how love should mature over time. And I don’t mean necessarily romantic love, just love.

And you look at a little kid and you would say, why do you love your mom? Why do you love your dad? Well, because they take care of me.

My kids might say they love me because I let them stay up late and watch TV last night. I don’t do that very often. My daddy takes me places.

My daddy lets me have snacks. You know, they love me at this point. I understand this.

and I’m okay with it. My kids love me at this point because I do things for them. That’s what they see.

That’s what they understand and recognize. I take care of them and I do things for them. And so if I ask Benjamin, Madeline, y’all would be surprised probably because she was so vocal last Sunday night here.

Madeline doesn’t talk a whole lot yet. It doesn’t form a whole lot of words. But Benjamin does.

And he’s to the point, even at three years old, you can actually carry on a conversation with him. It’s kind of fun. But if I were to ask him, why do you love daddy?

He would probably list the things that I do for him. I know that as a small child, that’s how I felt about my parents. Well, I love them because they take care of me.

They feed me. They buy me clothes. They, you know, all of, they put a roof over my head.

All the things that, that we think of, okay, my parents did that for me. But as I’ve grown up and I’ve gotten to know my parents, not just as my parents, but as people, I realize how wonderful they really are. I mean, they’re not perfect.

neither am I. But I realize there’s so much more about them to love than just what they do for me. I’m very fearful of being stuck in a child.

You know, there’s something to be said from the Bible about a childlike faith, but I’m very concerned about being stuck in a childlike love toward God. I want to love God as much as a little kid loves his parents, but I don’t want to love him for the same reason that a little child loves his parents. I don’t want to be so focused on praising God and thanking him for the things that he does for me, that I forget to praise him for who he is.

So I could sit there and make a list and never, as I said, never run out of things to thank him for. If I was thanking him and praising him for all my blessings, but the list is even bigger. When we start to go through the scriptures and what we learn about him and what we see about who he is and begin to make a list of his attributes and all the praiseworthy things that are there.

And by the way, there are only praiseworthy things there. In prayer, we need to honor God, not just for his blessings, but for his nature as well. And as I started out by talking about, I’ll close on this thought, that there’s nothing wrong with going to God in prayer from time to time and asking for things.

And we want to make sure that’s not the only thing we do. And more importantly, there’s nothing wrong and everything right about going to God in prayer from time to time and not asking for things and saying, can I just tell you how great I think you are right now? Can I praise you just a little bit?

and begin to praise him for his attributes, and for his blessings, and for his nature, the way David did.

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