006. The Prayer of a Spoilt Child

PP   The Prayer of a Spoilt Child

The message today is ‘The Prayer of a Spoilt Child’ – God, gimme this and gimme that.  We often don’t even say ‘please’.

pp    Book cover photo

A few years ago I picked up this book.  The front cover got me – ‘The Papa Prayer - The prayer you’ve never prayed.’  Then up at the top it says,

pp   “You think you know, but you have no idea.”

Well that seriously caught my attention.
I hope it’s catching your attention too!

I had tried interceding for others in my prayers.  I’ve tried petitionary prayer – please give me this and that.  Then there’s Centreing Prayer, Contemplative Prayer and praying liturgically – Big words. -----  A great prayer model is the ACTS model,
A-C-T-S ---
You start your prayer with A, adoring God, then C, confessing your sins to God, then T, thanking God, and finally S for supplication, asking God for things you think you need.   Then there’s the Ask, Believe and Receive prayer.   Ask God for something you want.  Believe you’re going to get it.  And then expect to receive it.

But this prayer – the Papa Prayer was new to me.  Maybe it’s new to you.  J

The P.A.P.A. Prayer goes a bit like this -  P-A-P-A.  

pp   ‘P’ - present yourself to God without wearing a mask
.... the kind of mask you think He’d like to see.  BE REAL in the relationship!  Tell Him the truth about how you’re feeling at the moment.  Be as open with your heavenly Father as you are with a good friend.

pp    ‘A’ – Attend to how you’re thinking of God.  

Again, no pretending.  Ask yourself, “How am I experiencing God right now in my life?”  Is  He a vending machine where you want an item, press the button, and expect to get what you asked for?  Or is He a frowning father, a distant , cold force?  Or is He your gloriously strong but intimate Papa?
Now next comes ‘P’.

pp    ‘P’ -  Purge yourself of anything blocking your relationship with God.

Put into words whatever makes you feel uncomfortable or embarrassed when you’re your in prayer with Him.  Are you thinking more about yourself and your satisfaction than about anyone else, including God and His pleasure?
Now...
pp     ‘A’ -  Approach God as the first thing in your life

....  as your most valuable treasure, the Person you most want to know.  Admit that other people and things really do matter more to you right now, but you long to want God so much that every other good thing in your life becomes a ‘second-thing’ desire.

pp     put all 4 titles together

The Papa prayer is about enjoying a wonderful relationship with God before we ask Him for stuff.

Of all the ways the Bible invites us to pray, petitionary prayer – asking God for things we want – is perhaps the most common and the most abused.    We need to restore petitionary prayer to its privileged and powerful place in our lives as God’s children, and that place is after relational prayer and after a few other kinds of prayer as well.  So let’s start by looking at ....

pp     The process of communicating with God in prayer.

The Bible indicates at least five distinct ways that we can communicate with God through prayer.  We can relate with Him, worship Him, thank Him for who He is and what He does for us, intercede for others in response to their needs, and petition Him for blessings we’d like Him to provide.

First, we start with relational prayer.  (do an add-to ppt list)

pp      Relational prayer

This is what Jesus had in mind when He told us to abide in Him like a small branch sticks close to the vine (John 15:4-7).  We need to snuggle up to, and love, and embrace, the ultimate Father, our heavenly Father.

Second, when we’re feeling close to God who we’re relating to, ....

pp       Prayers of worship and adoration   .....

naturally follow.  We fall to our knees in amazement when it dawns on us that the God of creation, the ruler and Lord of the universe, is our Father, our Papa.  His hugeness is awesome.  But His graciousness reduces us to unbelievable head-shaking silence.  We can get close to Him, like a child with his daddy.  It’s mind-boggling.  This father is just too good for words, unlike anyone, or any father, we’ve ever met.

Then, our relationship with and worship of God lead us to....

pp     Prayers of thanksgiving  .....

for Him and for all His blessings.  It should be noted that only when we’re first overwhelmed with who God is can we be properly thankful for what He provides.  Skip over the prayers of relating and worship, and we’ve lost it.

Our efforts to worship God without first getting to know Him,  can reduce our worship to just showing appreciation for the times when God cooperates with our agenda, our requests.

As we get to know God, and worship Him, and thank Him in all things, our hearts go out to others, including our rejecting spouses, our irritating teenagers and our betraying friends.  The mind of Christ in us takes over, and we become more concerned for others than for ourselves.  We want them to know God, and worship Him, and to recognise His blessings in their lives.  So we naturally turn to ....

pp    Prayers of intercession

.....    for them.  We pray to God on their behalf.
BUT, if we intercede for others without first attending to our own relationship with God, our intercession will have more to do with our well-being than with theirs.  
For example --- “God, change my spouse so I won’t hurt so much.”  “Soften my child’s heart so I won’t be so worried.”  “Change so-and-so in my group, or at work so I’ll enjoy my time there more.”  ---- Intercession must flow out of knowing God ourselves, worshiping Him for who He is, and humbly thanking Him for all He provides.   If we don’t take those steps first, then our prayers will be stained with self-centredness.  And we may not even recognise it. --- Why not?  -  We are, after all, praying for good things to happen in the lives of others.  What exactly is wrong with that?  We don’t stop to think do we, that we might be thinking more of ourselves than them?

Once we’ve got those prayer points in their proper order, then our....

pp    Prayers of petition  ......

can come.  For example,  “God, may my surgery go well, may I make more money, may I feel more energy, may I find more friends, ...  but ... please grant me these personal comforts only if they will enhance the formation of Christ’s character in me, and not draw me away from Christ.”     When I want to be like Jesus more than I want anything else, then I pray, like Jesus did,  “Not my will Father,  but Yours be done.”  

So friends, we need to get our prayer points into the right order.  If we try to get things from God without first praying to get more of God Himself, our petitions will sound more like the rantings of a spoilt brat than the requests of a dependent child. -----

Now we’ll look at the confusing abuse of petitionary prayer and suggest how to restore our requests to their right place in our prayer life.  

So, now back to our title for today...

pp   The Prayer of a Spoilt Child

Jesus said in John 14:14 ....

pp    “You may ask for anything in My name, and I will do it.”

Anything?  Well, that’s what He said.

Then Jesus said it again two chapters later in John 16:23,24, this time with stronger emphasis and an added guarantee of joy....

pp    John 16:23,24    “I tell you the truth”, ...( He leaves no room for quibbling;  He wants us to know He means what He says)... “I tell you the truth, My Father will give you whatever you ask in My name.”.... (Anything!  Whatever!) ... “Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.”

Petitionary prayer is a good thing.  Jesus told us to ask Him for whatever  we want.

pp   “ASK  AND  YOU  WILL RECEIVE”  .....  

pp    ANYTHING?

Can you get these verses to work?   Every time?   ----  Then we notice something.    Jesus narrowed things down with the qualifiying phrase  “in My name”.     I’ve heard a dozen explanations of what Jesus means here and it boils down to this:  He promises to give us anything we ask for that suits His ultimate purpose for us.   And since He’s a lot smarter than we are, we’re told that that’s a good thing.  ---- But it leaves me wondering why we should bother to pray if He’s going to do what He knows is best anyway.  Just sit in the back of the bus and leave the driving to Him.  ----  Well that’s one metaphor.  Here’s another.

Prayer sometimes seems to be like feeding money into a poker machine.   The successful Jackpot stories (actual answers to prayers) get told far and wide.  But those who walk away with empty pockets ( no answers to their prayers) – well, they just walk away and try to hang on to their faith as best they can.

A father woke up at two in the morning, wracked with pain over his two adult children.  His daughter won’t talk to him.  His son is openly gay and hurt that his parents don’t accept his ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

For more than an hour, the father prayed, he sobbed, he begged.  “God, work in Maria’s life.  I’m not even asking that she speaks to me.  I just want her to know You and to feel some hope in her life.  And Brent – oh God!  I can’t accept what you reject.  But I know you don’t reject him.  You love him.  And I do too.  Please let him realise that what he really wants is Your love and that he can have it.  Please, God, please!”  That father has been praying that same prayer for three years.
His pastor had told him that God always answers every prayer, with yes, no, or wait.

If God’s heart is love and His character is good, then prayer for someone’s salvation has to fit.  Doesn’t it? ----

An old lady prayed for many years that her oldest son would accept Jesus as his Saviour.  She waited a long time and finally died at age ninety with that unanswered prayer still on her lips.  Twenty years later her son passed away.  To everyone’s knowledge, he never made a decision to accept the gift of eternal life.  What on earth do all the prayer promises in the Bible mean?

The father of the estranged daughter and gay son said, “I’ve been reading and rereading the parable of the persistent widow.  I just don’t get it.”

The parable is written in Luke’s gospel.  Let’s turn to it.  Page 1207.  Luke chapter 18 and verses 1-8.  Page 1207.  Luke 18 and starting at verse 1.  NKJV

v1“Then He ( it’s speaking about Jesus here)   Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart,”
 v2 “saying: ‘There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man.”
v3   “Now there was a widow in that city, and she came to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary.’  (My enemy).
v4  “And he would not for a while;  but afterward he said within himself, ‘Though I do not fear God nor regard man,”
v5  “yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, (I’ll punish the person who has done wrong to her) lest by her continual coming she weary me.”
v6   “Then the Lord said, ‘Hear what the unjust judge said.”
v7  “And shall God not avenge His own elect (His own best people) who cry out day and night to Him, though he bears long with them?”
v8   “I tell you that He will avenge them speedily.  Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?”

It’s hard to miss the point isn’t it?  Jesus was pretty clear: keep praying, don’t quit;  and if you stay with it, your request will be granted, sooner rather than later.

But that’s not what’s happening is it?.  Sincere people all over the world cry out to God and get no obvious answer.  A teenager in a wheelchair died last week on Bribie despite the intense prayers of many people.   Fill a room with a thousand honest Christians;  ask them to stand up if they’ve been asking God for something unselfish and good for a long time that has not yet been given, and nine hundred will get to their feet.

Why?  Is God listening or not?  Does praying make any real difference in what happens?  We’ve probably all heard by now the statistics that hospital patients who are prayed for have fewer medical complications and better recovery rates than the patients who are not prayed for.  Has that been your experience?  Has your child’s asthma continued despite your faithful and fervent prayer?  Does your friend still get disabling migraines?  Are we supposed to keep on asking for things we never seem to get?  What’s the point?

How about prayers for wisdom?  Are any of you right now facing a tricky situation and you’re not sure how to handle it?  Perhaps a tension with your spouse?  How should you talk to your husband or wife when all love is gone?  Or how do you decide how to change churches or to switch jobs, or maybe where to look for a new church or job? -----

What do you do with the verse that tells us to ask God for wisdom but only with absolute confidence that it will be given?  The person who requests God’s wisdom to know what to do when life gets rough needs to pray without doubting.  That’s what James says in the Bible.....  

pp   James 1:5-8  NKJV  
“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.
But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.
For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord;
he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

A lady called Margaret explained, “My son married a drug user who sleeps around.  He wants to have us over for dinner because his wife thinks we don’t like her.  We don’t!  She’s breaking our son’s heart, and she has some kind of hold on him.  He seems so weak.  Do I tell him that?  Do we go there for dinner?  What should we do?”

Well, what do you tell her?  “Well, if you want to know what God thinks you should do, you must first have complete confidence that He’ll tell you if you ask?” Am I hearing James right?

In another place, Matthew 17:20, Jesus said....

pp   Matthew 17:20   “I say to you, if your faith was no bigger than a tiny mustard seed, you could tell a mountain to shift location and it would.”  ----

I’ve got a few mountains in my life I’d like to move.  I’ll bet you do too.  How do we inflate our faith to a size that will get our prayers to work?  Wasn’t Jesus’ point that even a tiny amount of real faith is enough?  Don’t many of us have at least the bare minimum?  Then why are so many mountains in our lives still sitting in the same spot?  It isn’t that we haven’t prayed, and with at least some faith. ----
Let’s look at .....

pp   The Problem with the Way We Pray

One more verse, this one direct from our Father God, our heavenly Papa.  Listen to what He once said to some of His kids who weren’t doing so well.  Since God doesn’t change, we can assume that the longing heart from which He spoke to them, is the same longing heart from which He’s speaking to us right now.  It’s in Jeremiah 3:19. He said, speaking to us right now:  .....

pp   Jeremiah 3:19   “How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land.”

What’s stopping Him?  Maybe there’s a problem with the way we pray.  Or maybe it’s the way we don’t pray.  Consider this:  we do a lot more asking of God than relating to God.

But even if that’s true, is it a problem?  Didn’t Jesus tell us to come to Him with our requests?---- Here’s a second thought, and it’s revolutionary:  maybe petitionary prayer is supposed to come after relational prayer.   Maybe we shouldn’t be asking for stuff from someone we haven’t bothered to get a decent relationship with.       Would we ask for stuff from a person we don’t know very well?
I’m going to repeat that ....

pp   Maybe we shouldn’t be asking for stuff from someone we haven’t bothered to get a decent relationship with.

------  I wonder what would happen if our prayers were more like the response of a child lost in the big city when he finds his dad?

When Larry Crabb’s younger son was 8, he took him for a weekend of fun in a big city.  On the Sunday they played hide-and-seek in a big park with lots of people around.  At one point Larry hid behind a tree just 6 metres from where little Ken was leaning against another tree, eyes closed, counting to 10.

“Ready or not, here I come!”  he shouted.  Well Larry didn’t let little Ken find him.  Larry kept circling the thick tree trunk staying just out of his sight.  But dad was always watching his boy.  

After a long two minutes, little Ken’s excited smile suddenly disappeared, and a look of sheer terror came over his face.  Where’s dad?  Did he disappear?  Did some bad man knock him out and drag him away?  Larry could see these questions in his son’s panicking eyes.

He immediately stepped out from behind the tree.  “Dad!” Ken shrieked as he ran to him.  “I was scared I wouldn’t find you.”  

At that moment, he had no thought of the toy-shopping trip he’d been promised.  All he wanted was to be with his dad, to stay close by his side, to keep him in sight, to go wherever his dad wanted to go.  ----

Missionary and evangelist, E. Stanley Jones wrote,...

pp   “The first thing in prayer is to get God.  If you get Him, everything else follows.  Allow God to get at you, to invade you, to take possession of you. He then pours His prayers through you - prayers inspired by God Himself, and prayers ready to be answered by Him.”  -----   He goes on to say something like this ....

pp    “Prayer is like the fastening of the cup to the wounded side of a maple syrup tree to allow the sweet liquid to pour into it.  In prayer, you are now nestling up inside the side of God, ---- the wounded side if you will, --- and you allow His sweet grace to fill you up.  You are taking in the very life of God.”  ----

Christian writer Ravi Zacharias put it this way:  

pp     “Prayer is not the means of bringing our will to pass, but the means by which God brings our will into line to gladly receive His will.”   (And then Ravi adds this counsel)   “Make a plan for your times of prayer and implement it,  
1. to His honour and glory and
2. for your joy and sustenance.”

The great need of people in churches today, and perhaps even in your own life, is to better relate to God.  And the best way for all of us to do that is to find a plan for our times of prayer that draws us near to God for the sheer joy of just being close to Him, --- before we ask Him for a single thing.  Relational prayer must come before petitionary prayer.  We’ll never understand petitionary prayer until we learn to practice relational prayer, until we nestle up into the wounded side of God and let Him pour His sweet life into our empty cup.  Even then it will still be a mystery, but a delightful mystery, not an annoying one.

So here’s .....

pp   The PAPA Prayer – A Way to have a Wonderful Relationship with God.

More than anything else, the PAPA Prayer is a relational prayer.  It’s the foundation for understanding a little better and for powerfully practicing petitionary prayer.  It’s a prayer that we girls and boys can pray to our daddy.  Unless we become as little children who approach our heavenly Papa just to be near Him, something in our hearts will keep us confused and frustrated when we ask God for what we want.  Worse, we’ll be selfish and haughty and demanding.  And worse yet, we may not even see how selfish, and haughty and demanding we are.

Friends, the Papa Prayer is doing something deep inside me that’s not been done before.  It’s opening my eyes to see not only a new way to live but also a new way to pray.

The Papa Prayer brings together everything I’ve been thinking about since I began the Christian life.  It’s helping me want to touch God more than wanting to put the touch on God.

I offer it to you as a plan for restoring the relationship with God to its right place at the centre of your life, and for reclaiming the privilege of asking for whatever we want in His name and in His will.  That’s what Jesus did, in the power of the Spirit.  And He invites us to do the same thing.

When Jesus returns, He’ll find the faith He’s looking for in the heart of every Christian who has drawn close enough to God to trust Him with everything.  The Papa Prayer can help us do exactly that.  It can help bring us into a life-giving and life-changing relationship with God.

As Christians on Bribie Island and across the world put relational prayer in the centre of their lives, the church will recover its power.    Our desire for Him will be bigger than every other desire.  We’ll suffer well, we’ll be good stewards of blessings, and we’ll live to reveal what our Papa is like, to a watching world, to our spouses, kids, friends, and colleagues.  

Keep this point clearly in your mind:  .....

pp   Relational Prayer is the Centre of True Prayer.

The power of petitionary prayer depends on relational prayer being in the centre.  

Now I’m going to bring it all together and simplify it as we summarise the two kinds of prayer on the screen.  I’ll also give you a printout of this chart to stick on your fridge or hang up where you pray at home.
Let’s take a few minutes and think what prayer looks like in the life of a Christian whose central interest in prayer is petition.

Thanks and credit to David for charts.

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