6 Ways to Pray Effectively

Are you satisfied with your prayer life? Are you satisfied with your prayer life?! It's no wonder that the disciples came to Jesus and said,! Master, teach us how to pray.

Teach us how to pray. They knew their struggles, and Jesus was clearly a master at prayer. And so we can sympathize with the disciples.

We have our own struggles in prayer, and prayer is hard. It doesn't come natural. And there's few that pray well. And so we need to pray better.

We really need to pray better. Ryle is going to give us some directions, some recommendations on how to pray well, how to pray better. And it will do us good if we listen to these and put them into practice.

But before we look at those recommendations, let's do some review. Last week, Ryle tried to convince us that prayer is the most important subject in all of practical religion.

It's the most important subject. And he gave us five reasons. Do you remember those reasons? What were some of the reasons that prayer is the most important subject in practical religion?

Chuck? We wouldn't have salvation without prayer. There's no salvation without prayer. We believe in grace alone and faith alone, but there's no one who can be saved who doesn't ask for salvation.

There's four more. Prayer is the mark of salvation. Prayer is the surest mark of salvation. It seems like every other Christian virtue and Christian duty can be repeated and duplicated, but someone who draws close to God is impossible unless they're saved.

Anything else? There's three more. Roger? Prayer is the most neglected duty. It's the most neglected duty. He says, it's a matter of course and all Christians are to pray.

And of course, that means that most Christians don't. Like most matters of course, there's few people who actually do it. There's a couple more. God gives great encouragement when you use words to pray.

Right. God encourages prayer the most of all the things that He tells us to do. He gives us great promises. He tells us great things that would encourage us to pray.

And what's the fifth and final one? Mike. Deligence is the secret to the whole. Right. If you want to be holy, if you want to be eminently holy, which means you have great distinguished holiness, then prayer is the secret to that holiness.

And so I do hope that as you were going through this week, that lesson kept coming up in your head like it came up in mind. It kept popping into my mind.

At random times that I need to be praying more. God has given me everything that I need to pray more. He's encouraged me. He's prepared everything so that I would pray more.

So prayer is worth doing. And it's worth doing well. And so that's what Ryle is going to encourage us for this week. That not only is it worth doing, but it's worth doing well.

And so he gives us six recommendations on how to pray well. The first recommendation is to pray humbly, but boldly.

Humbly, but boldly. Humility and boldness, they're not opposites. They are. They're sort of, they're kind of paradoxes. They're hard to balance.

And if you imagine a tight rope, and on one end there's humility, and it's pulling this rope of prayer. And then on the other end, there's boldness. And it has to be pulling the rope of prayer if the rope is going to remain taut.

So we can actually walk to God in prayer. Humility and boldness, they have to be both doing their part. Humility is necessary because of who we are and because who God is.

God is eternal, and we live 70 years or 80 if we have strength. God is a consuming fire, the Bible says, and we're just the dust of the earth.

God made all things by the power of his word, and we are what he made. And so we need to have humility. The angelic host never stopped crying out, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

And the only thing that we can really cry out is what a wretched man that I am. And it's all true. And so we have to keep those things in mind when we pray that God is separate from us.

He is not sinful like we are. And so our sinfulness and our frailty and just the fact that we are creatures and he is the creator means we need to have humility.

And those things need to come and roost in our souls where they're deep down. And so every time we pray, we pray with humility. But we can't stop there because if all we had was humility, that would drive us away from prayer, wouldn't it?

If all we could think about was how terrible I am and how great God is, there would be no prayer. We have to pray with boldness. So let me ask you, where does boldness come from?

What are some of the things that make us bold in prayer? That make someone to ask great things of God and to dare to ask great things of God? Dare. Adoption.

Adoption. We can pray boldly because we are God's children. On Tuesday, Barack Obama is going to become the President of the United States.

and people are going to start calling him Mr. President. And foreign dignitaries and White House staff are going to sweat it out when they're in Barack Obama's presence.

There's going to be only a few people that don't call him by that title, by Mr. President, with great respect. It's going to be his wife and his children and maybe some of his closest friends, long-time friends.

While all these other people are going to be nervous in his presence, not wanting to say the wrong thing, not wanting to do the wrong thing, his daughters are going to be running around the White House and calling him Dad because his assumption to the office of President doesn't change their relationship.

He's their father and they're his children. And in the same way, we have great boldness in prayer because God is our Father. And that relationship is primary in our life.

What else gives us boldness? Jim? His promises in His Word that He will not give us for forgiveness. I think of Lamentations 3. Jason, the writer says, Yet this I call to mind, therefore I have hope.

And he goes on to say what he calls to mind. And where his hope is. Because of God's great love, we are not consumed. There's actually a couple things in that verse. One is the promises and one is the character of God.

That God is loving and so we can depend on His character. But He has also given us great promises. And it's really those promises that help us to pray well or pray boldly.

Martin Luther taught his people to pray boldly. He was known to pray very boldly. And he taught his people how to pray. He said when they were doubting, when they were doubting God's goodness or God's ability, they were doubting something about their relationship with God, he told them to hold God to His promises.

And this is what he said. In such cases, in such cases when you doubt, we must say, Lord, You alone give help and comfort. You have said that You would help me.

I believe Your Word. Oh my God and Lord, I have heard from You a joyful and comforting word. I hold You to it. I know You will not lie to me. No matter how You may appear, You will keep what You have promised, that and nothing else.

So, God, You said You're going to do this. And I know You're going to do it. You're going to do this and You're not going to do anything less and not anything more.

And I hold You to Your promise. Boldness and prayer comes when we know the promises of God. What else? Well, Jim mentioned the character of God.

The character of God. Turn in your Bibles to Genesis 18. Genesis 18. And we're going to start reading in verse 20.

Genesis 18. 20. Then the Lord said, The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great that their sin and their sin is so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me.

If not, I will know. The men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham approached him and said, Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?

What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a wicked thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike.

Far be it from you. Will not the judge of all the earth do right? So, what's the basis of Abraham's boldness and prayer?

What does he know about God? He's righteous. He's righteous. He's just. And so, if you think about it, Abraham is pleading for Sodom, a city of aggressive homosexuals, and he's being bold in prayer because he knows that God, he knows God's character.

And that's why he says, Far be it from you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked. Will not the judge of all the earth do right? So, we can pray boldly because we know God's character.

And so, we can say, God, you are a loving God. You should help me because you love me. You should forgive me because you are merciful. And so, we can be bold in prayer because we know who God is.

There's one other thing that should make us bold in prayer. We have a great high priest. There's two things. We do have a great high priest.

Right. We talked about that last week. That when we come into the presence of God, we are not coming by ourselves. We are coming with God's Son.

And He's praying for us. And He's standing there with us. What I was thinking was justification. Justification is Christ's righteousness is being accounted to me.

And so, when I come in the presence of God, God doesn't see me in my sinfulness. He doesn't see me in my tattered rags of all my unrighteousness.

He sees me robed in Christ's righteousness. And that gives me boldness. Because when I pray in Jesus' name, I'm saying, God, you should answer me and hear me because of Jesus.

Because of His righteousness and not my own. And so, we can have great boldness because we're justified. We're right with God.

And God has nothing against us. So that's the first recommendation. Pray with humility and with boldness.

The second is pray spiritually and earnestly. Spiritually and earnestly. It's easy to say our prayers. And at Grace Fellowship, we're what they call probably a low church.

And that means we don't use a liturgy. We don't say the Apostles' Creed. We don't say the Lord's Prayer all together every week. We don't say the Ten Commandments.

We don't have a routine where it's easy to become formalist. But, we can fall into the same sort of formalism as any high church Anglican.

And that's when we just say our prayers. We go over the same request time after time with no feeling and no heart. There's no liveliness in our prayer.

There's no earnestness in our prayer. We're sort of like the horse at the mill. We go around and we go around in the same trudging way. And our requests are the same and we feel the same way about them.

It is true. We do have a lot of the same requests day after day after day, don't we? It's not that we have to pray about things that are different every day.

We have the same needs day after day. We need our daily bread. And so Jesus teaches us to ask for our daily bread. And we have the same enemies. We have the flesh and the devil and the world.

And we need to pray against those things every day. And our family needs God's blessing every day. And the church needs our blessing every day. And so we're going to have the same prayers, or very similar prayers every day, but we need to strive to stay away from just, I say my prayers.

I just say them because I've always said them. I always ask because I've always asked. And I mindlessly and heartlessly and carelessly pray without any real earnestness, without really any asking the Holy Spirit to help us to pray.

We need to learn to wrestle in prayer. And that is something that you learn, that you strive for, to wrestle with God in prayer.

There is such a thing as wrestling and overcoming God, where you basically, in a bad way of saying it, is you force God to do what you want.

You wrestle him until he is overcome. Turn in your Bibles to Genesis 32. And this is the story of Jacob wrestling with God.

And this is really a story of prayer. In verse 22, we'll read through to 28. That night Jacob got up and took his two wives and his two maids servants and his eleven sons and crossed the fort of the Jabbok.

After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. And if you remember, he's about ready to meet Esau. And Esau is going to meet him with four hundred men.

We assume to kill Jacob and his family. At least it seems that way. When the man saw that, okay, let me see, 24, so Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, let me go for it is daybreak.

But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me. The man asked him, what is your name? Jacob, he answered. Then the man said, your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and you have overcome.

So Jacob was in a very bad situation. And so he sends his family ahead and he stays to pray to God for safety.

And instead of God hearing his prayers from heaven, as Jacob's praying, a man comes out of nowhere and basically bowls Jacob over and they start wrestling. And they wrestle all throughout the night and Jacob is struggling and he's sweating for hours on end and he desperately wants a blessing.

And finally, because he won't let the Lord go, the Lord touches his hip and he's basically left crippled. And so Jacob is just left clinging to the Lord.

He can't do anything against him, but he will not let him go. And so the Lord blesses him. If we want to pray well, we have to learn that sort of holy tenacity where we won't let go.

We won't let go until God blesses us. Jesus prayed with loud cries and sighs and tears. And it would be good for us to do the same.

And so we have to ask ourselves how earnest are we? Do we really care what we get in prayer? Ryle says, there's no surer mark of trifling in prayer than when men are careless about what they get.

If you don't care what you get, then you're just messing around. And God is not going to answer your prayers. prayers. And so all I have to say is I trifle in my prayers too often.

And I'm not serious about them. And so God could easily say, Jason, you're not, you don't mean what you're asking for. You don't want what you are praying for.

If you wanted it, you would be more earnest about it. you would shed some tears and you would sigh and you would cry. But as it is, you're not very earnest.

So that's the second recommendation, is to pray with earnestness and to pray with the Spirit's help. The third recommendation is pray regularly.

Regularly. And what he means by praying regularly is this, to make prayer a daily part of your life. A daily part of your life.

Just like you eat and you get dressed and you go to work, you need to pray regularly. I'm going to give you two routines, two Christians and their routines. And I just want you to listen and think about which one is better, which one has a healthier prayer life, and which one sounds more like me.

The first Christian's name is Joe. And Joe wakes up an hour every morning before breakfast, breakfast, and he goes into the living room, and he reads his Bible, and he prays.

He has lists of things that he prays for every day, and so he spends at least 20 to 30 minutes in prayer before breakfast. He then gets ready for work, and he has a 15 minute commute to work, and in that 15 minutes he usually prays over the things that he's going to be doing that day and the people he's going to run into.

At work he has two 20 minute breaks, and in one of those breaks he eats lunch, and in another one he stays at his cubicle or office, and he reads his Bible, and he prays.

And at home he does what everyone else does. He eats, he plays, he does what everyone else does, and when the kids are in bed he takes a shower, and in the shower he thinks about what he's done wrong today, what he has to be thankful for, and he thanks God, and before he goes to bed he prays with his wife.

Christian number two is Joanne. Joanne wakes up 20 minutes, after her alarm clock goes off, and that's, so she has about 10 minutes, and she rushes through her devotions in her 10 minutes, and then she starts getting ready for work, and she listens to music in her car on the 15 minute commute to work.

Joanne also has a couple of 20 minute breaks, and she uses those times to just surf the internet. And on her commute back from the home, or from work to home, she puts on her favorite Christian CD and sings along.

And after everything's done, at the end of the day, she takes a shower, and she thinks about the Sunday school lesson about how to pray regularly, and she asks God to help her. And she falls asleep in front of the TV.

So, which Christian has a better prayer life? Which one's more like you? There's no rules about when to pray. There's no rules saying you have to pray to God four times a day, have four set times a day, or seven times.

But there is a need to pray regularly. Not to give prayer the leftovers of your day. Not the ten minutes in the morning because you haven't planned correctly.

Not just as you're going to sleep because you just all of a sudden thought of it. Prayer needs to be a regular part of your life. And so if you need to make concrete changes to your routine so that you pray more, you need to do it.

We all need to have prayer to be a regular part of our day. So, you know that prayer needs to be a regular part of your day, and you'll be blessed if you make it that, if you do it.

So, that's the third recommendation. The fourth recommendation is pray particularly. Pray particularly. So, let's say I go to the doctor and the doctor asks me, what's wrong?

And I say, I'm sick. Okay, well, what's wrong? Well, I'm sick. Well, tell me, what's wrong? How do you feel? I don't feel good.

And we never get around to telling the doctor exactly what's wrong. Well, that doesn't happen, because when we go to the doctor, we have specific problems and exact symptoms that we want to tell the doctor.

We say, my head hurts, my stomach hurts, my leg hurts when I do this. You tell them precisely what's wrong. And in the same way, we can talk that way to God.

we can say, God, I'm a sinner. And I think there's a place for saying things like that. You know that deep down you're a sinner, but if you never get around to actually confessing the sins that you've committed, then you're sort of left at that surface level of, I'm a sinner, I need your help.

But we never get around to saying, what we need is help for. Is it pride? Is it pride? And then you confess your pride. Do you need help because your daughter is doing something that needs corrected and disciplined and you don't know how to do that?

And so you pray exactly over that situation. And it seems like so much of the time we hide our shallowness of our relationship with God in these sort of the general area.

You pray, but you never get very specific with him. You tell him that you love him, but you don't tell him why you love him. You say, I praise you, but you don't tell him what you praise him for.

We never get around to mentioning precisely what we're looking for, what we have to say, who we are, and who we think God is. We can learn a lesson from an old servant of Abraham.

He's this old guy, and we don't know very much about him, but he did know how to pray particularly. So turn in your Bibles to Genesis 24. Genesis 24.

It's time for Abraham to find a bride for Isaac. And so he calls his oldest servant, his chief servant, and it's probably Eleazar of Damascus.

We don't know. And Abraham commissions him to go back to Abraham's people and find Isaac a bride.

And so the servant takes on the task, and he goes to the town of Nahor, and he sat down by a well, and he prayed. And we pick up his prayer in verse 12.

And just listen to how he prays. Then he prayed, O Lord, God of my master Abraham, give me success today and show kindness to my master Abraham.

See, I am standing beside this spring, and the daughters of the townspeople are coming out to draw water. May it be that when I say to a girl, please let down your jar that I may have a drink, and she says, drink, and I'll water your camels too, let her be the one you have chosen for your servant Isaac.

By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master. So, the servant has a very particular request, and he's not afraid to ask God for this very particular request.

He's not only looking for a bride for Isaac, he's looking for just the right one, and he's going to know just the right one because he says, God, I'm going to say this to this girl, and I want you to have her say this back to me.

And if we have that exact conversation, then I'll know that you have picked this woman out, and she's exactly the right one for Isaac.

So, do we pray like that? Now, I think we can get ourselves into trouble if we're always putting God to the test and say, or not God to the test, if we pray like this all the time, where we're like, God, let me have this conversation, and it exactly happens like this, and then I'll know what your will is.

That's not the point. The point is, this man was particular. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and he asked exactly for that.

So, in the same way, we need to tell God exactly what we're looking for, exactly who we are on the inside. God is our Father, Christ is our husband, and we need to keep no secrets from him.

If we're feeling a certain way, if we have a certain problem, then we need to tell him exactly what we're desiring and what our problem is. So, that's the fourth recommendation.

And then, the fifth one, the fifth recommendation is to pray selflessly. selflessly. Who's the easiest person to pray for that you know?

Yeah. How many times do you just instantly pray for yourself? And then, how many times do you instantly pray for someone else? There's, we pray for the person in the mirror a lot more than we pray for anyone else.

We know our needs. We care and we love ourselves. And so, we pray. And it's good that we pray. And as I thought about this, the most loving thing I do for myself is I pray.

I want God's blessing in my life. I want success. I want forgiveness. I want to walk with God and I want to have a good relationship with God and I want to grow in wisdom and knowledge.

And so, I pray. I want a healthy Christian life and so, I pray. And I pray for myself. But if we're called to love other people just as we love ourselves, then we need to learn to pray for other people just in the same way that we pray for ourselves.

Isn't that true? That those other people need God's richest blessing too. They need forgiveness. They need to know the power of the gospel.

people. So, husbands, let's begin with you. Your wife is called to be the bone of your bone, the flesh of your flesh. The two shall become one.

So, do you pray like you are one? That her concerns and her interests are your concerns and your interests. Her fears are your fears. Her needs are your needs.

Do you pray for your wife? And wives, you're called to be the helpers of your husbands. And one of the best ways that you can help them is to pray for them.

Because they need God to be at work in their life. And the best thing you can do is to pray and hold them before God. Parents, you love your children.

You give everything that you can for your children. you provide for them. You take care of them. Do you pray for them? Because they need more than your care.

They need God's care. They need God to take an interest in their life. They need God at work in their life. So do you pray for your children?

Church members, do you pray for your pastors? You love them. If you love them, pray for them. They're men just like you and they need prayer.

You're going to do them the most good when you pray for them. So we need to pray for others. And others need us to pray for them. If we're going to love other people like we love ourselves, then we need to pray earnestly!

for others. The biggest reason, I think, the best reason I have that you should pray for others is because that is what Jesus does for you.

that's what Jesus does for you. Jesus is the master and we're the disciple. And it's the job of the disciple to look at the master and see what the master's doing and then do exactly that to emulate it.

And so what do we see when we look at Jesus? We see someone who prays for other people, not only for himself, but for other people. He prays for Peter.

Peter, Peter, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I've prayed for you that your faith would not fail. And John 17, he's praying in the upper room, and he says, sanctify them by your truth.

Your word is truth. And my prayer is not for them that you would take them out of the world, but that you would protect them from the evil one. So these are Jesus' prayers for us, that we would be sanctified, that we would be protected from the evil one, and that's Jesus' present ministry to us now.

We've already spoke about that, how he's our high priest, and he prays for us. There was no one like Jesus who could intercede for someone else. And if he's the master, and we're the disciple, then we need to learn to do what he does.

He prays for others, and we need to go and do likewise. The fifth recommendation, that's the fifth recommendation that Ryle gives.

The sixth is this, be watchful over your prayer life. Be watchful over your prayer life. If prayer is worth doing, then it's worth doing well.

And if it's worth doing well, it's worth protecting, and nourishing, and making it grow. Some people's prayer life is like an overgrown garden.

There's a row of green beans here, there's a flower patch over here, but the whole thing is covered with weeds. It's alive, it's there, it exists, but it needs attention.

There needs to be a wall around that garden, a fence. There needs to be some protection of our prayer life. We need to have set times in our day, set days on the calendar, set hours in the day, where we say, this time is sacred, and nothing barring God's overruling providence is going to keep me from praying.

My prayer life is so important that this fence is going all the way around it, and nothing is getting in. We also need to do some weeding.

If your garden is overgrown, you need to weed it. So how do you weed your prayer life? Well, you set up the walls to keep all the bad animals out, and you take care of the weeds by pulling things out that doesn't need to be there, that's choking out the life of your prayer life.

So, can you watch that TV show, and then in good conscience, go and pray. If you can't, then the TV show has to go. And if your friends that you're around, if they don't encourage you to pray, if they instead discourage you to pray, then, I mean, you can't get rid of people totally, but you need to withdraw and put some space so you can protect your prayer life.

God will have to say. They said, everything's permissible to me. Everything's permissible to me. And when Paul wrote them, he basically said, you're asking the wrong question.

Christians are not supposed to live on this bare minimum level of this is okay for me to do, and this is not okay for me to do. He says, everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial.

And so we have to ask ourselves, what is beneficial for our prayer life? Do we need to get rid of the TV? Do we need to stop looking at the internet so much?

Do these games, these activities, these people, these friends, these things, do they help my prayer life? Because if they don't help our prayer life, then they have to go.

Because our prayer life is the most important thing that we do. is how we have communion with God. And there's nothing more important than communion with God. So from that point, we have a few minutes.

That's what we can negatively do. We can put up the wall, protect our prayer life, we can pull out the weeds so we have more room to grow in our prayer life. What are some positive things?

What are some of the things that you find to help you to pray more, to pray better? prayer? The thing I find worse and best for me, Jason, is getting up early in the morning, which I've lately been up in the morning, I can't sleep, but getting up early in the morning when it's just me, nothing distracts, and I'm thankful for more help than this to not turn the television on or jump on the computer, but to spend time reading his word and bring it a day before, and thank him for his many blessings, and trying to remember friends.

going through Blanchard's book on Mark, he struck a chord the other day that we made me stop and think, we all know how busy Jesus was, but he always knew it was important to make time to meet with his father.

Blanchard walked out in Mark 6, just after Jesus had fed the 5,000, he said immediately Jesus made his disciples get into a boat ahead of him to the city, where he dismissed the crowd.

After leaving him, he wanted him outside to pray. I mean, he did seem to have not done something else, but he knew it was important to meet with his heavenly father, and he didn't let the business, the compassion was there, and he found time to go and spend time with his father.

That really struck me, that his business was compassion and everything else, he still found time to put everything out and go meet with his father. I think we need to learn something from that, and that is, on our busiest days, isn't that when we need prayer the most?

That it seems to be the opposite. When we're at the busiest and we're the most frantic, that prayer is one of the first things to go. Martin Luther said, you know, on my busiest days, I have to pray for three hours.

And that seems out of this world to us. But he knew the importance of prayer. So what else have you guys found to help your prayer life? Going along with that, from the Gospels, when I think it was you over the pulpit, that God is indulgent.

And I went through the Gospels and started thinking, was Jesus indulgent when people came to him? And I hit a blind man who was told to be quiet, and Jesus stopped and said, what do you want?

I'll give it to you. And there were women that came with kids that were filled with demons, with their own ailments, and I never once saw Christ turn any of them away.

That spurred me to pray harder and more further. It's those kind of examples when people today in real life tell me that Christ did not turn them away. And when I go to the Gospels and he didn't turn them away, I do have an indulgent God, and that encourages my prayer life.

Very good. Roger? One big encouragement for me, especially when my mind is all mixed up and I'm, you know, hovering back and forth and just not all together and not prepared to go to the prayer, and that's to fellowship, to get in contact with another Christian, get my mind straight, get my head straight, get the principles down again.

Weekend's about it for me. I mean, there's no one I can speak with during the week, and that's when I get my mind straight. That's where I encourage you to get back and pray and get back to do my rest.

There's no way we can overestimate having a clear mind when we pray, and whatever helps us have a clear, set mind, I think is good for prayer. That's all the time that we have.

Let's pray, and then we'll be dismissed. Father, I thank you that you are an indulgent God, and we're just sorry that we don't ask you for more, because we have not, because we haven't asked.

And the slowness has not been on your part, but it's been on our part. We've been too independent, too proud, too selfish.

So we pray that you would forgive us. We set Jesus before our eyes again. Put your spirit to work in our heart that we would be like him, that we would by faith lay a hold of your promises and your character, that we would pray better.

Father, Grace Fellowship needs to be a praying church. It all depends on your blessing, and so I pray that you would do that for our good and for your glory.

In Jesus' name, amen.