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Part 2: Steady Prayer, Desperate Prayer, Private Prayer, Public Prayer

Exodus 32:15-35

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of prayer from Exodus 32:15-35.


I mentioned yesterday that in the course of these topical surveys of prayer and Scripture we shall consider together the four prayers of Moses that are summarized in these three chapters: Exodus 32, 33, 34. I shall begin by reading Exodus 32:15–35.

“Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, ‘There is the sound of war in the camp.’ Moses replied: ‘It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear.’

When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. He said to Aaron, ‘What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?’

‘Do not be angry, my Lord,’ Aaron answered. ‘You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, “Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” So I told them, “Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.” Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’

Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, ‘Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.’ And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” ’

The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, ‘You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.’ The next day Moses said to the people, ‘You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.’

So Moses went back to the Lord and said, ‘Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.’ The Lord replied to Moses, ‘Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.’ And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.”

This is the Word of Lord.

Many are the topics that might usefully be integrated into any faithful theological reflection on prayer. For instance, we might think through some of the standard categories of prayer. Praise, adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, intersession.

We could take any one of those and break them down further: intersession for the church, for our own family (we remember Job praying preemptively for his own children), for the broader world, for justice to be done, for the dawning of God’s kingdom, for the progress of the gospel. One could work through the emotions one finds in Scripture in prayer. Just think of the range in David alone: the abyss of bleakness in Psalm 51 when he is confessing his sin after the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah; the joy and confidence, delight in the creator God in Psalm 8.

But in this session, I want to use the time allotted me by thinking through with you another set of prayer’s polarities, five of them in particular. That is, patterns of praying in Scripture that are really quite different: a pole here and an opposite pole there, both of which are found in Scripture and sustained in Scripture. They will teach us not only of the rich diversity of the Bible’s witness to prayer, but also they will help to reform our own praying.

1. Sustained prayer and brief prayer

In this instance, let me draw your attention to Nehemiah 1. I’m sure you will recall the setting. Nehemiah is serving in the palace in Susa in the twentieth year, we are told. That is, in the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes. A report comes to him from Jerusalem that the walls of the city have not been rebuilt. The fledgling, returned community is in terrible straits.

There is no joyful worship at the newly built, fledgling temple. He weeps, and he mourns. Then he prays. Chapter 1, verse 5: “ ‘Lord, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel.

I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my ancestral family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees, and laws you gave your servant Moses. Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, “If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.”

They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.’ ”

Now the thing to observe about the prayer, first of all, is if you watch the month notices that are preserved in the book, Nehemiah prayed this night and day for four months. Here is sustained intercessory focused prayer, month after month after month. Now all of us remember what happens in the next chapter.

In the next chapter, he is looking a little down in the mouth, which you’re not supposed to do in the presence of Artaxerxes, and he is challenged. In that context, when he is finally invited to speak, he actually (as the dialogue continues) has an entire plan of what he wants done: how long he would be away, what kind of support he would need, and so forth.

It’s all thought through very carefully. But, we’re told, when he is actually challenged by Artaxerxes, immediately he casts a prayer to heaven. Now I’ve heard lots of comments and sermons on that bullet prayer. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an exposition of the prayer in chapter 1. We like bullet prayers. Yet, what we should see from this bullet prayer is it is a bullet prayer in the matrix of massive sustained theologically-rich prayer. It is almost the overflow of a life of intercessory prayer. Do you see?

Moreover, when you look at the prayer in chapter 1 and focus on its features, or, rather, the characteristics of God presupposed by the prayer, there is an awful lot to be learned by Nehemiah’s intercession. Look at some of the characteristics of God presupposed by this sustained prayer:

A) God is sovereign.

“Lord, the God of heaven, the great and awesome God.”

B) God keeps his covenant.

“You are the God who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments,” picking up language drawn from the Decalogue.

C) God expects repentance where there is sin.

Verses 6 and 7. “Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of God. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my ancestral family, have committed.” Here again, you find Nehemiah the man so identified with the people, he’s not confessing, as it were, outside the box for their sins.

He’s in the same position as an Isaiah in chapter 6 who, when he sees something of the glory of God, acknowledges he himself is a man of unclean lips, and he dwells amongst a people of unclean lips. God expects repentance where there is sin. Daniel, likewise, prays in this corporate “I am with the people, I am no better than they” sort of sense when he intercedes with God.

D) God punishes and restores his people.

Chapter 1, verses 8 and 9. In some ways, this is the crux of the entire prayer. It is making overt allusion to earlier Scriptures. Deuteronomy 4:25–31. Deuteronomy 30. The promise of God that even if his people were exiled again, he would bring them back where there was confession and repentance. God punishes and restores his people. That’s not just an old covenant warning. Read Revelation 2 and 3, for example, or Hebrews 12.

E) God knows his own people and watches over them.

Verse 10: “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.” “The Lord knows those who are his.”

F) God guards his own name.

Verse 11: “Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.” It is not even his concern for his concern for the people that is at the focus of this prayer but his concern that the Lord’s name be revered.

And God controls everything, so only he can work out the practical responses needed. It is within this huge theological matrix Nehemiah finally appends, “Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.” In other words, here is sustained prayer, followed by brief or bullet prayer. Do not pit one against the other. In the ideal, the latter emerges out of the context of the former.

2. Desperate prayer and steady prayer.

I don’t know if this is the right pairing or not. It’s the best I can do. Come back with me now to the passage we read a few moments ago in Exodus 32. In this prayer, especially verses 31–32, Moses could wish himself accursed for his people. In our age of religious tolerance, the entire passage can strike even the most biblically faithful of us as a bit severe.

Scattering the dust of the ground-up idol in the drinking water and making the people drink, the Levites strapping on their swords and running amuck through the tents, cutting down those who were most evil and 3,000 die, and being approved by God for it because they cared more for fidelity to the covenant than for their own families. We say, “Theologically, yes. I know that’s right. I know that’s right, but somehow I feel just a bit squeamish.”

But, of course, what we must recognize is all such pictures of judgment in the Old Testament are not to be cast over against “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” in the New Testament. That’s not the direction of the trajectory. Rather, as you move from the old covenant to the new covenant, it’s not that the picture of God becomes a little softer, a little gentler. As you move from the old covenant to the new covenant, the picture of God’s love becomes all the clearer, and the picture of God’s wrath become all the clearer. They both get ratcheted up.

The ultimate fulfillment of this sort of depiction is, finally, hell. The New Testament equivalent of Moses’ prayer is Paul praying for his own kinsman in Romans 9. He could wish himself accursed. Do you hear that? “I could wish myself dead if only they could be saved.” I have to tell you, quite frankly, I can’t pray like that, not honestly.

The closest I come to it (and I have come to it) has been when I prayed for my own children. “I could wish myself dead if only they’d be saved.” Then you begin to see how that ought to be extrapolated toward all the people in our charge. There is a sense in which you know, I know, God knows, Moses knows, Paul knows that’s not the way it works! So why bother praying the prayer?

But by that same token, you could say, why on earth, then, did Jesus bother praying in Gethsemane, “If it’s possible, take this cup from me”? Don’t you see, there are some prayers in Scripture that are so blisteringly intense you don’t analyze them with strict logic and simply say, “Well, that’s not a very realistic prayer. Everybody knows that’s not how the Bible works, in any case.”

Are you going to rebuke Jesus for his desire that the cup be taken from him when he knows full well what his Father’s will is? But it says something about the seriousness with which we approach our pastoral tasks, our ecclesial and familial priestly tasks as we pray for others and want so much for them to know life and forgiveness when they stand under the wrath of God that we could wish ourselves damned if they could but be saved.

There is a place for praying life that, and it can’t be aped. It’s not formulaic. At the end of the day, it reflects where your heart is or it’s pure chicanery. On the other hand, one should not think all praying in Scripture is of that sort of intense, desperate nature. There are many, many prayers that are measured and others that are full of the joy of the Lord and a kind of steady grasp of who God is.

Some of you know I’ve told the story of how we started teaching our kids to memorize Scripture. My wife is English, and the English, far more than Americans or most other species as far as I’m aware, have a fabulously-rich heritage of nursery rhymes. My parents were both born in the UK, as well, so I was brought up with them. Because of my wife, my kids were brought up with them, so we learned all of these nursery rhymes and passed them on. From the earliest age, our kids sat on our knees, and we read nursery rhymes to them.

We had our memories refreshed, and the kids learned them. When my daughter was still a week shy of a year, amongst her books were four nursery rhyme books with a picture on one side and a nursery rhyme on the other side with 25 poems, nursery rhymes, in each book. That’s a hundred nursery rhymes, because there were four of these books. She could open these books up to any picture and recite the entire nursery rhyme. Verbal little thing. It suddenly dawned on me if she can learn nursery rhymes she can jolly well memorize some Bible. It’s about time.

So in family devotions (they had been with us from the beginning in family devotions) she was there in her high chair, and I started reading 1 Corinthians 1, the first paragraph, and 1 Corinthians 13. The next day, 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 Corinthians 1, the second paragraph. The next day, 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 Corinthians 1, the third paragraph, and so forth. So we were working through the book, but every day she got some 1 Corinthians 13. After two or three weeks I simply dropped off the last word of each phrase and looked at her.

“Though I …”

“Speak.”

“With the tongue of men and of …”

“Angels.”

“But have not …”

“Love.”

“I am only a resounding …”

“Gong.”

So it went. They pick it up so fast, you know? A couple of weeks later, she simply said, “Tiffy do it,” reached out for my Bible, plunked it down in front of her, and recited 1 Corinthians 13. Now she made two mistakes. We worked on them. Her mother and I, my wife and I, fell off our chairs laughing when Tiffany got to the bit, “When I was a child, I understood as a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me.” I am not saying she understood it, but, boy, she was sure learning to hide God’s Word in her heart.

The second one we did was Psalm 8. This is not a prayer of desperation. “Lord, O our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

I can’t read this psalm nowadays without thinking of Tiffany at the age of about 15 months (she’s 27 now) because she always had a beat, and when she got to the latter verses of Psalm 8, she bounced with the beat: “You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.” And she’d look and grin. That, too, was good praying, even if she didn’t understand much of it yet.

There is a place for steady, regular acknowledgement of God as Creator and Sovereign, to work through the attributes of Christ, to remember what he has done on the cross, to think through all of God’s providential care over us, to rehearse and review in our minds the various attributes and functions of God and his names, the various ways in which he has disclosed himself across space-time history recorded in God’s most Holy Word.

Whether in children sitting in a high chair, squirming with the beat or in senior saints who are passing through their minds again the steady, steady prayers of youth and thought-through biblical theology, there’s a place for that, too. Prayer is not all desperation. Desperate prayer, steady prayer.

There are some intercessory matters we should be praying for constantly, should we not? Should we ever stop praying the Lord of the harvest that he would thrust forth laborers into his harvest? There may be peculiar times when things are so bleak that may become a prayer of real desperation, but surely it is a prayer we should be offering up all the time. It should be written down in our prayer list so it is something that is a constant burden to us. “You do not have because you do not ask,” James says.

3. Private prayer and public prayer

Now come back to Exodus again. This time, chapter 33. I’m not going to take time to read the entire chapter, but I need to remind you that God, at the beginning of chapter 33, tells Moses to lead the people into the Promised Land. He swears he will drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, and so forth, before them. He says in 33:3, “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”

Then we’re introduced to the Tent of Meeting. This is not the tabernacle. They have had instructions for the tabernacle, but they have not yet built it. In fact, the instructions had just come down with Moses and all of that was short-circuited because of the wrath of God falling on the people. The tabernacle was still to be built. At this juncture, there was a small Tent of Meeting where people could go to meet with God, and it was situated outside the camp. Moses resorts there. Then in verse 12 we find Moses praying to the Lord privately.

He’s praying for certain things, interceding with God. This is not before all the people. This is in the privacy of this small Tent of Meeting. Now listen to his praying. “Moses said to the Lord, ‘You have been telling me, “Lead these people,” but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, “I know you by name and you have found favor with me.” If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.’ ”

You see, Moses is now expressing himself not only in terms of the nation but in terms of his own need. If in the previous prayer Moses could wish himself accursed for his people, here Moses understands his ability to stand and withstand depends utterly on knowing God better. “Teach me your ways,” he says, and he wants other help. You see, the deal all along had been that Aaron would go with him as his spokesperson.

But now Aaron is so utterly compromised Moses cries, “You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me.” Because now it looks, to Moses, as if he has lost his right-hand man. “The Lord replied, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’ ”

But do you hear that? This is right after verse 3, where God has said, “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you …” Now God is saying, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest,” and Moses fastens on that and begins to ask, “Is that just for me? Or is that for all the people?” He pushes it. It’s almost as if he’s clinging to it.

“Moses said to him, ‘If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?’ ” Do you see how he has made this corporate now? Unambiguously corporate?

“You’ve said you won’t go with us. You’ve said if your tabernacle is built right in the center of the tribes, three on the north, three on the south, three on the east, three on the west, your holiness would lash out in destructive power against sin in the camp so you won’t go with us. But what’s the point of going if you don’t come? What distinguishes us from any other people except for your presence?”

What distinguishes the church of the living God from the surrounding world apart from the presence of God? Listen. I have friends working in Muslim communities, largely Turkish, in Germany. In some of these Muslim circles they have what we would call evangelistic rallies: singing, semi-pop music, preaching, homilies, an appeal to come forward. My friend goes along to some of these and says quietly to his wife, “They have everything we have, except Jesus.”

It’s easy to ape religious, liturgical experiences. What you must have is the presence of the living God. If God sets himself apart from us we’re undone! Moses sees that for himself; he sees it for the people. Quietly, he intercedes. “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and know you by name.’ ” He does it for the people because of Moses’ intercession in this passage.

So when the tabernacle is built, in God’s great condescending mercy, it is built in the midst of tribes, three on the north, three on the south, three on the east, three on the west. And God’s presence goes with the people, despite all their sin. But Moses still understands what he must have is such a clear apprehension of God, such a growing knowledge of God himself that he is steadfast, that he can stand and withstand, that he is stable, that he is certain.

“He cries, ‘Now show me your glory.’ And the Lord replies, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you …’ As if God’s maximal glory, if I may speak that way, is displayed best in God’s maximal goodness. ‘… and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence.’ (‘Understand this is never any diminishment of my sovereignty.’)

‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ (‘You can’t just become my buddy. Moreover, if by asking to see my glory, you are asking to see me somehow, in some unmediated way, face-to-face.… Listen, you cannot see my face.) “… for no one may see me and live.” ’ ”

Now tuck that away in the back of your mind. I’m coming back to that tomorrow when we start thinking of some ways in which our praying should be in line with the mind of God and what that has to do with our understanding of biblical theology. My only purpose, at the moment, in rehearsing these verses is to show that in this context, Moses understands his ability to stand and withstand depends utterly on knowing God better, on God’s presence amongst the people. He prays for it alone, in quiet, in private, in this small Tent of Meeting.

One the other hand, there are a lot of public prayers in Scripture. One thinks, for example, of the prayer of Solomon at the dedication of the temple in 1 Kings, chapter 8, a spectacularly rich prayer, theologically speaking. Here is a king who has built a magnificent structure but whose theology is rich enough he understands the structure cannot domesticate God. “The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built!”

He understands it is a place of sacrifice for sin, and he knows full well the people will sin again. He envisages the possibility there will be exile, destruction, punishment. Then, “O, if only the people turn to the place of sacrifice that you yourself have ordained, will you not hear from heaven and turn and heal their land?” Now this was a prayer offered to God. No doubt.

But it was a prayer offered to God that the people were supposed to learn. The people needed to absorb it into the public, covenantal mentality. At the end of the day, for people of God to sin and fall into disarray left them with only one hope: to return to the place where God meets with his people by his own design, the place God himself has designated, the place for remission of sin.

Solomon wanted the people to understand that, for it would come into huge use a bare half-millennium later when the people had gone into exile, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, then Daniel and Ezra and Nehemiah, in a steady succession from just before the exile to the beginning of the return, would recall God’s covenantal faithfulness, grounded in the institutions God himself had ordained. All of these were public prayers. Perhaps one of my favorite public prayers in all of Scripture is one that is offered by the Lord Jesus himself.

It’s found, of course, in John, chapter 11. In John, chapter 11, at the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus and the mourners and Mary and Martha finally get to the tomb. Jesus prays, 11:41: “ ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.’ ” Now that is astonishingly interesting for it is recognition that when you are praying in public there is, necessarily, a pedagogical function.

There are some people who pray in public exactly the way they pray in private. That is, they try to make it intimate and homey and individualistic, and so on, failing to recognize public prayer necessarily, rightly, has a pedagogical function. That means as pastors, as Christian leaders, when we pray in public, we should be thinking simultaneously, “How is this rightly addressing God? This is prayer, and how does this prayer rightly instruct the people of God to pray, to teach truths about God and his promises and his grace?”

Do you see? When Moses is praying in chapter 33, he’s not praying with any thought about the audience listening in and learning something from him. Solomon is instructing the people while he’s praying. It’s not less prayer for that. Jesus is instructing the people. It’s not less prayer for that. Private prayer, public prayer.

4. Prayer of corporate covenantal renewal and prayer for special requests

Again, I’m not sure the categories are the happiest ones, but they’re the best I can do. Come back to the last of Moses’ four prayers: Moses, as found in Exodus 34:1–10. I’m sure you’re familiar with the scene. Moses has asked to see God’s glory. He has been told he cannot see God’s face and live; nevertheless, it is as if God promises to let Moses see something of the aftermath of God’s glory. He hides Moses in a cleft of the rock, and he instructs Moses to chisel out two stone tablets.

He is to meet God again on Sinai. Then the Lord comes down in the cloud and proclaims his name as Moses is hidden in a cleft of the rock. Afterwards, at the end, Moses is allowed to peep out and witness something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of the Lord. But the heart of the revelation is not this trailing edge of glory. The heart of the revelation is word, where God proclaims his name. He proclaims who he is as he passes by.

And he says, chapter 34, verse 6: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Then Moses prays. He bows to the ground. He worships, and he cries, “Lord, if I have found favor in your eyes, then let the Lord go with us, although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin and take us as your inheritance.” Do you hear what Moses is praying? He begs for God’s presence among the people whether in blessing or in judgment.

You see that only when you set Moses’ prayer in the context of God’s self-disclosure. In God’s self-disclosure, the Almighty has presented himself on the one hand as the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. On the other hand, he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children to the third and fourth generation.

In that context, of God disclosing himself as righteous yet merciful, without unpacking exactly who is going to be forgiven and who is going to be punished; nevertheless, this is a God of grace and mercy and of righteousness and terror, of punishment and of forgiveness and cleansing. That is the kind of God he is. In that context, Moses says, “If I have found favor in your eyes, then let the Lord go with us, although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin and take us as your inheritance.”

Moses begs for God’s presence amongst the covenant people of God, whether in blessing or in judgment. Here is a prayer of corporate covenantal renewal. But it’s a prayer of corporate covenantal renewal that is unsentimentalized. We sometimes think of corporate covenantal renewal as if everyone is entirely on board and everyone is entirely happy. We’ve all repented now, and now we just ask for the blessing.

But even in the covenantal renewal intrinsic to the Lord’s Table.… Read 1 Corinthians 11, and those who approach this covenantal renewal inappropriately may find themselves sick or dead. In our intercessory prayers, on behalf of our people, for corporate covenantal renewal, what we want, no holds barred, no footnotes, no exceptions, no caveats, is that God will take us as his inheritance. If that means judgment, so be it.

If, instead, because God is the faithful God, full of mercy and grace and forgives sin to the nth generation, it brings about renewal and restoration and revival. “Yes. Thank you, Lord God. But we’re not asking for revival first. We’re asking for God first. God’s presence. God’s presence and his power, his very being, in righteousness, in mercy, in holiness, in generosity, in compassion and wrath and all that God is, amongst his people. Whatever it means, that’s what we want. We want God.”

Again, it would be wrong to think all of our praying must be of this sort: prayer of corporate covenantal renewal. There is plenty of space in Scripture for what might be called special requests: Moses asking the Lord for meat, receiving the quail; 1 Peter instructing us to cast all our cares on God because he cares for us. It is not wrong to pray about where the mortgage money is coming from, for solace and compassion for a grieving sister who has just lost her husband, for individual needs of children away at college somewhere, for a little more wisdom in how to handle a particularly obstreperous deacon, for …

Do you see? There is a place for all of those individual prayers. If those are the only things we’re praying for, our vision is too individualized. It is too small. It is not absorbed in the bigger, covenantal relationship between God and his people. But on the other hand, if all of our praying is at the level of the corporate and the massive and the structural, we forget we are exhorted to cast all our cares on our heavenly Father because he cares for us.

5. Unacceptable prayer and acceptable prayer

This final polarity offers not two equally acceptable and mutually complementary forms of prayer but an antithesis. That polarity is regularly cast up in Scripture: what prayers are unacceptable and why and what prayers are acceptable and why. Let me just list three.

A) Unacceptable versus acceptable

Luke 18:9–14. The Pharisee and the publican in the temple. Unacceptable prayers are prayers that sustain self-righteousness. Acceptable prayers are prayers characterized by contrition and brokenness. Let us be quite frank. It is very easy for some of us who have been reared in conservative, confessional homes to think, deep down in our hearts as we pray, “I thank you, Lord God, that I am not as other men are.” That’s not an acceptable prayer. Never has been; never will be.

B) Overlooking the absence of righteousness versus pursuing righteousness

We are told again and again, as in Proverbs 15, “The Lord detests the sacrifice of the wicked, but the prayer of the upright pleases him.” “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” It is not because this becomes a kind of meritorious step in God’s approval. That would utterly undermine Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the publican both going up to the temple to pray. The problem is a little different. It’s a little adjacent.

We are not to come to God thinking God is always happy to pour out blessings upon us, even while we preserve our idols, nurture our bitterness, feed our lusts, watch porn on TV, let our imaginations go off in secret resentments and then pray intercessory prayers for our people! We are to examine ourselves. How often do the prophets of the Old Testament inveigh against the entire sacrificial system of the Old Testament, not because it was formally wrong, not because the liturgy was out of step, but because these steps were taken in the context of nurtured sin, rebellion, idolatry, malice, injustice in the land.

Isn’t this also what the New Testament says, in generic terms? James 4:2–3: “You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” There is even a place for examining our own motives as we seek the face of God, is there not?

C) Overlooking Christ’s righteousness

How do we boldly access the presence of God? Do we not do so in Jesus’ name? Is that not one of the great themes of Hebrews? Because Christ has died once for all, we have boldness of access into the very presence of the living God. On a theological level, we all know that. I’m not saying anything new. I suspect, nevertheless, this is one of those theological areas where most of us have to keep working very hard to put it into practice.

I’ve given this illustration before. Forgive me if it is a repeat for you. I just can’t think of a better way of getting it across. You wake up some morning. It’s drizzly and wet and cold. You have a bit of a cold. You’re going to be studying at the church office that day, but you get up and can’t find two clean socks to make a pair. You’re late, and you’re supposed to be meeting somebody there to give them some instructions on what to do. You get out to the car, and it won’t start.

Now you know you’re really going to be late. You’re an associate minister and your senior actually questions your piety because you have this habit of coming in a wee bit late. Later in the day, you’re visiting in a hospital, and somebody asks some question about religion, makes some snarky remark. You snarl back with some smart-mouth response or you ignore it coldly. You’re just having a bad day.

Eventually you get home and there’s a nice little note from your spouse saying, “The lasagna’s in the fridge. Help yourself. I’m at a Christian meeting,” which doesn’t make you feel very pious. The kids are out of sorts. Eventually, then, you get down on your knees to pray at the end of the day, and you say, “Heavenly Father, this has been a rotten day. I know I’ve failed miserably. I’m pretty sorry. Forgive my sins. Your will be done. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

But some days later, you wake up. The birds are singing, and the air is fresh as it comes in the open window. You get up, and you smell a full English cooked breakfast. You wonder if you’ve forgotten an anniversary or something. Your socks are clean. You go out early. You’ve had a wonderful quiet time with the Lord. The car starts up. You arrive early, and you speak with wisdom in the pastoral counsel. Later on, you’re doing hospital visitation, and now there is a certain anointing on your form of witness.

Even the poor bloke who dared to ask a question the other day was there and actually makes another remark. This time you answer with insight and humility, and the chap actually says he might come to church on Sunday. You get home, and there’s a wonderful dinner. The kids are right little dears. That night you get down to pray, and it sounds like this. “Eternal and merciful God, in the richness of your beneficence toward us, I bow before you and exalt the name of our great King and Redeemer, the blessed Lord Jesus.”

And it goes on from there, maybe for half an hour or so as you pray for the obstreperous deacon, everybody in your congregation you can think about, missionaries and their second cousin twice removed … everybody you can think of. You go through the attributes of God and the names of Jesus. Finally, you snuggle down into bed, justified. Both prayers have been utterly and totally unacceptable before God because you have dared to think you have access to the presence of the Almighty on the basis of the quality of the day you had, instead of on the basis of Christ’s righteousness.

Listen, unacceptable praying sustains self-righteousness, it ignores the lack of righteousness in our own lives, and it overlooks Christ’s righteousness. These have been very theological addresses. In the little book I wrote some years ago on praying with Paul, I did try to preserve one chapter for some practical advice. I give you just one of those points. I wish I had always observed it myself. I have not.

I’ll just give you one.… Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. You can get all of this theological perspective on prayer, but at the end of the day, much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We need not only to think these things through, we then need to plan to pray, for his grace and power are such none can every ask too much. Let us pray.

We hear afresh, Lord God, the damning indictment of the half brother of our beloved Savior, James. “You have not because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because of your corrupt motives.” Lord God, forgive our sins and teach us to pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.