The text for our message this morning comes from the 4th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi, the 4th chapter, the 4th through the 7th verses. Hear the word of the Lord. Rejoice in the Lord always. "Again I say, rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance, the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. And the piece of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Let us pray.
Come Holy Spirit, heavenly dove, with all your quickening powers. Come shed abroad a Savior’s love and that will quicken ours. Amen.
People are funny. They are also profound. A mark of genius on the part of us persons may be in how we take that which is serious and treat it humorously. That may also be a survival technique. To laugh at that which drives us mad if we take it too seriously. Let me illustrate. Someone has said that the nuclear freeze issue centers in the fact that we may all be cremated equal. And a bumper sticker reminds us that if we see one nuclear war, we will have seen them all. Another serious issue that has been given a humorous touch is that of corporate scheduled prayer in public schools. Despite the defeat of the school prayer proposal in Congress recently, I’m told that some classrooms are sprouting this sign - In case of nuclear attack, the federal ruling against prayer in this building will be temporarily suspended. Now I’m not going to preach on the nuclear freeze issue, though I’m for it. Nor am I preaching on prayer in public schools, though I believe that issue has been confused and blown far out of proportion. I am preaching on prayer. And prayer is not a matter of law, it is a concern of the heart. A personal response to God which at times becomes corporate. At times prayer is even political. And when it is political, it’s always partisan, because it’s always on God’s side. We’re talking about the Acts of Prayer. A C T S. Adoration. Confession. Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Let’s begin with Confession.
I. Confession
Confession is necessary because sin separates us from God. Isaiah made it clear, but your sins have made a separation between you and God and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear. I contended last Sunday that the problem, the failure of what we call main line churches, and we Methodist are among them, our failure during the past three decades has been the failure to deal with the fact of sin in our personal and in our corporate life. During the past 30 or 40 years, we reduced the gospel to self help remedies, aids to positive thinking, and the language of psychology became the language of the church and the vocabulary of the preacher, rather than the language of scripture. We concentrated on social ills, but we failed to confront the fact that these ills are rooted in hardened hearts, deceitful minds, self-centered, pride-dominated persons who have become so perverted in their self understanding that they sense absolutely no need of God.
Our director of program, Marvin Budd, is doing a study research project for our annual conference on the future of Christian education. He asked me the other day what I felt was the crucial need of the church, especially as it related to the Sunday School and Christian education. I listed three priority needs. The first of which is crucial. The church today, especially we Methodists, need to recover our book, the Bible. We need to root ourselves in scripture. Now I mention that here because it is so essential for our praying, especially the confessional aspect of our praying. In scripture we will see clearly that God’s demand for righteousness and holiness go far beyond our shallow understanding of personal piety. And our equating the Christian life with being good, clean, moral American citizens.
Last Sunday, I focused confession primarily at the personal level, and this is where must begin. We can do this in an effective way and stay up to date in our confession by a daily examination of consciousness. I find that the best time for this is late in the evening, just before we go to sleep. And this is the way it might work. We replay the day, moving through it hour by hour, job to job, relationship to relationship. Did I do my best in that job? Was I understanding and kind in that relationship? Did I speak the truth in love? Was I condemning, judgmental? Did I fail to speak when I should have? Did I allow someone to be hurt by idle gossip without raising a question? Did I write the needed letter or make the helpful telephone call or visit? Was I lustful, covetous, jealous, callous? Did I fail to witness for Christ in any given opportunity? Not only personal confession, we need to stay aware that we are involved in a corporate way?
Isaiah provides the model – “Woe is me,” he said, “for I’m undone. I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. For mine eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts.” So we need to confess not only our personal, but our corporate sins. That of the church, that of our community, that of our nation. As participants in these bodies, we bear some responsibility in their actions or in their failures to act.
My heart was gauged to pain the other day, when I was told that doctors in a clinic in Chicago are so overworked that they can’t take time between abortions to fill out the forms for payment, so they make hash marks on the bloodstained smocks, callously totaling them up at the end of the day. Do you recoil in horror at that as I do? Are you relieved that you’ve played no part in such a desecration of God’s creation? But wait, wait. “Woe is me for I am undone. I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” We are involved - inescapably so. And we need to confess and be a deeply repentant people whose hearts are contrite over the practices of our culture that break the heart of God.
Let me suggest a specific examination of consciousness, rooted in scripture, that will provide a way for us to be clear and specific in our confession as it relates to ministry and mission. Recall Jesus’ parable of the last judgment and ask ourselves if we did it unto the least of these. I recommend, not that you do this daily, but that you do it at least once a week, maybe on Saturday night or Sunday morning as you prepare for corporate worship. Rehearse Jesus’ words. “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. In prison and you came to me.” Now we need to make a literal response to these calls of Jesus. The demand is clear - to feed the hungry, to give to the thirsty drink, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick, to minister to prisoners. We also need to examine ourselves in a more encompassing way. Cries come to us from persons who are hungry and thirsty for spiritual food and moral support. There are persons who are well-fed and sheltered, but need to be clothed in friendship. There are persons locked in prisons of destructive habits - demeaning jobs, relationships that are destructive and painful - who need our love and support.
Through confession we experience cleansing, and can thus enter into communion with God. The loving God to whom we pray wants fellowship with us. Because we know God is good and righteousness, our sin prevents us from that intimate communion. So the barrier’s on our side, not God’s, and the barrier is removed by confession. We come to God as we are, honestly naming ourselves before him, and receive the forgiveness which he offers freely, which forgiveness makes us clean, and enables our communion to be more vibrant and alive.
II. Thanksgiving
Adoration, Confession, and now the third Act of Prayer - Thanksgiving. Now I don’t believe those who offer singular evidence by which we can discern a Christian. But there is an index by which one may test his or her own experience. Confronted by pain and annoyance, do you say - why does this happen to me - or encompassed by God’s bounties, do you say - who am I to deserve such blessings. The first reaction is that of self-pity and self-righteousness. The second is a response of Christian humility.
There is a distinctive radiance about Christians who cultivate the attitude of gratitude. Whose prayers are punctuated with thanksgiving. There’s a story out of the life of Alexander White, the great preacher of Edinburgh in the last century, a fellow who was famous for his very charming and eloquent pulpit prayers. He always found something to begin his prayer with for which he was deeply grateful to God, and he would rise to the heights of eloquence in thanking God. Even in bad times. One stormy morning, a member of the congregation thought to himself , “The preacher will certainly have nothing to thank God for on this wretched morning.” But Dr. White began his prayer, “We thank thee, oh God, that the weather is not always like it is this morning.”
Now like all acts of prayer, thanksgiving must be deliberately practiced. We could do this in the same way that we daily examine our consciousness for confession. At the close of the day, we relive in our minds all that has happened, locating those things in our experience for which we may be grateful. Jeri and I drove to Paris Landing last week for a retreat. Somewhere along the way, Jeri saw a billboard which had a marvelous message. I wish I knew who sponsored it. It admonished, “If you can’t sleep, instead of counting the sheep, trying talking to the shepherd.” Good advice. How much praying, and how much spiritual power would be generated if we used our wakeful hours during the night for prayer? When you awake in the night, instead of fuming and fretting, concentrate on God’s bounties, and you may find yourself asking Christian humility - who am I that I should be so blessed? Now I’m not altogether naïve, and I know that we go through some days when everything seems a curse rather than a blessing. Days when we feel that we would have been better off not to get out of bed. Now that fact makes thanksgiving even more important. If we’re earnest in our praying, we will not be daunted by those dreadful days when everything goes wrong. For we will have cultivated our perception to see clearly and from a longer view rather than the perspective of the moment, and we will have stored up memories of all that for which we can be joyfully grateful, and our thanksgiving to God will transform us, and give us perspective and power to get through that which otherwise would be unbearable.
III. Supplication
Now the final act. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving - and Supplication. Now supplication is not a common, everyday word. You haven’t used that in speech lately. “Have no anxiety about anything,” Paul said to the Philippians, “but in everything. By prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God.”
Supplication is not a common word, but it’s an intense word, a powerful word, and it combines what we may refer to as petition and intercession in our praying. It is a kind of brooding, a kind of longing act of remembrance and hope. Sometimes this brooding and longing cannot find expression in word, that may by when we’re doing our most effective supplication. In times like that, the spirit helps us in our weakness, as Paul said, for we don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with size too deep for words, and he who searches the hearts of men knows what is in the mind of the spirit, because the spirit intercedes for the saints, according to the will of God.
The good news of the Bible is that God has established this universe in such a way that we humans are given the responsibility and the opportunity of sharing God’s word. In God’s economy prayer is the powerful medium of exchange. We don’t’ have to understand it to practice it. We simply have to accept the promises of God, and believe that in his eternal scheme of things, certain conditions are to be met by us, in order that he might act redemptively in our personal lives and in the life of the world. And if we keep vigilant in searching the scripture, stay sensitive to the presence of God through our praise and adoration in worship, then we can be confident that our petitions and intercessions will be responded to. If we have confessed, and if we have accepted forgiveness, if we have earnestly turned from our wicked ways and sought his face, if we abide in him, we can come boldly to the throne of grace presenting our personal longings and dreams, as well as our petitions and intercessions for others and for the world. And I want to remind you that this one of our neglected aspects of supplication - that is, our intercession for the world, for the poor and oppressed of the world, for the plight of persons in spiritual darkness, and for institutions and governmental systems that generate and propagate injustice, for the barriers that separate human family and ravage relationships. Somehow as Christian, we must cultivate a compassion that is so deep and so informed and empowered by the spirit of Christ that we will not only know about the pain of others, but we will actually enter in that pain. Feel it, and share it, as far as possible. We’re not simply called to know about the sufferings of others, or to assess the painful conditions in which they live - we are to feel the other’s feelings, and to not only feel but to act when possible on behalf of others. That’s the meaning of supplication.
I had one of my most meaningful experiences since coming to Christ Church last week. A young man called and asked to see me, and I asked his permission to share this story. It’s a great witness to the meaning of supplication. Tim Forbess is his name, and he’s the president of the Wesley Foundation at Memphis State. After breakfast and their worship service there at Memphis State on Sunday morning, Tim rushes over here in order to attend our 10:45 service. He works part-time at a funeral home. Recently the body of an 18 year old boy was brought to that home, the victim of a tractor bush hogging accident. The young victim’s aunt shared her deep pain and anguish with Tim, who is one of the most mature and sensitive young fellows I know. The greatest tragedy the aunt said to Tim was that this young man wasn’t a Christian. He never accepted Christ, knew nothing of the fellowship of the Christian church, and Tim couldn’t get over that.
Later when the family had gone, Tim went into the room where the 18 year old boy lay in death. He was overwhelmed with grief, and his heart was wrenched by the words of the boy’s aunt that he had died without knowing Christ. In sorrow of spirit that is rare, Tim began to search himself. Who failed, that a young person such as this should die without Christ? The moving and challenging and judging thing came as Tim told me the story, then asked, almost pleading, “Dr. Dunham, what can we do that that sort of thing will not happen again?” Now that’s supplication. When we feel so keenly, even though the feeling may be helplessness, when we care so deeply, that we sorrow for, that we brood with, that we anguish over the condition of others and our world. That’s supplication. And people and the world are perishing for the want of it.
Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. The Acts of Prayer. Prayer is something we do, but it’s also something we are. When the act of prayer - adoration and confession and thanksgiving and supplication - are integrated into our lives, they shape who we are and what we do. Tim finished his story by telling me that, after days of brooding and even sleepless nights over that young man who had died without Christ, one morning after a time of devotion and prayer, he recommitted himself to Christ - yielded himself to be used in whatever way the Lord wishes him to be used in ministry to others. And it wouldn’t surprise me if in a year or two Tim doesn’t enroll in a theological seminary to become an ordained minister. That’s the in of prayer - our commitment to be God’s answer to our praying and the praying of others. We have not really prayed until we make that commitment - to be the answer to our praying and the prayers of others. Let us pray.