A Rhythm of Prayer in a Culture of Self-Sufficiency

[00:00:00] Hello, church Hi. Before I start Ed is here, and he gets married in a month. So, how about I pray for… How about we pray for him? Father, thank you for Ed, and thank you for, uh, his fiancée, Jeanette. And we pray that you would pray that you would be blessing them as they prepare this next month before them, before their wedding.

[00:00:21] Um, but Lord, you would also be blessing their marriage. Father, I pray that you would lead them to love each other well, to to picture you as they do that, as they love each other well and go out into the world as a married couple. And I also pray that they would keep you central, that you would be their rock and that their love for you would, uh, would strengthen their marriage.

[00:00:49] And so we pray for, for Ed over the next month, but then onward into a life of being wed, uh, that you would bless them. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen. This is the– Actually, let me lift this. This is the last sermon from Rhythms of the Day. I’ve really enjoyed this series. I hope it’s been a, a blessing for you guys.

[00:01:11] And prayer week also starts tonight, so there’ll be a QR code at the end that you can sign up and all that kind of stuff that I’ve been talking about for a while. Something I’ll be posting every day starting tomorrow will be a reading from Daniel, because we’re going into Daniel next. A reading from Daniel, like a chapter per day, and then like a two to minute, two to three-minute thought on it, and then a prayer off the back of it.

[00:01:38] And the reason I’m doing, I’m doing that through the f- for six days, six chapters of Daniel, is because next week we start our new series in Daniel. Uh, I think it will help us during prayer week, but I think also it will help us to know the story a little bit before we come to it next week as well.

[00:01:53] So from next week, we’ll have nine weeks looking at the Old Testament book, uh, that follows God’s faithfulness to his people. There’s a, that breakdown on the slides. The book is all about God’s continued goodness amidst the darkness of Babylon and Daniel’s faithfulness when everything looks rough.

[00:02:14] And it also points to and speaks of and brings hope of an everlasting kingdom which will not fade away. So in a nutshell, the series aims to help us to live faithfully as children of the day, even when all looks like night. That’s next week. This week, we’ll, uh, we’ll finish off this series. I’m gonna pray.

[00:02:37] Lord, you are, you are good, and you are great, and we, we thank you that we can come to you together this morning. I pray that you would speak through me and, and use me, but also speak through all of us, and use all of us as we seek to build your kingdom and build your church this morning. And I pray this in Jesus’ name.

[00:03:01] Amen. The Christmas movie, Is it too early to talk about Christmas movies? No. Well, I’m going to. The Christmas movie Last Christmas is a corny, very corny Christmas… It’s, like, 42% on Rotten Tomatoes or something. It’s really bad. But, but- … you know, Christmas is kind of for bad Christmas movies. At a glance of the Last Christmas or Last Christmas, its main theme is a love story.

[00:03:26] A downcast lady who’s kinda turned in on herself, she can’t lift her head from her problems, she finds herself regularly running into this very handsome, gentle man, and he has it all together. And it’s a classic Christmas love story, but there’s a subplot, a refrain throughout the movie, to look up It’s, it and it’s, it’s the guy telling the main the main woman to raise her eyes essentially from being so inward, from her phone and from her problems, to raise her eyes from herself and to see the things that are always there on the buildings or in the night sky, and catch the beauty of what is often missed, that we rarely take time to see.

[00:04:08] And as, as the movie progresses, you see the main woman slowly turn from herself, and you end up thinking afterwards, or I do, ’cause I overanalyze movies after I’ve watched them for like seven weeks afterwards, that maybe the subplot is actually the main plot

[00:04:25] We live in a culture of self-sufficiency. And what I mean by self-sufficiency is the belief that it is up to me. It is up to me to provide what I need to live and to flourish. Now, that kind of sounds like individualism. We talked about individualism a few weeks ago. Individualism teaches us that we flourish independently from others.

[00:04:48] They– I feel like they kind of run on parallel lines. Individualism teaches us that we flourish independently. Self-sufficiency tells us that we, we provide what we need in order to flourish. So individualism places us away from others. Self-sufficiency places us within ourselves. Self-sufficiency turns us inward Our culture hasn’t invented self-sufficiency.

[00:05:13] It’s, y- you actually see it in the Garden of Eden. Like, at the fall, the beginning, the serpent’s lie to Eve is, “You will be like God. You will know good and evil.” And Eve finds that lie desirable, to not have to depend on someone else, to be able to have the wisdom and knowledge to live self-sufficiency, self-sufficiently.

[00:05:39] The lie of the servant, serpent, and the act of the first sin was a turning away from God and a turning in on oneself. So our culture hasn’t invented it. But I would argue that the 21st century Western world has become very good at making self-sufficiency feel possible. We have everything at our fingertips.

[00:06:04] We have knowledge and wisdom at arm’s reach. We have technology that makes us able. We have internet that makes us wise. We have iPhones to make us everywhere at once. That’s omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, if you want theological terms for, for it, all wrapped up in our current age.

[00:06:23] That’s the culture we live in. We’re told to believe that we have the means of providing everything we need to thrive. We just need to turn inward

[00:06:32] There are many problems to this. Tim Keller says that self-sufficiency is a lie. That’s w- a main problem. But some felt problems that we have from this, this culture is, um, two things I just wanna highlight: pride and anxiety When things go well, self-sufficiency leads to pride. In, um, in Daniel four, which we’ll look at in a couple of weeks, Nebuchadnezzar is the king of Babylon, and he’s standing on the rooftop of his palace, and he’s looking out over the mighty kingdom of Babylon, and he says, “Look what I’ve built by my mighty power for the glory of my majesty.”

[00:07:11] The success of his self-sufficiency brings him to pride. That’s a really extreme example. We often experience smaller, more mundane examples. “Look what I’ve built. Look what I’ve achieved. I did this, and God forbid someone help me.” That’s when things go well. But when things go badly with self-sufficiency or times ahead are uncertain, because it’s up to me, I have to keep it together, I have to provide, we are led toward anxiety.

[00:07:42] Because what if I’m not enough? And what if I can’t do it? Or what if all the power goes out like last night? Do I have candles in the house? Uh, we did.

[00:07:52] I, I did. Self-sufficiency turns us inward, and we live in a culture of self-sufficiency. How is this forming us? Because it is forming us. It’s why, uh, we might be some of the first people to offer help, but we find it very hard to ask for or even accept help for ourselves. It’s why we can give good advice, but we still lie awake at night trying to figure out the next week of our own lives.

[00:08:17] It’s why we can get so caught up in our everyday moments and forget to look at the beauty that sits in the mundane. But today, we’re thinking about prayer. Prayer in a culture of self-sufficiency. So question to ask is, in a culture of self-sufficiency, how can a rhythm of prayer form us in light of the Kingdom of God?

[00:08:39] Three things. I mean, lots of things. I’m narrowing it down to three things. Prayer as trust, prayer as dependence, and prayer as rhythm Just a heads up, the first one is a lot longer than the last two. So if I get to the end of the first one, you go, “Oh, my good- goodness, he’s got another two points.” It’s okay.

[00:08:56] Prayer is trust. There’s a story in Exodus 16. God’s people have been slave- s- saved from slavery in Egypt. They’ve been brought out of Egypt. They’ve spent years and years there. They’ve kind of grown up with Egyptian surroundings, and Egyptian gods, and the Egyptian way of doing life. And then when God sets them free, He’s taken them through the wilderness into the promised land, and He’s teaching them how to live free, how they can live as free people now.

[00:09:24] So in Exodus 16, God’s people are walking through the desert. They’re on their way to Mount Sinai, and they begin to grumble about the lack of food, because they’re in the desert, and they want to eat, and they want to go back to Egypt, where there’s food. They want to go back to their old way of life, but God is teaching them a new way of life, how to live free.

[00:09:47] So what He does is God provides for them. He gives them manna, bread from heaven, that appears on the ground every morning, and He explains that He will provide it every day, except for the Sabbath day, but every day. He tells them, “Because I will provide it every day, don’t keep any. Don’t store it up.” For God’s people to learn how to live free, they had to learn how to trust.

[00:10:17] They had to learn how to trust God

[00:10:20] But what do they do in the story? They end up storing it up, and the food goes moldy and gross. And they find it hard to trust, and they rely on themselves. God is teaching them to release their self-sufficiency, to trust that God will provide every single day. But why do they find it so hard? Maybe because the gods they were surrounded by in Egypt had bad characters.

[00:10:50] Maybe because they were used to storing up for themselves in Egypt, or maybe because they have a lack of trust in God’s character, Yahweh’s character Tyler Staton in his book Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools says, “Before we can have faith that God will answer a given request in prayer, we simply have to learn to trust the character of the God we’re talking to.

[00:11:16] We simply have to learn to trust the character of the God we’re talking to.” And I believe that prayer helps us to do that. Let’s go to Luke 11

[00:11:25] In Luke 11, Jesus’s disciples who being Jewish people, they would have had a very natural rhythm of prayer drilled into them. And they ask Jesus to teach them not teach us how to teach, not teach us how to cast out demons, not teach us how to evangelize, but teach us how to pray. They say, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

[00:11:46] So Jesus teaches them, and the way that He teaches them is He prays with them. He shows them how to pray. Which is why the… A- and He prays what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, which is why the Lord’s Prayer becomes a model prayer for us because it’s literally asking the q- the request, “How can we pray?

[00:12:05] Teach us to pray.”

[00:12:06] We’re not gonna go through the whole thing. What- but what I love about the Lord’s Prayer is that like Tyler Staton said, it begins with simply learning to trust the character of the God we’re talking to. The character of the God we t- talking to. The character of God is vast. Very vast. But the model prayer, the prayer that helps us to learn to pray, begins with two things about God: His goodness and His greatness

[00:12:32] It starts like this. Luke 11 verse 2. Jesus said to them, ” When you pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be your name.'” It starts with Father. That is very intimate language. That, uh, and it’s, and it is intended with all the beauty and goodness of the Heavenly Father without any of the corruptible brokenness that we sometimes experience of fatherhood.

[00:12:58] It is intimate, and it’s teaching us to start our prayers with an acknowledgement of God’s goodness, God’s goodness as Father, who has adopted us into His family. It’s giving Jesus his… Jesus is giving His disciples permission to come to His own Father as their own Father. And then it says, “So Father, hallowed be your name.”

[00:13:21] And hallowed be your name is a request. It is a request that God’s name will be hallowed, that God’s name will be holy

[00:13:28] God’s holiness is is seen and talked about in scripture in the fact that he is unlike anything or anyone or any kingdom, any human kingdom. He’s unlike it. Ho- holy literally means set apart. He is set apart from any other gods, any other worldly kingdom. He’s set apart existing on an entirely different plane to everything else.

[00:13:50] He is holy. He is the creative force behind the whole universe. He’s mighty and glorious and everlasting. He deserves praise and glory. He’s great just in and of himself. That’s what holiness is. So through God’s holiness, we see his greatness. So the request, holy be your name, is a request that God will be greater than everything else in our lives in that moment of prayer.

[00:14:18] Holy be your name now. Be set apart from everything else now. Be greater than, than anything else in my life in this moment of prayer, that his greatness and majesty will prevail. So as we pray, holy be your name, we’re requesting and also voicing that God’s greatness will be true

[00:14:39] Jesus, teach us how to pray,” the disciples said, and Jesus begins with holding in tandem God’s goodness and God’s greatness

[00:14:49] Prayer, in the way Jesus taught it, deepens our trust. Because if we start our prayers with, “Father, hallowed be your name,” then we’re requesting and reminding ourselves that God is both good and great

[00:15:04] If we start our prayers the way Jesus teaches us, prayer will form us deeper in trust Why did why did the people in the wilderness keep some manna? Why did they lean into self-sufficiency? Like they think they needed to provide Well, maybe because it’s really hard to hold in tandem God’s goodness and greatness

[00:15:25] Maybe they trusted that God was g-Go-God was great enough to provide every day. He was great enough to g-to give manna from heaven every single day, but they didn’t trust that he’s good enough to do so or maybe they trust that God is good to give them food and he wants them to be filled, but maybe God doesn’t quite have the greatness to do so they store it up.

[00:15:47] Before we can have faith that God will answer any given request in prayer, we simply have to learn to trust the character of the God we’re talking to. And some of the aspects of the character of God in its simplest form is holding in tandem God’s goodness and greatness, God as Father and God as holy.

[00:16:05] Father, holy be your name

[00:16:08] Because maybe in our prayers, we, we might trust that God is good

[00:16:12] might trust that as Father, he will listen to my every word, and that he cares. But he just doesn’t have it in him to bring his kingdom into that area of lo- my life that I hate, or he just doesn’t have it in him to soften the heart of my loved ones so that they come to salvation in Christ, or he just, he just can’t quite bring the reconciliation to a relationship that seems too far gone Or maybe vice versa.

[00:16:38] We trust God’s greatness that he can do everything. He created the world. He’s set apart, but we find it really hard to trust his goodness. Why would he listen to me? Why would he step into my insignificant mess? Why would he be a good father to someone who’s run from him in the past? Jesus says, “Pray like this, ‘Father, holy be your name.'”

[00:17:00] Then we’re requesting and reminding ourselves that God is both good and great, and it needs to be both

[00:17:06] And that’s the foundation of prayer. That’s where the formation of prayer begins. Can I go one step deeper? Are you tracking? All right As we start our prayers like this and we deepen in our trust in God through prayer, holding in tandem His goodness and, and greatness, then this changes how we might respond to the answers that we receive of our prayers Maybe you’ve prayed for some big things.

[00:17:36] Maybe you prayed for some little things And maybe you wonder when it will happen or why it’s not happening. Why finances are still low or why sickness still prevails, why loved ones aren’t saved, why He won’t give me that encounter, why my life can’t just be easy Trust in God’s character as good and great allows us to say, “I don’t understand what God is doing right now, but I trust that he’s good.”

[00:18:06] Or, I don’t like what is happening right now, but I trust that he’s good and great.” And I will keep praying to my Holy Father. And it, it’s this kind of prayer and this kind of perspective that deepens trust, and it leads to prayers like Jesus’ in the Garden of Gethsemane just before he dies. He says, “Lord, Father, take this cup from me.

[00:18:32] Don’t let me suffer. Don’t let me experience what I’m about to experience. Don’t let me, don’t let me experience this pain and humiliation and suffering of the cross. I don’t like what is happening right now.”

[00:18:44] But I trust that God is good and great. So he finishes his prayer with, “Yet not my will, but yours be done.” And that prayer is almost the complete opposite of storing up manna in the wilderness

[00:18:59] He’s not turning in on himself, trying to provide for himself, and he’s not trusting one aspect of God above the other, goodness above greatness. He’s trusting that God is both good and great, and no matter the circumstance of his prayers and no matter the answer

[00:19:16] He trusts. And maybe that’s why our prayers should start with, “Father, holy be your name”

[00:19:23] So when we pray this week, as we go into prayer week, as we continue to ask God for things as a church, for a, a kids worker and staffing, and we continue to pray for healing for people, and we continue to pray for the current global war and, and suffering to cease and ask the lost to be found and pray the requests of the church as we put them up on the prayer room, pray like this: Father, holy be your name Prayer is trust.

[00:19:50] It deepens our trust

[00:19:52] Secondly, prayer is dependence. I find it interesting that in, in the Lord’s Prayer, in Luke 11, it goes from “Father, holy be your name,” immediately to a huge prayer, “Your kingdom come,” and then immediately to a really small prayer, “Give us each day our daily bread.” And that’s interesting because as through prayer, our trust in God deepens.

[00:20:19] It ac- it leads us to actually pray and enjoy praying. And, and we can pray big prayers, and we can pray little prayers, and whilst they may not be answered in, in accordance with the exact things that we want, like we don’t get yeses all the time, they will be in complete accordance with God’s goodness and love for us and His greatness to work.

[00:20:40] So we can pray kingdom come prayers, and we can pray daily bread prayers. Kingdom come prayers we c- we can and should ask the good and great God for the kingdom of heaven to break in, to bring restoration to all that’s broken and lost, to bring light to darkness and beauty to the ugly reality of today’s world, and we should pray th- this because this is why Jesus came.

[00:21:06] Kingdom come prayers, your kingdom come, is the prayer of undoing the Fall. It is a huge prayer. But because of God’s greatness, we can be bold to pray that And then there’s daily bread prayers. In, in God’s goodness, we can also be audacious to ask the little things. Give us this day our daily bread. And we don’t have to decide whether our need is im- important enough to God Give us this day our daily bread is, is daily submission to His goodness, and it is right that we pray them regularly.

[00:21:43] Because even the act of praying these big prayers and small prayers form us. The, the big prayers and small prayers, kingdom come and daily bread prayers are daily reminders that we are not in charge, we are not in control, we are not self-sufficient. And although we live in a culture of self-sufficiency, we do not have the means within ourselves to bring His kingdom by ourselves, no matter our technology, our internet, our iPhones.

[00:22:11] And although we live in a culture of self-sufficiency, even our daily bread is a gift from God So what I love about prayer is that we have a God who is trustworthy and approachable, and we can and should bring him prayers of all kinds. We can come as we are because we don’t have to decide whether our need is important enough to God.

[00:22:33] So this week in prayer week, come as you are Pray the big prayers if that’s where you’re at. Pray for God to break into the mountains and do His work, to bring forgiveness and reconciliation to the people who don’t know Him, and strengthened faith and courageous kingdom living for those who do know Him.

[00:22:51] Pray the big prayers for the politicians and the world leaders, for the end to injustice and peace instead of war. Pray the big prayers. But also pray the little ones Pray for your child who had a nightmare Pray for your fear as you head to the dentist. Pray for your food on the table and drink in your water bottle and the air that you breathe Ask for wisdom for what book to read next or what direction to take.

[00:23:15] And pray for a car parking spot, because why not? We don’t need to decide whether our need is important enough for God

[00:23:25] Yes, he is holy and set apart, but he’s also our father We can come as we are, and as we do, we deepen our dependence on him in the big things and the small things. And all of it turns what we think is the main plot of our life away from ourselves. Just like the subplot of a daggy Christmas movie.

[00:23:48] Asking the main character to raise her eyes from being so inward, from her phone and her problems, to see the things that are always there on the buildings or in the night sky, and catch the beauty of what is often missed. Prayer teaches us to look up and find the beauty of what is always there but often missed.

[00:24:05] Prayer turns us outward from ourselves, from our self-sufficiency. And as we do, we might begin to realize that maybe the subplot of prayer is actually the main point

[00:24:18] I’m not done. I got one more. One more point. Prayer is rhythm For such a long time prayer had rhythm. The- God’s people would pray at least three times a day, morning, noon, and night. Then there’ll be specific sacrifice prayers, tassels on garments to remind people of the covenant and of prayer, and it was, it was a rhythm.

[00:24:40] It was a rhythm of life. We generally have different rhythms now. We might pray before dinner say grace. We might pray before we sleep. We might pray first thing when we wake up in the morning. Whatever it is I think that rhythm is really important to prayer. There are personal rhythms of prayer.

[00:24:59] I’ve mentioned it before, but the Lectio 365 app, it offers approachable pre-written prayers three times a day that lead us into prayer. So if you don’t know where to start, that is a really good place to start. What other rhythms of prayer can you have in your life? Where might, uh, where might prayerful music fit, or prayer walks, or the first few minutes of a commute, headphones in, but no music playing?

[00:25:26] I heard, I heard a story of someone praying for the same three people whenever she took a shower. They were her shower people. Little bit weird. Why not? What rhythm of prayer can you have? It might also just look like being a bit more intentional with kind of a flaky rhythm that we have. But then there’s, there’s bigger rhythms, communal rhythms.

[00:25:46] Uh, Sunday gra- gatherings are of course like a very obvious place. We provide a space to come. We provide prayer that people can pray along with, uh, music, prayer through music, praying with one another afterwards. There’s, uh, there’s prayer within families, prayer within extended families, at celebrations, at parties.

[00:26:04] The, um, the, the book, Every Moment Holy, the, those liturgical books, they’re wonderful. They’re so good and help, help us to pray as well in lots of different moments of life. And then we have gospel communities and DNAs where prayer for one another takes place on the regular. And then we have prayer week.

[00:26:24] One time a year, a week dedicated to pray Be really intentional as a church, a time where we can actually put things to the side in order to just pray. And in doing this we really hope that we will see prayers answered

[00:26:40] But we also hope that as a church, we will deepen in our trust in God, and that we’ll deepen in our dependence on God just through prayer, praying the big things and the small things, and coming as we are. Because if, if we take Jesus’ invitation seriously to pray like he says, then what might happen? What, what might happen in you?

[00:27:05] What might happen in our community? What might happen in the Blue Mountains? At, at the very least, our trust will deepen, our dependence on God will deepen, and we will be unified or more unified, at the very least. At the most, anything could happen

[00:27:26] salvation, restoration, healing, provision, peace. And all of that is God’s kingdom breaking in. All of that is forming us away from self-sufficiency. Our culture says, “You have everything you need. Just look inward. Turn inward.” But a rhythm of prayer forms us in light of the kingdom of God by leading us to look up, to look to the Father, look to the Holy One, look to the one who provides, to the one who saves, the one who is good and great.

[00:28:01] Prayer deepens trust, and prayer deepens dependence, and prayer is the rhythm by which we learn to depend on the God we trust Prayer teaches us to look up and find the beauty of what is always there but commonly missed. Prayer turns us outward from ourselves, from our self-sufficiency, and as we do, we might begin to realise that maybe the subplot of prayer is actually the main plot