Fascinating.
Stuck on the back of Person Hall, at my alma mater, UNC is a statue of an archbishop, one Stephen Langton, late of Canterbury. The statue was rescued from some rubble somewhere between Big Ben and the Parliament building. You will notice the good bishop appears a bit tired, and he is holding a scroll. There is a reason. He’s the chap who is responsible for the division of the Bible into chapters and verses.
When once we have grasped the truth that ‘God still speaks through what he has spoken’, we shall be well protected against two opposite errors. The first is the belief that, though it was heard in ancient times, God’s voice is silent today. The second is the claim that God is indeed speaking today, but that his Word has little or nothing to do with Scripture. The first leads to Christian antiquarianism, the second to Christian existentialism. Safety and truth are found in the related convictions that God has spoken, that God speaks, and that his two messages are closely connected to one another, because it is through what he spoke that he speaks. He makes his Word living, contemporary and relevant, until we find ourselves back on the Emmaus Road with Christ himself expounding the Scriptures to us, and with our hearts on fire. Another way of putting the same truth is to say that we must keep the Word of God and the Spirit of God together. For apart from the Spirit the Word is dead, while apart from the Word the Spirit is alien.
–Dr. John R.W. Stott, I Believe in Preaching
The biblical understanding of God’s Word is not just that he speaks it, but that he acts through it. His words are not merely speech; they are deeds as well. This is clear of creation, which was effected by God’s words of command. ‘God said … and it was so’; ‘He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth’ (Gn. 1:6-7; Ps. 33:9). The same is true of salvation, which indeed is a new creation. For the same God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ has shone in our hearts, revealing Christ to us (2 Cor. 4:6). His Word was creative; it brought to us both light and life.
–Dr. John R.W. Stott, The Authority and Power of the Bible
Sermon delivered on Sunday, October 17, 2010 at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Lewis Center, OH. If you would like to hear the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Good morning, St. Andrew’s! In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells us to persist in prayer so that we do not lose heart. This morning I want to look at how our persistence in prayer is a manifestation of our faith and whether God is worth the effort in doing so in the first place.
How many of you have ever lost heart or hope? By that I mean how many of you have ever gotten so discouraged that you have either wanted to give up or have actually given up on a particular course of action? It is easy to do, isn’t it? Or how many of you have ever prayed for something or someone, only to have your prayers go apparently unanswered and so have become discouraged and stopped praying? It happened to my daughter. When her grandpa Maney got sick she prayed that God would heal him and then grandpa died. The blow was so traumatic for her that she lost all her faith. Not only did she stop praying after that, she stopped believing in God.
And I suspect my daughter’s experience isn’t all that uncommon. This past week, for example, in an apparent answer to many prayers, the 33 miners were finally rescued after a 69 day ordeal of being buried alive in a collapsed mine. We are all thankful for this, of course, and are happy for those miners and their loved ones. But then we wonder why God has not answered our prayers about something or someone important to us that we have prayed about for a long time. I have a beloved former professor and mentor who was afflicted by cancer and on the mend, only to find out last week that the cancer has returned and he faces more painful surgery and uncertainty about his future. Throughout his ordeal I have been praying for him and so I was understandably discouraged when I heard the bad news. I was tempted to wonder why God answered the prayers for the miners but not mine for my professor friend.
And that is the point. When our prayers apparently go unanswered while others seem to have theirs answered we naturally begin to wonder. Has not God heard us? Doesn’t he care about us or our concerns and loved ones? Is there something wrong with us? Are we not praying correctly? Or worse yet, we may wonder in despair what we have done to cause a non-response on God’s part. Has our sin cut us off from God? There are many reasons why God sometimes doesn’t appear to answer our prayers but that would be a sermon in itself and will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say here that one reason why we often cannot make rhyme or reason of answered versus unanswered prayer is because God’s thoughts are not our thoughts nor his ways our ways (Isaiah 55:8), something the book of Job makes quite clear. God is all-knowing and has an eternal perspective on things. We, on the other hand, are finite and have only limited knowledge about ourselves and this world. We may not like it but that does not change the truth of the matter and so we must deal with it one way or another.
That is why our Lord tells us in today’s Gospel lesson to be persistent in prayer so that we won’t lose heart and give up praying or worse yet, lose our faith. For you see, faith allows us to pray in the first place and is nurtured and reinforced when we persevere patiently in prayer. How so you ask? I am glad you asked this question because it will allow me to finish this sermon in a timely manner.
The illustration of the unjust judge in Jesus’ parable focuses our attention in prayer away from ourselves to God. What is God really like? Is he like the unjust judge who really doesn’t care about anything or anyone except himself? How we answer these questions will have a definite impact on whether we pray at all and whether we keep on praying even when we do not have our prayers answered in the way we want. Jesus, of course, argues here from the lesser to greater. He assures us that God is not like the unjust judge so that if the widow’s persistence can finally pay off with the likes of someone like this judge, how much more will our persistence pay off when we pray to God?
So to what kind of God is Jesus telling us to persist in prayer? Let us see what Scripture and Jesus say about it. We pray to a God who in today’s OT lesson promised his people in exile that he would put his very Spirit in their hearts (and ours) to enable us to be the people he created us to be, and who delivered on his promise in Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2). We pray to a God who searches out his sinful and rebellious creatures in paradise even when they are hiding from him (Genesis 3). Consequences there are for our sin—alienation, separation, and exile from the Source and Author of all life—but God still pursues us relentlessly because wants us to live. We pray to a God who brought his wayward people out of captivity in Egypt and into the promised land despite their constant grumbling and lack of trust in his mercy and power (Exodus-Joshua), and who constantly urges us to choose life and not death (see, e.g., Deuteronomy 30:19). We pray to a God who does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, who instead is pleased when they turn from their evil ways and live (Ezekiel 18:23). We pray to a God who has appointed a time for every season under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time for laughing and a time for crying, a time for mourning and a time for dancing, a time for keeping and a time for letting go (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8).
We pray to a God who tells us to put our trust in him when we are afraid (Psalm 56). We pray to a God who is with us even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23) and who bids us literally hundreds of times in Scripture to not be afraid. We pray to a God who has promised to abolish death forever and who will wipe away the tears from all our faces (Isaiah 25:8). We pray to a God who tells his despairing people in exile that surely he knows the plans he has for them, plans for their welfare and not for harm, that he intends to give them a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11). We pray to a God who cares for the weakest and most helpless in society, who is slow to anger, who is merciful and gracious (Nehemiah 9:17), and who expects us to do and be the same (Micah 6:8).
We pray to a God whose good pleasure it is to give us the Kingdom (Luke 12:32). We pray to a God who does not condemn those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). We pray to a God whose love for us is so strong and so faithful that there is nothing in all creation that can ever separate us from it, not death or life or trouble or hardship or danger or sickness or anything else in all creation (Romans 8:31-39).
We pray to a God who sometimes does not answer our prayers so that his grace and power will be stronger in us because when we are the weakest he is the strongest (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). We pray to a God who enables us to do all things here and now through Christ who strengthens us (Philippians 4:13). We pray to a God who calls us to rejoice in him at all times, to not be anxious about anything, but rather to bring our requests to him with thanksgiving (Philippians 4:4-7).
We pray to a God who ultimately has overcome the separation and alienation that sin causes by becoming human and bearing the terrible curse of its punishment himself on the cross. We pray to a God who in the resurrection of Jesus Christ promises us New Creation, the redemption of this broken and fallen world that was caused by human sin, along with his creatures.
We know these promises are true because they are contained in Scripture and as Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle lesson, all Scripture is God-breathed. This, of course, confronts us with a choice. Do we believe this or not? If we do not, then we ought to stop paying the Bible lip-service and get on with the other more important things in life. But if we choose to believe that all Scripture is from God, then we must believe that its various descriptions of God are accurate and his promises are trustworthy and true. Is that the kind of God that evokes in you a desire to pray and be persistent in it? Does that sound like a God who does not care about or is indifferent to you and the world in which you live?
So what can we take from today’s Gospel lesson besides the obvious, that we are to persevere in prayer so that we do not lose heart? First, as I hope I made abundantly clear by the examples I rehearsed for you, if we are going to have faith in God and his promises, we must know our Scripture. The more we know Scripture, the more we learn about God’s character and his trustworthiness. This should make perfect sense to us. Think about those whom you know most intimately and whom you trust the most. You did not learn to trust them overnight. You had to give them a chance to demonstrate their trustworthiness and the only way you could discover that is to get to know them intimately. In other words, you had to establish a track record with them. Likewise with God. We learn to know God in prayer but we also learn to know God in Scripture. This knowledge, in turn, will help strengthen our faith and help us persevere in prayer. Do you know Scripture well enough to know that God and his promises are trustworthy and true?
Second, we learn to know God through his people. We are flesh and blood and we need the human touch. God knows this and blesses us with other faithful Christians to help us in our own faith journey. We need each other to help remind each other of God’s promises, to rejoice with us and to mourn with us. We need each other to persevere. We have to look no further than Paul’s epistles in which he uses the terms “each other,” “one another” and their cognates over 70 times. God created us for fellowship with him and each other, and we dare not ignore Christian fellowship as a means of grace. Do you have that kind of intimate fellowship in your life? If you don’t, you are making yourself easy pickings for the Evil One.
Last, we learn to know God through the weekly sacrament of holy communion. Our very bodies and souls are nourished when we come to the Table each week to feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving. We aren’t concerned about how he does this, we just know that he does, and each week we take his very Presence into our bodies by eating the bread and drinking the cup. In turn, Christ’s very Presence in us helps us to persevere in our prayers.
I want to close by offering you two examples of persistent prayer, one resolved and one not. This past week one of our members, Tom, died after a yearlong struggle with cancer and I tell the following with his family’s permission. I had the great privilege and honor of ministering to Tom and his wife, Teresa, during his illness. For a long while Tom was afraid of dying. He knew himself and was convinced he couldn’t pass heavenly muster. That made me very sad because there is no reason for any real Christian to fear dying and Tom was a real Christian. So we looked at Scripture and my prayers for him changed over time. Yes, I prayed that God might heal him, but I also started to pray that God would bless him with the assurance that is ours in Christ Jesus. I know Tom and his family prayed likewise. I am so very pleased to tell you that the Lord took Tom’s fears from him before he died and on Monday he died in peace and without fear. Thanks be to God! It is also an awesome thing to see how his family’s faith has sustained them during a terribly difficult time in their lives. Yes they are sad and grieve his death. But they do not grieve as those without hope. They also met the evil of cancer with grace, perseverance, and faith, and I have profited from watching them live out their faith.
The second example of persistent prayer I offer has yet to play itself out. I told you at the beginning of this sermon that my daughter has lost her faith and my father’s heart for her is utterly broken. Each day I pray that God will lead her back into his light but that prayer has not yet been answered. But I persevere in prayer about this for two reasons. First, because my Lord has commanded me to do so and second, because I know this God to whom I pray and have faith in him. I trust him and his purposes, even when they sometimes remain unclear to me. This helps provide comfort to my broken heart and provides me with hope that in his good time and way he will answer my prayers for my daughter. I would invite your ongoing prayers for her as well today.
We live in a broken and fallen world where bad things happen and evil lives. But we take heart and hope because we know that Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). Until he comes again in glory to finish the work he started, our Lord commands us to be patient and to persevere. This means that we must walk in faith and trust that even when our prayers are not being apparently answered, we are still praying to a God who loves us and gave himself for us, and who will not ultimately disappoint. If we have faith to really know this to be true, we will discover that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.