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Preached in Markham Baptist Church, August 22, 2004 A
SEASON OF PRAYER: A long time ago in a land far, far away there lived a king who had many strange dreams. There was one dream that particularly disturbed him. In this dream he saw a great tree which grew and grew and grew until its top reached the sky and people could see it from hundreds of miles around. It was a beautiful tree with leaves that did not wither and fruit that was abundant enough to feed all people and animals. But then a kind of celestial woodsman came along, a messenger from heaven and he said, “Cut that tree down, but let the stump remain, and let him live among the plants and animals and let his mind go to mush so that he is given the mind of an animal.” The king of course is disturbed by this dream and he calls a man of God, a man by the name of Daniel to interpret the dream for him. And Daniel says “You, O King are the tree. Your kingdom is great, your dominion reaches to the distant parts of the earth but you will be cut down to size, you will be driven away from your people and will eat crass like cattle and your mind will go to mush. Until, until, you acknowledge that God, the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes.” And wouldn’t you know it, 12 months later the King is walking on the roof of his royal palace and says, “Look at this great kingdom I have built, isn’t this great? Aren’t I great? Aren’t I wonderful?” And Scripture says that while the words were still on his lips a voice from heaven came and said, “O King your authority has been taken from you and you will live with the animals and eat grass like cattle until you acknowledge that the Most High is Sovereign.”(see Daniel 4) King Nebuchadnezzar had to learn this truth the hard way. God is sovereign. He is above all, over all and is not matched by any other god, king, president or grand pooh-bah. God is sovereign. It is a truth about God that many in our world forget. Political leaders often think they are in control of world events and history. CEOs sometimes think that they are the shapers of current events and trends. Pastors and deacons sometimes think that they are god and set themselves up as the final word on truth. We all tend to forget that there is a hand controlling history, there is one whose word is supreme, there indeed an overwhelming power that controls the events of this world. And that power is the Sovereign God, creator of the universe, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords. The truth of God’s sovereignty is a truth that we must constantly keep in mind as Christians, especially as praying Christians. Our God is sovereign and you know that truth makes a huge difference in a church’s prayer life, in an individual’s prayer life. It makes a difference in how we approach God in prayer and trust God in prayer. This is demonstrated for us in the first recorded prayer of the early church. Open your Bibles to Acts 4 and in verse 24 we see the early church at prayer. Now we need to remember that this was a time of great stress. The floodgates of persecution are just beginning to open. The threat to life is very real. Peter and John had just been arrested for healing a lame man in the name of Jesus Christ. They have been held for proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. They are put on trial and released but are told that they must not proclaim Christ any longer. Upon their release Peter and John join their fellow believers and tell them everything that happened and we read at verse 24: “When they heard this they raised their voices together in prayer to God. 'Sovereign Lord,' they said." What a wonderful way to begin a prayer! They don’t begin with a list of things that they want God to do. In the midst of their crises there is shopping list of needs presented to God. Instead they call to mind God’s character. They are taken up with God, Sovereign Lord. Now the Greek word that is used for Lord here is not the usual word used for Lord in the New Testament because it has at its core a very hard, harsh meaning. The word is despotes from which we get our English word despot which we use to refer to tyrant leaders, people who abuse unrestricted power. That is the modern meaning of the word. But the ancient meaning speaks of a relationship between a master and a slave. That’s the way the early church understood its relationship with God. The implication being that God is their master and they are His slaves. We may be repulsed by such an attitude – we have seen so many abuses by people with power – but we do not need to fear any abuse like that from God. We know He binds up the broken and lifts those who are down, so we read in that great promise in Isaiah 42:3: “a bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” O Sovereign Lord – God is the master and we are the slaves – O how we need to remember this and recapture this attitude in our prayers. So many times we come with our commands, our demands, our desires when instead we need to say “O Sovereign Lord”, despotes. You are Sovereign. Notice the attitudes that grow out of this – there is an attitude of humility, of emptying ourselves of our all self-importance and self-exaltation. O how God loves the humble. He commands us in Micah 6:8 – “he has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” And Jesus promises that whoever “humbles himself like a little child is the greatest in heaven.” (Matthew 18:4) And in Peter’s first letter we read that "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (I Peter 5:5) We need to come to God with an attitude of humility, of emptying ourselves of all self-importance, all self-preoccupation of self-exalting and let’s escape this idea that God owes us something. That we can demand from God anything. We need to come before Him humbly – how do we that by recognizing that He is sovereign. He is the King. Closely tied with this is the attitude of dependence. The text goes on, “O Sovereign Lord you made the heaven and the sea and everything in them.” They are saying, God you are sovereign over creation. “You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The Kings of the earth take their stand and rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One.” They are saying that God is sovereign over revelation. Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed. They did what Your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. They are saying that God is sovereign over history. Notice the verbs used in the text, “You made” “You spoke”, “You …decided”. Why are the early Christians reciting all this? Are they telling God something He doesn’t know? No. They are saying, we depend on You. We come to You in dependence on Your complete sovereignty. I remember hearing it said that if God should stop breathing we would cease to exist. And O how God takes great delight when we depend on Him. Why? Because He is emotionally needy? No! No! No! a thousand times, no. It is because when we recognize our dependence on Him He is able to work through us. How often I come to God in prayer believing that everything depends on me. The spiritual growth of the church depends on me. The success of our outreach depends on me. The spiritual vitality of our worship depends on me. The success of our fall ministries depends on me. O God, forgive me! You are the sovereign Lord upon whose shoulder rests all the government of the universe. I depend on You. The ministry here must depend on God. SO we read in Psalm 33: “No King is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength to save. But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love, to deliver them from death and keep them alive in famine. We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. In Him our hearts rejoice for we trust in his holy name”. (Psalm 33:16-21) My friends the sooner we realize our dependence on God the sooner God’s work will get done; for then we are not trusting in our programs, promotion or building or personalities but in the power of His might! O Sovereign Lord. It brings an attitude of humility and God takes great delight. It brings an attitude of dependence and God is able to work. But not only this but when we grasp in our hearts and minds that God is sovereign it brings about an assurance. This is what we learn from verse 27 and 28. “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” You know when Jesus was crucified the disciples thought all was lost. It was a dark day indeed even the sun was blotted out. But then they saw the risen Lord and they discovered that the cross is an act of God through which we can be released from sin and death. They saw that God was fulfilling his purposes. So we ask, who was it that delivered up Jesus to be crucified? Not the Jews for envy; not Pilate for weakness; not Judas for greed; but the Father for love. So God is sovereign and in His sovereignty we can have this assurance as we come to Him in prayer that He is able to take the darkest, bleakest events of our lives and turn them for good. O what assurances this gives us. We can indeed cast all our cares on Him. We can bring to Him our broken dreams, our messed up lives, our heartbreak and He is able to turn them into something wonderful and beautiful for His kingdom. But if this isn’t enough we also learn here that when we pray with an awareness of God’s sovereignty we have this assurance that He is greater than the obstacles that face us. “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” O let us do away with defeatism, let us do away with the words it can’t be done, or it’s not possible. Our God is sovereign and He is greater than any obstacle that we face. Often I get downhearted thinking there is no way the church move forward. We’ve tried so many times, experienced such limited gains, known outright defeat and such negativism from within and without. O God forgive me, forgive us for we have forgotten that you are sovereign and greater than any obstacle that we face. Doesn’t the truth of his sovereignty give you a new fervency to your prayers? There is a new attitude and a new assurance. But look at the closing verses. Not only do we need to recognize his sovereignty we need to invite Him to be sovereign. Now don’t miss this, this is key. Verse 29 and 30: “Now, Lord consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” What are the early believers doing here? They are inviting God’s sovereignty into their lives. “Enable us to speak your word and do your work. Come and reign in us.” they are saying. It is a truth that while God is sovereign He will not force His will in you. He will not force His kingship in on your life. Even though He is King above all kings and His kingdom stretches to the very ends of the universe there is one kingdom in which He can be shut out and it is the kingdom of the human heart. You see when Adam sinned he gave over the keys of his heart and the God-given privilege to rule over this earth to Satan. Mankind and this world became enslaved to sin and to Satan and self. To be sure, God never lost His sovereignty but when man in his foolishness listened to the devil – man became captivated by him. So we have the truth in Romans 6 when you offer yourselves to someone to obey as slaves you are the slave to the one you obey, whether you are slaves to sin or to obedience. You submit to sin you become a slave, you become dominated by it. And when you became a Christian you invited God in to your life to be King and your life changed. You became a new creation. You gained a new King. You gave Him access to your life, access which He did not have before. And so in prayer we are giving God access to our lives, we come humbly before Him, we come in dependence upon Him, recognizing that He is able to change lives and situations and obstacles by His power. Understand that just as God did not force you to become a Christian, He does not force His Kingship on your life now. So it is a truth that you and I are as spiritual as we want to be. We allow God to work in our lives as much as we want Him to. We can shut God out we can put signs up in certain areas of our lives and that say “no trespassing”. So in Scripture we are told that we can quench the Holy Spirit in our lives. Not because we are more powerful than the Spirit - God is sovereign - but because He has given us the freedom to limit Him, to prevent Him from doing what He would do otherwise. In prayer we are given the ability to let God in. Without prayer we effectively shut God out. Finally this, when we pray, be prepared for the sovereign God to act. Verse 31: “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” When you pray with the sovereignty of God in mind be prepared for God to act. Praying Christians should be on the tip toe of expectation. Why? Not because prayer is not holding a pistol to God’s head and saying you had better do this, or twisting His arm. We cannot make God do what He doesn’t want to do, but we can prevent God from doing what He would otherwise do. God doesn’t do something extra because we pray but does not do what He would do when we don’t pray. We can grieve the Holy Spirit. You do not have, James says in James 4. Why don’t we have? Because we do not ask. With prayer we bring God into situations. Not to get God to serve us but that “your will be done”. We simply invite God to fulfill His agenda. The privilege we have in prayer is that we bring God in. When we don’t pray, we shut God out.
Copyright MBC and Tom Cullen - August 2004 |
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