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The Big Picture on Prayer
An Overview of the Bible
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
January 26, 2003
The biggest motion picture of the year seems to be
The Lord of the Rings—The Two Towers. I have not yet seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies. I definitely plan on seeing them—it’s just that at this stage of my life, with three young children, it is very difficult to set aside three hours for viewing a movie! But I have seen portions of the movie in trailers and TV commercials. I have seen amazing scenes—breathtaking images of landscapes and battles and strange creatures. But I must admit, not a lot of it makes sense. I know that I need to see the entire three hours of the first movie before going and seeing the three-hour second movie. It won’t be until then that all those scenes will make sense. In need the see the “Big Picture.”
In our desire to get into the nitty-gritty of the Bible and to understand what God has revealed to us in detail, we may lose sight of the big picture of what God has been doing to reconnect with us human beings. It is important and exciting to dive deep into particular passages of the Bible, and that is what we do most of the time here at Vanguard Church. But if we do not understand what we are studying in its
larger context, we may come up with skewed interpretations and conclusions. It is very wise to step back at times and remind ourselves of the “Big Picture,” for once we envision the bigger story of God, the smaller portions make sense. We need to see the sweeping big story of what God has been doing to allow communication between his divine self and us finite beings in order to better worship and pray.
So, today’s message will give you an overview of the Bible’s teaching on God’s history of loving actions to reconnect with a rebellious race of human beings. We will look at this sweeping story in four parts: (1) God establishing the relationship through a covenant with Abraham, (2) Moses seeing that covenant as the basis for his pleading with God on behalf of the rebellious people, (3) the Old Testament Temple and ceremonies as the basis of communicating with God, and (4) Jesus Christ as fulfilling the covenant relation and Old Testament ceremonies so that we can have intimate communion with God.
We could start with Creation, Adam and Eve, and the Fall, but we have already talked about that at some length just recently. After the sin of that first couple in Genesis 3, God could have decided to wash his hands of the human race, but, out of his love, he did not. Instead, God did something completely surprising! He expressed a desire to be in a loving relationship with humans! He even establishes that relationship in the form of a covenant!
1. God provided to Abraham access to himself.
After the Flood, it is clear that the human race has not changed. The story of the Tower of Babel proves that humanity remains sinful and full of themselves. Out of this lost and scattered human race, God calls a man named Abram to leave his home and go to a new place where God can establish a relationship with the whole human race through him. God makes a promise to him to bless him and to make him a blessing to all other people. In faith Abraham trusts God and goes to the land that he is promised.
There God makes a covenant with Abraham. The heart of the covenant was the relationship that God established. He would be God to Abraham! It is summed up in what God says to Abraham in Genesis 17:7,
“I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.”
(Genesis 17:7)
You see, this relationship provides Abraham’s access to God! Because God has established a relationship with Abraham, Abraham is able to pray to God!
--Because God has established a personal relationship with Abraham, Abraham can pray to God about being childless, seeking through prayer to trust that God would come through on his promise of a son.
--Because God has established a personal relationship with Abraham, Abraham can intercede to his God on behalf of others.
--Because God has established a personal relationship with Abraham, he realized that he walks in God’s presence at all times. This means that his life manifested his faith—he lived what he believed in the constant presence of God. When it came crunch time—when he had to sacrifice his one and only son Isaac, he was willing to go through with it because of his constant trust in this ever-present God who remarkably established this personal relationship with him.
Since God established a relationship with Abraham, communication was possible!
I would never presume that I could call up President Bush and tell him what I think about the Iraq situation or about domestic affairs. My call to the White House will not make it to the Oval Office. I do not have a relationship with the President of the United States. I do not personally have his ear. But imagine that, out of the blue, a knock came on my front door and I open it—and there flanked by Secret Service agents is the president. He asks, “Can I come in?”
“Uhh…yea, sure!”
He sits in my family room, and after Trey has jumped on his lap a few times and Kaira shyly smiles at him and Joel cries for 15 minutes because he is scared of all those guys in dark suits and sunglasses, I ask him, “Mr. President, what can I do for you?”
“Call me George,” he says. “I want you to phone me at any time if you need anything.” Then he gives me a secret phone number that will ring his personal cell phone. That’s what it would take—the president would have to come to me and establish that relationship.
That is what God did for Abraham, only ten million times greater. God came to Abraham out of the blue, and said, “I am going to be
your God: I am going to bless you; I am going to listen to you; I am going to guide you; I am going to love you. And I am going to do the same for your descendents. This is my covenant with you.”
The covenant provides access to God for prayer!
2. Moses’ prayers pleaded the covenant with God.
Since God established the relationship with Abraham and his descendents, they can now pray to God based on that covenant. Moses, like Abraham prays on the basis of the covenant relation that God had established.
When God first appeared to Moses at the burning bush, he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). In other words, “I am the God who has a covenant relationship with you through your forefathers.”
And this wonderful covenant relationship becomes vivid when the people of God rebel against God. Imagine it! Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving from God the ordinances for the people in order to remain close to God in this relationship, and down below, what are the people doing? They are worshiping a golden calf! God is rightfully steamed. But what does Moses do? He pleads with God
on the basis of the covenant! Moses prays to God, “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever’” (Exodus 32:13). And what does God do in response to Moses’ prayer?
“Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened” (Exodus 32:14).
You see, the covenant was not so much what God will do for Israel, but what God will
be for Israel: He would be their God—dwelling in their midst! After that terrible incident with the golden calf, God righteously judged that generation. He also threatened to cancel his plans to build the tabernacle. The tabernacle was to be God’s dwelling place—the physical manifestation that he was there with his people. Moses responded to this with great grief. He cries,
“If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here” (Exodus 33:15). God was not simply freeing the Israelites from Egyptian bondage and giving them a homeland. He was leading them to a place of
fellowship, to a land where he would “set his name,” to his homeland where they can dwell with him in loving relationship! That’s what’s so amazing about the Exodus! It is the story of God promising a land of “rest,” where God would be their God and they would be his people!
But that generation’s sin is so great that they were kept from entering the promised land of rest. So Moses prays to this God and pleads that covenant relationship—he prays the only possible he could in order to restore God’s plan for this idolatrous people. He could not promise God that Israel will “shape up” and be an obedient, righteous, holy people…the evidence showed that
that was an impossibility! Moses’ only hope was to cast himself on the mercy of God, and to plead the covenant relationship.
Moses prays, “O 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” (Exodus 34:9).
When you know that you are a hopeless sinner and that you will inevitably screw up things again and again, all you can do is come to God and plead with him based on the covenant relationship you have with him. All you can do is appeal to God’s willingness to continually reveal his nature as a God of the covenant of
hesed—“lovingkindness.” Those who are brought into a covenant relationship with God plead his mercy and cast themselves by faith on his grace. That is all we can do. For we can never expect to ever measure up to God’s standards. God must be our God in order for us to be his people. God must make us, through the power of his Spirit within us, the kind of people we are meant to be.
3. The Old Testament Ceremonies express the Covenant Relationship.
God’s Tabernacle symbolized God’s presence among his people Israel. On one hand, the tabernacle and all the elaborate ceremonies of the Old Testament Law might seem to institutionalize God’s presence. An appointed priesthood mediated worship; a detailed Law told the worshippers what to do; a sacred calendar told them when to do it. But on the other hand, God’s temple meant that God had an abiding presence with his people—the worshipper could come into God’s courts with praise, confident that God would be there, ready to receive the sacrifices and the prayers of his people.
To have God as your God is to live before him. This requires a higher level of obedience—they were, after all, the people of God, with God ever present with them! The presence of God opens the door to prayer
and it opens our lives up to him as well. All those Old Testament ceremonies bear witness to this: they were the means by which a people intimately in the presence of a pure God could remain pure themselves, even though they would continually become impure. The people, if they are to remain in the presence of a holy God were to be a holy people—the ceremonial laws symbolized that moral purity.
Prayer in the Old Testament context, therefore, was made possible when God established a relationship with a certain people through the covenants he himself established. It all started with God. The people are consistently seen as fallen and sinful and unable to connect with God because of their depravity. God must therefore make the effort to reconnect with human beings—simply because he loves them and chooses to show grace and mercy. But the hearts of the people never changed—they were still hard toward God.
The ultimate merciful, loving covenant was foretold through the prophets—a time in their future when God would fulfill the covenant promises and provide the definitive means to connect with him.
4. Christ fulfills the Covenant Promises of Relationship.
Through the prophet Jeremiah, God foretells this:
“The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.
“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
In Christ, all the other covenants are fulfilled. He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mathew 5:17).
According to John 2:19-21, Jesus presented his body as the true temple. His death was the sacrifice that fulfilled what all those sacrifices at the Temple’s altar were pointing toward.
The Holy Place is no longer here on earth, it is in heaven where Jesus Christ is (Hebrews 8:1-2).
When Christ died on the cross, all that we learn of God in the Old Testament, the Bible of Israel, the Scriptures of the People of God, came to fulfillment. All the covenant promises and all the ceremonies and all the sacrifices and all the love of God was displayed there upon the cross. In the Old Testament, prayer to God was all tied into the Most Holy Place—that inner sanctum of the Temple, where only the High Priest could go to offer sacrifices for the sins of the people. That Most Holy Place had a duel significance: It represented God’s abiding presence—God was always there for the people. But it also was a place that was so sacred that only one person could enter as a mediator for the people. The curtain that they all could see that separated the rest of the Temple from that Most Holy Place filled the onlooker with mystery and awe—God is there! Oh, how I long to go in there, but oh, how terrified I would be to do so!
When Jesus Christ died upon the cross, that curtain was miraculously torn in two from the top to bottom. The separation between the people and God had been eliminated by the body of Christ dying for our sins as the ultimate sacrifice.
Look at Hebrews 10:19-23.
“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.”
(Hebrews 10:19-22)
The way to heaven is now opened through the curtain of Christ’s body that died on that cross. The great High Priest who mediates for the people is
Jesus Christ, and since he is now in the real temple, the heavenly one, we can draw near to God in our prayers. We can confidently come to God as his people, knowing that our access is accomplished by the New Covenant of Jesus Christ’s blood, shed on the cross.
The covenant relationship that Jesus Christ accomplished provides us the reality of God’s presence in our lives. The presence of God in the Old Covenant was there in the Temple, a building of stone and cedar. The presence of God in the New Covenant is the person of Jesus Christ, and he is personally present through his Spirit within us (1 Corinthians 6:19). We no longer worship in Jerusalem as the Jews did, nor at Mount Gerizim as the Samaritans did—the place of worship is now
wherever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name in spirit and truth (John 4:21; Matthew 18:20). You see, the Spirit indwells us as believers;
our bodies are now the earthly temple that represents the heavenly one. Today, by his Spirit, we are able to enter the heavenly Jerusalem in worship as we spiritually gather with the saints and the angels. We are led in worship not by an earthly High Priest, but by Jesus Christ himself, the one Mediator between God and human beings.
"You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to thousands of angels in joyful assembly.
You have come to the assembly of God’s firstborn children,
whose names are written in heaven.
You have come to God himself, who is the judge of all people.
And you have come to the spirits of the redeemed in heaven
who have now been made perfect.
You have come to Jesus,
the one who mediates the new covenant between God and people,
and to the sprinkled blood, which graciously forgives." (Hebrews 12:22-24)
This is the basis of our prayers. We are tied into the same type of covenant relationships as those who came before us.
1. We pray in thankfulness for the fact that God established a relationship with us through his choice, in Jesus Christ, to die for our sins. The sacrifice on the cross is what initiated the New Covenant—the covenant through which God actually writes the law in our minds and in our hearts. This New Covenant of Christ allows for us to really know God! And if you really
KNOW someone, you can really COMMUNICATE with him (and that is what prayer is!) Now that the covenant has been established, we have access to God! We can confidently enter the Most Holy Place and draw near to God!
2. And when we pray, when we are in need of God and his direction and his blessings and his love and his provision, we pray
PLEADING THE COVENANT, just like Moses did. We pray to God, looking in His Word for what it means to be in a covenant relationship with God. We do not come to God making deals—“I’ll be a better Christian if you will…” We do not pretend that we have anything but depravity in our earthly bodies and motives.
We come to God and ask for mercy and grace—pleading the covenant truth that God will change us by his Spirit from the inside out and not just through our efforts alone.
We look to the Bible so that we can better understand the provisions of what we have and who we are in Christ, so that we can plead these things to become manifested in our lives. These are the prayers that are guaranteed to be heard and answered, for you will be praying in God’s will!
3. And like the Old Covenant ceremonies of worship and sacrifice, we who are now in the New Covenant should be living our lives in reverence and awe! We cannot pretend that we can hide from the presence of God. I must live my life as it really, truly is: A life meant to be holy and full of worship as I am constantly in God’s presence through Jesus Christ’s mediation and the Holy Spirit’s constant indwelling.
In the Old Testament, their form of worship was the sacrifices they made. In the New Testament, our form of worship is also the sacrifice we make.
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.” (Romans 12:1) |
