Praying in faith

Good morning everyone

Our theme today is Praying in Faith. It’s the third in our Faith February sermon series.

I am going to talk about prayer - but first, you need to know something.

In my heart of hearts, I’m a bit of an 80s girl. So I was thinking, for some of us:

•    Prayer may feel a bit like this [The Bangles, Manic Monday]

•    Or perhaps like this [Midnight Star, Operator]

•    Perhaps for you it’s more like this [Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart]

•    Or maybe even this [Grease, You’re the one that I want]

If you can get past the extraordinary haircuts, earrings etc in these songs, the real point is … prayer is a love song, sung in duet.

Danny sings to Sandy and she sings back “you’re the one that I want, you are the wa da one, oooh oooh oooh honey”

Now you may never have addressed God quite like that, nor heard His still small voice sing back to you quite that way … but that sense of longing for God, and His longing, cherishing love for us, is at the heart of prayer.

So if it’s not the hot pants, the hoop earrings or the haircuts, what does it mean to pray in faith?

At its heart it’s about keeping that love song alive, through thick and thin.

So I’m going to say something today about prayer in the everyday; prayer in the good times; and prayer when life is really hard.

And hopefully wherever you’re at with God, and whatever is going on in your life, there will be something that rings true for you.

So first of all, praying in faith in the every day.

The best advice I was ever given is this: pray as you can, not as you can’t. And the second was this: keep it simple.

I’m not a morning person, so the idea of a half hour quiet time before anyone else wakes up is really never going to work. For me what works best is praying when I’m walking, out in nature, or driving in the car.

It doesn’t matter how or where you pray, but the key thing is to pray, so you need to know what works best for you.

And keep it simple. This is a relationship, a chat with your loving Father. He doesn’t need the fancy hairdos, and He doesn’t need special words or poetry. He just needs you to be real, to stay in touch, and keep the conversation flowing.

One of my very good friends just turns our ordinary chatting into prayer, it’s like pulling up an extra chair, acknowledging Jesus is already there with us, and inviting him in.

And as we pray in the everyday, God uses the ordinary things of our lives to show us that nothing really is “everyday”. We have friends and family,  warm homes, good food to eat. We are surrounded by beauty, and live in a country at peace. How extraordinary. Thank God. Prayer helps us to see afresh and rejoice in the miracle of our ordinary lives.

So take a minute now just to notice, remember, reconnect with - what works for you? Where do you pray most easily? How can you commit to keeping that channel of communication with God open in the every day?

So if that’s something about prayer in the everyday, what about prayer in the good times, the mountain top moments of our lives?

Bonnie Tyler sang about a total eclipse of the heart.

For some of us, perhaps just a few times in our lifetime, prayer really is like that, a total encounter with the Holy Spirit, in ways that shift our sense of who we are, and who God is, forever.

This is the work of the Holy Spirit, and, in a way, the ‘mountain top’ of what it means to pray in faith. Like when Jesus went up the mountain and saw the faces of the prophets transformed. Like on the day of Pentecost.

Think back in your own life now. When have you known the presence of the Holy Spirit breaking in on your life, washing you away?

Maybe it was when you held your child for the first time.

Maybe it was when you sat with a dying parent.

Maybe it was on Alpha, or on beautiful dawn morning, or in a moment where you really felt you’d reached the end, and couldn’t take another step forward … and then God was there.

What did you know about God in that moment, that re-shaped your life?

How do you need to reconnect with that moment today?

The Bible says if we pray, God uses our prayer to transform our minds. Philippians 4 says when we give everything to God in prayer, His peace will guard our hearts and our minds.

Back in November when Hugh went to Cornwall for the interview for this new job, I knew that the interview started at 11am, and as ‘luck’ would have it, there I was, pulling in to the Blue Boys roundabout to fill up with petrol at precisely 11am.

So I just stopped right there by the petrol pump to pray - probably to the annoyance of anyone waiting behind me - and right in that moment I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, giving me words to pray over Hugh, and over the whole appointment process, that weren’t my own.

It was the strangest thing, this sensation of being taken out of myself, and the Holy Spirit taking over and giving me the words to pray. Words not in my vocabulary, that I never normally use, or could have thought of on my own.

That experience brought a great sense of peace, even there at the garage, that the whole thing was, and is, in God’s hands … and as these moments so often are, it’s become a touchpoint for me. In all the sadness and pain of leaving here, I know that this IS God’s calling on our lives, that the Holy Spirit was there in it all, going before us, calling us on …

Perhaps you have moments like that. Moments that change your thinking, transformed how you see your life … and that you need to come back to, over and again, to ground you and hold you, when the waves of life rise up. 

So thirdly … what does it mean to pray in faith in the hard times, when it feels like the line has been cut … Operator? Operator?? … and when our prayers go unanswered.

All of us have times like this, when we’re confronted with suffering, when we’re walking in the valley of the shadow of death, when the thing we’ve prayed and prayed for doesn’t happen, like God is on mute. How do we walk through these valleys, and continue to pray in faith?

There have been many times in my life when I’ve felt that prayer wasn’t being answered … but when I look back, I can see God was there, answering my prayers, sometimes with a whispered promise of hope for the future; sometimes with … not yet; and sometimes with not that, but this … in other words we don’t always get what we pray for, but what God knows we truly need.

There was a time a few years ago when I was having a terrible time at work. I prayed and prayed for the situation to get better, for the strength to keep going, for others to grow in wisdom and courage, but things just got worse and worse. And then one day as I was walking and praying in Angley Woods, I saw an image of a swing, like the rope Tarzan swings through the trees on, and felt God saying: hold on to me, let go of everything else, and I will keep you safe. And I knew in that moment that I needed to resign.

That answer wasn’t the one I wanted or that I’d prayed for - but I knew I needed to have the courage to walk away from work I loved, and trust completely that the rope would hold me.

And although it was incredibly painful, that moment of clarity - of knowing that God was asking me simply to trust Him and walk away - meant I’ve never doubted it was the right decision.

So we don’t always get what we ask for in prayer, but if we are faithful in asking, we do get what we need.

And what about the times when we’re confronted with suffering that simply doesn’t make sense? Things that even with the passage of time, we have no way of comprehending?

What about the death of our own loved ones, or of the innocent, in the most appalling circumstances, as so many Christians who face persecution all around the world have to live with every day? How on Earth do we pray in faith in the face of the worst that life brings?

One thing that has helped me is the reading from 1 Corinthians 13 that Hugh shared with us last week, when he preached on living in faith. Paul says now we look in a glass darkly, but one day we will see face to face.

There are things that simply don’t make any sense to us in this life, and never will … but we know that God sees the world, our lives and deaths, not as we see them.

Once when Eli was aged about 4, I was shouting and shouting to get him to come downstairs and get into the car. He wasn’t keen, and after a bit of a stand off between us, there was a silence, and then he called sweetly down the stairs “I’m sticking my fingers in the plug socket”. You’ve never seen me climb the stairs so fast. He was that kind of child. And that’s what it’s like living with little ones isn’t it? We live with a fear for their safety that can be overwhelming.

And as I was praying about this fear one day, I felt God say, you don’t need to be afraid. I’m not promising no harm will ever come to those you love. But I promise you, in my love, nothing will ever change. I will always hold them and you, exactly as I’m holding you now.

In that moment I felt I was given a glimpse of another reality, a glimpse of Heaven, where everything that we fear, everything we hold most dear, is held, not in our physical reality, but in a completely different dimension. That while our lives here together are the blink of an eye, God’s love holds us, and those we love so much, eternally. And as Paul says in Romans 8

“neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God”

And in the bleakest moments, when suffering and the death of loved ones stares us straight in the face, that promise, that reassurance, can transform our fear and pain, our grief and incomprehension, into peace.

So what does it mean to pray in faith through the hard times?

Not that God takes our suffering away, not that we understand, or get the answers we want. We are every one of us touched and scarred by suffering. We are the walking wounded. But with our wounds, just as we are, we are always held. Always loved. And we can know, in a way that’s beyond our human understanding, that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God.

So to wrap up, here are some final thoughts.

Praying in faith means different things in the different seasons of our lives, but it always means turning to God, giving him whatever is going on.

We’re not asked to understand everything, but to pray as we can, to keep it simple, and to keep the connection going.

We tend to think of prayer as something we do, but perhaps it’s not so much something we do, but God’s gift to us. It’s the means by which He transforms us, heals us, shapes our lives, and changes our sense of who we are, and of who He is, for us.

Prayer is a love song sung in duet.

It’s us singing to God, you’re the one that I want. And God singing back, the same to us. 

So let us pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you for your gift of prayer. Help each of us today to be encouraged to pray to you and with you. Bless, encourage and transform us as we pray, so we might become ever more the people and the Church you’ve called and created us to be. Amen.