This evening for a few moments, let's together explore this mysterious treasure. that the Apostle Paul is talking about in this concluding passage of the book of Philippians, this mysterious treasure of prayer. You know, prayer, when you think about it, is a source of such great comfort to us, isn't it? But it can also be a source of great discouragement. Some of us may remember from those catechism lessons where we had to learn the Heidelberg Catechism. We might remember what the Heidelberg Catechism says about prayer. It is the most important part, the catechism says, of the thankfulness, of the gratitude that God requires of us. And then it also goes on to say, you might remember, and God gives his grace and his Holy Spirit to those who continually ask God for these gifts. But let's face it. God doesn't always give us exactly what we ask for, and we don't always give God thanks either. You know, the great Welsh preacher, some of you may have read his book on the Sermon on the Mount, for example. The great Welsh preacher, David Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is known for his long and very complex sermons, said this about prayer. He said, of all the activities in which the Christian engages and which are a part of the Christian life, there is surely none which causes so much perplexity and raises so many problems as the activity which we call prayer. I suspect we really don't need a famous Welsh preacher to tell us this evening. Prayer is such a mysterious, difficult thing to understand. Think of it. Two cancer patients pray for healing with an equally fervent faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. One recovers. one dies. Such a mystery is prayer. Christian parents pray fervently and faithfully that their children will follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Some do, while others wander a long time in a distant land, Such a mystery is prayer. And some people rejoice in spectacular, spectacular answers to many prayers, while others may see no answers. After years and years and years of crying out to God, And so, because of this mysterious nature of prayer, some Christians pray very little. Others limit their prayers. They scale them down very much. They never really ask for anything when they pray, because they say that's too selfish. And besides, it really doesn't make any difference, they think. God already knows what we need, and he has planned from eternity all that he is going to do in our lives. So what's the point of asking? Why ask? Instead, they think, I'll simply praise God for who and what He is. I'll simply thank God for what He does in my life, and I will confess my sins. Some Christians think this way and act this way. And this seems to be a great way to avoid the pain of unanswered prayer, to give God the pleasure of praise and of thanksgiving. But this strategy, this way of approaching the mystery of prayer, this way flies in the face, doesn't it, of what Jesus teaches us about prayer, especially in the Lord's Prayer. That prayer, if you remember, has six requests in it. And it also ignores Jesus' promises about prayer, like, ask, and it shall be given to you. And His commands, the commands that Jesus gives about prayer, like, present your requests to God, During my time working in Allred Prison, a maximum security prison in North Texas, I came to deeply appreciate what a man named Philip Yancey, perhaps you've read some of his books, what he wrote about prayer in his book, Prayer. Does it make any difference? Yancey says that we should think of prayer, you and I should think of prayer, not as a transaction, a business transaction between God and us. But we should think of prayer instead as a relationship between God and us. Prayer is not a shopping trip to Costco. Prayer is not a shopping trip to the mall. Prayer is not a shopping trip to Meyers, where if the supply chain is working, we can get whatever we want. Prayer instead is like a candle-lit dinner at which we simply enjoy our time together, time with our spouse, time with our best friend. Prayer is then, first of all, not a transaction designed for us to get what we want. It's a sharing of our life with someone we love and someone we know who loves us. Desi Ansi says, prayer is keeping company with God, who is already present. So what a mysterious treasure prayer really is. And I believe Yancey is spot on when he goes on to say that when it comes to prayer, we are all beginners. When it comes to prayer, we are all beginners. And in the spirit of Yancey's comment, for a few moments this evening, let's review the ABCs of prayer as the Apostle Paul presents them in Philippians chapter 4. And as we review these ABCs of prayer, maybe this mysterious treasure of prayer will become a little less mysterious. and a bit more of a treasure, a precious treasure in our lives. Well, the apostle Paul introduces prayer in verse 6 in the passage that I read this evening. And he introduces prayer with this penetrating insight into our hearts. Paul says, do not be anxious about anything. Don't be anxious about anything. And this is precisely the reason we so often pray, isn't it? We're worried about something, we're anxious about something, we're afraid about something, we're sad about something, we're scared about something. We think something is wrong, or something might go wrong, and so we pray. And because we don't want it to go wrong, and because we want what's wrong to be made right, we turn it over and over and over in our minds, don't we? Until it nearly drives us crazy. We worry because we care. And it's not bad to care, but it is wrong to worry And so God says, I want you to stop your care from becoming worry by turning your care into prayer. Might cause some of you to remember the words of that song we used to sing. Oh, what peace we often forfeit. Oh, what needless pain we bear. all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer. Everything that song says, everything the Apostle Paul says, everything or in every situation. This is what he says next in his primer on prayer. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything or in every situation, present your requests to God. And there are no exceptions, no exceptions to that statement. Oh, I'm not going to bother God with that little thing. He's got better things to listen to than my daughter's concern about her kitten. Even God couldn't cure this disease, and then we proceed to worry about those seemingly unsolvable problems. Oh, I couldn't pray about that. I couldn't. I'm simply too embarrassed. I'd be ashamed to bring something like that, something so common, so ordinary like that, into the presence of a holy God. C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, he wrote, we must lay before him, that is God, what is in us, not what ought to be in us. In everything, in every situation, present your requests to God. Well, let's not rush over. Let's not slide quickly over what Paul just said in this passage thus far, because let's not do it simply because we think we already know, already have the ABCs of prayer nailed down pretty well in our hearts and in our lives. If we get the fundamentals of prayer wrong, then we run into trouble everywhere else. We must present our requests to God. We must take these requests out of our heads and out of our hearts, and we must present them, present them to God. So stop the spinning of worry, stop the chaos of anxiety by grabbing hold of your worries, by grabbing hold of your cares, lifting them up to God as a present. Give our cares to God and then walk away, leaving the gift with Him. Now, You and I know ourselves well enough to know that undoubtedly we will return to them to pick them up again. This is the nature of worry. This is some part of our humanness. A worried mind simply can't, can't leave those cares with God. It circles back, circles back, and pulls the cares back into the circle of worry. So we have to do this again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Turn our care into prayer, our worry into a request. Do this, says the Apostle Paul, by prayer and supplication, by prayer and petition. These two words that Paul uses indicate that our requests must be from the heart, from our heart, our deepest center of our being, and must be specific if we are to be done with worry. We can't think, we can't just think about our worries before God. I suspect you find yourself doing this. I know I do. We start, we open our prayer to the Lord, and then we simply think about, and we rehearse the worries over and over again in our mind, going down the checklist and up the checklist once again. We must take them from our minds and we must lift them to God with all our heart and be specific, specific about them. Oh, of course, God knows what we need better than we know ourselves. He knows what you need even before you ask him about that. but we won't have peace of mind. We won't have peace of heart unless and until we tell God specifically what troubles us, what's on our mind, what's on our heart, and ask him to take care of it. When we get that worry out of our mind and into God's hands by being specific, the peace of God will guard your heart and will guard your mind in Christ Jesus. When and only when we pray with thanksgiving This is probably the most neglected and misunderstood aspect of what the Apostle Paul is telling us about prayer this evening. Peace will not replace worry, will not replace worry unless we pray with thanksgiving. Now, this doesn't mean, of course, putting a little sticky note on the end of your prayer, a note of thanksgiving. This doesn't mean thanksgiving is an appendix to our prayers. Some of us, I imagine, learn to pray from our parents using that acronym ACTS. We learned that, and it's a good means of learning to pray, we learned that prayer must include adoration and confession and thanksgiving and supplication. That's good, but thanksgiving is not just a part of prayer. Thanksgiving is the entire atmosphere in which we pray. It's the basic attitude from which we pray. Our whole prayer is bathed in gratitude then. Picture this, we come before God. We stand before God. We stand before Him, we hear Him, we speak with Him, and then we depart from God. Those are our actions. And we do all of these things with thanksgiving being the air that we're breathing. We thank Him for His past blessings. We thank Him for His present blessings. We thank Him for the blessings He will send in answer to our prayers. When we can thank God in advance for the good things he is going to do with the requests that we present to him, then we will have the peace that passes understanding. But how do you know? How do you know he will do good things? How can we be so sure of God's answer that we give thanks for his answer before it even comes? How can we do that? Well, Paul helps us this evening by reminding us in the words that are just before our text that we read this evening, the words, the Lord is near. The Lord is near. If we believe that this is true, the Lord is near, then we'll begin to experience that peace that passes understanding. All the prayer in the world, all of the prayer in the world will not bring peace unless we really believe the Lord is near. Peace, you see, is not the product of perfect prayer technique. It's not our skill in prayer or our mastery of the technique, the mastery of an acronym that brings the peace of the Lord. No. Peace is the product of faith. Peace is the fruit of faith. Peace is the fruit and the product of deep, deep trust of assurance. The Lord is near. And here's our deepest problem. Here is really our deepest problem as Christians. With prayer, we're just not sure we're not certain of the Lord's nearness. In the midst of our anxiety, in the midst of our fear, in the midst of our anger, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our sadness, we're just not sure. Oh, we believe in theory. Berkhoff's book of Christian doctrine talks about it. We believe it. And after all, we are Christians. We believe that. But in the middle of life's worry, in the middle of life's cares, as we try to pray and try to give thanks as we pray, we simply don't trust Him. to do the best with our requests. So what can we do about it? What can we do about that? How can we overcome this lack of trust that gnaws around in our lives, the lack of trust in the goodness of God and the love of God for us, toward us? Well, there's only one way. The Apostle Paul points this out at the end of the passage I read. He ends his primer on prayer by saying, with this note, in Christ Jesus. We can give thanks. We can give thanks, we can find peace, peace that passes understanding only, only, only, only as we stay laser focused on Christ Jesus. He, the Lord, is the ultimate proof himself. of God's amazing, splendid love for us, He, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, is the ultimate proof, certain beyond a doubt, of God's passionate desire to do us good, you and me. He, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, is the ultimate proof of just how good, how trustworthy God really is. Well, we won't be able to trust God enough to give him thanks as we pray unless and until we focus like a laser on the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. But if we do, If we are focused on the risen Lord Jesus Christ, the one who died and lives again, if we are laser focused on him, eyes, everything, attention directed to him, he will give us his own peace. He will grant us his peace, the peace that passes understanding because we will be able to trust God. fellow Byron Center prayers, pray-ers, I should say. This doesn't make prayer miraculously less mysterious, but this does assure us, focusing on Jesus, this does assure us that as we pray, we are treasured by a good God. Amen. Let's pray. As we speak to you in prayer this evening, Father, we speak to you as the great and good God. And we pray in the name of your Son, precious Jesus, who shows to us so clearly Your greatness and Your goodness and Your love. We trust in You, we love You, and we pray to You now, through Christ Your Son. Amen.