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This message was given at Grace
Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information
about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. If you have your Bibles, let's
open up to the Gospel of Luke. Gospel of Luke chapter 6. We are in Luke chapter 6. We'll
be picking up in verse 12. This is the reading of God's
word. In these days, he went out to
the mountain to pray and all night he continued in prayer
to God. And when day came, he called
his disciples and chose from them 12 whom he named apostles. Simon, whom he named Peter, and
Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip and Bartholomew,
and Matthew and Thomas, and James, the son of Alphaeus, and Simon,
who was called the Zealot, and Judas, the son of James, and
Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. This is the reading of God's
word. Let's open in prayer. Our Father,
help us now to worship you, to bring that offering of worship
which you alone deserve. We pray that the way our hearts
and our ears are attuned to your word would please you. We pray
that the ways that we struggle to have hearts and ears attuned
to you, we pray in those ways you would help us. May this be
a time that we hear every word you want for us. May this be
a time that you are glorified, even as we consider your word. It's in Jesus's name we pray,
amen. You know, Jesus, he's doing so
many big things in his ministry, isn't he? So many big events,
so many noteworthy things are happening. From healing people
on the one hand, to mixing it up with the religious authorities
on the other hand, there's fireworks going off, right? Big events
happening. And it's actually really easy
to miss when Jesus does something quiet. It's really easy to miss
the quiet things that Jesus does, but just because they're quiet
doesn't mean that they are not important. Today's passage begins
with a quiet moment. Verse 12, I read it for you again.
In these days, he went out to the mountain to pray, and all
night he continued in prayer to God. Jesus prayed. I don't think that we have done
this justice if this moment does not actually make us pause. Jesus, the son of God, prayed. All things being equal, which
I guess is just me saying, if we look at this from a worldly
perspective, if there's ever anyone who did not need to pray,
doesn't it seem like it's Jesus? Yet Jesus prayed. Luke shows across his gospel
that Jesus had a rich prayer life. We could have talked about
this in one of, or in many spots across this gospel, because Luke
is continually making sure we see that Jesus was praying. He prayed often and he prayed
with urgency. We often find that his prayer
life is much different from our prayer life. If you've been here
on any of the Wednesdays I've taught recently, you've been
hearing these thoughts bubbling up, haven't you? It's obvious
that our prayer life is not the same kind of prayer life that
Jesus lives out before us in the gospels. And see, it's not
just different because, oh, he's the son of God and we're us.
Of course he does it better than us. I think that's a cop-out.
I don't think that's the heart of the matter at all. It's different
because Jesus clearly views prayer differently than we do. He understands
prayer to be something different than we understand it to be. When I have to come and proclaim
about prayer, it's a convicting thing. It's a convicting thing
and it's hard to, you know, bang my fist on the pulpit all that
much when I come to you with something that I'm not strong
at. I am not strong at prayer, and I don't mean that as a sort
of brag cop-out, you know, if I own my sins like they're not
sins anymore. I'm not that strong at prayer.
And the thing is, it turns out that this is so often the Christian
condition. So often we are not very good
at prayer. And if you're like me, you end
up taking an approach, whether it's with your words or just
with your actions, You end up looking at prayer like this.
Prayer is something we would do more if only we had our act
together. Prayer is something that, yeah,
we respect it and we value it. But I mean, seriously, if we're
going to be honest, prayer doesn't make a lot of sense to us. It's
not the natural way we think about things. We look at prayer
like this godly discipline that some people are so good at, but
when it comes to our lives, prayer is basically optional. Good if
you got around to it. Oh well, if you didn't. Do you think that's the kind
of prayer that Jesus believed in? I don't think so. I don't think any of the evidence
would lead us to believe that Jesus looks at prayer the way
at least I do, and I imagine some of you do as well. It's
not at all his kind of prayer. We see from Jesus' prayer life
that prayer was not only a regular part of his life, prayer was
an important part of his life. Don't miss that second half.
It was a regular part of his life. It was also a very important
part of his life. And so you look at the regularity
side of it. And for Jesus, prayer is not a mere discipline. Don't we view it that way? If
you're disciplined, you pray. I don't think it's just that
Jesus was better disciplined than us, that he prayed. Prayer
was a part of the rhythm of his life. Prayer was a regular event, not
a special event. Prayer was a prioritized commitment
in his life. One that took a prioritized place
in his life. Take this passage, for example.
What did Jesus prioritize below prayer on this night? Sleep. You got it. Apparently,
that night he decided He needed prayer more than he needed sleep.
Don't misread this. We can misread this into thinking
Jesus didn't need sleep. He's the son of God. No, of course
Jesus needed sleep. The next day he paid for this
decision. It's not like, you know, sometimes
we like to think, oh, if you do the right thing, it's like better than
doing the other thing. As if it was like getting eight hours
of sleep that he prayed all night. No. If you choose to pray all
night instead of sleep, the next day you will in fact be tired.
All night long while you were praying, he was probably tired,
but that night he chose prayer over sleep. And the only way you can explain
the regularity of prayer in Jesus's life is that he must have thought
it was very important. I think part of that importance
flows from the fact that when he prayed, he was drawing near
to his father. When he prayed, he drew near
to his father. He pursued prayer, again, not
just as a discipline, but as a means of fellowship with his
heavenly father. Prayer wasn't just a discipline,
and now it wasn't even just a rhythm. Prayer was relational for Jesus. And that is an aspect that I
think opens this whole thing up to us, that prayer is relational. You see, I've never stayed up
all night praying. I just haven't. Again, I picture
that this is a similar case for many of you, if not most of you,
if not all of you. I've never stayed up all night
praying. And so when I read a passage like this and I see an experience
so different from my own, we ask the question, why? Isn't that a natural question?
If he's doing something I've absolutely never done, why would
he do that? Why would he pray so long? And I believe it's because it is
in part relational. Jesus wanted to spend time with
his Father in that special bond of prayer. See, if all we have
is a discipline, there are so many disciplines that I cannot
do for hours on end. I do not want to do them for
hours on end. So I don't understand just doing
a discipline for the whole night through. But you know what I
do understand, and I think you probably do as well, is wanting
to spend extended time with someone you love. It's no longer than a, oh man,
I can't believe how long I got to spend with you. It's like,
oh, there's not enough time for how long I want to spend with
you. Such a different emphasis to our prayers. And we understand
that relationships thrive based on time spent together. A relationship that's constituted
entirely of three to four minutes snippets It's forever going to
be constrained by those time limits, won't it? And that maybe
is being even generous to us to say that we are spending three
to four minute snippets with our God. Jesus spends time in
prayer because in prayer he draws close to God. He didn't just
pop in to say hi. As so often our prayers are,
he wanted to be near his beloved father. He wanted the fellowship,
he wanted the strength, he wanted the help of a deep relationship
with the God of heaven. You can also tell how important
prayer is to Jesus because He's always praying before big decisions
and before big moments in His ministry. If you go and look
at the Gospel of Luke and see where it is He's praying, this
is where. He prays at the very beginning of His ministry. That
was in chapter 3, verse 21. Here, He's praying right before
He's choosing His 12 disciples, His 12 apostles. Later on, he's going to pray
at his transfiguration when Moses and Elijah appear to him in chapter
nine. Before his crucifixion, he's going to pray for his disciples,
and then he's also going to take the chance to pray for himself.
Jesus is regularly praying in this gospel, and he's regularly
praying at the most important points of our gospels. I imagine your brains and your
hearts are well ahead of me on this, but we just ask that obvious
question again. Do you think there are any lessons
we are meant to learn here? Do you think there are any lessons
for us in the prayer life of our Savior? You bet. You bet there are. Prayer was
regular for Jesus. Prayer should be regular for
us. If Jesus prioritized prayer,
Do we think we can neglect it? Do we enjoy some advantage over
Jesus so that we can ignore what He needed? No, no, we absolutely do not, do
we? The answer is obviously no, yet so many of us struggle with
this, don't we? So many of us struggle with a
prayer life like Jesus. Just the regularity of it is
hard to us. Prayer is not a regular priority
in our lives. We pray sometimes and we pray
in some ways. I'm just gonna assume something
here. I am actually going to just grant that your conscience
probably convicts you about your prayer and your daily life. It
seems to be universal. Christians consistently stand
convicted by their conscience of the lack of prayer in their
lives. The way that their prayer life
looks and feels like so much less, like something almost altogether
different from the kind of prayer that Jesus seemed to practice
and his apostles would then go on and preach. I'm actually just
going to grant that conviction. And because I believe that conviction
is there, I'm going to not hammer you on this one. I'm not going
to dwell on a point that I'm pretty sure you guys agree on.
So I touch lightly here for the moment. Let us all be reminded
that almost without a doubt, prayer should have a more regular
place in our lives. We also learn that prayer should
be a means of fellowship with God, a means of fellowship with
God. See, it's not just some ritual.
And that's what we've often slipped into thinking is that it's just
some cold bear ritual. No, but in prayer, we should
be drawing close to our heavenly father. In prayer, we're actually
investing in our relationship with our heavenly father. In prayer, we are establishing
that relational rhythm that leads to a deep relationship with our
heavenly father. Prayer is a precious privilege,
and it's a special opportunity for us to draw close to our God,
to enjoy our God, to grow deep in our relationship with our
God. Jesus teaches us also that prayer is a necessity, a necessity,
not an option. And so you think of it again
like this. If Jesus seemed to think of prayer as necessary
for him, what is it for us? If it's necessary for him, it's
like desperately necessary for us. It is a necessity in our
lives. The Bible paints this picture
of us as being totally dependent upon God. totally dependent creations
who constantly need their God, whether it's for their daily
bread or their daily breath, they need their God. That attitude
is supposed to inform our prayer life. When we recognize our need,
when we see that we are in fact desperately needy, and then we
go to God like the beggars that we are, God is glorified. In contrast, if prayer is this
casual option to us, where's the glory for God in that? Hey,
I'll see you when I see you, God. We'll catch up later. We
will pray like transformed people when we become convinced that
we are in fact utterly helpless and dependent upon God for anything
good. It will transform our prayer
lives. See, where our prayer life isn't like the Bible, isn't
like what the Bible puts forward, it means that somewhere along
the line, we have failed to believe something about ourselves or
something about God. I mean, we've started believing
lies like we are autonomous, we're gonna make it through this
day just fine on our own, even if we forget to pray to the one
who upholds all things by his will. We started to believe that
prayer doesn't actually have much to do with our relationship
with God. I listen to sermons, I read some Bible, and I can
just skip the prayer part because the prayer part's really not
that important for where my relationship is. We started to believe that
God doesn't care that much about prayer. We started to believe that God
doesn't do that much through prayer. A call to prayer, brothers
and sisters, a call to prayer, it is not simply a call to discipline. It is a call to faith. It is a call to stop going your
own way and then begin to trust that God is truly our heavenly
father and God truly does want to be with his beloved children.
It's a call to trust him, not what the world says about our
lives, but him when he says, you utterly need me. You are so dependent upon me.
You have no hope without me. It's a call to faith to say,
yes, Lord, I believe you. So I come to you in prayer. And if prayer still sounds like
this overwhelming and difficult task, I want to remind you that
God doesn't just give us the model for prayer. He gives us the ability as well.
Never lose sight of the ways that the gospel has enabled you
to live in ways you never could before. The gospel gives us the
ability to pray that we never had before. When Christians pray,
God helps them. Who can forget those beloved
words in Romans 8? Likewise, the spirit helps us
in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought.
but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep
for words. And he who searches hearts knows
what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes
for the saints according to the will of God. Good news to struggling
praying people. For so many of us, prayer is
a convicting topic because prayer is just a glaring area of failure. Prayer displays our weakness
in particularly bold colors. But God always knew that we were
weak. God always knew it. God was never under the illusion
that he had taken in a strong people. He knew that we were
weak. So God not only gave us the privilege
of prayer, he gave us the Holy Spirit to enable us to pray.
Even when there are no words sufficient for the prayer we
need, He is there interceding for us with groans too deep for
words. For those who have been too weak
to pray faithfully, this is the good news. Our God will even
help us to pray. Jesus prayed. And after Jesus
prayed in this passage, Jesus went on and chose his 12 apostles,
those disciples that he raised up to even more service to the
kingdom. See, we said earlier that Jesus
would pray before big decisions. Here, in this moment, he is about
to choose the 12 people who will advance his church on earth.
12 from all of the peoples of the world. He's going to choose
12. The advance of the gospel starts with these people. They will plant the churches.
They will disciple the next generation. They will face powerful enemies.
They will preach to the lost. These are important people he
is choosing. These are going to be the ambassadors
of the king. This was a big decision Jesus
was making and he stays up all night praying for it. Now these
are important people, but I don't want you to think for a second
that they're anything different than ordinary people. They're
important people, but they are ordinary people. The text doesn't
mention in any way that the apostles were superheroes. And that's
how we like to picture them. They were different from us,
cut from a different cloth. Superpowers. These were ordinary men. Ordinary
men with ordinary careers, living ordinary lives. And that was
the way God wanted it. You imagine if you, for some
weird reason, were given the task to assemble a team to go
and save the world, who would you pick? The ordinary? No. You're going to go and look for
the bravest, the wisest, the best. You're going to go look
for your A-team. God doesn't need our A-team. God is glorified when he shows
that he has no need for humanity's best. He will accomplish glorious
things through ordinary people, and that's how he wants it. He
will work salvation through the weak. He will conquer the powers
of the world through the small and through the insignificant.
This is how he established his church. And this is how he continues
to work today. God is doing his all important
work today through ordinary people. And if you are a child of God,
that means you. Ordinary, just like you. That's who God wants to work
through. It is so easy to slip into thinking that our lives
do not matter. Our lives feel so painfully ordinary. Our daily tasks feel so unimpressive. We look at ourselves in the mirror
and we look at our skills and we look at our giftings and we
look at ourselves and we can't help but concluding that we really
don't look like much. And we take all that ordinariness
and then we conclude that that means that what we are doing
is unimportant. And that is wrong. That is a wrong perspective. And I want to encourage you because
I think this is something we put on our shoulders. If you
are doing what God has called you to do, you are doing the
most important thing that you could do. The value of our lives
is not found in doing what we think is amazing. The value of
our lives is found in faithfully following God and the calling
that he has for us. The impact of these apostles
was not going to flow from the strength of their character or
their amazing abilities. The impact of these apostles
flowed from the one who chose them. The impact of these apostles
came from the God who used them. It wasn't about them. Our lives will be no different
when we walk in God's plans. whether that's in a home in a
suburb or in a jungle in Africa, when we walk in God's plans,
we can know that we will have God's absolute best for us. When
we walk in God's plans and we follow him faithfully, we know
that he will use us to the absolute maximum and all according to
his perfect wisdom. The God who condescended to become
an ordinary man also used ordinary men to build his church. And
the God who built his church with ordinary apostles also chose
to use ordinary you. Ordinary is not the enemy of
importance. Although maybe ordinary is an
enemy to our self-importance. Christian, if you are a child
of God, you are an ordinary part of an extraordinary plan. In our passage, as Jesus picks
12 ordinary men, he is at the very same time advancing his
extraordinary plans for salvation. And his plans involved picking
men who would persevere until the end and take the torch of
faith into the darkness of the world. And his plans also involved
picking the one who would betray him and betray him to his death. Jesus picked 11 faithful men and one traitor, Judas Iscariot. And the traitor was no accident. The traitor was no accident.
The bigger plan of Jesus, this plan that he's advancing and
working out, it was not merely to build an organization. He came to die. Even when he
chooses his disciples, Jesus is stepping one step closer to
his death. This passage and this gospel
as a whole tells us of our praying Savior. And our praying Savior
reminds us of the precious privilege of praying to God. It's absolutely
precious. but yet it's a privilege we so
often take for granted. And this passage also tells us
of a savior who advanced his extraordinary gospel through
the lives of ordinary men. Our savior's glorious pattern
is to work wondrous things through seemingly insignificant people.
This was the way he worked back then, This is the way that he
is working now. See, when you leave church today,
you're going to step right back into seemingly ordinary lives. But I assure you, your life is
woven into the glorious plans of our Savior, glorious plans
to save the lost and to heal the broken. So embrace the ordinariness
of your calling and know that your Savior is working extraordinary
things all around you. Let's pray. Our Father, our extraordinary Father, We
praise you who works through ordinary people, through ordinary
means, through ordinary jobs, through ordinary conversations. We can't even fathom how big
your plans are, especially when we consider that you know us
by name and you are working in our lives specifically. Our God, you are glorious, and
your plans are glorious. We pray that you would help us,
help us to see your plans unfolding all around us, and help us to
embrace what your plans are for us. Whether that feels ordinary
or extraordinary, we know that it is from you, and that is good.
And Father, help us to pray. We are so weak. and we pray that
you would help us in our weakness. Even tonight, tonight may we
pray with the urgency that our Savior modeled. May we pray as
those who are drawing near to a heavenly Father who loves them.
May we pray like it matters. We ask this in the name of our
praying Savior, Jesus Christ, amen. We hope you've enjoyed
this message from Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. To
receive a copy of this or other messages, call us at area code
775-782-6516 or visit our website gracenevada.com.
Praying & Choosing
Series An Exposition of Luke
| Sermon ID | 121315174836 |
| Duration | 30:58 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Luke 6:12-16 |
| Language | English |
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