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.