In this episode, we discuss the importance of prayer in our daily lives and how it can influence our relationship with God and the world around us. Through the story of an elderly widow and her pursuit of justice, we illustrate how persistence can lead to divine intervention. This conversation also touches on various types of prayers to avoid and the importance of maintaining a sincere and humble attitude when approaching God. Plus, get insights on how to weave prayer seamlessly into every part of your day to unlock its full potential.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Your Life. Today, we’re getting into a sermon that I had the honor of giving at Agape Kingdom Fellowship. And this was on what I consider to be a surprisingly effective program. prayer strategy. I think you’ll be able to get more out of your prayers if you pray them with this strategy. That’s a little bit of a sales pitchy type introduction there. But this is going to be a sermon on kind of nagging God, almost nagging God. And we’re going to see what the Bible says about nagging God. And I think we’re going to see from the Bible that there’s a, that God actually, he kind of wants us to nag him. And we’ll get into that a bit in this sermon. And that should be a lot of fun. Hey, I’ll see you guys on the other end. I want to tell you guys today a story about a woman who was wronged. She was wronged. This woman, she lived in a city and she was wronged, but it wasn’t just that someone sinned against her, but they actually committed a crime against her. And I’m not going to get into what that was that he did to her, but what she did, and she was an elderly lady, she was a widow, and so what she did, she did what a lot of law-abiding citizens might do, and she went to her government, she reported the crime, and she asked for help. So she asked for help and she demanded justice, right? And so she’s a widow who isn’t really able to stick up for herself. So she needs help from the government. So she went to the government and she asked for help. She asked the government to provide justice. And as most governments are, her government was very bad and did a very bad job providing justice. And so what she did was she went to this judge and she pleaded to this judge and asked, judge, please administer justice to this criminal. And the judge, he just wouldn’t help the lady. He just wouldn’t help her. Not because he hated the lady or because he loved the criminal. He was just a very lazy judge. He was a judge who never should have become a judge. He didn’t fear God. He didn’t love his country. He was just some guy who happened to become a judge. And so he didn’t fear God. And so this helpless old widow comes to him for help. And so he’s sitting there and he’s thinking, you know, I could either help her or I could do nothing. And between doing something and doing nothing, doing nothing is a lot easier. And so if you’re a lazy judge, you’ll opt to do nothing. And that’s exactly what this judge did. But this elderly widow, she had no choice. She needed the help of the judge. And so what she did is she went persistently every day, and she kept nagging this judge, kept saying, you know, judge, I need your help. I need your help. I need you to administer justice. She kept going to this judge and asking for help and pestering him. And then after enough time, sure enough, the judge, he said, you know what? Well, I don’t fear God. I don’t love this lady. I don’t love my country. But just to get this lady off of my back, I’m going to help her and I’m going to administer justice because he was sick and tired of it, of just having her complain to him. And so she got help. And so what’s the moral of this story? The moral of the story is to continually seek help, even when it seems like it’s not being given, to continually seek help. And, you know, dare I say, it’s like the squeaky wheel gets the grease, or dare I say, that the Karens of the world kind of get their way. And so ask for help consistently and help will be given even if you have a bad judge. But now let’s have a little alternate ending to this story. And let’s pretend like the judge was a good judge and see how that might have gone. Well, an elderly lady shows up and she says, hey, judge, good judge, I have been wronged and I need your help. What might the judge say? He might say, okay, who wronged you? How can we fix this? Where is he? I’m going to teach him a lesson. I’m going to help out. I’m going to be eager to help. And he would be chomping at the bit to help if he was a good judge, right? He’d be eager to help. And then if she continued in asking, in petitioning for help, that judge, if he loved her, if he was a good judge who loved his city, he would continue to help her. And she would receive a lot of help, not just in this area, but in many areas as well. Now, this story of this terrible judge, I have to admit that I’m a little bit plagiarizing this story, but I think it’s okay because I’m plagiarizing it from Jesus, and I don’t think he’ll mind too much. And he told this parable of this corrupt judge who was petitioned by this woman, and then he eventually gave in, and he relented, and he helped her. And so I want to go through this parable together. And I don’t think we have slides today. I know the projector’s up. We don’t have slides, and so you guys are gonna have to actually turn to your Bibles. I don’t know, we’re going old-fashioned here with this one. But this is found in Luke chapter 18, and this is one of the, I would say, probably neglected parables of Jesus. A lot of people have the famous parables and then the more neglected ones. I would say this is a neglected parable. And so I wanna read this together with you guys today. This is Luke 18, 1 through 8. Now, there was a widow in that city, and she came to him saying, “‘Get justice for me from my adversary.'” He would not for a while, but afterward he said within himself, though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. So he’s saying, she keeps nagging me. I don’t want to be nagged. I’m going to help her. Then the Lord said, hear what the unjust judge said, and shall God not avenge his own elect who cry out day and night to him, though he bears long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. So the message that God is trying to get at here, that Jesus is telling us, is that we should be consistently going to God in prayer. It should almost be like we’re nagging God continually, God help me, God help me, please help me, God, please help me, right? And so it’s interesting, this pestering lady in the story, she’s not like put up as like, oh, she complains a lot and that’s bad. No, God doesn’t view it that way. God uses her as the example for how we ought to treat prayer. We ought to be going to God continually and in prayer. In fact, I want us to reread verse 1 again and focus carefully on what Jesus does and then his motivation for what he does. So in the first half of the sentence, we see what he did. In the second half of the sentence, we see why he did it. So Luke 18.1, then he spoke a parable to them. So what did he do? Well, he spoke a parable to them. And why did he speak the parable? Well, the second half of the sentence, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart. Two weeks ago as a church, we were discussing why we need to continually be in the word of God and how when we read our Bibles, that is how we allow God to speak to us. And that’s kind of like the divine email system for how we can talk to God. But we touched on it just briefly that prayer is, is the flip side of that. So reading our Bibles is how God can talk to us. Prayer is how we can talk to God. And today I want to urge the church to have a continual focus and a renewed focus on prayer. And in liberal Michigan, as Michaela loves to say, they have a slogan, which is vote early, vote often. And AKF, we have a better slogan, I think, which is pray early, pray often. And so that’s why I want to focus on here today a little bit. And why is that? Well, because prayer is a powerful thing. I believe that prayer is the most powerful tool that we have. It’s not our only tool, but I do believe it’s our most powerful tool. And it’s one that we should be using every day, every single waking hour of every day. When we wake up, we should be praying. When we’re getting ready for work, we should be praying. When we’re driving to work, we should be praying. When we get to work, when we get our coffee, when we are talking to people at work, when we’re coming home from work, when we’re alone with our families, when we’re alone by ourselves, we should always be praying as much as we can. We should spend so much time in prayer that we accidentally pray in our dreams. A lot of people, they have sinned so much that their sin carries over into their dreams. We should be doing that, but with our prayer. We should be praying so much that in our dreams, we accidentally pray. Now, there are a few types of prayer that the Bible warns against, and so I want to cover these very briefly, but I’m keeping this part short intentionally, because typically when we fall into errors about prayer, the error that we fall into is not praying enough, and so I don’t want to accidentally have people say, oh, well, Dominic didn’t want me to pray like this, so I’m not going to pray, right? Never say that. You’re not allowed to say that. That is not the point of today’s message. if you ever do find yourself in a situation where you think, hey, this prayer maybe isn’t a godly prayer, what you should do is pray differently, not skip your prayer. So three different types of prayers that the Bible warns against. One is prayers of revenge. A second is prayers of hypocrisy. And then third is a prayer of showmanship, of like trying to pray so people think you’re so wonderful. I’m not going to spend too much time discussing these for reasons I’ve already covered, but I will cover them very briefly. Prayers of revenge, right? Think of how the disciples, they saw the Samaritans being wicked, and they, you know, they said, hey, Jesus, should we pray to God, to heaven, to rain fire and brimstone down on Samaria? And Jesus rebuked them. In And when his disciples, James and John, saw this, they said, Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them just as Elijah did? We’ve been studying Elijah. That’s a lot of fun. But he turned and rebuked them, being Jesus rebuked them for this, and said, you do not know what manner spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village. So Jesus rebuked this revenge-oriented prayer. That’s not a good prayer. Another type that we should be careful of is prayers of hypocrisy. So Isaiah 115 says, “…when you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.” So think of an abortionist who’s a Catholic and he attends a Catholic church and he prays, God, God, please bless me. Please bless my family. Please help me become more like you. You know, God’s not going to listen to that prayer. He has blood on his hands. Those prayers are not going to get him very far. He can definitely have a prayer of, God, I’m so sorry. I’ve wronged so many. I’ve murdered. I’ve killed the innocent. And please forgive me. And God would definitely answer that prayer. But that’s a prayer of repentance, not a prayer of hypocrisy. God does not like hypocrisy. And then finally, God doesn’t like to be manipulated, but finally then prayers of showmanship. Matthew 6, this is the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon of all time. Matthew 6, 5 and 7 says, And when you pray, you should not pray like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. Verse 7. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. for they think that they will be heard for their many words. So don’t have prayers of showmanship. Again, we see kind of what they do and then why they do it. So what do they do? They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets. That’s what they do. And that’s not inherently wrong, right? Praying in public isn’t inherently wrong, but it’s why they do it that’s wrong. Why do they do it? That they may be seen by men. Prayer is how we talk to God. It should not be how we talk to men. Think of Daniel and how Daniel prayed very publicly. That was an act of courage which God blessed because the king commanded, hey, no prayers to Yahweh. That’s illegal for a month. Daniel said, you’re going to stop me from praying to my God? I don’t think so. I’m opening my blinds. I’m praying where everyone can see me. And God blessed that. So that was a prayer of courage, not a prayer of like, oh, look at me and how good I am. So those three types of prayers, don’t pray those ways. Don’t pray prayers of revenge, hypocrisy, or showmanship. With that said, today I want to focus on why we should pray, when we should pray, and how we should pray. And starting with why we should pray. And I have three main reasons for why we should pray. Number one is to change us. Number two is to change the world. And number three is to have a relationship with God. And so I want to assure you that prayer really does work. As I said earlier, it’s our most effective tool. James 5.16 says, “‘Confess your trespasses to one another “‘and pray for one another that you may be healed.'” Now get this, “‘The effective, fervent prayer “‘of a righteous man avails much.'” So it doesn’t just avail, it avails much, right? It works very well. Now, interestingly, James gives the stipulation here that it’s the prayer of a righteous person, right? So if you’re being wicked and having a prayer of hypocrisy, that’s not going to get you very far. But I have a prayer of a righteous person that will avail much, right? But how do we be righteous? How do we have these effective prayers? Well, as we covered two weeks ago by reading our Bibles, that’s one way. There’s many different ways. But also, ironically, through prayer. 1 John 1.9 says, “…if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So if you want to have effective prayers, be righteous. If you want to be righteous, have prayers. If you want to have good prayers, be righteous. And so you get it, it’s kind of circular, right? Now, luckily this isn’t like one of those cases where it’s like, okay, if you wanna get a job, you gotta have 10 years of experience. But to have the experience, you gotta get the job. It’s not like that because we can start praying immediately. The process of sanctification is a lifelong process. It’s a slow process that we go through and God sanctifies us. And luckily we can start that immediately. We don’t need 10 years of experience praying and being righteous to start that. God does not hand us that excuse on a silver platter to not pray. But let’s see here. Okay. And it is cool to see that it’s kind of an upward spiral, right? You pray more, and you become more righteous. You become more righteous, your prayers do better. Your prayers do better, you become more righteous, and so on and so on. But prayer doesn’t just change us individually, it also changes the whole world. It changes our family, it changes our church, it changes our country, and it changes the whole world. I want to think about several times throughout the Bible when prayer changed an entire nation. Think of the prayers of young Solomon asking for wisdom, and his wisdom blessed his entire nation. Now, unfortunately, Solomon stopped in prayer, and his nation was cursed because of his sin, but that initial prayer, it blessed his nation beyond measure. Think about the prayers of Nineveh’s king and how he… had them fast, and he had them put on sackcloth and ashes, and he had them pray, and his nation was saved. Your prayers, they don’t just affect you. They don’t just affect your immediate family. They affect the entire world. They affect all peoples of all the world. That’s why we’re commanded to pray for all peoples of the entire world, right? Because our prayers are effective, and they work, and that’s why we’re supposed to pray for everyone. 1 Timothy chapter 2, one through four, says, therefore I exert first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence, for this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of truth. So our prayers, we’re supposed to pray for all people because prayers can affect all people. We’re not like the Calvinists who think that prayer doesn’t actually do anything and they just do it anyways and consistently. We believe that prayer can affect people and so that’s why we pray. But I like to think of prayers that seemed minor that have huge, huge impacts. And I think of the prayer of Hannah. If you guys recall, Hannah was Samuel’s mother, and she was barren, and she prayed to have a child. And then she was given Samuel. And Samuel would later go on to anoint David, who the line of Jesus came through David. And so it’s cool, Hannah’s, dare I say, selfish prayer, her petitionary prayer, was a prayer that helped, that benefited the coming Messiah, which saved the entire world. So even our prayers, even when they seem selfish, they benefit the whole world, which is really cool. Even when it doesn’t seem like it’s that big of a deal at first, prayer really works in really huge and effective ways. Now, A lot of people think of God as like this statue who’s unaffected and unmoved by his creatures, but he’s not, right? Think of Hezekiah and how Hezekiah was sick, and God said, I’m going to kill you. You’re going to die. And Hezekiah said, please, God, extend my life. And that touched the heart of God, and so he extended his life, right? our prayers, they don’t just affect us, they don’t just affect the world, but they also affect God, which I think is really cool and really beautiful. I think of when God wanted to destroy Israel for their sin when they were leaving Egypt, and God went and implored God, said, God, please don’t destroy your people. Please remember your promises. Please love your people. And God said, okay. I was going to destroy them, but you prayed and And now I’m not going to destroy them. By the way, some people think I’m overstating my case here. Psalm 106.23 says otherwise. Therefore, he said that he would destroy them had not Moses, his chosen one, stood before him in the breach to turn away his wrath, lest he destroy them. So Moses touched the heart of God, and it’s like, how could that be? But it’s because our relationship with God is just that. It’s a relationship. It’s a two-way dynamic. We need to speak to him, and he needs to speak to us. That’s why we read our Bible, so he can speak to us, and that’s why we pray, so we can speak to him. There’s the lie out there that we can’t affect God, which is just that, it’s a lie. Of course, we can bring him joy through worship and prayer, and it’s crucial that we do so. So those are our three reasons for why to pray, to change us, to change the world, and to have a relationship with God. But how about when to pray? So why we pray, we get that, but what about when should we be praying? that question, when should we pray? My answer probably won’t surprise you. Maybe it will. But we should pray in the morning. We should pray in the mornings. In the morning, we should pray, eyes open, head still on the pillow. You should say a prayer right then and there. Psalm 5.3, my voice you shall hear in the morning, O Lord. In the morning, I will direct it to you and I will look up. But okay, you know, sure. In the morning, we got to pray. What about like in the evening? Don’t we get some time off in the evening to pray? That we don’t have to pray, right? Because we prayed in the morning. Well, Psalm 141 too, let my prayer be set before you as incense, the lifting up my hands as the evening sacrifice. So we’re supposed to be praying in the evening too. It’s like, okay, okay, sure. We have to pray in the morning. We have to pray in the evening. What about at noon? At noon, don’t we get like a little bit of time off that we don’t have to pray? Well, Psalm 55, 17, evening, morning, and at noon, I will pray and cry aloud, and he shall hear my voice. We have to be praying evening, morning, and noon. It’s like, okay, all right, fair enough. Sure, we have to pray in the evening. We have to pray in the morning. We have to pray at noon. But it’s like, what about at midnight, right? We’re not expected to get up at midnight and start praying, right? Well, Psalm 19, 62, at midnight, I will give thanks to you because of your righteous judgments. It’s like, oh man, I gotta be praying all the time. It’s a lot of praying. It’s like, well, okay. At the very minimum, I’m not expected to stay up all night long praying, right? I don’t have to do that. I can go to sleep, right? Well, Luke 6.12, we can look at Jesus, our example. Now, it came to pass in those days that he went out to the mountain to pray and continued all night in prayer to God. It’s like, oh man, if Jesus had to be praying all night, do I really get an excuse that I don’t have to pray all night long? But I say all this obviously tongue-in-cheek to illustrate that we should be in a constant state of returning to God in prayer, right? And it’d be nice if there was a verse in the Bible that just said, like, pray without ceasing or something, and then I wouldn’t have to hunt down all these verses and psalms about praying all these different times. Actually, we do have a verse like that. 1 Thessalonians 5, starting in verse 16. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. So pray without ceasing. That’s incredible. That’s remarkable. And so we need to be in a constant state of prayer. The enemy, he’s in a constant state of attack, so we think we can get away with praying occasionally? It’s like, no, we need to be in a constant state of prayer. And to be clear, I don’t… think that every single thought of our lives has to be in prayer, right? Sometimes you have to focus on work or cooking or you’re playing football and you’ve got to catch the ball. You’ve got to focus on that. So we don’t have to every single second of our lives be in prayer, but we should be in a constant state of returning to God in prayer, right? It’s like you’re at work and you’re busy. It’s like, are you really so busy that every 20 minutes you can’t say, God, thank you for this work. God, you’re good. God, thank you for the cross. You can say a quick two-second prayer so often. So we need to be praying without ceasing, not meaning we’re living every moment in prayer, but meaning that we’re consistently returning to prayer. Let’s see here. So when should we be praying all the time? We should be praying very often. We should be praying when we’re sad, happy, anxious, confused, concerned, scared, busy, bored, right? When we’re driving, when we’re showering, when we’re getting ready for bed, when we get up in the morning, we should be praying all the time. Even in a high, intense, stressful situation, we should be, you know, go get the bad guy or something. It’s okay to say, God, give me strength for this. And then you go on. We can be praying. We can pray without ceasing. That’s not an unachievable goal. I’m going to read that again. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. So that’s why we pray and when we pray, but what about how do we pray? How should we pray? And so that question, how we pray, there are many acceptable forms of prayer. So should we pray loudly, quietly, slowly, quickly, openly, privately? My answer is yes. Yes, we should be praying in all these different ways. Like we talked about, there’s just those three ways you shouldn’t pray. You shouldn’t pray like a hypocrite. You shouldn’t pray for revenge. You shouldn’t pray for showmanship. And today, I want to share some of my favorite ways to pray. But before I do that, and by the way, this is such a big topic. I could talk about prayer for the next two months and not get halfway through. There’s so much about prayer that’s incredible. But today I want to talk a little bit about how should we pray when we set aside very intentional time for prayer. And I’m not saying this as like you have to do it this way, but I just want to give kind of a helpful guide. And so if we could have like a model prayer, what might that look like? Well, it might look like, shocker, the model prayer. And so Jesus gives us the model prayer in the Sermon on the Mount. And I want to read that here. This is in… I believe Matthew 6. I actually don’t have the reference on my notes here. We read, And when you pray, you should not pray like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father, who sees in the secret place, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetition as the heathen do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them, for your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask him. In this manner, therefore, pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart, and we are out of time on today’s show. If you want the rest of this sermon and all of Bob Enyart’s sermons, I recently was going through a Bob Enyart sermon on where was Jesus during those three days after the crucifixion and before the resurrection? Where was Jesus? those three days. I just went through his sermon on that. It was so much fun. If you want to get all of my sermons, but more importantly and more impressively, I think all of Bob Enyart’s sermons, you can get all of those at enyart.shop, E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P, enyart.shop.com. such a resource which has blessed me so tremendously, and I think it will bless you as well. Just check out that page, enyart.shop. Check on the sermons. You won’t regret it. Hey, may God bless you guys.
In this episode, we discuss the importance of prayer in our daily lives and how it can influence our relationship with God and the world around us. Through the story of an elderly widow and her pursuit of justice, we illustrate how persistence can lead to divine intervention. This conversation also touches on various types of prayers to avoid and the importance of maintaining a sincere and humble attitude when approaching God. Plus, get insights on how to weave prayer seamlessly into every part of your day to unlock its full potential.
