Rogate – Pray!
John 16:23-33
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
St. John 16:23-24 “Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you. Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… Did you know that the National Day of Prayer came and went this past week? Some years it gets more publicity than others. What should we think about such a day? Well, if you go to the official website for the day, you will find a statement of faith that is disturbingly lacking in clarity about what true prayer really is. And, frankly, for the Christian – for us – we don’t need a National Day of Prayer, for the entire life of the Christian is one of prayer and service to our neighbor. Further, each and every Lord’s Day, as well as every day of our lives is a day of prayer. And, if I may be so bold, the government should stay out of the lives of Christians anyway.
The more important question and emphasis for us today is this: what does God want us to know about prayer? What does He want us to do with what we know, so that we will be, as James 1:22 says, “doers of the word, and not hearers only.”
The Jews were very familiar with prayer from the Old Testament. They knew that there are beautiful examples of prayer filling especially the Psalms. Frankly, if you really want to learn how to pray, pray the Psalms every day. In fact, there’s a chart in the front of our hymnal that you can follow for each day of the month so that you can pray through the entire Psalter every month.
We also know that Jesus taught His disciples about prayer on many occasions – with the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, with parables urging Christians to pray often and persistently, and with His own example. Jesus often sought a private place to pray. But as He, the Son of God, was about to fulfill His mission on earth (and again, our Gospel reading for today is from Jesus’ discourse on Maundy Thursday evening), there would be an important change in the very nature of prayer.
Some things, of course, would not change, like what prayer is. Praying, most broadly and basically, is simply talking to God. But a good prayer, a godly prayer, isn’t just babbling or rambling. Prayer is talking to God with thanksgiving and praise. Prayer is talking to God with a confession of your sins or weaknesses or needs. But primarily, to pray is to ask God for something. God wants you to ask Him for things.
Now, some might say, “That’s selfish. We spend too much time asking God for things already!” I would argue that we don’t spend nearly enough time praying. God is angered when we imagine that we don’t need anything from Him. He is angered whenever we think that He is unwilling to hear us or to help us in our need.
So, ask for what you need, Jesus says; that has always been the main purpose of prayer. And when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, He said, “When you pray, say, Our Father who art in heaven.” When, not if. The Lord expects His people to pray. So, yes, prayer is commanded, but we emphasize also the fact that prayer is a GET TO, it is a privilege, and it good for us.
What was about to change, though, for Jesus’ disciples – and, really, for all people – was the way in which prayers were to be offered. Jesus said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.” Now, genuine prayer always had to be to the true God. Prayers offered to idols or false gods were never valid; they were not and are not heard because they are prayed to false gods that do not exist. In the Old Testament, the Jews prayed to the true God who revealed Himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But now God has revealed Himself more fully as the one God who is three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
God is the Father who sent His Son to be the sacrifice and the Mediator for mankind. God is the Son who fulfilled His Father’s will and reigns at God’s right hand. God is the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and brings His Word to us. From this point on, people are to approach God the Father in prayer specifically through Jesus the Christ, asking God the Father to hear us in Jesus’ name. That doesn’t necessarily mean adding the words “in Jesus’ name” to every prayer. It means asking the Father to hear us because of Jesus’ saving work on our behalf and on the basis of Jesus’ intercession on our behalf. Now that Jesus has been revealed, crucified, risen, and ascended, all prayers to God must be offered through faith in Jesus who is, as Timothy wrote, “the one Mediator between God and man” (I Tim 2:5).
That is the first thing to understand about prayer, and it is what makes a “National Day Of Prayer,” even though it seems like a good idea, sacrilegious, because no nation on earth confesses that the name of Jesus alone saves. And any prayer offered to God that is not in the name of Jesus – trusting in Jesus as the one and only Mediator – is open idolatry. And gathering together with people from all different “faiths” to pray to each one’s own “god” is nothing short of syncretism, which amounts to giving the false witness that all roads lead to heaven.
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Of course, we must not fool ourselves into thinking that as long as we are praying regularly in our homes, it is basically all that God commands. To act that way would be tantamount to denying that God also commands us to worship Him and hear His word and use His Sacraments – things which fall under the Third Commandment. All these things are commanded by God, and Christians do them. But we do them not in order to earn God’s favor or the forgiveness of sins, but in the new obedience that God brings to those whom He has saved by faith in Christ and whom He is daily renewing by His Spirit.
Further, we pray because of the promise of Jesus. In our reading for today we heard Jesus say, “Whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.” How great a promise this is!!! The God who created all things, the God who preserves all things, the God who rules over all things – this God has promised to give you whatever you ask in Jesus’ name. If we fully comprehended this promise, why wouldn’t we pray?
But we don’t. We don’t because our wretched sinful nature is sluggish and cold; we don’t because the devil drives us away from prayer with all kinds of excuses and distractions; we don’t because the world gives us so many “better” things to do with our time.
Yet over all these things that stand in the way of prayer stands the wonderful command and promise of Jesus, “Ask!” And, “whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.”
Well, what are we to ask for? There are seven things Jesus teaches us to ask for, seven requests, seven petitions; we know them as the seven petitions which are included in the Lord’s Prayer. First and foremost, God would have us pray for His name to be holy among us, for His kingdom to come, and for His will to be done among us. Then He would have us pray for daily bread – for all everything we need to support this body and life. Then we are to pray that God would forgive us our trespasses, with the understanding that we, too, are to forgive those who trespass against us. We are to ask God to lead us away from temptation, and to deliver us from evil. Every single need that we have in life falls within the scope of these seven petitions. So, study and review your Catechism, first the Small, then the Large, and see how much light God has shed on prayer in Martin Luther’s summaries.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for specific things, too. Jesus tells us in Matthew 9:38 “to ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” Paul commands us to pray for “kings and all who are in authority” (I Tim 2:2). We are to pray for ministers of the Word and for all the churches, for all the saints of God, and for one another. And James tells us to pray for wisdom (James 1:5).
And when we don’t know what else to pray for, we need not despair, for that is yet another reason why God has sent down His Holy Spirit to dwell with us here on earth in this Christian Church. As Paul writes in Romans 8:26-27, “Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”
Why will God hear and answer these prayers? Not only because He has commanded it; not only because He has promised it, not only because we ask for things according to His will – things He Himself wants to give. God will hear and answer these prayers because, as Jesus says in the Gospel, “the Father loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.”
“The Father loves you.” In this verse this is a different word in Greek for love than the one in John 3:16 where Jesus says “God so loved the world,” etc. That word is agape, the self-giving, self-sacrificing love that only properly belongs to Jesus. But here in our Gospel, it is the word phileo, which is the friendship kind of love, the love of mutual benefit, the love where there is something likable in the other. What is it that the Father finds likable in you? It is the very thing His Spirit has worked in you – a love for Jesus. It is a love that notices and declares, “This one loves My beloved Son. This one believes in Jesus, whom I sent to be the world’s Savior. Of course I will hear! Of course I will help!” Isn’t that amazing? You couldn’t love or believe in Jesus by nature. But God’s own Spirit has worked faith and love in your heart, and now God sees that love and hears your prayers and will help you in your need.
This is the gift of true Christian prayer. Use it, dear fellow redeemed; use it each and every day, and do so for all the reasons just mentioned. You know the true God; you know how to approach Him. He has commanded you to pray. He has promised to hear and answer your prayers. He has taught you what to pray for.
And He has tied it all to Jesus, the beloved Son of God, in whose name and because of whose work we are privileged to come boldly before the Father, asking Him as dear children ask their dear father. For again, when we pray in Jesus’ name, we are praying to and coming before the God who has given His only Son, Jesus, who fully and completely took to Himself all of your sin, and then died to pay for those sins, thereby setting you free from sin to serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. This is the God to whom we are privileged to come. And this is the God who then comes to you in, with, and under these elements of bread and wine which are Christ’s real and true body and blood, for your forgiveness and your strength to continue to live your life to His glory and for the good of your neighbor.
Thank God for His gift of true Christian prayer!
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
