"prayer" Tagged Sermons (Page 2)
Matthew 11:5 describes Christ’s ministry as God’s final visitation, with John the Baptist cast, in Christ’s own words, as Elijah returned. The prayer of 11:25-27 is read as event-centered rather than idea-centered, rooted in what God has just done rather than in abstract truth. That whole chapter’s scope narrows, finally, to the plain invitation of 11:28: ‘Come unto me.’
The ‘holy hands’ of 1 Timothy 2:8 are read as figurative, not a posture to imitate literally, describing instead a new man free to pray and worship anywhere. What that freedom rules out, specifically, is prayer carried out in bitterness. Men are called to lead in that same praying with a humility patterned on Christ’s own.
Three distinct reasons stand behind Paul’s letter to Timothy, but the method Paul actually uses to correct him is prayer itself, not merely instruction. Paul’s own praying models what he then commands in 1 Timothy 2:8. Men are told to pray with humility and submissiveness, not simply with raised hands.
1 Timothy 2 grounds the church’s prayer in God’s own purpose to gather worshipers from every nation, not merely in personal devotional habit. Paul draws on Old Testament precedent to make that call to prayer. The sermon’s closing claim is blunt: those who actually pray die well, and lead well, in ways those who don’t tend not to.
‘Ask, seek, knock’ in Matthew 7:7 describes an access to God so astounding that, set against it, even the real access Old Testament saints had can look like almost none at all. Psalm 88, one of Scripture’s bleakest psalms, supplies the contrast deliberately. Christ’s coming did not merely improve on prayer; it changed what access to God actually means.
Prayer, this sermon argues bluntly, is in genuinely dire straits in the modern church, a crisis that goes well beyond neglect at the margins. Two principles are offered in response: Christ’s new day makes praying without ceasing possible, and boasting about how long or how often one prays is a real danger to guard against. Both principles, taken together, aim at prayer that is neither absent nor performative.
Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane is taken on its own terms here, a real and terrible night rather than a stage on the way to something easier. The disciples’ own failure to stay awake sits uncomfortably close to how easily prayer gets neglected in ordinary life. What Christ faces alone in the garden is what makes everything that follows in the Sermon on the Mount possible.
Three real questions about prayer get asked here: whether our disposition in prayer matters, whether it matters who is praying, and whether prayer actually changes anything. James’ own confidence that ‘the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much’ answers all three at once. Elijah, a man with a nature like ours, is James’ own proof that ordinary people’s prayers matter.
Christ fills the law and the prophets full with himself rather than merely keeping them, a distinction the sermon presses carefully in 5:17. Two problems commentators regularly raise about the Golden Rule in 7:12 get direct answers. Prayer, in the exegesis of 7:7-11 that follows, is inseparable from that same fullness.
Isaiah is driven to pray that God himself would awaken and act, a prayer answered across the rest of this passage. The shift from singular ‘thou’ in verse 12 to plural ‘thou’ in verse 16 marks a real change in who is being addressed. In the servant, God makes himself last, taking the lowest place, for the sake of his people.