Prayer for the Battle
September 29, 2024 Speaker: Pastor James Wychers Series: All Things United in Christ
Topic: Prayer Passage: Ephesians 6:18–20
SERMON INTRODUCTION
“There are two things a preacher can talk about that pretty much makes everyone feel guilty. What are those two things? Prayer and Evangelism.
I know that as soon as I start talking about those things, we start feeling guilty. And interesting, we have three verses this morning and they deal with both of those. So that's kind of where we are and that's where God has us here.
We all perpetually feel like we, at least to some degree, fail in these areas of prayer. We don't pray enough. We don't pray like the Bible calls us to pray. Evangelism, we don't speak enough about the Lord, and we know that we should, so we persist in this state of guilt about these things. Now regarding prayer, I have a very paraphrased quote that I heard, I heard John Piper say this, this is my paraphrase of what he said. But regarding prayer, he says, many people see prayer like a call to the butler to come and fluff my pillows, okay? Many people see prayer that way, to get things that make me more comfortable. But he says, prayer's more like a combat radio used to call in support in the middle of the fight.
That's really more of what prayer is to be. You see, this morning, guilt is not my goal. My goal is never to make you feel guilty, and no matter what we do, that's really not helpful. If the Spirit does it, so be it, and we have to deal with that, if the Spirit does that. But my goal is to show how we might approach prayer differently this morning.
How we might find it more practically appealing to us and therefore be drawn to it kind of from the heart more. The problem I think that we have is we try to avoid needy situations. We try to do the thing that puts us in a better situation, a less needy situation, a less dependent situation, and therefore we don't depend on prayer because frankly, we don't need to depend on prayer. Just look for that as we go.
In the last few weeks, we've seen that the real battle of the Christian life is a spiritual battle. That we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. But as it says against the powers, the cosmic powers, the rulers of the world, the spiritual forces of evil, it says in the heavenly places. The weapons opposed to us are schemes of the devil. They're flaming darts of the evil one, as we saw last week. They are mainly lies, deceptions, and falsehoods.
The battlefield is our minds, and the battlefield is our hearts. We’re called to apply God's armor and use spiritual weapons, which we already possess through our union with Christ and our relationship with Christ. We possess those, and it's a matter of using them. So this morning we're going to look not at another piece of armor. This is not another piece of armor. It's an urgent and necessary spiritual practice that enables us to use the armor, and we'll see how that works.
Our primary claim this morning is that prayer is the urgent necessity that effectively engages the weapons of battle in the Christian life. Prayer here is specifically related to the needs of the spiritual battle.”
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