In this fourth week of the 2024 edition of my series, “PRAY Like Jesus” looking at the Lord’s Prayer, today’s theme is yielding to God in prayer.
While God does answer our prayers, sometimes the response isn’t a simple “Yes.” Praying for God’s will to be done might mean accepting that our will won’t be done.
Today’s Scripture readings are Proverbs 3:1-8, Psalm 85, and John 15:1-8. This sermon is adapted from my sermon on March 9/10, 2019. The discussion on meditation vs. prayer draws on this article from Amy Julia Becker in Christianity Today.
Here’s the livestream from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio.
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Grace to you and peace from God our heavenly Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Last week, Micah discovered speed limit signs, so if you ask him, he can probably tell you that on highway 43, you can go 70 miles an hour, but only 45 here on highway 33. He also likes stopping at every street corner to read the roadsigns and see what road we’re on.
There are some other road signs, though, that he’s still learning. It’ll be a while before he needs to know how to drive, so it’s ok.
One of the signs on the trail we walk on is an upside-down red triangle, which he knows means yield, but it’s a little tough to explain what yield means. I think I’ve tried to explain it as “a yield sign means we need to let others go first.”
I bring that up because the final letter of our P-R-A-Y acronym for prayer is “Y” for yield.
In the last 3 weeks, we’ve talked about praising God, which is saying thank you and acknowledging God as our source of life.
Then we talked about repenting, saying “Sorry” to God for all the things we’ve done wrong, turning around when we’re going the wrong way and asking for God’s forgiveness.
Last Sunday, we talked about asking, because Jesus invites us to bring all our cares and concerns to God.
Today, we’re talking about yielding our will to God’s. I said last week that asking was the hardest part of prayer for me to talk about. Well, yielding might be the hardest to actually do.
Martin Luther explains the lines “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” by pointing out that God’s kingdom and God’s good and gracious will come “without our prayers, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come about in and through us.” (Small Catechism)
God’s not going to stop working in this world because we stop praying. We don’t have that kind of power. But when we pray, we’re asking for us to be a part of God’s work, asking God to come in and change our lives. We’re opening ourselves for God to work on us.
Prayer is all about recognizing that the relationship between us and God is not equal. Praising means paying attention to the marvelous things God does; repenting means admitting we are captives to sin in need of a Savior, and asking God for help means recognizing we’re not God.
For me to pray, I have to acknowledge I’m not in control, and I like to be in control.
Sometimes I think people are reluctant to pray because it feels like it might be a waste of time. What if no one’s listening? What if I’m just talking to myself?
And it’s true, there’s no way to scientifically prove anyone’s listening when you pray, so there’s an element of trust and faith involved. It’s a valid objection for some people.
For me, though, I think questioning if God is listening is often just as much a way to disguise that if I were to pray, it would mean accepting that God’s answer might not be what I want. Actually taking my concerns to the Lord in prayer means I have to let go of them.
I’ve looked it up, and when you’re driving, a yield sign is technically an indicator that you must prepare to stop if necessary. When God answers no to a prayer, yielding means I need to accept that, to be prepared to stop if that’s not God’s will.
Praying for thy will to be done means accepting my will might not be done. We’re praying for God’s kingdom to come, not our kingdom, and God’s kingdom might not look exactly like my kingdom.
In fact, I hope and trust it doesn’t! God’s priorities are not the same as our priorities—and we’re the ones who are supposed to change.
NT Wright (in The Lord and His Prayer) points out in some religions, the goal is for “our desires to be taken away or annihilated,” to try to be at total peace, transcending everything in this world.
But that’s not what Jesus says to pray for. Instead, as we’ve just prayed for God’s will to be done, “it asks for our desires to be satisfied in God’s way and God’s time.”
We’re praying not just for earth to become more like heaven, but for God to prepare our hearts for heaven, for the Holy Spirit to make us more like Jesus in this world.
Proverbs 3 tells us to trust in the Lord with all your heart, rather than relying on our own insight and understanding, and I’ll say, trusting in God sounds good, but I tend to be rather fond of my own insights.
God’s perspective can be awfully challenging. Going against our own instincts of self-preservation to help our neighbors?
Giving up money I’ve worked hard to earn to give it to someone else when I don’t know if they really need it, or what they’ll do with it? Praying for people who attack me instead of attacking them back?
Defending people when the gossip turns against them instead of going along with the crowd? It’s a lot easier to rely on our own insight, to follow our own paths. Being wise in our own eyes is easy; turning away from evil is hard.
Yet God calls us to yield and follow in all our ways, to write our loyalty to God on the tablet of our hearts.
So I wonder, what do you need to let go of to yield to God?
Which of your priorities is God calling you to change? What path are you on that you need to prepare to stop and check in with God to make sure you’re going the right way?
We end the Lord’s Prayer with, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
There’s debate over whether Jesus actually said that part because the oldest copies of the gospel don’t have it.
Scholar Philip Harner (in Understanding the Lord’s Prayer) says that although Jesus himself may not have included the doxology when he gave the Lord’s Prayer to the disciples, there was a common Jewish understanding that a prayer would end with an expression of praise to God, so Jesus would have expected his followers to add something like this doxology we have, and it’s been part of the prayer for centuries.
It’s one final reminder that praying is all about God. Everything belongs to God. Everything we have, everything we are, our hope for the future, all belongs to God. The kingdom, the power, and the glory belong to God, not to us.
That focus is one of the differences between prayer and meditation. In meditation, you’re trying to center yourself, to clear your mind, to simply be in the present moment. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not prayer.
Meditation is about turning inward; prayer is about turning outward. Prayer is not just about silencing your inner thoughts by letting them go; prayer is giving your praises, needs, concerns and whatever else is on your mind over to God.
Meditation is about attending to yourself; prayer is about attending to God and God’s relationship with you. Meditation techniques can be wonderful for praying, but prayer always focuses on talking with God.
When you pray, you’re focusing on God’s relationship with you, on God’s love for you. Jesus says he is the vine, and we are the branches.
For our lives to bear good fruit, for our lives to have purpose and meaning and make a real difference in this world, Jesus says we need to abide in him. If a branch gets cut off from the vine, it withers and dies. Apart from me, Jesus says, you can do nothing.
One of the ways we live that out, of course, is through being part of a church, Christ’s body on earth. Church membership is about accountability and supporting one another.
It’s about recognizing that we can’t do everything on our own; we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We abide in Christ together, in community. We do God’s work most effectively when we work together in Jesus’ name.
We pray for each other, giving of ourselves to support the needs of others, neighbors in our congregation and people we’ll never meet. One of our presiding bishop’s catchphrases is that we are church together for the sake of the world. Church is not about us; it’s about our neighbors. We’re here for the sake of the world God loves, not just for ourselves.
We come together week after week, bringing our prayers to the foot of the cross as we submit our wills to God, praying for God’s work to be done in and through us, asking God to lead us.
Next week, we’ll be talking about the other half of prayer: Listening to God, and we’re going to be doing something a bit different in worship and exploring some creative ways of praying with interactive prayer stations, so I hope you’ll be here next Sunday.
We continue with our hymn of the day.