[this transcript created with AI - apologies for any errors]
If you want to take your Bibles and turn, we're back in Mark, Mark chapter 1.
And the title of this sermon is Why Pray?
I practiced it on LBC a couple of weeks ago, so hopefully it's better today.
That question, why pray?
is one I've thought a lot about in my life.
Like, why does it even make sense to pray?
If we believe in a God who knows everything, a God who's in control of everything, He doesn't need any information from me, and He doesn't need any help from me, like, what's the point of praying?
And yet, throughout scripture we have both examples of people praying and God responding to that prayer,
As well as like direct commands to pray or encouragements to pray, 1 Peter 5 says, cast all of your anxieties on him because he cares for you.
And the book of 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, it says, pray without ceasing.
So God wants us to pray.
So then if we know that, and if we know God and love God, we want to be obedient to God, we should want to do what he tells us to do.
That's a good thing.
But so often we don't pray.
So what are the hindrances to our prayers?
And I think two hindrances to praying are, number one, that we just don't actually think it's important.
We know in our head it's something that we should do.
We know that God says to do it.
And we maybe even feel guilty about not doing it.
But in the end, when the rubber meets the road, like in that moment, in that situation day to day, it doesn't seem like the most important thing to do.
And so we don't do it.
And number two is even if we feel like we should, and we know we should, maybe even we think we need to, but we don't actually believe that we're heard.
And I think the text this morning before us addresses both of those things, whether we need to pray and whether we are heard when we pray.
So Mark chapter 1, just to kind of situate us back where we are in the text, Jesus has just called his first disciples Simon and Andrew and James and John in verses 16 through 20.
And then last week we spent verses 21 to 34 spending one Sabbath with the Savior, just one.
day hanging out with Jesus as he goes into the synagogue and he starts to teach and the people are amazed at the authoritative way in which Jesus speaks to them.
He's not speaking with suggestions.
He's not talking like the scribes do.
He's not talking with just helpful pithy sayings for life.
He's speaking with the authority of God himself.
He speaks authoritatively and the people are in awe.
And then to add to his
This is a
They inform Jesus that Simon's mother-in-law lays sick in bed and Jesus goes and with just a touch he takes her by the hand, he lifts her up and she is completely well.
The fever is gone, she has her strength restored, she's able to help serve and make dinner probably that night and so Jesus,
displays his authority in his teaching, he shows his authority over spiritual and demonic powers, and he shows his authority over the human body, over created matter itself, which should indicate, if people are paying attention, if he has authority over these things, may he not be the creator of them.
So that's where Jesus is, and his popularity then starts to spread.
If you're familiar with the other Gospels, Jesus is partially moving into Galilee, coming to this region, because he's already become so popular in Judea.
He's becoming well-known, and at the same time as John the Baptist is being persecuted and thrown into prison, and the Pharisees are hearing about Jesus amassing followers,
He decides to go north to Galilee to kind of like get out of the pressure cooker that is Judea.
But now his popularity starts to swell in Galilee as well.
Verse 32 says, That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons.
And the whole city was gathered together at the door.
And so we see that as Jesus starts to show who he is, people start flocking to him and pressing in on him.
And then, I mean,
Just to think about this from Jesus' perspective, like, I mean, we had a long day as a family yesterday, and all I wanted to do this morning was sleep in, right?
I did sleep in a little bit, and I want to go home and take a nap now.
I'm tired.
I peopled out, and Andie's like, you're not even close to as peopled out as I am, but there's
That's reality, right?
Like, even if we're spending time with other people that we enjoy, doing things that we like, like, spending time with a lot of people can be very, very exhausting.
And so we would think that Jesus, as he recovers from this Sabbath day where everybody is pressing in at the door, I mean, probably they're having to close the door and people are still wanting to come in and like, no, actually, it's time for us to sleep.
We would expect to find Jesus taking us
You know, maybe sleeping until nine the next morning.
But instead we read verse 35.
And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place and there he prayed.
So our first point is this.
Why pray?
Pray because you need God.
Pray because you need God more than anything else, more than anyone else.
You need God.
It's very interesting that we find Jesus in this situation praying.
And when we think about who Jesus is, I mean, yes, we see very clearly in Mark's gospel that Jesus is a man.
And we read in scripture that he hungered and thirsted and got tired.
But we often think of Jesus as kind of a Superman.
You know, he's the eternal God who took on flesh and dwelt among us.
He's the one who spoke creation into being.
He's the one who upholds the universe by the word of his power.
So he shouldn't ever be tired, right?
And yet, we do read of him being tired and needy.
And what he does with that neediness is he goes to commune with the Father.
Jesus, who is the Word of God, the eternal Son of God, here on earth in human flesh, when he is pressed, when he is stressed, when he needs help, expresses that need by going to the Father in prayer.
We only see Jesus pray in Mark's gospel three times.
I mean, we see it more often in the other gospels, but three times in Mark's gospel do we see Jesus praying.
There's right here, and then there's Mark chapter
6 and verse 46, which is right after he has fed the 5,000.
And at that point, we know from John chapter 6, the crowds wanted to come and make Jesus king.
The crowds are really pressing in on Jesus at this point, and he has to disappear from them, sends the disciples out on a boat across the lake, and Jesus then disappears up the mountainside to be by himself and pray.
And the only other time we find Jesus praying in Mark's gospel is
in the Garden of Gethsemane, chapter 14, verses 32 and following, before he goes to the cross.
So it's at these moments of intense pressure, intense, I don't know what the right word would be, like anxiety or just a weightiness, like life is weighty for Jesus.
And his response to that is to go pull away and pray.
Why would Jesus need to do that?
We could see why we would need to.
I don't know if we see that as well as we should, but we know if we're believers, we know we need God.
Why would Jesus need to spend that concentrated time away from everybody else to commune with the Father?
I think this does point us to just
How Jesus' human experience was on earth, that He lived life with so many of the same weaknesses that we do.
Hebrews 4 says that He was tempted and tried in every way as we are, that all of the burdens and the difficulties that we face were not foreign to Jesus.
And so here was the Son of God incarnate.
And he felt the need to commune specifically with the Father in prayer.
One of the things that we're doing in prayer, we often think of prayer just like as talking to God.
Like if you ask somebody for a definition of prayer, they'll say talking to God.
And that's a perfectly fine description of what you're doing when you pray.
But like what's underneath of that?
Why would we talk to God?
And I think part of maybe the main thing that we're doing when we are praying is we are expressing our dependence upon God as our creator.
We are acknowledging in prayer that we are not sufficient in and of ourselves to handle life, to handle the things that face us.
We need God and Jesus in his humanity had those same needs.
And so what we're saying,
What I'm saying when I spend so much of my life prayerless is that I think I am greater than Jesus, right?
That's the implication of what I'm saying.
We're not thinking it through in crass terms like that, but that's what our heart is expressing.
Jesus says out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
And we might say out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth acts.
If we are acting in a way that says, I don't need God, I'm not praying, then we're saying that we don't think we need him.
I think that's what Paul's getting at in 1 Thessalonians 5 when he says, pray without ceasing, pray all the time because you always need God.
But here with this, Jesus is actually doing something beyond just like a normal
I heard Billy Graham once describe his prayer life as like a running conversation with God.
He's like, even as we're having this interview in which he was talking to this guy, I'm praying right now.
I'm sure Jesus was communing with the Father like that, but here he even pulls away from that to pray.
So if we need God,
What does that mean?
If we need God, we need to pray, what does that mean?
Number one, I think it means that we ought to prioritize prayer over activity.
We ought to prioritize prayer over ministry activity.
And we see that in the verses that follow.
Verse 36, Simon and those who were with him went in search for Jesus.
So he got up.
He didn't tell anybody he was going out to pray.
He just disappeared, got up before they were awake and left.
And they found him and said to him,
I don't think we'd be wrong to hear a little bit of rebuke in these words.
Everyone is looking for you.
It's like Simon finds Jesus and he says, hey, all those people that were at the door last night when we went to bed, they're back this morning.
There is work to be done.
There are urgent needs.
There are people who are sick and people who have demons.
Don't you think they need your help?
Why are you out here by yourself, Jesus?
Isn't this kind of selfish of you?
to spend your time this way.
And yet Jesus does not respond to that by saying, ah, yeah, you know what?
You're right.
I'm coming.
I'm coming.
Sorry.
You know, I just needed a little bit of me time, a little bit of personal space.
No, he says, let us go on to the next towns that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.
Jesus
priority in his ministry was on preaching.
It wasn't on the healing and the casting out of demons.
Though those things are important, he was glad to do them, but they were not why he had come to earth.
He had come to preach the gospel and to die for sinners.
And so all of those other things are displays of his kindness, displays of his authority.
They validated who he was in the eyes of those who were around.
But they weren't the point.
And when in Capernaum, Jesus has become so crowded out by people seeking healing that he can't even speak to them anymore.
He can't even spend time teaching.
He pulls away and prays so that his priorities in ministry can be aligned.
He could let himself be overwhelmed by all of the things to do, the genuine needs that were in front of him.
But by pulling away to pray,
He was able to say, okay, what am I actually supposed to be doing?
Father, lead me in the right direction.
And the right direction for Jesus at that moment was out of Capernaum and into the other towns that were ready to hear him preach.
It's the same thing that the apostles do in Acts chapter six.
So in Acts chapter six, there's in the early church in Jerusalem, there's this dispute that arises between the Jewish widows and those who are, they're also Jewish, but they're
They're from other parts of Rome, the Roman Empire, where the Jews had become more Hellenized.
They'd adopted more of Greek culture.
And so these two groups in the church of the Hellenistic Jews and the more closely ethnic Jews, in the church they were saying, hey, the Hellenized Jews, their widows are not being treated as well.
They're not receiving equal portions in the distribution of the goods that the people had contributed to.
And they bring this problem to the apostles, and it's a real problem, right?
Mistreating widows is not a good thing to do, to treat people unfairly in the church, like to not be treating people with a baseline of wanting to lovingly meet everybody's needs as well as we can.
Like, that's a big problem.
But the apostles' response to that problem was not, okay,
James, you deal with this, and Peter, you take this part of the problem.
Their problem was, or their solution was, okay, we can't handle all of these needs.
If we do, it will distract us from the ministry of prayer and of the word.
And they prioritized the prayer and word ministry over the genuine needs of those widows.
And they didn't say those things didn't need to be taken care of.
They then said, okay, appoint from among yourselves deacons, servants, who will address these needs.
So the problem still got taken care of, but they said, we can't do this.
We need to, if the church is to continue to flourish and function and go forward, then the central thing that needs done is prayer and the word so that others are then equipped to address the tangible, physical needs that are present.
And the church,
That's how we should function as well.
Like the reason we prioritize in a service prayer and the word and why my attention is primarily prayer and the word is because that's what equips all of us to do the many different kinds of ministry that God calls us to.
But Jesus prioritized prayer over active ministry.
One of the most famous stories in the Gospels.
is in Luke chapter 10.
Beginning in verse 38, Luke 10 verse 38, Jesus has gone to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus.
Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.
She had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.
But Martha was distracted with much serving.
And she went up to him and said, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?
Tell her then to help me.
But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things.
But one thing is necessary.
Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Mary chooses the good portion, the one thing that is necessary.
Now, is Martha right that everybody needs fed?
Yeah, Martha is right.
She's not wrong there.
But Jesus says there's one thing that's truly necessary.
You know that food?
It's going to feed you temporarily.
But to sit and spend time with and to hear
The Words of Life from the Savior.
That does you eternal good.
So if we're going to believe and act on the belief that we need God and that we need to pray, we have to prioritize prayer over activity.
And that can be hard when we have lives that are very busy and very full.
Which means, secondly, that we have to make time.
One of the things that I have said many times and I've heard countless other people say is that I have a hard time finding time to pray.
And the fact of the matter is you won't find time to pray.
It won't just like fall there in front of you and be like, here I am.
Let's spend time praying.
You have to make that time.
This is probably true.
It seems to be true in Jesus's life 2,000 years ago.
I think it's especially true in a day and age where we find our worth often in how busy we are.
I mean, you talk to somebody, like talk to people in the shop.
How's your day going?
Man, I'm super busy.
How's your weekend going?
Well, we got a lot of plans.
It's just busyness is how we measure our worth in our society.
It's how you tell if you're a good person or not, if you're busy.
But if your busyness is crowding out your relationship with God, then even if that busyness is good and godly and wonderful things, it's missing the point.
Jesus did not allow his ministry as the Son of God on earth to crowd out time.
to pull away and commune with the Father.
We, in the end, cannot do others... I won't say that we can't do them any spiritual good, because God is able to use all kinds of things, but we will not be doing them as much good as we could if we were prioritizing our own communion with Him.
So first of all, why pray?
Pray because you need God.
Pray because you need to pray.
Secondly, pray because you're heard.
Verse 40, And the leper came to him, imploring him and kneeling, said to him, If you will, you can make me clean.
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, I will be clean.
And immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.
Now you have to put yourself kind of in the shoes of this leper.
This is a man who would have been a total and complete social outcast.
If you go to the book of Leviticus chapter 13, there's a whole array of skin diseases in the Old Testament that were considered leprosy.
I heard one person say there was 72 distinct skin diseases possible that would have been covered by this term leprosy, and some of them are as extreme as what we now call leprosy, Hansen's disease, where you lose feeling and you can
Lose whole limbs, get smashed off and you don't even know because you have no feeling there and there's still in parts of the world leper colonies.
Like it could be that extreme or it could be something where it was just this rash that won't go away.
It's a broad term.
But if in Leviticus 13, it's essentially like a diagnostic manual for priests.
And if the priest examines you and looks at the book of the scroll of Leviticus and says, yeah, you have
You have leprosy.
Your life is essentially over.
You have to wear tattered clothes.
You have to cry out with your hand covering your upper lip as you walk through the streets.
You have to cry out, unclean, unclean.
Nobody can come near you.
You can't go into anybody's house.
You can't go into the temple because any home or building that you enter itself becomes unclean.
You can't have contact with others.
You are a total and complete social outcast.
There's only two examples in the Old Testament of leprosy being healed.
Number one is when God himself gave leprosy to Moses' sister Miriam, and then he removes it.
And then the only other time it's healed is when the Assyrian general Naaman comes to Elisha, and he didn't get healed quite the way he wanted to, but he miraculously is healed of this leprosy.
And the rabbis looked at that
evidence in scripture and said, wow, there's only two, two times somebody is healed of leprosy.
To be healed of leprosy is more difficult than to raise the dead.
So essentially it just gets written off as a possibility, right?
If you have leprosy, you're done.
There are procedures it shows in Leviticus 14 for, you know, if it goes away, here's how you go through the cleansing process.
But the rabbis just said, pretty much that's not going to happen.
And so this man, we don't know how long he's been a leper.
We don't know if he was born with this condition or got it as a young child and has lived his whole life this way, or if he's got a family and he's got a wife and kids and this has happened to him later in life and he's had to leave them and go live on his own.
But we do know whatever the situation is, that he's very desperate because he would be in enormous legal trouble for approaching anybody.
And he comes and he falls before Jesus.
And says, if you will, you can make me clean.
Maybe he'd seen Jesus from afar healing, or maybe word had just got to him that this man is a powerful healer.
He has power, authority over the body.
He can heal you.
And he comes to Jesus with this word of faith.
He says, if you will, if you want to Jesus, you can make me clean.
He comes believing that his request will be heard.
And Jesus hears him.
Moved with pity, verse 41, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said, I will be clean.
And part of why I find this so remarkable in the context is because Jesus has just left Capernaum with a whole pile of people who wanted him to heal them.
And he says, no, my priority is not this physical healing.
My priority is the preaching ministry.
I'm going on to the next town so that I can keep preaching the gospel of the kingdom.
I can keep calling people to follow me.
He's left behind so many who would like to be healed and said, this is not the priority.
And yet when this man comes and falls before him in faith, Jesus is moved with pity for him.
And he says, I will be clean.
Why is that matter?
Well, because so often we don't pray because we think, and that's stupid.
It doesn't really matter.
I'm not going to bother God with that.
I had a football coach in high school who
He would, he wasn't a believer, but he would joke about prayer and say something to the effect that, you know, I'm going to save up all that praying for like when I really need it.
Like when I've got cancer or something, you know, all the things that I think about right now, like, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to bother God.
I wouldn't want to waste his time.
So often we feel like, man, the things in my life aren't that big of a deal.
The things in my life, there are so many people that have way worse problems than I do.
They've got abuse in their past, or they've got family drama that's worse than my family drama, or they're going through cancer, or you know, there's just so many things.
I don't live in a part of the world that's in the middle of war.
Like, there are so many good things in my life that I can be thankful for.
Why would I come to God with my requests that are so small in comparison?
You know what?
Your requests might be small in comparison to a lot of other people's.
But they matter to you.
And if they matter to you, they matter to your Father.
Jesus says in Matthew 10 that are not two sparrows sold for a penny.
They're teeny tiny birds.
They are meaningless in the broad scope of the world.
And not one of them falls to the ground apart from the Father.
And then Jesus says, you are worth more than many sparrows.
You have little faith.
We can talk ourselves out of praying by thinking, it doesn't really matter.
God's not going to care.
You know what?
To anybody else in the world, it might not matter, but to God it does because it matters to you and you're his child.
Psalmist says, you, you've kept all my tears in a bottle.
Are they not in your book?
There's nothing that matters to you where God's going to say, that's stupid, get over it.
He might call you to mature past caring about some things, but that's not going to happen by you retaining it to yourself.
That's going to come going to him with it.
So pray because you are heard.
Verse 42, immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.
And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once.
said to him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded for a proof to them.
And there Jesus is just saying, okay, there is this whole process laid out in Leviticus 13 and 14 for how to be cleansed or how, I mean, the priest can't cleanse you of your
of your leprosy, but if you have become clean, he can go through the process to declare you clean officially and legally.
And this is going to be a witness, a proof to those in the religious establishment, to the priest that something has happened here.
The lepers are being cleansed.
Something strange is afoot in Galilee.
There is a strange power here that we haven't seen before.
If lepers
are being cleansed.
Do this as a proof to them.
And this man is so overwhelmed.
I still haven't figured out how we should think about verse 45.
Like, is this man to be commended or just understood?
Jesus told him to be quiet just like he told the demons to be quiet.
But verse 45, but he went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread
The news so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town.
You know, Jesus says, okay, go to the priest and have this cleanness displayed.
And the guy just starts, he can't help.
He can't help.
Jesus has healed him.
Jesus has made him well.
His life has given back to him and he can't help but tell everybody about it.
He's overjoyed.
He speaks freely.
His, his lips are loose with Jesus.
And it came because he believed that Jesus would hear his prayer.
Do you believe that God hears your prayers?
So often the encouragements in scripture are, you have not because you ask not.
Ask and you will find.
Knock and the door will be opened to you.
Seeking you, asking will be given to you.
Knock and the door will be opened to you.
Seeking you will find.
Whoever asks receives.
Whoever seeks finds.
But we just
We just don't think that he's going to listen.
We're afraid to get our hopes up lest they be dashed.
I wonder what like your relationship with your dad is like, if you can kind of imagine that.
And if you had a good dad who was really responsive to you and had conversations with you, like you, you have maybe some framework for this, a father who
who hears and gives good gifts.
And if that wasn't your dad, then this is kind of probably a hurdle to get past as you think about, okay, I have a father in heaven who actually cares what's going on in my life, who actually cares what's going on inside of me.
And I have a father in heaven who not only cares, but wants what's best for me.
We should pray because we need God and we should pray because he will hear us.
And it's interesting this, this passage is kind of framed by these desolate places.
Verse 35, Jesus had gone out into a desolate place to pray.
And here at the end of the passage, he is driven out into a desolate place.
He could no longer openly enter a town, verse 45, but was out in desolate places and people were coming to him from every quarter.
These desolate places that had been a place where he could go retreat and now even there the people are pressing to him, they're coming to him.
I think that's what he wants from us, to press into him.
I remember listening to the late J.I.
Packer talk about how
He was a scholar on the Puritans and he spoke about how in the Puritans writings, there was this high value on communion with God.
And for us, that just seems to be totally absent.
When we talk about our walk with God, we talk about the things that we're doing, the books that we're reading or the activities that we're involved with.
And I mean, he was talking specifically to pastors.
So guys are talking about like, how big is your church and what ministries do you have running?
And just how often do we just ask each other, like, how is your walk with the Lord?
What has the Lord shown you in his word lately that's encouraged you, that's challenged you?
What sweet communion have you had with him in prayer?
That's almost foreign language to us.
And yet that seems to be exactly what Jesus is enjoying here with his Father, is being able to pull back.
We thank you that you do care for us.
Thank you
We thank you for the gift of being creatures.
Lord, we treat creatureliness as a curse so much of the time.
We want to know more.
We want to be like God.
We want to have power over our circumstances.
And yet you've given us just our built-in, not even the sinful limitations, but just the limitations of being creatures.
And you've given that to us as a gift to be received.
Help us to receive it, Lord.
Help us to look at dependence upon you, not as some failing,
but as part of who we are meant to be.
And then help us when we do have all kinds of failings to come to you knowing that you care.
You love us so much that you sent your son to pay for our sins and you give us now your spirit to dwell within us so that we might have communion with you, that we might have fellowship with the Father by the power of the Spirit because of what Jesus has done for us.
It's in Jesus' precious name we pray, amen.
