If most of us are being honest, we likely consider prayer to be a weak point in our spiritual lives. We find it hard to make time to pray; we find it unproductive in a world obsessed with hurry and productivity; we feel guilty for not praying often enough, and yet when we finally set aside the time to do so, we find ourselves distracted or confused, not sure how to proceed. Rather than serving as a life-giving connection to a redemptive, loving, and restorative God in the midst of a broken world, prayer becomes a chore or a bore or a guilt-riddled religious game. We often find ourselves, as Jesus’ earliest disciples did, wondering how we can begin to pray. Join us as Midtown as we wade into the challenging waters of prayer, exploring the way that the Psalms teach us authentic, genuine prayer, and how their model can provide us structures for how we begin to relate to and know God more fully in our own lives today.
Listen as Pastor Clint introduces many of the hurdles we face when we enter into prayer, and then explores Psalm 20 and the practice of intercessory prayer.
Sermon Resources:
1. Interview with Justin Rosenstein on social media: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
2. “We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.” -Ronald Rolheiser, "The Holy Longing: The Search For A Christian Spirituality"
3. “If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer. Intercession is a way of loving others…it is selfless prayer, even self-giving prayer. In the ongoing work of the kingdom of God, nothing is more important than intercession.” -Richard Foster, "Prayer: Finding The Heart's True Home"
4. “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” -Karl Barth
5. Christine Caine and A21: https://www.a21.org/
6. News of "AmericaFest" at Phoenix church: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/the-growing-religious-fervor-in-the-american-political-right-this-is-a-jesus-movement/
7. “This way of praying was an antidote against a way of believing that vests power in a person to provide ultimate security and success…The king could not, in any separated and independent way, be the basis or content of trust.” -James Mays, "Interpretation: Acts"
8. “Leave your plans in man’s hands and they get manhandled.” -Chance The Rapper, "Child Of God"
9. “God has dignified humanity with causality.” -Blaise Pascal
10. Story of Tyler and healing of Van from "Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools," by Tyler Staton
11. “Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the way of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current forces. Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present. History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors.” -Walter Wink, "History Belongs To The Intercessors"
