The Key to Prayer 2: Confidential Prayer

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

It’d be interesting to listen to all the mothers teaching all their children how to say their
prayers, because it might be surprising how similar we all were. Ours were – God bless Dad, God
bless Mom, my brother was called Desmond, so God bless Desmond and then, we had a dog whose name was
Chummy and so, we blessed him as well. And then we did, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon the
little child,” and then we did the Lord’s Prayer, and depending on who was in form that night, my
brother or I got to the end first. But we always did say our prayers; and I don’t know what yours
were like but, probably most of them are more or less the same. And so, I’d like to start there by
asking you, do you say your prayers now? Do you pray now? And I put it that way because it’s so easy
for us to just bluff each other in a service like this. Of course we all say our prayers. I am
asking you, do you pray? Do you pray every day? And probably a lot of us would say, “No, we don’t
pray everyday. Yes, I do pray, but I don’t pray every day.” And I’d ask you, why you don’t pray
every day? And probably you would answer, “Well I really don’t feel the need to pray every day.”
Then I’d say to you “Well, when do you pray?” Maybe too many of us would say, “Well, we pray when
our son has cancer or when our mother is dying or when we lose our job or when lightning strikes our
neighbor’s house.”

And so really, what we are saying is, we pray foxhole prayers. Foxhole prayers are prayers that we
prayed when we were in the army, when we were in a foxhole and the bombs were falling all around us
and we cried out for fear because we realized we were no longer in control of the situation. And the
fact is that most of us tend to pray when we feel the need to pray and of course that’s not the
basis of prayer at all. If we pray in that sense, you can hardly even call that prayer and probably
we know that ourselves. We are not very aware of whom we are praying to, we are just crying out in
desperation. “God help me, help me, save me.” And we are still preoccupied; you might even say it’s
just we are preoccupied with our own safety, our own security. And of course it’s not really prayer
at all.

In fact real prayer doesn’t actually need to have an overwhelming sense of need. It doesn’t even
have to have a great sense of reality. And I know you may rebel against that, you may say, “How
could I pray if I don’t feel that God is there? Or if I don’t feel some tremendous reality, prayer
is meaningless unless you feel something. That’s why at times I like to go to an old church
somewhere because you can kind of feel the presence of the ages and all the saints. Or that’s why
at times I like to be out on a lake in quietness because I can kind of feel the presence of God.”
And you remember, several Sunday’s ago, loved ones, we shared that that finally drives you away from
prayer.

When you pray looking for a feeling, or thinking that you are only praying when you feel the
presence of God, eventually that destroys you, eventually that drives you to distraction. And I
don’t want to bore you by referring to it again but you remember C.S. Lewis, when he was a little
guy at boarding school, would pray a prayer and then he would think, “Have I really realized that
prayer? Did I really pray it the way I prayed it last week? Did I really-really pray it? Do I feel
that God heard my prayer?” And he says, “Eventually prayer became a self-torturing experience for
me. I wore myself out, because I was so preoccupied with praying and then trying to examine if I’d
really prayed.”

And the truth is, you don’t need to have any feeling to really pray, you don’t. I know it goes
against our society’s emphasis on existential experience and our society’s emphasis on, are you
enjoying yourself? Was it a good service? Was it a good prayer time? Meaning really, had you an
enjoyable experience?

I know it goes against that, but the truth is, you don’t need to have feeling to pray. All you need
— and I just point you to it very quickly, is in Matthew 6:6, it’s very simple. It’s just what
Jesus says,” But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is
in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” All you need is faith to believe
that, that’s it. You don’t need to feel it; you don’t need to feel the Father’s presence, you just
need to go into your room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is in secret. And your
Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.

If I could speak to the husbands; you know that your wife and your children need certain things, but
just you go to God about it. You don’t need to share great things with them; you don’t need to share
things with all kinds of friends. Go to God, privately. It’s far better actually, that it’s just
between you and him; it really is — far better. In a way, when you share this thing with someone
else, it isn’t quite that it frustrates or vitiates the prayer, but you better not. And you ladies,
you know there are certain things your men need; certain things your children need; just go in
privately to God and ask him for those things. And keep on asking. I think a lot of us spoil our
prayer times because we pray for 3 weeks about something, no result comes, then we go to the pastor
or we go to some counselor or we go to some book to find out why we are not getting an answer.
That’s a shame, don’t you see? Don’t you see what God thinks when he looks down upon us? And here we
are going to somebody and saying, why doesn’t God hear me? Don’t you see how that breaks confidence
with God?

See, God wants you to trust him. He wants you to believe that he is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek after him. He wants you to just come to him and pray, and pray to him alone. There
is an awful lot, loved ones, that we lose in prayer because we are performing something that we
think will work magic, instead of going quietly to our Father privately and asking him for something
and keep on asking. George Muller was originally a German who preached for years in England, and
built orphanages for thousands of children through faith in God providing the money. He built them
with thousands and thousands of pounds that God brought into him in answer to his prayers. And do
you realize that at the end of his life which was a long life, he died at 92 a week after he died; a
man received Jesus as Savior for whom Muller had been praying for 35 years?

And you see what it says: Here is a man, who was mighty in prayer. Who had seen thousands of pounds
and many orphans brought up in answer to his prayers, but he too, had people that he was praying for
year after year after year and he saw no change in them but that didn’t stop him. He knew what Jesus
had said about this unjust neighbor that kept on being asked by his friend for a loaf and even
though he hated to get up, yet because the other person kept on asking, he got up and gave him the
loaf of bread. And Muller and all the men who have experienced God’s answers to prayer have believed
that. So loved ones, don’t spoil your prayers by either looking for feelings, feelings, and
feelings; am I having a feeling of God’s presence, or by looking for answers in your time.

God expects you to believe him and that means, you keep on praying and you keep on praying until you
die, absolutely confident that God will either answer your prayer or will change your prayer. He’ll
either answer it or will change your prayer. He’ll either give you greater insight into it or he
will give you an answer to the prayer. But what is needed is just a little confidentiality to tell

the truth. A little confidentiality between you and me and God; and less of this looking upon prayer
as a game that we are playing or something that we do right. “Am I holding my mouth right? No I am
not. Should I close my right eye and wink my left eye?” No, don’t get silly about prayer. And you
may say, “But Pastor, aren’t there right ways to pray?” But God is going to show you those, you know
that. You know how silly it is to work out how is the best way to approach your Mom, after you’ve
been absent from her for a year or months. You don’t go to somebody else and ask, how should I
express my love for my Mom, you do what comes naturally. It’s the same with our dear Father. He
actually is dying for a direct line between you and him; and all the time you are putting things in
place. So many of us were brought up in Catholicism and we said all the priests were in a place
between us and God. That’s just an excuse, you know. We are always putting things between ourselves
and God.

We are trying all kinds of books, all kinds of methods, all kinds of techniques, all kinds of
counseling, all kinds of advice, all kinds of other people’s successful ways — don’t, just go to
God. Yes, he knows you, he knows how foolish you are, he knows how stupid you are, he knows how
inexperienced you are, he knows all that. But he will respect you, if you do what Jesus said. Go
into your closet and just pray.

Now, I would point out to you that you know that is true because you had prayers answered when you
knew less about God than you know now, you know that. And we all know people who are surprisingly
and ridiculously irreligious people. And yet we hear them say, “Oh I remember when God answered my
prayer for my mother.” Because God does; God answers an honest heart that really believes in him. So
to pray, you need to just believe that God is there and you need to be real with him.

Now, you remember last day, we pointed out the difficulty that you have in this next verse. It’s in
Matthew 6:7, Jesus is elaborating on how to pray and telling us not to make a game of it or kind of,
a verbal maestry or magic, abracadabra of it, but to be real.

Matthew 6:7, “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do” as if you thought God
would be influenced by your eloquence — “for they think that they will be heard for their many
words. Do not be like them.” And then here is the problem, “For your Father knows what you need
before you ask him.” “For your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” Then why ask him? I
mean, why waste our time? If our Father knows what we need before we ask him, then why ask him?

Well, a good enough reason is of course, God tells you to ask him, that’s good enough. He says “Ask
and it will be given you.” So that’s enough reason. But you remember, the other reason that we
mentioned last day is this amazing fact. You have free will; God has given you free will. You are
free to believe in God or not to believe in God. You are free to accept him or you are free to
reject him. God has given you free will, loved ones and really with all the teaching of Skinner (an
American philosopher) on determinism you know that you still have free will. Yes, you are influenced
by your heredity and environment, but finally, you can act against that. You can do whatever you
want. God has given us free wills. When he said, “Look, you can eat of any tree of the garden, but
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, do not eat of it or you’ll die” — that is a command
that is given to a person who has free will.

If we didn’t have free will, God wouldn’t bother giving us a command. Because there is no point in
giving a robot a command, because you know he won’t be able to do anything that you don’t allow him
to do anyway. You give a command only to free will agents and God has given each of us free wills.
And even though God knows what you need in your life at this present time, God will not be able to

bring it to you unless you ask him, he won’t. You can protest; you can say “Look brother this is
game playing. If God sees that I need this change in my life why doesn’t he just go ahead? Isn’t he
a good God? Why doesn’t he just change me, whether I ask him or not? If God sees what I need in a
job why doesn’t he just give me that job whether I ask him or not?” Well, do you see why? It would
cease to be of any importance what you wanted in life, if God did that, do you see that? It would
cease to be of any importance what you wanted. If God just brought you the job that he knows you
should have, you wouldn’t have any free will. If God just changed you as he sees you need to be
changed, it wouldn’t matter what you did. Do you see loved ones, it would make fun and foolishness
of free will and God would end up at the end of this life with a bunch of robots that were the
result of his overruling sovereign action in your life.

In other words, God cannot do even what he sees needs to be done in your life unless you ask him.
Otherwise he makes you a robot. Now, you may say, but doesn’t he rain his rain on the just and the
unjust? I mean, he rains whether we ask for rain or not, he rains the rain whether I get up this
morning and ask for my heart to beat, he keeps my heart beating. Aren’t there certain natural laws
that he keeps operating for all his creatures? Yes. In order to give us the opportunity to accept
him or reject him, he has given us natural life. We needed natural life in order to be able even to
choose. And so, God has given us certain life actions and certain life grace that we have, whether
we ask or not. But whenever you approach the redeeming grace of God, whenever you are dealing with
friendship with God or acceptance with God or rejection of God with wanting to live with him forever
or to live in hell forever, then free will governs your life and God will not do any thing that you
do not ask him to do.

In other words, if you say “Look, he knows I have bad temper, why doesn’t he just take the bad
temper away?” Because he requires your will, the activity of your will to want that with all your
heart; then he will take it away. But he will not make you like himself unless you want to be made
like him. And that’s why he says you must ask him. Even though he knows what you need, you must ask
him for it. Otherwise he is not able to do it.

You remember we looked at the end of the study last Sunday at one of the verses that shows that very
clearly. It’s in Ezekiel 36:37. And it occurred at the time in Israel’s history when they had of
course, just been put into exile and their numbers had decreased tremendously and God looked down
and saw that they needed to increase in number if they were to survive so that his son Jesus could
be born into the world. And yet even though we knew that, you see what he says in Ezekiel 36 and 37,
“Thus says the Lord God: This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to increase
their men like a flock.” Now God saw that what they needed was to be increased in number and yet he
says, “This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to increase their men like a
flock.” So God knew they needed to be increased in number, but he would not act apart from their
wills. He required some little human being here on earth to ask him to do that, among the people of
Israel. And so it is in your own life and in the lives of your friends and your relatives.

God knows what they need, but he cannot act against his own will. That is, he cannot kill people, he
cannot send cancer to people, he cannot destroy people and yet, he will not act apart from your
will. And unless you or I ask him to do something in regard to changing people and making them like
himself, he cannot do it.

Now there is another reason loved ones for it, and I’ll show you it in Acts 9, and I think you’ll
just see the sense of it immediately as we read the historical record. It’s Acts 9:5 “And he said,”
that is Saul you remember, on the road to Damascus. And Saul said, “Who are you, Lord?” He was

struck blind you remember, “And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter
the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’” And then look at verse 10. “Now there was a
disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, ‘Ananias.’ And he said, ‘Here
I am, Lord.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Rise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire in
the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus named Saul; for behold, he is praying, and he has seen a man
named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.’ But Ananias
answered, ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to thy saints of
Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon thy name.’ But
the Lord said to him, ‘Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the
Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake
of my name.’ So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said,
‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that
you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ And immediately something like scales
fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, and took food and was
strengthened.”

Now do you see it? Ananias wouldn’t have touched Saul with a 40 foot pole; because Saul was a
persecutor of the Christians and Ananias was scared to go near him. But God’s plan for Paul was to
receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit through the hands of an ordinary person. And the only way
that could take place in a way that gave glory to God and brought Saul into a right relationship to
the Father was if Ananias was free from fear to lay his hands on Saul. In other words, there are
things that God intends to do in this world; but he intends out of his great graciousness to allow
you be part of them. And you can only be part of them if you know what to do when. Now just reflect
for a moment; the Israelites at the Red Sea; Pharaoh behind with his army. God, just by sovereign
act without speaking to anyone at all, suddenly moves back the water. Yeah, the Israelites might
know to go through, but can you imagine the absolute chaos that begins to take place in their lives,
as they saw, for no reason at all, the laws of nature apparently being superseded? Would it have
brought glory to God? They wouldn’t have known why it happened. They may well have said that —
people even say today it was just a strong wind that dried up the water.

In other words, glory came to God and it was a revelation of God only because Moses was praying to
the Father, and God told him to stretch forth his staff over the Red Sea, and the sea would move
back. Glory comes to God only when it is seen by men and women to be God’s sovereign act. If God
acts apart from any of us knowing then it is attributed normally by human beings to chance or to
Satan or to just the absolute unreliability of the laws of nature. Do you see it’s the same with the
Mount Carmel situation? If the pagan priests had set up the altar and the sacrifice, and then God by
sovereign act had just sent fire down without any explanation from an Elijah who had prayed and who
had talked with him, it would not have brought glory to God. It would just have seemed an arbitrary
effect of nature.

Now, it’s the same, loved ones, in our lives. Your friends and relatives, your colleagues at work,
whom God wants to touch and he wants to do works in their lives; but no glory or witness will come
to God if God by sovereign act just changes them. Unless one of us is able to see what God intends
to do and ask him to do it, so that we know God answers that prayer unless that happens, glory does
not come to the Father. And of course the other side is, that quite apart from God’s glory, it is
his great graciousness and kindliness to give you and me the opportunity to work together with him,
to work with him. God gives you the opportunity to work together with him to bring this world under
his control and under his will. And that’s why he requires you to know what he is doing.

Do you see how messy our own system is? I mean the way you and I operate? We are looking at our
situations at work and we are thinking up, what do we want God to do? We are looking at the
situations in our families and we are thinking “What would God want to do in this situation? And
what do I think he should do?” And we end up praying what we think God should do. Now can you
imagine the reality of that? The Father is here, and he has given us a can of paint and a brush, and
we are looking up and we are saying, “Well, you want me to paint the chair? The chair, I’ll paint
the chair. No, he didn’t want me to paint the chair. Oh, paint the lectern. Okay, I will paint the
lectern. Do you want me to paint the lectern?” We are going around suggesting to God all kinds of
things that might be good for him to do. Don’t you see there is an easy way to solve that?

Lord, what do you want me to do with this paint? That’s it. We have husbands and wives, we have
friends and colleagues and children all of whom need God’s touch in their lives and our Lord God
knows what they need. All we have to do, is find out from him what they need and then ask him to do
that. That’s it; just find out from God what he intends to do in their lives and then ask him to do
it and he will immediately act; that’s it, loved ones.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? He is the Father that has made the whole world. He is the Father that
has made all of us. He knows what we need. It’s just silliness for all us little tinkers, all us
little good tryers, all us miniature fleas, to be saying “Well, should you do this, should you do
that, should you do the others?” It’s silliness. The Father knows, and he will tell us if we will
stop making all the suggestions and we will start spending some time listening to him and finding
out what he wants to do. I just point you back to that comment of old Bismarck. Didn’t they call him
the Iron Duke? He was just a dictator, you remember, responsible partly for the unification of
Germany, back I suppose in the 19th century and Bismarck was just, to all intents and purposes, a
brutal military tyrant.

And yet you remember someone said to him, what’s the difference between a statesman and a
politician? And he said, “A statesman is one who listens for the footsteps of God.” A statesman is
one who listens for the footsteps of God — and you know we attribute to Winston Churchill some of
that ability; we call it a sense of history. And we attributed it to Harold Macmillan and we
attributed it to some extent to John Kennedy. We said, they were men who sensed the way history was
moving and actually the way Bismarck put it was they sensed the way history wasn’t working. The way
God’s story was moving; they listened for the footsteps of God — that’s our job. The Lord God has a
will for your life and mine and for each of our friends and each of our colleagues and he is able to
begin to bring it about if we will find that from him what he wants us to pray for, and then we
pray, that’s it.

Next Sunday, I’d like to try to talk about how we do that. Let us pray.

Dear Father, we bow before you. Lord God, we know that there isn’t a bird that flies, but it is in
accordance with your design and your plan. There isn’t a little insect that crawls anywhere in the
vast hinterland of Africa, but you know where it is crawling, and you know how many steps it has
taken. Father, we know that you know all things. And we realize that you know all about us, and all
about our friends, and that there isn’t a problem that they have that you have not already seen a
solution for. And so Father, we bow before you now. And we ask you Lord to begin to show us what we
are to ask you to do. We ask you Father to show us what you want to do in our own lives and the
lives of our friends and colleagues. So that we may take part with you in your great plan to bring
us and everyone for whom we pray, under your will, and into the plan that you already had for us
from the beginning of the earth. Father, we thank you, that prayer is so simple, and we thank you

Lord that you are God, and you are in charge and you are the boss and the Lord of all. And we bow to
you and acknowledge that and commit ourselves to praying in accordance with your will. Now the grace
of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of
us, now and evermore. Amen!