23 Jan

11/4/18       LUKE 18:9-14        “OIL AND WATER”

Today we are going to look again at prayer.  I cannot stress too much how important prayer is.  It is fundamental to our faith.  This is how we talk to God through Jesus Christ.  You know how important I think prayer really is.  I often say that the only bad prayer is the prayer not prayed! Today I would like to talk about how you shouldn’t pray and how you should pray.  You might remember how I told you that when I became a Christian, I didn’t know how to pray until I asked Jesus.  He said I was doing it by asking!  This might work for other people as well.

But first of all we have to ask why even bother to pray?  After all, we have all we want.  We live in great plenty.  But it is only through our Lord Jesus Christ that we get what we need.  For example, Mark Brunner tells of a missionary doctor in Zaire.  One of her patients at the mission station died after giving birth to a premature baby.  They needed an incubator to keep the baby alive.  The only hot water bottle they had was beyond repair.  So the children gathered and one girl prayed, “Dear God, please send a hot water bottle today.  Tomorrow will be too late because by then the baby will be dead.  And Lord, please also send a doll for her sister because she is so lonely.”

That afternoon a large package arrived from England.  As it was being unpacked they found a hot water bottle under some clothing.  The girl who had prayed immediately began digging farther into the box and sure enough, she found a doll.  God had delivered.  Five months earlier God had led a ladies’ group to include both of these specific articles.  There are thousands of stories like this.  God answers prayers and we should praise the Lord for that!

We can even see this is a more scientific sense.  Duke University ran a study a few years back on 393 coronary patients.  The doctor in charge of the study was not a Christian but he asked this question in the study, “Does prayer have any impact on a patient’s healing?”  People were asked to pray for half of the patients every day.  They were given their names and their conditions.  The other half had no prayer partners.  The results were amazing.  Recovery rates, hospital stays, length of medication and type of procedure needed were all better for the group that had prayer support.  And the people being prayed for didn’t know they were being prayed for.  I have heard so called scientists throw dark shadows on these kinds of studies but if you really look closely at them you will see something that we have always known.  Prayer works all the time.  I don’t need some scientific study to tell me this.

As we begin today’s reading we find that Jesus is talking to a very special audience.  These are the people who are confident in their own righteousness.  These are the people that look down on others.  We don’t have to look very far to find this in the United States today.  I have attended churches that look down on people if they haven’t accepted Jesus in a dramatic fashion.  There is nothing wrong with accepting Jesus like this.  This is how I came to Jesus.  But there are other ways also.  We can slowly grow into Jesus.  We can accept Him when we are children.  These other ways aren’t acceptable to these people.  We have to do it their way.

We have churches where you can’t be considered a Christian if you don’t speak in tongues.  If I’m not mistaken, all Christians have been given at least one gift and that gift may not be tongues.  It could be teaching, helping, or discernment.  I just don’t understand how these churches can be so narrow and limiting.  Jesus is for everyone and we are not to limit what He can do or where He can be or who He can be with.  I could go on and on with this but I think that you can see what I mean.  And it is the same thing that Jesus is talking about in this Scripture.

He tells a parable of two men going to the Temple to pray.  One is a Pharisee and one is a tax collector.  Let’s talk about the Pharisee a little first.  Over the centuries of hindsight, we have painted these people to be very bad guys.  The fact is that they were highly esteemed in their culture.  They were looked up to because of all their knowledge of the Torah, which is the Jewish Bible.  These people had regular jobs just like we all do.  They would work all day and study well into the night.  Often times their Torah was still in the oral tradition so it was memorized.  And the Pharisees knew it, studied it and were sought after for clarification.  People looked up to these men.  Unfortunately, they had it wrong, not unlike many people and churches of today.  This is especially true of many bishops and church leaders!

And we see this as we read on here.  In some Bibles the language gets a little unclear.  But in the original language it says that he stood up and prayed to himself.  The custom of the Pharisees was to stand in the middle of the temple with people all around and pray.  This way they could set the example for the others.  And maybe in some cases this is a good thing.  There is nothing wrong with a pastor standing in front of you and leading you in prayer as long as that prayer is to God and not me.

Because that is what the Pharisee did.  And then he showed everyone to pray like this as he said, “I am not like other men, robbers, evil doers, adulterers or even this tax collector.  I am better than all of these guys.  I am here in the middle and everyone looks up to me.  As a matter of fact I even fast twice a week and I give a tenth of all I get.”

Let’s think about this for a moment.  Is there anyone here today like this?  This man was something else.  According to the Jewish custom, they only had to fast once a year and here is this man fasting twice a week.  Not only that but the Jews were only required to tithe certain parts of their income, and this Pharisee is tithing on all that he gets.  Obviously, this guy was some sort of super prayer hero.  He is carrying out the law to the extreme.  He was indeed better than all the rest.

We fall into that trap also.  I hear all the time about some good natured ribbing between the Methodists, the Lutherans and the Catholics.  I know that none of this is serious.  But what about that church down the road a bit that does everything so different?  Are they indeed Christians?  And they look at us the same way.  They think that we cannot possibly be Christians because we worship in a more traditional way or on the internet.  They believe that they are superior and we are a mission field.

But we also look down on the religions, like Islam, that don’t believe in Jesus.  I mean, if they don’t believe in Jesus then they are obviously not at our level.  This is probably true.  They are probably above us if this is our way of thinking.  I think that this is one of the reasons we fail so many times in our trying to win people to Jesus.  We fail to understand them.  We often times think that all we have to do is present Jesus and people will be converted.  This is not the case.  If I present the Gospel in English to a man in Africa who cannot understand me, chances are pretty slim that anything will happen.

We need to understand and minister to them first.  We have talked of this before; hungry people cannot hear us until they have been fed.  There is probably not a non-believer in the world that needs to have a pompous Pharisee stand on a raised platform and tell them how good he is.  This is not how Jesus works.  This is not how Christians work.  When we see other denominations do this to us in a serious fashion, and this does happen right in your own area, we should respond in a way that is different, a way that is Christian.
The question now is ‘how do we respond or better yet, how do we pray?’  Let’s take a look at the tax collector.  The audience that is listening knows that this is the bad guy.  He was a Jew who worked for Rome.  He was looked upon as a traitor.  He would collect a certain amount of taxes for Rome and anything above that he kept for himself.  Basically, he was an extortionist.  He was hated by all.

But look what he does.  He stands off to the side where no one will notice him.  He felt so bad that he couldn’t even look up to heaven.  Often in those days you prayed looking up and not down.  He was in such anguish that he beat his chest as he said this seven word prayer, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  What powerful words!  Just out of curiosity, is there anyone here today who is a sinner?  One of the hardest things that we have to do is to admit that we are sinners.  It is tough to say that I did such and such wrong.  Or I have been thinking these bad thoughts.  In this world that is controlled by the dark side, these things are hard for us to do.  But they are necessary.  We are sinners, each and every one of us, and we need confession.

This tax collector was the worst of the bad and he knew it.  He was at the end of his rope and he was calling out to Jesus.  In our society where we put so much emphasis on being independent, this is hard to do.  It is this man’s sincerity that gets the attention of God.  It hurts him so much to do this that he has to beat his chest.  He cries out for mercy.

People are crying out for mercy all around us.  In the global sense, we see countries expelling Christians all around the world.  If they aren’t expelled, they are tortured and killed.  Bad things are happening to Christians just because they believe.  Many of these other world religions are scared of us.  They are scared of us because the dark side owns them and he knows who has won the war.  Therefore he has to get rid of us in order to win more battles.  They don’t know it but they are crying out.

On the national level we can look any place and see this.  Our young people are trying this and trying that so that they can find themselves.  But they are also being bombarded with the message that they should definitely not try Jesus.  They surely don’t want a generation to come to Jesus because it would shut down a lot of industries like television, the movies, advertising, newspapers, and even government.  As elections grow closer we can see this.  It is a shame that Republicans have to hate Democrats and Democrats have to hate Republicans.  This has led to several shootings!  Our election process has become a sick, sick joke!  That is not how our country was founded.  We should be able to disagree and still love one another.  Anyway, all these people need mercy.  We need Jesus injected into our political process or we will continue to hate and kill the opposition!

Even on the local level, it is pretty easy to see people who only talk the talk and don’t walk the walk.  Jesus Christ is looking for people to come to Him in sincerity.  He is looking for people to come before Him in total honesty.  We are sinners and we are to confess to Jesus.  If you have never done this before, please do it today.  This is the season of the harvest festival.  If someone comes to the Lord today, all the angels in heaven will stop and celebrate at the harvest.  What a great feeling that would be to know that heaven has stopped to celebrate you.

Life with Jesus is full of dichotomies.  Jesus came to this world as a servant/leader.  You learn this morning that you are to humble ourselves before God so that you may be exalted. Life in Jesus is not a worldly life.  It is a life of surprises, ups and downs, and satisfaction.   When you quit pointing to yourselves and start bowing at the feet of Jesus in total surrender, then you begin a life of freedom.  This is how He works.

Try this sometime.  Take a jar or bottle and fill it half full of water.  Then fill the other half with cooking oil.  Put a cover on this and shake it up real good until it is all mixed up.  Then set it down.  Within a minute or two, you will see that the water and the oil have separated.  The reason has something to do with chemistry that I cannot explain.  But they will always separate.  Pride and humbleness are also like this.  They do not mix.  You cannot be both at the same time.

When you go out into the world this week, let’s quit trying to fool ourselves and the world.  Drop the pride and come to Jesus in genuine prayer.  Separate yourselves from pride like the oil and water.  When you are honestly talking with Him, He is sure to answer.  God loves you so much that He sent His Son to die on the cross for you.  You don’t deserve this love.  Acknowledge yourselves as sinners and let God’s love flow over and through you.  Let it permeate you in every way.  Jesus loves you so much that He will take care of you forever, especially when you don’t deserve it.  Thank you Jesus for showing us how to pray and thank you for first loving us.  Let’s pray.