SPROUL: Anyone who's ever listened to me lecture for
any period of time, quickly realizes that I love the Old Testament Scriptures, because
we find in the pages of the Old Testament narratives that I find gripping and poignant
and moving because they involve real live people in real life struggles as they seek
to develop their personal relationship with God. And one of, I think, the most moving stories
that we find in the Old Testament is the story of Hannah, the mother of Samuel. We remember that in the second chapter of
the first book of Samuel we read the song of Hannah that is so closely compared with
Mary's Magnificat in the Old Testament, and there're all kinds of parallels between those
two women. But the song of celebration and of joy that
Hannah sung in the Old -- sang in the Old Testament was in response to God's answering
her prayer. And what we're going to be looking at in the
next few sessions is a Christian approach to prayer, and I want to do this from a practical
perspective because I'm acutely aware that many people in the Christian world struggle
with this whole matter of prayer. And the -- people carry a lot of guilt around
with them because they feel that they have not been proficient and consistent in their
prayer lives, and even a cursory reading of the pages of Scripture reveals that the saints
of old were people who were characterized by a consistent life of prayer. And so what I want to be concerned with in
the hours to come is the question: How can we learn how to pray like the Biblical saints
of old? And I want to start by looking for just a
moment at this episode that is recorded for us in 1 Samuel concerning Hannah. Hannah had been married and her life's desire
was to bear children, but we're told in the first chapter that the Lord God had closed
her womb, and her rival provoked her severely to make her miserable because the Lord had
closed her womb. And so it was year by year, when she went
up to the house of the Lord that she provoked her and therefore she wept and did not eat. And then Elkanah, her husband, said to her,
"Hannah, why are you weeping? Why are you not eating? And why is your heart grieved? Am I not better to you than 10 sons?" And so, Hannah arose after they had finished
eating and drinking in Shiloh, and Eli the Priest was sitting on the seat by the doorpost
of the tabernacle of the Lord, and Hannah was in bitterness of soul, and she prayed
to the Lord and wept in anguish. Now, you get the scenario here, that Hannah
is miserable and her condition has not been ameliorated over a period of years. And her life had been scorned by her rival
to the point of bitterness. And so, her husband sees her, and is concerned
that she is so downcast and says, 'What's the matter with you? It's OK that we don't have any children. Don't I count for anything? I would hope that I would mean to you as much
as 10 sons.' But it wasn't enough for Hannah. She wanted to be a mother, and so there she
comes to the tabernacle where Eli is ministering to the people, and we are told that she prays
out of a spirit of anguish. Now, the New Testament tells us that the fervent,
effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much, but that man there is generic. That is, we could translate that to mean that
the fervent, effectual prayer of a righteous person availeth much. It's not just male prayers that are efficacious. But notice that when we are told that in the
New Testament that one of the keys to effective praying is that the prayers be fervent, that
they not be desultory, that they not just be casual, but that when people expect to
have answers to prayer they have to come into the context of prayer meaning business. I mean, if God were to walk into your house
this afternoon and you wanted to talk with Him or to beseech Him, to implore Him for
some action, or to extol Him for His greatness or to confess your sins, what would be the
state of your soul in that conversation? It would certainly not be dull and casual. When people of old entered into conversations
with God, like Jacob, they wrestled with God, they stayed at it all night, they were persistent,
they were zealous, because their concerns that they brought before God came out of the
depths of their own agony, out of the anguish of their situation, and so they cried out
out of the depths of their heart to God. And that's what happens with Hannah. "In bitterness of soul, she prays to the Lord
and she wept in anguish and she made a vow and said, 'Oh Lord of hosts, if you will indeed
look on the affliction of your maidservant and remember me and not forget your maidservant,
but will give your maidservant a male child, then I will give him to the Lord all the days
of his life and no razor shall come upon his head.' And it happened as she continued praying before
the Lord that Eli watched her mouth. Now Hannah spoke in her heart. Only her lips moved, but her voice was not
heard, and Eli therefore thought that she was drunk, and so Eli said to her, 'How long
will you be drunk? Put your wine away from you.' But Hannah answered and said, 'No, my Lord,
I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine, nor intoxicating
drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord. Do not consider your maidservant a wicked
woman for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief I have spoken until now.' And Eli answered and said, 'Go in peace, and
the God of Israel grant your petition, which you have asked of Him.'" And her prayer was answered. It was a prayer that she didn't even utter
audibly. It was a prayer that she lifted up silently. She moved her lips as she prayed, but she
was addressing God who can hear the interior cry of her soul from her heart. Just last night, I spoke with a woman who
was married to a minister, and she said, "You know, my husband has a ministry of the Word,
but my ministry is a ministry of prayer." And she said she spends her days in prayer,
and she said she finds herself speaking out loud even when she's in the supermarket going
down the aisle. She's sending up prayers to God praying for
the people of the congregation. She says sometimes people look at her like
she's crazy. She's not crazy. She's discovered the secret of prayer. Now, I have to take a moment now to give a
contrast between the prayer of Hannah and its result. And the first time I can remember in my life
really praying hard, praying out of my soul's concern and anguish -- but I want us to preface
this by telling you also that the prayers that I prayed on this occasion were not the
prayers of a believer. This prayer that I can remember was uttered
and prayed by me in a chapel on my knees with great fervency when I was not even a believer
in Christ. The occasion was the birth of my sister's
firstborn child. I was in high school and my sister went into
the hospital to have her child, and we were called to the hospital late at night because
after she delivered her son, she began to hemorrhage, and the doctors were not able
to stem the hemorrhaging. And so her life was in great danger, and when
we came into the hospital, I was not allowed to go up to her room. I mean, it was such an emergency situation
that none of the family were allowed to be in her presence at that time. And so I can remember being in the lobby of
that hospital, and it was, like, two o'clock in the morning. There were no other visitors around. It was dark and it was absolutely silent. And I knew that she was on the sixth floor
and I also knew enough about this hospital that in the basement was the hospital morgue. And I went to the chapel and I prayed that
my sister would live, and then after I finished praying, I came and stood in front of that
elevator and I watched the needle as it would go from their various floors. And on one occasion, I saw the elevator open
its doors on the lobby level, and I saw a body with -- that had been covered with a
sheet, and they -- then I saw the, the doors close, and it went down to the morgue, and
my heart was terrified. And so then I watched and watched and I saw
the thing go to the sixth floor, and I watched the arrow come down and it passed up the lobby
and went down to the basement. And again, I was terrified that it was carrying
the body of my sister, so I went back into the chapel and I cried. I was by myself, and I was on my knees and
I was begging God. I said, "Please, God, don't take my sister's
life," and the doctors were able to stop the hemorrhaging, and she survived. I don't know that I ever went back, got on
my knees to say, "Thank you." If there were such a thing as foxhole religion
or crisis praying, that's what I had experienced. It really betrayed that I knew there was a
God even before I had committed my life to Christ or had become a Christian and prayer
was not a part of my life, but when life and death was in my face, I retreated to something
that should have been natural and regular and a daily practice of me in my life. The next prayer that I can remember praying
on my knees was three years later when I prayed beside my bed and asked God to forgive me
of my sins and the night that I was converted, but I can remember from the very beginning
of my Christian life loving the times that I had in personal communion with God. There was an intimacy about it, and I've had
many experiences in my life of spending eight hours solid in prayer. Don't get me wrong. I don't do that every day, but I have had
many experiences of that, and there is nothing like that, but I learned that concept of prolonged
praying and intense praying when I was a college professor in the first year of my teaching. I taught in the same college that I had graduated
from, and it was a small town. It was an old Presbyterian college, and there
was a section of the town that had housing for retired missionaries, and there was one
gentleman who was in his late 80's, who was a retired medical missionary and his name
was Dr. Jameson. And Dr. Jameson was considered by those of
us of the younger generation as a bonafide authentic Christian saint. He had practiced medicine on a mission field,
again, for decades, but now he had reached a place in his life where he had suffered
from certain illnesses and he was infirm. He could no longer practice medicine. It was never his plan or desire to retire,
but he couldn't work anymore, and so what he did at this stage of his life was he devoted
himself to a new vocation. His second career was that of the intercessor. He said, "I can still work eight hours a day,"
and so what Dr. Jameson did day in and day out eight hours every day was be on his knees. He's what we call a prayer warrior. Now, let me tell you something. When we had concerns, when I was living in
that town and we wanted people to pray for us, who do you think I wanted to have pray
for me? You got it. I would go straight to Dr. Jameson's house
and knock on the door and said, "Dr. Jameson, I -- would you pray for me?" "Yes, of course." And I knew that when he said he would pray
for me that he would, in fact, pray for me. I think of James in the New Testament, the
author of the epistle to James, who, according to early church history, in the best sources
that we have from antiquity, was in fact the brother of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he was known in the early church, by two
names, two nicknames. One of his names was James the Just, because
he developed a reputation for an extraordinary level of personal righteousness, and this
was a fellow who wasn't converted to his brother until after his brother was raised from the
dead. And he went from skeptic to believer to the
title 'James the Just.' But his other nickname I think was even more
revealing. And his other nickname, according to antiquity
was Old Camel Knees. Old Camel Knees. Now, I've recently spent some time with my
grandchildren in Virginia, and we were sitting around a table, and my grandkids were playing,
and they looked at me, and they -- they call me Pap and they said, "Pap, how comes your
face looks like leather?" That's out of the mouth of babes. See now, most people don't come up to me and
say, "Why does your face look like leather?" But they must be thinking it, if this is what
my grandchildren are coming up with. And I said, "Well, I'm not sure, you know." Maybe it's because it's a little bit overworked. Remember, my mouth is 95 years old, in terms
of the miles it has on it. I said, " So I've been tanned I guess over,
over the years." Well, no one ever accused me of having leather
knees, but the phrase Old Camel Knees was ascribed to James, the brother of Jesus, because
he had calluses on his knees from spending so much time in prayer. Now, not everybody is called to the ministry
of prayer like Dr. Jameson, and not everybody prays with the intensity and persistence of
a Hannah, but every one of us has a capacity for growth in our prayer life, and one of
the things that's -- that I find a little bit sad, is that we tend to look at prayer
as a sacred duty, merely as a duty, and the quickest way I know to get people not to like
something is to set it forth to them as an obligation, because then it becomes a burden,
and we can lay guilt trips upon people and so on. But in reality, yes, prayer is a duty. I can't deny that it is a duty. We are called and commanded by Christ and
the apostles to be constant in prayer. We have that mandate before us, but we already
know it's our duty, and so I'm not going to spend time talking about our obligation to
pray. What I want us to see is the opportunity that
it brings to us. How sweet it is for our lives to be engaged
-- to have the opportunity to come into the actual presence of God Himself and to speak
to Him, and to speak to Him from the deepest level of our concerns and of our hearts. And we should not be considering ourselves
failures, simply because we haven't been all that successful in achieving a consistent
prayer life. I think the basic reason why we haven't, in
many cases, is not because we have no desire to have fellowship with God or to commune
with God. It's not because we don't have enough time. That's not our problem. It's not because we lack discipline. All those things may be true, but those aren't
the main reasons why we fall short of what, we could achieve or enjoy in prayer. I think the main reason is we don't know how. We don't know how to pray. And that doesn't surprise me when we will
see later on when we look at the Lord's Prayer, that the one thing that the disciples of Jesus
asked their teacher for extra credit, for extra homework assignments -- I mean, there
aren't too many students that go up to their teachers and say, 'Thanks for all you've taught
me so far, but how about teaching me a little bit more?' The one time we see them coming to Jesus and
asking for a graduate course is what? "Lord, teach us how to pray." And I'm convinced the reason they asked that,
or two reasons why they asked that, first of all because they didn't know how, and second
of all, they saw that Jesus did know how. They observed Him. They watched Him go off by Himself, never
making an ostentatious display of His piety. They noticed that Jesus was not at all like
the Pharisees who paraded their spirituality before everybody, praying at every opportunity
in such pious display, because they were trying to gain the approval of men. Jesus didn't do it that way. He got by Himself, quietly, intimately. He poured out His soul to the Father. In fact, before Jesus even selected His disciples,
you remember, what does the Bible tell us in Luke's Gospel? He spent the whole night praying before He
chose them. When's the last time you spent a whole night
before you made a major decision in your life? Well, we don't do that, but the disciples
said, 'Hey, there's a correlation here between the spiritual power of Jesus and the way in
which He's plugged in to the Father in prayer.' And so they said to Him, 'Teach us, please,
how to pray.' And that's what I hope we can accomplish to
some degree in this series.
