I Want Men In Every Place To Pray

So last week we studied verses 5 through 7, particularly Christ's mediation on our behalf. We saw that his sacrifice satisfied the wrath of God against us and canceled our debt that we owe God because of our sins. And we talked last week about what this accomplished. And one of the things we spent most of our time on was that it accomplished peace between God and men. That as a mediator, he came in and stood. We also saw that God was satisfied with that. That that was sufficient for him. That his father was pleased with it. And that there was no more debt owed. That we didn't come away from that transaction still having a payment plan, if you will, with God. Even for sins that would be committed in the future. But this peace...

It was not the only thing that God established for us. We started to touch on the access to God that Jesus' mediation secured for us. And this week we're going to talk about that a little more. Now I want you to think for just a minute. If someone is angry with you, would you want to speak to them? Do you like to speak to people who are angry with you? And the general answer is no. We don't like to speak to people that are angry at us. I could also ask, do you like to speak to the people you're angry at? And again, you would say no. And so one of the things I want us to see at the very beginning of our text is that anger or enmity or strife that exists between two people breaks down communication. They don't want to talk to each other. And if they do talk, it's combative. They're at each other. And yet when Jesus died on the cross and he...

mediated all of the conflict, all of the tension, all of the debt that we owed God. We have to come away from this first asking the question, is God still angry at us? Is there still some beef between God and us? Or not? We talked a little bit about this in Sunday school in a different context, but the question bears repeating. If God is satisfied, if the Father was satisfied with the sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, the ones we've committed in the past, The ones we committed last week, the ones we're going to commit next week, and the ones we're going to commit in 20 years. If he was satisfied with that sacrifice, does there remain a conflict between God and us? And we say in our heads, no, no, there's not. There's no conflict. But I want to push a little further and say, do you live as though there's a conflict? And you might wonder, well, I don't know. What does it mean to live as though there's a conflict? And I say, okay.

Prayer is a really good marker or measure of whether you live as though there's still a conflict. If there is still a conflict, if you believe or behave as though there's still a conflict between you and God, how is that going to affect your prayer life? Well, it's going to affect your prayer life the same way it would affect your relationship with someone else if you thought they were still angry with you or if you were still angry with them. It would mean that you wouldn't pray. You wouldn't want to pray. You wouldn't feel welcomed to pray. You certainly wouldn't feel the need to pray. But if God, as the scripture teaches, is no longer angry with us, there's no longer a barrier between us because of the sacrifice of his son, what we've gained is access to him. An ability that we didn't, you know, an access or an ability that we did not have before. It may be that if we were talking about one another, we might say, well,

I don't want to talk to you because you're angry at me, or I don't want to talk to you because I'm angry at you. But with the Lord, it's different. We cannot talk to him. He will not hear. He doesn't entertain the prayers of those who are not reconciled to him. And yet with his children, he does. He does hear. He does listen. He does act and answer. And so if there's no tension between us and God, we now have... peace with him, and in that peace we have access to him, to communicate freely. You can think of a time in your own life where there's been some sort of conflict between you and some other person, and your willingness and desire and ability to communicate has been hampered. Maybe that's in your marriage. Maybe that's in your workplace. Maybe that's with your kids, with your parents. I don't know. But there's some sort of wedge. There's some sort of a divide. And then when finally that conflict, whatever it was, is addressed.

And it's removed. There's this relief and this sense of peace now. Because now there's free communication between us. And if we're going to talk about prayer, as Paul tells us to, he says, I want men in every place to pray. We have to understand that we're not being made to break through a wall or to speak to our God who's still angry with us. But rather, we're speaking to a God. who has been satisfied by the sacrifice of his son and now wants to hear and wants to communicate with his children. And so we could describe prayer in this way. Prayer is a fruit of the gospel. It's one of the things that is given to us, gifted to us, through the forgiveness that we have in Jesus Christ. And so what should this produce? Well, it ought to produce in us a desire to pray.

A desire to speak with our Father in heaven and to talk to him and to bring our cares and our burdens and our trials and all that goes on in our life to him because now we have access to him. We're not sending mail off to Santa Claus hoping, you know, where does it go? Well, we know where our prayers go. We know that he is pleased to hear and to receive our prayers because the tension between us has been removed. And so we can pray with full assurance that God hears our prayers because we believe that he has accepted the sacrifice of his son and as a result forgiven all of our sins. Now I want to ask you, if you don't have that knowledge or if you wonder about that, if you think, well, maybe he's still angry, maybe he's distant still, will you want to pray? You say, no, you won't want to pray because you'll think it's a waste of time. Here's another question about prayer. Do you think of prayer more as a duty?

A responsibility? Or do you think of it as a privilege? I think too often we live as though prayer is a duty. I'm supposed to pray. And it's true, we are supposed to pray. But that's not the heart of prayer. That's not what prayer really is. It's not just another thing you're supposed to do. It's something you're able to do. It's something you're invited to do. Through the shed blood of Jesus Christ, you now can do it in a way that you never could before. I remember when I was in high school, before I was a Christian, before I'd ever really even been in a church, I was at a track meet that would qualify me for state if I won. And I remember wanting very badly to go to state, the state track meet. It was what I was good at, and I'd almost qualified the year before, and I really, really, really wanted to go. Now, this is a silly example, mind you, but I really wanted to go, and I wasn't a Christian.

But I thought, you know, I need help. So what did I do? Well, I prayed. As someone who had never been in a church before in my life. And it was the most awkward thing that I can remember in my life because here I am acknowledging that there's a God somewhere that I'm talking to and asking to give me something. But the thing that was clear in my mind as I was asking was that I had no place to be asking. And I actually said that, whether I spoke out loud or I don't remember, or if I just thought my prayer. I remember thinking, God, whoever you are, I don't love you, I don't know you, I don't trust you, I don't obey you, I don't even know what any of that stuff means, but I've got this desire. And I don't have any reason to think that you would give me this, but if you could, I'd really appreciate it. Real godly prayer, right? I tell you that story to say, does that man...

who offers that prayer, have any confidence that his prayers will be heard? Well, no. And in that moment, I didn't have any confidence that my prayers would be heard. Is that true, though, of Christians? Should we have no confidence that our prayers will be heard? Should we be like that man? And the answer is no. Absolutely not. Because if that were the case, why would we ever pray? What hope is there in it? What privilege is it? If anyone can ask and no one can have assurance that there's any mercy available to them, that they will actually have God's ear, that he's inclined to hear and he's inclined to act based on their requests, why would we pray? We wouldn't. And yet scripture tells us, Paul says, I urge that in treaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings be made. In verse 1 and then down at verse 8.

Therefore, I want men in every place to pray. And that's how prayer becomes a duty. Prayer becomes a duty when you think it's just something I have to do. I'm just sending it off out into the space and maybe it'll get picked up and maybe it won't. I don't know. I have no confidence that it will be. That's how prayer becomes a duty. But prayer is not simply a duty. It's a privilege. It's something that we receive along with being forgiven of our sins. we receive access to our God and Father, to be able to speak to him, to be able to make all of our requests and all of the burdens and the cares of our hearts known to him, and that he won't just look at us and go, here they go again. Why do they think I'm going to listen? Those of you who have children, especially older children, don't you want them to talk to you? This is just a simple example, and it pales in comparison. But kids, parents of teenagers,

want their kids to talk to them. Come tell me what's going on. Come tell me how you're feeling. Come tell me what your burdens are. I want to hear. I want to help. And if that's true of sinful men, how much more so is that true of our Father in heaven, who wants to hear what his children have to say? This is why Paul exhorts us to pray. I want men everywhere to pray. Why? Because it's their duty? No. Because they have access to a Father in heaven who wants to hear and wants them to trust him and bring their burdens and their cares to him. He wants to carry those things along with you. So who is supposed to pray? Where are we supposed to pray? Paul says men everywhere should pray. Now, those may just be words that just wash over us like water. Well, he says, I want men everywhere to pray.

And you say, okay, good. Men everywhere are supposed to pray. Carrying on. But this is a change. This is a contrast to what was going on in times gone by in the Old Testament. At that time, could the people pray to God? Yes, they could. But when did they get closest to God? When did they get closest to having access to God? Well, it was when they all went up to Jerusalem and they worshipped. And there was a sacrifice made, and the priest... went into the Holy of Holies. He went into the part of the temple where the Ark of the Covenant was. He entered into the presence of God. And he was all dressed up in the garb that God had appointed. And on his breastplate, he had stones. And those stones represented each of the tribes of Israel. And so when he came into the presence of God, that one time a year, he came bringing the people to God. And he said, here they are. And here's the sacrifice for their sins. But the people were far off.

They weren't there. Not themselves. They had to go through the priest. And they could only do it in that one place. They couldn't decide, that was great. That was wonderful. We want to do more of this. Let's set up an altar in our village and let's do this every week. That would have been sin for them to do. Because God had said, no. In this place and at this time and in this way, you'll approach me. And so when Paul says, I want men in every place to pray, he's saying, It's one of the fruits of the gospel. It used to be this way, but now it's this way. I want men everywhere to pray. In another place in scripture, it says to pray without ceasing. And so prayer really changed. Jesus' death and his atonement for our sins changed the nature of prayer. It's no longer something we do here and we do there and we do because we have to. We now have access all of the time from any place where we are at. We have direct access.

To our Father in heaven. Do you remember when Jonah got told, go to Nineveh and preach to them? And Jonah said, I'm going to Nineveh. He turned around and he headed the other way. And he didn't make it. Ship sank. He got thrown overboard. Swallowed up by a fish. Down in the belly of the beast. Down in the bottom of the sea. And what does he say down there? There's nowhere I can go. There's no place I can be. Even down here in the bottom of the sea. I've not escaped you. And what was he doing? He was praying. Even in the depths of the sea, he was not in a place. In the belly of a fish, he was not in a place where he couldn't offer prayer. And it was extraordinary then, but meant to teach us what would come, that we would have access and be able to speak to God from any place and at any time. Now here's the thing. Paul says, I want men to pray. Did any of you catch that? Does that seem strange to you? Did you just assume it says, oh, he just means everybody? I don't think he actually means everybody.

I think there's something to the fact that he says that he wants the men to pray. If we had the next verses up, you would see he says in verse 8, therefore I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without rash and dissension. And then he would say, and likewise, I want women. And then he goes on. And he's talking about their behavior. And he's comparing the two of them. And he's saying, I want the men to do this. And I want the women to do this. Next week we'll look at what he wants the women to do. But I don't want you to read this passage and go, well, he's just talking about all of us. Is he generally talking about all of us? Are women able to pray in this way? Yes. But is there something more to this command? Yes. In prayer, we lead. To pray is to lead. Now how many of you are familiar with popcorn prayer? You just sit in a room and you say, pray as you feel led.

Any of you guys familiar with this? Is it comfortable or is it awkward? Okay, it's awkward. Why is it awkward? Or a moment of silence or like 10 of them, right? And everyone's like, and what is going on in that moment is you're looking for someone to lead in prayer. Will someone please lead in prayer? And we want to be all spiritual. We want to be all like as the Spirit leads you. But there's no leadership. It's much more comfortable and much more productive when we sit in a circle and we say, okay, we're going to share our prayer requests and you're going to pray for the person on your right. Because then everybody knows what's going on because now there's leadership. And so what is going on here? He's saying, I want the men to lead in prayer. This is their work. I want them to lead in prayer. I want the women to follow in prayer, undoubtedly. But I want the men to lead. We're bringing our requests, our entreaties, our prayers, our thanksgivings, our petitions.

Have you ever been in praying with somebody and they're praying something that's making the hair on the back of your neck stand up because you're angry? You don't like what they're praying. But they're leading. And they're offering prayer that you're incapable of offering because of your weakness. And this is something that men do. This is our work. This is our privilege. And it's something that's appreciated by those who are following. They say, there's someone I can follow in prayer. They'll bring my requests, our requests, my needs that I'm either too weak to offer, I'm struggling with anger to offer. I don't even know how to put words to it. They do. This is the work of men in prayer. We lead in prayer. So who's to pray? Men are to lead in prayer. Where? Everywhere. Now, how are we to pray? Well, he gives us two things not to do and then one thing to do.

He says, when you pray, pray like this. When someone asks Jesus, how should we pray? He says, pray like this, our Father. And he gives them a form of prayer. He gives them words. In this passage, we're given some do-nots and some do. We're going to start with the do-nots. He says, don't pray or pray without wrath or dissension. And so simply put, he says, when you pray, don't pray when you're angry. Don't argue in your prayer. Don't complain in your prayer. Now, who might you complain about? Who might you be arguing with? Well, it might be your brother. And in this context, that's the first realm of thing that's being dealt with. He's telling them, I want you to pray, remember, for those leaders that are ruling over you, those who are in authority, those who use their authority to oppress you. I want you to pray for those men, and I want you to do it without complaining about them. And the same could be said of us when we pray for one another.

I want you to pray for the person that you're at odds with without complaining about them, without wrath or dissension, without calling down God's fire and brimstone on them for the things they've done. You remember when Jesus was walking with his disciples and they were mocking and they said, do you want us to call down fire from heaven? And he says, no. We ought not to pray in such a way that we're calling down fire from heaven on those for whom Christ died. But we're also not to pray with wrath and dissension. When we're angry with God. And there's a lot of tension in me saying that. Because I'm not saying you shouldn't pray when you're angry. But I am saying you ought not to pray in anger. And those are two different things. Hey, Josiah. Go sit back near Canaan and be quiet. And so Calvin addresses this. This idea of praying when we're angry at God. And this is what he says. He says, we know that we should not bring our vexations with us when we pray so that we feel resentful toward God.

As those who are praying to him in anger or who chafe with impatience over the afflictions that he sends. And so he says, when you pray, it's often going to be because of the burdens that you're bearing. You know, Paul prayed and he said, you know, I have this thorn in the flesh and I prayed three times. And the Lord's answer was, no, I'm not going to remove it. My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. And so we're not to pray in anger or with impatience over the afflictions that God sends. Going on, Calvin says, we scarcely do honor to God if we reproach him with our prayers, if we accuse him with our prayers of wrongdoing when we pray. Many people pretend to pray, but all they do is argue with God. They're annoyed and distressed because he does not do as they like. So they come to God wanting to challenge him as a husband might who is unhappy with his wife, saying, you should be doing this. You aren't doing your job. Or as a wife who asking something of her husband says, I mean nothing to you.

We ought not to pray in these ways. And yet this is how many people behave. It would be better if they never prayed at all than that they should come with a heart seething with anger toward God. When we pray, we should do so in a quiet and tranquil mood, which is why Paul, while recommending that we be diligent in seeking God, also tells us to add thanksgiving to our prayers. He means that when our wishes burn strong within us, We should nevertheless be prepared to rely on God's good pleasure. If he does not immediately grant us what we want, we should wait patiently. We ought, therefore, to pray without complaining, without getting upset, and we should not answer God back or ask why he allows us to languish. And so Calvin takes this idea of not praying with wrath or dissension, and he says, here's what it looks like.

For you and for me. When we bring our prayers, our requests, our burdens to God, we're to bring them with thanksgiving and we're not to turn our prayers into an accusation against God. Paul addresses this same sort of thing, not particularly in prayer. In Romans, when he says, you know, when we would call back to God and say, why have you made me thus? What is that but an accusation brought before God that we stand as his judge for how he's made us? What does Paul tell us of the one who would ask that question? Who are you, oh man, to answer back to God? And so we recognize in prayer that we're coming as a creature, as a created being, bearing the image of God, being invited to pray. That God wants to hear our prayers, but he's not inviting his children to come and accuse him of wrongdoing. That's not the invitation.

Any more than you would say, I want my children to talk to me. Here, come say whatever you want. If your kids came to you and they said, I'll tell you what I think, you'd say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, that's not what I meant. And you know that. This is the tension of prayer. Because if you're angry, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to pray. But you can't pray in anger. You can't complain and dispute with God, even as you're angry. And yet you can't run away and decide not to pray. There are many times in our lives where what we want are very clear directions. Do this, and if you do this, you're fine. And yet so much of our lives are made up of tensions that we have to live with. If we were driving down a road, instead of being able to remove the drop-off on the side of the road, all we can do is put a rumble strip and say, don't go over the rumble strip because there's a drop-off on the other side of the rumble strip.

And that's the tension that we live in with prayer, because we will get angry. We will want to know how, or why, or how long. And yet those questions can't become the basis of our anger toward God. We cannot become angry, even though we don't know the answers to those questions. And we really think, from our perspective, we say, it would be better if I knew why. And what I tell you is that if you don't know why, You have to trust God that it's his wisdom and his love and his kindness that you don't know why. And that's a hard thing to accept. Hard for me to accept. Hard for you to accept. That there are things that happen in your life that you don't understand. And your lack of knowledge makes you angry. Because there's consequences and you go, I don't want this consequence. I want to know why it happened so it doesn't happen again. And you can't put your finger on why.

In that moment, you have to trust that God, who knows all things and sees all things and works all things together for the good of those who seek him, who love him and who are called according to his purpose, that if he withholds that knowledge from you, it is for your benefit. Now, we understand this if we were talking about our own children, that we would withhold some of the more difficult things of life from them because we don't want them to be overwhelmed with that knowledge, to be overwhelmed with those realities. Those are not their burdens to carry. And yet they'd have to carry the consequences of them in ignorance. But how many of you have parents have thought of things that have happened in your life? I don't ever want my kids to know about that. They will deal with the consequence of it at some level. They will have questions. And it's best that they don't know everything. Is that not your love for them that keeps you from telling them all of the details? Well, the same is true of our Father God. The things that he withholds from us are for our good.

And they're not meant to be the seedbed of our complaints and our angers toward God. It's meant to be a comfort to us, but only if we see it by faith. That the things that he withholds are his kindness to us, not to overwhelm us and cause us to despair. And so we live in this tension. Pray without wrath or dissension. If we're not content with the non-answers or not getting what we want in prayer, the direct result of it will be our prayer life will suffer. When we don't get what we want from people or from God, our relationship with them suffers. In 1 Peter, husbands are warned about this very thing. Peter says, You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way as with someone weaker since she's a woman, and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life. That's all fine and well and good. Here, husbands, this is what you're supposed to do. And then what does he say at the end? You're supposed to do all of this. Why? So that your prayers won't be hindered.

Now, you husbands, what does it mean for you to live with your wife in an understanding way? Well, Peter tells you, she's weaker than you. What's that mean? It means she's going to drive you nuts. It means you're going to want her to do things and carry things, maybe physically, maybe not spiritually. You're going to want her to be able to do stuff she is not able to do. And that's because she's weaker than you and because she's a woman. And if you despise her because of her weakness, your prayers will be hindered. So don't despise her weakness. so that your prayers will not be hindered. Live with her and show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life so that you can pray without hindrance. The same is true of our relationship with God. We're to be careful in how we pray and what we think of God and the accusations that come into our hearts from Satan regarding God. You know, I never thought about it until this week, but I was thinking about Job because when I look at Job, I think,

I've never seen a man like that in my life. And that's even what God says about him. He says, have you ever seen a righteous man like Job? Has there ever been one on the face of the earth? And the answer was no. Job is the cream of the crop. He's the best of the best. And then God allows Satan to afflict him. And the first affliction is to take away all of his wealth, all of his family, except his wife. And what's it say of Job? His wife comes and says, what? Curse God and die. And he says, you speak as one of the foolish women speak. Shall we accept good from the Lord and not adversity?

And it says in all of these things, when God is recounting and analyzing or describing Job, he says, in all of these things, Job did not sin with his lips. And so my question to you is, do you think Job was angry? All of his children were killed in one fell swoop. All of his wealth and everything he'd worked for his whole life, gone. And he's left with a wife who's tempting him to sin. Do you think he was just above all of that? Job knew to keep his mouth shut. When he opened his mouth, he didn't have very many good things to say. And so I don't want you to look at Job and think, oh, a man above reproach who never got angry. No, he got angry and he knew not to give voice to it. And that's what Paul exhorts us to hear. Pray. Don't give voice to your anger. Confess your anger as sin. Plead the blood of Jesus Christ for mercy regarding your anger and for help to fight against it because you don't want to be angry. You don't want to be God's accuser. You know that's not your place. Ask for God to help you.

But don't accuse him or your prayers will be hindered. So these are the things we're not supposed to do. What are we supposed to do? He says, well, pray lifting up holy hands. And there's a good thing here and there's a caution. The good thing is here's what you're proactively supposed to do. Lift your hands when you pray. Lift your hands when you pray. But not just lift your hands. What does he say? He says lift holy hands. And I think we too easily pass over the holy part. And we say, oh, I'm just supposed to lift my hands when I pray. So we'll all pray and we'll all lift our hands and all the men will go, yes, and we're all doing what we're supposed to be doing. And I say, we have to be careful because there's more to lifting our hands than the action. He tells us to lift holy hands. So what does it mean to lift holy hands? In Isaiah chapter 1, verses 12 to 15, Isaiah is addressing the worship of God's people and how they worship God.

And before I read it to you, I want to say to you, lifting your hands in prayer or lifting hands in prayer or in worship is something that has been done across all of time, and it's not exclusive to the Jews or Christians. This is what people do when they worship God. Whatever their God is, whatever their God is. They lift their hands. They dance. They move. They use their bodies. And those actions in and of themselves don't make it holy. And that's what Isaiah is dealing with and addressing in these verses. He says this, The Lord says through Isaiah, When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring your worthless offerings no longer. Incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath, the calling of assemblies. I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. And so he's talking about how they come to worship him. They come full of sin and making all of this outward show of worshiping God. But none of it's real. None of it's true.

He says, I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my face. I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood. And so when we think of what Paul is exhorting us to do here, lifting up our holy hands, what we're supposed to do is not just go, oh, I'm supposed to lift my hands. Yes, but what type of hands? And our physical hands in this text are secondary to the holiness that comes along with them. Now I want you to think, when Isaiah was writing to these people, and he says, your hands are covered in blood, do you think they were literally in the solemn assembly covered with blood? No. They weren't allowed to come into the solemn assembly that way. They had washings and all this stuff. They were supposed to be purified and cleansed. They didn't have literal blood on their hands. What did they have? James, do you have any idea what that is?

don't think so. Sorry, guys. Can I use, huh? What? It wakes people up. There you go. That's what it's here for this morning. Okay. Can I use a different mic, John? Because this is, you guys don't seem to be distracted by it, but it's really distracting to me. I can just use this handheld. I'll just hold it. I don't want to. Thank you, John. Is this thing on? Have you got me, James? All right, great. Thank you. So when we lift holy hands, The holiness is the important part. The Israelites in Isaiah weren't holy. They were coming in and doing all of the right stuff, but they weren't doing it with any holiness. And God says, I hate it. I despise it. And when you lift your hands to me, I'm going to turn my eyes away from you. Even though you multiply your prayers, I'm not going to listen. And so one of the things we're learning from this is that the goal is not simply lift up your hands. The goal is holiness as you lift up your hands, that there be holiness in you.

And you say, well, where do we get holiness? And I say, not from yourselves, right? Lifting up holy hands is a call to us to look to Jesus Christ even as we pray. Lift up your hands by faith. Lift them up looking to Jesus Christ. Lift them up seeing his righteousness and his holiness, his death in your place that gave you access even to pray to God. I don't want you to think that if you lift up your hands, you're doing the right thing. In fact, it would be better if you didn't lift up your hands if they're not holy. Because God's not pleased by the simple outward action of it at all. In fact, he's concerned more with the holiness than with the lifting of hands. So then you might wonder, well, should we lift up our hands then? Is Paul just being, is he just being, using some sort of a literary device? Should we do anything with our hands? And I say, yeah, we should actually lift up our hands, but not because it makes us holy. Not because the act is the thing.

Should we lift up our hands? Yes. Why? Calvin says it like this. He says to lift up our hands, I say, is not important in itself, but it serves a purpose that is good, helpful, and necessary. Why is that? Because knowing how ignorant we are, we think that we are too far from God and that he is not close enough to hear us. Now, when do you see in your life, your day-to-day life, when do you see hands come up? With children. Most of the time you see it with children. When mommy or daddy comes home, they come running up, hands go up. And do they do that when you're far away? No. They do that when you're close. And so Calvin's arguing here, for our sakes, that we would learn, we raise our hands to remind us of the nearness of God. That we would reach up, even here and now, because of the nearness of God. If he's far away, we're like kids, we don't raise our hands. But because he's near, we ought to.

This external sign, then, of raising our hands is therefore meant to assure us that God is near to us when we seek him in prayer, not far off. When we raise our hands, it is a suitable help which encourages us to seek God because we need to be lifted beyond our ordinary thoughts and especially to be free of all earthly passions and of everything that holds us captive here below. And since we have no wings to fly to heaven, when we raise our hands, it is a sign that we must be lifted in spirit heavenward by faith. And so the sum of all of that, when we're being told by Paul, lift up, pray, lifting up holy hands, one, look to God for his holiness, even as you pray, and reach your hands up to heaven because you can't fly there yourselves. Do everything you can to get as close to God as you can when you bring your requests and your petitions and your prayers and your thanksgivings to him. And you might think, well, I'm going to look like an idiot. And I say, what kid looks like an idiot who wants a hug from his dad? You're believing the eighth grade dance fallacy. That's what I call it.

Everyone in an eighth grade dance thinks, well, you're not supposed to, you know, if I dance, I'll look like an idiot. And all the while, they sit and watch the half a dozen kids that are willing to dance, and they're jealous of them. So lift up your holy hands to God when you pray, men. When you sing, lead. Don't be ashamed of it. Remind yourself that he's your father, and that he's near to you, and he delights to hear your requests. I want to end by reading Psalm 46 to you, which is a prayer in the midst of trial. But before that, this last thing regarding prayer that I found very encouraging, this quote. It says this, it says, Let us therefore, when all has been said, when we've studied this verse and we've taken everything out of it we can, let us therefore give him, our Father God, our full trust and be content to have him as our help and aid. For unless we believe that that is what he is, the practice of prayer, good though it is, will be an empty, worthless exercise. And this is what we started with.

Prayer is a privilege that we have as God's people. It's something that Jesus secured for us through his death, that we could approach his Father without any fear, but rather confidence. And so we come into his presence, bringing all of our cares and our burdens, our petitions and our requests to him, without fear and without anger, with holy hands, knowing that he delights to hear the prayers of his people. I want to read to you now Psalm 46. It's a beautiful comfort and encouragement to us as we seek God through prayer. It says this, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride. Selah. And so he's describing all of the worst kind of tumult you could understand. Worse than any hurricane. The earth breaking apart.

and being swallowed up into the sea. That sort of trouble. God is our strength and our refuge, a very present help in trouble. He says, there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God. The holy dwelling places of the most high God is in the midst of her. She will not be moved. In the midst of everything that's being moved in your life, in the midst of everything that's up and down and back and forth and uncertain and shaky and scary and hard, the city of God will not be moved because he's in her midst. God will help her when morning dawns. The nations made an uproar. The kingdoms tottered. He raised his voice and the earth melted. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold, Selah. Come, behold the works of the Lord who has wrought desolations in the earth. He makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth. He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two. He burns the chariots with fire. Cease striving. Cease striving and know that I am God.

I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold, Selah. This psalm was written in the midst of great trial and great difficulty and great hardship. As though the world were coming to an end, breaking apart at the seams. And the psalmist says, there is hope and there's help. There's stability for the people of God because God is with them. And through Jesus' death on the cross, Our God is with us and near to us and close to us in a way that he was not before. And so let us not neglect to draw near to him in prayer as his children. Let us pray.