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It's not if you pray. There's an expectation of his disciples as he's preaching the Sermon on the Mount. He says when you pray, go in to your closet and shut the door. When it's the expectation that those who are his, those who are following after him, that have fallen in love with him, will want and will spend time in prayer and in the Word.
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You've probably heard a pastor mention that before, that Jesus said, when you pray, not if you pray. Yet despite this, it can be a struggle, a struggle to prioritize it, a struggle to keep our eyes open as we wake before the sun comes up, a struggle to be consistent. Or maybe the struggle is simply not knowing what you should do during these times alone, privately with the Lord Today on Renewing youg Mind, our guest teacher will help us think through both the why and the how of private worship. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and it's good to have you with us on this Wednesday. This week you will have heard three messages from Jason Holopoulos, 11 part series created for worship. Consider taking the time to dig deeper into this topic when you request the entire series and the Physical Study Guide when you donate before Midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org we'll send you the DVD and study guide and unlock both digitally in the Ligonier app as our way of saying thank you for supporting this daily podcast. Well, if you have ever struggled with regularly being in the Word and prayer, stay with us because here's Reverend Helopoulos.
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As we're looking at worshiping with all of our life, our Lord and our God, we're going to come to that last sphere of worship. As we talk about secret worship or what has been called private worship, or as evangelicalism in some ways has been very helpful in its kind of encouragement for you and I to have daily devotions or those quiet times as it is often called. And that's what we want to look at and spend some time thinking about today as we do. So I want to encourage you that this is not something that's new with evangelicalism. Quiet times, daily devotions is not something that just started in the last hundred years or even the last couple of hundred years. Rather, it's something that we see in the scriptures. If you want to think upon it that way. When Moses has died and has ceased to be in the land with the people before actually they enter the land, Joshua is commissioned by God. And there in Joshua 1, the Lord tells him, you are to meditate upon the law day and night every Day and every night he commissions Joshua to do this. We continue through the Scriptures. We all know the story of Daniel, how Daniel was willing to give his life to spend time in prayer with the Lord and be willing to be persecuted for such. We observe it in the Psalms. Throughout the Psalms, there is this constant refrain of thinking upon the Lord, even through the watches of the night, and meditating upon his Word, finding it sweeter than honey, going to him in prayer. Just an example, let me give you here from Psalm 63. David, who is often the writer of our Psalms, says this in verses 5 through 8. He says, My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips when I remember you upon my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night. For you've been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. My soul clings to you. Your right hand upholds me. We could turn to various passages like that in the Old Testament. That's not just in the Old Testament, is it? When we get to the New Testament, we find a man by the name of Cornelius there in Acts, who we're told is a God fearing man. And he is praying constantly to God. And it's in one of those prayer times that the Lord reveals himself to Cornelius. And following that, Peter is up on the roof. And as he is up on the roof praying, spending time with his God, he receives this word from God that he is to go and to minister the Gospel to Cornelius. But maybe all we really need is the example of Our Lord. In Mark 1, among other passages, the very beginning of Mark's Gospel, he says that Jesus rose up early and he went out to a quiet place to spend time with his Father in prayer. Now wrap your mind around that. Here is the eternal begotten Son of God, who knows uninterrupted fellowship with his Father. And Jesus found it necessary in his humanity to go out before everyone else was up early in the morning to spend time with his Father. He saw this as a precursor to going out on his day.
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He sees it as something that you and I should mark our lives as well. If we look at Matthew, chapter six, you know Matthew five, six, seven, here in this great Sermon on the Mount.
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And as Jesus is speaking in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter six, he says this. And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by Others, truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 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. Who sees in secret will reward you. Notice Christ's language. It's not if you pray, there's an expectation of his disciples as he's preaching the Sermon on the Mount. He says, when you pray, go in to your closet and shut the door. When it's the expectation that those who are his, those who are following after him, that have fallen in love with him, will want and will spend time in prayer and in the Word, it's the expectation of our savior. Robert Murray McShane, the famous Scottish pastor from the 19th century, said this. He said, a believer longs after God to come into his presence, to feel his love, to feel nearer to him in secret, to feel in the crowd that he is nearer than all the creatures. Ah, dear brethren, have you ever tasted this blessedness? There is greater rest and solace to be found in the presence of God for one hour than in an eternity in the presence of man.
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What m' Cheyne is picking up is what we've been talking about over these lectures is that what is worship above all? It's just dwelling with God and God dwelling with us. And what m' Cheyne is pointing out is this is the great heart cry of the Christian, is I just want to be with my God. I just want to dwell with my God. And so there is a draw and there is a pull to getting away in secret worship with Him.
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If that is true.
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Why is it? What are the benefits of getting away with the Lord in secret worship? Well, one is that we become more like Him. This is one of the great draws of private worship, of secret worship, is that we want to become more like the one we love and so we want to spend time with Him.
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I don't know if you noticed. It's often true, isn't it, that older couples that have been together for 50, 60 years married together, that they begin to look like each other. Sometimes there's a physical resemblance. Not quite sure how that works, but there's often an intellectual and there's an emotional resemblance. Why? Because they've dwelt together for so long that they've begun to look like each other and sound like each other and be affected by the same things.
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The Christian as he or she, spends time with his or her Lord, there's just a resemblance that begins to happen. We just get conformed more and more to his likeness because We've just been dwelling with him.
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That doesn't happen overnight.
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It takes time. We're not looking for perfection in the moment. We're looking for progress over time. But habits form persons. And so we attend daily to spending time with our Lord and our Savior, and it begins to shape us. Rome wasn't built in a day. The Christian life isn't built in a day. I love that parable of the farmer who Jesus says, goes out and he sows the seed in the field, and then he goes in and he lays down for the night and he goes to sleep. Now, he would be an awful farmer if he sowed the seed in the field. And he said, I can't believe it's not growing. What's wrong?
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No, it's the good farmer that lays down for the night. And while he's sleeping, what happens? The Lord is working, and when he raises in the morning, there is a bountiful harvest.
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You and I are just planting seeds in our life as we're spending time with the Lord. And over time we expect there to be progress. We expect to see it overnight. That's a fool's errand. We're sowing for the long run to be conformed more and more to his likeness, to look more like the one that we love.
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I find one of the great joys and the great discouragements, it's the same thing of the Christian life, is that we just don't always know what actually is being accomplished. I don't know. I spend time with the Lord in prayer here, praying for these things, and I'm not quite sure was there any effect from these prayers. And that's both the discouragement and the joy of the Christian life. It could be a discouragement because you go, did I just waste the last 20 minutes? But it's also one of the great encouragements because I never quite know what he's doing. And just a moment spent here can have eternal benefits here. It's amazing.
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Should motivate us.
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So what does it look like to spend time daily with the Lord? Well, I really don't need to tell you, but it means attending to the means of grace. As we've talked about, he works by His Word and he works in prayer. And so that's what we do when we're in our closets, when we're alone with him, we open up the Word daily. Would you have a plan for doing so? Not just open the book and say, I believe in a God of Providence. And you just open up wherever and read what page it opens up to. No, you have a plan. Maybe it's a yearly plan where you're going to read through the Bible in a year. Ligonier provides wonderful resources along those lines. Table Talk does Or maybe you're going to work your way through a book of the Bible with a commentary alongside of you and you're going to delve into the book of Romans and try and understand it better. Remember hearing Sinclair Ferguson years ago say that that was one of the great things he did early in the Christian life is he took Murray's commentary on Romans and he sat down and he just studied Romans until he knew it through and through. Using that commentary. You could do something like that. Take a good study Bible where you have those notes at the bottom and you're just reading through the passages and reading the study notes, the Reformation Study Bible or the ESV study Bible and sowing it in your heart so that you're growing in your knowledge and allow that knowledge to inform your heart and stir your affections so that you become more like the one you love. Just attending to his word. Man does not live by bread alone or to hunger and thirst for the word of God. And just like when you plant a sapling oak tree, it takes time, but it needs nourishment. It needs that water, it needs that sun. So you need nourishment. So you got to keep feeding your soul. You have to keep feeding it.
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The second, of course is prayer.
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In prayer, just bowing before the Lord. We're making our requests made known. We're giving him adoration, we're giving him thanksgiving. We're just spending time with Him.
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This maybe is where we suffer more than anywhere else. I have a dear friend that is from Malawi, Africa and he sent me just the other day. He's a church planter in Malawi Africa and he has a friend of his that labors in East Africa. And he sent me this little proverb from his friend in East Africa. He said that there in East Africa in the early centuries of the Christian church, that the East Africans had quite a commitment to daily private worship. And that there in East Africa they would go outside the village and they would all go into the thatch out there outside the village and go there into the woods. And they would each kind of have their own little place where they would kneel down and they would worship and there they would spend time with the Lord in private. He said those became well worn paths. And so it became apparent when a man or a woman in the village wasn't going out and spending time any longer with the Lord in prayer or had neglected it. And the phrase that they would use with one another was, brother, the grass grows on your path.
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Does the grass grow on your path?
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Are you spending time on your face before the Lord?
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Here's one of the great traps, I think, especially for Christians. We can be so busy about kingdom stuff that we're not busy with our king. This was the era of Mary and Martha, right? When Mary is sitting at the feet of the Lord and Martha is in great air. She is so busy. She's prepping all of the food, she's doing all kinds of things, and then she's complaining against Mary. And when she comes to the Lord Jesus with her complaint, what does Jesus say to her? Mary's chosen the better portion.
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Because she's seeking the Lord. She's soaking up the goodness of her Savior. Don't be so busy, even with good things, so busy with kingdom things that you're not busy with the king.
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Commit to praying. Pray regularly. Now, how do you do that? How do you pray if you don't know how to pray? Well, you start simply. You can pray the Lord's Prayer. Just start praying the Lord's Prayer. You say, well, I've done that. I'm not quite sure how to grow beyond that. Well, you could get together with an older Christian in the faith and say, teach me to pray. And you listen to them pray. Listen to your pastors and elders pray. They pray in service. Or as we've talked about before, you could take a passage of scripture. I'll flip open to one here. How about Psalm 120, one of my favorite psalms.
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And just turn around the pronouns. It's this easy.
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Let's just turn around the pronouns here together. If I was praying this myself, I would pray it like.
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Lord, I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. I know you will not let my foot be moved.
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You who keeps me will not slumber. You who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.
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Lord, I know that you are my keeper.
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You are the shade on my right hand. The sun shall not strike me by day, nor the moon by night. Lord, I know that you will keep me from all evil. Would you keep my life?
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Would you keep my going out and my coming in from this time forth and forevermore? It's that easy. You can do that with psalm after psalm. You could just turn around the pronouns so that it's you speaking and those things begin to inform your mind, and you'll find that they begin to come across your lips just when you're praying extemporaneously without the scripture in front of you. Be a praying people.
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What do you do when you feel dry, as many of us often feel dry in the midst of our Christian lives? What do you do when, ah, don't feel like getting out of bed today and spending time with the Lord before you go about your work? You get out of bed and you spend time with the Lord before you go about your work? That's what you do. You keep at it. You just keep at it. What do you do, though, when it just continues to kind of abide there? There's just kind of a lukewarmness, just kind of a dryness. You let the Lord know.
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Not as if he doesn't know, but you cry out to him, lord, would you help me?
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I just feel dry. I don't feel your nearness. I know that you are with me. You have promised that you would never leave me nor forsake me. But I don't feel it.
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May I experience, not just know it, but can I experience it?
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Would you reveal yourself to me in that way?
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I will. Often what I do in such moments is I will take a passage about Christ and I'll just meditate on it. I had a mentor that used to say, what you need to do is you read the Word, you memorize it, and then you meditate upon it, and then you imitate.
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So it's. You memorize, meditate, imitate, memorize, meditate, imitate, memorize the word so that it's so in your mind that then you can just turn it over and turn it over and turn it over in your mind. Think of it like a piece of good chocolate. You put it in your mouth. You're just gonna. You're gonna suck all the goodness out of that thing before you swallow it. You're just turning it over in your mind. But you have to have it memorized to be able to do that where it's here and you can just keep looking at it in every kind of facet like it's a diamond with all of these different facets on it. And you're just trying to get everything you can out of it. And then you allow your life to be impacted by that. So I'll do this. I'll be like Jacob with the Lord. I'm not going to let you go until my affections are stirred in some way for you. I'm going to wrestle with you in prayer and upon the Word, until you stir my affections in some way for you. And so I'll just take a passage like Colossians 1.
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Where you have this great hymn of Christ here in Colossians 1.
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He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things are created through Him. And for Him. I'll just take a phrase for by him, all things were created.
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If all things were created by him, then that means that he is uncreated.
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He created all things. He's uncreated. That means that he's forever existed. He's eternal.
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He has no beginning, which means he has no end.
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He created all things. He created all the stars in the sky, and he created the trees, and he created this podium. He created the ants.
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But it's not just the things visible. He created all things that are invisible.
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Things that I can't see with my naked eye. Oh, the particles in this room. There are billions circulating around here, and he created all of them.
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But there's more than that in the invisible. He's created every angel and every demon.
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He's created all things.
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How great must he be.
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That everything is created by him, but not just created by him, but for Him. That means that, oh, he is deserving of all glory. Everything is aimed at his glory.
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How great must he be that everything is aimed at his glory?
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You just keep turning it, just taking something about your Lord and Savior and just turning it and then praying that, oh, Lord Jesus, you created all things visible and invisible. You're beyond glorious. And just let it stir your heart and shape you and mold you.
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Private worship is not so much a list of do's and don'ts. It is and should be our great heart's desire. And where it's not, then we pray and we ask for his help and enliven that within me.
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Something about when my wife and I were dating, it was, oh, this was days before email, right? And so we would write each other letters as we were away during the summer months. And I'd write that love letter to her. Sure, it was brilliant and beautiful, unbelievable poetry. And it would go off to her. And then I would wait. I couldn't wait for that postman to come four days later and hear her response to this incredible love letter I had written, just anxiously. Want to read it? It's a love letter.
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These are love letters to you.
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Love letters to you.
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It is his grace and his kindness shown to you. And then he says, draw near to me in prayer and just speak to me. Let me know what's on your heart. Talk to me and be conformed to my likeness.
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There are these three spheres if you think about it. Corporate worship, family worship, private worship. It's an overused illustration, but that's never stopped a pastor before, so it doesn't stop me. They're like a three legged stool in my mind.
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They go together and they help support a life that is lived in worship. You can survive for a while without one of them, but it's wobbly. It's just wobbly. But when all three are firmly rooted and they're all three there, it informs a life of worship and they inform one another.
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It makes all of life lift more to his glory.
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Have you noticed one of those three legs missing in your life? Or perhaps not being as strong as you would like? What a helpful 3 days it has been as we've been encouraged to grow and bring stability in the area of worship. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing youg Mind, the daily discipleship podcast of Ligonier Ministries. Today's message from Jason Holopoulos is from his series created for worship and for the final day. You can request the entire 11 message series when you donate before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. We'll send you the DVD along with the physical study guide and unlock all the messages and the digital study guide in the free Ligonier app. Simply show your support of this program with your donation@renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast. Show notes and we'll get this resource package to you. And as always, if you're part of our global listening audience and are Outside of the US and Canada, Digital Access is waiting for you at renewingyourmind.org.
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You've heard our teachers speak of Covenant theology, but what exactly is a covenant? And what is Covenant theology? Be sure to join us tomorrow as JV Fesco provides answers. That'll be Thursday here on Renewing your Mind.
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Sam.