Transcript
A (0:00)
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.
B (0:30)
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.
A (1:49)
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.