The Life That Can Pray…With The Assurance That God Hears and Answers

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason  - Sunday May 18, 2003

At a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Bobby Richardson, former New York Yankee second baseman, offered a prayer that is a classic in brevity and poignancy: "Dear God, Your will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. Amen."

Now, that is a powerful prayer. 

Our text today is found in John 15:7:  “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be given you.”

James had this to tell us in his book, chapter 5:16:  “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”

Consider this prayer written by  Thomas Aquinas:  "Bestow upon me, O Lord my God, understanding to know thee, diligence to seek thee, wisdom to find thee, and a faithfulness that may finally embrace thee." 

Here on earth success in asking a favor of someone is dependent entirely upon his character and the relationship he has with the person for whom he is interceding. What he is gives weight to what he asks.

It is no different with God.

Our power in prayer depends on our life.

When our life is right with God, we will know to pray in such a way that pleases God, and prayer will secure the answer.

Look at our text.  It is pretty clear that you will ask and it will be given to you. Whatever it means to remain in Him and His Word is the key to answered prayer.  We will receive what we ask for because we obey and please God.

Let me make another statement related to this:  Lack of power to pray correctly, all lack of power in prayer with God indicates some lack in our Christian Life. As we learn to live a life that pleases God, God will give us what we ask for.

Now, what kind of life is this that is required of us that will guarantee that we receive what we ask for?

It is “branch life”. It is branch life that gives us power in prayer.  

We are branches of Christ, the living Vine. We must simply live like branches – abiding or remaining in Christ – then we will ask whatever we will and we will receive it.  We all know what a branch is…in fact I cut some off my clematis just recently. The new growth is beginning to come and I cut off some of the branches so that growth will produce the flowers I want during the summer. A branch is simply a growth of the vine; produced by it and appointed to bear its fruit. A branch has only one reason for existence:  it is there to do the bidding of the vine, so that the vine may bear and ripen its precious fruit. The vine lives to produce the sap that makes and nourishes the grape, so the branch has the simple object of receiving the sap and bearing the grapes. The only work of the branch is to serve the vine, in order that through it the vine is able to do its work.

On a spiritual level, the only reason a believer in Jesus Christ exists here on earth is that Christ may bear fruit through him. It is to this branch life that the unlimited promise is given that whatever we ask it shall be given us. It is this branch life that exists solely for the Vine that will have the power to pray properly. When we live or remain in Christ and His Words abide or live in us – kept and obeyed- in our heart and life, and are absorbed into our life, then we will have the grace to pray correctly and the faith to receive the answer.

Jesus promised:  anything and whatsoever we ask for. We view this statement as being to big, or too literal and we often qualify them to meet our human ideas of what is right. We do that because we separate them from that vine life Jesus spoke about…that life of absolute and unlimited devotion to Christ’s service…to which they were given.

When God deals with His people, He always expects this:  Give all and take all. Whoever is willing to be a branch and nothing but a branch, must be ready to place himself wholly at the disposal of Jesus Christ, the Vine of God, to bear His fruit, and to live every moment of every day only for Him. It is this person who will receive the Divine freedom to claim Christ’s “whatsoever” in all its fullness and the Divine wisdom and humility to use it right. He will live and pray, claiming the Father’s promises as Christ did, only for God’s glory in the salvation of men. He will use his boldness in prayer only for power in intercession and getting men blessed.  The person with this branch life, abiding wholly in Christ Jesus, is the one who can pray the effective prayer in the Name of Christ.

Does this mean that you have to be perfect in order to have this kind of relationship with God in Christ Jesus?  No!  None of the great men of God were. They struggled with issues of faith and trust in God. And yet they lived their lives with God in such a way that they intimately knew God and bore the kind of fruit that pleased God.  

An example of one of these great men of God was Moses.  

Hebrews 11:24-27 tells us this:  “By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward, By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”

Look with me at Exodus 3:1-14. According to Stephen’s testimony about Moses in Acts 7 before the Sanhedrin, Moses was 40 years old when he left Egypt fleeing for his life. At 40 Moses was so full of himself that he actually thought that the people would join him and revolt against Pharaoh and secure their freedom.  That failed.  Then He was 80 years old when God came to him in the burning bush. What a change has come over Moses.  

Exodus 3:1 - He is in the back side of the desert; away from everything and anything like he had as he was growing up. So on the back side of the desert, tending a flock that was not even his own he stumbles upon Mt. Horeb, the Mountain of God. He sees a bush on fire on the mountain side. He notes that there is something strange about this bush. It is burning but is not burning up! He decides to go over and see this strange sight…and the Angel of the Lord appears to him in flames of fire from within the bush.

The Lord speaks to him out of the bush:  “Moses, Moses!” Moses immediately responds, “Here I am.”  God responds to Moses, and after telling him not to come closer and to take off his sandals because he was on holy ground, He proceeds to give Moses a lesson in theology:

·        I am the God of your Father, the God of Abraham, …Issac and …Jacob…”

·        I have indeed seen the misery of my people Israel

·        I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers…

·        I am concerned about their suffering…

·        So I have come down to rescue them…

·        I have seen the way the Egyptians have been oppressing them

·        So now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites. Moses you are my rescuer!

·        Tag! You are it!

Moses responds to God with this:  “Who am I?  Lord I am a nobody! And that is an overly generous estimation of who I am! 40 years earlier, he would have been ready to go charging off to set the people free…but now 40 years later…he is so selfless that he cannot go.  He does not have the means to do so. He is so humble that he is of no value to God as he is.

God says,  “I will be with you.”  Moses, don’t worry about a thing. I will be with you.  Moses, you and I make a majority!  When you bring the people out of Egypt, you will worship Me on this mountain. Notice, God sees the mission as already accomplished.

Moses is not convinced.  “Suppose I go to the Israelites and I tell them that God has sent me to them and they ask me “What is His name?” What shall I tell them?

God’s response:  Tell them…”I am who I am.” has sent me to you.

Moses  is not done yet. Verse 1 chapter 4:  ‘What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?” God has revealed his plan to Moses and has told him exactly what is going to take place. The angel of the Lord is still speaking to Moses out of the burning bush. God gives Moses three signs to confirm the message and Moses as God’s messenger:

·        What’s in your hand.  What resources do you have?

o       Moses:  a staff

o       He is told to cast it down and it becomes a snake

o       He grabs it by the tail and it becomes a staff again.

§ He is given this sign because God wants them to believe  him.

·        Put your hand in side your cloak

o       He does and when he takes his hand outside his cloak, it has become leprous. Leprosy  is a very contagious skin disease and when someone had leprosy, they would be quarantined from others so long as they had  the disease.

·        Take some water from the Nile and pour it on dry ground. The water of the river will become blood.  

Moses is not done yet making excuses.  “O Lord, I have never been eloquent…I am slow of speech and tongue.

God’s response is to ask,  “Who gave man his mouth?...is it not I the Lord?

Moses offers his final objection…”O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”  Moses is God’s choice to go. Why?

·        Scripture tells us that Moses was the meekest man on earth.  That is quite an estimate of the man Moses.  God’s perspective is that Moses is meek…the meekest man on earth. You may remember that several months ago I suggested that in order to understand the concept of meekness it was necessary to go to the race track.  The horse that wins the race will be the meekest horse on the track. Obviously, meekness is not weakness. No! The horse that is most under the control of its jockey will be the winner of the race.  Meekness is strength under control.  

·        That is God’s estimate of Moses. He is not perfect but he is living his life under the control of God…eventually, Moses goes with Aaron his brother to Egypt. He performed the signs before the elders of Israel and they believed him and his message about his mission to set them free. And then the worshiped God.

When you look at the life of Moses, you see that he lived it in intimate fellowship with God.

It took him 80 years to get to the point where God could use him…to the place where he could and would pray in such a way that God would answer. He talked with God as we would talk with each other. When God spoke, Moses listened. When Moses spoke to God, God listened and acted upon what Moses requested.

What happened in the 40 years during which Moses was taking care of another man’s sheep in the back side of the desert? 

 The answer is found in John 15:1-3  “I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he trims clean so that it will be even more fruitful.” During those intervening 40 years of Moses life, God was pruning him. When you prune a vine, what are you doing? You cut off good wood, good parts of the branches so that the branch can be what it is meant to be…bringing forth more fruit.  A vine of all plants must be pruned if it is to bear grapes that will bless the vine owner. To get the plant to put more of it’s energy into fruit bearing the vine’s branches are cut back so that it does not just produce more branches. The object is fruit not branches. What does the gardener do when he prunes the branches? He cuts back good wood. He does so because the wood he cuts off would draw off strength and nourishment from the fruit. The more he cuts it back the less wood there is for the sap to run through and more of it can go to the grapes.

Be certain that it is the good wood that gets pruned.

We are not talking about rotten wood that is removed from the vine…no, the good wood is removed to allow for more abundant fruit. What was the cost to Moses to have the kind of life he had that please God so much that he spoke with Moses face to face?  It cost Moses His life, his will, his strength, his effort and the pleasure of his own life apart from God’s plan. He left it all for God and the plan of God for his life to set Israel free.

So it is that we must be willing to submit ourselves to the pruning knife of the Gardener, our Heavenly Father for it is in the full and willing surrender of what humans hold fast to that we will become what Christ chose and appointed us for: being fruit bearers, to whom whatever is requested from the Father in Christ’s name, will be given.

If you want God answering your prayers like he did for Moses and Elijah, then it will require us to be like Jesus Christ himself, the servant of all, denying self, taking the cross and losing our life. When we submit to the Vinedresser’s pruning we will find that we have the kind of life that gets its prayer heard and answered. For that pleases God.  The life that can pray in that way…is branch life. Put it another way:  The life that can pray is a branch entirely given up to the Vine and to the Vine life, trusting and yielding to God in Christ Jesus. In the power of such a life, we will love prayer; We will know how to pray and we will pray and receive whatsoever we ask.

Period!

If the request is wrong, God says, "No."
If the timing is wrong, God says, "Slow."
If you are wrong, God says, "Grow."
But if the request is right, the timing is right and you are right, God says, "Go!"

--Dennis Gleason