Jesus prays on purpose, Jesus prays in secret and Jesus prays in quietness.
Mark 1:32-35
Mark 1:32-35
Let's pray...
Okay, we are diving back into the Gospel of Mark. There are several verses but a lot of this is review, so it won’t take as long as you might think.
There’s just one Big Idea from this text tonight.
Let’s get into the text. Before this point in Mark, we saw the majority of one day in the life of Jesus (starting in v 21):
• He went to the Synagogue, because it was the Sabbath.
• As a visiting Rabbi, He was allowed to teach.
• People were blown away by the way He taught. He didn’t teach like the others. He taught with authority.
• A man who was controlled by an evil spirit interrupts Jesus and Jesus tells the demon to shut up and get out of the man – the demon does – the man is freed and the people are amazed again.
• Then Jesus and His crew go to Simon’s house for a Sabbath meal.
• Jesus finds Simon’s mother-in-law in bed with a mega fever, He heals her with a touch and she responds by serving Him.
Now that we are caught up, we’ll finish out Jesus’ day and see that the people in Capernaum flocked to Jesus. Within a day, they were coming to Him en masse. The buzz about Him was great.
This isn’t the Big Idea for the night, but I do want to touch on verses 33-34 real quick.
When the crowds heard about Jesus, they flocked to Him and went to Him for help with EVERY ailment.
Matthew Henry said about Jesus, as revealed in this passage:
Here’s my question, do we really believe that Jesus CAN heal every ailment in us. Do we really believe that He can heal our physical diseases – from cancer to the common cold?
Do we really believe that He can heal our emotional sickness from clinical depression to the broken heart of a teen’s first love? Do we really believe that Jesus can heal every sickness, every ailment?
What about the sicknesses of a neighborhood, a culture or a whole city?
IF we are truly Christians, we have believed and experienced our own soul-sickness, or better put, our spiritual death –we’ve witnessed that, we’ve experienced that first hand. And our dead spirit was regenerated by the power of Christ. We trust Him for that healing. Are we trusting Him for the little things after that?
I’m going to leave you hanging a little bit on that question – I’d love for you to search the Scriptures if you have doubts about God’s abilities in those areas. Dwell on that question in your quiet time with God this week. Do you believe that He CAN heal any and every ailment?
We'll discuss this more in a couple of weeks. For now, though, let’s move on.
We see again Jesus commanding the evil spirits to be quiet in verse 34. That is hugely significant, and we covered it at length a couple of weeks ago. If you weren’t here for that message, you can read it online OR see me after the service and we’ll walk through it together.
Let’s go on to verse 35. This is where we are camping out tonight:
The Big Idea for tonight is simple and straightforward. Pray.
Pray. Jesus Prayed. We are Jesus followers, therefore we should pray. We're going to unpack three aspects of prayer from Jesus' example in this passage. They are all interrelated, but there are some clear distinctions.
Jesus prays on purpose, Jesus prays in secret and Jesus prays in quietness. So should we. Let’s unpack that.
Pray on purpose. It would have been easy for Jesus to say, “Well, I had a lot of “God time” yesterday in the synagogue and last night at Simon’s house with his mother-in-law and the crowds…maybe I can just sleep in this morning.”
This is a struggle that I have, but not one that I can always see clearly. You see, since I do most of my studying and sermon prep at night, I often buy into the idea that, “Well, I’m spending that time in prayer to God and in the study of His Word, so maybe I can forego quiet time with God for my own needs.”
It doesn’t take long for that idea to be debunked because after some time of not going to the Lord on purpose for my own time with Him, I begin to feel spiritually dry.
And, when my spirit is dry it starts to react like dry skin. My spirit is more sensitive and irritated when things rub up against me. Whether that is my family, my co-workers, or the barrage of information and noise that the world sends my way each day. I just get irritated. I get mad.
And when my spirit gets dry enough and the irritations build I break out into a personality rash and I become unbearable (either in anger, frustration, whininess, or isolation).
But, when I go to the Lord in prayer and read what He has revealed of Himself in His Word, that disciplined turning toward God, is a salve for my dry spirit. I can be rejuvenated and I am able to find rest that escapes me when I try to find it anywhere else.
On a side note as I follow the dry skin/dry spirit analogy, we are all so much better off and our relationship with God and with others is so much healthier when we don’t wait to apply the salve until the rash happens.
In the wintertime, I can either apply a little lotion to my hands in the morning and at the end of the day and not deal with dry skin, or I can wait until my hands are cracked and bleeding.
If I wait, I will still have to put something on my hands, but now there is pain that comes with healing.
The same is true when I neglect going to God in Prayer as a disciplined maintenance that helps me to avoid the spiritual dryness. If I only wait until there is pain, then there will usually be a lot of unnecessary pain involved in the healing process as His truth penetrates my heart.
I may have taken this analogy too far, but do you see what I’m getting at? Let’s keep going. We’re still on the first point of Jesus praying on purpose.
Jesus didn’t see time with the Father as something to be tacked on a “To Do” list. He purposed to pursue God as a matter of first importance.
Now, if you know me and if you’ve heard me preach and teach, then you know that I want to fight legalism whenever I see it. But, I would weep if that fight that we have against legalism causes us to neglect the spiritual disciplines that Jesus, God Himself, demonstrated for us to follow.
He not only prayed on purpose, as His first priority in the morning, He also Prayed in Secret.
Let me start by clarifying, it is permissible, wise and good for us to pray as a body of believers – Praying together anytime we gather is wonderful. I am trying to move us to more prayer as a gathering.
It is good to pray together at meals, before ball games, before city council meetings, and all that.
But Jesus also taught us clearly that we need to have quiet time ALONE with the LORD. The passage tells us that Jesus went off to a solitary place to pray. This brings us back to the portion of the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught us to pray in secret to the Lord.
We all, as individual Christ followers, need to develop a personal prayer life with God that is away from the ears and eyes of others. And that needs to happen so that we don’t fall into a trap of praying for the audience of the people around us instead of the Audience of God, instead of the Audience our Father in Heaven.
And finally in regards to prayer, we need to Pray in Quietness. What I mean is we need to pray in a place that is not distracting us.
During the day, Jesus had the disciples around Him; the crowds came to hear him and to be healed by Him. Demons reacted loudly when He got near to them. His life was full of distractions.
I think that moms of toddlers can relate to this better than anyone else. From the time your children get up to the time they fall asleep, they are on you like jam on toast.
It is hard to pray when kids are climbing on you; and asking you why, why, why?
It’s hard to focus on the Lord when you are trying to keep your kids’ fingers out of power outlets and their eyes away from the many bad influences in the world.
But, listen whether you are a mom or a dad or a childless man or woman, or a teenager, the things that vie for your time and your attention are NOT valid excuses.
If He is the most important person in your life, then stop making excuses. Instead make a way to be near to Him in prayer.
Even Jesus – Holy, magnificent God in the flesh – Jesus who was totally in tune with the Will of the Father – Even Jesus understood that He needed to quiet all of the other distractions and be alone with God.
We need this so desperately. Until we are quiet until we are free from the distractions of the world and the people around us, we will only pray on the surface.
I’m all for the open dialogue with God, to pray to Him while you are driving, while you are working on a project, while you’re shaving and whatever else. But there also needs to be some “face on the ground” time, eyes closed time, noises off time - with God.
It is in those times that we begin to open up to God about the deep hurts, about the plaguing worries.
It’s in those times of quietness before the Lord, when His Word can finally start to break down the walls that we don’t really want to have broken down.
It’s in those times of quietness that we start to hear that still small voice that says, “It’s time to put that down. It’s time to set that aside. There’s a better wiser path here.”
Sometimes I avoid the quiet because I know that in the quiet, the Spirit of God confronts me in the deepest levels of my sin.
Mother’s of toddlers, busy workers of industry, white-collar businesspeople artists, craftsmen, make no more excuses. As Christians, as disciples of Jesus, we all need to follow Jesus’ disciplines and find a way to pray on purpose, in secret and in quietness.
Now before we close, let me say this, maybe you have tried prayer and it just didn’t move you like I am talking about. Maybe you’ve tried prayer for a season and you just didn’t get the answers that you wanted or maybe you just didn’t hear anything.
If you are here tonight and that is you, let me encourage you to keep at it. Start small with small prayers, but please Keep At It, don’t quit. Be faithful to God’s call on you to pray without ceasing.
But, these don’t have to be super eloquent prayers that are packed with every theological truth. Start where you are and move on where the Spirit leads you.
In fact, some of you should ease up on the technical side of the prayer and just keep it simple.
Start small, with small prayers. Start with small prayers, slowly moving through the words, and dwelling on the truth.
Maybe you can just begin praying through the Gospel.
Just let every word be a pointing for your straying heart to His glory.
“Help me Jesus.”
“I’m a sinner.”
“I need you and I always will”
“Jesus, Forgive me.”
“Jesus, my Lord, thank you for the cross.”
“Thank you Jesus.”
“You have freed me from sin and from death.”
“Jesus, my whole life is yours.”
“Jesus, thanks to you I have nothing to fear.”
“Give me boldness.”
“Jesus give me the right words for my friends.”
“Jesus give me the right words for my enemies.”
Those are just a few examples. Start there, and then in your purposed, secret, quiet time with the Lord, you can pray out in circles from the people closest to you to the people you only know from a far.
In that time you can pray for your pastors. And for this church, and for all of the churches and all of the Christians in the area…
And before we leave, let me remind you that you may not get the prayers just right. They will not be perfect. But, if you are in Christ you can be confident of this truth.
God the Father, whom we are praying to, has God the Son, Jesus, at His right side praying for you to the Father.
In Romans 8, it is written
And when we can’t even say the simple prayers. When the pain is too great, when our frustrations are overtaking us, when the brokenness of the world around us and our own hearts is too great we can cry out in indistinguishable tears and still know that we are heard and that He understands our situation even better than we do.
To that aim, let me leave you with this encouragement, which is also from Romans 8:
Christian, you are not alone. Pray on Purpose, Pray in Secret and Pray in Quietness. And
don’t pray because it is some religious duty. Pray because you are forgiven, the work is finished and there is a waterfall of grace pouring out over you. Pray to our perfect and loving Father in Heaven. He’s waiting to hear from you.
Let’s pray together…
