So John chapter 16, I'm going to read a few verses there, and then a few verses over in Hebrews chapter 4. So John chapter 16, you can find it on page 902, there in the Pew Bible. John 16, I'm going to begin reading at verse 20. John 16, beginning our reading at verse 20. Please give your attention to the Word of God. Jesus here is speaking on the night when he was betrayed. He said to his apostles with John 16, verse 20, truly, truly I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come. But when she has delivered the baby, She no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So, also you have sorrow now. But I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you. In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, I will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask! and you will receive, that your joy may be full." Please turn over now to the book of Hebrews, at chapter 4. Hebrews 4, towards the end there of the Bible, on page 1003. So, Hebrews chapter 4, I'm going to begin reading at verse 13. is hidden from God's sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. Since then we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Tonight we discuss prayer. What's prayer? Well, you begin simply with children. You say, well, prayer is talking to God. That's the most basic, true definition. Prayer is talking to God. I don't want the kids to know, the small children, if you don't know anything else, what we talk about tonight. Prayer, what's that? Prayer is talking to God. I encourage the adults not to lose sight of that. That's what it is. Of course, with kids it's good not just to tell them what prayer is, but to tell them good occasions to make a habit of prayer, like before you eat or at bedtime. Small children to provide words, teach them to use the words, as I learned very early. Dear God, thank you for this food. In Jesus' name, amen. Good basic prayer before you eat. Now, when you pray, you're never to forget to whom you are speaking. Since prayer is talking to God, it becomes a very special kind of talking. It's to be done respectfully, and carefully, and humbly. Now, what can you talk to God about? Almost anything. After all, if you have a good relationship with your Father, and you have time, what can you talk to your Father about? Almost anything. If you have some coach that you have for a long time, over a period of years, and there's a long trip to the game or something, what could you talk to the coach about? Well, after enough years with the coach, almost anything. So it is with God. You can talk to Him about almost anything. But again, you never forget to whom you are speaking. And as God is our Creator, our Sustainer, our Judge, our Savior, our Rock, and as we are small, and mortal, and in the body, and subject to many pressures, and sinful, obviously a lot of what we're going to talk to God about is our need, our needs, our wants. That's really going to be at the center of what a lot of our prayers are going to be. And so you'll notice the definition there in the back of the bulletin. On the Westminster Shorter Catechism, it kind of puts the need part on center stage. What's prayer? It says prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God. Prayer is talking to God, yeah, but especially we're lacking by design, but we're made for communication and relationship with Him, and so we go to Him asking, asking for help. And in what we sang, Psalm 62, we saw God inviting that. Verse 8, pour out your heart to Him. That's the invitation that we need. Our hearts are often full with anguish or uncertainty or our need, many things. We need that invitation from God, though, and we haven't. Psalm 62, verse 8, pour out your hearts now to Him, all people. So what's prayer? It's talking to God. About what? Almost anything, but it's going to often be asking him for various kinds of help. Now, aren't some desires off limits? Yes. It would not be right to ask God for help in sinning. To bring him and try to make him an accessory to our sin would be a monstrosity. We rightly recoil from doing anything like that. And we're also not to pray for anyone who's now dead. We have an example, David. David sinned with Bathsheba, and a child was conceived. The child is evidently born. And David is told by the prophet Nathan, this child is going to die as a punishment on you for your sin. And David then prays very hard, long, and earnestly for that child to live. And he prays, and he prays, and he prays. He fasts, and he prays. He doesn't get off the ground. The servants are concerned for him. And the child dies. and David gets up, and he washes, and he goes in and worships God, and he sits down and he eats. And his servants say, now what is this behavior? He said, well, while the child was alive, I prayed for his life. Now that he's dead, I'm not going to bring him back. So we see we're not to pray for those who are dead. Nor, does the Bible say, nor it says, the Bible also says, that nor are we. to pray for anyone who has sinned the unforgivable sin. There is a sin unto death that says, I don't say you should pray for that. Now, I don't know how we would know that someone else did sin such a sin, so I think we're just including that for completeness sake. There is talking to God, asking for help, provided just about anything, but not for anything sinful, not for anyone who is dead. Notice that the definition there says prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God. Huh. Does he have to say yes to your prayer? Well, no. We already covered that with David. Here's David. The Lord's anointed and he does not gain that particular prayer. And we have Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Lord's ultimate anointed. Let this cup pass from me. Let not my will but yours be done. And so in prayer, we are invited to ask, but we don't reverse the relationship and leave God dependent on doing what we ask. Not at all. God remains God, and so we offer up our prayers to him. There's that sense of we're going, we're asking, we're speaking, and then we are leaving it in his inbox. You can place it again in his inbox tomorrow. But you are, in a sense, relinquishing it to him. It's an offering up of your desires. You say it, and you put it into his hands. And you say it again, because he encourages us with a parable. They keep on going, the widow going to the unjust judge. She went every day. And that's supposed to encourage us to pray with persistence. And as we pray with persistence, we're also giving it to him. We're relinquishing it. I have a friend that I go back and forth with talking about prayer. And this friend says, I don't pray for things. I pray for the strength and the peace to handle what comes. And I said, well, you know, Psalm 62, verse 8, I don't know if I quoted that verse to him yet, but it says, pour out your heart. You'd find to pray for things, give us this day our daily bread. But I also see the point of what he's saying. What he's saying is, yet not my will but yours be done, and help sustain me through that will that you have." That's always implicit in our prayer. So we have this balance. We're invited, we're commanded to pour out our hearts. Ask, Jesus says here. Ask. And know that He is God. He is God. And our prayers should not just be our requests. Now, suppose you love candy, which you probably do. And suppose you have to go to mom for candy. And she doles out the candy. So every day you say, mom, can I have some candy? Candy. Mom, can I have some candy? Candy. Mom, can I have some candy? Candy. Well, that's fine. But that's the only thing you ever ask mom for. You have a pretty narrow relationship with mom. So in the same way, prayer is an offering of our desires unto God. But it's more than that. There's more definition coming. It's to be broader than that. It's to be talking to God. You might notice the wording there. It says, prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to His will, as things that are not sinful, not for the dead. But that can trip us up, that particular wording. You might say, wait, mom has cancer. I want her to get better. But I don't know if God's going to heal her. So am I supposed to pray for it? The answer is, yeah, you are. Because although the wording is agreeable to His will, you don't know His will. But you know what's agreeable to His will. God does heal many people. Jesus healed when He was on earth. It's in Psalm 103. He who heals your diseases. It is agreeable to God's will that He heal people generally, so it's agreeable that you pray in particular for Mom. Well, no, isn't it? God will do as He has decreed. So we're to pray, and we're to offer those prayers up in hope, because God is good and merciful. This week I took a page out of Hunter's book, and I said, alright, I'm not just going to consult commentaries, I'm going to talk to living people. I said, hey mom, I'm preaching on prayer. Talk to me about prayer, mom. So she did. I said, early on in Cyprus, they were all Cyprus stories. She's a young Christian and a young missionary at the same time. She's there in Cyprus, and they are figuring out that there's a lot of missionaries there, and that meant there were disagreements. And so she's there with another young missionary saying, why are we here? And so they looked at Psalm 138. The Lord will work out what concerns me. He will perfect the things that pertain to me. And she and Bonnie Piper took comfort from that together. All right, the Lord knows why we're here. We're feeling kind of frustrated, not sure where this is going, being here. But the Lord will work out what pertains to us. So prayer is talking to God, asking Him for good things. It's humbly offering up our desires to God for the things that are good, that are agreeable to His will. And it's broader than that. It is talking to God, building that relationship with God. Now, people sometimes have this question. What if I don't think God will give me what I'm asking for? Can I ask somebody else? And if that sounds bizarre, that's OK. But that seems to motivate a fair amount of the Roman Catholic vote praying to Mary or praying to the saints. Well, you know you have a special saint for missing objects, or for sailors, or for all kinds of things. So, should I pray to the saint for the particular problem that I have? Should I pray to Mary? Perhaps a woman might be gentler than a man. Let's think through it biblically. Give me all the examples in the Bible where someone prays to somebody other than God. Yeah, that's what I came up with, too. I didn't come up with any. Didn't come up with any. Also, what did Jesus command? He's talking about praying to the Father in my name. So we have a positive command to pray to God, and we have no command or hint to pray to anyone else. Let's think about it theologically. Can I hear you if we're in our respective houses? That's only a yes if you live in my house. Is there any hint in scripture that when we die, our hearing improves? There's not. That's sentimentality, to say that dead people can hear you. We don't really know. It doesn't tell us that. So who can hear your prayer? You know God can hear your prayer. And we have no data to suggest that anyone else can. To go further, who can grant your prayer? Again, it's difficult to grant an unheard prayer. And particularly difficult to grant an unheard prayer if you're dead. But God has the power to grant these prayers. So God alone has the knowledge and the power. But finally, the thing that really brings down the hammer here is prayer is part of worship. Prayer is a part of worship. And whom are we to worship? The Bible is very categorical. We worship God only. And so no, we are not to pray to anyone else besides God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The ordinary way to think about prayer is we pray to the Father in the name of the Son with the help of the Spirit. It is acceptable to pray to any of the three persons, for these three are one God. You may direct your prayer to Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Ordinarily, we pray to the Father in the name of the Son, with the help of the Holy Spirit. And to pray to anyone other than God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is sin. Now, underneath that desire that some people have to pray, but not to God, can I pray to someone else? Underneath that desire is this question. Why should I think? that God would hear me? Why should I think that God would be merciful enough to pay attention to me and grant me my prayer? And that is a great question. Now we have a really central basic question that we need to get our hands around. Why should God be interested in your prayer? Why should He be merciful to you? After all, what we read in Hebrews 4.13, we're naked and exposed to His sight. He knows our selfishness. He knows our sin. Why should He be interested in granting our prayer? Well, you know, we need a mediator. We need someone to stand between us. When you've offended somebody, sometimes they don't want to hear from you. But if you can talk to someone, even talk to them for you, maybe you can start to move the ball forward. So you see that consistently in scripture. You see mediators. And the mediator needs to be a couple of things. First of all, he needs to be acceptable to God, which is to say appointed by God. We don't just get to pop up ourselves and say, I'll be your mediator before God. Well, how are you going to get to God? You can't see Him any better than the rest of us can. The mediator has to be appointed by God, and the mediator must be pure. It's all through the Old Testament you have priests, and they're not all that pure. So they have to sacrifice for their own sins first, to purify themselves. Once they've purified themselves, then they can purify the people. Then they can mediate with the people. But Jesus is the final priest. And so after verse 13, which is quite scary, we have verse 14, which may seem oddly positive after scary verse 13, but he's building on what he's been talking about. We have a great high priest. And who's the we? The we is everyone who's believed in Jesus Christ. That's the we. Do you ever wonder, why should I be a Christian? When you get real about prayer, that's why you see that you need to be a Christian. Why should God listen to me? Well, do you have Jesus? Is He your High Priest? Have you believed in Him? Have you been baptized in His name? If you have Him and He has you, then you have an answer to your question. Why should God listen to me? Because I come in Jesus' name. Because I'm coming obedient to His Son, coming in His name. And I know the Father is pleased with God the Son. He said so. He raised Him from the dead because He's pleased with His Son. So since I know He's pleased with the Son, if I can come in the Son's name genuinely, because I believe in the Son, then I know that Jesus is my mediator, and that God will listen to my requests. As you see the wording there, what is prayer? Well, a prayer that is sure to be heard by God. It's an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to His will in the name of Christ. That's why you have, in the name of Christ. Even a brother in the church came to prayer meeting for many years. He had to move away for the sake of work. He would pray every prayer meeting, and he would say, Father, as we come to the throne of grace. I don't think he got through a prayer meeting without the throne of grace. If you're wondering where he was getting that from, it's right here in verse 16. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace. It's because of Jesus that the throne is a throne of grace. Without Jesus, it's a throne of judgment. But because we have Jesus as our high priest, it becomes a throne of grace. And we're to go confidently to that throne of grace. Someone objects, wait a minute. The Lord's Prayer doesn't say, in Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, it doesn't. Because Jesus taught it before he completed his priestly work. It would not yet have been appropriate. That's why he says in John 16, until now you have asked nothing in my name. Now that I'm on the point of dying and rising again, now is the time. That is, you might say, in three days. Now is the time to begin praying in my name. Should we modify the Lord's Prayer? There's no need. The Father knows who taught it. When you pray the Lord's Prayer, you're praying in obedience to Jesus. You have Jesus, and you pray the Lord's Prayer that Jesus taught. And when he said, ask in my name, he was making a point, a point about himself and his centrality in our prayers. When King Solomon dedicated the temple, in his long prayer at the dedication, he said, God, When your people, wherever they have been taken in exile, pray towards this place. Notice that. Pray towards this place. Hear, O Lord, their prayers and answer in him. And so we see Daniel, a couple centuries later, he's in Babylon. What's he do? He opens the windows towards Jerusalem, that is towards the temple, or the ruins of the temple. He's praying towards that place. Jesus said to the woman at the well, who said, who's got the right temple? You Jews in Jerusalem, or us Samaritans over here? And he says, hours coming when the answer to that is neither. And he says, the hour is at hand when he says, pray in my name. There are those who still pray, getting down on their knees, facing in a certain direction, towards a certain city. We don't need to do that. Because as it says in John chapter 4, Father is looking for those who worship Him in spirit and in truth. Because of Jesus, the mediation happens, not because of sacrifices happening in a certain place, but because of Jesus. He's in whom the sacrifice has happened. And He is in heaven, so we don't face towards Jerusalem or Bethlehem or anywhere else. Instead, we pray in His name. So when you ask in His name, That's to be something that you say, yes, but that's also to encourage you to pray. Why should God listen? Because I'm obeying His Son. I'm praying like He told me to, and I'm praying in the Son's name. This encourages me. Because not only has He told me to, not only is He my mediator, because He sacrificed Himself, He remains my mediator, because look at what it says. He has passed through the heavens, and we have a High Priest. We do not have one unable to sympathize, the one who was tempted. So let us now draw near with confidence to the throne of grace. It's a throne of grace, not only because the Father is gracious, but because the Son is there. And he is there ever to intercede for us. Now, there's one phrase missing here in the shorter catechism that you get in the larger catechism. Archdiocese says, how do you pray? What is prayer? It runs through the same kind of thing. Prayer is an offering of our desires unto God for things agreeable to His will in the name of Christ by the help of His Spirit. So we'll mentally put that in right now. You pray with the help of the Holy Spirit. In that same farewell address, where he said, from now on, pray in my name, he also promised to send the Spirit. The Holy Spirit strengthens us. The Holy Spirit prompts us to pray, prompts us to repent, prompts us to forgive. The Apostle says that the Spirit helps us to pray by speaking for us, with groans too deep for words. That asks us to encourage us to pray. Sometimes you're like, I'm so upset about this, and I don't really know what to say. So maybe I won't pray, I'll just play it on my phone. Wrong. Pray about the matter that's disturbing you. Don't try to scratch the uncomfortable itch with a phone. Pray about it. And you say, but I don't know what to say. Well, you can grope around for words and trust that the Lord understands, because it says the Spirit intercedes with you, for you, with groanings too deep for words. Go to the Lord in prayer at those difficult times. And grope out a few words. And trust that the Spirit is helping you. So you have that definition there. Prayer is talking to God about many things. But given who He is and who we are, the central thing is it's asking God for help. It's offering up our desires to God for things agreeable to His will, things that are right and good. In the name of Christ, that's our mediator. By the help of the Spirit, you don't see that part. And you have two things left. I know some of you just turned 20. Some of you are about to turn 21. When I was 21, I sinned up at Quail Lake Camp in such a way that I quickly became notorious on the camp top. I won't need to tell you what it was. But my parents were not there to hear about it, but they come over every morning. So they were about to hear about it. Someone said to me, they better hear about that from you. So I made sure to intercept them at the parking lot and tell them first. And I'm sure they said, huh, what's our 21-year-old son doing waiting for us down here by the parking lot? I didn't make them wait very long to find out. Now, there's something roughly analogous with God. It's not that God has to hear it from us because he doesn't know. He's known from all eternity. He knows when it's happened. So that's not the point. The point is more the relational piece. What would it say to my parents if I didn't bother to tell them? If I tried to play it off or deny it or something? What would that have done to our relationship? Wouldn't it be good? Thus somebody saying, they better hear from you. In the same way, the God knows, but he's also watching our attitude. I know you sinned, and you know you sinned. Are you going to raise that or not? Are you going to ask for forgiveness? Or are you going to try and pray as if nothing happened? Or are you going to try and not pray at all? So you see, part of prayer is confession of our sins. Psalm 32. There are so many psalms. I could have had all 150 up here. sermon about prayer. Psalm 32 says, you know, when I kept silent, I was just aging and wasting away. But when I said, I want to confess my sins to God, then He forgave me, and life returned. The last thing there is, if you ask mom for something and she gives it to you, and you ask her for something and she gives it to you, and you never say thank you, is that right? So similarly with God, we've got to be thankfully acknowledging His mercies. The prayers He's answered, thank you. The sins He's forgiven, thank you. All the things we have, we've got to be thanking Him for them. Mom again, I remember being a young missionary, and another one of the young missionaries said, I see a verse I've never noticed before. First Thessalonians 5.18, in everything give thanks. Now wait a minute. I always kind of read that mentally as, thank God for the things I like. But the verse says, in everything give thanks. In everything. So she began to put that into practice. She tried to begin to thank God for small stuff, trivial stuff. and found that that discipline of thankfulness was transforming. Changed her whole attitude about life, actually. She began trying to look for things that I should thank God about this. And let me thank God about that. To be full of thanks warms our relationship with God. It honors God and it's safe for us. Reminding us of what He's done for us. Driving away bitterness. Driving away the devil with his lies. So what is prayer? It's talking to God. We're going to be especially asking Him for help. Respectful. It's an offering up of those desires to God, laying them before His feet, asking Him in hope and in the name of Jesus, the reason that we have confidence to come before Him. It's talking to God. It's confession of our sins. We can't hide them from Him. So let's be real and lay them before Him and seek His forgiveness. Let's talk to God with thankful acknowledgment of His mercies. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this extraordinary privilege that You've given to us, that You've told us to confidently draw near to Your throne and to believe that Your throne is for us a throne of grace. because of Jesus Christ our Lord. Father, we confess that though you have given us such a privilege and commanded us to use it, that we're very slow and often reluctant, negligent in doing it. Father, please forgive us for the sin of neglecting prayer. And Father, please stir us up that we may become more prayerful, quicker to pray, slower to be anxious, quicker to ask forgiveness, and slower to hide, quicker to give you thanks. I pray this in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.