So Daniel chapter 9, reading from verse 1 to verse 19, please be paying attention to God's word, noticing especially how Daniel prays, what he bases it on, how he frames it out, how he prays it. So Daniel chapter 9, please give your attention to the word of God. In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, by descent Amid, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans, In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely 70 years. Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleased for mercy, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, saying, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us, open shame, as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, and all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us because we have sinned against him. He has confirmed His words which He spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem. As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us, yet we have not entreated the favor of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us For the Lord our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and have made a name for yourself as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly. O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city, Jerusalem, your holy hill, Because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant, and to his pleas for mercy. And for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. Oh, Lord, hear. Oh, Lord, forgive. Oh, Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not for your own sake, oh my God, because your city and your people are called by your name. So we're talking about praying, something that we all do. Something that we're all to continue to do and to grow in. Something that we all find difficult, especially at times. Something that God calls us to and promises us blessings in. Prayer is, as we know, a means of grace. A thing that God has given us to bless us as we practice it to build us up. It's a means of grace along with His Word. and the church and the sacraments. So I exhort you never to stop praying. Continually pray, once a day by appointment, and at other times, when you know the need. So last week we began talking about prayer. We said, what's prayer? Well, it's talking to God. Of course, it's talking to God, so it's talking respectfully to God. It's talking to God by a mortal, fleshly human being. So it's talking to God, asking Him respectfully for the things that we need. Eventually, we arrived at the full definition in your catechism. There is an offering up of our desires to God for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies. And we hit a couple other points. To whom do we pray? To God alone. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, He can hear, He can deliver, and only He is to be worshipped. Why do we need the name of Christ? Because our sins have made a separation between us and God. Jesus is the mediator that God has sent. Why do we need the help of the Spirit? Because we don't know how to pray as we ought. The Spirit helps us in our inarticulateness, in our slowness, perhaps in our sin. There's a couple more questions to ask, though. For example, for whom are we to pray? The larger catechism says, well, pray for the whole church. Pray for your rulers. Pray for your elders and ministers. Pray for yourselves, your brothers. Yes, pray for your enemies. Pray for all sorts of men, living or future. Just don't pray for those who are already dead. And if you want to ask, well, for what should we pray? It's like, well, pray for anything that tends to God's glory. or the church's welfare, your own or other people's good, and not for anything that would be wrong or unlawful. And you see there that those answers push us, because of course we pray for ourselves and our good. I mean, it would be unusual not to pray for that. But it pushes us to pray for others as well, not just the others down the hall in the house, but for others to think more broadly, to think of leaders, to think of enemies, and so on. And also to widen out our conception of prayer, not just for particular things that are needed, but for God's glory and the church's welfare and so on. If you need some help in prayer, I have three ideas for you, one of which is the church prayer calendar that's right in the front pew. That can help you keep the promise that you made today. Today, everybody who stood up and said yes, you made a promise to pray for Hunter and Angie and Ephraim. So to help you remember, and you've probably made that promise before for other children. So to help you remember that, I encourage you to take one of these paper ones or, of course, print it out for yourself or look it up online. The second thing you might do is get ahold of a church directory, particularly if you're new to the church, which nobody here this evening is. But if you are, well, no, that's not true. Get ahold of a church directory, Justin. That'll help you get all those kids' names in. There you go. All those kids with the masks on that you can't see. All right. Yep. And you know, a third thing we can do is I write down the prayer requests that people make during Sunday evening worship so that I can then pray coherently from them. But you're allowed to write them down, too, even though you can pray incoherently for them. And then you can take it home with you and pray for it during the week. Same thing in prayer meeting. In prayer meeting, you can sit there, listen to them, and pray above them. But then you probably forget most of them. You can write them down during prayer meeting, if you wish, and then use them to pray outside of prayer meeting. But a main question then is, how do you pray? How do you pray? I have a friend who I remember saying, you know, when I pray like a Jew, it's like this. And when I pray like a Christian, it's like this. I said, Jack, what do you mean? And he told me a little bit about what he meant. But you'll notice that does provoke the question, how? How does God want to be prayed to? And of course, it's a very important question because we're talking to God. We're coming into His presence in the name of Christ. We see what it costs Christ to open up that way, to come into His presence, to His throne of grace. We're not to just assume that whatever we want to do is suitable to Him. It's a valid question. How are we to pray? And our Shorter Catechism assumes that He must have said something. It says, what rule has God given to direct us? How to pray. Surely, he must have said something. Of course, your answer is, well, all of the Bible helps with that. And you especially have the Lord's Prayer. All the Bible gives you direction in prayer. There's a lot of examples of prayer. There's particular parables and teaching about prayer. The whole Bible helps you with prayer. So we're looking at a very important prayer this evening. And then in upcoming weeks, we're going to be going through the Lord's Prayer, petition by petition. says Christians have done for 2,000 years. So looking here at Daniel chapter 9, this exemplary prayer by an exemplary person. And if we read a little bit further, you would have seen that his prayer gets a positive response. Not necessarily that he gets all the good news he wants to get, but he gets an angel telling him about things that are going to happen and telling him that he's greatly loved. So we get a very positive sense that surely this prayer is well received. by the Lord, not only is it preserved in Scripture for us, but an angel is sent to give him more information. Let's look at it. How does Daniel pray? I began in verse 1 to show you how he prayed according to God's will. Daniel was aware of what was going on in his world, he couldn't miss it, he was a top official, and he did not miss. In the first year of Darius, hold up, by the scent of mead, Okay, the world's just turned upside down. Daniel got taken away by the Babylonians. He was an official under the Babylonian Empire. Now, suddenly we're talking about Medes ruling. So it's in the first year after there's been this conquest, and this new empire has taken over, and he and his people are still sitting there in exile. All right, Lord, so what are you up to? You gave us prophecies that after Babylon crushed us, you would crush Babylon, and you did. But now, what? So he's cognizant of the world around him. It's what's going on. And now he goes to his Bible. Now, his Bible was shorter than yours, but it was a lot more cumbersome, because they didn't have paper the way we have paper. It was a much bulkier product. And each book had to be on its own scroll. You had to pull it off and shoulder it and unroll it carefully to read each book, each book of the Bible. So it was a fair amount of work for him. It wasn't this simple little flipping it open kind of thing that we have with our vastly superior technology right here. And yes, this is a vastly superior technology to scrolls. Now, he had to pull them out. And so you'll notice here, he He's reading Jeremiah the prophet, so that's one scroll. And then he alludes to everything written in the Law of Moses. That's five other ones, at least. He's doing the work, reading the Word of God, seeking to know what God's plan is. And so as he reads his cumbersome short Bible, he perceives that the time has got to be getting near. Now it's right to pray for Jerusalem's restoration. You might not have been sure if it would have been exactly the right time to pray before. Jeremiah said 70 years. The false prophet said, oh, just a couple. If you know Jeremiah is the true prophet, how do you pray at year eight? I'm not sure. But when you get up to year 65, 68, 69, OK, it's time to pray. Of course, you might ask, well, why does he need to? God said it'd be 70 years, so you can just, you know, break out a drink and wait, right? It's going to be 70 years. It's going to be 70 years. Why does he need to pray? Well, I think there's two parts to the answer. One is, it's been 70 years for their sins in Jerusalem. But they've not all been model believers in Babylon. Could there be fresh punishment for the fresh sins? That's something you might want to be concerned about. Certainly Daniel comes across as an exemplary figure, but they weren't all like Daniel. Remember, it's only three who get thrown into the fiery furnace. Do you think he only took three into captivity? And that's just among that set. Who knows what was going on elsewhere? That's one thing. You might say, well, you said so many years, but we've added more sins since then. Are you adding more punishment? Second reason he needs to pray is that this is simply part of our sonship, that we want the Father to carry out his good plan, and we want to say, go, go do it. You know, it's not much of a father-son relationship. When Betsy and I were small and Dad was young, he used to go back to Swarthmore College every year, early September, and run a really hot race. It was hot. The little guy was sweating. It was like 85 degrees out. And it was the varsity alumni cross-country race, where you have the recent alumni racing the college guys out in front, while a bunch of old guys stagger around the course. Dad was kind of in the middle of all that, between the two groups. And it would have been kind of lame of us if we just kind of sat there as he went by. So we didn't do that. We're like, yay, Daddy, go. And on a much greater level, we're to want our Heavenly Father to carry out his plan. We're to say, go on and do it. We want you to carry out what you've promised to do. And God has ordained not only the ends, but also the means. That is, not only has he declared what will be, he has also declared that we will pray and he will answer. And so our prayers are caught up in his plan. Our prayers are not this unnecessary little loose thing that hangs out loosely while God works out his plan over here. Don't bother me. I'm in my study right now. No, it's not like that. Our prayers are themselves part of God's plan. We shall pray, and He shall answer, and His will will be done, and carried out." In any case, please notice that Daniel appears as one of the wisest of the saints in the Bible. And as he perceives in the books that at 70 years, and we're to understand they're getting close to 70 years, he says it's time to pray. So, we are to pray according to God's will. How do you know God's will? Study your Bible. Pray that the promises that God has made in the Bible, pray that He would fulfill them speedily. And at times, like Daniel, we should pray with fasting. You'll notice that. I turn my face to the Lord, seeking Him by prayer, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. Now, fasting is when you voluntarily abstain from food or some other pleasure for a set period of time so that you can pursue the Lord in prayer. Voluntarily. If you have no food, that's called starving. That's a little bit different. You should pray while you're starving, but that's not exactly a fast. A fast is a voluntary act. We see people in the Bible fasting as they start out on a new expedition or a new phase. So Ezra, another century along, before he set out leading a group of people back to Jerusalem, and they did not have military protection because he'd said to the emperor, God will protect us. And then he thought, maybe we've got to really carefully ask God to protect us. So they spend the time fasting before they set out on their journey, and they are protected. Or Paul and Barnabas, when they are ordaining elders in every church, with fasting and prayer, They dedicate those brand new elders, who are pretty brand new Christians too, to the Lord in whom they have believed. Sometimes there's fasting as you set out for something new, some new phase of life, some new responsibility, some new expedition. Also, there should be fasting when there is disaster. I think in prayer meeting a couple times now, we've gone over the Book of Joel. In the Book of Joel, there's been some amazing locust plague just sweeping through, and how are they going to eat? And then the Prophet Joel comes and says, well, don't just sit there looking at each other. Consecrate a fast. Call the assembly together. Seek the Lord's mercy. That's what you ought to be doing in the sake of this disaster here. So those are group fasts. And the group does it together. Also, when we individually may fast, if we're overwhelmed by our sins, we're overwhelmed by our misfortune, when we're saying, Lord, have mercy. And we're seeking to focus and to meditate on him. Now, Jesus has spoken a couple times about fasting. But one thing he said, don't make a show of it. As with prayer, this is supposed to be something to draw you close to God. So it's about your relationship with God. So if you make a show of it, you've made it about your face in front of other people. And you can have that, but don't expect God to bless that. When you fast, don't let anybody know. Dress up and look normal. He also said that, of course, his apostles wouldn't fast while he was with them, because he says he is the bridegroom. When he is present, the joy of the kingdom is present. You don't fast in the king's presence. Fasting is a sign of lack, of sorrow, of seeking. And when you have all that you could possibly want, or should properly want, it's not the time to be fasting. But while Jesus said not to fast while his apostles were physically with him, that did not at all mean that we would never fast. He said, the day is coming when this bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they'll fast. So we are to fast. I must say, I think I've underplayed fasting, together with most American Christians, during my time here as a pastor. And I think that's a mistake. Fasting is scriptural. I see Daniel doing it here. It's confessional, it's in our testimony, in our book of worship, and you can read more about it in all of those different places. So how do you pray? You pray in accordance with God's will, studying His Word, praying for those things that He's promised to do, that He would do them speedily. Sometimes we pray with fasting. And you'll notice then that Daniel, as he began to pray, began to give the words to it, he praised God. He said, Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love, he is praising the Lord. This is a number of things. For one, it's the way to come in to a superior's presence. Should you be called into the Oval Office, you shouldn't just simply say, Joe, we need this. And say, Mr. President, thank you for meeting with me today. That's a much better way to begin. How much more, then, as we come before God? Now, in a moment of great emergency, you just simply pray what one of us calls a rocket prayer, sure. But as you sit down to pray, it is appropriate to begin with some proper respect. Let us show our faith by praising God, our creator, our sustainer, our judge. Or as the psalmist says, our rock and our refuge. Or like Daniel, he's a great and awesome God who keeps covenant love. Let's address God in this way. As we do that, we echo God's own words about himself. And what Daniel's also doing here is he's going to plead these qualities of God. So it makes all the more sense to mention them, and to praise God for them, and to encourage himself that God does have this kind of covenant mercy. Some of you may have learned the acronym for prayer, ACTS. In your prayer, begin with adoration, A, confess your sins, and thank God, and then make your supplications known, A-C-T-S, a good outline for prayer. Adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, supplication. You'll notice here, Daniel's got three of those four in the same order. He begins with the adoration. He then has a long confession. And then he ends with his supplication. If you ever wondered, does that have some biblical basis to it? Well, certainly. You have pretty much that outline here in Daniel. So then, after Daniel praised the Lord, came into his presence with singing, with praise and honor for God, and he confessed their sins. Now notice I have switched already to say, he confessed their sins. Because he prays with the we. In this particular place, he's not praying that, I have sinned, Lord, confess me. He's praying, Lord, we have sinned, please confess us. Now, that identification with the people is something to notice. Because Daniel had been wrenched away from Jerusalem as a boy. He had been inculcated with Babylonian religion and literature and the aim of making him a good Babylonian. He'd been subjected to a systematic, well-thought-through propaganda machine. And he'd spent his entire professional career apart from his people, serving the emperors of the Babylonian Empire, and now he's just getting shuffled over to the new Persian bureaucracy, because he's known to be so good at it. He spent his whole life apart from his people, and appears in the book as exemplary. He's one of the few biblical figures, I don't think we're ever told any of his particular sins. No doubt he had some sins, but we're not told any of them. So here's this exemplary figure, separated from his people at an early age. But he doesn't pray, please forgive them for their sins. He still prays, forgive us for our sins. He's saying, I'm one of them. This isn't us. And perhaps he's conscious, being a prophet of God, of being a mediator for his people. And we're not mediators. But at the same time, we should also know there's a time to pray, confess our sins, and the I, and the we, and I, and the me, just me, my sins. And then there's a time to confess our sins, as we are part of a group, and the group has some sin. Notice also that Daniel doesn't hold back. Perhaps you grew bored, as he went on at length about our sins and how we have done wickedly, and you have done righteously, but we have done wickedly, and we have not kept your law. You know, it's part of sincerity is not to go easy on yourself as you confess your sins. If you're in that spot where you want to say, yeah, I was wrong, please forgive me. Now, can we move on now? We know the feeling. As long as we're in that place, the person to whom we're confessing looks at us as rather askance. Are you really repentant for these sins, or are you just sorry you got caught and want to get out of the situation? Daniel does not make that mistake. He spends some time confessing their sins. And not only does he not minimize or hurry by, but spend his time in confession. He also accepts God's judgment. He says, as you promised you would do, you have done. You were right to do so. Righteous are your judgments. He says that even while he also says, boy, no city ever got it like we did. That's quite a thing to hold together. Nobody ever got it as bad as we did, and you are righteous in having done it to us because you told us the penalty and we sinned anyway. It all holds together, but emotionally it's hard to get to that place. But that is also as part of truly confessing. When you're truly penitent, you accept the punishment due to you for your sin. You may not ask for it to be dealt out in full, but should it come out in full, you accept it and say, yes, yes, this is what is due to me. I can ask for mercy, but I can barely require it. So having confessed and accepted the punishment and praised God's righteousness, having educated his mind with God's word and prepared his soul with fasting, and praised God and confessed their sins, He made his request. And his request is, of course, what Jeremiah had promised. He said, let your anger turn away from Jerusalem. Let the city be rebuilt. Let the temple be rebuilt. Let your worship resume. Let your people know the grace of your presence. A little independence might be nice, too. Let your anger turn away from Jerusalem. You notice how he pleads God's ownership. Your city, your hill, your people, they're called by your name. We can imitate that. Particularly when we pray for the welfare of the church. We're in the same place. We can say, Lord, let your face shine on us, for we are the people who are called by your name. Your son is Christ, and we're the Christians. The Christians, we're Christ's people. He rules something out. He says, we don't plead on the basis of our righteousness. That's not what I'm saying. I'm pleading on the basis of your mercy. This is where I began. The merciful God who keeps steadfast love and keeps covenant. And he ends with God's name. Jesus begins with God's name, hallowed be your name, and Daniel ends with the name, showing the importance of it. You know you're praying something in accord with God's will if you pray for God to exalt His name. So how are we to pray? The Shorter Catechism basically says, open your Bible and read anywhere. Follow the instructions you find there. There's a lot in the Bible to guide us in prayer. The psalms we're singing tonight, those are prayers. The psalms we sang last week, prayers. Psalms in particular are great places to find prayers. The larger catechism puts it this way. How are we to pray? We are to pray with an awful apprehension that is a deeply felt reverence. With an awful apprehension of the majesty of God and a deep sense of our own unworthiness, our necessities and our sins. We're to pray with penitent and thankful and enlarged hearts. We're to pray with understanding, know what you're saying, faith, believe God hears you, sincerity, fervency, or why are you praying, love and perseverance, waiting upon Him with humble submission to His will. You might think that's a little much to keep in mind But if it is, you could also simply look at Daniel 9, and you have an example there of all those things. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you call us to pray. Lord, we confess that we don't pray as we should, as often or as fervently. Lord, please forgive us that we would treat this great privilege and honor and command of yours lightly. Please forgive us for this, Lord, and please help us to grow as praying people, as those who pray with and for each other, as those who pray for our friends and our enemies, as those who pray for Your Church and for our nation. Help us, Lord, to pray fervently to You. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.