Text: Matthew 18:18-20, Luke 5:1-10
I’ll often come across a quote or a few paragraphs in a devotional that I’ll save for later, thinking – Ahh! This will make a good sermon illustration!
Today, as we think a little bit about diving into deeper water in our prayer lives, I remembered a story told by the seventeenth century French mystic Jeanne Guyon in her book, “Experiencing the Depths of Christ.”
But before I get to her writing, a little about Madame Guyon herself.
She grew up very religious, spending much of her childhood in a convent until she was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of 15.
By the age of 28, Madame Guyon was a wealthy widow with three surviving children.
But the piety of her youth was what drove her and she continued to have mystical experiences of God. She felt called to share these teachings and eventually left her children into their grandmother’s care and left behind most of her personal possessions to do so.
At one point, Guyon was imprisoned for her teachings on prayer, which focused on constant prayer and inward stillness which brings us into the presence of God. Her writings were considered heresy at the time because they prioritized stillness over vocal prayer and pious action.
So imagine this woman, who has not had an easy life. But through it all, she believed God was with her in the midst of her trials and suffering. Madam Guyon wanted others to experience the depths of a relationship with God that she herself had found.
She tells the story of a traveler who has embarked on a long journey… a quest of sorts. But when the man comes to the first inn along the way, he stops there and remains there forever.
Why?
“He has been told that many travelers have come this way and have stayed at this very inn; even the master of the house once dwelt here… Oh soul! All that is wished for you is that you press toward the end… Only remember this: Do not stop at the first stage.” (Guyon, Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ)
Do not stop at the first stage.
I wonder how many of us have stopped at the first stage of our prayer lives.
We recite the Lord’s prayer.
We have a few prayers we turn to before meals.
We might even have a daily devotional we pick up a few times a week that includes a prayer at the end of every reading.
But for many of us, we pray in much the same ways we did as children.
We learned some of the basics of prayer and then stopped at that stage along the way.
We forgot about our destination, what we were striving for in the first place: a life spent in the presence of God and a faith connected with the power of God.
While we spend a lot of time thinking about the prayer that Jesus taught us, we forget what else Jesus taught us about prayer.
Ask and it will be given to you.
Seek and you will find.
Knock and the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7-8 and Luke 11:9)
If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains… nothing will be impossible (Mt 17:20)
If we ask for anything in agreement with God’s will, God listens to us… we know that we have received what we asked from God. (1 John 14-15)
And from our gospel reading today:
What your bind or loosen on earth will be bound or loosened in heaven.
When just two of us get together and pray about something, God goes into action in response. (Matthew 18:18-19)
If we pray… stuff will happen!
Not little stuff… BIG. GIGANTIC. POWERFUL. MOUNTAIN SIZED stuff!
That’s what scripture tells us.
That’s what Jesus keeps reminding us.
Prayer is powerful.
So why is it such an after thought?
Even in the church, this institution dedicated to the teachings of Jesus, prayer seems to be icing on the cake, rather than the main course.
Think about our typical response to things.
When we see a problem or we have a goal, we create a team!
We have meetings and we plan and organize and we get approval.
And then we work.
We work our tails off trying to make something happen.
And at the end of the day we find ourselves so busy and exhausted and barely one step farther along the way.
Maybe, MAYBE, we had a devotion and a prayer at some step along that journey.
But not always. And not often. And not primarily.
Martha Grace Reese reminds us that churches are not declining or struggling because we are lazy.
We work really hard.
Maybe the problem is that we aren’t praying as much as we work.
In Luke’s gospel, Simon and James and John found themselves in this very situation.
They were hard workers.
They had been up all night and put in the hours.
And yet, they had nothing to show for it.
Until they listened to Jesus’ invitation to go a little deeper.
To row out a little farther.
To push beyond what they had always done.
Was it simply that there were more fish out deeper in the water?
Surely, that can’t be it… for they knew these waters like the back of their hand.
Was it that they just put in more hours of work?
A whole nights worth of effort didn’t accomplish what miraculously came in through one toss.
No, what changed is that they had spent some time with Jesus.
And they listened to what Jesus asked of them.
In “Unbinding the Heart,” Reese shares the story of the Benton Street Christian Church and their evangelism team.
As they got started in their work, Reese asked them to not make any decisions for three months to but simply spend their time in prayer.
This was incredibly difficult for this church full of do-ers and they got frustrated that the only thing they could report was that they were praying… but they did it.
They got together and prayed.
They prayed between meetings.
They prayed every day.
They got teased a little… but then they started getting prayer requests.
And by the time their three months of prayer was done, they had vision and energy and direction and one month later had fifty people involved in the ministry.
As one of the volunteers later said, “It was incredibly difficult for these four ‘can-do’ women to wait in prayer… a year and a half later, all four of us would say our prayer lives have been permanently impacted by this experiment… the entire church is still being impacted by this willingness to risk praying first.” (p30)
Isn’t that a funny phrase…. To risk praying first?
What risk is there in praying first?
What risk is there in stopping to ask God to be present and to guide our work?
I’ll tell you what the risk is…
Something might happen.
Something might change.
And it just might be us.
Richard Foster once wrote, “prayer is the central avenue God uses to change us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.”
Or to put it another way, if we are content with the status quo, we are probably not people who turn to prayer a lot in our lives.
The opposite is also true.
If we believe God is active in the world…
If we see that something needs to change…
If we want to transform our very way of being in the world…
Then prayer has to be part of the process.
It is key to the journey.
It isn’t just one stop along the way…. It is the very road beneath our feet.
Two weeks ago, our church leadership team thought together about the work we have before us this year and the role and responsibilities each of us will play along the way.
One of the things that we focused on was our vision statement.
Can we read that aloud together?
Through personal engagement in and partnership with our community, we will live a life of love, service, and prayer, so that all who hunger might be fed by God’s grace.
We’ve been working hard on making this happen.
We try to create opportunities for people to personally engage and reach out to our partners like CFUM and Women at the Well and Simpson Youth Academy.
We focus on physical hunger through our food pantry and meal programs.
We reach out to meet that hunger for connection and relationship.
But do you know what we haven’t done.
We haven’t invited all of you to pray about this vision.
We haven’t stopped to ask God to help us accomplish this work.
As much as we talk about love, service, and prayer… as much as we even practice intercessory prayer for one another’s joys and concerns… we have not prayed as a community for our work together as a church.
It’s almost as if we took all of the power of God to bring fruit and change and life to our congregation and we locked it up in a box.
Today… let’s set the power of prayer free.
Let’s let the good news of Christ loose on the world.
Let’s turn this work over to Jesus.
Just as Christ urged Peter, James and John out into deeper waters, this next week, each day you’ll get an email inviting you to pray for Immanuel.
Not just for our people.
But for the vision God has given us.
For the work before us.
Let’s not stop at the first stage.
Let’s not be content resting before our journey is complete.
But together, let us keep pressing onward, deeper, out into that place where the presence and power of God can truly change us and this world.
May it be so. Amen.
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