We have two things to do. One is to talk about prayer in a more focused way, and then to talk about fasting. We spend a lot of time on the word and its function in mediating the presence of God, the experience of God. And now we want to talk more about our response. Our part, our talking, not just God’s talking toward us saying, “I chose you, you’re holy. I love you.” You hear God in that. But now, what do we do? What do we say back?

What Is Prayer?

The Westminster Shorter Catechism answers it in Question 98. There’s a great story behind this. Some of you remember it because I’ve told it before. About 50 years ago or so, D. L. Moody came to Scotland. He was asked as part of his crusade to go to a day school where there was a chapel full of hundreds of little boys and girls. I forget what age. And he said, “I want to talk to you today about prayer. What is prayer?” He asked the question rhetorically, “What is prayer?” And about 1,000 hands went up.

He called on one little boy, and the little boy by memory said:

Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.

The boy sat down. Moody was so stunned, he said, “Thank God, son, that you were born in Scotland,” meaning a place where they believe in the Catechism. I don’t know how you’re doing. I edited a catechism one time and have been hitting this and using it with my own children. Because in our hectic lives, it’s not easy. But I really commend it to you, and I hope I do better with Talitha, our little five year old coming along. I hope I do better to teach answers to questions. That’s question 98 and it’s not the end. So let me just take a few of these pieces. I think that’s a very good definition of prayer: “An offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies.”

So you have an expression of desire. You have, “according to his will.” You have, “In the name of Jesus.” You have a proper role of confession of sin. You have gratitude for mercies. Maybe if there’s anything missing there, it might be praise. But we’ll come to that. So let’s just give some biblical examples of some of those desires.

Expressing Desire for God

The desire of God himself to be expressed. This is a prayer. You learn how to pray from the Psalms. The Psalms are mainly prayers but not always, and not every song is all one or all the other. This one is prayer. This is talking to God (Psalm 73:22–26):

Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
     you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
     and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
     And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
     but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That it shifts to third person here. The Psalms do that a lot. So you shouldn’t fault people too quickly if you hear them do that in prayer. It might be owing to thoughtlessness, but it might not be. I don’t think it’s thoughtlessness here that he shifts from “You, you, you” to “God is. God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” So here he says to God, “Besides You, I desire nothing on earth. I want you.” That surely should be right at the center of our praying. Offering up our desires unto God, not only for things, but in those things, for God.

Adulterous Praying

I hope you linger over that for a minute with another text, this issue of things. What do you pray for? Go to James. I’ll skip some things here. Here’s a good cautionary text on James 4:1–4:

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

This sheds light on what’s wrong with their prayers. It’s an image you’re talking about here. What’s the image? The world is your lover, so you’re an adulteress. Friendship with the world is hostility to God, your husband. So in the image, he calls them “adulteresses,” and then he unpacks the image for them. You become a friend to the world, you become hostile to your husband. He continues:

Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? (James 4:4–5).

I don’t think “Spirit” should be capitalized there. You can’t tell in Greek whether the spirit is your spirit or God’s Spirit. Here’s what I think this image is trying to say. You’re not supposed to love the world or the things that are in the world. Love of the world is not from the Father. You’re supposed to love the Father and love the will of the Father. Change Father to husband. You’re an adulteress because you’re married to God and you’re starting to go out and have affairs with the world. What’s that have to do with prayer? That’s what you’re doing when you pray. Prayer is adultery. That’s what James 4:3 is saying. You ask and do not receive because you ask as an adulteress. Well, what do you mean?

The picture I have in my head is this. Here’s your bedroom, and your husband is in there and he’s asleep. And you stayed up to do something, and you’re supposed to go get in bed with your husband and spend the night there. Instead, you go in there and you wake him up and you say, “Can I have 100 dollars.” He says, “Sure.” He reaches over his wallet, and goes, “Here’s your $100.” And you say, “Thank you, I’ll see you in the morning.” And you go down the hall, and you pay your paramour and call into bed with him. You buy sex with the money that your husband gave you, which is an answer to prayer. That’s the image here.

So we come to God in prayer not because we love God and not because we want his kingdom to advance, but because we want our 100 dollars to go down and get what we really want. And that’s why he says, in my image, he gave it to us. But here he says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” I think those pleasures mean pleasures at odds with God, pleasures that don’t have God at the center of them, pleasures that are not received for God’s sake and pursued for God’s sake. This is a striking image, adulteresses. You have a husband, you’re supposed to ask your husband for things that will enhance the marriage. Don’t ask him for things that jeopardize the marriage. Don’t use prayer as a means of getting stuff that draws you away from God. Use prayer for things that will draw you toward God, toward your husband.

But instead, she wakes him up and says, “Can I have $100?” He says, “Yes.” And she goes out and buys his favorite breakfast. I don’t know, I’m just thinking that way here. You use that hundred dollars for something that will enhance the relationship, deepen the relationship, and strengthen the relationship.

To Satisfy Our God-Centeredness

Don’t use prayer as a way of satisfying non God-centered desires. This is huge and it’s a very important thing to get worked out in your own head, because I think maybe the most important chapter in my book, Desiring God, is the chapter on prayer. I think it’s probably the deepest and hardest chapter to understand and the most important, because there I wrestled with, if God is to be our satisfaction, if God is to be our delight, if we’re to say, “Whom have I in heaven, but thee?” And, “There is nothing on earth that I desire besides thee,” then, what am I supposed to feel about my wife, children, food, and ministry? I mean, all these things are good things. I can’t desire them and delight in them? That’s what I wrestled with in that chapter.

Because prayer is all about, why are you asking for a job? Why are you asking for a wife? Why are you asking to pass this test? Why are you asking for health? Why are you asking for your car not to break down? Why are you asking? What is this horizontal idolatry? Or is it? Do you see the problem? Most people don’t wrestle with that at all. Is prayer idolatry? Is it adultery or not? What keeps prayer from being adultery? It’s like going to your husband and asking him to pay for what you really like, food. I got help from Augustine. He said this:

He loves thee too little who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake.

That’s the best sense I’ve ever read on that problem. You love God too little if you love anything together with God, which you love not for God’s sake. So pizza. Do you love pizza? Pepsi? Sex? Success in business? A nice house? A marriage? Children? Ministry? Preaching? Teaching? Do you love any of that? That might be okay, and it might be idolatry. What makes the difference? Do you love it for God’s sake? Then you have to ask, “What does that mean? How do I do that?” That is really asking for an exposition of 1 Corinthians 10:31, which says, “Whatever you do, whether you eat pizza, or drink diet Pepsi, do all to the glory of God.” And if you can’t, it’s idolatry. So you have to learn how to drink orange juice to the glory of God.

All to the Glory of God

You can do this by being born again, being filled with the Holy Spirit, and taking on the character of Christ who knew how to both feast and fast, so that from inside out, we are being changed from one degree of glory to the next. After we’re born again, we’re not only corrupt, now looking to Jesus, we are being changed from one degree of glory to the next. And we take that newness and by faith and we have new motives.

I wrote a chapter in The Godward Life on “How to Drink Orange Juice to the Glory of God.” I wrote a Bethlehem Star article about it one time. I tried to think my way through that, how to drink orange juice to the glory of God. If that sounds nitpicky to you, then I’m not sure what you think 1 Corinthians 10:31 is in the Bible for. Because it says, “Whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God.” Paul was choosing the most ordinary daily thing he could think of, eating and drinking. If you can’t figure out how to do that to the glory of God, then laying your life down on the mission field is not going to happen to the glory of God either.

One way would be, as you look at the orange juice sitting there on the table, to thank him for it. You say, “You created oranges. And you, in your providence have so ordained that there be climate like Florida, not Minnesota. And you have ordained that no hurricane wrecked the crop this year. You could have blown and all of them would have been ruined. And you ordained that human beings have brains to figure out how to get it from there to here without spoiling. And you granted me the power to make enough money to go buy a jug of orange juice. And you granted me the power to pay for refrigeration so it can be there for a few days, so it doesn’t spoil. And now here I sit, and you gave me taste buds. You gave me health and you enabled my sphincters to work in my throat so that I can swallow. And there’s enough to go around here so that I can have the Christ-like joy of sharing the orange juice with my family, and watching them enjoy it, and having my joy in that juice double as they have joy in that juice.

And then it really gets down to the nitty gritty if you don’t have enough juice to go around to all four boys, so you pass. And that’s Christ-like and that honors the Lord. In that case you glorify him by not drinking orange juice. And then they want seconds and there isn’t enough for seconds, and therefore they have a golden opportunity to glorify God in whether they murmur or not. Well, that’s a start on how you glorify God in drinking. And then as you drink, you enjoy it. So no deniers, no swings and playing games here. It tastes good, it’s good. And there’s pleasure in it. There’s a physical pleasure. So these pleasures are not that every pleasure is bad, but is it for God’s sake that you’re experiencing this pleasure? That is, are you turning it back to God and making it an occasion of gratitude, recognizing that it’s from him, and through him, and to him so that he gets the glory in the providing of it and the taste you experience from it?

Then another way would be to say, “All right, I have just received refreshment and energy.” What are you going to do with that? You’re going to live it for God or not. You can either go out, bark at your employees with the energy you got from God’s orange juice, or you can go out and in the energy that God has given you through the orange juice and you can love people with that orange juice-given energy from God. So communion with God in prayer, not using God in prayer. Pray for things that your husband and you will prosper with — that is, things that will enhance the relationship and will reflect God’s value rather than compete with God’s value.

Question and Answer

What do you think is meant by James 4:5, which says, “Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?

If that’s a small “s” what it means is that God is jealous of your spirit for him. That’s what I think it means. God is jealous that your spirit belongs to him rather than giving your spirit to the world. To capitalize it — he jealously desires the Spirit — I’m not even sure what that would mean. So I would defend this translation and argue what that would mean.

Couldn’t it mean that God earnestly desires that the Spirit not be quenched but have full course in our lives?

That’s a plausible interpretation. But I think it fits the context better to say that we are giving our spirit away to a paramour and making a cuckold out of God. We’re cheating on God by giving our spirits away to the world, and they’re meant to be for God. But it works either way, so we don’t need to settle that absolutely.

Praying the Word

One way to stay God-centered in your praying is to pray the word. I said that last night. I just put this up here as an illustration of it. I won’t read the whole thing, I’ll just show you that when the church came together to pray in Acts 4, they were praying for power. When they had been released, these apostles who had been arrested went to their own companions and reported all the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they heard this, they lifted their voices to God with one accord and said:

Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, “ ‘Why did the Gentiles rage, and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together, against the Lord and against his Anointed’— for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel . . . (Acts 4:24–27).

I would just encourage us in Bethlehem and whatever churches you’re a part of, try to build praying the word into prayer meetings. Now, I want to point out two ways to fall off the horse here so that we can stay on the horse. You can fall off the horse on one side by never taking the Bible into your prayers and praying Scripture back to God. And if you never do that, your prayers will probably get into not wonderful spontaneity in your language but ruts in your own language. The opposite of discipline in Bible memory is not spontaneity, but rut.

I grew up in a church where what I remember as a kid were the most absolutely stock prayers that the deacons prayed at the communion table, at the offering, and at the prayer meeting. They were just as predictable as could be: “God, lead, guide, and direct us.” We would pray for all missionaries on the home farms, and then we’d pray for the requests “spoken and unspoken.” I mean, as a kid, I was not turned on to God by these prayers. I didn’t feel there was anything authentic going on there.

But when I go to prayer meetings here, when those wonderful people come on Friday morning, and Tuesday morning, and Sunday morning, and Wednesday night, that doesn’t happen because they pray the word. Their minds and their hearts are full of the longings of God, for his glory in the world. So when they pray about a marriage, or about a kid, or about a disease, or about money for this building, or whatever, there’s so much God in it. There’s so much Bible in it that you know they’re dealing with him. They’re not just stuck in a rut learned from 20 years ago of how you say something. So don’t fall off on the side of the horse that says, “I’m not going to use the Bible in the disciplined or memorized way, because I want to be spontaneous.” Which will usually mean in a rut of your own words.

Call Him Father

However, there’s another side to fall off from. Greg Livingstone, when he was here, gave a beautiful illustration of it. You hear some people pray, and there’s so much telling God back to him what he already knows. You want to do what Moody did. And I learned this from Greg Livingstone. One time Moody was sitting on the platform, and a man stood up to pray. And he went on and on, saying, “Oh thou who created the heavens and the earth, oh thou who doth uphold all things, oh thou who just sent thine Son, oh thou who art the great refuge . . .” And then Moody, after about five minutes of this, stood and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Just call him Father and ask him for something.” That’s the other side of the horse. Don’t feel like you have to produce some big showy prayer. You don’t have to do this.

They knew this by heart. They didn’t get out their Bibles in Acts 4, I don’t think, and read this. This just oozed out of them. That could have gone on for 15 minutes and I think Peter would have stood up and said, “Ah, just call him, ‘Father’ and ask him to give us power, would you?” And that’s what they eventually do. Pray the Scriptures, and it’ll be God-centered.

Communion with God in Prayer and Confession

The definition that is in the Catechism included communion with God and confession of sin, and I just want to make sure to say a brief word about that because a huge part of our prayer alone, and some of it when we’re together, should be to just acknowledge our sin to God.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
     whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
     and in whose spirit there is no deceit.
For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
     through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
     my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
I acknowledged my sin to you,
     and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord . . . ” (Psalm 32:1–5).

Here’s the result:

And you forgave the iniquity of my sin (Psalm 32:5).

Then he says:

Therefore let everyone who is godly
     offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
     they shall not reach him (Psalm 32:6).

That’s the clearest passage in the Bible I know of to point out the devastating effects of hiding your sins from God and not confessing them. It is so healthy to confess your sins to God and receive forgiveness from God. And it is so sick emotionally to play games with God and try to conceal your sins from God, or not to speak of them to God. And it’s sick in a church when we can’t do it to each other. James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to one another.” So there should be occasions when in an appropriate setting — not just blabbing every secret thing in your marriage or your life to everybody, but with a select group of trusted prayers — you say, “Oh God, I blew it last night with my wife.” Or you say, “I said something wrong to my kid.” Or you say, “I had this awful thought.” Or you say, “I hit the wrong button, and I actually lingered over this muscle stuff on the computer, and I’m just feeling filthy.” And you say it. That’s very crucial. That’s very crucial.

Never a Cause for Anger

Let me say something here that I have found recently. Since last fall, I was speaking on this at Trinity Seminary and the looks that I got back from the students just blew me away. It’s like what I was saying was being met with, “You can’t mean this.” I’ll give you the summary statement which left many of them just absolutely befuddled. I said, “It is never right to be angry at God, ever. And it’s never right not to tell him when you are.” Is that a contradiction? Does that leave you as befuddled as it did them? It is never right to be angry at God. I believe that with all my heart. Anger at God is always sin. God has never deserved your anger. You may think he does, and that’s a problem in your brain because of the way things have gone in your life.

I had a very godly woman say to me last week that she was angry with God. You sin in this anger with God. And that’s why I said my second thing. If you are angry, don’t you play games with God. In other words, if you do feel this wrong thing, say it because he knows. He knows your feelings. So it’s two things. You see, most people today that I hear, they think anger is a non-moral issue. They think, “Anger is neutral and it doesn’t have any meaning. So it doesn’t matter if you’re angry at God. It doesn’t matter if you’re angry at anybody. What matters is what to do with it.” Well, to feel anger at God is sin. But not to tell him so when you do is another sin on top of it. Job did not commit sin, which is why we have a record of all that bad theology from his friends, and all that self-justification started coming out from Job.

At the end, he had to put his hand on his mouth, throw dust on his face and say:

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42:5–6).

Job is a repentant and broken man after two chapters of God speaking to him at the end. So I want us to be able to handle both of those; it’s never right to be angry with God, and therefore do your best to see in the providence of God, the goodness of God. But if, owing to our own remnants of corruption, which were stirred up off the bottom of Job’s life, we feel it. What are you going to do with it? Become a hypocrite all of a sudden? It doesn’t work with God. It might work with the church for a little while, but it doesn’t ever work with God. He sees straight through. He knows exactly what you’re feeling. You may as well say out loud to God what you’re feeling. And even in a group of trusted friends, you can say it.

That woman said it to me, I’m glad she did. She trusted me with that. She knows what I believe. She knew I wouldn’t have taunted her and said, “Oh, don’t ever feel that.” I didn’t have to say anything to her because the next thing out of her mouth was, “And I’ve been confessing to God and I’ve been struggling with this.” She’s real. She’s a real sinner. So let’s strive toward not being angry, that is not sinning against God by imputing things to him that are worthy of our moral condemnation. I mean, the only time there should be anger is when there is moral culpability against you, that’s real. And even then, it’s not always right. I say “moral culpability” to distinguish between broken clutches, bad brakes, and bad transmissions. Jonathan Edwards had 70 resolutions, one of them was, “Resolved, never to get angry at an inanimate object.” And the reason he felt strongly about that is because if you get angry at an inanimate object, you’re angry at God. Because God runs the world.

God runs wind. God does this temperature. You get angry at this temperature because your fingers get cold, you’re angry at God. That didn’t come from nowhere. Resolve never to get angry at an inanimate object. The right place for Christian indignation is sin, your own first. So most anger should be expended at yourself, and then the sin of others. But once you learn how God deals with sin, even that’s going to be cut way down: “The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).

Question and Answer

Is there a difference between struggling and being angry?

Yes, I think anger can probably exist in such increments that the struggle whether to allow it and experience it is a different thing than suddenly having the full blown thing and then having to repent or do something with it. And that’s where we live, really, I think that struggle level. And to the degree that you come to trust God’s sovereign, wise, good, loving providence, to that degree, anger toward him will tend to go down. If you doubt his wisdom, or his love, or his power, any one of those three, anger will tend to rise when circumstances hurt you. Because you will either think he’s not wise enough to fix it, or he didn’t care enough to fix it, or he’s not able to fix it. You’ll think he doesn’t have the power, he doesn’t have the wisdom, or he doesn’t have the will to fix it. It’s a very controversial thing. I think the solution to anger is not to take the power of hurricanes out of God’s hand or the power of cold out of God’s hand, as though he weren’t sovereign. But go further and put wisdom, love, and power into his hand, acknowledge that it’s there. So you could pull the plug on anger at God by saying, “God didn’t do this. God did not cause this cold. God did not providentially rule over your broken car. God was not sovereign and in control when the marriage broke down.” And on and on and on the list goes.

You could solve the problem of anger with God that way, and that’s a big theological jump that most Americans make. I don’t think that’s biblical. I think the solution to that is to say, “God, I don’t understand it. But you are wise, you’re all-powerful, and you are all-loving. And somehow in and through all this pain, and that earthquake, and this family crisis, you have my best interest at heart and You’re going to bring through this whole thing, something good for the glory of Your name and joy of our own souls. And I trust You.” That’s the way I’m going to counsel you if you ever come to me with pain. I’m not going to dump on your anger and your tears, I’m just going to try to patiently direct you to God. And I won’t say God didn’t have anything to do with that pain. I won’t say he doesn’t have power, I won’t say he doesn’t have love, and I won’t say he doesn’t have wisdom. I will try to help you patiently walk through that crisis. When it’s hard for you to believe that, I’m out to help you believe for you and pray with you.

I’ll put stories before you like the story of Joseph, or the story of Job, or the story of Jesus Christ to show how this truth plays out. I mean, isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it wonderful that James 5:11 tells us the point of the book of Job. Did you know that? Have you ever wondered, “What’s the meaning of the book of Job? Is it 42 chapters of bad theology, or maybe 38 chapters of bad theology? What’s the point of that?” Here’s the point, let me read it to you:

Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful (James 5:11)

End of story. The point of the book of Job is the compassion and mercy of God in and through the satanic attack on one of his best saints. Confess your sin and be honest with God. There’s no point in hiding anger or any other sin that you have, even the most horrible things.

Oh, that people would believe this because I know that addictions — like food addictions, drug addictions, alcohol addictions, caffeine addictions, and work addictions — are driven by people’s locked up lives. There’s something in there they’re scared to death if people knew it for what it was, if they knew them, what happened when they were teenagers, what happened they were kids, what they did at work, what they really consistently feel, they would be rejected. Their life would be an absolute utter chaos and mess, so there is undealt with stuff that’s wrecking the life here. Someone says, “My body wasted away, groaning all day.” What do you do with that? You medicate it, you eat, you drink, you shoot up, you sniff, or whatever. You do what you have to do to handle the pain, but you’re not going to take it out because it’s too scary. That’s when communing with God will be deepened and enhanced. If you cut yourself off from people, you cut yourself off from God. It’s a sweet thing in a church where we can trust each other enough to get the worst stories out on the table to the trusted few and have them love us in spite of them and then begin to be free from it and its effects.

What does Ephesians 4:26 mean when it says, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger . . .”?

Clearly in that text, not all anger is sin. I didn’t mean to communicate that it was. I don’t think that has anything to do with anger towards God. I think that is like Jesus saying, “If you know that your brother has something against you, get fixed and then go offer your offering.” Some anger is appropriate. Jesus was clearly angry. It says when the man with the withered hand in Mark 3 was about to be healed and they were all upset that he was going to heal on the Sabbath day, he looked around upon them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart. There’s two emotions side by side: anger and grief. When you put those two side by side, you might have a close thing to righteous anger.

In other words, if you get angry at some political thing or about abortion or about people lying and spinning in public life or whatever, how do you know whether that anger gets out of hand so that James kicks in with, “The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God”? When does that kick in? It probably kicks in when, number one, it lasts too long and seethes. Which is why you have to get rid of it before the sun goes down. In other words, it might be appropriate to feel an indignation. But if you nurture that thing, it will eat you alive. If you go to bed with it and sleep on it, and wake up, and then have it again, over time, the emotional effect of going to bed on anger will be destructive. And really, I think, in that context it is probably an unresolved conflict.

If that happens over and over in a marriage or between a parent and a child, well, you can just watch the distance appear. It will create distance between the son and the father. I have four sons and I’ve had disputes with all of them, big time. We’ve had some big collisions and big angry moments. Sometimes they’ve been justified, mostly not. I’m doing the anger, and they’re clearly doing the anger too, but I’ve got my share. When you get angry, if they’re little, you spank them in a way that you shouldn’t have. I believe in spanking but it’s careful spanking. Or if they’re older, the door gets slammed and you say, “You stay in there. When you’re ready to talk right to your mother, then you come out.” Now, what do you do at that moment? What happens to that relationship? You have two or three hours before the sun before you’re going to go to bed. He comes out, plays music, does his homework, and nothing is said.

That’s how a lot of families handle it. You just go to bed. If that happens 800 times in growing up, you have major problems for that kid’s marriage, and so on. So what should the dad do? The dad is responsible here. The kid is going to be held responsible by God, but the dad is doubly responsible for his anger. And even if he didn’t sin in the anger that he had and it was wholly appropriate, his responsibility is to get this thing fixed as much as he can. It says in Romans 12, “In as much as it lies in you, live at peace with all men.” Well, you can’t make that kid happy, but you can try. So an hour later, the kid comes out before you go to bed and you say, “Let’s just talk for a minute, okay? Noël come here. At supper time, it didn’t go well. I got really mad because of what you said.” I’ll pick Barnabas because he’s easy to pick on because he’s nice. I’ll say, “What you said on this really made me mad. That’s not the way to talk to your mother. I don’t want you to defend yourself right now because she did this or that. I know that’s what you were thinking. And I don’t want to get between here, I just want to say we all know it didn’t happen the way it should have happened. We didn’t fix this right. I got angrier than I should have. I’m sorry, Barnabas. You did wrong, but I did wrong. I’m sorry, would you forgive me?”

Oh, that is healing. For a dad to apologize to a teenage kid is massively healing. So many teenagers never feel a broken dad. So many will never see any manliness modeled in brokenness and humility, saying, “I blew it.” So I think, “Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath” probably means some kind of dynamic like that. Don’t just go to bed in a broken relationship as much as it lives within you. Now, Jesus went to bed every night on broken relationships with the Pharisees. And there’s always going to be people in your life that are mad at you, and you can’t wear the whole burden of the world.

I mean, I have enemies everywhere who don’t like what I think about Calvinism, or what I think about manhood and womanhood, or what I think about the foreknowledge of God. There are all kinds of things. They think John Piper is arrogant, proud, doctrinaire, and whatever — however you want to put the spin on the thing. And you just say, “Okay, I can respond to some of that mail and I can reach out to some people that I know.” But I don’t respond to all of it. It’s just too many and they live all over the world. And I can’t get out and fix all of it. I just take real comfort in the fact that in my church here things are going pretty well. There’s one of you I did this a week ago with. I don’t think you’re here. I wouldn’t mind telling you who it was. But I was very abrupt and I think un-pastoral and unkind with someone two weeks ago. And my conscience was so bad all day long.

I said, “Oh, man, that dishonored the Lord. If I don’t fix this, it will smooth over. They’ll be nice to me, I know they will. They’re nice people. But they’ll always be this distance and it’s going to grow.” So I called him up in the evening and he picked up the phone. I said, “This is Pastor John.” He said, “Oh,” as if to say, “I did not expect this because you seemed upset this morning.” And I just had to say, “I didn’t talk the way I should have it all this morning. I love you guys, I’m sorry.” And then we moved on from there. I think I had to do that. I had to. I was upset and I just didn’t handle it well at all.

What place does thanksgiving have in our prayers?

We could talk for a long time about thanks. Be sure that thanks is included in your prayers. Be sure a lot of thanksgiving is in your prayers.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God (Philippians 4:6).

Let every prayer you pray almost have thanksgiving. I’m not going to be legalistic about that. Have a lot of thanksgiving in your prayer. And then there’s times and places, and how often should you pray? The Bible says pray without ceasing. So you live in the spirit of prayer all day. You keep offering up your desires to God, and pleading for help for everything you go through. But alongside that spontaneous daily, hourly, moment by moment praying, there are these set times like Psalm 119:164: “Seven times a day, I praise you.” Isn’t that amazing? Or in Daniel:10–12 it says:

When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.

That’s a civil disobedience in your face with vengeance, right? We have the law of the Medes and Persians that can’t be broken. It says, “Only pray to the king.” And he goes before an open window three times a day and gets down on his knees facing Jerusalem and prays, “Oh Jehovah, Yahweh. You are my God.” They say, “But you’re in the lion’s den, fella.” That’s good. But the point is, three times. Three times a day, or seven times here. So here’s the question, what’s your pattern? And you say, “I don’t have a pattern, I pray all day.” That’s not good because that will not work in the end. Spontaneity without some discipline becomes worldliness and rut in the end. Nobody is purely spontaneous. Spontaneity of the most creative kind grows out of some of the most rigorous disciplines of life. It’s like farming. One of the most spontaneous things about farming is that corn comes up out of the ground. There it is.

It’s knee high by the 4th of July if you live in Nebraska. And it just grows and the farmer watches it. He thinks, “Wow. Man, that’s exactly what I want, spontaneous growth in the field.” Well, there was some sweat behind that. He plowed the field and he planted the seed. Spontaneity grows in the field of well furrowed rows. You want spontaneity, stick with the discipline. I’m not telling you what the discipline should look like for you, because I don’t think we should do that for each other. I won’t say, “You have to read the Bible an hour a day,” or, “You have to read the Bible 30 minutes a day,” or, “You have to pray an hour,” or, “You have to do it three times,” or, “You have to do it seven times,” or, “You have to do it in the morning,” or, “You have to do it in evening,” or, “You got to do it morning, noon, and evening.” What I’m saying is, find it, look for it, and change it now and then. Ask if you’re satisfied right now. And if you’re not, take 10 minutes this afternoon. That’s all.

Take 10 minutes to plan how it would look this week different than now. The reason we don’t change our disciplines is that we don’t plan to change them. We just keep getting up 10 minutes before it’s supposed to happen, and there’s no time left and so it never changes. But if you take 10 minutes to plan, then it might. This is true of all of life. You know the guys who write books about management, like One Minute Manager, and that sort of stuff. They make millions of dollars. And do you know they only have one message? I picked up one in an airport one time and I slopped open to the middle. This is a book that’s probably sold 5 million copies to people who run churches and businesses, and everything. They run the world. And I just slopped it open and it said, “If you get nothing else in this book, get this. Take the first 10 minutes of your day to plan the rest, and prioritize the things that have to happen in it.” Period. And for that, he makes a million dollars a year. That’s true. That’s not a joke.

Because when you hold these seminars, basically what they say to businessmen is, “Do what you know already to do.” These businessmen go to success seminars, these time management seminars, trying to figure out how to live their lives. They know how to do their lives. They never learn one new thing at the seminars. They just get the inspiration to do what they know to do. They get the motivation because these guys are so creative. These Zig Ziglar types are so creative, so motivational, and so inspirational. The guy says, “Yeah, I should get up 10 minutes earlier and plan my day.” And they come back at the end of the year and say, “Here’s your million dollars because it works.” And it does. It does. If you will take 10 minutes to plan your day and how Jesus and Bible readings fit into it instead of just running to breakfast, running to newspaper, running to put your clothes on, and running to shave and then realizing there’s no time for the Bible, and running off to work doing the same thing the next day and the next.

Well, of course it never works. But if somebody could inspire you to do the obvious, namely, take five or 10 minutes to plan where it’s going to fit in the day, and then put it in your calendar and call it an appointment and don’t accept any other appointments because it’s blocked off, then it’s going to happen. But it takes 5 or 10 minutes to do that. It doesn’t happen without discipline. So without telling you what it should look like, I just say it should be there. Are there any questions about that in that discipline dimension over against spontaneity? Both are absolutely crucial. We want to be spontaneous. We want to be able to pray in the car, pray while pushing the lawn mower, pray while we’re shoveling snow, and pray while we’re jogging on the jogging machine. We want to pray without ceasing all day long. That’s a part of it, but you better be alone with God over the Bible for certain times every day. Then try different times and try different ways. Don’t let it get too old.