Matt Chandler - Practicing Prayer

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. It’s going to be Matthew, Chapter 6. It will take me a little bit to get there, but let me set it up, and then we’ll dive in. We are in—I don’t know if it’s the middle yet; I don’t think it’s quite the middle—well, it’s certainly not the middle of a series that we’ve just called «Fire and Form.» The idea was that with all the transition occurring here, and since I missed last week because I was in Plano commissioning Plano to become Citizens Church—which was awesome—let me reorient your mind around this. About five years ago, we felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to become the fastest-shrinking church in the United States. God has heard our prayers, and He’s answering those prayers in really significant ways. Plano is no longer the Plano campus of The Village Church; they are now Citizens Church in Plano. They have a vision for that community and are already engaging in unique ways. That room was celebratory last week as a couple thousand of our brothers and sisters gathered and rejoiced that God had given them a vision for that part of Dallas to the ends of the earth and provision financially, as well as for leadership. We just got to celebrate that; it was a huge weekend. Then, in just a few more weeks, I’ll be down in Dallas because the North Way campus is about to become North Way Church, and we will commission them. They have a vision down in Dallas, and they have leadership and provision. God has heard our prayers, and He’s answering those. What that means is that it won’t be long until we are an autonomous church on our own, and we haven’t been that for 10-12 years. So before we get into, «Hey, here are some new structural things, here are some new pathways that we’ve been working on, here are some things that we’re going to change,» we’re going to cultivate our hearts to be hungry for the things of the Spirit, the things of God, to be intimate with Jesus. Then we can lay out structure. Let’s talk about fire and then get to form.

So week one really just introduced the idea that God can move in our day in ways that would blow our minds. There’s an ebb and flow to Christian history; it is not a long descent. You are not experiencing a situation where everyone once loved Jesus and attended church, but now it’s slowly dying. That’s not what you are experiencing. There is certainly an ebb, but in the Bible, as well as in Christian history, that’s the moment when the Holy Spirit tends to fall and revival and renewal break out. When it gets darkest, the people of God humble themselves and pray, right? So that was week one. Then, in week two, we introduced a concept that wasn’t new to me. It comes from Augustine of Hippo. Look him up later. He introduced this concept of witness, and we just said it is impossible to do life for Jesus without doing life with Jesus. We talked about the moral lens versus the redemptive lens. Are you with me? Are you tracking with me? Do you remember all that? No, it’s been a couple of weeks; a lot has happened.

We started last week going, «Okay, what are the practices of witness?» Because doing for Jesus? That’s easy—just give me the list! I mean, just give me the list of what I should do and what I shouldn’t do, and I’ve got it. But witness is a little bit different. How do I live with Jesus so that I might all the more empower living for Him? Last week, Mason, I thought, did a superb job teaching on the Sabbath. I asked Mason to do that. Mason is the live Sabbath man; I mean, he is a hard-working brother who rests in Jesus Christ. He threw out some real practical suggestions for you. Like, this week, go for a walk, cultivate a heart of gratitude, detach from your device a little bit, and create these spaces where you can be with rather than for.

Now, what I want to do is cover what I think is the greatest witness practice we have been given, while simultaneously being the simplest and most difficult: the witness practice of prayer. Now, here’s what I know. If you’re a Christian in here, you’re not going to be surprised by this. It’s like, «We should pray, ” right? You know, no one has ever said that to me, right? And yet, if we were to just stop for a second and look around, how many of you wish you prayed more deeply and more consistently than you currently do? Go ahead. Now look around. Keep your hand up. We got a little cares, man. All right. Now look around. Okay, so this is an issue; this is a problem. We’ve got a church filled with vibrant Christians who every once in a while blast somebody in Starbucks, but other than that, we have people who love the Lord, who are learning to pray, and who want to pray. They feel like, „Ah.“ So, I just want to talk about it. This is not a drive-by guilting; this won’t be a shame-on-you sermon about how Christ died on the cross, and you can take two minutes to spend some time praying. That’s not what this is. I want to talk about this in a little bit more nuanced way. Let me give you a quote from Brother Lawrence. I know you all love him.