Morning. It’s good to see you. I’m Doug. I’m the iPad’s husband. The woman on the iPad. Okay. It’s no weird AI thing. It’s uh Charlene is still in the uh rehabilitation hospital as she recovers from a broken leg, but she’s hoping to uh make an escape from jail on about the 17th. And uh so things are things are moving forward. I’m also that guy’s dad. And it’s uh just fun to have my son from New York here with us today as well. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So, as we as we go into the Bible this morning, uh we’re back in that time, the chapters in John where we’re in the upper room, Jesus, 11 of his closest followers. Jesus is giving lastm minute instruction and encouragement because later that evening he’ll be arrested and the next day he was going to be crucified. So, one crucial piece of instruction encouragement Jesus wanted to leave with his followers in that upper room and I’m sure with all of us this morning, it concerns this gift of prayer. Now, maybe to us when we think about prayer, it doesn’t seem like that much of a wonderful gift. Maybe it feels more like a chore or an obligation. it’s difficult, something we know we should do more of, but we can’t quite muster up the consistency that we would like to. Maybe we’re discouraged by what we think of as a a low batting average when it comes to answered prayer. It’s likely that all of us operate with fewer visible and concrete answers to prayer than all of us would like to see. especially prayer for family members, those close to us, for prayers for spiritual activity and renewal and growth and uh health and for healing. Prayers might feel to us a little bit at times like we’re randomly throwing a lot of stuff up against the wall of God’s attention, hoping that something might stick. And over time, we might build up a bit of a discouragement, a resistance, a hard crust, even against believing in the power of prayer. So if prayer is difficult for us, it was just as difficult for the disciples in that room with Jesus that night in John 14 when he spoke to them about it. In fact, later that same evening in the garden of Gethsemane, those men were too sleepy to pray with Jesus or even pray for themselves in a time of pending crisis. Even when Jesus specifically urged them to, they gave prayer a pass. So if we can relate to the disciples resistance to prayer, we want to crack through some of that. this morning by revisiting Jesus’ words that are meant to encourage us in our prayer lives. We’re looking at a brief passage. It’s stuffed with maybe not everything there is to know about prayer, but certainly what Jesus said to his disciples that night in that room is the nuclear core of what prayer is and how prayer is meant to work. Here’s the words of the Lord. Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth. Anyone who has faith in me will do what I’ve been doing.” I mean, incredible just to hear that. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the father and I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the son may bring glory to the father. You may ask me for anything in my name and I will do it. If you love me, you’ll obey what I command. So from our passage, I want to think this morning a little bit about the power of prayer and some of the problems you and I have with prayer and then two guidelines that Jesus gives for making our prayer lives more enjoyable and effective. The power of prayer as Jesus presents it, it really seems too good to be true. Anyone who has faith in me will do greater things than I’ve been doing. I will do for you whatever you ask in my name. You may ask for anything in my name and I will do it. So before we begin thinking about any caveats that might claw back that open-endedness of what Jesus is saying, just be amazed first at how radically Jesus extends this invitation to pray to us. His heart is for us to tenaciously grab hold of this practice and then observe wonderful things happening in our lives and through our lives. Jesus says we’ll do greater things than he did while on earth. How can that possibly be? Jesus walked on water. He raised Lazarus from the dead. He fed thousands of people just on the scraps of some bread and fish. I don’t imagine any of us would ever expect to equal or exceed those amazing miracles. But something changed forever when Jesus was glorified and when he returned to the father. A new day dawned on earth. One that releases power in our world when we pray. You think about it. While Jesus was on earth, he lived a fairly landlocked life. He didn’t journey a radius of no more than 125 kilometers throughout his 33 years on earth. His teaching, his influence largely very localized. They weren’t understood well or or adhered to embraced by his hearers and his following was predominantly ethnic. It was Jewish people limited in scope. But after Jesus returned to the father, we read in Acts chapter 2 that a small gathering, a small congregation of about 120 people devoted themselves to prayer. Then the day of Pentecost arrived. And on that day, Peter preached one gospel message. 3,000 new converts happily responded to the message. They repented. They believed. They were baptized. In his earthly ministry, Jesus had never seen results like that. Not long afterward, followers of Jesus be carry began carrying the gospel message all over the known world, escaping that little uh ethnic capsule of Palestine. So the greater works that Jesus followers are able to do are greater in scope and in clarity. The dawning of this new age with Jesus return to the father allows Jesus to activate his kingdom ministry using the prayers of his followers as the catalyst. I mean just think about it. the fact that we live in a country 2,000 years, half a world removed from the earthly ministry of Jesus, yet almost everyone in our nation would at least have heard of Jesus and would maybe know the basic outline of his life and what Christians believed about his life, his death, his claim of resurrection. It demonstrates again and again that the greater works that Jesus spoke of, they just continue to be accomplished through the prayers and through the labors of his followers. The greater works have been done and continue to be done. So, we shouldn’t try to blunt or diminish the sharp edge of Jesus’ words. Again, he says, “Anyone who has faith in me will do greater things than I’ve been doing. I will do for you whatever you ask in my name. You may ask for anything in my name and I will do it.” So prayer as Jesus presents it to us scandalously wide open privilege. It’s simply you ask, I do. You ask, I do. And again, let’s not let’s not sand down those edges right away so they fit our personal experience of prayer. Let’s just be amazed by what Jesus is saying to us. In James chapter 5, it tells of uh James rec retells the Old Testament story of Elijah and he’s confronting the evil king Ahab and and uh he prayed that it wouldn’t rain and didn’t rain for three years. There was a drought and then he prayed again and all the rains returned. And James reminds us of that story to encourage us to pray and he prefaces it by saying Elijah was a man just like us. I mean that’s just wild. James is saying he’s made of exactly the same stuff we are. He prayed. He saw amazing things happen. That’s James point in encouraging us to pray. So Jesus is telling us here that he’s going to the father to sit at the right hand of his father in heaven and from there his kingdom is going to keep on spooling on earth. Remember in the sermon on the mount Jesus told us to pray that his kingdom would come, his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. And in his kingdom, Jesus is committed to eradicating evil, eradicating oppression, to dealing with injustice, to winning converts, making disciples. Our prayers are the way that kingdom power is released on our planet. As Tim Keller says, we’re not suggesting that somehow in prayer we can grab control of the universe out of God’s hands, but that in the power of God, there’s a goodness that makes the world susceptible to our prayers. Makes the world susceptible to our prayers. Jesus and James are telling us that prayer accomplishes stuff, huge kingdomsized stuff, astonishing stuff. Full stop. Before we look at anything else on prayer, we just need to stare at that that immense resource that Jesus is willingly making available to us just by way of the things that we speak or even whisper in our hearts to God in prayer. I will do whatever you ask in my name. You may ask for anything in my name, I will do it. You ask, I do. Those passages on prayer breathtakingly elegant. But again, we’re faced with the question, why doesn’t prayer work that way for me? It doesn’t work for that that way for me. Not just sometimes, but hardly ever. It seems to work that way for me. I’m not going to expect that everything I pray for is going to be answered exactly in the way I think it should. But that still doesn’t explain why my batting average is as low as it is. Are these promises concerning prayer, are they a bit of a bait and switch? They get get us all excited, but over time reality sets in and prayer just isn’t experienced as that amazing resource that Jesus says it is. Author Corey Doctoro describes himself as a blogger, a journalist, an internet activist. He’s devoted many years of his life to investigating and writing about the inherent problems with the internet, why things are far worse right now than they were just a few years ago. His new book has a title you can’t say in church, but in it he takes a deep dive into recent activities of some of the big tech giants, platforms like Amazon and Apple, the iPhone, Facebook, Microsoft, Meta, Uber, Google shows us how and why their products have been degraded for us the end users. The case of Google, the development of the Google search engine, it emerged from academia. It was the work of two Stanford graduates came up with this really elegant almost spookily effective way of uh of fi of showing the top results to find exactly what people were searching for on the internet. It was so superior to the other search engines that relatively soon it became the search engine of choice for most of the world. We have that widely used verb. I’ll just Google that. And one of Google’s few natural competitors is Apple, which makes a big deal about not being Google. But Apple’s single highest source of revenue is a check for more than $20 billion that Google writes to it every year to buy the default search box in Safari and on the iPhone. So when you type a search query into the Safari address bar or the iPhone search, it goes to Google’s servers by default. Google in effect buys off all the competition so that no other search engine will be developed that will threaten their dominance. So author Corey Doctor goes on to show reveal some internal memos that surfaced as part of a trial last year between the US Department of Justice and Google. And the memos show that by 2019 Google had really maxed out its number of users. It had about a 90% market share in the world. they weren’t going to get any more users unless they could somehow produce another billion people on the planet or something and most people in the world were already completely locked into their platform. So, having maxed out their number of users, the executive in charge of Google search revenue suggested increasing ad revenue by making Google search worse than it was. Get rid of spellch check. Make it harder for people to um get the result they want with their first search. Make them spell everything perfectly correctly and make the search less intuitive. Instead of searching for trousers and getting results, contextual results for pants, make users work harder to get the result they want. Don’t give them a oneshot search. Because if a one-shot search can be extended to a two or a threeshot search, then Google can triple the number of ads that they show to the end users, sweeten their advertising revenue. And Dr. writes, “Similarly, Amazon makes $ 38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. When you search for a product on Amazon, the top results aren’t the best matches. They’re the matches that pay the highest bribes to Amazon to be at the top of that list. Those are the ones that are labeled our pick or top choice, and they’re only there because they’ve paid to do that.” He says, “On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on your screen, you’ll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match.” He says, “On average, the best match is located 17 places down in the Amazon search results.” So, if the internet feels worse today than it did five or 10 or 15 years ago, it’s because the tech giants when they have these great monopolies are downgrading the elegance of their products. They’re making things worse for us and better for their shareholders. They lock us into their platforms, degrade the product, and it becomes less and less useful. Oh, what’s that got to do with prayer? I don’t know what that got to do with prayer. Prayer feels, I think, a little bit like that to us. the promises we look at so elegant, so breathtaking, so sweeping, yet our day-to-day experience seems to be it’s not doing that for us. It’s downgraded. And maybe the reason for that can be attributed to the fine print, the terms and conditions surrounding prayer in the Bible. Those terms and conditions, they’re certainly there. They’re sprinkled throughout scripture. Here’s a few of them. Psalm 66:18 says, “If Id cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” In other words, nurturing sin in our lives and trying to communicate with God at the same time has a neutralizing effect on our world, on our words. Of course, there’s a spectrum there. We’re all sinful people. We all have sin in our hearts all the time. But there’s something about cherishing or nurturing or or uh trying to foster something so we can get away with everything we want to get away with and still have communication with God. It just doesn’t work that way. Or back to the book of James uh 4:3, not just sin, but improper motives, selfish motives. Says, “When you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” We’re not having enough faith when we pray. Again, this is a big spectrum. How do we know when we have enough faith? James 1:6 and 7 says, “When you ask, you must believe and not doubt because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” Or even not having our primary relationships in order. 1 Peter 3:7, “Husbands, in the same way, be considerate as you live with your wives and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. Just not spending enough time in prayer. Not being persistent in prayer.” James 4:2, you don’t have because you don’t ask. Luke 18:1, Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. And he tells the parable of a widow who bothers and persistently appeals to a judge who’s not particularly interested in giving her what she wants. After many appeals, she finally gets what she’s after. Now, with all those caveats concerning prayer, those terms and conditions, you know, they sound a little like those things that none of us read when we sign up for a for an app or a platform on the internet. Is that what why prayer becomes less effective than it ought to be in our lives? Are the terms and conditions just too overwhelming? Is that why we don’t think we have much of a chance really when we go before God in prayer? I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it really helps if we can simplify things by looking at the two primary conditions that Jesus speaks of in our passage when he gives his disciples this breathtaking invitation to pray. One, Jesus speaks of the importance of asking in his name. He says,”I’ll do for you whatever you ask in my name. You may ask for anything in my name and I will do it.” What does it mean to ask in Jesus’ name? Does it just mean to tack the same four words on at the end of every prayer time? In Jesus’ name, amen. And is that covering that? Or is praying in Jesus’ name a little more profound? Praying in Jesus’ name really, I think, means two things. One, it means going to the throne of grace under the covering and authority and representation of Jesus. And two, it means we’re doing our best to align our requests with Jesus’ will and his purposes. Ruben Tory was a late 19th and early 20th century pastor and evangelist. And in his book on prayer, he writes of being in Melbourne, Australia, he was about to speak to a group of businessmen and he was handed a note. And the note read, “Dear Dr. Tori, I’m in great perplexity. I’ve been praying for a long time for something that I’m confident is according to God’s will, but I don’t get it. I’ve been a member of the Presbyterian church for 30 years. I’ve tried to be consistent all the time. I’ve been a superintendent of the Sunday school for 25 years, elder in the church for 20 years, and yet God does not answer my prayer, and I can’t understand it. Can you explain it to me?” Ruben Tory read that note out loud to the businessmen in the room and then said, ‘ It’s perfectly easy to explain. This man thinks that because he’s been a consistent church member for 30 years and a faithful Sunday school superintendent for 25, elder in the church for 20 years, that God is under an obligation to answer his prayer. He’s really praying in his own name. And God will not hear our prayers when we approach him that way. We must if we would have God answer our prayers, give up any thought that we have any claim on God. Not one of us deserves anything from God. If we got what we deserved, every last one of us would spend eternity in hell. But Jesus Christ has great claims on God. And we should go to God in our prayers, not on the ground of any goodness in ourselves, but on the ground of Jesus Christ’s claims. This man is going on the ground to the claims that he supposes that he has because he’s been this faithful church member and a Sunday school superintendent and elder. He’s praying in his own name. And at the close of the meeting, a gentleman stepped up to Tori and said, “I wrote that note. You’ve hit the nail square on the head. I did think because I’d been this consistent church member and Sunday school superintendent that God was under obligation to answer my prayers. I see my mistake.” Tory concludes, “Not one of us has any claim on God. We’re miserable sinners, but Jesus Christ has claims on God, and he’s given us the right to draw near in his name, that is on the ground of his claims on God.” So, praying in Jesus’ name also means bringing requests that fit with the will and the purpose of Christ. Prayer isn’t given to us as this complaint department where we go before God and say, “Well, these are all things wrong and now you need to fix them.” It’s not an Amazon Prime website where we order up the things we want and they’re delivered the next day. Asking in Jesus’ name really prevents us from asking for things that would hurt us, that are not in our best interest. It’s like giving fireworks to a three-year-old. They might whine about it, but no good parent would ever do that for them. The same John who wrote the gospel later in one of his epistles, his letters wrote in 1 John 5:14, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God.” This confidence that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. So, it does something in our hearts when we go to God in Jesus’ name. We recognize we’re under his authority. We’re representing his will and purposes. It gives us a humble dependence and a bold confidence at the same time. Prayer becomes more than just worrying out loud, which I think is how our prayers often sound to God. Praying in Jesus’ name clarifies who we are as we approach God’s throne and exactly what we are there to do. We’re there under the covering and authority of Jesus to accomplish things in prayer that are in line with our great king’s will and his purposes. So, one condition for effective prayer in our passage is to come in Jesus’ name. And the other great purpose that Jesus mentions, the other great condition is to come with the intent of glorifying the father. Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth. Anyone who has faith in me will do what I’ve been doing. He’ll do even greater things than these because I’m going to the father. I will do whatever you ask in my name so that here’s the condition that the son may bring glory to the father. Glory of the father needs to be the overriding purpose of our prayers. Tim Keller again offers a helpful illustration. He says,”If you’re using something that’s not in line with its purpose, you really shouldn’t complain if it doesn’t work.” So, if you have a space heater that’s designed to bring heat into your room and you try to cook a meal on it and it doesn’t work and the food tastes horrible, you can’t say what a lousy space heater that is. The space heater is not designed for cooking. And if you don’t use it in accordance with its purpose, you can’t complain if it doesn’t work. So thinking about prayer and how its ultimate purpose is to glorify the father. Then what we’re trying to do in prayer, our utmost concern is to see the glory and get the glory and worship more of the glory of God. To glorify something mean simply means to give it ultimate weight in our lives. to center it and to make it the center of gravity of our souls. So we can see then that praying for wealth and health and jobs and relationships, nothing at all wrong with praying about any of those things so long as they’re not the center of gravity in our souls. And they’re revealed to be the center of gravity when we don’t get them the way we want or as soon as we want. We get frustrated. we throw up our hands and we say, “Well, prayer just doesn’t work.” Is that really what’s happening? Or could it be that we’ve centered ourselves on the wrong thing? We’re centered on the request and we’re not centered on the glory of God. We’re trying to use a space heater to cook food. The subject of our anxious requests might need to be desentered in favor of God’s glory for us to grow and develop in prayer. And we may if we do that we may find that the anxiousness of our requests gets swallowed up and kind of flushed out of us as the father’s glory becomes our primary passion. The purpose of prayer isn’t to convince God to satisfy our desires immediately. It’s to have God direct us and set our hearts on what will satisfy our desires ultimately. It’s not Lord I really want this job. I really want that relationship. It’s rather prayer begins with God, I really want your glory. I want to see, I want to serve you. If I can get that, then my prayer will be most fully and ultimately answered. So the most obvious thing in our passage is that Jesus thoroughly wants to give us things through the vehicle of prayer. And if we come in his name for the purpose of seeing the father glorified, Jesus is very pleased with us. And that allows us a lot of relaxation. As we pray, we can still be persistent and we can still be intense and we can pray with tears and we can pray at times with sorrow and still be quite centered and peaceful as we pray as we seek the father’s glory. We know that we don’t have all the factors at our disposal that allows us to see what will best glorify the father. We just need to learn to accept that the timing that will best glorify the father, the result that will best glorify the father. But through it all, what we can trust is that the things we do receive in prayer are the exact things we would be praying for if we had all the father’s knowledge and all the father’s will uh wisdom at our disposal. It’s it’s okay. It’s probably quite natural for sinful people like us if our prayers right now are a little off center. We’re all learning as we go. None of us have prayer completely figured out. In the meantime, we can be confident as our prayers ascend to the throne of God, they get translated into the acceptable language of heaven. Romans 8 gives us fantastic assurance when it says, “Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we don’t know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings that are too deep for words.” Few verses later in Romans 8 also assures us Christ Jesus is the one who died more than that who was raised who is at the right hand of God who indeed is interceding for us. So we have two persons of the trinity praying for us all the time translate translating our faulty prayers into the language of heaven. Jesus and the holy spirit. More than that, planning to pray for 10 or 15 minutes may seem too much for us, but Jesus prays for us all the time, even when we’re sleeping. We take seven or eight hours off each day to recharge, but Hebrews 7:25 tells us that Jesus always lives to make intercession for us. So, putting everything together in our passage, prayer is a no- lose proposition. We have this wide openen invitation in prayer. Jesus invites us. says, “If you ask, I will do.” We have the immense privilege of approaching the throne of God in Jesus’ name under his authority. We come to seek the glory of the father. We can be sure that the responses we do receive in prayer are exactly what we’d be praying for if we had all the information God has and could see all the factors he sees. And even as our prayers, and I’m sure all of our prayers are still a little offc center, they get rebalanced and reinforced by the secret prayers of Jesus and the Holy Spirit on our behalf. Last thing we’ll say about prayer this morning is that any answered prayer that we receive is all going to be based on Jesus’ greatest unanswered prayer. More accurately, we should say that in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus asked if the father would remove from him the cup of suffering and death that he was about to endure, Jesus prayer did receive an answer, but the answer was no. Jesus knows full well the shattering experience of making a request that was denied. We read a few minutes ago in Psalm 69 that if we cherish sin in our hearts, God will not hear us. Jesus had no sin in his heart. Yet he willingly faced the denial of his request to be spared on the cross in order to make a way for God to hear our prayers. Those of us who do have sin in our hearts. So now when we place our faith and trust in Jesus sacrifice on the cross to take away our sins, it opens up access to the throne of grace where our father hears and responds to every prayer we speak, every whisper we mention to him in the name of his son. praying in Jesus’ name to the glory of the father. It’s an amazing invitation. Jesus says, “You ask, I’ll do.” And if I could give two brief suggestions for making our prayer lives a little more consistent and enjoyable, one would be to just pray by the clock. I I found that my motivation to pray, it can vacasillate day by day. Sometimes deeply motivated to pray, other times lethargic, and I have to overcome the inertia of the day just to get to it. praying by the clock. However much time you determine, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half hour, an hour, whatever you determine, use your phone or use your uh watch and just pray until that time has elapsed. Sometimes it’s going to fly by. Other times it’ll drag incessantly. Don’t don’t be bothered by that. Our goal is just to be consistent and faithful in prayer as Jesus calls us to be. And second, don’t just jump into requests. Start by taking time to focus on God’s glory, on the Father’s glory. You know, the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer have little to do with us and everything to do with God. Let your name be hallowed or glorified or respected in our world. May your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let the Lord’s prayer be our templated for for stoking the fires of God’s glory as we go to pray before just jumping into our little shopping list of requests. Well, that’s enough time talking about prayer. I think we should just probably spend some time doing it. And to do that, I’m just going to offer us this is your time with God. So, three suggestions that you might want to take uh under consideration the next few moments. Thank God for the amazing open-ended resource of prayer. Confess your own difficulties with prayer. God already knows them. Thank Jesus and the Holy Spirit for their ongoing gift of intercession for you. And pray that the glory of the Father would really assume its rightful place in our prayer lives. And pray that or anything else in response to God’s word this morning. And I’ll close us off in a few moments. So this is your time of personal prayer with God.