Download Dan Walters - Our Savior

Rev. Dan Walters
2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Preached: 6/10/07 at Our Savior Lutheran Church
Text: 1 Kings 8:22,23, 41-43 (NIV)
22Then
Solomon stood before the altar of the LORD in front of the whole assembly of Israel,
spread out his hands toward heaven 23and said:
“O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below—you
who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your
way.
41“As
for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a
distant land because of your name— 42for men will hear of your great name and your mighty
hand and your outstretched arm—when he comes and prays toward this temple, 43then hear
from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the
peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and
may know that this house I have built bears your Name.
“Hear Our Prayer”
Please allow me to begin by reading the following letter: Dear President Bush, Hello from
Springville, New York! Thank you for devoting your time to governing our country. I truly
hope that the decisions you make will be for the benefit of our entire nation. Mr. President, I
know that you are a very powerful man in this country, so I have a couple requests to ask of you.
First of all, I have heard of plants and other sources of jobs that have closed in the past in
Western New York and others that might close. So I’m asking you to keep all current such
places open and reopen as many of the former ones as possible. Secondly, I’d like you to make
sure that construction of the 219 expressway continues from here down to mid-Pennsylvania,
within the next year if possible. Oh, and one more thing: could you please exempt me and all the
members of my congregation from paying any form of taxes for the next few years? Thanks for
hearing my concerns, and I look forward to you answering my requests. Respectfully, Pastor
Dan Walters.
If I were to actually write and send a letter like that, do you think it would get answered? Would
I get a personal, handwritten reply from the President, along with a schedule of when my
requests would be completed? You don’t think so? But I thought President Bush was one of the
most powerful, if not the most powerful person in this country. Shouldn’t he be the person for
me to ask? Well, as most of you know, things don’t work that way. The President of our
country may be powerful, but he simply doesn’t have the time to read letters and answer requests
from anyone who feels like it in the country. If he did, the President would spend all his time
reading letters. And even if he did get the chance to read my specific letter, he still probably
wouldn’t grant my requests, because there are other elected officials—mayors, legislators,
governors—who should be the ones approving them. There’s a chain of command in our
country, so getting something you want just isn’t as easy as writing a letter to the president.
But what if it was just that easy? What if it was even easier than writing a letter to get your
requests heard and answered? What if not only people in the United States but people all over
the world could present their requests to someone and expect not only that those requests would
be heard, but that they would be answered? Would that just be an impossible dream? No! In
fact as God’s Word is going to show us today, that’s exactly what our God promises us about
himself. Those are the promises we’re going to think about this morning, and we’ll do so using a
common phrase that we all might be used to: “Hear our prayer!” This morning we’ll see that
when we say “hear our prayer” to our heavenly Father, we say it in faith. We say it, expecting
that God will hear us. We pray it, confident that God will answer us.
Our text from 1 Kings for this morning gives us a great example of prayer. In it, we see King
Solomon, the wisest person ever to live on earth—with the exception of Jesus. Solomon, here, is
praying at the dedication of the temple, that magnificent temple that he had built for the Lord, the
temple that was huge and covered in gold and filled with riches that we could never imagine.
When that temple was dedicated, Solomon prayed: O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like
you in heaven above or on earth below. That start of Solomon’s prayer is a reminder for us
just exactly who we’re praying to. When we pray, we’re praying to God himself, the only true
God, the God who is one but is Father, Son and Holy Spirit as we were reminded last week.
We’re praying to the God who created all things, who keeps the planets spinning in their orbits,
who keeps the sun shining, the rain falling, who keeps all of us breathing and living here today.
And when I remember who it is I’m praying to, when I remember who God really is, it leads me
to ask a question. My question is: who do I think I am? Who do you think you are, that God
would actually listen to you? In the whole scheme of this universe, what are we really worth that
God would give us an audience to speak with him? It doesn’t make sense. We would expect
God to tell us to be quiet. “Keep it down! Remember, you’re just creatures that I created. You
are to be seen and not heard. You are only to speak when spoken to.” God has every right to say
that to me, to you, to all people.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he invites us to pray to him. It’s all over the Bible. In 1 Timothy, I
urge, then…that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone.
Then in Philippians, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and
petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And I could read off a whole lot
more, including passages where Jesus himself tells us to pray; he’s the one, after all, who taught
us the Lord’s Prayer.
Ok, so God tells us to pray, but can we really? Do we really have the right to approach our God
that way? Listen to this passage from the Old Testament, What other nation is so great to
have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?
That’s a neat verse that tells us that God is near to those who pray, but that verse is talking about
God’s Old Testament nation of Israel. So what about us who live in another nation like the US?
Does God still hear us? Or look what else Solomon prays in our text. He says to God, you who
keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.
That sounds pretty good except for the whole “servants who continue wholeheartedly in your
way” part. Because as I look at my life, and as you look at your lives, we will not see people
who are always continuing wholeheartedly in the way of God. Instead, we see sinners in the
mirror. We see in ourselves people who break God’s law, people who sin in uncountable ways
an uncountable number of times every day. We look at ourselves and see a constant stream of
thoughts, words and actions that go completely against the way of God. So why would God
listen to our prayers? Why would God not, instead, strike us down and condemn us forever?
The answer, as always, does not lie in us. There is nothing here in me or nothing in any of you
that makes any of us deserve to have God listen to our prayers. No, the answer is found only
there, in the cross. Because in the cross we see and understand what God, God the Son, Jesus
Christ, did for us! He continued wholeheartedly in the way of God his entire life on earth. Why
did he live perfectly? For us! He prayed without ceasing to his Heavenly Father. Who did he
pray for the most? For us! He went to the cross, laid down his perfect life only to take it up
again and be raised to life forever. Why did he do that? For us! Jesus has taken our sins, he’s
forgiven them, he’s paid the price that they deserved for us, to bring peace between us and God,
to give us the right to call God not our Angry Judge but our Heavenly Father.
We can pray to God because Jesus and his cross have opened that line of communication for us.
Through Jesus, our prayers find their way to our Heavenly Father himself, not in an overstuffed
mailroom somewhere. Through Jesus, God says, pray to me, I’m listening to you. God doesn’t
tell us that we’re not good enough or that we’re from the wrong country or that we don’t have
the right color of skin to speak to him. God says, Call upon me in the day of trouble. And it’s
only through Jesus that that’s true. When we pray, God doesn’t say, “your call is very important
to us, please continue to hold.” No! He listens! He says, Surely I am with you always. He
says Pray in the Spirit on all occasions. And he says that only because of Jesus, because God
the Son has saved us. Yes, friends, when we pray and we say “hear our prayer,” we don’t have
to wonder, we don’t have to doubt, we don’t have to worry. Instead we say “hear our prayer”
and we expect, we are confident, we know that our prayer is heard, because of Jesus.
And that’s not all we know. It’s true that knowing we’re heard with our prayers is an incredible
blessing, a blessing we don’t deserve, and something that we can only get through our faith in
Jesus. But just being heard might seem like it’s not quite enough. Sometimes we use the phrase
that talking to certain people is like “talking to a brick wall.” Usually we would say that when
the person we’re talking to doesn’t really respond or doesn’t act on or do anything based on the
conversation. Well, we don’t want to feel like we’re praying to a brick wall either. We want to
know that our prayers aren’t just heard but that they are acted on, that they have some kind of
result.
That’s what Solomon was praying for, too. As for the foreigner who does not belong to your
people Israel but has come from a distant land…when he comes and prays…hear from
heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the
peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you. Solomon is asking for something
pretty revolutionary by Old Testament standards. He wants God to answer and act on the
prayers of foreigners, people who aren’t from Israel, people like you and me here in the USA for
example.
So does God do what Solomon asked? Does he actually answer prayers? Of course he does.
Through Jesus, he not only listens to us, but answers us. Again, he promises this to us in his
Word. When he tells us to call upon him in the day of trouble he promises I will deliver you
and you will honor me. Jesus himself went so far as to say My Father will give you whatever
you ask in my name. Yes, God hears us when we pray to him. And yes, God does act, he does
also answer us when we pray to him.
Let’s get this straight, though. God is not a magic genie. God is not Amazon.com who will ship
you whatever you request in 5-10 business days. Yes, God will always answer your prayers, but
it might not always be the answer you want. His answer might be no. No, you can’t win the
lottery right now. No, you still have to pay your taxes. Or in more serious situations, “No, you
will have to go through troubles and hard times. No, you are going to lose your job. No, your
loved one will die.” God’s answer can be no, or God’s answer could be “wait.” Sometimes we
have to wait to get what we’re asking for. We won’t always understand when God answers “no”
or “wait.” We might think God should have acted differently. But as God says, My thoughts
are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. God has a reason for answering us the
way he does, and we can be sure that his answer is meant to work out for our good.
But does the fact that God might say “no” or “wait” make us stop praying? Does the possibility
of not getting exactly what we want exactly when we want it make us give up asking all together.
Of course not! Instead, it makes us pray big. It gives us the boldness to ask God for anything,
because even though he might say no, he just might also say yes. God, who created the universe,
who gives us homes and food, who sent his Son to save us from sin, this God loves us, and he
wants to give us what we ask for. As our heavenly Father he wants to give good things to us his
children who pray to him.
So don’t hold back. Pray to your God. Ask him for things. Thank him for what he’s done.
Praise him for who he is. Remember that he will hear you. Be confident that he will answer
you. Be sure that nothing you ask for is too small or too big for God. Remember that nothing
you can do makes you good enough for God to listen to you, but that Jesus did it all. So look to
the cross, fold your hands, bow your heads, say “hear our prayer” and have absolute confidence
that God will hear, that God will act, that God will keep every one of his promises to the people
he has redeemed.