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Pray to the Father, because He loves you!

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Sermon for Rogate – Easter 5

James 1:22-27  +  John 16:23-30

The National Day of Prayer came and went again this week in our country. You probably didn’t even notice, and that’s okay. The president is required each year to sign a proclamation, calling upon the citizens of the United States to pray for our country. But, who can pray? Whose prayers are acceptable to God, and whose prayers are an abomination to Him? Jesus answers those questions in today’s Gospel, for this Sunday that is historically called “Rogate Sunday” which means “Pray!” or “Ask!” Because the Church didn’t need any human Congress (or king or president) to pass a law telling us to pray. We have the only encouragement we need, coming directly from the Lord Jesus. Let’s reflect on His words in today’s Gospel.

First He mentions a different kind of asking: In that day, you will not ask me anything. “That day,” if you look back a few verses, is referring to the joyful day that begins with His resurrection from the dead and continues until the end of the world. During this time, Jesus says to His disciples, “You won’t ask Me anything.” What does He mean?

First, remember that Jesus’ disciples had been asking Him many things already on this Maundy Thursday evening, starting with Peter’s objection, “Lord, are You washing my feet?” Then, “Lord, who is it who will betray You? Where are You going? Why can I not follow You now? How can we know the way to where You’re going? How is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?” And then there was the question they wanted to ask, but they were too ashamed to keep asking questions. “What is this He says, ‘A little while’? We don’t know what He’s saying.” Question after question. Because they understood so little of what He was saying to them.

Many things Jesus said to His disciples on that night were rather cryptic. As He says here in our text, I have spoken these things to you figuratively. He was intentionally not saying things plainly, because things still had to play out in a certain way over the next few days. But after His resurrection from the dead, and especially after the Holy Spirit came on the Day of Pentecost, they wouldn’t be so confused anymore. They wouldn’t have to keep asking Jesus about the things He had said. The Spirit would teach them, and then they, through their preaching and writing, would teach us! It’s through the Holy Spirit that Jesus kept His promise to His disciples, The time is coming, however, when I will no longer speak to you figuratively, but I will tell you plainly about the Father. They wouldn’t be asking Him questions anymore. First, because, after His ascension, Jesus wouldn’t be there with them in the room anymore, as He had been until this time. But that’s okay. He would tell them about the Father, even after His ascension, through the teaching that the Holy Spirit would do.

But there’s another kind of asking that Jesus wants them—and us!—to do. Truly, truly I tell you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

Ask!, Jesus says. Pray! Ask the Father for things. And do it “in My name,” Jesus says. And He will give it to you. That’s a promise. But everything hinges on what it means to ask “in Jesus’ name.”

It doesn’t mean tacking on the words “in Jesus’ name” to the end of our prayers. “Father, I ask You for $1 million, in Jesus’ name.” Don’t expect to receive $1 million. In fact, don’t pray that way at all, because it’s a lie. You can’t ask for money in Jesus’ name. Why not? Because it’s not something Jesus taught you to pray for, nor is it something for which Jesus Himself ever prayed. To ask in Jesus’ name means to ask as if Jesus were the one asking the Father for it. You’ve heard the acronym, WWJD? “What would Jesus do?” Here it’s WWJAF. What would Jesus ask for?

You don’t have to guess. You just have to know Jesus from the Gospels. And from all of Scripture, for that matter, especially the Psalms. You have to know how He prayed, what His will is, how He has taught God’s people to pray all along. And how did Jesus pray? With perfect, childlike trust in His heavenly Father, trusting in His goodness, trusting Him to hear, trusting Him to care, and trusting in His wisdom to do what was best.

Knowing the Lord’s Prayer helps you to pray in Jesus’ name, because He’s the one who taught us how to pray. When Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re always praying in Jesus’ name, which means we have Jesus’ promise that the Father will grant our petitions.

When we pray for any of the things God has promised in His Word, for the things He’s told us He wants us to have, we’re praying in Jesus’ name. And when we pray for things that God hasn’t told us He wants us to have, for example, when Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that the Father would take that cup of suffering away from Him, we add, together with Jesus, “yet not my will, but Your will be done.” And so we are praying then, too, in Jesus’ name.

But a very important part of praying in Jesus’ name is knowing and trusting in Jesus as the One who came forth from the Father to be our Savior, as the one who is true God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit. An atheist can’t ask for anything in Jesus’ name, just as no non-Christians can pray for anything in Jesus’ name. Their prayers are unacceptable to God the Father, who is well-pleased in His beloved Son and who is filled with righteous anger toward those who reject His beloved Son.

What’s even worse than trying to approach the Father apart from Jesus is when a person who has no faith in Jesus attempts to pray to God, using the name of Jesus as a disguise for his own wickedness. So, for example, when the current president of the United States, who, by his own words and actions, has proven himself to be an unbeliever, claims to know the Lord, He is taking the Lord’s name in vain. When he quotes from Holy Scripture, as he did this week again in proclaiming the National Day of Prayer, when he speaks of his Christian faith, he is breaking the Second Commandment and committing the sin of blasphemy and the sin of deception. Yes, those are strong words, strong accusations. But the current president (and, to be frank, the vast majority of those in his political party, along with a sizable number of people in the other political parties as well), openly opposes the Lord Jesus Christ and His teachings, even as he tries to deceive people into viewing him as a Christian. But the Father sees the truth. He sees their impenitence, their unbelief, and their hardened hearts. And He shuts His ears to anything they ask of Him.

On the other hand, to those who believe in Jesus, this is what He says: In that day you will ask in my name. I am not telling you that I will ask the Father for you. For the Father himself loves you. See what Jesus is saying here! You shouldn’t think of God the Father as a distant being out there in the universe. Nor should you think of Him as an angry Judge, or as someone who’s so busy He doesn’t have time for you. He is an angry Judge toward sinners who remain in their sin and impenitence. But to you who have loved and believed in Jesus, whom the Father sent to save you from your sins, the Father is not angry, or distant, or unapproachable. On the contrary, Jesus reveals this amazing reality: the Father loves you.

Now, this isn’t the same word used in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world.” That’s a different kind of love, a love that seeks to help people not because of who they are but in spite of who they are, a love that drives God to do good even to the wicked, to sacrifice His Son even for His enemies, in order that they might become His children. No, here in this text the word for “love” is the love of befriending, the love of friendship, of common interests, of “liking” and appreciating someone. And Jesus says to His disciples that God the Father has that kind of love for them, for you, because you have loved me, Jesus says, and have believed that I came forth from God. “You have loved Me.” Same word. The Father not only accepts us through faith in Jesus. He has befriended us because we have befriended Jesus. We consider Him our friend. We appreciate who He is and why He came, and so His Father smiles on us and appreciates who we are, too.

Of course, who we are is who He is making us to be, by His Spirit. It’s the Father who draws people to Jesus, as He said earlier in the Gospel of John: No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him. So if you love and believe in Jesus as the Son of God who was sent from the Father to be your Savior, then it’s because the Father drew you to Him by His Spirit in the first place. And now that He has drawn you, and called you by His Gospel, and brought you into the Church of His beloved Son, He wants you to know that He loves you, and that you always have His ear. You should never think that you can’t approach God the Father with a request, whether big or small. You should never think that He’s too busy, or that He doesn’t care, or that you aren’t as important to Him as other people are, as if you needed to pray to them, to the “important people,” so that they could go to the Father on your behalf. No, if you love and believe in Jesus, then the Father loves you and tells you to ask, in Jesus’ name, so that you may receive, and so that your joy may be full, because the God of heaven has given you free access to Him. Now just remember to use it! Amen.

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The special gift of Christian prayer

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Sermon for Rogate – Easter 5

James 1:22-27  +  John 16:23-30

The national day of prayer came and went this past week. Some years it gets more publicity than others. What should we think about such a day? More importantly, what does God want you to know about prayer, and what does He want you to do with what you know, so that, as James said in the Epistle, you may be, not just hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word?

The Jews were very familiar with prayer from the Old Testament, with beautiful examples filling especially the Psalter. And Jesus taught His disciples about prayer on many occasions—with the Lord’s Prayer, with parables urging Christians to pray often and persistently, and with His own example. How often He sought a private place so that He could pray! But as He, the Son of God, was about to fulfill His mission on earth (again, our Gospel is from Jesus’ discourse on Maundy Thursday evening), there would be an important change in the nature of prayer.

Some things wouldn’t change, like what prayer is. Praying, most broadly, is simply talking to God. But a good prayer, a godly prayer, isn’t just babbling or rambling. Prayer is talking to God with thanksgiving and praise. Prayer is talking to God with a confession of your sins or weaknesses or needs. But primarily, to pray is to ask God for something. God wants you to ask Him for things. Someone will say, “Oh, but that’s selfish. We spend too much time asking God for things already!” On the contrary, we don’t spend nearly enough. God is angered at any time when we imagine that we don’t need anything from Him, or whenever we think that He is unwilling to hear or to help us in our need. So ask for what you need, Jesus says. That’s always been the main purpose of prayer.

What was about to change, though, for Jesus’ disciples—and, really, for all people—was the way in which prayers were to be offered from then on. Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you. Now, genuine prayer always had to be to the true God; prayers offered to idols or false gods were never valid. In the Old Testament, the Jews prayed to the true God who revealed Himself to Moses, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But now God has revealed Himself more fully as the one God who is three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the Father who sent His Son to be the sacrifice and the Mediator for mankind. God is the Son who fulfilled His Father’s will and reigns at God’s right hand. God is the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and brings His Word to us. From now on, men are to approach God the Father in prayer specifically through Jesus the Christ, asking God the Father to hear us in Jesus’ name. That means, not necessary adding the words “in Jesus’ name” to every prayer. It means asking the Father to hear us for the sake of Jesus, because of Jesus’ saving work on our behalf and on the basis of Jesus’ intercession on our behalf. Now that Jesus has been revealed, crucified, risen and ascended, all prayers to God must be offered through faith in Jesus, who is “the one Mediator between God and man.”

That’s the first thing to understand about prayer, and it’s what makes a “national day of prayer” impossible, and even sacrilegious, because no nation on earth confesses that the name of Jesus alone saves, and any prayer offered to God that’s not in the name of Jesus—trusting in Jesus as the one and only Mediator—is open idolatry.

Now, for those of us who do know how to approach God the Father in Jesus’ name, we’ve been given a solemn command by God: You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. That’s the Second Commandment. It tells us not to misuse God’s name, but that also means we are supposed to use God’s name the right way. God commands us to use His name to pray to Him. And Jesus Himself says, Ask! So prayer has God’s command attached to it. It isn’t optional. We are to pray each day because God commands us to. Pray in obedience to Him, as Luther points out in the Large Catechism. Of course, don’t fool yourself, as many people do, into thinking that, as long as you’re praying regularly in your home, that’s basically all God commands, as if He didn’t also command you to go to church, to hear His word, to use His Sacraments, to support the ministry of the church with your offerings. All these things are commanded by God, and Christians must do them, not in order to earn God’s favor or the forgiveness of sins, but in the new obedience that God requires of those whom He has saved by faith in Christ and whom He is daily renewing by His Spirit.

Pray also because of the promise of Jesus. Whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you. Can you comprehend just how great a promise that is? The one who created all things, preserves all things, rules over all things, has promised to give you “whatever you ask in Jesus’ name.” So why wouldn’t you pray? Why? Because this wretched sinful flesh is sluggish and cold, and the devil drives you away from prayer, and the world gives you so many “better” things to do with your time. But over all those things that stand in the way of prayer stands the command and the promise of Jesus, Ask! And, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.

For what are we to ask? There are seven things Jesus teaches us to ask for, seven requests or petitions. You know them as they make up the Lord’s Prayer. First and foremost, God would have us pray for His name to be holy among us, for His kingdom to come, and for His will to be done among us. Then He would have us pray for daily bread—for all that we need for our life on earth. Then we are to pray that God would forgive us our trespasses, with the understanding that we, too, are to forgive those who trespass against us. We are to ask God to lead us away from temptation, and to deliver us from evil. Every need that you have in your life falls within the scope of those petitions. Study your Catechism—first the Small, then the Large, and see how much light God has shed on prayer in Martin Luther’s summaries!

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask for specific things, too. Jesus tells us to ask the Lord of the harvest to send workers into His harvest. Paul commands us to pray for kings and all who are in authority. He asks us to pray for ministers of the Word and for all the churches, for all the saints of God, and for one another. James tells to pray for wisdom.

And when you don’t know what else to pray for, don’t despair. It’s yet another reason why God has sent down His Holy Spirit to dwell with us here on earth in this Christian Church. As Paul writes, For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

Why will God hear and answer these prayers? Not only because He has commanded it. Not only because He has promised it. Not only because we ask for things according to His will, for things He Himself wants to give. But, as Jesus says in the Gospel, because the Father loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God. The Father loves you. This is a different word in Greek for love than “God so loved the world, etc.” That word is the big word that expresses God’s selfless devotion to the world, not because He sees anything attractive about the world, but because God chooses to love it anyway. But here in our Gospel, it’s the friendship kind of love. The love of mutual benefit, love where there is something likable in the other, something we have in common with each other. What is that thing that the Father finds likable in you, the thing that He has in common with you? It’s the very thing His Spirit has worked in you, a love for Jesus. “This one loves My beloved Son. This one believes in Jesus, whom I sent to be the world’s Savior. Of course I will hear! Of course I will help!” Isn’t that amazing? You couldn’t love or believe in Jesus by nature. But God’s own Spirit has worked faith and love in your heart, and now God sees that love as the very reason why He should hear your prayers and help you in your need.

This is the gift of prayer—Christian prayer. Use it! Use it each and every day, for all the reasons we’ve considered today. You know the true God and how to approach Him. He’s commanded you to pray. He’s promised to hear. He’s taught you what to pray for. And He’s tied it all to Christ Jesus, the beloved Son of God, whom you also love, and for whose sake the Father also loves you. So ask, as dear children ask their Father! And when you ask, remember to give thanks for this special gift of Christian prayer. Amen.

 

Source: Sermons