Sermon (February 26) - "Unbinding Your Heart: The Prayer Plunge"

The Spirit of God is moving in our church. A lot of you have told me stories of the Spirit working as you talk about what’s happening with your small groups, your prayer exercises, and reading the book Unbinding Your Heart.

First thing Monday morning, I received an e-mail from somebody telling me how much she really enjoyed the first session of her “Unbinding Your Heart” small group.  And then, throughout the week, so many more of you shared with me how much you enjoyed the first meeting of your small group. 

If you're a guest today, you have come into a church that is on an exciting adventure with God. We just started a church wide focus on the importance of prayer and faith sharing. We're spending 6 weeks together inviting God to change us in any way that God wants to.

Do you want to join us? Anyone—we invite you to join a small group. You can still sign up by stopping by at the designated table in our parlor following worship today or by going to our church’s web page and you can sign up online.

In this past week, we've acknowledged that mainline Christians are rapidly declining in number and influence in our country. We've admitted our own reluctance to invite new people into the Christian faith.

We've explored why it makes a difference in our lives that we are Christians. We considered what our motivations might be for sharing the Christian faith with people who aren't connected to a church.

This week, we're going to look at what makes faith sharing effective. Are you ready for this?

We church people work really hard. We’re masters at hard work! We do CROP walks and Habitat projects.  We prepare meals and have lots of committee meetings. If you’ve been around churches for a while, you’d never be surprised to hear a story of a small church putting on a garage sale that raises four or five thousand dollars for missions. We publicize the sale, we clear out our closets, haul them over to church, sort them, label them, display them, etc., etc., etc.

Then we drag ourselves home, exhausted! And again the next day. And the next day!

We know church people. We know we’re determined, committed, hard workers for the Lord. Churches sure aren’t shrinking because we’re lazy! In fact, right now, I’m cringing as I think about all the times I’ve preached to an already very busy church to become even busier!

I’m sorry if I have fed into this church culture of busyness. I’m sorry because many of you are already hiking and climbing as hard and as fast as you can. As your pastor, I have unfortunately done my share of loading up your backpack of guilt with more and more baggage! And you keep toiling up that hill, carrying even more weight! From this point on, I will do my best to not have church work feel like just another task in your already busy life.

I wonder if that heavy, guilty backpack feel is what Simon Peter and the other disciples felt when Jesus gave one of my “work-harder/work-harder sermons.” Jesus said,

"Put out into the deep water and let out your nets (again!)" And Simon groaned, "We’ve already been fishing. We didn’t catch anything! But if you say so . . ." So they pulled up the anchor and headed back out to the deep water, this time with Jesus as a fishing partner.

Into the deep waters . . . into the deep waters with Jesus. That’s scary if we don’t know how. Somebody said that learning to scuba dive was one of the scariest things she’d ever done.

You have to jump off the boat and into really deep water. She said it was terrifying. Every muscle tensed, her jaw clenched and she is sure that she burned up a candy bar’s worth of calories every time she tried it! You waste a lot of energy as you learn.

And then the switch flipped! She discovered — All you have to do is relax, breathe, and trust the water to buoy you up! All the frantic kicking and thrashing around, all the trying so hard, all the conscientious striving doesn’t get us as far as relaxing. As trusting.

Trusting the water to hold you up is a little like learning to fish with Jesus. We are working hard at doing a lot of good things. But are we doing the God-things?

Are we experiencing the peace and trust God intends for us, or are we just tensing up and kicking too hard?

How’s our fishing going so far?

Jesus wants these men to join him in his work for God. He’ll soon invite them to become “fishers of people.” But before he signs them up for employment with God, it seems that he wants to be sure they “get” something. He wants them to know that if they’re going to be effective in this new work, they will have to follow his guidance.

They will have to have him along. When St. Luke wrote this story down, it was for a church that was working very hard to pass the gospel on to the next generation.

Maybe, in just a few decades after Jesus’ physical presence, the church had started getting tired with all the work they were doing. Maybe their efforts weren’t producing like they once did. St. Luke gives them, and us, this story to remind us.

Hard work alone doesn’t cut it. Only going to the deep waters with Jesus will be effective. Only trusting Christ’s guidance will produce real results for the church.

Prayer is one way to go into the deep waters with Jesus. Prayer is the most effective way I know to hear and heed Christ’s guidance. Now, it’s not that we don’t pray as a church. But I suspect we work a lot more than we pray.

We pray before our church meetings. But how many times do we meet to pray? What could God do through us if we spent half of our meeting times in prayer?

I’m starting to get nervous just standing up here saying these words. I can feel myself tensing up. I’m going to start kicking too hard and hyperventilating into the mouthpiece that connects me to my air tank!

What wouldn’t get done if we prayed more? What could God get done through us if we prayed more?

In the book we're reading together, Martha Grace Reese tells about a church that made prayer the focus of their meetings rather than just offering a prayer before meetings. Three high-energy, committed women were the new evangelism committee for Benton Street Church.

They were fired up to do great things for God that year. They brought in Martha Grace Reese as a consultant to get some direction about what they could do first. A calling campaign? A bring-a-friend Sunday? Maybe direct mail marketing?

No, the consultant said. Not that. Not yet. She told them to pray for three months before they did anything!!!

The evangelism committee at Benton Street was looking for activity, for hard work, for something to do! But instead, Reese told them to stand still and pray. Stand still for three months!!!

Prayer is a different kind of hard work, of course. Most of us don't know how to do it, at least not for very long. But this evangelism committee learned.

They prayed together for one hour every week. During their board meeting, when it was their turn to report, they would say, "We're still praying. She’s making us do it. We’re just praying."

People would laugh. But soon, board members started giving them prayer requests. After three months of "doing nothing but praying," interest in evangelism had skyrocketed. By the end of the year, 65 people were helping with evangelism.

New visitors came in droves. Twice as many people were baptized as the year before.  There was a new excitement in the church but it wasn’t because they were doing more.  It was because this church made prayer the center for everything.

Sounds like what our Scripture text says. Look at the fifth chapter of Luke, verse 6: "When they had done what Jesus commanded, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break!"

Apparently, going back into the deep waters with Jesus makes a difference. Prayer expresses our willingness to do what Jesus wants us to do. Prayer prepares us to be effective in whatever work we do for Jesus. Prayer helps make room for the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit, instead of our flustered kicking, provides the power!

So let's try it. Some of you already have prayer as a part of your daily life. Many of us do not. But we can all grow in prayer. And so can our church.  For the next month, let's pray as a church like we’ve never prayed before.

Will you pray with us for the next several weeks? You are already using the "40 Days of Prayer" guide if you are in one of our small groups. If not, join one! You can get your copy of Unbinding Your Heart, which includes the prayer journal, right outside the sanctuary.

We're also going to pray right now, as a congregation. Yes, right here in the middle of a sermon. Let’s put our money where our mouths are. Let’s take a moment to pray now.

Since you've been praying with Unbinding your Heart for a couple of weeks, this will be easy! First, fish the sticky Post-It note out of your bulletin. Did you find it? I want you to hold it while you pray. I’m going to explain this first, then we’ll all pray together. Okay?

Hold on to your Post-I note. First we’ll sit quietly and breathe slowly.

First, ask God who you are to pray for in this moment. This is important because many of us have our own agendas when we pray. Who is God calling you to pray for in this moment. Now, here’s where we need to use a little imagination, okay a lot of imagination!  As soon as God gives you a person or a situation to pray for, imagine that person shrunk down so he or she fits into your hands, right in the middle of your Post-It note. Hold whomever God puts into your hands and pray for them. I’ll say “amen” at the end. All right? Any questions? Everyone got it?

Okay, gently breathe and let's pray. [Pause for two minutes.] Amen.

How was that? Thank you for your willingness. What an amazing church to try something out of the ordinary like that! Now write the initials of the person you were led to pray for on this Post-it note. Take a look at this door in our sanctuary.  We’re calling this our prayer door.

The cross on our prayer door was made by our youth.  Following worship, you’re invited to put your post-it on this prayer door.  Maybe you’ll want to add some other notes, or update this one next week, and the week after. What’s most important is that you keep praying for whomever, or whatever, God has asked you to pray.

A lot of us know we should be praying more but we don't. We think we don't have the time. We think there are other important things that must be done.

We want to be responsible and get the "to do " list done before we take the needed time for the luxury of prayer. Today, I'm giving you permission.

Let’s be a lot less busy and let’s be more responsive to God. I know there are some basic things that we need to do in the church during these next several weeks but things can slide a little as long as we’re spending time praying instead.

I can’t believe I just said that! During these several weeks of this season of Lent, I want us to be praying a whole lot, like we’ve never prayed before, even if it means that we have less committee meetings.  And maybe instead of committee meetings, they become prayer meetings.

This week, as I’ve thought about this sermon, I really struggled with this.  Part of me was thinking, “Well, Robert. If all you do as a church is pray, then things are going to fall apart.  There are still meals to cook for the homeless.  There are Sunday School lessons to plan.  There are bulletins to be printed.”

But then another thought came to me.  If all we do as a church is to continue to be busy and we don’t make prayer a priority, then things will most definitely fall apart.  And I think that we know deep down what are those things that we should continue to do during this time and what are some things that we can set aside for these forty days so that prayer is at the center of all we do.  When was the last time that our church had an opportunity to go out into the deep waters like this?  It’s probably been a while.

Let’s agree among ourselves. We are going to make prayer our priority throughout our forty day journey together. Following these forty days, we’ll see what God has done with us . . . and through us.

I believe God will start doing some amazing things with us during this time. I don't know what it will be . . .

Maybe new visitors . . .

maybe a new unity . . .

maybe old wounds healed.

Most likely it will be something we never imagined. I believe making room for prayer always brings new blessings.

But here’s the catch: If we're anything like those totally human disciples of the New Testament, we may not be ready for big blessings! Like them, our response to whatever great thing God does will be, "We're not worthy!"

After Simon sees what success Jesus has given him, he falls to his knees. He says to Jesus, "Go away, Lord! I don't deserve this!"

If we go deep with Jesus, we might find ourselves in deep water! We may have the same reaction. We might feel ourselves resisting the blessings God wants to bring us. We might want to bury our heads and ask God to go away.

Maybe we're not sure God should do something in our lives. We don't feel worthy for God to use us.

Maybe we’re afraid of the change in our lives if God did do something in us. How’s your future mapped out? Peter went from fisherman to traveling preacher. Maybe some of us don’t really believe God can do anything new.

Let’s face it. Staying on the familiar treadmill is a lot less scary than going into the deep with Jesus.

But Jesus says to Simon, "Fear not. From now on, we'll be catching people for God." Then these hard working fishermen anchored their boats and their fish and their nets right there on the shore. They left their work and followed Jesus.

In this next month, let’s leave our work and pray like we’ve never prayed before. Let’s go into the deep waters together with Jesus.

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Based on the resource, "Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism," Chalice Press, 2008