Praying to Our Holy God #2

0:00Welcome to the Truth Palpit with Don Greene, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people, God's Word. Today, Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time. So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in the Truth Palpit. Today's message, keeping with the theme, is praying to our holy God, praying to our holy God. So we've had praying to our willing God, asking you will receive, come to me all who labor and are heavy laden. God is willing to receive us. That's a great inducement for us to pray and to wrestle through things in prayer. And to even to ask God, to God help me, you know, I've never thought about prayer like this. Help me to understand and internalize these things and change me away from that works-based, list-based thing that was so mechanical and made me feel like I was in jail, made me feel like I was in chains.

1:14There was never a sense of love and freedom in it, Lord, and you know, help me move from that to this. And then we praying to our knowing God, He's omniscient, we don't have to say a bunch of stuff to bring God up to speed on the situation. He's not only as he up to speed, he's way ahead of us. Now, today, what I want to do is to deepen our perspective on our privilege and prayer as we consider praying to our holy God, our holy God. And as you dive into these matters and you just try to think through them, there's a remarkable humanly unattainable balance that you need to keep. It's a nature. When you start to get to the nerve of certain biblical truths, you realize that there's a tension in play so often.

2:16So if you think about the inspiration of Scripture, you know, that God, the Holy Spirit, moved on the human writers and helped them to write what was exactly the Word of God. You know, there's work of the Spirit in that and enlightening and broadening their minds, but there's also a tension in it in that the human writers were still expressing things in their own perspective, in their words and in their according to their backgrounds and all of that. The Spirit was working through the human instrument in order to accomplish things. You can't emphasize one without also speaking to the other. The Apostle Paul said, for me to live as Christ and to die as gain. And you know, if I'm to live on in the flesh, I'll have profitable labor and there's this tension between living and dying that he dealt with. And so we shouldn't expect that there's going to be a need for balances we talk about these things. And that's kind of the purpose of today's message.

3:24I did this on Tuesday. What I'm about to say, I said this on Tuesday, and I want to go back to it. There's a phrase that I want you to think about and to consider in prayer that is I don't know that I've ever heard it used anywhere else, but that's all right. It's the phrase, uh-oh. Uh-oh. Now that's not a biblical term, neither in English nor in Greek, but there's something in that that is that is very important for us to contemplate when we come to the matter of prayer. One of my favorite memories of the term, uh-oh, was 30 some years ago, not 30, 20 some 25 years ago. We were at a family gathering and Nancy's niece, who was about two years old at the time, was in the midst of a bunch of adults and she was getting a little bit insecure.

4:30And so she wanted to go to her father for comfort and to lay hold of him. And I could kind of see what was happening. The funny thing was because she was so little and all of the adults were so big, she came over and she grabbed the hold of my leg. And then she looked up and realized that she had made a mistake. I was not her dad. I was somebody else. I was not what she wanted. And she said, uh-oh. She had a problem. She was somewhere she didn't want to be and she was, she was dismayed by it. Uh-oh. This isn't what I expected. This isn't what I was looking for. This is something different. Now, that phrase, uh-oh, you do a little Google search on it and you can find this definition. It's an exclamation that expresses alarm or dismay or the realization of a difficulty.

5:42Uh-oh. We're in trouble here. Uh-oh. The cop just flipped the lights on and I've got to pull over. Uh-oh. We've got a difficulty. I just, I've just come to realize that there's a difficulty here that I previously didn't understand. I didn't see it before. I didn't know that this was a problem. But it is a problem. Uh-oh. That's the idea here. Okay. Just uh-oh. It's an easy way to acknowledge the problem that prayer represents to us. So point number one, I'm going to go through three points now. Hopefully in reasonable speed. Point number one is, God is holy. God is holy. And if that's never been an uh-oh moment to you, it needs to be. See, the problem in saying pray to end abortion. Pray for our troops.

6:52Is that it tells people who have never said, uh-oh in the presence of God to just go and just, you know, and just try to go straight to God without the benefit of a mediator. Just go and tell God what you want. And this is not what we're talking about here. There's something prior that has to be dealt with. There's a balance to the willingness of God, the knowledge of God that needs to inform the way that we think about prayer as we come to Him and the grounds upon which we approach Him. Let me remind you that at different times I've said in a sense we're talking about even something that's even bigger than praying in that we're talking about how do we approach God? How do we- how does sinful man approach God? That's the real issue here. And if you understand that, then it filters down and informs the way that you pray.

7:56Now, point number one is an uh-oh moment. God is holy. Now, we've already established. We have already established and covered the ground that our Heavenly Father welcomes our many prayers and petitions and He delights in the prayers of His children. We've already covered that and nothing that I am about to say contradicts any of that. But we have to have this balance that I was talking about to it. We need to consider how it is that we got to this point where we can pray to our Father and know that He will hear our petitions. We have to consider that. How did we get to this point? Because, Beloved, we should not be able to do this. We should not be able to approach Him and to pray at all.

9:03And there are some things that I want to remind you from Scripture and I'm going to start with something that I didn't mention on Tuesday. Just going- and you don't need to turn there. It's not necessary to turn where I'm going. You may not remember this story from the book of Judges in Judges chapter 13. But the writer of Judges is laying the groundwork for the coming of Samson. And he describes and encounter that the parents of Samson had with the angel of the Lord who is the pre-incarnate Christ. And listen as I read here about what happened. And Manoa, who would become Samson's father, said to the angel of the Lord, please let us detain you and prepare a young goat for you.

10:03And the angel of the Lord said to Manoa, if you detain me, I will not eat of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, then offer it to the Lord. Just stay with me here. There's a simple point I'm leading up to. But I want you to have the context. Manoa said to the angel of the Lord, what is your name so that when your words come true, we may honor you. And the angel of the Lord said to him, why do you ask my name? Seeing it is wonderful. So Manoa took the young goat with the grain offering and offered it on the rock to the Lord, to the one who works wonders and Manoa and his wife were watching. And listen to this, the glory, the majesty of this. When the flame went up toward heaven from the altar, the angel of the Lord went up in the flame of the altar. Now Manoa and his wife were watching and they fell on their faces to the ground. They recognized that they were in the presence of transcendent holiness.

11:06They were in the presence of something majestic that was beyond this world. And then the angel of the Lord appeared no more to Manoa into his wife. And then Manoa knew that he was the angel of the Lord. And Manoa said to his wife, we shall surely die for we have seen God. We have seen God. We ought to die. We are surely going to die having seen God as a sinful man and woman. Now his wife had a fuller perspective on things that if we were going to die, he would have killed us already. Maybe there is another purpose to this manifestation. All I want you to see here for our purposes today is Manoa saw this majestic manifestation of the glory and power of God. And he struck with terror and he says, I ought to be dead. I should not have seen that and lived.

12:15All right. Now on more familiar grounds in Isaiah chapter 6, we read about that famous vision and I just want to read it to you. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings. With two he covered his face and with two he covered his feet and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called and the house was filled with smoke. The voice produced an earthquake. And I said, woe is me for I am lost. I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

13:15For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. I am undone. I have seen the glory of God as a sinful man. And there should be judgment on me because this is not the order of things. Sinful men don't see God and survive to tell the tale. You might remember Peter's conviction of unworthiness in Luke chapter 5 when they had been out fishing. And in Luke 5 we read on one occasion while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God. Jesus was standing by the lake of Guinness-Serrett and he saw two boats by the lake. But the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

14:17And when he had finished speaking he said to Simon put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. You know what happened? Simon protests. Simon feels the need to guard the reputation of the Lord. Says, Master, we toiled all night and took nothing. You might want to reconsider the command here in which you're making in public, Lord, because we just did this as professional fisherman and there wasn't anything there. Now you're telling me in front of all these people to let down the nets? Lord, I got to tell you this is going to be an embarrassment to you. Verse 5, Master, we toiled all night and took nothing. But at your word all let down the nets. And when they had done this they closed a large number of fish and their nets were breaking. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them.

15:19They came and filled both the boats so that they began to sink. There was such a way to fish. Both of the boats were about to sink. And Peter's response to this is instructive for us as we contemplate the matter of prayer. When Peter saw it he fell down at Jesus' knees saying, Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord. He had just seen an unmistakable manifestation of complete deity. Jesus displaying his control over nature as God in human flesh. And the unmistakable, undeniable reality of that on Peter's part was not, Why don't you end abortion? Will you take care of our truths? His reaction was, Lord, get out of here.

16:20Get away. I am a sinful man. You should not be here. I should not be in your presence as a sinful man. Now, one more from Revelation 1. We studied the Apostle John's vision of the resurrected Christ a while back. We come back to there in Revelation 1. And understand, just keep in mind, beloved, as we're going through these things, especially in Isaiah and Peter and here now with the Apostle John. We're talking about men of God. This is the response of men of God, of a prophet, and of apostles, in what we're about to read in Revelation after the resurrection. Sixty years after the resurrection, this took place. Apostle John says, I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me.

17:20And on turning, I saw seven golden lampstands. And in the midst of the lampstands, one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnish bronze refined in a furnace and his voice. His voice was like the roar of many waters. And in his right hand, he held seven stars. And from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword. And in his face was like the sun shining in full strength. This is another complete manifestation of the glory of God in the person of Christ. And our point for this morning is this, what did John do when he saw that? When he found himself in the presence of God, what did John do?

18:21This is the Apostle John. He says, verse 17, when I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. The consistent response that we see as men of God encounter the presence of God is that their personalities collapse. When they see unveiled deity, they disintegrate in fear. And they have this sense that the only possible relief for this stress upon my life is for you to leave the only way to guard your holiness is for you to leave because I shouldn't be here. I should be dead as a consequence of having seen what I've just seen. The majesty and the power and the glory of it is far too great for this human shell to absorb.

19:30That's what the men of God in Scripture did when they saw the presence in the glory of God. Now listen, beloved. We don't think that way. We're so casual. We're so confident in ourselves as we approach and we stroll easily into his presence. And it's only because people have not seen these realities about the glory of God and the separation from the sinfulness of man that you can pose billboard to say, pray this or that. And you just make a general call to the general public and say, pray and ask God to do for you what you want him to do. And there's this element of reverence and fear and honor that is utterly missing from it.

20:34That's my point. Well, my friend, thank you for joining us here on the Truth Pulpit. And I just wanted to let you know of an additional ministry that you may want to take advantage of. A few years ago, over a period of years, I taught through all 150 Psalms, generally doing one message per Psalm. And we turned that into a separate podcast for all of those messages. It's titled Through the Psalms. And it goes through all 150 Psalms over a course of about three years. And if that's something that you would like to use and benefit from, you can go to our website and find the podcast link and subscribe there. That's at thetruthpulpit.com. Once again, that's through the Psalms podcast. You can find it on our website at thetruthpulpit.com.

21:35That's Don Greene, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to the Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people, God's Word.