What Do you Desire?

We’ve finally come back to looking at the sin of prayerlessness in the Church today. I think right off the bat we need to see that we are dealing with the lack of prayer IN THE CHURCH.


When we first started looking at this subject, we said that: We must fight the urge to look at sinners and compare ourselves to them. We tend to dwell on the sin in the world around us instead of examining our own hearts before God and dealing with the sin that is there. That is the focus of this study, our own hearts before God. Why, when we have been forgiven so much as God’s children, do we condemn the world for its hopelessly lost condition and then refuse to see our own sin as it is? Simply, it is because we don’t have any real idea of what our sin looks like to our holy God.


I hope to show you that the sin of prayerlessness is a heinous sin of the worst kind. The greatest sin that man is guilty of is not murder, child abuse or the greatest social injustice we can think of, but that he would not give glory to God. Lack of prayer in the life of a believer fails to give God glory on so many levels.


I asked awhile back if up until you have been forced to think about it, did you view the lack of prayer as a weakness or a sin? Knowing our true selves, it should not come as a surprise when many believers confess that they have always looked at it as a weakness, and not a great sin.


We’ve all looked back in the Old Testament and shook our heads at those pathetic Israelites who just couldn’t seem to stop worshipping idols. And, even if we don’t admit it, we think to ourselves, “What was wrong with those people? Why couldn’t they get it?” Hopefully, though, as soon as the thought enters our head we stop and confess our own sin of idolatry which is a daily affair.


“Idolatry,” according to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “the worshipping of idols, is the greatest enemy that confronts us in the spiritual life. The greatest danger confronting us all is not a matter of deeds or of actions, but of idolatry.”

Idolatry is anything in our lives that occupies the place that should be occupied by God alone. It is anything that holds my life and my devotion, anything that is central in my life, anything by which I live or depend. It is anything to which I give much of my time and attention, my energy and my money. Anything that holds a controlling position in my life is an idol.


So we must be forced to ask ourselves these questions, ‘To what do I give the majority of my time and devotion?’ ‘What do I find myself thinking and talking the most about?’


The last time this subject was mentioned in this blog, I asked the following questions, ‘How much time do you spend in prayer? How much do you think would be enough? Would you say that your life is characterized more by living in the flesh or the Spirit?’ That is where I want to pick it up today.


At the onset, I want to stress that no matter if we spend four hours a day in prayer or less than five minutes in prayer, we should all feel as though we don’t pray enough. The holiness of our God and all that He has done for us demands that thought from us. Once the light of God’s Word shines upon our guilt, all excuses that come crashing into the forefronts of our minds should be smashed immediately before words are ever formed in our mouths. There is no excuse that suffices for the lack of prayer in the life of a child of God.


Instead, this sin needs to be acknowledged by each one of us in deep shame. Our hearts ARE desperately wicked above all else, and we should never question that or try to believe otherwise. There is way too much evidence of it.


We talked a little bit about the difference between the law and a compulsion in the life of a believer. While God does tell us repeatedly in His Word that we are to pray, it should be our greatest delight, and we should need no reminder to do that which delights us most. What three-year old needs to be told that he needs to spend time with a loving parent? Are you kidding me? On the contrary, there are multitudes of three-year olds in the care of others, for whatever reasons, who long for this time alone with their parents. Why? Because they love their mother and father. Mother and father are the whole world of the three-year old (after himself). There isn’t anything else that compares to spending time with the ones who loves him the most.

Believers are told to pray unceasingly. How could anyone make a command like that unless he understood that no one is going to earnestly pray night and day unless it is an internal compulsion, unless it is something that he longs to do. The desires of our hearts are the foundation for our actions. Simply put, we do what we want to do.


Natural man has evil desires. The reason he will have no excuse before a sovereign God on judgment day is because he ultimately followed the desires of his heart during his lifetime on earth. He had no desire to repent of his sin, believe in Christ or follow Him. On the other hand, believers get new desires at the time of their spiritual rebirth. They are born from above and have the same desires as those of their Father in heaven. He puts new desires in their hearts that reflect Him and His will. The compulsions we have as Christians, these right desires, are generated or prompted by the Spirit of God within us. The believer on judgment day will find himself in the eternal presence of God because of the desires that God placed in his heart to repent of his sins and believe on Christ for salvation. Due to the fact that God is sovereign over all aspects of salvation, that believer will stand there in humble gratitude before God and will be able to take no credit for his salvation or even acting on those desires that were given to him by God. Just as physical life is given by God and sustained by God, so, too is the spiritual life of the believer.


Our great and loving Father allows or sends afflictions and trials in our lives so that we will learn to run to Him for answers, for healing, for comfort, for EVERYTHING. Those who need God the most will pray the most. But, we must all learn to live close to Him and to abide in Him at all times. A three-year old child feels most safe and secure when his father or mother is near. During those times, all is right with the world. When a believer spends time abiding in the presence of His heavenly Father, all is right in his world even though he is in a world that is under the dominion of the evil one. Unfortunately, growing up is hard and where the natural child learns to be more independent of his parents, the believer must learn to be more and more dependent on God. This is a training process.


Because we are fallen creatures, what often happens when the trial is removed? We go back to ignoring God. I don’t know whether it is an American concept or what, but we have been raised to be independent. I guess that is how we chose to live at the Fall, so it part of our human sin nature. That is why the five-year old today is nothing like the five-year old 50 years ago. Sadly, the five-year old of our post-modern world has learned to be brave and is often thrown into the world long before he should be. As Christians, we must learn to be dependent upon our Father for everything since it goes against everything we know, everything that is ingrained in us. What should be natural for the child of God is to pray and stay close to Him.


Part of the problem is that we don’t have a clue how much we need God. Sitting right where you are reading this, you don’t even realize that you need Him for your next breath. We take things for granted, because we still have a lot of selfishness in us, and we are ungrateful. We must learn to be grateful for all the blessings that God has given us, including life, especially new life. Natural man wants to do everything apart from God – his own way. He wants to be able to say with Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Deep down, the fight we all must struggle against is this unbelief that we really need God for anything. Just the opposite, however, is true. We need God for absolutely EVERYTHING!


Regarding prayer, then, the measure of a person’s spirituality is not determined by how well he conforms to the DEMAND to pray but by the extent he is compelled to pray because of an internal passion for others in God’s kingdom.


Because our passions will come out in our prayers, we need to examine our prayers. If our prayers are focused upon our needs, problems, questions and struggles, then that is an indication of where our heart is. If we pray infrequently, briefly and in a shallow manner, our hearts are cold because prayer is just not that important to us. There is no inner desire. What would my relationships be like if all I talked about with my friends were those things that interested me, if every time my friend started to talk about something other than ME, I turned the conversation back to myself? Or, what if I never wanted to talk to my friend but only talked about the weather and things that really don’t matter a whole hill of beans? If we find that this is what our prayer life looks like, we need to be concerned that our hearts may be deceiving us into thinking things are okay between ourselves and God when, in reality, there is something desperately wrong.