A Theology of Prayer in Three Minutes

00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, at the recent Pastors' Conference you gave a mini-theology of

00:00:08.760 | prayer, and I was wondering if you could share that here on this episode of

00:00:12.200 | Ask Pastor John. What I said at the conference, that I spoke to try to

00:00:18.680 | encourage a pastor who had written a question concerning losing hope, losing

00:00:26.800 | confidence in prayer, probably because he had seen God do less than he had hoped.

00:00:33.480 | What I said was, Jesus called us to pray first and foremost that His name would

00:00:41.600 | be hallowed, that His kingdom would come, that His will would be done, and then as

00:00:45.280 | a support and a means to that, that we'd have our daily bread, and that we'd

00:00:50.240 | be protected from the devil, and that we'd be led in paths of righteousness, and so

00:00:55.080 | on. And so clearly, at the heart of our prayer life, is to be, "Father, cause your

00:01:01.680 | name in this world to be revered, and loved, and praised, and honored, and start

00:01:06.680 | right here in my heart this morning. And then advance your kingdom, O God, and

00:01:12.200 | cause your will to be done the way the angels do it in heaven." In other words,

00:01:16.080 | wrap up and bring your kingdom in, and do everything you need to to get us to that

00:01:20.800 | goal. And what I said was, in the book of Revelation, prayer is being gathered

00:01:29.400 | into bowls. This is seen in chapter 5, it's seen in chapter 8. And those bowls

00:01:34.840 | have two functions. They are censors, they're like incense, and in

00:01:40.880 | the presence of God, that incense is really pleasing to Him. God loves the

00:01:48.360 | aroma of the prayers of His people, which means that if you're on your face crying

00:01:54.000 | out for a lost loved one, or for some difficulty in your church, that very act

00:01:59.920 | is pleasing to God. It is not wasted. Quite apart from the answer that is

00:02:05.600 | going to come now, or ten years from now, or that God's going to just answer in a

00:02:09.680 | way totally unexpected, the prayer itself is precious to God. That's the first

00:02:15.760 | meaning of those bowls and that incense. The second is in chapter 8,

00:02:20.600 | there's going to come a day when those bowls are full. In other words, the

00:02:25.900 | billions upon billions of prayers that have been prayed, "Hallowed be thy name,

00:02:31.000 | thy kingdom come." The last one is going to be prayed, and God's going to look at

00:02:36.480 | that angel and say, "Pour it out on the earth." And He's going to take the bowl of

00:02:40.320 | prayers, like fire, and throw it on the earth, and the final purposes of God are

00:02:45.600 | going to be achieved. And I think we need to preach to ourselves that our prayers

00:02:51.160 | are part of the causality of the final victory of God. He wouldn't have

00:02:59.320 | asked us to pray that His kingdom come if He didn't mean for our prayers to be

00:03:04.400 | an instrument in the coming of the kingdom. So it's simply astonishing that

00:03:08.600 | when you think of the billions of times the Lord's Prayer has been uttered, all

00:03:13.000 | of those times when it's been uttered in faith, God's put it in a bowl there,

00:03:17.680 | and it's filling up and filling up, and the day's going to come when that

00:03:22.360 | bowl, as it were, will be poured out as the consummation of the age. So none of

00:03:26.560 | those prayers is wasted. I can't think of a greater motive for prayer than to see

00:03:31.680 | this theology behind it. Thank you, Pastor John, for this, and thank you for

00:03:34.520 | listening to this podcast. Send your prayer questions to us via email at

00:03:38.360 | AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Please include your first name and your

00:03:41.280 | hometown. You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper

00:03:44.480 | online at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:03:50.400 | Thanks for watching.