How Do You Pray in Public, Without Performing?

00:00:00.000 | Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast and today Pastor John I want to

00:00:04.000 | talk to you about your recent funeral prayer that you recently delivered on

00:00:08.240 | behalf of the Powell's family, a family of five planning and preparing to become

00:00:12.880 | missionaries to Japan who were tragically killed in an automobile

00:00:16.800 | accident this summer. You were asked to pray at the funeral and that public

00:00:21.200 | lament which we published in this podcast has now exceeded 700,000 plays

00:00:26.480 | to date which is at least three times more plays than any of the other 900

00:00:32.400 | plus episodes we've published in this podcast. It's been amazingly well

00:00:36.200 | received and I think even in the light of the tragedy that called for it, it

00:00:40.320 | would be beneficial to pastors and leaders to all of us to hear from you on

00:00:43.360 | how you made it. So can you take us into it, what is it, what did you intend to

00:00:48.040 | accomplish and and how did you write it? Tony the first thing I think we need to

00:00:54.760 | be completely honest about is my misgivings about whether prayers should

00:01:01.960 | even be broadcast on the internet and whether you and I right now should be

00:01:07.520 | talking about this. Of course the very fact that I am talking about it and

00:01:13.600 | didn't pull the plug on this and that we did make the prayer available at

00:01:19.840 | Desiring God and that I used Twitter to link to the whole service over at the

00:01:24.200 | Bethlehem Hope in God website shows that my conclusion from those misgivings was

00:01:31.440 | that more good would be done by sharing it than by not. But there are at least

00:01:38.480 | two reasons that give me pause and I think they would be helpful to mention

00:01:42.960 | here. One is that Jesus said hypocrites love to stand and pray in the synagogues

00:01:50.720 | and on the street corners that they may be seen by others. That's a really

00:01:59.040 | important thing for me, the prayer to hear. The other is that we're dealing

00:02:06.360 | here with real families and real relationships and real pain and real

00:02:12.880 | loss. It's very fresh even now, and the thought of somehow for us, you and me

00:02:21.800 | and Desiring God, the thought that we would exploit that moment and that pain

00:02:29.240 | to put ourselves forward would be absolutely loathsome in the eyes of God.

00:02:38.360 | So God abominates that kind of spiritual prostitution. So as I stand before God

00:02:48.520 | in prayer, I have to look him in the eye, as it were, and let him search my heart

00:02:56.720 | as to whether the very praying of a prayer, let alone the publishing of a

00:03:03.580 | prayer, were more about me than about him and those who suffer. And the reason

00:03:13.560 | mentioning this struggle is part of the answer to your question of where the

00:03:18.200 | prayer came from is that every pastor has to ask this question when he prays

00:03:25.120 | in public, which ought to be pretty much every week. The Bible endorses and

00:03:31.560 | encourages public praying. 1st Corinthians 14 16. We want people to

00:03:37.240 | hear and say "Amen" to what we pray. That's what that verse says.

00:03:40.920 | Christian leaders are to lead their people in prayer publicly, out loud, not

00:03:48.320 | just in a closet. And everyone who prays in public, whether in a group of six or

00:03:55.120 | six hundred or six thousand, must face the question of selfish motivation. It's

00:04:02.280 | not unique to me or to desiring God or to a funeral. It's every time anyone

00:04:09.760 | opens his mouth in the presence of two or three people. That's an issue of

00:04:15.320 | hypocrisy on the line and authenticity on the line. So the first thing to say

00:04:22.080 | about where this prayer came from is that it came from a sense of utter

00:04:28.200 | inadequacy. First, because the disproportion between the deaths of two

00:04:37.240 | parents and three children—the disproportion between those five deaths

00:04:43.920 | in one horrific conflagration, on the one hand, and the sufficiency of

00:04:51.600 | words—words, words, words—to embody or somehow represent the magnitude of what

00:04:59.880 | just happened, that disproportion seemed to me utterly mammoth, insurmountable.

00:05:08.760 | There's no way that words could do justice to the reality of what had just

00:05:16.200 | happened. That was the first sense of inadequacy, and it's true. It's not just

00:05:22.840 | like I've got an inadequate feeling here. It's true. Words cannot, cannot capture

00:05:30.040 | the breadth and depth of what these families were and are, even as we speak,

00:05:37.000 | experiencing. So what's a pastor to do? What's a friend to do? The second sense

00:05:44.480 | of inadequacy was that I knew I would be standing before a thousand real

00:05:52.480 | live people. This was the biggest service we've ever had in my 33 years plus in

00:06:00.120 | relation to Bethlehem. I knew that I would be standing in front of a thousand

00:06:04.920 | people plus, real live bodies, and how does a fallen, sinful pastor pray to God?

00:06:15.440 | To God, not to people, to God, really to God, when he knows that a thousand people

00:06:21.680 | are listening to see what he says? And again, I know that the Bible says when we

00:06:30.280 | pray publicly we should care about what other people hear us saying. 1

00:06:34.360 | Corinthians 14, 16. We should care. A pastor shouldn't say, "I don't care who's

00:06:39.000 | listening. I'm just praying to an audience of one." Baloney! Baloney! We know

00:06:44.360 | people are listening, and the Bible says we must care, lest they cannot say

00:06:49.960 | "Amen." The Bible gives explicit instruction to care about whether or not

00:06:55.240 | the people who are listening get it. So it's a supernatural work of God. It's a

00:07:01.400 | miracle if a pastor can really speak to God—that is, authentically pray,

00:07:09.240 | authentically intercede, authentically lament and praise and plead rather than

00:07:16.360 | performing for human audience. That's a miracle. It's a work of the Spirit. So

00:07:22.880 | behind this prayer was at least that double sense of inadequacy. One, without a

00:07:29.840 | miracle, the words I choose will seem all out of proportion in their weakness to

00:07:38.400 | the magnitude of what has just happened. And number two, without a miracle, I'm

00:07:43.400 | gonna be grandstanding instead of praying. So inside that double sense of

00:07:51.480 | inadequacy, as I've thought about it and felt it, I had three goals that might

00:07:57.160 | help pastors or whoever deal with how you put together a prayer in public in

00:08:06.040 | such a situation. And my three goals were, number one, to make much of the imperial

00:08:13.080 | majesty of Jesus Christ for whom this family gave their lives. Number two, to

00:08:21.600 | give some evidence by what I said and how I said it of the incalculable weight

00:08:29.400 | and loss and the intensity and the depth of the pain. Number three, to plead with

00:08:37.280 | God for the comfort and the strength and the hope and even the joy of those who

00:08:44.440 | remain. And to do that, to do those three things, I was guided by four convictions.

00:08:51.040 | Number one, since all words are inadequate to represent the magnitude of

00:08:57.360 | what had happened, the safest thing was to use as much biblical language as I

00:09:03.400 | could. I do believe deeply that the Bible encourages us to formulate word pictures,

00:09:10.920 | images, metaphors, similes, because this kind of poetic talk, which is pervasive

00:09:17.840 | in the Bible, this kind of talk comes closer to capturing the emotions of the

00:09:24.600 | moment than ordinary prosaic descriptions. So I reached for

00:09:31.000 | biblical images, and oh, the danger here. There's dangers everywhere. Every effort to

00:09:39.840 | express something with images runs the risk of drawing more attention to the

00:09:45.900 | language than to the reality we're trying to make plain with the language.

00:09:51.240 | Every person who speaks or writes or sings about anything that really matters

00:09:57.560 | has to come to terms with this danger and do their best to say things in a way

00:10:03.760 | that will help people see through the window rather than staring at the glass.

00:10:11.800 | That's the challenge of choosing words. Second, my second conviction

00:10:19.200 | that was guiding me, there is real biblical lament before the face of God

00:10:27.040 | that tells him how much he has hurt us without feeling anger at him. That's a

00:10:37.620 | deep conviction of mine. I do not believe it is ever, ever, ever, ever right to be

00:10:45.660 | angry at God. Ever. I disapprove strongly of making our anger at God a part of

00:10:54.660 | public worship. Public prayers are to represent what ought to be. Now, of course

00:11:01.700 | people get angry at God. Good grief. Of course they do. Christians get angry at

00:11:07.540 | God. They shouldn't, but they do. And if they do get angry at God, they should

00:11:13.780 | tell him so. There's no point in adding the sin of fearful hypocrisy as if you

00:11:21.100 | could hide anything. There's no point in adding the sin of fearful

00:11:25.660 | hypocrisy to the sin of Godward anger. God can handle our anger if we get

00:11:30.540 | angry, and there's no hiding it from him. He sees it before we know we're even

00:11:37.300 | feeling it. But anger at God is not godly lament. Godly lament says, "You have driven

00:11:49.940 | your arrows into my breast." Godly lament says, "You have filled my mouth with

00:11:56.700 | gravel." Godly lament says, "You have covered me with shadows, and I grope for

00:12:04.620 | substance of real bodies that have been taken away from me." Godly lament always

00:12:10.060 | says, "Nevertheless, to you, O God, I look for my deliverance. To you alone, I look

00:12:18.380 | for my hope. You alone are my portion." I wanted to express godly biblical lament,

00:12:27.340 | not anger, at the all-wise, all-good, all-powerful God. Now, whether I succeeded

00:12:34.540 | or not, others will judge, but that was a guiding conviction. My third conviction

00:12:40.620 | was that in order to pray for the comfort of the grieving, you need to try

00:12:48.340 | to get inside the skin of the particular people and relationships in front of you.

00:12:54.740 | So I tried. I took about five hours trying. I tried to crawl inside the minds

00:13:03.620 | of parents, grandparents, and brothers, and sisters, and little children, cousins, in

00:13:10.340 | the minds of hundreds of friends, and even strangers who I knew would care

00:13:15.580 | about this, given the news media, and the truck driver. I wanted to get inside his

00:13:20.860 | mind. Whether or not a pastor succeeds in this depends partly on the measure

00:13:30.820 | of his own life experience. It's hard, if you've never walked through anything

00:13:35.020 | horrible, to get inside the skin of those who've experienced something horrible,

00:13:39.900 | which is why pastors should never begrudge their own suffering. God knows

00:13:43.940 | what he's doing in creating shepherds that can empathize with sheep. And it

00:13:49.340 | depends on the Spirit-given powers of imagination to put yourself in someone

00:13:56.420 | else's shoes, because you never really are in their exact situation. There's

00:14:00.780 | something unique about every suffering, and you can't be in it all, but you can

00:14:05.780 | plead with the Holy Spirit for the miracle to try to get into the head and

00:14:11.260 | the heart of those who are suffering. That was the third, and here's my

00:14:15.780 | last, guiding conviction, was that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Universe. He is

00:14:23.680 | absolutely sovereign over all things. Nothing happens that is outside his

00:14:28.620 | ultimate control. He is unimpeachable in his character. He is good and holy, and

00:14:35.820 | his disposition toward his beloved is totally, totally merciful. Therefore, I did

00:14:44.820 | not want in any way to portray him as weak or ignorant or helpless or

00:14:50.420 | perplexed or outmaneuvered by Satan or any less capable of triumph in Japan

00:14:57.140 | because of this loss. I wanted to portray him this way not only because he is this

00:15:04.980 | way, but because Jameson and Catherine believed he was this way and would want

00:15:13.380 | me to say that. So Tony, there are a lot of wrestlings that went into the

00:15:20.300 | preparations of prayer, but that's perhaps enough for now. There's so much

00:15:25.500 | more, so much more that pastors and lovers of people who pray out loud

00:15:30.660 | have to get, but that may give a flavor to those who might find it helpful.

00:15:35.580 | I'd say so. Thank you, Pastor John, for walking us through this prayer and for

00:15:39.700 | all these wrestlings behind it and for explaining your convictions and your own

00:15:44.020 | personal fears in this tragic moment. This remains a unique teaching moment

00:15:48.980 | for all of us on so many levels, even down to thinking through a theology of

00:15:53.060 | lament. Of course, you can hear the prayer itself, which was released in an episode

00:15:57.940 | titled "John Piper's Funeral Prayer for a Family of Five," which was delivered and

00:16:03.260 | released back on August 6th. To find that recording or for more details about

00:16:08.820 | this podcast or to catch up on all the past episodes or to get our free app or

00:16:12.500 | to subscribe to the audio feed, even to send us a question of your own, go to our

00:16:15.500 | online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And we're back on

00:16:20.300 | Friday for the next episode, Friday, and we'll be talking about house churches.

00:16:24.260 | Should we meet in buildings or should we meet in homes? John Piper will help us

00:16:28.780 | work through the questions. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening to the

00:16:32.900 | Ask Pastor John podcast.

00:16:36.020 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

How Do You Pray in Public, Without Performing?

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