(upbeat music) - Well, sometimes we find it hard to pray because we are under spiritual attack. And sometimes we find it hard to pray because we lack personal discipline. And in a 1988 sermon, Pastor John explained the physical side of prayerful alertness. That's one reason for sharing today's clip.

The other reason is that two weeks ago, we were talking about wrestling and prayer back in ABJ 1795. And at the end of that episode, Pastor John threw in a little definition of prayer as being quote, a wartime walkie talkie. Prayer as a wartime walkie talkie. You might remember that from a couple of weeks ago.

At the end of that episode, I mentioned that we had never really talked here on the podcast about that phrase, which is one of Pastor John's favorite metaphors for prayer. And today I wanna give you a glimpse into how he uses that metaphor. Prayer is not a domestic intercom to ring the butler.

It's a wartime walkie talkie to connect us with the general. And Pastor John explains this really well in a sermon clip from 1988. Here he is. - Now, if you've been around Bethlehem a little while, you might have picked up that one of my favorite analogies of prayer is a wartime walkie talkie.

And I like to contrast the wartime walkie talkie of prayer with the domestic intercom. And what I like to say is, one of the reasons that prayer malfunctions is because people take a wartime walkie talkie and try to turn it into a domestic intercom in which they ring up the butler to please bring another pillow to the den.

Prayer was designed for the battlefield as a wartime walkie talkie, not to increase the pad of the saints through a domestic intercom. Now, keep that image in your mind as I read these verses again, and then I wanna paint a picture for you of the situation it looks to me like Paul is in.

Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. Pray for us also that God may open a door for the word to declare the mystery of Christ on account of which I'm in prison, that I may make it clear as I ought to speak. Here's one way to picture what's going on here.

Paul, Epiphras, Luke, Timothy, Aristarchus, that's the team mentioned in this book in other verses, kind of storm troopers, you could picture them as on the front lines. They have an assignment to penetrate the enemy line of Satan and to take captive for God, souls who are being blinded and held by Satan.

They attempt to spearhead a breach through the enemy line and they hit a massive counterforce. The result, at least two of them, Aristarchus and Paul are in a prison camp. It looks as though the enemy has gotten a significant tactical victory, but Paul in the camp manages to scratch a note and smuggle it out of the camp to the soldiers who are not at this point on the front line.

They're called Colossians back up country in the high ground and the note at this point simply says, "Use walkie talkie, call the commander, have him fire a missile, gives the coordinates and tell him to blow the door off of this prison and open a door for the word of God to go forward behind those lines and to rescue those people that we were after when we got waylaid here in this prison." Now, the point so far is this, we're all soldiers and we're all on the battlefield.

Some of us are in different places on the battlefield and some penetrating a front line can get into grave difficulty. And the job of the rest of the soldiers is to use the walkie talkie of prayer to call in air cover and firepower for those stormtroopers. We are crucial in evangelism indirectly through prayer.

So here is what the text, verses two to four, answers for us indirect supporters. It answers how to pray and what to pray. It gives three answers to each of those questions. Let's look at them briefly. First of all, how to pray. Verse two, the first way is persistently.

Verse two, continue steadfastly in prayer or your version might say, devote yourselves to prayer. Be persistent, continuous, devoted. Here's a way to illustrate this. Prayer is not like these new telephones that you can buy that don't have any cords. Our sons won one of these telephones by selling a lot of magazines.

So we now have one of these Tweety Bird telephones and you can just pull the little aerial up, flick it on and walk around the house, talking, go out in the yard. Now, prayer is not like these telephones because as soon as you take that telephone off the hook and start using it, the power runs out of it.

It starts getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And if you keep on using it, it's useless. You gotta stop using it. You gotta hang it up in order for it to get power again. Prayer is exactly the opposite. If you hang prayer up on the wall of your bedroom when you leave in the morning, it will be dead when you come home at night, very likely.

But the best way to keep prayer powerful is to hook it like I got this little doohickey right on me here. See, that's hooked up to this. You just keep it hooked on your belt and make sure it stays on. I gotta flick this thing off between services or I've got no juice, the battery runs out.

Prayer is just the opposite. You gotta keep it on because it gets more and more and more powerful the more you use it. I think that's what's meant by be persistent in prayer. It doesn't run out of juice. It's more and more effective as you devote yourself to it and continue in it.

So when you're done in the morning, suppose you spend five minutes or 10 or 20 or 30 minutes in prayer in the morning, don't hang it up, hang it on right here and don't flick it off, flick it on. So there's a little red light showing and you can get beeps and a little tweety sound during the day from God and he can just listen to you anytime you wanna pick it up.

Second way to pray after persistently is watchfully. You see that in verse two? Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it. Now, why do we need to be watchful and what does that mean? Satan, who is the enemy that we're against and who is holding people bondage knows how dangerous this walkie talkie is to his purposes.

And so he will try to jam the airwaves so you can't get through. He'll try to steal the unit so that you can't use it and he'll try to put you to sleep with some drug while you're talking on it. Now, how does he do those three things? He's the prince of the power of the air.

Picture him now, he's just everywhere as it were, at least his influence is everywhere. And our airwaves gotta get to God through this walkie talkie of prayer and it's as though he can jam the airwaves by filling our atmosphere with an incredible number of non-essential things so that the atmosphere over our brain is so cluttered with insignificant and sometimes very worldly things that our little effort to send our signal up just goes click and doesn't even get through.

And he's really good at cluttering your brain with non-essential airwaves that jam his or your desires to get through. How does he steal the unit? He steals the unit by tricking you into thinking it's broken so that you lay it down and walk away from it. And the third way, namely causing us to go to sleep with some drug as we talk.

There are a lot of ways he does this. Let me tell you the most common way that he does this. Satan puts you to sleep in prayer most commonly by tricking you into staying up too late the night before. Now I think this is a real serious business here and I'm preaching to myself mainly.

God designed you to need a certain amount of sleep. Most people are about the same, you might be a little different. If you don't get that amount of sleep, you get irritable and that's a sin and therefore not getting enough sleep is giving a foothold to the devil. It leads to depression.

It leads to falling asleep during prayer. So when you start to fall asleep during prayer and you say, "Oh, gotta fight the fight here." Look, that fight was lost the night before. And the problem is we don't see the fight the night before. We don't recognize that when it's time to go to bed in order to get God's prescribed amount of sleep, we don't realize Satan is the one who's tricking us to watch another TV program.

Satan is the one who's keeping us reading the book. Satan is the one who keeps us in the newspaper and the magazine. Satan is the one who keeps us out in the yard poking around or whatever. Because Satan knows if I can cut it back to six or five or four hours, I'll wreck their day.

I'll wreck their day and make them useless for God and I will put them to sleep during prayer. Vigilance or watchfulness is the only answer that I know of. That is when the temptation comes to fight back with an awareness of what God has called you to do. Now, I don't know the last or final answer to why God designed human beings to be unconscious one third of their life.

That's a great puzzle to me. But He did. I think it has to do with wanting to teach us that we are not God. I think sleep is the most humbling experience that anybody ever has. If there's any point in your life where you are utterly childlike and helpless, it's when you're unconscious in bed at night.

And God designed you to go unconscious about a third of your life. Probably more than a third if you count how much you slept when you were a baby or a child. You just gotta own up to that and stop trying to be God. I do anyway. The third way we are to pray besides persistently and watchfully is thankfully.

Continue steadfastly in prayer, it says, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. Now, in case the wartime analogy makes you jittery, suppose this wartime talk that I'm using causes you to think in terms of, oh, it just means you're biting your nails and your heart is thumping and your hands are sweating.

This is an awful view of the Christian life. Well, that would be an awful view of the Christian life. So this word is added to get rid of that image. If that's what wartime signifies to you rather than the thrill of conquest, then thanksgiving is added here to mellow things out a little bit.

We ought, as we call in the headquarters to guide us through the minefields of temptation and to give us the firepower we need and to blast doors off the hinges in our lives, we ought to mingle with all of our requests, sentences like this. The missile hit right on target, sir.

Thank you. The door was blown off its hinges, sir. Thank you. We're heading out in full force, sir. Thank you. The arm of Aristarchus has been healed, sir. Thank you. We're coming in, sir, with 20 captives. Thank you. You see, the battle belongs to the Lord. All the crucial engagements with Satan in the wilderness, in Gethsemane, on the cross, at the empty tomb, every one of them were triumphantly won by Jesus Christ.

We do not fight one single battle with the mindset that we are going to be losers in the end. We fight all of our battles knowing that in Jesus Christ, we will win and therefore gratitude ought to ring through this walkie talkie all the time. If it doesn't, something will malfunction in the walkie talkie.

It has this little sensor in there that begins to click when there's not enough gratitude going through. That's the answer to the question, how to pray as supporters of stormtroopers. Paradigm shaping definition of prayer here. One of the reasons we feel so weak in our prayer lives is that we have tried to make a domestic intercom out of a wartime walkie talkie, end quote.

So such a great clip. This clip is from John Piper's May 29th, 1988 sermon titled Walk in Wisdom Toward Those Outside. The whole thing is available right now at desiringgod.org. If you have a sermon clip to share, email me. Give me your name, hometown, the sermon title, the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio and make a note of what stands out to you.

Put the word clip in the subject line of an email and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. That's an email address, askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Well, Friday we return with Pastor John and we will all return to 2 Thessalonians. Who is this mysterious man of lawlessness who appears in chapter two? We'll find out on Friday.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)