July 15, 2024: Monday Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 11:22-26
Good morning fellow Bible Study friends. Thank you for your willingness to rejoin our group after an extended week-long vacation for my family and me. We had a staycation here in Tucson at a local resort. Our sons were in and out throughout the week, and Melody and I alternated nights at home during the week. That meant that we did not have to pay someone to stay in the house, and thankfully, it all worked out very well. I hope your home and you were OK through that pretty tough storm that rolled through the center of Tucson last night. There was a great deal of tree damage downtown which we saw coming through when we were on Broadway after our son's late basketball game last night on the northwest side of town. We had little rain, only a little wind, and hardly knew that the storm was taking place in another part of our community.
In today's reading, we find Jesus offering His guidance on prayer. We always need to remember that we may be reading in Mark with passages out of chronological order. Today's reading is one of those. This teaching of Jesus about prayer and the faithful person's relationship with God, and other people, is one of the specific sayings of Mark which appears to be connected to the passage on Christ's "blasting" of the fig tree. In this passage we find echoes of Jesus' teaching in the Gospels which reminds us that we are to love God more than anything else, and we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And at the heart of this is our faith in God! So, let's move on to talk more specifically about prayer.
A first step in faithful prayer is confession of our brokenness and offering thanksgiving for Christ's compassionate sacrifice for our very lives. Prayer in private is personal, giving us an opportunity for intimate conversation with God. I know that Christ gave us the perfect prayer in the form of the Lord's Prayer, and you and I know this prayer by wrote, but it is also to have such a love for God, and to remember God's love for us, that we pray with that intimacy filled with faith, hope, and love for God's desire to provide for us every good thing for which we pray. We are often timid about how much we think God is willing to do in the answer of our prayers, however, Jesus makes it most clear, that in answer to our prayers which are filled with hope, faith, and love, God will even answer with actions beyond our expectations, like moving mountains. For the Jew of Jesus time, this phrase about "moving mountains" was used to mean that a person of faith could pray to God and receive the solution of the faith questions of the heart for those for whom that teacher bore the responsibility. This ability to remove difficulties comes to those who live with intimate faith in their lives. If we have real faith, through our prayers, God can give to us the ability through our faith to deal with difficulties which we face, and also to discover ways to erase those same kinds of difficulties in the lives of those for whom we are responsible. These folks are our neighbors. Let’s ask ourselves if we are truly willing to acknowledge before God the nature and magnitude of our own struggles, and through faith, to receive God's answer to our prayer. (like it or not!) We can be confident of receiving from God those answers which are good for us to know, but if our prayer is for something which God does not find good for us, we need to know that the “no” of God's answer is still the very best one for our own well-being. All too often people think that God's no means that God did not answer at all. That response from God requires our humble obedience too.
The second step in our prayer journey with God is to fill our hearts and minds with expectation when we offer our prayers to the Father. When I pray the prayers of the Church on Sunday morning at worship, it is my every expectation that God will answer our prayers, prayers offered filled with expectation for their granting by the LORD. It is an incredible experience that our Father in Heaven hears every prayer. The ones we offer aloud, and those that are only in our hearts, for which we are too humble, or perhaps, too afraid to speak, even when they are being offered through me on a Sunday morning. This past week, our council president at American celebrated the life of her mother, age 100, as she passed quietly into the kingdom of the LORD in Heaven. In these most difficult times, it is so important to seek the LORD'S guidance and help. Our prayers at the bedside of our dying loved-one, are filled with the hope and expectation, that through Christ, our treasured family member, or friend, or work companion have been received into the loving arms of the Savior as they journeyed through the grave and gate to eternal life. I offer these prayers with humble hope and expectations. When we are ill and needing the restoration that only God can give, our prayers are offered with that very same hope and expectation, while we know that it is God's will that is ultimately done. Paul prayed to God for healing of that "thorn" which he bore in his life, knowing that God heard, and chose to not heal but to help Paul see the power of God's love for him, and as a teaching time for him, through which he came to accept this illness as an important part of his ministry and life.
The third step is the one in which we humbly offer prayers of charity for others, thanking God for His own charity in our unworthy lives. If we are bitter because our own lives have failed to live up to the prayers that we have asked and asked and asked of God, then we are very likely to think our prayers seem to not be heard. Our prayer is certainly most effective when we are in this intimate relationship with the Father through His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. This is a relationship which does not yield bitterness but finds joy in all of the blessing of God in our own lives, in the lives of others with which we have been blessed. I talked yesterday in my sermon about the adoptions of five of our children. Like the births of the other three, I was amazed at the gift of life in every one of our eight children, moved to tears at births and at the final words of the judge at the court that the other five would be ours too! Though, like me, they have their own struggles in life, they are the amazing gift of the LORD in my life! They are such a rich blessing of love, hope, and faith for us. Is our life really busy as mid 70s adults? Absolutely. While others retire, travel, and live on wealth that has been accumulated, we instead have chosen a really different path of loving God first, and then moving our lives to provide opportunities and love for our five children who were considered unadoptable. I want you to know that the blessings of God have surrounded us through our love for Christ, and the gift of faithful people who surround us every day. The words of Scripture guide us to pray constantly, so, pray, pray!
With love for the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ, Pastor Kim
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