Top 10 Prayers of the New Testament #9

00:00:06
Speaker 1: So how did Jesus pray. Jesus didn't pray to get more of the Father's love and attention. He prayed because he was experiencing the Father's love and attention. Does that make sense. He didn't pray to secure more affections. He prayed from affection. There's a world of difference. Welcome to Gospel Rat podcast. To doctor Bill Senor YouTube channel, I am your host, Doctor Bill Senor. We are free wherever you get good podcasts, of course on YouTube as well. Please subscribe there. As always, one of the fastest ways you can help us grow is by leaving your comments below if you're watching on YouTube, and thanks sincerely for that. Also, thanks for making Gospel Red podcast one of the top ten percent of the world. Thank you for listening every week. We hope that it helps to regularly hear about God's love that loves the unlovable, the love the unlovely, the unworthy of, the unlikely, the hurt, and that's all of a sudden any given day if we were just a little bit honest. So I'm going through my list to the top ten prayers of the New Testament. We're at number nine. I did my top ten prayers of the Old Testament last summer, and it was a big hit. Lots of dialogue, lots of disagreements, and that's fun. I get it. It's a bit bold to try to list the top ten prayers of either the Old or the New Testament, but you know that's what we humans do is not disrespectful. It's fun, right, you know, the top point guard of all time, the top NFL defense, the best restaurant. There's a purpose for as you who follow me, we'll see, I'm staying in my lane. I proclaimed me the love of God for the unlovable. Now, as I said about the Old Testament ranking, they are all favorites of God, all of them, even the ones that were left out of my top ten. This list represents my highly subjective assessment. You may disagree with one or two, or which is ranked over another. That's great and I would love to hear your thoughts Bill at gospel dash app dot com. One way or another. Each is a very powerful testimony of how real people really prayed. Yeah, and here's spoiler alert. The top five are from the lips of Jesus himself. They're clearly worth studying and embracing. I mean really digging into so welcome to the top ten prayers of the New Testament. I want to get right into it. After our brief word from our sponsors, will be right back. Number nine, The Spirit's Grown Romans eight, twenty two to twenty seven. So this one's different than the rest. It's technically not your prayer, my prayer at all. It's a spirit's prayer everyone. We can't form words, but that's exactly why it belongs in the list. This is God praying for you in you when you're past praying, when we start to feel the grown. There are seasons when something rises in us that we don't want to name. It's terrifying, a vague bodily sense that things are coming apart and we are powerless to stop it or even put words on it to frame it. Paul dares to name that groaning in Roman's eight. All Creation, he says, is disassembling, decaying, undergoing unwanted, painful groaning, and on some level, Creation knows that we know it. Subconsciously. We might label it on a large scale climate shifts or social unraveling, a polarization, family breakdowns, geopolitical chaos, a detached observer looks at geology and weather patterns, and Paul hears something else, a kind of a slow, animal like writhing, creation's protest against the distortion of what it was meant to be and what it will yet become. This, he says, has been the story up to the present, and the metaphor he chooses is not random. It's labor. Labor pains. Labor pains are terrible and profoundly hopeful. They mean two things. Pain is real, and it will not last forever, because delivery is coming. New life is coming. In Paul's eschatological now, the new creation is already forming in the womb of the old, and its birth is imminent. His hope isn't just that deliverance exists, but that it is certain and is drawing near. His Jewish readers knew the phrase the birth pangs of the Messiah, a period of fearful tribulation and anguish expected to precede God's final rescue, and Paul leans into that and stretches it to include the entire cosmic realm. The whole universe is like a woman in long, wearying, painful labor. She knows life is coming, but all she feels are waves of pain Heracleitus the stoic Us similar image for spring after winter's hard cold. The groaning earth gives birth in pain to what has been forming unseen within her. So creation is not just dying, It is hard labor with glory. Paul goes further. Creation has been subjected to frustration by God, not by his own choice, drafted into bondage it never wanted. It lives under slavery to decay, waiting helplessly for a liberator, a redeemer who will end that slavery. And so it groans. It's automatic, a reaction to strangling, ongoing, relentless oppression of labor. The Greek words to nottso is the same word the Psalmish use in his own suffering. I am worn out from all my groaning. There it is all night long. I flood my bed with weeping and drenched my couch with tears, as Psalm six y' six. It's not a polite ah sigh. It's anguish as trauma. That moment when you close your eyes, you drop your hands and whisper, I'm done. Creation is doing that on a cosmic scale. If we're honest, so are we? This is where we live. We are children in good standing with God, but we don't yet dwell by His side and a healed creation. We dwell in the groaning. We lose loved ones. We hear cancer, dementia, chronic We hear wars, terror, polarization, accidents, school shootings, terrorism. We absorb relational betrayals, divorces, career implosions, financial collapse. We battle anxiety, identity, confusion, depression, illness, loneliness, just fatigue. All of it is part of Creation's roaring cries, sounds we recognize in our own chest. God could take us home, but for his kingdom purposes and our future glory, we remain due. We're on a quest for glory signed ordained by Him, and we're not alone. The Spirit himself, Paul says, testifies with our spirit there were God's kids, God's Children's roman Age sixteen. The Holy Spirit dwells in our inner being, wherever that is that is charged with our comfort and well being amidst the groaning, not rescuing us from it. That will happen eventually. Without Him and his compassionate, motherly embrace, we would inevitably fall under the strangling grip of fear. Romans eight fifteen, not just fear for our own circumstances, but the deeper terror of being isolated, forgotten, helplessly abandoned in a hostile universe. Instead, the Spirit makes us know we are not alone. He actually trains our hearts to cry Abba Father, literally, Daddy, Daddy, like a frightened child reach for her father's arms. He stirs hope in us against hope Chapter eight, verse twenty four and twenty five, when humanly speaking, there's no visible reason for hope at all, and then Paul says the most staggering thing of all. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for then, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. Romans eight twenty six. When terror and shock trauma silence us, when we can't form one coherent petition, what do we ask for? When language itself feels insulting to the depth of our pain? The Spirit praise. He takes up our case before the Father with wordless groans. The Triune God is having a conversation among themselves about you and for you, that you cannot even hear much less improve, but you know it's ongoing, which gives you a sense of hope. Somebody has taken up your cause. So this makes our top ten list, even though so it is not our voice that Abba hears. It's his own spirit's voice interceding for us when we can't speak, like the silent sobbing of an infant in our mother's arms. When the tears are gone, but the terror isn't. God is brutally honest about the world. We don't tend to like going that direction. He doesn't deny the kay groaning a trauma. He names them and weaves them into his scripture. God sees pain is pregnant, not pointless. Labor pains are awful, but they aim at birth. He is bringing a new creation out of the ole. And we're witnesses and participants in that process of new birth. And God refuses to leave us to suffer alone. We are not deists. Where God winds the clock and lets it go, He is involved with it. He sends his spirit inside the groan. Can you isn't that humbling? Humiliating? He sends his spirit inside my groan? Right? He doesn't just answer from a above, it from a distance. God takes responsibility for praying when we can't. That great news. The spirit intercedes according to the will of God, but we have no idea what to ask. God cherishes you at your weakest, not just at your best. Your wordless collapse is not the end of prayer. It's the moment his own prayer for you becomes the loudest. So what does this prayer say about us? We are more fragile than we want to admit. There are seasons when even forming a sentence towards God feels impossible. Our pain is part of a larger story, our personal groans, our echoes. Yeah, a universal labor, a cosmic labor, creation of self longing for resurrection. It's also a necessary part of our present God or day kingdom quest. When the question is overwhelming, we're not alone. You're not alone. Second thing, it's we're not wrong to feel done. That exhausted slump is closer to biblical realism than forced positivity. Next, we desperately need help to pray. Sometimes left to ourselves, we either fall silent in despair or fake prayers we no longer feel. Next, we are invited to rest rather than perform. When we can't do prayer. God keeps the conversation going on our behalf and that's okay. Well, here's a simple way to lean into Romans eight when you can barely speak. Here's a prayer that we've shaped, and just sit back and let it wash over you. And maybe you would say something like it Abba, father, Daddy, Daddy. I don't even know what to pray right now. My heart and body are tired of groaning. I feel the decay of this world and the pain in my own story. Holy Spirit, you see what I can't put in the words. You know the law is the fear, the confusion, the anger. I trust it. You're praying for me with groans deeper than language. Hold me like a child in labor pains, waiting for a world I cannot yet see. Remind me that I'm not abandoned, that my story is pregnant with your glory. Until I can speak again, let your own prayer for me be enough. What's next? I'll let you know after this brief word from our sponsors. So what's next? You may be surprised by my next choice, the Lord's prayer. Yeah, it's number eight in the list of the top ten prayers of the New Testament. I mean, if I was just looking at which prayers were the most familiar, it would rank much higher, maybe number one. But doctor Bill doesn't Jesus ordain this prayer. Yeah, spoiler alert, the top five prayers also come from his mouth. So FYI. I'm finishing up a book that will include all twenty top prayers, old and new, sometimes later this year. The tenative title is good Enough Prayer. Email me Bill at gospel dashapp dot com if you want to know exactly when it will be released. It will be a great Christmas gift for people, for Christians who want to learn to how to pray. It's great for devotions or groups. We include discussion questions like this one. Paul names creations groaning as labor pains, painful but purposeful. Where do you see or feel this cosmic unraveling in your life? Yaws, illness, chaos? How does framing it as birth shift to spare to hope a little? Well, We'll see you next time. Take hard, child of God.