A man traveling to America on a passenger ship decided to save money by not eating in the ship's dining hall. Instead he packed enough crackers and cheese in a trunk to hold him until he arrived. But on the last day of the voyage he decided to splurge and buy one good meal before disembarking. Noticing that prices were not listed for the meals, he inquired of a waitress and was informed that the cost of the meals was included in his ticket. All he'd had to do to receive his meals was to come to the dining hall and place his order. The man had been living with less than he needed for no reason. He had deprived himself.

Too often we are like this man in our own lives. We live with less than we need spiritually because we simply try to live out of our own provision rather than asking for God's provision. Instead of prayer becoming our way of life, prayer all too often becomes something we don't take very seriously in our lives until crisis hits. Then out of desperation, we pray harder and and more often. When we reach the limit of our resources, then we turn to God in prayer.

If we're not careful, this becomes a norm in our lives. We fall into a pattern where the only times we really take prayer seriously is when we are desperate for God to come. The rest of the time we rely own our own strength and resources to provide for our needs. Why do we do this? Probably because we believe that prayer should just flow out of us all the time, naturally without our having to really learn how to pray. However, we deceive ourselves when we believe this. Prayer is something we must learn and practice. We must be trained to make prayer our way of life.

Jesus' own disciples realized this. They saw Jesus praying and they saw the what happened as a result of his prayers. They saw Jesus changing peoples' lives as he taught, healed, and comforted. They saw him changed as he went upon the mountain to pray and his appearance changed as his face glowed and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightening. And at one time when Jesus prayed, God answered in a voice that everyone around could hear. Jesus' prayed daily and his prayers changed his life and the lives of others. Jesus was nourished by prayer. The disciples wanted the same, so they came to Jesus and asked him how to pray. They knew they must be trained to experience prayer as a way of life that would help them to be more like Jesus.

Prayer was important enough to Jesus that he took the time to teach and train his disciples to pray. That tells us something very important - that we must also take time to learn how to pray. Jesus gave us a prayer that we call the Lord's Prayer that is a model prayer for us to follow. But that's not the only teaching Jesus gave us on prayer. He gave several teachings on the importance of praying persistently. Jesus said, "Ask and it will be given to you' seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Prayer is seeking for something we can't live without.

How many of us have lost something really important that we need to find? We will spend hours looking for it won't we? Last Friday, I took our car to Wal-Mart to have the tires replaced. Wal-Mart didn't have the size tires I needed. So I went to Goodyear. Same story. I tried another Wal-Mart, and BINGO! they had the tires. So here I go to Roebuck to get the tires. However, when I arrived the mechanic informed me that his tool had just broke and it would be Saturday before it would be fixed. Saturday we were going to Sand Mountain for a reunion so I decided to wait for a new shipment of tires to arrive on Monday at the Trussville Wal-Mart. The tires arrived late Monday afternoon, so I took our car to Wal-Mart to have our tires replaced. I left the car at the tire center and our family headed to Gasden to visit with Lori and her family at the funeral home. After leaving we went by to pick up the car and I discovered the tires had not been placed on the car because the mechanic couldn't find the hudcap key. I had recently acquired this car and didn't know it even had a hudcap key. Evidently the key had been left out of the car when the tires were last rotated. So I began looking all over the place for the hudcap key. Tangie and I looked all over the trunk of the car, in the glove compartment, under the seats, any nook and cranny we could find. But no hudcap key. So I went to Tucker's Salvage searching for a hudcap key. They thought they had one and wanted me to come back. When I returned the owner wasn't in the shop and his help didn't know where to find one, even though they searched for a while. I called several salvage auto-parts stores trying to find one with no results. Finally I asked one of the salvage store owners - "Where will I find one of these?" He quickly responded, "At the Buick dealership." Sure enough, the buick dealership had a key. I was very happy to have the key in hand yesterday and took it to Wal-Mart to get the tires put on the car. But much to my dismay, they had already sold the tires that would fit the car! So I had to track down another set of tires at another Wal-Mart. This has been a week of painful searching just to get a set of tires on the car. I can't tell you how relieved I am to have found the hudcap key and tires and have these on the car.

When we need something in our lives, we will spend hours and hours to find what we need. Jesus taught us the same thing about the need to seek in prayer.
Now to some people this sounds cruel. It sounds like God is saying, "I'm going to make you just keep coming over and over to me painfully seeking before I will grant any of your requests." But we need to understand that this is not the case at all. God desires for us to seek him daily in order that we may form a deep relationship of trust in Him. God isn't our stop-gap when all else fails. God is the one we should go to first, not last. So Jesus teaches us that we must show God that we trust him like a child trusts in a loving parent.

"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or is he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to whose who ask him?" God desires to give us the gifts of the Spirit that will bless our lives and give us what we need. However, we must come to God asking and seeking as a child who trusts in God and believes that God will give us what we need. Too often we've already figured out a way we're going to live our life and we come asking God to bless the life we want to live rather than the life God wants to give to us. Then we find our prayers aren't answered and we wonder why! God calls us to seek for the new life of total trust in God.

When we start looking to God in total trust and constantly going to him in prayer as a way of life, then we will see God's will fulfilled in our lives. That's when our lives will change because we will be seeking what God desires for our lives, not just what we desire. There are many examples from the scripture that we can see where peoples' lives were changed and transformed by praying to God. Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Ruth, Job….but I want to lift up a couple we often don't think about and how God completely changed their lives and the world by answering their prayer. That couple is Zechariah and Elizabeth. Look with me to Luke 1:5-19. Listen to how God answered their prayer and changed their lives:

Here is a couple who prayed for many years to have a child. It was something they wanted, probably so they would be blessed with a child just as those around them were blessed by children. But it didn't happen. Praying every day and trusting God, they didn't give up praying. However, they had accepted that it just wasn't going to happen. They had grown older and child bearing years were well behind them. Still they prayed for God's will to be done. They just kept trusting in God with their lives and asked for God to use them for His purpose.

Then one day, Zechariah goes into the Temple to burn incense in prayer to God. He goes into this building that has been built for one purpose and one purpose only - prayer. This is were people come into the presence of God. This is the house of prayer. But what is so beautiful about this passage is Zechariah is a house of prayer himself. His body is the Temple of the Lord as he comes into this stone Temple, he has already consecrated his own body and spirit as a temple to God. Well as he is praying, the Angel Gabriel brings him news that his prayers are answered. At this point, Zechariah must have wondered, "Which ones?" I'm sure he had prayed thousands - maybe millions of prayers. And when Gabriel announces to him that his wife is going to give birth to a son, I believe Zechariah was stunned. That prayer had probably not been lifted in many years. Why was God now answering that prayer? Isn't it too late?
But what Zechariah may not have realized is that God wasn't just answering the prayer that was prayed years ago, but also the prayer that was just prayed by Zechariah - "Lord, your will be done in my life." Zechariah and Elizabeth were people who had entrusted their lives to God and God answered their prayer by giving them a son that would not only change their lives, but the lives of many. Their son would be John the Baptist.
This story tells me something very important about prayer training. We really must understand that prayer is about giving our lives over to God daily for God's will to be accomplished in us. That's what the seeking, asking, and knocking is really all about. That's the only way we will be transformed.

(1) Praying is learning to give our will over to God's will. It's not about praying for our desires or what we want. It's about asking God for what we need. Daily praying is about learning what we need. We really don't know. That's what I've learned from praying. I don't know what to ask for. But the Holy Spirit knows. So we must give over to seeking and asking by the Holy Spirit. That's what Jesus taught the disciples and that's what Paul teaches when he says "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

(2) Praying is learning to become a House of Prayer. Our hearts are temples of the Holy Spirit. God's glory dwells in you and I. God desires for our lives to be a prayer to Him. This calls us to be aware throughout our day that Christ lives in us and desires to pray through us to God. We must begin to see ourselves as God desires for us to be.

(3) Praying is learning to listen to God. The scripture teaches us to "pray without ceasing" and we can do so by sharing our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with God all the time. However, just as important is to learn to listen as well as talk to God. The title of this sermon is "Talking to God will change your life."…but perhaps a better title what have been "Listening to God Will Change Your Life." We think about pray as mainly talking to God. But prayer is just as much about listening. Job talked a lot to God and to His friends about God. But at that moment when God spoke, all Job could do was listen. His words after that are so few and all Job can say is, "I repent." When he listened to God and experienced the Presence of God's Greatness, his whole life was changed. When we pray without ceasing we will experience the same. We learn that praying is more about listening than speaking. This is why solitude and eliminating hurry from our life is so important. It is when we can Be Still, that we can best listen to God. Perhaps when Zechariah was in the Temple he wasn't saying anything at all. Perhaps he was simply sitting in solitude when the Angel appeared and God spoke. When Dan Rather interviewed Mother Teresa, he aksed her, "What do you do when you pray?" Mother Teresa responded, "I listen to God." Then he asked, "What does God do?" She said, "He listens."

We can only learn to pray by taking time to pray. Praying alone and together is essential. Small groups are great ways to learn to pray as you pray with others. However, you also must learn to pray alone and to set aside times to do so. Use scripture or written prayers as a guide. And just talk to God from your heart. The important thing is to do so regularly and daily. In a few weeks we'll have an opportunity to learn more about prayer in the prayer training weekend. What a great time for us to share together and deepen our life of prayer.