Let me bring everyone up to speed on what is happening. King David wanders around on the roof of his palace and notices a beautiful woman. He has an affair with her. She gets pregnant. He tries to trick her husband into spending the night with her. When that doesn’t work, he sends her husband back into battle with orders to have him killed. He gets killed.
David sits and stews about this for several months. He has become alienated from God. We read in Psalm 32:3-4, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” David was in deep conviction over his sin. It wasn’t a blissful time for him, thinking that he had gotten away with something. It was agony.
Some months after the affair, the prophet Nathan confronts the king with his sin. David cries out, “I have sinned against the Lord.” David confessed and repented. Nathan told David that the Lord would not take his life, but the child would die. Nathan then went home.
Turn with me to 2 Samuel 12.
Read 2 Samuel 12:15b-24.
In this passage we see the true power of prayer. Prayer is perhaps the most important part of our Christian walk. Without it, we die. Marriage doesn’t work without communication. Our relationship with God doesn’t work without communication. In Psalm 51:3, David said, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”
In Romans 8:38-39, the apostle Paul wrote, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Notice there is one thing that is not on that list. “Sin” is missing from that list. Sin is what separates us from the love of God. Notice that David said that his sin was constantly in front of him. David’s sin had separated him from God.
Now his son is sick and he commits himself to…
I. Prayer and Fasting.
David’s goes headlong in prayer for his son. For a whole week, David did nothing but pray while lying on the ground. Twenty-four hours a day he prayed. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. All he did was pray. He refused to allow anything or anyone distract him from his prayer. His servants tried to comfort him and give him something to eat, but he refused. This raises a question.
A. Why do we pray?
Has that question ever occurred to you? Why do we pray? What’s the point in prayer? Why bother praying? God’s just going to do whatever he wants to do anyway. We’ll come back to that a little later.
1. David prayed for his son to be healed.
The answer to David’s motivation is found in verse 22, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept for I said, ‘Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’”
David was praying for the healing of the child. His motivation was to have God heal his infant son. His prayer was that God would spare the life of his son.
2. We often pray with same sort of motive.
Often our motives are similar to David’s. We want God to answer our prayers. We give God our list of “needs” and expect him to go through and check off each need as he answers it. We sometimes treat God as sort of a heavenly Santa Claus.
We should be careful about what we pray for, because God may answer our prayer the way we want.
I am reminded of a story that a friend of mine told me once. Anthony is one of the godliest men I have ever met. He told the story of how he was expecting a check to arrive in the mail any day. He really needed the money, but it hadn’t come yet. He prayed a quick prayer that went like this: “O, God, if that check arrives tomorrow, I’ll give you ¼ of it.” Well the check arrived the next day. He couldn’t go back on his word. So be careful what you pray for.
Sometimes our motives aren’t the best, but that brings up another question.
B. Why does God want us to pray?
Earlier I compared praying to God with communication in marriage. If Tammy and I just walked right past each other and didn’t speak, how would that affect our marriage? It would slowly deteriorate. As time goes on, it would get worse and worse. Communicating is how we grow closer together. We have been married a little over ten years, and we are closer now than we were ten years ago. We are closer than we were five years ago.
Most marital problems can be traced to a lack of communication. Whether it’s finances or child raising, the problem usually stems from a lack of communication.
One of the things we disagreed about early on in our marriage was laundry. The problem was not how each of us thought it should be done. The problem was that we hadn’t adequately communicated our thoughts and expectations about it. Once we talked it over, the problem was resolved.
We cannot expect to know God’s will for our lives if we fail to communicate with him.
That brings us to the whole point behind prayer. The purpose of prayer is not to give God our wish list. It is not for him to give us everything we want. It’s not so he can bless the missionaries in Africa. The point behind prayer is to be closer to him. The more we pray, the closer we get to God.
Without praying, we will not know the will of God. We won’t be able to understand the Bible. We will just be going through the motions of Christian life. Prayer is what keeps us in tune with God.
When we look at David, we see that it had been almost a year with his sin coming between him and God. If for no other reason, David’s pray accomplished one thing: getting him back in tune with God.
Than brings us to the idea of God answering prayer. God’s answers to prayer must be met with…
II. Acceptance.
Whatever the answer is to our prayer we must accept it. It’s not too hard to accept the answer to our prayer when God answers it with a “yes.”
The hard part is when God says either “no” or “wait.”
A. We are often frustrated with God’s answer.
When God says, “No,” or “Wait,” we often get frustrated. We can’t understand why he would tell us “no.”
I remember when God was calling me into the ministry. I prayed that he would remove the call, because I didn’t want to do it. I struggled with it for a long time. I prayed, “God, find another way for me to serve you. I’ll be a Sunday school teacher, anything.”
God said, “No.” It was not the answer I wanted to hear. I had two choices. I could either turn my back on God, or I could accept it.
B. We are to humble accept God’s answer.
When David’s son died his servants were afraid to tell him what had happened, because they were afraid that he would commit suicide. So they stood around and whispered to each other.
I can imagine the conversation between the servants. The first one said, “You tell him.”
The second said, “I’m not telling him. You tell him.”
The third chimed in, “Somebody has to tell him. Not me though. You’ve been a servant longer than I have.”
A fourth said, “I don’t want to tell him.”
David observed this, and drew his own conclusion. He said, “Is the child dead?”
The answer was, “He is dead.”
The servants probably then intently waited to see what would happen next. Would David go off the deep end? They feared that he would hurt himself, or worse. They were concerned for his well being. They weren’t sure what would happen, but what did happen came as a great surprise to them.
David stood up. He went and took a shower. He put on clean clothes. He put on cologne. He then went to worship God. Then he came home and ate a good meal.
I can see the servants standing with their jaws hanging open. They couldn’t believe it. Here was a man who had been a wreck for the last week. He hadn’t eaten anything. He hadn’t done anything but cry out to God. He was in great agony over the sickness of the baby. This did not compute for them.
God had answered David’s prayer with a “no.” David accepted the answer of God without griping or complaining. He worshipped God.
How often do we worship God when he says, “No.”? So often we whine and complain about God not listening to us. We may even come to the point where we question the existence of God.
Remember the point of prayer is not so God can hear and answer our requests. It is so we can be closer to him.
Over 2 Corinthians 12, we find that the apostle Paul prayed to God about something, and God said, “No.”
We read in verse 7-9 of 2 Corinthians 12, “a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being to elated. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” The Lord said “no” to Paul’s request. Paul goes on to say, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” The point of Paul’s prayer was to remove the thorn in his flesh. The result was that he received power from Christ.
In commenting on that 2 Corinthians passage, Richard Taylor, one of the great theologians in the Church of the Nazarene wrote:
“What power? To perform miracles? No, the power to victorious over thorns. Superficial Christians would have measured Paul’s spirituality by whether or not he received healing. True spirituality perceives that the greater miracle is not deliverance from the thorn but deliverance from preoccupation with it. True spirituality is exhibited in that pure devotion to Jesus which gladly accepts the grace rather than the miracle….”
The point of prayer is a closer relationship with God. The true miracle of David’s situation was not that the child was healed, but that David’s relationship with God was healed.
The point of our prayer should not just be to get what we can out of God, but to get as close as we can to God.
The result of our acceptance of God’s answer and our closer relationship with God is that we receive…
III. Grace.
We would not expect God to bless the union of David and Bathsheba. After all, it was so contaminated with sin. It started as an adulterous relationship. That was then the motive behind the death of Uriah.
Look at the first verse of our passage, verse 15. It says, “And the Lord afflicted the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David.” Now look at verse 24. It says, “Then David comforted his wife.” Bathsheba has gone from being Uriah’s wife to David’s wife in the course of this passage. That is nothing other than the grace of God.
David’s prayer for God to spare the life of his son resulted in David growing closer to the Lord, and ultimately receiving an abundance of the grace of God. Solomon became the next king of Israel.
John Newton was born in London in 1725. He grew up with very little religious training. By the time he was a young man, he had long since given up on religion. He went to work on a ship. He eventually came to own his own ship. He engaged in the practice of slave trading. On May 10, 1748, his ship was caught in a terrible storm. As it seemed that the ship would certainly be lost, he cried out, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” He later reflected on that moment as he wrote the words:
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.
“‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieve. How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!
“Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. ‘Tis grace hath bro’t me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
Newton later became a minister in the Church of England and quite a prolific hymn writer. Newton was a man who prayed to God to safe his life in the middle of a storm. That was the motivation behind his prayer. He wound up giving his life completely to the Lord. And the hymn “Amazing Grace” is one of the most widely recognized songs of all time.
Conclusion.
The point of prayer is that we are drawn closer to the Lord and we receive his grace. God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we wish.
In Mark 14:36 we read these words of Jesus, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
Jesus prayed those words on the eve of his crucifixion. He prayed that God would find another way to solve the problem of sin. Jesus knew what lay ahead for him. The pain and the agony along with the humiliation lay ahead. There was also the matter of separation from God as he carried the weight of our sins on him. He didn’t want to experience. He prayed that God would make another way. God answered, “This is the only way.” Jesus accepted it.
Aren’t you thankful that he did? Without Jesus death, we would not be recipients of God’s saving grace. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”
Without Jesus death on the cross, we would not have salvation. We would not be able to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as a body of believers.
