Lawson Road CoC Teaching
Hezekiah teach Us To pray - Peter Horne
God's moving down on earth begins here, doesn't it, and as in heaven. It begins with us. So just a reminder that on July 14th we're going to have our day of prayer and it'll be a prayer service here in the morning. And then from 12 o'clock on, we're asking people to sign up for a 15 minute prayer slot. And so when you're at home or just wherever you are at that time, pick a time that's convenient to you. But just take 15 minutes to get away by yourself and spend that with God. And we'll have a prayer guide for you available on that day. But the sign up sheet is available downstairs. So if you're planning ahead for the 14th of July already, I don't even look at the next month until I turn the page on the calendar. But I know some of you like to look ahead. And that's all right. God loves you too. And so you can look ahead and say I think at 2 o'clock on that Sunday, that'll be a good time for me to spend 15 minutes in prayer. Now you'll see there are two columns and it says that two people can take the same time slot. But it would be better if we can fill up one column first. So it's 24 slots. And so we have more than 24 people. So that's why we created opportunities for people to double up. But it would be good to finish that first time slot, first column first. All right. I need another click back there. I don't know why this isn't working today. Nope. Okay. Okay. That's good. Thank you. Yeah. So if you were to put together a list of people in the Bible who you would say have a strong and admirable prayer life. I wonder who would be on your list. Okay. Now I'm not going to let you get Jesus. Okay. Everybody's got Jesus. Okay. Jesus prayed a lot. Right. And was often praying all night, fasting and praying for 40 days in the wilderness. So Jesus is somebody that would say, yeah, he has a really close relationship with his father. He prays and talks to him a lot. Now the next person that I think of is Daniel. Daniel was so dedicated to prayer that he got thrown in the lion's den. Okay. Like he risked his life to pray. That's commitment. The next person that comes to mind for me is David. Particularly if you think of the Psalms that he wrote so many of the Psalms, if we think of them as prayers, which they are, right? They're songs directed to God. Often asking God to win a seat, to do something for him. So I wonder who else you would put to round out the top five. Anybody got anybody else that comes to mind for you? Paul? Can you think of examples of Paul praying? Yeah. So in his letters, he often says in his letters, I'm praying for you. Okay. Praying for you. Whenever I pray for you, whenever I think of you, I thank God for you. Okay. So that's a, he seems to embody that idea of pray without ceasing. All right. One more. Anybody else? Moses? Okay. He certainly talked to God, didn't he? And face to, or as close to face to face, as we might get. It's surprising in a way that we're not given a lot of examples of the prayers of people. Okay. So we might be told that somebody prays, but there aren't a lot of examples of those. What did they pray? What did it look like? Even with Jesus, right? He gives us the model prayer, if you will, that we looked at last week. But that didn't occupy him all night. And so whatever the topics were that he covered in his, you know, talk with God during the night, you know, did it begin with adoration and confession? And did he work through that? Did he just talk, you know, like he would to another, like what were his prayers like, and would say we don't know, right? We can imagine, and we might all imagine something different, but we can imagine what his prayers were like. But we don't actually, other than Lord's prayer, have an example of his, of his prayer life. Perhaps in the, the garden of Gethsemane or on the cross might be other opportunities. So one person that you may not think of, because he doesn't occupy a lot of pages in the Bible, is King Hezekiah. So Hezekiah's life story is told in just three chapters of Second Kings. It's also replicated in the book of Isaiah. But most of it is there in Second Kings in three chapters. And so, but of those three chapters, they record three prayers. So think of your life. If your life was to be summarized on one sheet of paper, how much would it say about your prayers? I don't think my sheet of paper would say anything about my prayers. But for Hezekiah, it tells us of three of his prayers. So he was a king of prayer. He was the king of Judah. We come across his story in Second Kings chapter 18. He becomes king of Judah. This is the southern kingdom after Solomon, Israel, the nation of Israel, split divided into two, the northern kingdom that was called Israel or Samaria, and the southern kingdom that was called Judah. And so the Hezekiah becomes king. His throne is in Jerusalem. In verse seven of Second Kings 18, we're told that one of the first things Hezekiah does is rebel against the Assyrians. The Assyrians were the great big world power from the east. And apparently, Judah had been paying tribute to the Assyrians to kind of keep them in the east. And Hezekiah says, "Yeah, we're not doing that anymore." Okay. And so he's saving money. Well, then in the fourth year of his reign, so he's been king for four years, the Assyrian army comes, but not to Jerusalem. It comes to the northern kingdom of Israel. And it lays siege to the capital city of Samaria. And it lays siege for three years. And then that time the people become, they're starving. They're killing each other like life is just desperate. And after three years, the Assyrians capture the city of Samaria. They destroy the city. They take all the people, most of the people, from the land, and they resettle them in other parts of the empire. And Hezekiah is down in Jerusalem watching all of this. It's not that they're not that far apart, Samaria and Jerusalem. Well, then the Assyrians are happy with that and they go back to Assyria. But a few years later, in the 14th year of his reign, the Assyrian army again marches through this part of the world. And this time, they don't have to attack the northern kingdom. It doesn't exist anymore. But they kind of go up and down around Jerusalem. In the countryside, around Jerusalem. And there they destroy all the other significant towns or capture them. Okay. So if Hezekiah is king of Judah, and Judah has a dozen significant cities, then including Jerusalem, then the Assyrians capture 11 of them, just leading Jerusalem. And so Hezekiah is getting a little bit nervous as are the people in the city. So in order to appease the Assyrians, Hezekiah takes all the silver and gold from the temple. He takes the implements that they used in their worship ceremonies that were made of silver. He takes gold off the columns and he gives it to the Assyrians. And he says, "Okay, I'm sorry I stopped paying you those back whenever. Can you please go back to Assyria?" And they say, "No." Now, the way they do this is there's a little bit going on in terms of where the army of the Assyrians is located. It's not right outside Jerusalem. But the Assyrian general travels to Jerusalem and he stands outside the walls and he taunts both Hezekiah and Hezekiah's god. And you can read the details of that if you want in the second half of Second Kings chapter 18. A little while later, they send a letter to Hezekiah. They had to go and take care of some other insurgencies in other places and then they come back and they send a letter to Hezekiah. And basically what they're saying to Hezekiah is, you really should surrender. It's time for you to just give up. We've captured your other 11 or however many cities that it was around Jerusalem. The land belongs to us. And not only that, we have defeated all the other nations between Nineveh and Jerusalem. And guess what Jerusalem, guess what Hezekiah, those other nations had gods and their gods didn't help them. We were stronger than their gods and we're going to be stronger than your god too. You saw what we did to Samaria. Do you want that to happen to you? Do you want a three-year siege that you have to try and survive and all the terror and the suffering that comes with that? Or you could just open the gates and let us in. I'm paraphrasing that a little bit. But why should the god, you see, it's not just about Hezekiah. Why should the god of Hezekiah, why should the god of Jerusalem be any different to the gods of all the other places that Assyria has defeated? Now Hezekiah has done a couple of things that are questionable up to this point in their wisdom. But here we see the faith of Hezekiah on display. The first thing that He does in chapter 19 is that He goes to the temple. He goes to the temple. He stands for the prophet Isaiah as well. He was the prophet at the time. But in verse 1 we're told when King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord. And then he sent messages to the prophet Isaiah. So that's not the first time before he gets the letter. And then in verse 9 and following he gets this letter that he can obviously read saying the same thing. And in verse 14 Hezekiah receives the letter from the messengers and he read it and he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. So we get the same response in two opportunities, two instances. The first time when they come and threaten and then the second time when they send the threatening letter. Both times Hezekiah's first impulse is to go to the temple, is to pray to God. And then he sends messengers to the prophet of God because he wants to get God's input. And when he gets to the temple he lays out the letter for God to read. You can see that here. I know in the picture the photo it's a little cut off there but he's laying out the letter and God is able to read it. And the reason he wants God to read it is because God is the one being insulted, even more than Hezekiah is being insulted. And as he lays it out for God to see he tells God about the insults. As though God isn't able to read it or see what's happening out there. He also prays and he tells God what is going on. Listen to what they're saying. And then he closes with this great statement in verse 19. It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste to these nations and their lands. So he says there's validity in what they're saying, God. It's true. The threat is real. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them. For they were not gods but only wood and stone fashioned by human hands. Now, Lord, our God, deliver us from his hand so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God. And so he acknowledges the strength of the Assyrians. He doesn't say they're nothing. Obviously, they were something. But in doing so, he acknowledges his dependence upon God. He says, God, the threat is real. They have destroyed all these nations. They can destroy us. They have devastated Samaria. We've seen that first hand. He says, but we know that we can depend on you, that you can do what we can't. He also expresses in faith in saying, God, we know who you are. You are the one true God. And it's interesting, he says, not just of Israel, but of all nations. They may worship their idols of wood and stone. But he says, we know that you're their God also. So I think that's interesting. I want to look at some lessons that we can learn here from Hezekiah. The first one is that Hezekiah goes to God immediately when facing problems. And so where's our, where do we turn first? I don't think it's wrong. We pick up the phone and we call a loved one. We pick up a phone and call our best friend, or we drive around there, or whatever it is. We talk to somebody first. I mean, Hezekiah before he went to the temple, sent messengers to go and get Isaiah. So it's not as though, oh, I talk to somebody before I talk to God. I have weak faith, right? That's not really the point. But as part of his initial response, he goes to God when facing problems. You see, I think sometimes we can come up with our plans for how to get through a crisis. And then we say, hey, God, this is the plan. Can you make it happen? Okay. And so Hezekiah doesn't do that. Hezekiah's like, God, I got no plans. What plan do you have for me, for this city, for this people you have entrusted me to lead? And then can you make it happen? And so I think that's an attitude there that I think is something that we can learn from Hezekiah. The second thing is that He vents to God. Everybody know what I mean by venting, right? It's when you come to somebody that you feel safe with and you just complain, right? Something's gone wrong. And you say, I just want to get this off my chest. And I'd rather do it to you in a safe person than in front of the people that could get me in trouble. And so it can be a healthy thing. Sometimes we need to express the emotions that we're feeling, the thoughts that we're processing, and to get the feedback from that other person can be valuable. But Hezekiah vents to God. And I think, I wonder if this is missing from our prayers. Okay. Because He comes to God and He says, God, let me tell you what's Sennacherib, the general of the Assyrians, what He said to me. And He goes through that conversation and He lays it all out for God and says, this is what's been happening. And so He gets it off His chest in that way. And I wonder if we don't very often abbreviate things and say, God, this person's giving me a hard time. I'd really like your help. Amen. Right? And we say, yeah, I prayed about it. But Hezekiah would say, God, this person said this to me the other day. I didn't like their Turner voice. It made me feel this way. I don't know how to respond to it. And in fact, Hezekiah, although he didn't do this, but I wonder if he wouldn't endorse writing it out like a journal, writing out what the complaint is, laying it down, and then telling God about it as well. Saying, God, this is serious. This is what's going on. This is what I'm feeling. Because I think sometimes we just, God, you know all about it. I don't really need to talk to you. Some of you have children. And sometimes as parents, we know what's already happened in our child's life. Not always, sometimes. But even when we know the bare bones of whatever it was, then we want, isn't this something special about hearing it from them? What were you feeling? What was your impression? What did you see? What did you think about that? And to get that kind, like, we know they were in a car on the side of the road, got a flat tire, they sat there for three hours. Eventually it got fixed and they came home and everybody was safe. Oh, you have a good trip home? Yeah, we got a flat tire. It's like, no, tell me about it. And I think God, as our father, as our parent, wants relationship with us. And so do we just say to God, God, I got a flat tire. God, I had a bad day at work. God, I need some more income. God helped me in this relationship. And we keep it as perfunctory and just, you know, as a dot point on a list. God said, tell me about that. I want to hear about that. How do you feel? Do you know why they did that? Why did that happen? And so, here's the car, I think, models this kind of conversation, this revealing of himself. As the army is threatening to come and destroy his city, he says to God, let's get real about what's going on. Deliver us from his hand. And then this last line, I think, would be easy for us to overlook so that all the kingdoms on the earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God. You see, Hezekiah cares about God's reputation. I don't know about you, but when I say God, I'm in trouble, can you rescue me? It's because I'm in trouble. And I don't want to be in trouble. Whatever my problem is, God, I just want you to get me out of that trouble because I'll be happier with it. I will be a happier person if you can rescue me from here. But if you think back to Moses at different points in time, he sort of had this attitude as well. But also Hezekiah here is saying, God, rescue this city because it's your city. It's your people. This is your reputation on the line. But I want to see you do something powerful, not just so we can be safe. That was certainly part of it. Hezekiah wasn't ready to die. We'll see in a moment. But he's saying, when you do this, everyone will know that you are God. So think about that in our prayers. When God answers our prayers, when God works in our lives, yeah, it's for our benefit. But it also has the opportunity for other people to see God at work, in our lives and in our church, in our kingdom. And I think really that is what we mean when we say, our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, right? It's get all those people out there knowing who you are. Will you listen to our prayer? Will you answer our prayer? Will you demonstrate that you are the God above all nations? And so we care about God's reputation. We see that in Hezekiah's prayer here. So the short version is that God responds to this prayer. He rescues Hezekiah and Jerusalem. If you turn to the end of the book, you'll see, not the book, but the chapter. But you'll see that God in verse 35, the Assyrians fled. They had a big army because God killed almost 200,000 of them that were camped around the city. And that happened overnight. Nobody knows how or why and we know why, but not how or when. And so the rest of the army just took off. You don't hang around when that many of you have died for unknown causes. God rescued His people. And so that's chapters 18 and 19. In chapter 20, Hezekiah is sick. And Isaiah, the prophet comes to him and he says to him in verse 1, this is what the Lord says, put your house in order because you are going to die. You will not recover. Like most of us, that Hezekiah was hoping for better news. And so in verse 2, Hezekiah prays to God. And this time it's a short prayer. He says, remember, Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with whole hearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes. And Hezekiah wept bitterly. I think this prayer is perhaps one that we can relate to. It's perhaps a prayer or a thought that we have had at times. God, I went to church on Sunday. I even went to Wednesday night Bible class. I've done what you asked me to do. Why is this happening to me? I've done what you wanted me to do. Why is this happening to me? I've walked faithfully with whole hearted devotion. I've done what is good in your eyes. Remember me, Lord, don't let me die now. Like this doesn't make sense. And He weeps bitterly. Does that mean He doesn't trust God? I don't think so. He's just talked to God. And we might recognize a little bit of Job's thought process in this prayer. Mightn't we? Why is this happening to me? But again, Hezekiah's response to bad news is to immediately talk to God. Isaiah says, you're going to die. Hezekiah turns his face to the wall and prays to God. It's an automatic response at this point in his life. Now I can't explain why in this particular instance God decides to answer, to respond to this prayer. He says, okay Hezekiah, you're going to get 15 more years because I can think of some other people I would like to get 15 more years. People that perhaps aren't here anymore. And so why did God respond to this one? And we don't know. I think what we can learn from this is that God wants to hear from us, okay? That's similar to what we talked about with the first prayer. But God wants to hear from us. He wants to hear from us when things are difficult. He wants to hear about our struggles, about our questions. Why is this happening? To hear our thanksgivings and our praises, to hear our needs. And then also not just ours but to hear the concerns that we have for other people. You see God wants to hear from us. And hezekiah wanted to talk to him. To this point hezekiah has prayed to God when his nation faced a crisis. He's prayed when he personally faced death. And finally we turn to the passage that we read earlier Isaiah chapter 38 verses 9 through 20. And here after being told that he will recover from his illness. Hezekiah offers a prayer of thanksgiving to God. Now we sing songs of thanksgiving, don't we? I sort of go, thank you Lord for loving me. Thank you Lord for blessing me. Right? They're happy. Thank you Lord for loving me. Right? And so we have these happy songs and we say thank you a lot because we're grateful for what God has done for us. Have a look at how hezekiah writes this prayer and how he writes his prayer of thanksgiving. I said in the prime of my life must I go through the gates of death and be robbed of the rest of my years. I said I will not see the Lord, again see the Lord himself in the land of the living. No longer will I look on my fellow man or be with those who now dwell in this world. Like a shepherd's tent my house has been pulled down and taken from me. Like a weaver I have rolled up my life and he has cut me from the loom day and night you made an end of me. You can like feel the great gratitude just dripping off the page. Can't you know? No. Like like he begins this prayer of thanksgiving by saying God I had no idea what you were doing. I got some questions about it frankly. Why was this happening to me in the prime of my life? Okay. Why did you allow it to happen? This is what I felt like. I felt like a shepherd whose whose tent you know gets packed up. He lived in a palace and he said I feel like my tent my life is a tent that's just been packed up and taken away. I feel like a piece of cloth that's just been cut off because the the the weaver has come to the end of the whatever it is that they're making. That's how I felt God. So again what we see again is Hezekiah having this relationship with God where he's sharing his feelings. Not just God thank you for giving me 15 years. That's how I would pray. All right. Get straight down to the point of the matter and move on to the next thing. God I really appreciate 15 more years to live. You know I'll do my best help me to make the most of these 50. You know that would kind of be about my prayer. Hezekiah is like God I was feeling like that really shook me up God. This is how I was feeling and it goes down and keeps talking all the way through. He we as with many of the Psalms we sort of find it transitioning around to praise us we get to the to the end of it. In verse 17 16 Lord by such things people live in my spirit my spirit finds life in them too. You restored me to health and let me live. Okay this so he's moved to the next chapter. Surely it was for my benefit that I suffered such anguish. He doesn't really know I don't think what that benefit is but he says surely it was for my benefit. In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction. I didn't die and you have put all my sins behind your back. Comes down verse 19 the living the living they praise you as I am doing today. Parents tell their children about your faithfulness. The Lord will save me and we will sing with stringed instruments all the days of our life in the temple of the Lord. So he gets to praise but even when he's this song of praise and thanksgiving it's filled with or it begins with man that was tough. He's very realistic very open about what his experiences were. So I'm not saying that based on Hezekiah's prayer in in chapter 38 the God wants us to have doubts about him. Okay but this prayer does demonstrate that God wants to hear what's going on in our hearts. He wants us to be honest with him. I remember when I was in campus ministry there was a girl and she'd grown up in the church but it was so frustrating because she would never acknowledge that she was going through difficult times. Like her boyfriend broke up with her. Oh it's going to be good you know it's going to work out. God's got something to start for me. I was like yeah right now no grief no regrets like you know he broke up with you but you were kind. Of course she was hurting and I knew she was hurting but there was no way to be able to have conversation with her because everything was good. She just put on her happy face and shove those emotions and those feelings down. Maybe she told other people about them that's fine but as long as she kept it at that level I was unable to minister to her. I'd just be like well that's great. I'm glad he broke up with you. Like there's got a really good future ahead for you right? That's fantastic. Maybe you'll break up with the next guy as well like you know you don't know how God's work. No I didn't say that. But we do that don't we for people. We put on our best face in difficult circumstances. I think that's understandable. I think it's important that we have people that we can talk to. But when we come to talking to God God doesn't want our happy face unless it's happy unless it's honest. God wants to know what's going on in our lives. He wants to hear from us about what our thoughts and emotions are. He doesn't want us to be polite. Maybe our prayers up here need to be polite because there's a lot of people listening. But our personal prayers to God they don't need to be polite. God I'm going to word this carefully because I don't want to upset you. He's already reading your heart. So just say it. You're not going to upset him. He's big enough to hear it. And so in many ways these prayers of Hezekiah I think we could read through them quickly and we go there's nothing all that remarkable about these prayers. What's remarkable is that God answered them. That God delivered Jerusalem. That God gave him 15 years of life. That is remarkable. But we can't imitate God in either of those respects. So in some ways yes we can learn to trust Him but I think we can learn from these prayers because our takeaway is not that there are specific words that Hezekiah says. Unlike the Lord's Prayer last week there are not specific words to say to God that are going to get an outcome or a result that we're looking for. We could repeat Hezekiah's prayer that he received when he got the death notice. And we could repeat that every day and it wouldn't guarantee. It's not a magic spell. It wouldn't guarantee that I'm going to get 15 more years of life. I know the doctor said I've got cancer and I've got six months but I'm praying that Hezekiah prayer and that's going to give me 15 years. It doesn't work like that. But the message that we take away, the lesson we take away is the reminder that God wants to hear from us. Nothing is too big. Nothing is too small. Nothing is too angry. Nothing is too doubtful. Nothing is too anything for us to share our thoughts with God. And I think the other takeaway that we do see from God's response is the reminder that when we pray in this manner, when we pray honestly and openly to God that He hears us. I think He hears us when we're polite as well but He hears our prayers. You see prayers are not just for our own self-motivation. They're not just a form of venting to an empty space. God hears our prayers and answers them. We don't always understand the answers. We don't always understand the timing but God hears them and He wants to hear from us. Prayer is talking to the creator of the universe about our lives and often asking Him to take action and He does take action when we pray to Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]