John 15:7 – Does Prayer Pay? – Bible study

John 15:7 Does Prayer Pay? John 15:7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Does prayer pay? That is a good question. By it, I mean do we get what we pray for? The Bible certainly indicates that we should: Mt 6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. Mr 11:24 Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. Lu 11:9 And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. There are many other verses, but notice that I have given you the words of Jesus from each of four gospels. Theyas well as the writers of the epistlesall agree. We have every right to expect prayer to pay. Yet, does it? In the last few days, I have heard of another who is apparently defeated and seems to have lost ground in their faith. I do not know all of the details, but I do know the feeling. Having thought God was going to do somethingsomething I very much wanted and expected Him to doI have been severely disappointed. To be honest, that happened to me oftenway too oftenespecially in the earlier years of my Christian walk and ministry. So much so, that it made me wonder if the Bible was true, if what I believed was correct, and if what I was attempting to do was even possible. Tonight for a few minutes, let me share with you what I have learned. I. Concepts A. False Concept 1. Simply put the false concept that many Christians seem to have is that God is a Bank and prayer is the withdrawal slip. a. To the best of my remembrance, I have only been to a bank to borrow money onceand that was for a 1969 Blue Chevy Impala. (1) The best I recall, it was 1975, Kathy and I had not been married long, and we needed another car. (a) I think my dad actually lined things up. (b) The bank owned the car and all of the details were worked out before I got there so that all I had to do was sign the papers and walk out with the keys. (2) Borrowing money really should not have been THAT easy! b. But that is the way most Christians see prayer. (1) We see something we want. (2) We close our eyes to ask for it. (3) And when we open our eyes, we expect to see our request setting before us. 2. That is the wrong concept. a. God is not a bank, and prayer is not the withdrawal slip. (1) Someone says, "Well doesnt the Bible say, Ask and ye shall receive." (2) Yes, but It doesnt say, "Just ask and you will receive." b. Notice even in our text, the promise to answered prayer comes surrounded by a conditions necessary to get our prayers answered. (1) \#7\ "if ye abide in Me" (2) "if my words abide in you" (3) And the that whole verse is dropped into a parable with an emphasis on being part of the Vine which is Jesus Christ. c. No. God Is not a Bank. B. What is a better concept? 1. Our prayers are stocks and the answered prayers are our dividends. a. I do not mean to be crude and degrade God or prayer. b. I am just attempting to take a totally false concept and improve some upon it. c. Nothing I compare God to will be perfect, but I do think this is better. 2. With stocks, your dividends grow based on three things; the same three things that cause your power in prayer before God to grow. a. Time b. Investment c. Faith in that stock 3. Please understand. I am no Wall Street wizard. In fact, I have never owned a stock; but I think I get the concept of stocks and of prayer; and I think they are similar to making our prayers pay. a. Time helps our prayer payout. (1) I do not know what the hot stocks are today, but some of the older folks might imagine what you would have today if you had bought IBM, Microsoft, or Intel when they first came out. (a) Even a small investment over time would have earned you a large payout. i. In a case like that, time becomes a golden syrup. ii. Just pour it on the stocks and watch them increase in value. (b) So time, if well spent, CAN increase your prayer payout. (2) I say CAN because time is not required for our prayers to pay, but for most Christians, I think it will be needed. (3) It took me time to learn a few basic things about God that have helped my prayers to pay off. (a) For example, I had to learn that prayer does not make me Gods master. i. The promise of answered prayer is not a promise that God will obey me. ii. Prayer is one of the tools God has given to help me to obey Him. iii. To be honest, it took me a long time to understand if I am not getting my prayers answered, I am either not praying the right prayers or I am not living the right life or both. (b) And there have been many other lessons I have had to learn and then to relearn! i. The time necessary for me to learn these lessons is that golden syrup. ii. For me it was necessary and is time well spent. (c) I am slow. Maybe you figured these kinds of truths out much quicker than I did; but for me, it took time. b. Investment helps our prayer payout. (1) No matter what stock you buy, your payout will always be in correlation to your investment. (2) So it is in prayer. (a) You can talk to God day and night, but if you live like the devil or even a carnal- Christian life, you are far less likely to get your prayers answered. (b) I have been surprised to see that while most know that in their heads, they dont live it in their lives. (c) I am not auditioning for the role of judge in your life, but if you are drinking, drugging, lying, harboring bitterness, filled with doubt, being hypocritical, or even neglecting your Bible and worship, you are diminishing your prayer payout. (3) Again, someone says, "I didnt think works saved us! (a) Works do not save us. Grace does. (b) But after we are saved, our works do determine our blessings. (c) If you want a larger prayer payout, give God some better works. c. Faith helps our prayer payout. (1) No one does well in the stock market who does not have faith in their stocks or their stock broker-whoever is calling the shots. (a) There are days when even the best market is going to dip. (b) If you doubt your stock or broker and insist on selling the dips, you payout will be greatly diminished. (2) So it is in prayer. (a) The first requirement to getting our prayers answered is to have a rock-solid faith in God. (b) Will God do everything you want the way you want it? NO. (c) As a matter of fact, in my life, it seemed at the time that God never did anything I wanted especially the way I wanted it; but now looking back, I cant see any plan I had that God has not done better or any desire that I had that God has not given me more. (3) Have faith in God! II. Means – To help us to see how God might pay our prayers out, let me share some ways I have seen God answer prayer. A. God has paid out prayers by blessing personal effort. 1. I do not know, but I think this may be the way God has answered most of our prayers. a. I think of the children and our prayers for them. Without doubt, Kathy but forth the most effort to point them to Christ, but God blessed her efforts. b. I think of our finances. I do not work hard these days, but there have been days when both Kathy and I worked very hard. I am not complaining. God took what we did and blessed it. c. In the ministry, I could point you to the Apostle Paul. He prayed for open doors and the effectual working of God through the gospel, but then he traveled to city after city, preaching the gospel; and God blessed his labor. 2. It does not matter what field you are praying about: from souls to be saved, lives to be delivered, down to taters to grow in the garden, and little puppies to get well. a. Pray much. Pray often. Pray hard. b. Then do what you can do so that God can pay out on your prayer and bless you. B. God has paid out prayers by doing things differently. 1. God has a way of doing what we ask but in ways we never imagined. a. I have said before that when it comes to me praying for things, I can almost guarantee that the way I figure out for God to do a thing WILL NOT be the way He will do it. b. He often pays out prayers in ways that we would never expect. 2. If you do not believe that God pays out prayers in completely unexpected ways: a. Ask Moses who stood by the Red Sea, probably waiting for God to send a ball of fire from heaven to destroy the Egyptian army only to end up walking through two walls of water and never getting his sandals wet. b. Or Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego whose last hope of salvation likely disappeared when they were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace, only to have it rekindled again when they hit the bottom and found God waiting on them. c. Or ask Paul and Silas, who were content to sit in shackles until God sent bail money only to have the earth shake the locks of their hands and their doors off their hinges. 3. I am not speaking of the magnitude of the miracles here, although I will in a moment. 4. I am only speaking of HOW God pays out prayers. a. Sometimes He does it by blessing the effort of those who do the labor. b. And sometimes He does it by doing something completely unexpected. C. God has paid out prayers by doing something absolutely supernatural. 1. I do not want to give you the idea that God depends on our efforts to pay out prayers. a. He does answer prayer quite often by blessing our efforts. b. And I think if we do not put forth any effort to do His work while we wait on our prayers to be paid out, we will greatly diminish the payout if not cause it to be declined all together. 2. However, God does not need us to answer our prayers. a. God could have parted the Red Sea without Moses lifting his staff. b. God could have brought water from the rock without Moses smiting the stone. c. In fact, God did resurrect His Son without the disciples prying against a single rock. d. He also stopped the mouths of the lions without Daniel sewing a single pair of lips together. 3. God is God and God needs no help at all. 4. He is the God of all power, and can make our prayers payout without any effort on our part at all. III. Stops A. There are somethings that will stop God from answering your prayer. I do not have the time to elaborate on them, but let me give them to you. 1. His glory – God will not answer a prayer that does not give Him the glory He desires. a. This is why we must pray in the will of God. b. Gods first and greatest desire is to be glorified. 2. Mans freewill – God will not violated a persons freewill. a. He will allow us and circumstances to push individuals toward the right path, but God will not violate a persons freewill because we have asked for something. b. This is one area where we will have to do much of the work. c. With love, kindness, and grace, we must plant the seeds so that God can water them. 3. Personal Sin a. As a rule, God does not reward sinful behavior, and you dont really want Him to do so. b. If God answers our prayers when we are away from Him or even worse, against Himthere would be one more reason for us to continue on our wayward path instead of return to Him. B. Even if we pray for good and noble things, if they hit one of these stops, they will not be answered. Believe it or not, God wants us to pray. He wants us pray for things that He wants to give to us, and He wants to give us things that He has planned for us. The challenge is to learn to pray so that God can do these things for us. I don’t know that praying like that is hard, but I know it is hard work; however, it pays with some miraculous dividends!