Praying The Bible Out Loud

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Praying The Bible by Wesley & Stacey Campbell
I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes in the middle of our plans, you know God says in the Bible “man makes his plans and God directs his steps.” Sometimes you come to that place where there is a fork in the road. And you have to decide, Am I going to take this fork? or that fork? So I am going to ask your permission this morning to not take the fork I would have taken this morning; we can come back there next week.

But you know sometimes we tend to rush ahead, the scheduled topic this week and the notes I printed out last week are all about quietly coming before the LORD, Beholding Him, in the presence of the LORD. But if we did that now, I think we might just gloss over “Praying the Scripture” And just move on to the next point, move on to the next point, move on to the next point, ever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth.

Does that make sense? Will you give me permission to take a diversion from Madam Guyon for one week or maybe two? I mean we could go ten or twelve weeks off topic. I don’t want to do that, but I do want to make sure that we are setting into place, the Praying of Scripture. And I am going to give you some homework this week, so I am not going to leave you without structure. If you have a pen or pencil, I want you to write down Revelation Chapter 4:1-11. We are going to practice what we preach here; I am going to read this passage to you.

In this book…I referenced this book in your notes last week, under other resources, “Praying the Bible” by Wesley and Stacey Campbell. A great book, it is a little different take than Madam Guyon. This wasn’t written by a woman from 200 years ago, but it is written by a couple that are in our day, that are prayer intercessors, that have studied prayer. You know, it is good to receive the full council of God, and this is just a different take on this. One of the things that I am going to challenge you with is… to take this prayer and pray it ten times a day, for ten days. It is Revelation Chapter 4: 1-11, let me read it to you and as a background let me tell you what is in this book, because it is too long to share here this morning in the time I have.

Every generation from Moses on, have prayed the scripture, except for the last generation, the one we live in. Every denomination, almost without exception has prayed the Scripture. The highest, the most central thing in the Jewish religion was the Shema, “Hear Oh Israel the LORD your God is one,” and it is also our first commandment we could say it right now, “And thou shalt love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength” Well, the reason we can quote that, is that it has been prayed. The only one that we hang on to in our generation and ours is the only generation that hasn’t prayed the scripture. We have hung onto “Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” Did you know that when you pray “Our Father”, you are praying scripture? And where did that prayer come out of the context of? The disciples had seen a man, a perfect God-man pray. And they said, "teach us to pray!"

In our context we would say, "why would Jesus have to pray? He knew the Father. He was with the Father in the beginning the Bible says and the Father was with Him. Why did he have to pray?" Because prayer is an expression of love and He loved the Father, a lot so He prayed a lot. And it is an indication, like we talking about this morning, Pat’s talking about one way to show God, how we love Him is how we serve him with our finances. but another way is how we serve him with our heart. Prayer is a service of the heart. Jesus didn’t have to pray because he was so, "out of fellowship" with God, he had to pray because he was so "one" with God. And how much we pray will not indicate how much we need to be "in fellowship" with God either, but how much we are "one" with God.

Sometimes when we come into worship, the way we get to, what I am going to talk about next week which is "Beholding the LORD, in His glory," comes to us as we pray scripture. This is a great scripture to do that.

Revelation Chapter 4:1-11
“After this I looked and there was before me a door standing open in Heaven, and the voice I had first heard speaking to me, like a trumpet, said “come up here and I will show what must take place after this. At once, I was in the Spirit and there before me was a throne in heaven, with someone sitting on it, and the one who sat there had the appearance of Jasper and Carnelian. A rainbow resembling an emerald encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne, were 24 other thrones and seated on them were 24 elders, they were dressed in white and crowns of gold on their heads from the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peels of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing, these are the seven spirits of God, and also before the throne there was what was like a sea of glass, as clear as crystal. In the center around the throne there were four living creatures and they were covered with eyes in the front and in the back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings, and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stopped saying Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD God almighty, who was and is and is to come. Whenever the creatures gave glory honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne, and who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fell down before Him who sits on the throne and worshipped Him who lives forever and ever.
They lay their crowns before the throne and say you are worthy Oh LORD and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you have created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”

This book has several kinds of prayers, these are called the Theophanies? These are the chance encounters where a person prays, or they fall into a trance like John did and then they actually see Jesus you know. Wouldn’t that be good to remind ourselves about how people have seen God? Might give us a picture of what’s going on in Heaven. Cause one of the challenges we have about prayer frankly and about worship, is we don’t see into Heaven. What we see is each other, we see the back of somebody’s head. We see sheet rock and ceiling tiles and we see people up here with mic stands. We see a pulpit and we see a person standing here moving their lips, but we don’t see JESUS. So it is good to find what saints of old saw when they saw Jesus, this is John on the island of Patmos. But if we pray that out in our quiet times, it will bring us to place of worship, that leads us into the next kind of prayer that we are going to talk about, when we get back to Madam Guyon. The prayer of silence, the prayer of quietly beholding God and seeing Him in His Glory. Words paint pictures on our brains, these words, painted pictures this morning. I don’t know if you have ever seen a rainbow that looks like an emerald, one that surrounds a throne, I haven’t. But you start to get a picture, that the God we serve is not just some…poverty stricken, with insignificant impact on our culture, which is so with it and so moving forward. But rather our culture is missing it and our God is so with it. And if we miss Him we miss everything. Hollywood will show you movie after movie, after movie, where some evil person, is sitting on a throne and lightning is flashing behind the throne and there is peels of thunder, and they want you to fear the person, in the movie. But did you know that they stole that from our God? It says in here that behind His throne is lightning and thunder; He is a scary God. Like Mr. Beaver says in the Narnian Chronicles says, ”is He safe? No! but He is good!” But we miss it! He is the center of everything, if we miss Him, we miss life! So when we come to pray we can’t come to pray, as though we are talking to some absentee landlord, off somewhere in the galaxy. No! This is the One, who sent His Son. Our prayer has to be the expression of our heart being hooked up with His heart. And the more our heart is hooked up with His heart, the more He’ll will call in the middle of the night, or He’ll call in the early morning. Or He’ll call when we finally turn the sound down of our sports bar like we talked about a few weeks ago. And He will say, “Come away with me,” He will say, “Come up here and I will show you some things that must come to pass.”

So the way that we go to the quiet place, is actually is by praying scripture. The other thing I will ask you to do is… I cannot give you all that is in this book but I recommend it. If you want to go places you have not gone before, this is a good book, to add to the other one we are reading. Pray Scripture out loud. That has been the tradition, Pray it Out Loud, because you’ll be declaring it, not only to yourself but to those things that are set against you, to oppose you, as you pray scripture you will be declaring the word of God.

So if you see this in the context, prayer has three different dimensions,
1. Connects our heart to God
2. Sets a separation between us and the enemy. It
3. It tells our souls what’s real, what’s reality.

So it works on three different planes,
1. It works against your enemy,
2. Draws you closer to the one you love and
3. Sets you in a place where you can deal with reality.

Can we just pray that God could use this in our lives this week?

Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ by Madame Jeanne Guyon
Other resources on praying scripture:
“Praying The Bible” The book of prayers by Wesley & Stacy Campbell...Please feel free to share this with a friend by sending them a link. Why not e-mail me with your comments.