Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Sermon Transcript

Context of my sermon, I’ll address the text listed on your outline through verse 53, but we’ll simply begin at verse 22 and read what I believe is the prologue to Solomon’s prayer before he gets to the specific verses in verse 31. So, please stand. We’ll be reading at First Kings 8 beginning at verse 22 through verse 30.

Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward heaven.

And he said, “Lord God of Israel, there is no God in heaven above or on earth below like you, who keep your covenant and mercy with your servants who walk before you with all their hearts. You have kept what you promised your servant David, my father. You have both spoken with your mouth and fulfilled it with your hand as it is this day. Therefore, Lord God of Israel. Now keep what you promised your servant David my father, saying, ‘You shall not fail to have a man sit before me on the throne of Israel.

Only if your sons take heed to their way, that they walk before me as you have walked before me.’ And now I pray, oh God of Israel, let your word come true, which you have spoken to your servant David, my father. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain you, how much less this temple which I have built. Yet regard the prayer of your servant and his supplication, oh Lord my God, listen to the cry and to the prayer which your servant is praying before you today, that your eyes may be open towards this temple night and day, toward the place of which you said, ‘My name shall be there, that you may hear the prayer which your servant makes towards this place.

And may you hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place, here in heaven, your dwelling place. And when you hear forgive.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we pray Lord God that your spirit now would open this word to us. Transform us that we might be a people of prayer. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

This is the time of year when our thoughts turn to the Reformation. Preparations are beginning to be made for our Reformation party or celebration, which will be a dinner theater this year. Last week as we began the month of October, you may not have noticed it, but we sang Luther’s version of the Nicene Creed. During our worship thoughts turn to men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, John Knox, Zwingli, Bucer, etc. During this month and in the providence of God my summer has been brought to completion with the trip to Moscow, travels doing this that and the other thing, moving into this structure and getting the structure ready for use at least for purposes of study and counseling and meeting with people.

What a delight it’s been to be here in this structure to have ready accessibility to people. I’ve never seen so many people from the church on a regular basis as I’m doing now. Praise God for that, for this structure being used in that way. This busy summer of preparation and then getting ready for the Presbyterian meeting has come to a conclusion. We begin this fall, moving toward the new year, moving toward the year 2001, making preparations and plans for the ongoing reformation that we seek to accomplish and promote in the context now specifically of Oregon City and across the nation and the state as well, to the preaching of the gospel.

That’s who we are. We’re Reformation Covenant Church. We seek and promote an ongoing reformation in the lives of the individuals who come to this church, their families, their friends and the extended community as well. And as the reformers sought to transform their culture through the proclamation of the word and the transformation of worship, so do we. We seek an ongoing reformation through the proclamation of God’s command word, which is also a grace word to us.

We have a distinctive eschatology that says that this effort will be successful in the long term, long haul. As the Psalms we just recited responsibly and the songs we sing every Lord’s day declare, the praises of God will fill the entire earth. And that’ll happen as his people transform their lives through worship and the application of the word of God that transforms our worship and also transforms our lives.

We bring the standard or ethic of God’s character, the law of God to bear upon our worship, upon our lives, upon our education, on our recreations. We have the means to affect reformation, the full word of God, which most of us did not have fifteen or twenty years ago. We have the goal of our reformation, the transformation of our culture that most of us did not have twenty years ago. We have the optimistic understanding of the whole word of God that tells us that we have motivation that brings us to joy as we seek to pursue this endeavor, which most of us did not have twenty years ago.

And now in the providence of God, we have the tremendous blessing of institutional connectionalism through the CRA and of being planted in a neighborhood and having now not just crawled up on the beach with our elbows ready to join the fight, but now bivouacking on that beach, the context of Oregon City, having a place of operations that can afford a fuller reformation in the lives of our people and effect upon the culture in which we live.

That’s why we started with worship this summer. And that’s why we moved from worship to a discussion of diligence, a love for these tasks that God has called us to do in our families, our homes, our communities, our school, whether it’s home school, the classes, whatever school your children are in. It’s why we started with diligence, a love for those tasks, and a commitment on the part of the people here to be part of the ministry of the organized visible church as well.

If we expect to rule by means of reformation our culture, it is required that rulers be diligent in their rule and so we must be diligent fathers, diligent husbands, diligent worshippers of God on the Lord’s day, diligent in our vocations and if we do that we will shine as lights in the midst of a slothful, distracted world. And we said that as we go about doing this work we do not want to walk in the council of the ungodly.

We do not want to make plans for this church based upon plans that are somehow outside of the will of God. We don’t want to walk in the ways of the world to affect reformation. Instead, we want to meditate on the law of God, which is a meditation on the person and work of Christ. As we said last week from Psalm 1 and Psalm 2, as we go about doing this reformation work that God has called us to do, we’re to do it in a context of worship, praise, and thanksgiving to God, in obedience to God.

We’re to do it with diligence, with love, and a carefulness to our tasks. And we’re to do it with a spirit of submitting to the full council of God’s word, a meditation on Christ as we go about doing this work that we’re now in the midst of praying about and implementing here at this church. And we do not want to do it with scornful, derisive speech or attitude in our hearts toward the work of the Lord Jesus Christ going on in this church or in other churches.

We don’t want to be the scornful or the mockers. They’re on the verge of destruction. Young people, I don’t know if you understand what I’m talking about or not. But understand this: if your lies are characterized by the devil, the opponent will attempt to get you to be like him by mocking and derision toward your parents, toward other Christians, toward the work of this church, you are on the verge of destruction.

Now, that’s what the word of God says about the scornful. Now, you’re becoming—you’re moving away from foolishness, young people. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of the child. I think that’s inevitable. Children come into the world believing they’re the center of all life. They don’t have the thought of God in their lives. So we train them. Well, you’re leaving foolishness. You’re becoming conscious of the world around you.

And you have two paths now to go in terms of how you interact with that world. The world of submission to God, wisdom of his counsel, and speech that is appropriate toward other people, or a derisiveness the way the world is today. Think about your recreations. Think about the power of music to transform a culture. God brings us together and says, “Reform yourselves by singing the Psalms.” We’re doing that.

Praise God. Again, which most of us didn’t do twenty years ago. You understand the blessings that God has given to us here. And you understand the purpose of this is for this ongoing transformation and reformation that God calls us to do. So we’ve talked about worship. We’ve talked about diligence. We’ve talked about the council of God. Avoiding scornfulness and the judgments of God on the scorner. And today I want to say that what must also undergird our efforts of reformation as we seek to implement various programs and things we’re doing here to affect reformation in our lives, the life of the culture—the other thing it must undergird is that we must be a people of prayer. We must be a people of prayer.

Now I talked on this in terms of the formal worship of the church already, but I wanted to come back to it. I didn’t have time to spend the time I wanted to on Solomon’s prayer. Both of my own personal studies meditating on that prayer and then talking to you about it. And I want to do that today. I want to give you a structure that’s helped me to understand Solomon’s prayer that may be useful as you meditate on your prayer life being modeled after the prayers of the church.

I want to get to that in just a couple of minutes. But I also put that overview of Solomon’s prayer in the context of some very simple and yet I think rather important, profound under the surface. As we learned from Doug Jones, those of us who were in Moscow, things are profound under the foundations. Some profound truths about our prayer. And I want to set this, maybe a little detailed analysis of Solomon’s prayer in the context of some very basic truths about prayer which we all must know.

And I want to give you an opportunity to begin to apply this sermon tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I want you to pray for the next meeting of the elders with the deacons this coming Friday night. We’re moving forward in some directions. Some of it’s in the announcements. There’s some signup sheets downstairs. There’s some directions that we’re beginning to form. There’s some tasks we’re considering putting our hand to, put our hand to these plows.

I want you to pray for unity, peace, direction, and guidance as God brings together most of the elders and deacons, those that can make the meeting this Friday night. I want you to do that tomorrow morning. Pray for this ongoing reformation here at RCC to be affected by the work of these men Friday night. So I want to talk about prayer. I want to talk about prayer in the context of your life. I want to talk about prayer in relationship to reformation.

And I want to start with a quote from Martin Luther. That’s the subtitle of this sermon. “How to pray like a dog.” May sound a little disrespectful. I hope it doesn’t and isn’t taken that way. You know Martin Luther—if you read his works, if you do a search through a lot of Martin Luther’s works for the word dog, you find a lot of references. The world was a different place then. There were a lot of dogs running around.

Some people say that’s part of the reason why some churches have rails around. There’s other theological reasons for rails around the altar, but some people say it’s to keep the dogs off. I mean, it was, you understand, there were a lot of dogs around. Well, Luther was doing something, maybe trying to pray, and he had a dog, a puppy supposedly, and the dog comes up to him, and Luther has a piece of meat for the dog.

The dog is staring intently at it, and he said, “Oh, that I could pray to God the way my dog looks at meat. If I could just do that.” You see? Well, I want to encourage us today, and I want to keep that model in front of your mind of the dog looking at the meat intently, knowing that’s what he needs, focusing on it. That’s the way our prayer should be. Luther was right. Some very colorful expressions. He said we should pray the way a dog looks at meat.

And that’s what I want to encourage and exhort us to today as we apply the truths of the word of God and the ongoing reformation here at Reformation Covenant Church. So we want to approach our task in terms of reformation prayerfully as well as diligently and respectfully and with a humble submission to God’s word.

Now first, simple truth: you know, you should be praying probably more than you do. Maybe not. Maybe some of you have a well-established prayer life, but there are people in our church, I’m sure, who are not praying as much as they ought to. Thomas Watson said that Jesus Christ was more willing to go to the cross than we are to the throne of grace all too often. And that’s true. We do not find ourselves compelled to pray to God. And maybe one reason for that is that we think of prayer more complicatedly in a more complicated fashion than we ought to.

The first thing I want to say by way of application—and if you get lost when I go through Solomon’s prayer, some of this other stuff, you just stick to the simple points of application in this sermon. You’ll do fine today. All right? There are people here who won’t get lost as we go through Solomon’s prayer. And I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but I’m saying these outlines are provided to give you a very simple point of application of what the scriptures say.

And the first point is very simple. It’s something we should be teaching our little children from the time they can articulate speech. The first thing is to pray eagerly. Don’t be intimidated. These are some don’ts and do’s of prayer. Don’t be intimidated by methods of prayer. Prayer is easy from one perspective. You know, there are methods of prayer and we’re going to talk about it. We’re going to talk about Solomon’s prayer as a method of prayer.

There’s this wonderful book—yeah, this book right here—a “Method for Prayer” written by Matthew Henry. Wonderful work. A mature work of this man when he was an older man, mature in his ministry, just chalk full of prayers that are completely made up of—most of the time—direct quotations from the scriptures. In this particular version it’s been cleaned up, it’s a modern language version more or less. It’s got outlines for prayer, a wonderful book in terms of the devotional life of the church. So those things are good. We’ll talk about adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.

But see, we can—there’s all these books on how should you pray and you start thinking, “I must not know how to pray because there’s all these books and I’m not using this method. I don’t understand Solomon’s prayer. You know the Lord’s prayer. I’m beginning to get a handle on it, but you know, I’m confused by my prayer life.”

Prayer at its basic element is just talking to the one who loves you and who you love. R.J. Rushdoony in his systematic theology, the last section is on prayer, and the first section of his last section on prayer, he says, “You know, when I fell in love with my wife and married her, nobody had to tell me how to talk to her. I didn’t need to be instructed in methods of communication with my wife or she with me. We loved each other and we talked. We would talk about things that came up. If I had a problem, I’d talk to her about it. If I had a joy, I’d talk to her about it, and her with me. That’s what prayer is. It’s that simple.”

You know, Paul says to pray without ceasing. We don’t understand it. Well, I think it’s just basically—most prayer is this shooting up individual thoughts to God throughout the course of our day in simple communication with the one who has set his boundless love on us and whom we are growing in our love for him, understanding the depth of his love to us. That’s what prayer is. Some guy swears at work. “Help me Lord God to respond to that correctly. How do I work with this guy? Help me to think through how to deal with this particular fella.” Get a bonus at work. “Praise you father for the work that my hands are able to do. Thank you.”

You see your wife. “Thank you Lord God for the provision of my mate.” You see your wife and you can’t know what to say to her. Maybe things aren’t going well. “Help me Lord God to communicate to her.” Simple sentence prayers. It’s just like breathing. One saint said prayer is just living out the life that God has given to us in Christ. It’s that simple.

We don’t have to do a great deal of study to implement prayer. Pastor said, “Pray tomorrow morning for the elders and deacons meeting.” Well, you get up tomorrow morning, say “God help the elders and deacons get their work done.” That simple. Just thinking about things, submitting those thoughts, problems, joys, delights to God on a regular basis.

It’s a communal or a community of relationship that produces a communication between us and God. Spurgeon said that “prayer is the lisping of the believing infant. Prayer is the shout of the fighting believer. Prayer is the requiem of the dying saint falling asleep in Jesus. It’s the breath, the watch word, the comfort, the strength, and the honor of a Christian.” If you’re a child of God, Spurgeon said, “You will seek your father’s face and live in your father’s love.”

John Calvin put it this way: “God tolerates even our stammering. He pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us. As indeed, without this mercy, there would be no freedom to pray.” So we have great freedom to pray because God forgives us.

You know, we’ve often said that our ongoing reformation of the church is immature. It will be, you know, because we think we know what we’re doing in worship here doesn’t mean we don’t think that it’s somewhat immature. Let me give you an example. We just recited a song, a psalm responsibly, and we had this word “selah” in there. Notice that word bothers you, doesn’t it? Because you’re saying something you don’t understand. You don’t know what it means. And you know what? I don’t know what it means. And you know what? I went to Peter Leithart’s—Peter Leithart’s library last week smoking cigars and he doesn’t know what it means.

Nobody knows what the word means. Now, there are ideas on what it means. For instance, in my studies recently, I came across a couple of men that think that the origins of the Hebrew word are related to a word that means to raise up. And so some have taught that what it means is to raise up a doxology to God. Now remember, all five books of the Psalms end in a doxology, praise and glory to God. And so some people think that, you know, this is like a hymn book. “Insert doxology here.” That kind of statement in a hymn book. So you’re reading through a Psalm then you insert the doxology. I like that idea. I like the idea of our prayers—and that’s what Psalms are—being peppered with these doxological formulas that conclude each book, inserted into those prayers or songs. I like that. Don’t know that it’s right though.

But I am sure that in a thousand years or maybe two thousand years, at some point in the future, I am 99.9% sure that we’re going to know what the word means. God has not granted us the knowledge of that yet. How can that be? We’ve got computers. We got all the original documents. We got all—no, we don’t have squat. I talked to a pastor the other day about my age and we were sitting around, the three of us, trying to remember what Psalm says that, you know, “all men I said in my haste all men are liars.” I was talking about that—when you get to my age you realize the truth of that statement in a deeper way than you ever have before.

You know of yourself, of everybody else. We all sin. None of us can bring salvation to one another. I don’t know who’ll leave me tomorrow, but I’ve had people leave me—close friends leave me turning a dime. I don’t know. I know that my savior is with me for the long haul here. I know that he’s the one who will always be faithful. He’ll see me through the various deaths and transitions I have to go through in life. I know that.

I don’t know a lot of other things. And this pastor, we were trying to figure out—where is that? What Psalm was that verse in? And three pastors sitting there, nobody can name the Psalm. I finally named it just because I think I’d preached on it recently or something. And this other pastor, seminary grad, bright man, said, “You know, the older I get, the more I realize I don’t know.” He used a colorful expression. “Squat” is what we’ll say, you know, and that’s what happens when you get older.

Well, the church—see, we’re an immature church. We’re a baby church at a thousand years, two thousand years old. God is going to be faithful for tens of thousands of generations. So we’re immature. Now, what’s the point of prayer? Well, the point is this: you’re immature in your prayer. I’m immature in my prayer, but the Lord God hears our lisping, forgives us our childlike stupidity, and delights to hear us pray.

Calvin said, “That’s why we have freedom in prayer is we got a gracious, loving God who wants to hear us.” When your child draws a picture of you when they’re three, four, five years old and bring that picture to you, do you say, “Well, that doesn’t look a thing like me,” or “Well, that’s not very complimentary. Both eyes are on the left side of my face. I don’t look like that. I’m symmetry. You don’t say that.

You see, you just love it, don’t you? Your kid brings a picture of you. You love it. You love the expression of their love for you. They’re thinking about you. They’re trying to represent you on paper. Well, our prayer says to God, “We’re thinking about him. We know who to go to. We may not know how to say it very well. We may not know all the details of how Solomon prayed and all that stuff. God delights in these simple childlike affirmations of trust and faith in him.”

So the first thing I want us to tell us to do in terms of prayer is to pray eagerly. Pray. Pray easily. Talk to God. Converse with him in your mind and in your lips when you know that’s safe. Jonathan Edwards says, “Prayer is as natural an expression of faith as breathing is of life.” Let’s pray this week. Let’s pray today.

What’s when you take that bite of Pam Forrest’s blueberry pie or whatever the beautiful dessert someone brought today or the wonderful food somebody’s cooked up, you know, pray to God. Say, “Praise God for that food. That’s delicious.” Set up a prayer. That’s how you pray. Pray eagerly.

Secondly, pray meditatively. Now, we want to, you know, advance a little bit. That’s not the end of prayer. That’s simple prayers we do in the context of the word of God. We have forms of prayer given to us to meditate on. And we’ve prayed meditatively now for about the last year or so. Elder Wilson has brought the Lord’s prayer to us in various ways and structured in particular ways to help us to meditate on it a little bit.

You know, Jesus says don’t use vain repetitions, but he does give us a form of prayer to help us to think through what prayer is. So our prayers are expected to mature as we grow in the Lord. And they’re expected to mature as we meditate on the structures of the scriptures themselves. We’ve said this: the Psalms are written out prayers that the church was supposed to recite or sing together, which we do. And we for a year or so—took Psalm, maybe a couple years—took Psalms and used them as our form for our intercessory prayer during the Lord’s day worship service.

Those of you who’ve been here a couple years know that. See, the idea of that is to get us all to meditate a little bit. This is a book of prayers, songs to God that are prayers. And so we meditate on the form of those prayers in the Psalms. We meditate on the Lord’s prayer. We meditate on various parts of the scriptures. And I mentioned two ways that meditation occurs by referencing our worship service.

Now, when I talked on prayer, you know, a month or two ago, what I said was that the prayer in Lord’s day worship is a model. Everything we do in Lord’s day worship is a model that flows out into the rest of our lives. Okay? And prayer is the same way. Jesus said that my house was to be called a house of prayer for all nations. Jesus categorized the entire worship system of the temple, and which was a picture of course of the church. He characterized the entire thing in a summary sentence that is to be a place of prayer for all the nations.

See, so that’s what we’re to do on Sunday. And what we do here helps you have a pattern for how you pray in the week. We pray the Lord’s prayer in a meditative way. And now you’re equipped to take what happens to you in the week, your praises, your thanksgivings, your supplications for others, your intercessions for others. You’re able to put that in a model of the Lord’s prayer, a little further understanding of it.

You see, it provides again the model whereby our lives flow into the week. And we take the Psalms and say, “Hey, Psalms say that some of them begin not with adoration nor confession, begin with supplication. ‘Help’ is how some of them start again, and that’s okay.” So now you know—we pray through these Psalms—you see that pattern. Sometimes that the Psalm does. Now you know it’s okay. A horrible situation comes up. Just yell out to God, “Help me Lord God.” Now, okay? See, it provides a pattern, a model for us. This place is the place where prayers are to be performed for all the nations. Our savior was quoting here from Isaiah 56, verses 6 and 7.

We talked about this where all those who keep covenant with God. This is to be a house where they gather together the nations. Says their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. So we know by that all these burnt offerings and sacrifices—and now I’ve not checked out this, but Peter Leithart says that sacrifices, when it’s used almost always refers to peace offerings.

Now we know the difference. Those of you who have been—well, some of you can’t remember this stuff. That’s okay. But how do you do the burnt offering? It’s that consecration thing in the context of the word. The whole thing’s offered up. It’s transformation acceptable to God where we become acceptable to God. And the peace offering correlates to this gift of life that God gives us, joyful life at the Lord’s table. So here, you know, the worship of the church is correlated to that.

And those things that burnt offering and the peace offerings are put in parallel fashion to the house being a house of prayer. So our prayers arise and ascend before God. That’s another verse in the scriptures. And so the church prays for all the world corporately. And we pray according to some models. You’ve got elders who have studied prayer in the Bible and are trying to reform the prayer of the church. And that flows out from this mountaintop into your house.

And your prayer should change a little based upon this stuff the spirit is doing. Now, it’s not purely an intellectual exercise. You will find yourself formed by the worship of this church whether you like it or not. But part of it is intellectual. Part of it is a meditation on “How are we praying at church and how does that help me in my home? Take home the sheet that expands out the Lord’s prayer. How does some of our prayers at home fit into these petitions?”

You see, so what happens here is a model for the rest of the week. And so what we do here flows into the rest of this.

Calvin, remember I quoted Calvin on this idea of intercessory prayer in the context of the worship service. Calvin says, “It’s observed that by the word prayer the prophet expresses Isaiah the whole worship of God. All the worship of God is summarized in this idea of prayer.” And then he goes on in this quote to say that “we are called into the church in order that we may call on God.

You’re called to worship so that you can call on God in prayer. In vain do they boast to neglect prayer and true calling upon God and yet hold a place in the church. If you don’t pray, you don’t have a place in church. You may have a seat here, but you’re not really doing what we want you to do, what God wants you to do. You’re called to call on him.”

And then Calvin goes into the application: “In whatever place we are, therefore, let us not neglect this exercise of faith. For we learn from the words of Isaiah, as it is also said, Psalm 51, verse 4, that this is the highest and most excellent sacrifice which God demands.” So if this sacrifice that we enter into in worship is correlated to prayer, Calvin says the result of understanding that is that “whatever place we are this week, we offer up the best of our sacrifices to God through prayer.

We’re a praying people. So what happens here flows out. So pray eagerly. Don’t be afraid to pray just ’cause you don’t know how to think of God the way you think of your wife or your husband, a close friend. And more than that, there’s a friend that stick of close, closer than a brother, and it’s not any of you. It’s the Lord Jesus Christ ultimately.

Now there are friends who stick closer than brothers, but the one who sticks closer than a brother, the lover of my soul, is the Lord Jesus Christ. The father places his love upon us and the spirit calls back to him, motivating us to daily have conversation with him. You know, some of you have a hard time conversing with your wives. Some of you have a hard time conversing with your husbands or your parents or your children or your friends. Maybe the way to turn that around is to enter into simple conversational prayer with God in heaven.

If you don’t have that relationship to him, what do you think his attitude is, so to speak, of your relationship, desire to have a nice friendly relationship with other people? He’s going to take it away because he doesn’t want you to be an idolator. He doesn’t want you seeking by way of relationship with others without having relationship to him. So he breaks those relationships down that you can have a conversational relationship with him.

And as a result, I believe that’ll be transformational in some of your lives in terms of your conversational relationship with spouses, children or friends. Pray eagerly, but pray meditatively. Think about what we do here in the structure of his prayers.

And third, pray imitatively. You know, imitation is what the Bible says is a large part of our sanctification. Paul says, “Well, you saw me. Look at me and act like I act,” he says. And we think, “Well, that’s hypocritical.” It is not hypocritical. God wants us to transform our exterior appearances and what we do according to other models. He works from the outside in frequently in our lives. “No, I’m going to wait for God to move me to prayer before I go about just hypocritically praying when I don’t feel like it. That’s foolishness.” God commands you to pray. And as you pray, he’ll drive out the sins. If you don’t pray, the sins in your life will be driving out prayer.

So pray and it’ll drive out that sin of hypocrisy. God wants us to be imitative. He wants us to meditate on these structures and then reform ourselves in the context of them. So Matthew Henry’s book, as I mentioned, has this act—or other people—it’s sort of it sort of comes from Henry’s book. His model is a little longer, but you’ve heard this idea of ACTS. I know some of your families are doing this to good—to good—with good results in your children’s lives. That when we come together for formal prayer in our families, some families try to follow: adoration to God, confession of sin, thanksgiving, and then supplication.

Some people would separate supplication and intercession—supplication is for us, intercession is for others—but in the ACTS thing it’s altogether supplication, intercession, prayer, making requests for yourself and others. So: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and then supplications. There are these models and it’s good to model ourselves. Matthew Henry in this wonderful mature book on a “Method of Prayer” basically just simply imitates, uses God’s very words in composing prayers that he suggests for various occasions. And that’s a good thing to do. So we want to pray imitatively. We want to understand the relation of our prayers to various forms.

And now I want to talk about Solomon’s prayer specifically. And I want to give a little model, an overview of Solomon’s prayer. Probably won’t get through all this today. That’s okay. And some of you are not going to like this. You know, if you think that I need to be better at this sermon stuff, the way to get a better pastor is to pray for him. Prayer will change things. But I think it’s important to meditate on Solomon’s prayer. It is given to us as the prayer of dedication or consecration of the entire temple service.

You know, the idea: David doesn’t build the temple; Solomon does. The whole thing’s built. Now Solomon is going to dedicate this temple and he’s going to set up this temple. Now we talked about in our Sunday school earlier with our kids that, most all the kids in my class know now, that from everything we know, tabernacle worship was silent and temple worship was musical and singing.

Why? Because we’re closer to Jesus. You see, the temple is closer. Jesus is coming. In Psalm 98, at the center of the fourth book of the Psalms, says that when God comes, he expects his people to shout for joy and to sing Psalms and to play instruments and be happy and merciful in his presence. So as Jesus is being prepared for by the temple, the temple becomes a place of singing. The point is that proximity of the temple to the coming of the savior and the establishment of the temple of the church means I think that this prayer of the Psalms is important for us.

It’s important to meditate on it as we try to mature in our prayer life as a church and as families and individuals. It has things to teach us. And what I’ve done on your outline is suggest a sevenfold or actually a nine-fold outline of this prayer of Solomon. You know, you kids are in writing class now. There’s an introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Something you write, an essay. Got a prologue, and the thing, and then the epilogue.

You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And Solomon’s prayer has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the middle are these series of very specific requests that he lays out. But it starts first with a beginning, an introduction, a prologue, and it concludes with an epilogue. So let’s work our way through now this kind of seven or nine-point outline of Solomon’s prayer and ask God to reform our prayers on the basis of it.

What we’ll find first in this introduction is there is a confession of sin going on. There’s an adoration of God and a beseeching for God to hear their prayers. Verse 22 is the beginning of this. Look in your scriptures. Verse 22 of First Kings 8. Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward heaven. We know from Chronicles that he’s actually built kind of a pulpit-like structure here and he’s actually on his knees before God for this entire prayer.

This is a long prayer and it probably was a lot longer than this. This is what has been given to us by God. And he’s on his knees with his hands spread out before God in a supplicant position the entire time.

And he said, “Lord God of Israel, Lord God of Israel.” So his prayer begins in its address with a reference to God and his particular relationship to Israel. Look at verse 53. And this is part of the epilogue, the end, the conclusion. See, verse 54 says, “So it was when Solomon had finished praying.” So the last part of his prayer is given. The last part of verse 53: “You spoke by your servant Moses when you brought our fathers out of Egypt, O Lord God.” See, he begins and ends his prayer. The book ends that Solomon has in his prayer is this addressing of Father Sovereign. Remember when we spoke on Genesis, “Lord God”—one way that some have translated it is “Father Sovereign.”

“Lord” is the name of the covenantal relationship of God to his people in these capital letter Y’s. It’s Yahweh. It’s the God who keeps covenant. It’s the God who is our father. It’s the God that we’re trying to understand better as Pastor Wilson preaches through the covenantal structure of our relationship to God. He’s Lord, not in the sense here of master. It has that connotation, but “Lord” in the sense of the covenant God who keeps covenant. He’s our father. He loves us.

And what Satan wants you to do in your prayers is to forget God’s love for you. He wants you to address him as God, but not as Yahweh, not as Jesus. See, Jesus, lover of my soul—Jesus is Yahweh, Father Sovereign. So Solomon begins his prayer and bookends it with a reference to an understanding of the covenantal relationship of God to his people. And secondly, by calling him God.

God is El Elohim, strong one, powerful, sovereign God. I’ve talked about this before, but our prayer should be informed by this name of God. It does us no good in terms of motivation and joy in prayer to focus on God’s sovereignty to the exclusion of his love as our father. And on the other hand, it perverts our prayer to focus on his love without focusing on his sovereignty.

I was talking to Kuyper Singlinger this last week and he said, “God does all things well.” And we talked about it, him and I, and what that means is to understand that properly, we keep in mind that God is all powerful. He’s sovereign. He’s all wise. He knows everything. He’s the God who created everything. And he is all loving toward his people. He’s Yahweh. He’s Jesus. He’s father as well as sovereign. And those things, see, you got to keep all of those together.

And as a result of those attributes of God focused on, we recognize that God does all things well for us. Whatever happened that was horrific to us last week or incomprehensible or difficult or a trial comes from the loving hand of Father Sovereign who is all powerful, all wise, and all loving. Now, you know, if you don’t like that, I don’t know. It seems to me it’s the obvious truth of scripture.

And so we begin our prayers with a recognition that whatever we’re praying about has been given to us from the hand of a God who both loves us and is sovereign over us. So Solomon in his introduction and his ending conclusion talks about who God is in himself, in his being. He says, “There is no God in heaven above or on earth below like you. There’s no God like you.” This is adoration. This is going to God and saying, “There’s no other place I can turn. You are the only God. In your being, you are the most perfect being and separated totally in your being, in your essence.”

So he begins with this adoration about God. And then he puts it in relationship to the people. “There’s no God in heaven, earth like you who keep your covenant and mercy with your servants, Israel.” So now he’s addressing God in terms of his being the most high master. He’s the most high being above all other beings. He is God and the only God. And he is the most high master over his people. He’s adoring him here for his relationship to his people. And he is a God of covenantal faithfulness and he is a God of love.

Mercy can be—has said mercy can be translated love. Loving, loyal love is one way to look at the word for mercy here that God has toward his people. And so God is a God who in and of himself has this tremendous love and loyalty to his people. And he keeps covenant with us. He is ever faithful. He’s omniscient. He’s omnipresent. He’s going to get to those attributes as well. He addresses the character of God in the beginning of this prayer.

Now, you know, again, when you cry out to God for help tomorrow, don’t think, “I got to go through all these steps.” You see, if we’re developing this conversational, easy prayer with God, we must always have it. It will develop into the habit of understanding who this one is we’re speaking with. He’s not like our friend. He is separate. And so our prayers to him reflect that as we get to know him in that way. We understand his attributes and we declare those attributes to him in our prayer.

“You have kept what you promised your servant David, my father. Now you know, we always put this in a redemptive historical understanding and a theocratic understanding. And so you know, this is Solomon, this is David. But let’s just step back for just a minute. Can some of you children pray that same thing? Can you go to God tomorrow and say, ‘Well, well, you know, you promised dad that you’d be doing these things in his life’? Well, not maybe in a direct revelatory sense the way that this is talking of, but you know, dads, I think this means or by way of application that we should be letting our children know of our prayers for our family and of God’s answering those prayers according to his word.

Because he’s going to go on here. He says, ‘You’ve kept the stuff that my dad prayed for. You’ve given him that stuff. You’ve performed these past mercies,’ and he’s going to say, ‘On the basis of you doing those past mercies, I’m going to ask for new mercies from you today. Okay?’ So prayers for the future are based upon a faithfulness of God in answering prayers of the past and specifically here, the prayer of someone’s father.

Dads, we should be telling our children of God’s answers to prayer in our lives. You know, there’s a signup sheet downstairs for watch night service, a New Year’s Eve service. I’d like to have here. Maybe only a few of us will show up. That’s okay. But Joe, we—I do. I thought about it as a vehicle. We haven’t planned it yet, but maybe it’s a vehicle where people can talk about answered prayers this year in the life of their family.

We used to have an opportunity here in the transition of our worship. It’s gone for sharing. But I think it’s important in the context of our homes and in the church to share answers to prayers so that we can be confident in our prayers to God the way that Solomon is here.

So Solomon addresses in this introduction this one wonderful sovereign God who knows all things and he keeps his word. “Therefore, Lord God of Israel. Now keep what you promised your servant David, my father.” And then he says what God promised. Solomon’s prayer is prefaced by a wonderful apprehension of who God is in his being and his relationship to Israel. He puts that in the context of God’s love and covenant keeping and his sovereignty. And then he puts that in the context. The other thing he’s underlying all his prayer with is that God keeps his word.

So what he is going to pray for here is consonant. It fully matches what God has already declared he will do in a general sense. So Solomon’s prayers are on the basis of God’s word. And our prayers should be informed by what the word of God says. You see what the word of God says. So the introduction is important. It tells us a lot of information as we meditate upon it.

It tells us that Solomon gives glory to God at the beginning of his prayer. He prays in terms of God’s historical actions, looking for future actions based on an appreciation of past actions. When we expect further mercies from God, we best be thankful and acknowledging to him in our prayers past mercies from that God, his historical actions, and praising him and thanking him for those things. There’s thanksgiving here. And then he prays in terms specifically of God’s word. Verse 26 again: “I pray, oh God of Israel, let your word come true.” He prays in relationship to the word of God.

And so should we. Yes, we should pray eagerly. We should pray meditatively. And here too, pray imitatively. We want to include in our prayers a reliance upon God’s word for the specific requests we bring to him.

“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heavens of heaven cannot contain you. How much less this temple which I have built.” See, now he’s going to talk about hearing prayers in this place. But again, there before he gets to that, he praises and glorifies God for his omnipresence, for his infinitude, for his eternality of being. You see, he knows he’s not some dumb Old Testament guy who hasn’t evolved to the place of knowing who God is. That wasn’t what the tabernacle and temple were all about. That’s stupid, modern men who are minded because they reject God’s word who do not understand that the theology of the Old Testament certainly was well informed about the person of God.

Solomon tells us, “Well, it’s ridiculous, obvious that this puny little house—that’s kind of the way he says it here—could contain you, big, huge, golden, fine gold, wonderful, beautiful temple. But Solomon knew that compared to the eternality, majesty, glory, and infinitude of God, that temple was nothing.” See, that’s what he says here. So he moves back to adoration, back to a proper sense of who we are as we come before this majestic God.

“I know you’re not limited to this house. Yet you told us to build it. Your word says this is where you’re going to come and hear our prayers. So yet regard the prayer of your servant in his supplication, oh Lord my God, listen to the crying and to the prayer which your servant is praying before you today, that your eyes may be open toward the temple night and day, toward the place of which you said, ‘My name shall be there, that you may hear the prayers that your people bring. Your servant makes toward this place. And may you hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place, here in heaven, your dwelling place. And when you hear, forgive.’”

Okay, so he says that this place that God has said that he wants to hear prayer is open all the time. What is that the picture of the access we have by Jesus.