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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church. I am a sanctuary skeptic. At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn to side number two for the remainder of the message.

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Let us continue in our worship by giving our attention to what Matthew has written in the sixth chapter of his gospel, beginning with the verse which is numbered five, and reading this morning from the King James Version. These words are taken from the very midst of the Sermon on the Mountain.

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Jesus is speaking. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

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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. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do; for they think that they

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shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them; for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him. To this manner therefore pray ye, Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

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Thy kingdom come; thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.

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Amen. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. We continue this morning our conversations concerning prayer. You will remember that we noted last week that prayer is intently intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father.

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Now this intently intimate relationship with God, which prayer is, is powerful beyond our belief. There is just no end to what can be accomplished in and through it. Recently one of the young men in our congregation suddenly discovered that in order to pursue

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his doctoral degree at college, he needed a much larger sum of money than he had imagined. He was actually about $1,500 short, and he had no way of knowing where the money was coming from. This young man and his friends were quite sure that it was God's will that he should

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pursue his studies, but they didn't know where the money was, and so they began to pray about it. Up to a matter of a very few hours before the time when the money was due, the young man and his friends had no direct response to their prayer.

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Then on the very day before the money was to be paid, the young man happened to meet, under certain unusual circumstances, a gentleman whom he had never met before. This gentleman gave him a ride, and in the course of the ride this boy related to this gentleman his particular need.

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And within a few hours, the man called back and said that he and his friends were providing to the boy the $1,500, and since then they have done so. Now this boy and those who were praying with him know that this was a direct and dramatic demonstration of the power of prayer.

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Of course, prayer isn't always answered as directly and as dramatically. It's not always answered so immediately and so obviously, but prayer does have within it that power. But you cannot prove that to anyone.

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This young man could not, for example, prove to another that the coming of this money was in response to his prayer. A skeptic might say, "It was just coincidence that the money came to you as it did. There is no way he could prove that was not so."

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A skeptic might say, "God was planning to make this money available to you anyway, and your prayer had nothing to do with it. It was in his mind previously, and there's no way in which this boy could prove that that was not so."

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Someone might say skeptically, "This man has ulterior purposes. This isn't really for your good. It's going to work out to your harm and hurt. He's only doing what he selfishly wanted to do for some purpose you do not yet know."

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This boy and his friends know that is not so, but there is no way that they can prove absolutely that this is not so. You cannot argue a man into belief in the power of prayer. The unsaved individual, far from Jesus Christ, cannot believe in the power given to the person

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who knows Christ as Lord and Savior. This was brought home to us in this last week so tragically that I almost weep to tell you this. Last Sunday morning I related from this pulpit the story of a child who was brought to us

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as a prayer request. This little boy was born with a deformed esophagus, with a malfunctioning respiratory system, and with a bad heart. From the moment of his birth he had been in an oxygen tent, and the prognosis was terminal.

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He was not expected to live. He was brought before this congregation in our healing service last month, and there was prayer for him. And within twelve hours the baby's condition had completely reversed itself.

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He was able to take nourishment for the first time. He was taken out of the oxygen tent for the first time, and the prognosis of terminal was changed to "this little boy is going to make it." I told that story last week, and I told that story as a demonstration of the power of prayer.

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But following the service, the lady who had brought that little boy to us by proxy for prayer came to me and told me something I did not know. The parents of this little boy are not Christian. Indeed, they ridicule and reject the faith.

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Even when this youngster responded to prayer as he did, they had nothing but contempt for the suggestion that the prayer had anything to do with the reversal of the situation. The woman who brought the child to us in prayer by proxy sought to witness to these people, but they rejected the witness.

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And within a few short days, after this complete refusal to accept what is to us the obvious grace of God, that baby suddenly took a turn for the worse again. Back into the oxygen tent, prognosis again terminal. And the parents, without any faith, simply left the baby here in the Cedars of Lebanon

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Hospital and went to their home some miles from here, expecting any moment to hear that the child had died. And once again, this woman spoke to us about this need. And once again, a group of us prayed.

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And once again, that child knew an experience of the power of God taken out of the oxygen tent. Once again, able to receive nourishment. Once again, the prognosis reversed.

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And still, those parents will not believe. Still, they will not accept any word of witness. Any suggestion or apologetic in defense of the power of faith is ridiculed and turned from.

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And it will not, it appears, be otherwise. This is so, you see, because we can't win people with our words. There's no word that you can speak to another. There's no word I can utter from this pulpit which is going to bring a person to Jesus

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Christ. You can't argue a person to the Almighty. You can't debate a person into the kingdom of heaven. You can't persuade a person, logically or emotionally, to clasp hands with the Prince

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of Peace. What we do when we witness is to simply to try to clear away the barriers so that the Holy Spirit, who alone can convert, who alone can save, who alone can transform, who alone can give rebirth, so that the Holy Spirit may begin to work on that heart.

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The ministry of our witness, you see, as individuals or as a congregation, does not save. But it can soften so that the Holy Spirit may follow after the witness and touch the now malleable hearts of the unbeliever and bring them to the new life which belongs to any man who claims Christ as his own.

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So it's important to us to witness to parents like this. And I hope you'll pray for those parents. And I hope you'll pray for the woman who is engaged in witnessing to them. And I hope you'll pray that the Holy Spirit will follow up those words as she tries to

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respond logically to twentieth-century skeptics. This morning I want to consider with you some of the things that skeptics say about prayer. And I want to sketch with you some of the things which we as responsible Christians can say and reply.

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But I caution you at the outset of our consideration. I offer you no magic formula to transform people's lives. I offer you only a reason for the faith that is in us, with the hope that you will learn to advance that reason so cogently and so effectively that walls will be torn down and

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people will open themselves to the Spirit who can by His power reverse and reclaim their lives. These objections which we consider are very old. They've been repeated for the last two thousand years.

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You see, nothing new or original about sin. It's always the same old thing. Just so these objections. And if you have not heard them in your defense of prayer, you certainly will.

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The first one is this. Prayer is nothing but an escape mechanism. It's nothing but a device designed to enable people to get away from the hard places in life.

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It's nothing but a crutch to be used in times of stress. Now the thing you have to watch out for when someone launches this objection is this. Beware of the skeptic who tries to take the worst example of lived faith that he can find inside the church and match it up against the best example of pure humanism which he

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finds outside the church. That's an old trick of the skeptics, you know. They pick the worst hypocrite they can find on the church rolls and then they match his life up against the most noble and splendid but still unchristian living that they can

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find outside the church. Never let the skeptic try to match that poor fellow who sits three rows in front of you every Sunday and is struggling with his faith up against Marcus Aurelius. Don't sit still when those who are attacking the faith try to pit the intellect of Socrates

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against the puny mental efforts of your pastor. You've got some big wheels to roll out too. And if they're going to call on such, then you call on John Calvin and John Knox and Augustine and Saint Francis and Paul.

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The reason that's especially important to remember when you confront this kind of skeptic is this. He can call forth as evidence in defense of his charge certain individuals in the church who do use prayer as an escape.

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There are some people the harp of whose gospel has only one string, and that string is to escape every difficulty in life with which they might be confronted. You come to them with some personal or social problem and lay it before them and they mumble a pious "well, I'll pray about it."

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And then they go off and breathe solemn sentences to the Lord endlessly until they get caught up in some kind of spiritual euphoria which puts them all together out of touch with the hard spot in life which other people are really confronting. There are some people you know who are so heavenly they're no earthly good.

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And this is precisely the kind of individual that the skeptic will advance as his exhibit A. But recognize that while there are exhibits like that within the church, this is not the essence of our faith and this is not the essence of prayer.

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While Christianity has never been a device to escape life, it's always been a commitment to transform life. I remember on a college campus a young collegian saying to me on one occasion that the sentence which he thought summed up Christianity best was taken from one of our hymns.

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You'll recognize the line. "Drop thy still dues of quietness till all our strivings cease." That's Christianity, he said, avoiding all strivings and trying to lose itself in quietness. I went on to point out to that boy that the man who wrote that line, John Greenleaf Whittier,

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was a committed Christian reformer who prayed and then involved himself in life with the power he got from that prayer. Whittier was active in the anti-slavery movement. See him at Concord in Massachusetts when he goes to an anti-slavery rally to speak against

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the evils of slavery. Hear him ridiculed and attacked. They threw rotten eggs at him until his black coat ran yellow with the smashed yolks of the eggs.

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And the stench was all about. And in the midst of that kind of circumstance, he stood up for what he knew by the power of prayer to be true. And when the anti-slavery declaration was passed, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote these

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words, "I set a higher value on my name as appended to the anti-slavery declaration of 1833 than on the title page of any poem or book I have ever written." Yes, he wrote about still dues of quietness. Yes, he prayed for the time when all our strivings would cease.

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But yes, he plunged into the middle of life with the power of prayer which was his. This book on which our faith is built is concerned with life as it really is. This is a book which talks about kings that murder children, about governors who know the truth but won't do it, about crooked religious experts who traipse on everything that's decent

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in life. This is a book that goes right into the darkest, the foulest, the most rotten pages of life where traitors betray men whose lives are beautiful beyond our power to describe and crowds laugh when the Son of God hangs and dies.

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This is a book that talks about life as life really is and in the midst of life it says there are those who have faith and those people involve themselves in life and those people through the power of God given them in prayer transform life. They don't run away from it.

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When I see an individual today pause to pray, I think him the man of wisdom. Look at the world in which we're living, a world in which we build skyscrapers next to slums, a world in which for all of our learning microbes can still murder men, a world in which an airplane can fly us from coast to coast in hours but we can't carry on a decent

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conversation with the man who lives in the ghetto. It's a world in which we have brought to the fore every plan our puny minds can construct, every idea that we can possibly apply to the problems of society we have brought forth and the effect has been next to negligible.

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Now in the face of that kind of situation, when I see a man who knows that God can create a clean heart and renew a right spirit, when I see a man who knows that God can cause lilies to grow on rocks and fruit to come forth out of sand, when I see a man with that kind of commitment pray and seek the counsel of God, not the miserable counsel of other men, but

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the counsel of the God who made all men, when I see a man so pray and then invest himself in life at no matter what the cost, taking up the cross and following his Savior, when I see a man do that, I say, "Not escape!" This man is living the life that is supposed to be lived.

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Now another objection that is commonly brought to us as Christians about prayer is this. How can a great God be interested in the puny prayers of one mere mortal? I mean, after all, if your God is as great as you claim he is, how could he possibly be concerned about some little prayer which you whimper his direction?

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Now you have to be very careful about this skeptical comment, because you see there is something good in it, and also something that is not good enough. The good in it is obviously this. They are suggesting that God is great.

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If your God is so great, they begin, all right, it is good to accentuate the magnificence and the transcendence of God. We have too many people today who try to be palsy-wowsy with the Almighty, and refer to God as the "man upstairs" or the "somebody who likes me."

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We have too many people who go into prayer in a vulgar and a trite manner, who do not understand that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So when someone talks about the greatness of God, we can say to them, "Amen." But the difficulty with this skepticism is this, that it does not go far enough in speaking

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of the greatness of God. It suggests that God is great enough to have made us all, but it goes on to suggest that God is not great enough to hear the prayers of us all. It says that on the one hand, God could bring us all into being, but on the other hand,

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God is somehow incapable of relating to each one of us as if there were only one of us with which to relate. They try to make scripture out of the little poem that goes, "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

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She had so many children, she didn't know what to do." They see God as great enough to have all of these children, but not great enough to know what to do with them. And I would suggest to you that this is blasphemy.

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And I would suggest to you also that this is patently illogical. For if you pause to think about it for a moment, you will recognize that when knowledge becomes broader, it also, if it is authentic knowledge, becomes deeper. Let me put that in the form of an illustration.

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Suppose we have a room full of law books, and we send an ignoramus into that room. He comes out and he says, "It's a room full of books." That's all he can say. That's all that he has the equipment to say.

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Now suppose we send into that room a young man who has completed half of his law school education. He goes in and immediately identifies the books as a law library. He can perhaps tell from the books and his beginning study of them which books apply

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to this section of the law and which books apply to this division of the law. He can begin to give us some idea in general terms about the library. Now send into the library the master jurist, the supreme court judge, who has amassed this collection of books.

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As he takes you into the room, he can explain it to you, not only in terms of its size and its scope, but he can go to individual books and pull them down from the shelves and show you where his hands have rested and where his pencil has marked the page. He not only understands the whole library, he understands each book within the library.

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Now take that illustration and magnify it to the infinite. That our God is not only omniscient and omnipotent, but that he is omnicompetent. He can do all things. And you understand that in viewing all things, he does not necessarily give up his capacity

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to understand in infinite detail each part of the great mass of humanity that confronts him. When we think about Africa, we think about millions of Africans. The missionary who has just come back from Africa thinks about Africa.

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He thinks about millions of Africans, but he thinks specifically about a few hundred or a few thousand Africans that he has gotten to know personally in the course of his ministry there. But when God thinks of Africa, he thinks of each individual as if there were only one

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individual about which to think. It is no accident that the scripture does not often describe God as the God of the hosts of all mankind. Instead the scriptures say he is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.

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The God, you see, of the individual. The God of the particular. Never lose hold of the fact that your soul is of infinite worth to God. You remember the hymn, "Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too

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small, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul." Think about that. That is asserting that your soul is worth more than all the diamonds in the Kimberley mines, than all the trees that cover the hillsides of the world.

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It's worth more than the produce of all the fruitful valleys, the San Joaquin included. It's worth more than the total value of the stars and the planets and the suns, all the spheres that we can see and all the spheres that we cannot see. If you're living on the very edge of hell, if you've got your feet in hell so that you

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are at this moment or in these days yielding to things which are far from what God would have you do, still, no matter where you are in life, your soul is of such infinite worth to God that He let His own Son die for the love of it. That God with that kind of love encompasses everything that is, but encompasses everything

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that is in the particular. "So that our tiniest prayer, whispered in our closet, away and apart, is heard as if that prayer was the only thing in all creation there was for God to listen to." What about this objection, taken from the words of Jesus?

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"Your heavenly Father knows what things you have need of before you ask Him, therefore why pray?" The skeptic really feels he has one up on us when he brings this because, of course, he's quoting Scripture in defense of his objection.

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Never let it surprise you when a skeptic quotes Scripture. Even the devil can use it, you know, to his own purpose. So they take these words of Jesus, "Your Father knows what things you have need of," and then they say, "Why bother to pray?"

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So the first thing to notice about that objection is it's a magnificent truth. I mean, isn't it a wonderfully comforting thing to know that your heavenly Father knows the things that you have need of even before you ask Him? That's a glorious thing.

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When I was a boy, I never had to argue my dad into giving me my lunch money for school. I never had to fight with my father to get the money that was necessary to buy defense stamps during the Second World War. You remember how we used to do that.

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I never had to enter into any kind of logical persuasion with my father in an effort to get him to buy me gymnasium insurance for school. My father knew the things that I had need of, and so he immediately was ready to give them to me.

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And it's a glorious thing to know that you never have to debate with the deity about the things that you need in life. But going beyond that, it is still necessary for us to pray, and it's necessary because God has made us free, and God will never violate our freedom.

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Even when God knows the things that we have need of before we ask for them, He will not force them upon us. He will not intimidate us to the place where we must receive what He has ready to give to us.

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He waits until we indicate to Him our readiness and our willingness to receive. When I was in college, I used to work during the summers as a camp counselor. And the leadership of the camp came to me one day and asked me if I would be willing to accept into my group a little boy who was retarded.

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The parents weren't sure that the boy would be able to make it through camp, but they at least wanted him to have a try. So, of course, I said he could come into the group. Well, it became very obvious within two days that he couldn't keep up with the group.

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He was afraid and lonely because he was away from his parents. He was uncoordinated and so he could not enter into the boys' games and contests, so much a part of camp life. He was intimidated by some of the other children, either consciously or unconsciously.

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The experiment was a complete failure and the parents had to come and take the boy. I had the task of gathering together his belongings before he went. I remember looking at them. They bought him the best baseball glove you could buy, the best bat you could use, the

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best sunglasses, the best swimming trunks, every t-shirt carefully lettered with his name, the best tennis racket, far too good for a child his age. They wanted, you see, to give him everything, but he was unable to receive. How it must grieve the heart of God to stand with infinite treasures ready to bestow upon

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us, and we do not ask, so he cannot answer. We do not seek, so he cannot help us find. We do not knock, and so he will not violate our freedom by opening the door. I heard two teenage girls in this congregation talking about prayer about a year ago in the

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back steps of the church. One girl said to the other, "Well, it hasn't worked for me, and I'm not going to pray again for two weeks." And the little girl who was sitting next to her and was much more spiritually sensitive

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responded, "Poor God." Well it was a good response, but I wonder if she ever thought, if she ever thought about how God does suffer when he watches his children stumble and stagger and fall through life, and all the time his hand is extended, waiting for them to reach out.

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You parents, you know what it's like to have some rich treasure ready to give to your children. Sometimes it's your love, and your children won't receive. Poor God, and poor world, poor you and poor me. Oh, what peace we often forfeit.

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Oh, what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer. And there's one last objection. I realize I'm over time, but this is important, so stick with me please.

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This is the most serious objection of all. This is the one you hear the most often. And this is the one that comes forth from the deepest agony of spirit. It's the skeptic who says, "Well, I don't believe in prayer because my prayers aren't

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answered." Now it shouldn't come as any surprise to a Christian that some prayers apparently aren't answered. The Bible states very specifically that some prayers are not answered.

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The psalmist writes, "Oh my God, I cry, but thou answerest not." Jeremiah writes in Lamentations, "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through." Yes, there are some prayers that aren't answered.

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And there is a tendency amongst many of us, when we hear of someone whose prayers aren't answered, to say, "Well, there must be something wrong in their life and that's why their prayers weren't answered." Don't ever say that to anybody.

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Don't ever say that to anybody. In the first place, you're not privy to the inner secrets of their hearts. And in the second place, it's not your province to so judge. There can be a lot of reasons why their prayer is apparently unanswered.

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It might have been answered in a way they didn't expect. It might have been answered in a way they're unwilling to accept. Sometimes God says, "Yes." Sometimes God says, "No."

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Sometimes God says, "Wait." All of these things you could say to them, but I'm really not so sure that it's worthwhile to say those things. I think what you have to say to these people is this, "Don't stop praying."

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Many times these people have gone through very painful situations. They have prayed that their child might live, and their child has died. He has prayed that his wife would still be with him, and the home is broken. The parents have prayed that the child will grow up and live like Jesus, and he smashes

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their hopes and turns to ashes all of their dreams. When a person stops praying in that kind of circumstance, claiming that their prayers aren't answered, your word to them should be this, "Your only mistake is that you've stopped praying."

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You see, Jesus gives us a balanced teaching on this as He does on everything. He says on the one hand that if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, everything is possible to you through prayer. But He says on the other hand, "Ye ought always to pray and think not."

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That is, keep on praying and don't lose heart. I'm sure there were a lot of times when the disciples wanted to come to Jesus and say, "Lord, we prayed, and what we prayed for didn't happen." Weren't they praying that night in Gethsemane that He wouldn't be arrested, and He was arrested?

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I'm sure there were lots of times when they wanted to say that to Him. But when they came to Him, what did they say? They said, "Lord, teach us to pray." These were men who had learned how to pray at their mother's knees.

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They had grown up in the synagogue where you prayed three times every day. These men knew the procedures of prayer. But when they looked at Jesus, they saw dimensions in His prayer life which were beyond anything they had ever known.

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So all they could say was, "Lord, teach us to pray." We're only beginners in this praying game. And when Jesus says to us that all things are possible to us in it, we must not understand this to mean that we can turn on the power of prayer like flipping a switch on the wall.

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Prayer is to be in communion with God, and it's out of that communion, that continuing communion when we keep on praying, when we keep on keeping on no matter what happens, it's out of that that the power of prayer is made manifest. So you thunder at the gates of heaven, "Let my child live!" and you hold to the hand of

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God, "My Father, don't let him be taken away!" And the child dies. But you see, you still have hold of the hand of God. I don't know why the child died.

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I don't know why ugly things happen in life. I don't know why homes smash and people hate each other. I don't know why we have the kind of things that we do going on in the kind of world that this is.

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But I do know that God works in all things for good. That doesn't mean all things are good. It just means that God is working in things to make them good. And that means, you see, we've got to hang on, to keep on keeping on.

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Not like Halloween, where little youngsters run up and ring the doorbell and run away. But like children who go to the Father's house and who ring and who ring and who ring and who fellowship with Him again and again and again and gradually see worked out in their lives the power which is His.

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I just read two weeks ago the last journal of Adoniram Judson, the great missionary who served in Burma for so many years. And on almost the last page of that journal, after his magnificent life, he writes these words, "I never prayed sincerely for anything, but it came.

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At some time, no matter how distant a day, somehow, in some shape, probably in the last shape that I would have imagined, it came." That's a beautiful affirmation, isn't it? And then I thought of Adoniram Judson's life.

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I thought of how the great desire of his heart was to go to India, and he never got there. He was sent to Burma instead. Of how he had prayed that his wife's life might be spared, and she died in his arms. About how he prayed for the lives of both of his children, and both of them died before

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their father's eyes. Of how he was imprisoned and prayed, held by the hands of ungodly people, prayed that he might be released, and yet languished in chains for months and months and months. It was the man who lived through that who said, "I've never prayed sincerely for anything,

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but in some way, at some time that I might never have imagined, God's power brought to pass in my life that which I most desired." When Jesus knelt in Gethsemane, he prayed so hard to be spared that cross that his blood came like sweat.

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And then he got up, and he walked out of that garden with a courage the cross could not crush. With a steadfastness that no nail or crown of thorns could swerve. And he climbed that hateful thing, and on it he did not pray, "Father, I will not pray

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anymore." He prayed, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." That's what it is, to keep on praying. My skeptical friend, if you this morning think enough about Jesus to doubt him, then why

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not think about him enough to try him? And if you're concerned enough about prayer to question it, then why, and I ask you this in the name of God, why don't you try it? Why don't you kneel like 10,000 times 10,000 and say, "Lord, teach me to pray."

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(Pause for group photo) (Pause for group photo)