That Your Joy May be Full

From today's gospel that they've already read, it's the first two verses of it, John 16, 23b and 24. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name.

Ask and you will receive that your joy may be full. And the reason for the lack of joy in many of our lives can be traced back just to this, that we are afraid or for some other reason, unwilling to take hold of his promise. We don't want to stick our necks out anymore.

What if I ask and nothing happens? Then the few drops of faith that are left in me will go down the drain and I'll have nothing. It's better to keep it vague. Keep our prayers general.

Dear God, bless everybody in the world. Bless all the people in our fellowship. Bless those in trouble.

Then you can't possibly be disappointed because you never know whether it happened or not. Now there was a time when we, in fact, did pray specific prayers and fantastic things happened. But then we moved into a time when it seemed that our prayers weren't getting answered.

We asked for that mountain to move and nothing happened and we felt like fools. And so then we thought, maybe those earlier answers to prayer were coincidence. Possibly God has withdrawn from that divine, that miraculous relationship with him we once had.

Or maybe it's just the way it is that after you get through the honeymoon time, prayers don't get answered like that anymore. So now we keep our prayers vague. We don't have the boldness we once had.

In fact, our prayers are much more monologue than prayer. Still say the word. You know, dear God, open those doors.

Dear God, pour out that blessing. Cause your light to shine. But even when we say the words, we know very well in our hearts that we're not expecting anything to happen.

No wonder we can't find time to pray. Everybody says, I can't find time to pray. No wonder our minds go around the world and back when we do find time to pray.

Because we're not expecting anything to happen anyway. We're not going in there and claiming these promises of our Lord. We're just saying our prayers.

If we really believe that the God of the universe is listening to these prayers, if we really believe that our Heavenly Father is lovingly taking in every single word we say. I say, if we believe that, there would not be a person in this whole place who would ever say, I don't find time for prayer. Why we'd find time to pray if we had to quit eating.

Let's admit it. Our problem with prayer is that most of the time it isn't prayer anyway. We don't really believe that God is taking it in.

We don't really believe that God cares. We don't actually expect anything to happen. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, He will give it to you.

Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name. Now ask and you shall receive that your joy may be full. With this promise, Jesus is calling us up into His own prayer life.

Inviting us to partake of the exact communion with God that He had when He was here on this earth in flesh and blood. Giving us the privilege of coming right into the Holy of Holies and talking with the Father. In that day, you will ask the Father in my name, and I don't say I will pray the Father for you, for the Father Himself loves you, because you believe that I came from the Father.

Everything that Jesus did for us, His death on the cross, His resurrection, His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and His pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, was done in order that you and I might be able to come joyfully, boldly, gladly, and with praise into the Father's presence. Might be able to speak with the Father, knowing that indeed it is a Father who listens. Now when this is not in fact our experience, when we're not coming into the Father's presence and asking and receiving, this means that the death of the Lord Jesus is in that sense wasted on us.

You know, the purpose of His death is not being fulfilled. Jesus didn't die to atone for our sins for some future showdown. He atoned for our sins so that we might now go into the presence of the Father as His children.

The first indication that the blood of the Lamb in fact covers our lives is that we are free now and glad to come into the presence of our Father and ask. When our prayers are weak, that means our salvation is weak. When our prayers are weak, our experience of the resurrection is weak.

When our prayers are weak, our vision of the Lordship of Christ is weak. And when those things are weak, what can our daily life be but weak? How can our love for our brothers be anything but weak? How can our witness to the world out there be anything but weak? Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name. Now to ask in Jesus' name means more than learning certain things about prayer.

You know, you get a whole bunch of books about prayer. You go to the library or Christian bookstore or read through a catalog and everything about prayer, you get it and you read it. And you learn those things and you put them into practice.

That's not how you do this. It's rather a matter of coming up into the mind and spirit of Jesus Himself. That's what it means to pray in Jesus' name.

Not just taking the formula in Jesus' name and tacking it on the end of your prayer and hoping that that's going to cause the magic thing to happen. But to pray in Jesus' name means that you enter into the very spirit of the Son of God. Because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Father, to pray in Jesus' name means that I yield to that spirit of God, the spirit of the Son of God really, who comes down into me.

That I yield to the spirit, that I obey the spirit, that I submit to the spirit. When I do this, then my prayer just lifts off the ground. And it becomes communion that's free and clear and joyful and solid and confident and bold.

And then things start to happen. Then whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth is loosed in heaven.

Whatever you claim on earth is released from heaven and doors open and mountains move and walls come crumbling down. Now everything we see about prayer in here, for instance the accounts of prayer in the book of Acts or the writings of Paul or the book of Revelation, all the prayer we see in here is prayer that originates in heaven, not on earth. It's just shot through, breathed into with the spirit of Jesus Himself.

These people were flesh and blood, men and women, just like we are, but they were praying prayers that were utterly beyond their own understanding or their own power. They were praying now in a way that they could not possibly have prayed before Calvary or Pentecost. An example would be Peter himself.

What a change we see in Peter after Calvary and Pentecost. Now Peter is a man with divine authority and the source, the root of that authority is inspired prayer. Peter kneels by the corpse of Dorcas and prays, calls her back to life.

Goes up on the rooftop to be alone and prays. And while he prays, he gets leading to do something he never dreamed he'd ever do. He has to go to the house of a Gentile.

He's locked up in prison. The church sends up strong prayers to God for him. The prison doors open.

Now these people weren't just having prayer meetings, they weren't just saying their prayers. They were a people gathered in to the name of Jesus. They were thinking with the mind of Christ, seeing with His eyes, hearing with His ears, loving with His heart.

And above all, they were submitting to His Spirit who carried them right up into the will of God. And things happen. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, hitherto you have asked nothing in my name.

We need to learn to get into the name of Jesus. And to get into the name of Jesus means that we have to go out of ourselves and enter into His mind, His Spirit, His nature, His love for the Father, His love for this broken down race so that we're not praying out of ourselves but we're praying in Him. And there are two things that will help us immensely to get into and stay in the name of Jesus when we pray.

First, to know clearly that every single prayer you pray to the Father is based on the death of a son. It doesn't matter what you're praying for, wisdom, forgiveness, power, peace, helping a financial problem, guidance for one of your children, deliverance for a brother or sister, whatever you're praying for, you can come into the presence of God and claim that thing only because of the blood of the Lamb. That's the basis of it.

Every time you really pray you are standing at the cross and the more clearly you understand that the more bold your prayer becomes. And so often we think that we have to somehow go through acrobatics to prove to God that we're really sincere or that we really have faith. Or that we actually deserve an answer to this prayer.

We go through all kinds of nonsense trying to indicate to God that we really mean business and we in the back of our minds are thinking at least we're more religious than those people. That doesn't give us any leverage with God. That doesn't do anything for us.

The only thing that permits you or me to go into the presence of God and claim these things is the blood of Jesus. That blood causes you to come to your Heavenly Father as His Son, as His Daughter and ask and notice who was it that caused the Son to come and die? Who was it that caused Calvary, the very God that you're talking to? The same love that sent the Lamb to come down and shed His blood for you is now listening to the cry of your heart. Not anger, not wrath, not indifference, but love that knows you by name everything about you and is pleased to call Himself your Father.

The second thing to keep in mind so that we can get into the mind and spirit and will of Jesus when we pray is that every prayer we pray and all prayer is made possible only by the power of the Holy Spirit. When you pray and it's really prayer, it's the Spirit. You don't know how to pray.

You don't have it in you to pray. You don't have the vision, you don't have the faith, you don't have the wisdom, you don't have anything to enable you to pray. It's the Spirit who stirs upon your mind.

Every word you utter, every groan, every sigh is inspired by the Spirit of the Living God. We don't know how to pray as we ought. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we know not how to pray as we ought.

But the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. So that when I yield or when you yield, when we yield to the Spirit moving on our minds every time we try to pray and go with the Spirit you won't be praying off the wall.

You won't be praying for all kinds of nonsense. You won't be praying for things that are going to inflate your ego more than it is now. But you will be praying in God's will.

You will find yourself praying for things you never dared to pray for before. Things that never entered into your mind. And you will receive and your joy will be full.

There are miracles literally hanging over our heads all the time. Just waiting to come down the instant we yield to the Spirit who is staring upon us and pray as the Spirit leads us. A little handful of us were downtown yesterday afternoon and while we were there there was an army of people who represent Maharishi or whatever he is the 15 year old Divine Light who is going to save the world.

These people meant business. They weren't playing jokes down there. They were for real.

They had his picture on their lapels or sweatshirts or whatever it was. They were full of joy and patience and they just flooded the downtown area. And here we are playing around.

Hundreds and hundreds of so called professing Christian churches in this city. Nobody else down there. If there were no other church let's see this body right here.

If we only had that handful down there that's a disgrace. And I don't mind saying I was disturbed. And not just mad at everybody else but there's something wrong with me too if this is happening.

Then it came to me before anybody in this flock or any other is going to go out there with a kind of authority and power and boldness that is needed to do any kind of job beyond just passing out leaflets and running and hiding. Before anybody is going to have the authority of the living God out there in the world wherever this happens to be we're first going to have to have the boldness to go into the Holy of Holies before our Father and ask and receive because if we haven't been in the Holy of Holies and asking and receiving we're wasting our time down there. The things we're up against down there are utterly beyond our power.

We can't even begin to cope with it. But it's the same fear and it's the same unbelief that keeps us from opening our mouths out there in the world and proclaiming Christ. The same unbelief and fear keep us from going into the Holy of Holies as sons and daughters of the living God.

And so our Lord again today speaks to us as a body and as individuals whose prayers are far from the refreshing, joyful heavenly thing they ought to be. He says to us draw near to the Father don't be afraid truly, truly I say to you if you ask anything of the Father in my name He will give it to you. God help us to believe that.