Prayer: Praise and Thanksgiving

This morning we're going to be talking about the issue of prayer. Someone once told me that you can see a lot of a person's theology through the way that they pray. People who pray in a loud voice with great passion and conviction often show their understanding of God to be a God of power and of authority. They remind God of the promises that are found in His word. They think of God as a mighty warrior, a God who is quick to act, who is mighty to save, a God who is always approachable and always on their side.

Others pray with a great humility. They approach God with reverence and holy fear. They speak to God in a quiet, gentle voice. They show their understanding of God to be a God of transcendence, a God that is above the created world. They appeal to God's holiness.

They appeal to God's supreme justice. These people often plead with God in their prayers rather than instruct God on how to act. They like to think of God as a very just and noble king who is willing to listen to their prayers, but are keenly aware of His great knowledge, power, and majesty. And then there are many others, people who simply love chatting with God, who see God as an intimate personal friend.

They see God as an old companion who has travelled many, many miles with them on the journey of life. They feel very comfortable being in His presence and sharing their life stories with Him. Some see God as being distant. Some see God as being very close. Some are very aware of their sin before coming before Him.

Others are very aware of the freedom they have when they come to Him. Can you see how people pray shows what they believe God to be? A while ago, I'm not sure if you remember, we looked at the issue of prayer again and we discussed and we looked at praying for God's will to be done in our lives. Praying for God's will to be done in our lives. And we looked specifically at the example of Jesus and how He prayed.

This morning we're going to be looking at another aspect of Jesus' prayer life. This morning we're going to specifically focus on the attitude of praise and thanksgiving in prayer. If you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to Luke 10, and we're going to be reading from verse 17. Luke 10, verses 17 to 23.

The 72 disciples returned with joy and said, "Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name." Jesus replied, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

At that time, Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and have revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was Your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him." Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.

For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it." So far our reading. When we look closely at the example of Jesus and His prayer life, and we investigate the recorded examples of His prayers, we often see that He gave thanks. It was one of the characteristics of His prayers. We've just read about one occasion where Jesus gave thanks to God.

We have another instance, for example, in John 11, verse 41, where Jesus says, "Father, I thank You because You have heard me." On many other occasions, Jesus gave thanks for meals before He broke bread or whatever. At the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus gave thanks and broke the fish and broke the bread before the people ate it. The night before His death in the upper room, Jesus gave thanks for the bread and the wine that they had. Now the thing is, in the Gospels, we don't find massive slabs of Jesus' prayers except for John 17, where Jesus prays for His disciples, prays for the world, prays for the disciples that would come after His 12 disciples. We don't find much about the content, the exact wording of Jesus' prayers. Yes, the disciples weren't there sort of sitting and recording every single word as He was praying.

But we do notice, however, that when Jesus prayed, His prayers were marked by praise and thanksgiving. It's something that comes up over and over again. So we're going to spend a bit of time in our text this morning in Luke 10. We're going to specifically look at verse 21. I believe there are a few things we can see about an attitude of praise and thanksgiving in our prayer life.

The first thing, point number one, that we notice about the characteristic of thanksgiving in prayer is the need to remember the origin for why we are thankful. There's an old Chinese proverb that says, "When you drink from the stream, remember the spring." In other words, remember where it all came from. Thanksgiving is all about remembrance. Every year we celebrate ANZAC Day.

And the longer I'm in Australia and the longer I celebrate ANZAC Day, the more thankful I am for the sacrifices of our ANZACs, what they have done for this country. It's almost as if you could write an equation for it. The more we remember, the more we are thankful. Remembering is the crux of thankfulness. It goes hand in hand.

For the Jews of the Old Testament, the act of remembering was an extremely important thing. That is how they exercised their faith—to remember. At the Passover meal every year, a child would traditionally have to ask his father, "Why do we celebrate this Passover?" The father would then have to explain to everyone sitting there the act of salvation of God rescuing Israel out of Egypt through mighty power, through miracles and so on. The Passover was a time of thanksgiving as they remembered what God had done for them.

So why did Jesus then give thanks in Luke 10? Because He knew who the original giver was. It was only because God the Father had done something first that Jesus was able to give thanks. You see, nowhere in the Bible does thanksgiving happen in a vacuum. Nowhere in the Bible does thanksgiving happen on its own.

Praise and thanks always happen because of a reason. It always happens because it's a response to a blessing. It's a response to salvation. It's a response to God doing something in someone's life. In fact, the Hebrew word "barakah" is translated as either praise or thanksgiving.

They're not two different things. They're interchangeable. On one hand, you can praise God. On another hand, you can thank God for exactly the same thing. Jesus shows here in Luke 10.

He says, "Father, I praise You, Lord of heaven and earth." In other words, Jesus is remembering who God is. God is the Father, the Lord of heaven and earth. Because You are the Creator of the world, Father. Because You are the King and the Master over all of it, of everything in it, You have obviously had a hand in this situation.

And therefore, I thank You. Jesus knew who the giver of this blessing was. He knew that it was only God who was able to humble the proud and to raise the lowly. Only God could do something so dramatically ironic as to send these 72 lowly peasant farmers and fishermen to do mission work, to drive out demons, to perform miraculous healings.

Do you believe that God is the origin of all the good things you have? Do you really believe that? I think sometimes we forget to remember how we got where we are. We put it down to hard work. We put it down to a bit of luck, to good networking.

But God needs to be remembered. He deserves to be remembered. He deserves the glory and the praise. God is so good. Even though He is the Lord of heaven and earth, He is hard at work in our lives, guiding and opening doors for us.

I mean, if He is the Lord of heaven and earth, then I'm pretty sure He's had a hand in giving you that job, giving you a healthy body to play volleyball, giving you time away. There's a story of a man who once grumbled, "I don't have to thank anyone for what I have. I don't have to thank anyone for anything I have, because everything I have, I got the hard way.

By the sweat of my own brow." His neighbour smugly replied, "But who gave you the sweat?" Thanksgiving in prayer is about remembering the origin of the blessings. The second thing we see in the example of Luke 10 is that thanksgiving in prayer comes from remembering the reason for why we are giving thanks. After saying, "I am the Lord of heaven and earth," Jesus said, "because..." Because there is a reason for His praise.

And the reason is the 72 disciples had returned from their short-term mission trip and they had just completed another chapter in the story of God's salvation of mankind. We have to jump back about 700 years earlier to the time of Isaiah the prophet at the lowest point in the history of Israel, in the darkest days of Israel. And in Isaiah, it was written, "The Lord says, 'These people come near to me with their mouth. They honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up of rules taught by men.

Therefore, once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder. The wisdom of the wise will perish. The intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.'" At the time that Isaiah said these things, there were many prophets, there were many priests that were saying everything is fine. They were the so-called leaders of Israel.

And as they were saying everything is fine, the enemy, the Assyrians, were creeping closer and closer and closer. They were fascinated with the act of worshipping God, the performance of worshipping God, but their worship was empty of any soul. They had no ticker. So God humbled them. That's what Isaiah says here.

God would humble them by destroying their vain pride and the crutch of their intelligence and their so-called wisdom. The Assyrians devastated their towns and took them into captivity. But this was also a prophecy of a time that would come later, and it's pretty much the condition of the human heart. You could say that it is even the condition of our society today. But in 1 Corinthians, Paul speaks about the people who reject the message of the cross.

They see themselves as wise, as intelligent people, and the idea of a saviour who dies on the cross is laughable. It's ridiculous. And Paul says, "Well, the message of the cross will humble the wise and will frustrate the intelligent." It's like a farmer who once dined with a well-to-do gentleman. While there, the farmer prayed at the table.

He was a humble, godly man. And his host said to him jeeringly, "That's old-fashioned. It's traditional. It's not customary nowadays for well-educated people to pray before they eat." The farmer answered that for him it was customary, but he admitted that there were some on his farm who never prayed over their food.

"Well then," said the gentleman, "they are sensible and enlightened." "Who are they?" "My pigs," he answered. Jesus remembered the promise. He remembered that the wise people, your Pharisees, your teachers of the law, would ignore the message of the kingdom of God.

And the irony is that these people who were so caught up in wanting to see God come missed seeing God among them. The irony is they were around when people were being healed and didn't believe. They missed out. Yet the disciples who carried this message to the surrounding villages were humble fishermen and farmers. And they returned to Jesus and say, "Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name."

Jesus says to them in verse 23, "Do you know how lucky you are to have seen these things? So many prophets and kings would have given their left arms to have seen what you have seen, to have heard what you have heard." Those silly Pharisees have missed out. There is a reason that Jesus gave praise for. Thanksgiving doesn't happen in a vacuum.

There's a natural law here, just like Newton's third law of physics for engineers: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every word of thanksgiving, there's an equal and corresponding word of blessing. Remember the reason for why you are giving thanks. For every blessing we receive, we should give thanks.

Our prayer life should just be packed full of praise and thanksgiving. Instead of saying simply, "Thank You for the food," let's remember why we are thankful. "Thank You for the food, Lord, because I asked for my daily bread and I've received it. Thank You for the food, Lord, because now I can feed my family." There's a great power in remembering and counting our blessings.

Thanksgiving is a response to a blessing, and the cycle isn't complete unless we give thanks for what we have received, for what we have experienced. So the second thing we see is that Jesus remembered the reason for thanksgiving. And then lastly, it's to remember the attitude. Thanksgiving is uplifting and is liberating. If you are struggling in your Christianity, if you are feeling down, if you're feeling depressed, thanksgiving is going to be the cure for it.

Thanksgiving rises from the depths of the soul, through its way to the mouth. It touches every nerve. It touches every sense we have in our body. Have you ever had that feeling of pure and utter joy? It swells inside you.

It bubbles out of you. It comes out. And it feels like if you can't give thanks, if you can't express it in some way, you're going to burst. We see in today's passage, notice how Jesus' thanksgiving starts. It says that Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit.

See that in verse 21. "Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said." I think when we have remembered the first two aspects of thanksgiving in our prayer lives, when we remember who the origin of our blessing is and the reason for our blessing, then from that flows the attitude of joy. Notice that Jesus had joy through the Holy Spirit. Some indication that this joy is supernatural.

This joy is that joy that surpasses all understanding. It's a joy that someone like Paul could have in prison, fearing for his life, not knowing if he's going to make it to see the next sunrise. It's that sort of supernatural joy that comes from God. It's not something that can be attained simply on a human level. And that's why I believe Christians do joy the best.

Christians experience joy at its most intense, at its most intoxicating. We do it best because the Holy Spirit brings that bubbling joy out in us. We know that the Holy Spirit's role is to remind us of the promises of God. That is the Holy Spirit's role or function. He gives us a bird's-eye view of everything around us, and then just like a person who's had sort of an out-of-body experience, the Holy Spirit enables us to see with clarity that, "Wow, I really am blessed.

I really am blessed." I believe that the core emotion of Christians will always be joy. Listen to what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 14 regarding the scandal of eating certain types of food. He says to the Christians, "The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men."

Isn't that great? It all boils down to righteousness, being in a right relationship with God, peace in our hearts, and joy. The times when I haven't experienced the joy of the Holy Spirit have been times when I failed to remember. I failed to remember the origin of my freedom. I failed to remember the Saviour who loved me and laid down His life for me.

I failed to remember every good thing I have in my life. We must begin by giving thanks. Let's season our prayer life with thanksgiving and praise. Remember the origin of our blessings. Remember the reason for them.

Remember the attitude that comes because of them. Your life will be the richer because of it. Joy and peace will be the characteristic of your life.