Chapter 1: What is the significance of private worship in Christian life?
It's not if you pray. There's an expectation of his disciples as he's preaching the Sermon on the Mount. He says, when you pray, go in to your closet and shut the door. When? It's the expectation that those who are his, those who are following after him, that have fallen in love with him, will want and will spend time in prayer and in the word.
You've probably heard a pastor mention that before, that Jesus said, when you pray, not if you pray. Yet despite this, it can be a struggle, a struggle to prioritize it, a struggle to keep our eyes open as we wake before the sun comes up, a struggle to be consistent. Or maybe the struggle is simply not knowing what you should do during these times alone, privately with the Lord.
Today on Renewing Your Mind, our guest teacher will help us think through both the why and the how of private worship. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and it's good to have you with us on this Wednesday. This week, you will have heard three messages from Jason Holopoulos' 11-part series, Created for Worship.
Consider taking the time to dig deeper into this topic when you request the entire series and the physical study guide when you donate before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org. We'll send you the DVD and study guide and unlock both digitally in the Ligonier app as our way of saying thank you for supporting this daily podcast.
Well, if you have ever struggled with regularly being in the Word and prayer, stay with us, because here's Reverend Halopoulos.
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Chapter 2: How can we prioritize daily prayer and devotion?
As we're looking at worshiping with all of our life, our Lord and our God, we're going to come to that last sphere of worship as we talk about secret worship, or what has been called private worship. or as evangelicalism in some ways has been very helpful in its kind of encouragement for you and I to have daily devotions or those quiet times as it is often called.
And that's what we want to look at and spend some time thinking about today. As we do so, I want to encourage you that this is not something that's new with evangelicalism. Quiet times, daily devotions is not something that just started in the last hundred years or even the last couple of hundred years. Rather, it's something that we see in the Scriptures, if you want to think upon it that way.
When Moses has died and has ceased to be in the land with the people before actually they entered the land, Joshua is commissioned by God. And there in Joshua 1, the Lord tells him, you are to meditate upon the law day and night. Every day and every night he commissions Joshua to do this. We continue through the scriptures.
We all know the story of Daniel, how Daniel was willing to give his life to spend time in prayer with the Lord and be willing to be persecuted for such. We observe it in the Psalms. Throughout the Psalms, there is this constant refrain of thinking upon the Lord, even through the watches of the night and meditating upon his word, finding it sweeter than honey, going to him in prayer.
Just an example, let me give you here from Psalm 63. David, who is often the writer of our Psalms, says this in verses 5 through 8. He says, My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food. My mouth will praise you with joyful lips. When I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night. For you've been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.
My soul clings to you, your right hand upholds me. We could turn to various passages like that in the Old Testament. It's not just in the Old Testament, is it? When we get to the New Testament, we find a man by the name of Cornelius. They're in Acts, who we're told is a God-fearing man. And he is praying constantly to God, and it's in one of those prayer times.
that the Lord reveals himself to Cornelius. And following that, Peter is up on the roof, and as he is up on the roof praying, spending time with his God, he receives this word from God that he is to go and to minister the gospel to Cornelius. But maybe all we really need is the example of our Lord. In Mark 1, among other passages, the very beginning of Mark's gospel,
He says that Jesus rose up early and he went out to a quiet place to spend time with his Father in prayer. Now wrap your mind around that. Here is the eternal begotten Son of God who knows uninterrupted fellowship with his Father. And Jesus found it necessary in his humanity to go out before everyone else was up early in the morning to spend time with his Father.
He saw this as a precursor to going out on his day. He sees it as something that you and I should mark our lives as well. If we look at Matthew chapter 6, you know Matthew 5 and 6 and 7 here in this great Sermon on the Mount. And as Jesus is speaking in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew chapter 6, he says this,
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Chapter 3: What examples from the Bible illustrate the importance of secret worship?
The great joys and the great discouragements, it's the same thing of the Christian life, is that we just don't always know what actually is being accomplished. I don't know. I spend time with the Lord in prayer here, praying for these things, and I'm not quite sure, was there any effect from these prayers? And that's both the discouragement and the joy of the Christian life.
It could be a discouragement because you go, did I just waste the last 20 minutes? But it's also one of the great encouragements. because I never quite know what he's doing. And just a moment spent here can have eternal benefits here. It's amazing. It should motivate us. So what does it look like to spend time daily with the Lord?
Well, I really don't need to tell you, but it means attending to the means of grace as we've talked about. He works by his word and he works in prayer. And so that's what we do when we're in our closets, when we're alone with Him. We open up the Word daily. Would you have a plan for doing so?
Not just open the book and say, I believe in a God of providence, and you just open up wherever and read what page it opens up to. No, you have a plan. Maybe it's a yearly plan where you're going to read through the Bible in a year. Ligonier provides wonderful resources along those lines. Table Talk does.
Or maybe it's you're going to work your way through a book of the Bible with a commentary alongside of you. And you're going to delve into the book of Romans and try and understand it better. I remember hearing Sinclair Ferguson years ago say that that was one of the great things he did early in the Christian life.
He took Murray's commentary on Romans and he sat down and he just studied Romans until he knew it through and through using that commentary. You could do something like that.
Take a good study Bible where you have those notes at the bottom and you're just reading through the passages and reading the study notes, the Reformation Study Bible or the ESV Study Bible and sowing it in your heart so that you're growing in your knowledge. And allow that knowledge to inform your heart and stir your affections so that you become more like the one you love.
Just attending to his word. Man does not live by bread alone, but a hunger and thirst for the word of God. And just like when you plant a sapling oak tree, it takes time, but it needs nourishment. It needs that water. It needs that sun. So you need nourishment. So you've got to keep feeding your soul. You have to keep feeding it. The second, of course, is prayer.
In prayer, just bowing before the Lord, we're making our requests made known. We're giving Him adoration. We're giving Him thanksgivings. We're just spending time with Him. This maybe is where we suffer more than anywhere else. I have a dear friend that is from Malawi, Africa, and he sent me just the other day.
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Chapter 4: How does private worship shape our relationship with God?
Well, you could get together with an older Christian in the faith and say, teach me to pray. And you listen to them pray. Listen to your pastors and elders pray. They pray in service. Or, as we've talked about before, you could take a passage of Scripture and I'll flip open to one here. How about Psalm 121, my favorite psalms? And just turn around the pronouns. It's this easy.
Let's just turn around the pronouns here together. If I was praying this myself, I would pray it like this. Lord, I lift up my eyes to the hills from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. I know you will not let my foot be moved. You who keeps me will not slumber. You who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. Lord, I know that you are my keeper.
You are the shade on my right hand. The sun shall not strike me by day nor the moon by night. Lord, I know that you will keep me from all evil. Would you keep my life? Would you keep my going out and my coming in from this time forth and forevermore? It's that easy. You can do that with psalm after psalm. You could just turn around the pronouns so that it's you speaking.
And those things begin to inform your mind and you'll find that they begin to come across your lips just when you're praying extemporaneously without the scripture in front of you. Be a praying people. What do you do when you feel dry, as many of us often feel dry in the midst of our Christian lives?
What do you do when you don't feel like getting out of bed today and spending time with the Lord before you go about your work? You get out of bed and you spend time with the Lord before you go about your work. That's what you do. You keep at it. You just keep at it. What do you do, though, when it just continues to kind of abide there? There's just kind of a lukewarmness, just kind of a dryness.
You let the Lord know. Not as if he doesn't know, but you cry out to him, Lord, would you help me? I just feel dry. I don't feel your nearness. I know that you are with me. You have promised that you would never leave me nor forsake me, but I don't feel it. May I experience, not just know it, but can I experience it? Would you reveal yourself to me in that way?
I will often, what I do in such moments is I will take a passage about Christ and I'll just meditate on it. I had a mentor that used to say, what you need to do is you read the word, you memorize it, and then you meditate upon it, and then you imitate it. So he'd say, you memorize, meditate, imitate. Memorize, meditate, imitate.
Memorize the word so that it's so in your mind that then you can just turn it over and turn it over and turn it over in your mind. I think of it like a piece of good chocolate. You put it in your mouth, you're just going to suck all the goodness out of that thing before you swallow it. You're just turning it over in your mind. But you have to have it memorized to be able to do that. Or it's here.
And you can just keep looking at it and every kind of facet, like it's a diamond with all of these different facets on it. And you're just trying to get everything you can out of it. And then you allow your life to be impacted by that. So I'll do this. I'll be like Jacob with the Lord. I'm not going to let you go until my affections are stirred in some way for you.
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