The POWER of Prayer

Prosecuting Our Case, Part II

Gary L. Cox

3.12.02

“The Lord is at hand.  Be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be known unto God and the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 4:5b-7

If I am supposed to moderate my behavior and not pursue and preserve my interests, then what do I do?  With what do I replace scheming, calculating, counter-moves and the whole process of gaining security for my earthly interests?  What is the counter move that a believer makes?  Scripture says in Philippians 4 verse 6, “Be careful for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”  “Be careful for nothing.”  You are probably familiar with the idea of care. “Careful” here does not have the kind of meaning which we use to do something well.  “Careful” in this Greek word means to give great consideration and it usually has an intonation in the Scripture of some form of worry; the mind is so concerned that it cannot shake the worry about a matter. 

We all know that since worry is a sin, we do not want to be sinning so we may quickly say “I am not worrying about anything.”  Then we go on worrying by a different name because we do not want to admit our deep concerns, or lay them at the feet of Jesus.  We are worriers when we are minding earthly things, instead of praying.  What is it you are worrying about?  If you can actually find one of your worries, you have found a place that today you can actively work towards taking on the cross of Christ and gaining that fellowship of the suffering of that cross, as well as that shared promise of the resurrection and its power.  We have to face our worries, and remember that Jesus Christ already defeated them. 

What we fail to realize is our worries are the means that God uses to approach us through earthly things to get us to come to Himself, put them on the cross through deliberate prayer, suffer entirely whatever loss we feel, and go on, go on in the sureness of victory. We may not have what we wish for, but through hope in Christ, we will receive what is better.

In verse the second part of verse 6 Paul writes in contrast, “But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”   We are not to keep quiet or to connive our own way of dealing with our cares and concerns; instead, we are to make our requests known to God.  The Scripture gives us four things to follow here:

1. Requests
2. Prayer
3. Supplication
4. Thanksgiving

Our requests are to be made known to God.  If you have a little list of worries that you are struggling with, “request” literally means those individual items of concern.  Requests create prayer lists because of worries that we want to lay down at the cross.  How more practical can the Lord get in teaching us how to pray and how to process our difficulties?!

When you look at the word “prayer,” whether it be “prayer” singularly or “pray” general, the word that is used in the Greek means a prosecuting of your case before God.  In fact, even today lawyers file briefs called “Prayer for Relief” with the court and judge of jurisdiction.  Prayer is like the appointment, it is like this time that you get aside and you bring your matters before Heaven’s throne.  Prayer is a very broad term, it is very general and includes anything that you bring before God.  Instead of calling it prayer, we might be able to say, “I am prosecuting my case with God.  I am going to where all the power and authority is and I am bringing my requests there.”  That is prayer.  What we find is that the mature believer gets such a vision for the privilege of prosecuting his case before God that he makes it his regular habit to go there.  The whole understanding is this personal relationship with God that is dynamically individual and tediously tenuous with each little point that we are facing.  In other words, God cares about the things that are your cares.  In keeping with this promise is probably the best known Scripture that uses that same Greek word when Peter says, “Casting all your cares upon Him for He careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

Most of us, when we find ourselves arguing with our superiors or authorities, we are actually praying, but we are just praying with the wrong guy.  We need to pray before the throne of God, who will hear our case. 

Supplication is a tough word in the Greek.  Half of the time the Greek word is translated “prayer”, the other half of the time it is translated “supplication.”  There is just a little difference in terms of the idea.  Then the word here for “supplication” really means the particular request for supply.  In other words, very specifically the details of my circumstances – it one of the ways we pray.  There are many things that we do in prayer (honor, praise, request, glorify – see the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer), and supplication is one. In prayer there are two things highlighted here for the crucified life.  One is, we make supplication, we bring up the particulars and we bring our concerns.  Part of supplication has to do with our expressing our feelings, how we feel about a particular thing, “Lord, if this happens, I just feel like this will be the end of me, I cannot imagine how I would ever live beyond this day, it just seems too much to me.”  The word here for “supplication” is the same word used in Hebrews 5 about what Christ did in the garden.  When Jesus was in the garden He made supplication and said, “Lord, if it be possible, remove this cup from Me.”

Supplications are the specific details of your requests – the heart of why you have the concern.  The idea is, you might have five requests but in each request you may have 10-15 supplications, the honest, deep reasons you are bringing your requests.  What you really find is this whole process of praying is bringing my mindset into the heavenly realms.  This is where God is, this is where authority is and the Lord is “at hand”;  my life here on earth needs to reflect this to have the peace of God in ordinary and extra-ordinary matters.

Why is thanksgiving such an integral part of true prayer?  In Romans 1 the basis of idolatry and paganism is the refusal to give God glory and thanks in all things.  The nature of thanksgiving is such that it reminds me and it keeps practically God on the throne of my life.  If I am in a circumstance and I cannot give God thanks, there is a practical flaw in my: We do not believe God brought this cross and we do not believe He is able to remove it.  He is not the source of my comfort, He is not the source of my help, He is not the means of my expectation.  So I am a man without God in the middle of a problem, unable to give Him thanks.  Thankfulness brings back my spiritual perspective, “God is, and God can do anything.”  The fact that God has not done what I would like Him to do is a very powerful statement that He is doing something different than I think is best.  That is true surrender.

Verse 7 concludes the case:  “And the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”  There is a direct consequence to properly processing my worries or concerns in prayer.  If we do not get off our knees in peace, then you did not go into the throne room of God, you did not exchange in debate and in statement of concern all of your worries and all your fears, and you did not, when you had those things so stated, give Him the glory by giving Him thanks and acknowledging that you truly are going to have the requests you have asked and that you have truly brought yourself to the place of thankfulness, rejoicing and when you get up you are going to have peace. 

This is the practical side of the cross.  If you are dealing with Christians who are living under the cross successfully, you will always find the mark of peace in their life.  Nothing is disturbing them because the onslaught of the earthly things that are coming at them, they have already been processed through the heavenly grid and they are looking at it through the heavenly grid and they are seeing it differently and the sword of death to them is not the sword of death but it is the instrument of resurrection, it is the instrument of hope and promise and so they welcome it and they relax and they are just ready to receive whatever God has. 

I have heard the comment at least once in my life, where a Christian came and said, “I had a concern and I prayed and when I finished praying, God gave me peace.”  Then the thing that they prayed and had peace about, they took action upon, “Since I have peace, I am going to make this decision based upon that peace.”  Then time goes on and that decision reaps a nasty harvest.  It was not something they had in mind when they were looking for peace.  Then they come back and they ask with such consternation, “I thought I had God’s peace.  Now it is obvious to me it was totally the wrong decision.  But if I sinned in making the decision, why did God give me peace?”  One little comment about the peace that passes all understanding and how you get to it.  The peace that passes understanding is a peace that only comes because that which in the flesh I treasure most, I sacrificed entirely with no expectation of that being fulfilled on my behalf and I walk away from the loss, I count something loss, with no regret and no expectation of it being restored to me.  That person will never have regrets at the cross of death nor will they say, “Wait a minute, why did this happen?  I prayed and I had peace.”  When we have the peace of God, which surpasses understanding, we lay our lives down and die peacefully because that was the plan from the beginning – we are not seeking our own.

The peace of God that passes understanding is a very peculiar and a very particular benefit.  It is the peace that allows us to embrace death as only temporary and have freedom from all ambitions.  Now I am truly at peace.  As that thing is surrendered, I am unable to be influenced by fear.  I am like a dead man already though I am in the body still alive, as it were. 

Then what is this peace that people talk about that they prayed and get disappointed about?  I will tell you what it is, it is the wrong kind of peace.  It is called “peaceful calculation.” So everything that we get peace about is the expectation of benefit; our peace, then, is not in Christ or His Cross but in the selfish hope that what we are expecting is going to happen will go according to our glory and honor.  The nature of the peace of the cross is I surrender to the hardest possibility of what could happen and I say, “If this be of God, I receive it because it is far greater, it is far better than anything that I could construct.” 

The peace of the cross is a peace that has embraced the cross so it has already died before the time of fulfillment; and, the peace of calculated blessing is a peace that is just designed to give me comfort that if I make this decision, I will not be sorry for it. 

You embrace the cross, you embrace death, you embrace loss and the processing of any incident which I get up from my prayer closet and I have not died to my fears and I have not accepted them on the terms of Christ, I have not prayed at all and I did not come away with anything.  All I did was riddle God with my view of my expectations.  How many people have walked away from God and they are angry at God and they say, “I prayed to God, I surrendered everything to God and then He did this.  Why would He do this?  If this is the kind of God, I do not want anything to do with Him.”  What a calculated covenant.  God is your personal vending machine.  You put in two quarters worth of prayer and you pull the lever and you only get a blessing as you wanted it.  That is not prayer, that is not relationship with God, that is not salvation and that is not the cross of Christ.  The entire working of God to you and I is a continual working of the cross in our personal, daily lives and our individual experiences and the whole purpose of prayer is to prepare our own expectations to release the benefits of earth and accept rather the benefits of heaven no matter what the cost and when the cost comes, I yield with great joy.  Why?  Because I have my eye fixed, I know where the glory is and I am not turning to the right or left because I know where the glory is.  Thus I have the peace that passes understanding.  That is the definition of the peace of God.

END OF ARTICLE TWO  (4.16.03)

“The peace which passes understanding.”  Unless you looked at the Greek you would not get the incredible power of this phrase.  Go back to verse 6, it says, “Be careful for nothing.”  Literally in the Greek it means “be mindful of nothing.”  Do not sit there calculating and considering and thinking through, “Okay what is going to be the strategy, what is going to be the consequence, what is going to be the benefit, how am I going to get from A to B?”  That is what we set aside, calculated considerations, and we die on the cross, surrendering all to God.  Now I am going to get a peace that is beyond calculated understanding.  That word there is the same word, it is the calculation of the mind.  Nobody working out of the mind, which is the worldly vessel that God has given to us while we live here, nobody operating out of the mind will choose the cross.  It is a mindless choice.  It is impossible for a man to let go of his life without some calculated sense of an improvement of it.  What we find here is this spiritual work of the cross as such that it moves me from the earthly level of calculating on the earth’s plane and transfers me to the heavenly level and it gives me a perspective that only God has and all that God shares with me is not the end, is not the process, He shares with me His peace.  The assurance, unequivicably, that no matter what cost I pay, it is nothing compared to what He has in store.  So without calculation, I abandon all to Christ and Christ alone.  I yield, I give up my rights, I give up every anticipation.  Thus, in me is worked this great exchange of minding earthly things and having my conversation in Heaven.  Getting that audience with God and getting God’s view on it and living it out right here in the flesh in time and space.  In that context alone then this peace comes.  There is an interesting word here, this peace which passes understanding, it says, “Shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”  That word in the Greek literally means a military guard.  What is the effort of calculations that men use?  It is to protect themselves, to protect their assets, to preserve their interests.  So they are always looking for ways of guarding those interests in the best way possible.  What we have here is instead of guarding our assets, God recognizes that you have nothing here on earth that is important to you, “Where I am taking you you are not even going to need your body, so do not worry about it, I will improve that.”  In fact the context is out of that, “He shall change our vile body.”  There is an important concept, this understanding that I have to have a measured surrender of the preciousness of this life including my own body because it is something that is being transferred and exchanged.  The only thing that you and I have that is precious and real and eternal, it comes down to these two things that are guarded by the peace of God, my mind and my heart.  Those are the two things that need guarding.  I do not need to mind or guard my assets, on my earthly concerns.  Everything that is my asset, everything that is my earthly concern, even the physical frame that I live in, all of that is going to burn.  It is all on a very temporary schedule.  No matter how well I provide, it is still going to be cut off and be nothing and I am going to be left with that inheritance that is eternal.  So what I need here in order to endure the cross and suffer the loss of all things, I need a vine guard.  I need a military outpost of strong men who can resist the onslaught against my mind for this worldly viewpoint.  The peace of the God is just that guard.  Here is a man, minding earthly things and he has a whole scheme and he thinks, “Here is how I can bring pressure against that believer, I am going to move against him in such a way, against his assets, his good name, all of those things that are worthwhile in this life, I am going to move against them and I am going to cause him to negotiate.  I am going to get some concessions out of him.  I am going to, by his need to protect and preserve his assets, I am going to gain a counter thing from him to get what I need.”  So the whole mindset of the earthly, worldly men functions but not so the believer.  As the calculated attempt to come after that which I hold dear on this world is made, I have already counted it loss, I have already got a better gain going and I am unmoved; my mind is fixed and my heart is set.  Now I have this guard, the guard of the peace of God.  That is what we need, we need the peace that comes from having died.  The peace that comes from having died attends me when words of wisdom from the mind of man come at me.  Everything that comes from the motivation to preserve life is annihilated because this guard of the mind of Christ has already suffered the loss, I have already counted that loss, it is not important to me.  This is a poor illustration but it reminds me of an incredible snapshot of a person’s life, someone I dearly respect, George Washington Carver and his great gifting God gave him, an incredible scientist.  At the early part of his career he gets a call that basically says, “Give up whatever you have in this world because you have a need to serve people that have a need that is so great.  Surrender your ability to do well to serve.”  God worked in his heart and he gave up his fast developing career, he came to Tuskagee Institute to help found that school for former slaves and as time went on he did very well, he was blessed, his name became a household word.  He became so well known though that the best industrialists of the day, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, they wanted him full-time on their staff.  Plastics were invented by George Washington Carver and Henry Ford adapted them to the automobile.  There is a story of Carver in his lab coat and a representative from Edison comes to visit with the plea to join his company.  This is turn of the century, early 1900s, every household income was about $2-3,000, Thomas Edison comes and says, “We want you on staff for a $100,000 salary.”  It was an incredible and immediate response because he had the peace of God guarding his mind in Christ Jesus.  He had already died to gain, he had already come here to serve instead of have gain.  He chuckled and said, “That is a strange offer, what ever would I do with $100,000?”  And then he opens the drawer and whatever salary he got at that time, maybe $6,000, he says, “I do not know what to do with the checks I am getting now,” and he had a stack of checks weeks and weeks old that he had not cashed because he was too busy he did not have time to spend money.  That is a picture of being guarded.  Your heart is guarded in advance because you have set aside the expectation of earthly gain instead you have the heavenly hope, whatever it is.  There is the process for the cross in our daily life.  You and I cannot walk the cross except we have our case prosecuted before God.  We need every one of our requests prosecuted and I dare say from a practical experience, my opinion would be that you and I very rarely recognize the long list of things that need to be prosecuted before the throne of God.  I will close with my own assessment here, I find in my own life that praying through to have the peace of Christ is not as difficult for me as it is in recognizing where I am worried and struggling. My problem is I carry my worries out here and I deny them.  Almost all of my worries are all the time unattended by prayer because I am denying that I have a worry.  It is not until my worries get so big that my coat sticks out and gets caught in the door and I say, “What is this?  I have all kinds of worries in here,” and then I take that to the cross.  But I believe God would have us quickly and entirely and thoroughly and regularly prosecuting particulars of our case so that we might walk in the liberty of the glorious peace that passes understanding.  That is the nature of the Christian walk.  We have nothing except the effort to guard our hearts and minds as we go through the difficulty of daily life. 

The Gospel accounts of Christ going to Jerusalem deliberately is a significant account of pursuing the cross.  It is so interesting if you play this stage out, we have the deliberate focus on the cross in all of what Christ does.  Everything that He does is spoken in light of the cross.  You can see how it tempers.  Everything that is spoken by the disciples and by the Pharisees and priests, I say everything, virtually everything, from there is spoken out of the minding earthly things which reject the cross.  It is so interesting to see the interaction between the two fields of play.  Christ un-waivered that guard on His heart and mind, as it were, just plows Him right towards the cross, smoothly, no amount of controversy or wave unsettles Him and He is able to stop and heal a blind man, He is able to rebuke the disciples for seeking worldly gain and at the same time tell them, “Yes, you are going to get the baptism I got, it is coming, but you just do not get the seat you want to sit on once you have been through it.”  We see the unfolding of our own anxieties.  There is a lot of teaching that goes on in this section if you are in Matthew, pay attention to the teachings, whether it be the contents of the discussion or the reaction, you find one thing that there is no other message and there is no other situation that lends itself to a different strategy; we are called to lay down our life in the same fashion that Christ laid down His and my need today is to die.  My need is to die in every tangible faction or means that is visible and capable of dying on the earth, everything.  There is nothing on this earth that I have the right to preserve and to hold dear, nothing.  I say that and yet you and I in our spirit we do not receive that naturally and we automatically have ten things that we are worrying about but we excuse that, “Those are not really earthly worries, I am worried about important heavenly things.”  We just change the label.  No, it is the worldly concerns that are snaring in our so-called heavenly mindset.  I encourage you, this is part of the practice of our faith.  When Charlie shared last week from John 12 about this whole issue of judgment being delayed, the reason you and I fall into judgement is because we are prosecuting the earthly outcome.  You have to execute judgment to prosecute an earthly outcome.  It is inescapable.  You cannot pursue an earthly outcome without some kind of judgment.  Sharp, firm decision making and what God is after is surrender of all.  We have to set it aside and there is a coming time for judgment.  Somebody said this that I liked, “Just remember, the day that you demand absolute, perfect judgment for your sake God has to arrest the entire world’s agenda and Christ returns and judges the whole world because that is the perfect day of judgment” and until that time we are experiencing a time of longsuffering where judgment is deferred for the offering of hope, for the offering of life.  That is why Jesus could say, “He that would save his life shall lose it.”  Calculated, measured living, prosecuting my own interest in a worldly mindset, and I am going to calculate, measure, pursue and I am going to die, “whose end is destruction.”  But if I take up my cross and if I surrender my life for Christ’s sake and for the Gospel’s sake, then I am going to find it.  I am going to give up that which is passing and I am going to gain that which is unable to pass, it will endure forever.  That is the call to everyone of us as we go through everyday.  Let us pray.

Father, we come in Jesus’ name and we want to give You glory and we want to give You thanks and we want to just ask for help Lord, it is so unlike us to only prosecute our case before Your throne.  We are so prone Lord to scrapping and fighting and seeking our interests, forgetting that with one breath You can alter the course of history.  Lord You have the means, furthermore Lord, You are perfectly trustworthy and You have promised that in Christ You will take every circumstance and bring for us the greater blessing and a greater glory as we learn with Jesus to die the death.  I pray for us as fathers especially Lord that we could lead the way, that the appearance of moderation, self-control, gentle spirits, that that would appear in our ministry as fathers and husbands and at work where we have duties and responsibilities, Lord that there would be an example of how peace becomes the product and fruit of prosecuting our case.  We thank You in Jesus’ precious name, amen.