Incense and Prayer

encouraged you to sing the songs in your family worship. If you sing the songs all week long during family worship, even if you don't do every song every day, your children start to learn these hymns and so do you. And in fact, the only way I could get through the Vilest Offender Who Truly Believes line without breaking down was that we sang it so many times this week that I could get through that line. but in Revelation 8 which we're going to read in a minute I just want you to see verse 3 and 4 and I want you to think about it in the context of last week's sermon which was Nadab and Abihu bringing unauthorized fire unauthorized incense before the Lord and the Lord smote them instantly means he killed them And another angel, Revelation 8.3, came and stood at the altar with a golden censer.

And he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne. And the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints rose before God from the hand of the angel. what we can see here is that this incense that's rising up from the altar up to God this incense represents the prayers of his people it's what we offer to God it's what we can in a sense send to God like sending smoke up and for us to be able to come to God took Jesus Christ to die on our behalf And so when you wake up in the morning and you say your prayers or before bed, or before a meal, and you think about praying, and it's a commonplace thing, literally every religion has prayer. Every religion that has some kind of supernatural deity He has a way that people try to interact and pray and offer sacrifices and ask for things.

And what I want to remind you of is that our prayers to God are heard by Him. And He listens to our prayers because of Jesus Christ making atonement for His people. So what that means by implication here is that before you were saved, God wasn't listening to your prayers. In fact, the Bible calls our prayers an abomination to Him if we turn away from the hearing of His law.

If we are people who have not yet repented and trusted in Christ, our prayers are just basically hitting a wall. Because God listens to the prayers of the faithful. Now, this is one of the reasons why I think Nadab and Abihu offering this strange fire on the altar of incense to the Lord. Why this was such a big deal? Because what God was letting us know is He doesn't hear the prayers of those who He hasn't granted the faith to.

The only ones who come to a father to request childlike blessings would be his children. The only ones who come to a king to receive what the king has to offer would be his subjects And we serve a great king and a great father and he loves his children dearly And actually that's part of the joy that we can have is knowing that when we come to God, he hears us. You could be, so it sounds very exclusive, yeah, God doesn't hear the prayers of the wicked, He calls him an abomination.

He's not answering the prayers of all these people. And it sounds so negative, but let's put it in the positive. God hears every cry of your heart. When the righteous cry for help, Yahweh hears and delivers them. It says in Psalm 34. On your very worst day as a Christian, when you have spent the day angry and irritable and jealous and envious and in sin, and when you have maybe stolen things even, when you've lied or been dishonest in maybe a lesser way in your mind, when you've failed to keep holy God's commandment of marriage in all ways, when you have found yourself not loving your brothers and sisters the way you ought, when you've found yourself resentful or impatient or unkind, God hears your prayers. because those prayers are made through Jesus Christ.

Now we can certainly make things difficult between us and God by our sin at times. We can certainly feel the lack of his smiling face upon us because of our sin and he allows us to feel that. But the fact of the matter is he's always smiling upon his children because he sees us the way he sees his son it us who blocked from sensing it when that happens you blocked from God God not blocked from you and so for the believers I just want you to be encouraged that God hears your prayers and honestly knowing that God hears your prayers should bring you a sense of shame to realize how little you pray if you had direct access to the governor of Ohio or the mayor of your city or the President of the United States, you would probably be on the phone a lot more often trying to get some things done than we are just talking to our own Father in Heaven who has all power and all authority everywhere.

And so I don't want you to feel shame, no, Jesus took all of our shame for us. So put it all on Him. Come to Him now and just ask Him to help you to be a better prayer. And as we go to the table, this is a chance to be reminded that you are in communion with Jesus Christ. That you have a union with him that can't be separated. A union that is so close that when you talk to the Father in heaven and you make your requests known, it's no different than if he was making them known.

And so you ask him to conform your request to his perfect will that he might fill them out. So what I want to do now is sing Glorious Day together. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us, and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net. You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us.

I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures