The Peace of God
Passage Philippians 4:6-7
Speaker Nick Bending
Service Evening
Series I Have Hidden Your Word in my Heart
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6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
Good evening, everybody. As Steve said, my name's Nick. I've not met you before. I'd love to get you to know you. Come and see me.
Oh, you can hear me now, can't you? Couldn't hear me. Come and see me afterwards. I'd love to get to know you more. As Steve said, we're carrying on in our series that we've been looking at at 06:00 through the summer on verses to remember.
And Steve's done a great job at helping us say it over and over again. And I make no apology for the fact that I'm going to say it quite a bit to you guys as well. Because hopefully by me hearing me say it, you guys are going to get the hang of it. And by the end of it, when Steve comes back and tests everybody, everyone will be able to remember it without the bibles open. But it would be remiss to start this evening on a talk about prayer without praying.
So let's do that to start with. So let's pray.
Thank you, Lord, that we can meet here this evening. Thank you. That we can worship you together. Thank you. That you are a giving God and a saving God.
We petition you this evening to be among us, to come alongside each and every one of us. Open our hearts, our minds, our ears to your word. Let it transform us this evening and in the days and months to come. Amen. So do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation.
By prayer and petition. With thanksgiving present your request to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Do not be anxious about anything. It's a bold statement to make, particularly stood here. This is a massively personal verse for me.
It's the verse that I come back to as a christian time and time again, as Steve said, it's the verse I think about overnight when I wake up thinking what's going to happen tomorrow. It's a verse that both challenges me, but it comforts me in equal measure. That's why I come back to it. I'm sure there are plenty of us in the room tonight that find anxiety a big thing or maybe a completely overwhelming thing. I struggle with anxiety.
It's low level anxiety, for example. Now I'm incredibly anxious about speaking. I'm always anxious when it comes to speaking because I want to speak faithfully about Christ. I want to get it right. I'm anxious that I might say something that's blasphemous or might not be very helpful.
For people.
While you can argue that being anxious might keep you sharp, it's also not a very comfortable place to be. Right. I get anxious about work. I ask myself, have I done enough? Am I good enough at what I do?
What will happen if this thing at work goes wrong? I worry about it. And I find most often my mind, however unlikely, the outcome jumps to it. And that is what is going to happen. That worst thing is going to happen.
It's a certainty. And then until, of course, that's not what happens, and it doesn't happen at all. Starting our verse this evening is no mistake. Starting this way. Paul was writing to the Philippians.
He wants to encourage them. He wants to thank them for their support. He wants to warn them about false teaching. He wants to ensure that they turn to Christ for their needs. And Paul is writing this from a prison cell in Rome, the perfect place to be worried.
To be anxious, to be fearful. He doesn't know what's going to happen to him. Yet he has the faith in our Lord that it'll be okay. He has the faith that despite his seemingly desperately situation, he's able to write about how not being anxious and trusting in our Lord is so important. Now, if this was the end of our verse this evening, I'm not sure that any of us, especially those of us, have to deal with anxiety would be great.
The Bible says not to worry or to be anxious. So you know what? Therefore I won't. I'm not going to do it. From now on, I'm not going to do it.
It doesn't work like that, does it? That's not how it works. It would be amazing if it did, but that's not how it is for many of us. Fortunately, though, our verse continues and gives us the answer to why we should not be anxious and some, even more importantly, some practical steps to help us with that. So do not be anxious about anything.
But in every situation, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. But in every situation.
Four simple words that prefix the next part of the verse. But in every situation. So we could have skipped over these. It seems so simple. Every situation.
The Bible is really clear. It's an instruction that's going to come that tells us, well, what is about to happen. And what we're about to be told is for every situation. It's not for when we feel like it, or when we have time, or when we remember or when we're not distracted by something else, it's for every situation. So that should make us sit up and think, okay, what's coming?
What are we going to be told? What am I going to do in every situation? What is going to turn me away from anxiety?
Okay, back to it. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation. By prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. By prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Okay, so this is the bit.
This is where we have the practical steps that we're being commanded to take by prayer and petition. We're told to pray. We're told to petition. The use of a petition is really powerful because if we petition for something, we're appealing for it. We're crying out for it.
Paul is telling us that our first thought should be when we feel anxious about something is to pray to ask our saving Lord for help. We're instructed, we're told, to present our requests to God. We should cry out to our Lord to save us from anxiety. But it's more than that because as we said, we're asked to pray and petition our Lord in every situation, not just when we're anxious in every situation.
And here's a challenging bit. And what's more, that's with thanksgiving in our hearts. With Thanksgiving in our hearts. So I don't know about you, but on the face of that, that's really challenging. We've got every situation with Thanksgiving.
We're going to pray and we're going to petition our Lord. So imagine the situation. You've been given some bad news and you're fearful of the outcome. And I know at that point my mind and my body take over and I'm imagining the worst possible outcome.
My first thought should be, I must pray fully with Thanksgiving to our Lord because that's what he's told us to do. The challenge here is perhaps not so much to cry out for help, because that's quite easy. We tend to do that in hard times, but it's to find a way, or the words to do it with Thanksgiving as well. And do you know what? It's even harder if our prayer lives are not in good order.
How can we pray with Thanksgiving in the hard times if we're not used to praying in the good times, when we have got things to be thankful for? How do we shift our reaction to a situation of one of prayer when times are good and bad as a family. A couple of weeks ago, we were privileged to take our annual trip to the Keswick convention up in the Lake district. And as an aside, I really can't recommend it enough. Please, if you want to know about it, come talk to me at the end.
I would love to talk to you about it, but we were treated to a week of Bible teaching from a guy called Vaughan Roberts. Most of you, some of you will know his name. He's the rector of St Eve's Church in Oxford and he's written extensively on helping us understand the Bible and our Lord more closely. He spent the week speaking on psalms, and he spoke so clearly and eloquently on how these songs should help us express ourselves in our christian lives. And he speaks far better than I ever will.
So I'm going to play you a little bit. So if we could play the clip, please. And it challenged me a lot. I think it might challenge you as well.
Do we pray as Jesus prayed, with fervent cries and tears?
If not, why not? Is it because we think we can cope?
Ian Murray, in his brilliant biography of Doctor Martin Lloyd Jones, the welsh evangelical leader, said of Lord Jones, his basic unease with english evangelicalism was its failure to recognise their lack of true spiritual power. So Lord Jones, the Welshman, looked at english evangelicals and thought, well, they think they can fix things. I think it was a time at General Sid in the Church of England, there was a debate about evangelism. And at the end of a long debate, the resolution was to set up a committee. We can just have a committee and then we'll fix things, but we can't fix things.
Maybe you feel in your life sometimes, yes, things are difficult, there are spiritual challenges, but you back yourself, no, we can't fix things. These enemies are far, far too great for us. I remember the first time I preached at St Ed's and we just sung the old hymn, I need thee. Oh, I need thee, every hour I need thee. And I sang that to myself before I preached because I felt the need of his help.
Now I'm so used to preaching. The danger is, I think I can do this, but I can't. I can't live the christian life. I can't fight against sin. I need him.
Do we not pray with fervent tears because we think somehow we can cope? Or is it that we don't care that we live in a world that even though we know Jesus is Lord, he's ignored so on your street, if the word Jesus is ever mentioned, it's very unlikely to be mentioned in a prayer or in a worship song. It's more likely to be used as a swear word. Do I care?
Countries of the world where there's just a handful of believers talking with a friend about turkey. Turkey, where we go on holiday. It's almost just down the road in modern terms. Quick flight. Handful.
Just a few thousand local believers in that vast country. Do I care? And if I care, do I think, oh, well, let's organise a committee, we can fix things. No. Pray with fervent cries and tears or the crisis in the church at the moment, at least my own church leaders abandoning the word of God, trying to fit in with the culture rather than prophetically speak to the culture.
Do I give up? Or do I think, well, we can fix it with good organisation, a bit of money, able people. Or do I cry out to the Lord with fervent cries? Tears?
Do we pray fervently like Jesus? Do we care enough to pray? Do we think we can solve things ourselves? They're all powerful questions that form poses. They're all thought provoking.
Hit me right here. I was sitting there and I heard that and it hit me right here. He went on exploring more around this and I really do encourage you, if you've got time, look it up on YouTube, watch the whole thing. He talks really eloquently about it. Do we have a prayer life that allows us to pray for every situation?
With thanksgiving, are we able to pray in both the good and the bad times with fervour? Or do we think that we can solve everything ourselves? It opens us up to the question, who in my life is in charge? Is it me? Or have I submitted myself to Christ and have I put him in charge?
These are questions that I struggle with daily. I know and I love our Lord. But it's still a struggle, isn't it? When the world around us tells us it's all about us, it's about us achieving, it's about our success.
This brings us back down with a crash. We're not in charge. We have a Lord who's in charge and he loves us. Why do we know this? Why do we have hope in this?
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation. By prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Verse seven gives us the hope, the encouragement. If we trust the Lord by giving him every situation in our lives, then verse seven tells us what we can expect in return the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. In other words, the Lord will work on your behalf, on our behalf in every situation.
He will provide, he will protect. We may not always understand it or see it in the way that we want as humans, but our Lord has a plan. He will guard our hearts and our minds in every situation.
This is an encouragement, but it'll still be hard for many of us. But if I can, I'd like to try and offer some hope, an example of my hope, personal hope, for me. I became a committed Christian eleven years ago. So I've lived my life both as a non Christian, as an adult, and as a Christian. I look back on my adult life prior to becoming a Christian.
Don't really know how I functioned. The levels of anxiety and stress, particularly on a Sunday evening, were off the scale. I do not know how I functioned, but when I read this verse as a Christian, it was liberating. I was reading about a God who I could have a relationship with, who would fight my battles for me, a God that would be there to rely on alongside me in every situation. It's through God's will and the Holy Spirit that I can stand here this evening and not be hiding behind the pillar going, no, no, I can't do that.
There's no way eleven years ago I could be stood here talking to you, let alone talking to you about Jesus and how great he is and how he saves us. He is a God who hears, he saves us. He looks after us, he equips us, he answers our prayers. He knows what we want. Does that mean that life is easy?
No, but it is possible, because we've got Jesus in our corner, right? He's there alongside us. He says he listens. He does. He's there every day.
We just have to let him in.
I wanted to finish with one final thought, one final challenge, perhaps, to us all. I was talking this talk through with Harry. We were walking down the road, Harry's my eldest, if you don't know. And we were discussing prayer and what it means to pray and how we pray. And his response stopped me dead, stopped me in my tracks.
He said, it's quite straightforward, daddy. Prayer is like a telephone call with Jesus. And if any of you have done any kids work, there's a song, you might know it. I'm not going to ask you to sing along. But it stopped me in my tracks because it reminded me that this childlike image of us on a phone talking to Jesus.
And the line in the song goes, we pick it up and we use it every day. It's so important. So my challenge to all of us here this evening for this week is that every time you sat on the sofa, you're bored at work, you're walking down the street. I know we all do it. Reaching for our phone to cheque the news, play a game or anything like that, is to pop the phone down, take a moment, and instead of doing that, pick up our virtual telephone and pray and talk to Jesus.
Let's be childlike. Let's do that. Let's talk to them in every situation. Because do you know what? When we do it in the good times, when we do it in every situation, when we really, really need him, it's so much easier.
I'd like to close. Let's take a few moments, let's have some quiet prayer, let's have some signs. And then what I'll do is I'll pray for everybody after that. Let's give our thoughts, let's give our week, let's give anything to Jesus right now. Let's do that silently, and then I'll pray for us all.
Thank you, Lord, that you hear our prayers. Thank you, Lord, that you give us the peace of God to guard our hearts and minds. Help us to make you the centre of our lives. Help us to lean on you. Help us to trust in you in both good and troubled times.
Help us to pray fervently to you. Help those of us here this evening who struggle with anxiety. Come alongside us, counsel us, make your presence felt in our lives. Be with us all as we think about how our prayer lives look this week. Help us to give ourselves to you in everything we do in Christ we pray.
Amen.