Intimacy of openness in this prayer

John 17 begins: [1] These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

[2] As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.
[3] And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
[4] I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.
[5] And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

You see the tremendous focus the Lord Jesus Christ has on glorifying the Father. Everything’s about the Father, explains Richard Jordan.

John 17 is what preachers usually refer to as the Lord’s Prayer—the real one. It’s at the end of the discourse He has with His apostles in the Upper Room before He goes into the Garden, and He prays with them. It’s the most extended prayer in the Scripture.

Prayer is just you talk to God, communicate with Him. That’s all prayer is. People get all bent out of shape about the doing of it. Prayer’s like breathing; it’s sort of a natural kind of a thing.

You know, if you get short of breath and you start thinking about it, you make yourself breathe. The doctor says, “Take a deep breath,” and you do, but he doesn’t tell you to keep breathing. You have an involuntary muscle system that just makes you breathe and you don’t even think about it.

Well, prayer is really designed to be that way. If you overthink it, it’s like thinking about, “Am I breathing? Did I breathe enough? Am I going to breathe next time?” You get to overthinking it and all of a sudden it gets to be confusing.

Prayer is just communicating and fellowshipping with God; telling Him what’s on your heart, what’s going on in your life. Now, when you do that, the natural course of things, just the way we’re made, when we commune with someone we talk awhile and then we let them talk to us. The way God talks to us is through His Word.

What prayer winds up being is simply the catalyst whereby we take what His Word says and apply it to the details of our life. And as we apply it to our life and we think it through, we get into this renewing of our mind process where we take the doctrine, and take it out of the pages of Scripture, just as the doctrine is, and it becomes life to us because we put it into our experience. Prayer is the catalyst that accomplishes that.

That’s why I say to you, if you live a prayerless life, you live your life in the flesh. Prayer is not a formality kind of a thing. I was talking to a fellow one time who said, “You know, when you pray it’s like when you go to a job interview—you need to plan what you’re going to say.”

I said, “You don’t think God is hearing you plan that?!” You see, you can’t sectionalize your life away from God. God hears everything you’re thinking and He hears you planning on talking to Him!

It’s like this thing that’s in the news about this team bugging the offices of the opposition’s coaches in order to listen in on the offensive and defensive coaches and their communications.

That’s sort of the way the Lord is with you. He’s got you bugged, man. He knows anything you say, anything you think. He knows it all, so just relax because He’s for you. He’s not doing it so He can, you know, knock you around. He does it because He desires to be that involved in your life.

So when you pray, really you just express your heart to the Lord. One of the privileges and one of the neat things about audible prayer, praying in a group, is you begin to hear what’s in someone’s heart.

One of the great assets of prayer in fellowship, in bonding people together, is you begin to hear this person talking to the Lord—what is his thinking process. It’s a wonderful thing where you’re able to share . . .

Now, most people know that when they pray . . .  half the time people are praying for the crowd. You know, everybody hears me say this, that and the next thing. That’s when you make it religion.

 But when it’s real, you’re able to look into the person’s heart and that’s what you’re doing in John 17. You’re looking into the very heart of the Lord Jesus Christ, at the most intense time in His life.

Here’s the night before He goes to Calvary. All of the plans of eternity, expressed and carried out in time, are brought to a head this night that we’re reading about.

When you go through chapters 17-19, all of the course of the ages, the plans of the godhead from eternity past about eternity future, all pivot on Jesus Christ doing what the Father had planned for Him to do in these evenings. That is, go to the Cross.

Those events are the little fulcrum upon which all of redemptive history resides. So in that kind of an intense moment, the Lord Jesus Christ allows His apostles, and us through the Book of John, to hear and to see into His mind.

One writer when he wrote about this chapter, he entitled it, “Take off your feet for you’re on holy ground.” He wasn’t far from wrong about that because of the intimacy of openness that you get here.