Pursuing a Culture of Prayer
June 8, 2025
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
1 Thessalonians 5:17
17 Pray without ceasing.
This morning, we are beginning a new sermon series called, The Praying Church: Learning Ceaseless Prayer from Paul. Each week, we’ll take a look at a passage from one of Paul’s letters where he’s telling a church to pray, teaching a church how to pray, or providing a church a model of prayer. And we’re doing this because one of our goals as a church for 2025 is to pursue a culture of prayer. We don’t want to just be a church where prayer is featured as one aspect of what we do. No, we want prayer to infuse everything about what we do. To put it another way, we don’t want to just be a church that sometimes prays, we long to be a praying church. And we’ve taken some ground in this way. We have community groups going through prayer studies, we’ve got a regular monthly prayer meeting, we’ve got prayer ministers available following each service to pray with anyone who would want prayer for anything big or small, we have corporate prayer on Sunday mornings, we’ve got prayer in classes. But for Community Free Church to be marked by a culture of prayer, we’ve got more ground to take. So for 11 weeks, we are going to sit with the apostle Paul and learn what it means for every moment of our lives to be saturated in prayer. So, if you want to be a part of pursuing a culture of prayer in this place, come expectant for God to teach us through his Word, and come ready to participate in the glorious privilege it is to call upon the God of the universe. Let’s do that now.
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
This summer, we will have more kids in the service than usual since we’re on a break from kids’ Sunday schools. So, like some summers in the past, we’ll have blank pages for kids to draw pictures related to the sermons we’re preaching. So this morning, kids, draw a picture of all kinds of people praying together.
In one of his wonderful books on prayer, Christian author Paul Miller tells this story:
An East Indian evangelist described his first experience at an American prayer meeting. He was visiting a megachurch known, even in India, for the pastor's outstanding preaching. He was thrilled when the pastor invited the three thousand Sunday worshipers to the midweek prayer meeting. The pastor even shared that something was "heavy on his heart" for prayer.
The evangelist couldn't wait. In India, the prayer meeting was the heartbeat of the church, where you stormed the heavens, often far into the night. The designated prayer chapel seated only five hundred, so he arrived early to get a seat. But at the designated 7:00 p.m. start time, he was alone. At 7:15, puzzled and still alone, he wondered if he had the wrong location, so he went outside to check the name. Yes, it was the same chapel the pastor mentioned on Sunday. Finally, at 7:30 a few people straggled in, chatting about sports and weather until the leader arrived at 7:45. The leader shared a short devotional with the seven attendees, prayed briefly, and closed the meeting.
The evangelist was stunned. No worship. No crying out to God for help. No senior pastor. What was heavy on the pastor's heart?
What about prayer for the sick, for the lost?
No one in this story thought that corporate prayer is important [Miller continues]: not the senior pastor (he didn't show up), the congregation (only seven came), or the prayer leader (he was forty-five minutes late and only had one brief prayer). Prayer was a mere window dressing. If you doubt something, you don't think it works, so you don't use it. No one here thought prayer works. Unbelief is as practical as faith.[1]
I share that story for no other reason than the fact that for many churches in the West, including ours, I would bet it feels a little uncomfortable listening to that story because it’s so convicting. We hear that story and we know that something is wrong, and yet if we examine our own lives, other than a zealous few among us, this story is representative of our own realities. To put numbers to this, a recent study published by Pew Research Center[2] indicates that only 60% of Christians in the US say they pray daily. Like if that percentage was a test score in school, American Christians would be failing. 13% of those American Christians surveyed said that they seldom or never pray. What? If that’s an accurate statistic, of the 224 million people in the U.S. who claim to be followers of Jesus, almost 30 MILLION American Christians don’t pray.
Now, I am confident those numbers are not representative of our congregation. Yet, I think we should be shaken by these statistics. We may talk a big game about the importance of prayer on paper, but in practice, I would venture to guess that many, if not all of us have a general sense that our prayer life could and should be stronger. So where is the disconnect? Why is it that so many of us would confess the importance of prayer in the same breath as we confess our own prayerlessness?
There are a few reasons why I think our age is plagued by a pandemic of prayerlessness, but I think at the core, we have lost sight of our need for God, which blinds us from our need for ceaseless prayer. As much as it’s a blessing to live in a country that has been graced with so much prosperity, the availability of anything at any time of the day or night has left us numb. I mean, why do we need to pray, “give us today our daily bread” if I can tap a few things on my phone and have any food item I can imagine hand delivered to me, still steaming, without even needing to leave my house? Why pray for manna when I have DoorDash? And of course, I could get into how much of an inconvenience it is to have to wait more than two days for a package from Amazon, or any number of other privileges we have that have become so normal to us. What I want us to see is that the blessing of abundance can be a curse when it acts as amnesia for our soul, causing us to forget that we are utterly and totally dependent on God for everything. Not just our food, not just our clothes, but our next breath and our next heartbeat.
So, in order to take our passage today seriously, we need to reckon with our utter dependence on God. And only then can we see that a heart posture of dependent, ceaseless prayer is the way we take hold of God’s resources with are ours in Christ. In order to see this, we are going to ask three questions: what is ceaseless prayer? why should prayer be ceaseless? and who do we ceaselessly pray to?
And I’ll just mention here at the beginning of this series that there are some of you for whom this series ought to act as a wakeup call. Prayer is commanded in the Bible, and that’s not something you know. But there are others of you, probably more of you, that know that you should pray more, but maybe lack the motivation to. My hope for this series is that we walk away with both of these people being confronted. For the person who needs to know that prayer is a command, we’re going to see that all over the place. But for the person who feels guilty about not praying enough, my hope is that this series gives you a vision for why we would want to pray in the first place. Not just why should we, but why should we want to?
WHAT IS CEASELESS PRAYER?
Let me read our text again in case you forgot it. 1 Thessalonians 5:17. Three words:
17 Pray without ceasing
So, the first question we need to ask and answer is, “what is ceaseless prayer?” But maybe even more fundamentally, we need to ask the question, “what is prayer?” Pastor Tim Keller has an incredible definition of prayer, and all week I tried to write a better one, but I just couldn’t do it. It may be an impossible task. So, let’s use his. According to Keller, “prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”[3]
What do we learn about prayer? Prayer is communication with God. Prayer is not just throwing some words at a black hole and hoping something changes because of it. Prayer is not an attempt to manifest what you want. No, prayer is communication with a person. Prayer is relational. Prayer builds intimacy. Prayer is the unveiling of our soul before the one who has called us into relationship with him. So much so that prayer eventually becomes a full encounter with God.
But prayer is also a response. God has begun a conversation with us in his Word, and prayer is continuing that conversation. This is incredibly good news for us because we don’t need to try to start a conversation with God and hope that he will listen to us. No, he has already invited us into conversation and continually speaks to us in and through his Word. He’s already listening. It’s also good news because no prayer is off limits. When God invites us to pray, listen to what he says:
Mark 11:24 – Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
John 15:7 – If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
Philippians 4:6 – Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
1 John 5:14 – And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anythingaccording to his will he hears us.
I could go on. We’ll talk later in this series about when the answer to these prayers is “no.” But for now what I want us to see is that over and over when we are invited by the Lord to pray, we’re invited to bring anything and everything to him. No prayer is off limits. I mean, this is God, after all. He already knows what you’re thinking. Just tell him.
So again, according to pastor Tim Keller, “prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.” So good.
With a better grasp of what prayer is, now we can return to our question. What is ceaseless prayer? What does it mean to continue a conversation with God ceaselessly? Do I need to clear out my calendar?
Well, no. And yes.
To pray without ceasing does not mean that we need to abandon all of our responsibilities to get tucked away in our prayer closet, fold our hands, and close our eyes 24/7. Rather, everything that we do must be carried out in an attitude, a heart posture, a spirit of prayer that arises out of our dependence on God. One pastor said that this means that the continual cry of our heart should be “oh God.”[4] Or, in other words, the lines of communication between you and God should always be open. Of course, we should set aside specific times to intentionally pray. I firmly believe that our spiritual lives are lacking if we do not have regularly scheduled, disciplined times of prayer. So, do that. But what Paul means when he says to “Pray without ceasing” is to say that the regular posture of our whole being should be one that flows in and out of regular communication with God throughout the day. Maybe to illustrate this for us, our relationship with prayer should look like the way many of us have a relationship with our phone. It’s always on us, and even if we’re not actively using it all day, we’re constantly checking on it, interacting with it consciously and unconsciously.[5] Yet prayer is a much better use of our mental energy than staring at a screen. So, whether you’re washing the dishes, driving the car, playing on the playground, sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s, doing homework, reading a book, sitting on the beach, whatever it is that you find yourself occupied with, lift your heart to God.
We can lift our hearts to God because God is with us always. Church, there is nothing you encounter in your life that you need to face alone. Immanuel is not a Christmas reminder alone. In Christ, by his Spirit, God is with you always. So pray.
WHY SHOULD PRAYER BE CEASELESS?
We’ve talked about what ceaseless prayer is, but why should prayer be ceaseless? There is a quote that has taken on many forms over the years that seems to regularly get attributed to the 19th century pastor Charles Spurgeon that says, “prayer is the lungs of the church.” That’s a powerful image. Author Paul Miller, who I mentioned earlier, picks up on this theme when considering the fact that, in the Bible, there is no gift of prayer mentioned. He says, “Paul never mentions ‘the gift of prayer.’ Why? Because there is no gift of breathing. Prayer is not an option; it is the engine.”[6]
So why should prayer be ceaseless? Because it’s necessary for the Christian’s survival. It is as vital to our spiritual health as breathing is to our body. Consider your relationships. Whether with your friend, spouse, child… if you never speak with them, your relational health is going to tank. Or maybe more telling and more accurate, if they try to speak to you regularly, but you never respond, what does that say about your relationship? So it is with our relationship with God. He is constantly speaking, constantly available. We should be too.
What do you think it is that gets in the way of ceaseless prayer for us? I think there are 5 main things that get in the way of ceaseless prayer.
1. First (and I mentioned this one earlier), we don’t realize just how dependent we are on God. The privileges we have in this country are enormous, but they blind us to the reality that God is the one that provides. Not Giant, not Amazon, not Target, not your employer, God.
2. Second, I think for many of us, prayer has not moved from duty to delight. When we think about prayer, many of us think about prayer more as something I should do rather than something I wantto do. But what’s going on below the surface here? Why would we think about prayer more in terms of duty than delight? Well, I think when this happens it means we’re not seeing God clearly. I mean, think about the person you most love to be around. When you’re around them, is that something you think about as like, “oh gosh… gotta hang out with that person again…”? No way! If they’re someone you really love and really love to be around, it’s not duty, it’s delight. What about talking to the person you most love? That’s the best, right? When we think about talking with God, let’s not think, “oh gosh… gotta check my box of prayer for the day…” No, that’s not it at all. But if this is something you struggle with, let me challenge you to read some Scripture that stirs your heart to how awesome God is before you pray. Consider some of the ways you have seen God at work in your life. Think about how he has literally saved you and brought you from death to life. I mean come on, how could we not want to spend time with him? I said this earlier, but I really don’t want this whole series to only make us feel guilty about not praying. More than that, I want us to have a vision for why we would want to. Don’t you want to spend time speaking to the lover of your soul? Don’t you long to see his power at work in your life?
3. Third thing that I think gets in the way of ceaseless prayer: unanswered prayer. There are some of you that have prayed for something for as long as you can remember and it feels like you’ve been knocking on a door that nobody is on the other side of until your knuckles are raw. If that’s you, I just want to say that I so admire your faith to keep praying even when you don’t see any results. But the reality is that this kind of experience can often leave us with less faith, not more. And we tend to stop praying for things we think will never happen. To say it another way, unanswered prayers often cease our prayers.
4. The fourth thing I see that gets in the way of ceaseless prayer is busyness. As one Christian thinker famously said, “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”[7] Whether or not it is true that hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day, it is certainly true that it is an enemy. How often have you felt the anxiety of having to get from one thing to the next, day after day, week after week, until you’ve realized that it’s been two weeks since you spent any intentional time with the Lord, and that was only after two more weeks of spotty prayer and reading. The constant hum of things to do, places to be, people to talk to, meals to make, kids to drive, diapers to change, elderly parents to look after – these good things, if we’re not careful, can become white noise that drown out the voice of the Lord calling us to come be with him in prayer. Or, maybe the way that the frenetic pace of life has affected you is it’s sold you the lie that prayer is boring. Only a scheme of the devil would convince us that speaking to the God of the universe is a boring use of our time and that other things, like our eyes being glued to screens is actually preferable.
5. Fifth and final thing I’ll mention that gets in the way of ceaseless prayer: we don’t see the spiritual battle being waged around us. We didn’t read it, but earlier in this passage, Paul writes this,
1 Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.
So just before telling the Thessalonians to be constant in prayer, he tells them that the Lord is returning, and that as Christians we need to be sober minded and put our armor on. You’re probably familiar with Paul saying something very similar to the church in Ephesus. They, and we, are to put on the armor of God because there is a battle being waged in the heavenly places right now. The world is not a neutral place, it is a spiritual battleground. There are spiritual forces that are out to get us that we cannot see that are far, far more powerful than you and I, and are able to absolutely obliterate us if not for the grace of God. Friends, if we could see the war raging on around us right now there is no doubt in my mind that we would be constant in prayer. Because although our enemy is far, far stronger than we are, Jesus is infinitely more powerful than the enemy. And he is fighting for his people.
Pastor Tim Keller’s wife Kathy once gave this illustration:
“Imagine you were diagnosed with such a lethal condition that the doctor told you that you would die within hours unless you took a particular medicine – a pill every single night before going to sleep. Imagine that you were told that you could never miss it or you would die. Would you forget? Would you not get around to it some nights? No – it would be so crucial that you wouldn’t forget, you would never miss. Well, if we don’t pray… to God, we’re not going to make it because of all that we are facing.”[8]
So why should prayer be ceaseless? Because we can’t make it on our own with all that we’re facing. We are in way over our heads in the midst of a spiritual battle beyond comprehension, totally dependent on God, the lover of our soul, who listens even when we can’t see the answer, even amid our busyness and distraction and forgetfulness.
Church, I am convinced that when we have lost sight of our need for God, we are blinded from our need for ceaseless prayer. And yet even when we forget, even when we are faithless, God remains faithful. Christian, let me encourage you – you have by your side and in your corner the most powerful person in the entire universe, and he loves you. Not only does he love you, but he invites you to ask him for what you need and what you want. Do you believe that? Like I know you believe that up here. But do you, sitting here today, believe that Jesus Christ is for you? That he loves you. That he invites you to bring your requests before him. Do you actually believe that he wants to fight your battles for you? I pray that that sinks deep into your gut. That even if you are sitting here this morning feeling like he has completely abandoned you, or is ignoring you in the midst of your battle, my prayer for you would be that the truth of God’s Word world miraculously break in. Christian, God is for you and is drawing near to you. He is inviting us to draw near to him.
CONCLUSION – WHO DO WE CEASELESSLY PRAY TO?
So we’ve talked about what ceaseless prayer is and why we pray ceaselessly. But let’s close our time together considering the question – who is it that we ceaselessly pray to? The answer will come as no surprise to you because I’ve been giving it away this whole time. As we answer this question, I’ll invite you to turn with me to a parable of Jesus. This parable is found in Luke 18:1-8. I’ll read it for us.
1 And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3 And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’ ” 6 And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. 7 And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8 I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
In this parable, Jesus doesn’t hide his main point. He tells us right up front. Verse 1: “he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” Basically, Jesus is telling a parable to give his people a vision for ceaseless prayer. There is a widow who really needed something from this judge, and she asked and asked and asked and finally this judge, who is evidently not a very great guy, gets so annoyed with her that finally he caves. Now, too many of us stop there in our own view of prayer. “Well,” we think, “if I continue to ask God for things he’s going to end up just getting annoyed with me… but maybe then he’ll actually listen to me.” But notice what Jesus goes on to say. Verses 6-8: And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. 7 And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8 I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.” What Jesus is saying is, “if even an unrighteous judge will grant the request of a persistent prayer, how much more will God, who is generous and kind and loving, respond to the requests of his children?” This is a beautiful counter example. Friends, we can take great comfort from this parable. Why? Because Jesus told the parable so that we pray without ceasing. And so that as we pray ceaselessly, when we don’t see the results we’re asking for, we hear the voice of Jesus saying, through this parable, “don’t lose heart!” Brother, sister, don’t lose heart! If you’ve been praying for that person in your family who doesn’t know the Lord, don’t lose heart! If you’ve been praying for the confusing clouds of mental illness to be lifted, don’t lose heart! If you’ve been praying for stamina in parenting, don’t lose heart! If you’ve been praying for someone who, right now, is battling addiction, don’t lose heart. If you’ve been praying for our government, don’t lose heart. If you’ve been praying for contentedness or patience, don’t lose heart. If you’ve been praying that God would give you the desire to read his Word or pray, don’t lose heart. Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Keep praying.
When we’ve been persistent with prayer, but it seems like our requests go unanswered, it can be easy to doubt the love of God. But when we doubt the love of God, where do we look for assurance? When our sinking souls need buoyed with gospel hope, where do we turn? Christian, look no further than the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. For thousands of years, God’s people prayed for a deliverer. For thousands of years, God’s people waited. It seemed like God had not heard his people and all but forgotten his promises. Yet in the midst of the darkness and confusion, he sent his Son to put on the greatest display of love ever. On the cross, the loving Savior answered the prayers of thousands of people over thousands of years by laying himself down to pay for the sins of people like you and I who lack enough faith to even just keep praying. Even now, Jesus is at the right hand of the Father interceding – praying – for us! Jesus is constant in prayer even now, out of love for his bride. And all of that is an act of love that is a concrete reminder to you and I that no matter what our doubts tell us, God loves us, God hears us, and God will keep his promises, even when we fail. And that same God invites us to come to him and pray, and pray, and pray, and pray. He wants to hear you. That’s the kind of God we ceaselessly pray to.
When we actually believe that truth individually and as a community, imagine how that would shape the life and culture of a church. To walk into church and hear voices of people praying for one another, calling upon the resources of heaven on behalf of one another. To see perfunctory, canned prayers as ancient history, and instead have every ministry event and every service filled to the brim with truly coming before the presence of God boldly with our requests and praises. What if we dared to share a vision for prayer that the Indian evangelist had, where prayer was the heartbeat of the church, where you and I could storm the heavens together? To wholly trust the love and generosity of our Father?
I’ll leave you with a question that has been haunting me since the first time I heard it asked by another pastor. What if everything you prayed for in the last week came true? What would change? I dare you to find out.
Let’s pray.
[1] Paul Miller, A Praying Church, 12-13.
[2]https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/prayer-and-other-religious-practices/#personal-prayer
[3] Timothy Keller, Prayer, 48.
[4] This is an insight from John Piper’s sermon, Pray Without Ceasing.
[5] This was an illustration used by Paul Miller in A Praying Church.
[6] Paul Miller, A Praying Church, 26.
[7] Dallas Willard said this to Jon Ortberg, as told in John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
[8] Timothy Keller, Prayer, 9-10.
Sermon Discussion Questions
Prayer is an important part of our discipleship as Christians. Is this an area of strength for you or an area where you really feel a need to grow?
As you consider your own life, where have you seen God answer prayers in the past? Does that encourage you to pray more now?
Does prayer, for you, feel more like duty or delight? Why?
How we view God will influence our prayer life. If we view God as stingy, we will be hesitant to ask him for things, but if we view him as generous, we will come to him with our requests more freely. What is one way your view of God shapes your practice of prayer?
Noah mentioned a few things that get in the way of ceaseless prayer (we forget our dependence on God, prayer feels more like duty than delight, our prayers in the past have gone unanswered, we are too busy, we don’t see the spiritual battle around us). Which of those most resonates with you in your experience?
What is one practical way you can make prayer more of a regular practice in your life?
