Excel Still More

Ep. 25 - The Throne Room

April 15, 2019 Kris Emerson Season 1 Episode 25
Excel Still More
Ep. 25 - The Throne Room
Show Notes Transcript

Prayer is incredibly important to daily growth and faith.  But sometimes it begins to wane.  Sometimes it becomes difficult to stay focused on God.  Maybe you are praying, and even journaling about prayer items, but still find it difficult to give Him attention and stay engaged for more than just a minute or two.  I deal with that often. I've dealt with that heavily in the past two weeks.  When that happens, it is time to head to the Throne Room of God!  When you can feel the experience of entering His court and bowing before His presence, He captures your attention. Revelation 4 builds a picture that will transform your prayer life in His presence.  Come and see the glory of God and find a new intensity in your prayer life. 

- How to stay focused on God while praying.

- How to enter the Throne Room and experience the presence of the Lord.

- What can help us to block out worldly influences when engaged in daily prayer?

- How to feel connected to God, humble before His majesty when praying.

- What does the Throne Room look like and how do I experience it? 

Speaker 1:

Okay, so today's episode feels a little bit different to me, maybe because the topic we're covering and the way we'll cover it is a little unique to what we normally do, but I think more because this episode is born out of personal necessity. I need this. About two weeks ago I started to notice a measurable drop in the focus of my prayer life. I was still going through some of the daily approaches and we'll talk about that in this episode, but I was losing focus very quickly. It's like I would start addressing God and then I would be distracted by some other thought or something else that was going on and I just started to notice that I wasn't getting that refreshed, fulfilled, strengthened feeling that ought to be coming out of prayer. Now for me, a go-to is the throne room. If we can imagine entering into the throne room of God, and we'll talk about what that would look like if you were actually experiencing it, some incredible things happen.

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One is, it is impossible to lose focus. You are encompassed with this scene of angels and creatures and elders and the Father and the Son and the Spirit and it draws you in. Something else that happens for me when I walk into the throne room is it creates instant humility. I consider myself unworthy to even be there and what it does is it channels all of this love and admiration and recognition of the glory of God and it just washes over you. This idea of how unworthy I am to even be in the room and yet he welcomes me and he listens to me and cares. We need to feel that every day, and some of us, some of you, can naturally bring that in no matter when or where you're praying, but for me, I just started to notice that it was missing.

Speaker 3:

Now let's talk a little bit about prayer in general. Let me back up a bit and work our way up to the throne room, and if you've experienced any of the things I'm about to describe, I will tell you more about the throne room of Revelation 4 at the end and you today can try this as well. So for me, it starts with understanding the need for daily prayer. Let's back up and discuss that you don't need me to take 15 minutes and preach to you, but you know that the New Testament describes healthy daily prayer lives for God's people. We know that in first Thessalonians chapter five it says to pray without ceasing, but in everything give thanks. I'm thankful every day. I pray every day."Pray without ceasing" to me means never letting a day go by without multiple times addressing the God of Heaven. We know Philippians chapter four and we've talked a lot about that. Be anxious for nothing. Every day has the potential to infuse anxieties and concerns upon us. And the text goes on to say, be anxious for none of that, but in everything with prayer and supplication in thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Maybe it's pouring out your bucket at his feet, maybe it's dropping cinder blocks from your shoulders. Whatever imagery that you need, you have to release it before God and you do that every day. So that those daily struggles that Jesus talked about in Matthew six,"each day has enough trouble of its own," you can manage that by taking it before the Lord. So let me be clear, and I think this will resonate with you as well. When I say I noticed some slippage in my prayer life, it wasn't that I forgot that I needed to pray. It wasn't that I forgot the value of prayer or what the Bible says. I know that Jesus taught us to pray. I can recite the Lord's prayer. I know that Jesus prayed in the morning, in the afternoon, at night before meals that he partook of, and before making big decisions. I mean, I get it. Prayer is important, but for me, over the course of a few weeks, it had lost its impact and was not as important to me as it ought to be. Now let me say something else about this. This doesn't mean that I wasn't planning to pray or preparing to pray or praying. I was still doing all of that. If you've been following along in this series from the very beginning or even hopped in midway, you know that we talk a lot about the one great hour in the morning. You know we talk a lot about journaling, whether you're on board with that or not. Here's what we kind of do there, or at least two paragraphs that I write down with my pencil every morning that are direct prayer actions. In fact, it's almost as if I'm praying with the pencil and I've been doing it every day. One of them is this section called"Ask Beautiful Questions" where you're effectively writing down prayer requests, people that you want to pray for, things about yourself that you're asking of God. I've been doing that and I feel like I'm talking to God as I'm writing them down and have followed it up with prayer quite often. Near the end of the morning journaling session, there's a section called"Level Three Gratitude", and so I write down all the things that I'm thankful for and the description of God's power that makes it possible and how I want to return thanks to him. I write that down, so I'm connecting with God every day. I'm just here to confess that at some point it's not that it became ordinary, it's just that I couldn't stay focused on it. As soon as I would pick the pencil up off the paper and try to keep conveying the message to God, I would be off thinking about something else. Maybe I'd pick up the phone and look at something or think about what I was going to do today. I was just having some issues, so again, let me continue to be clear about this. When we talk about prayer, needing the throne room to regain some of what it's missing, we're not saying that you're not praying. I was praying, planning to pray, writing down things to pray. I just started to notice that the impact of that exercise had waned a bit. Now before we get into how the throne room has helped me and how I believe it will help you, I want to add something else.

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This is my opinion on this, but one of the things that I started doing this year is a lot more of what I would call informal praying. I get up in the morning before I even sit down and begin journaling or reading or anything. Maybe I just walk over to the window with a cup of coffee and look outside and just start talking to God."God, thank you for this beautiful sunrise and for this home we live in and the green trees" and a lot of informal conversation just driving down the road on the way to work and just begin saying things to God lauding and magnifying him and it became sort of informal, if that's the right word and I'm not faulting that. Let me be clear. I think that that is valuable. I could have been thinking about anything else at those moments and I chose to address God.

Speaker 3:

However, for me, they were always very, very short, in the moment and then I was off to something else, turning on the radio or busting into practicing a sermon. They were nice, but they were very abbreviated. But I enjoy it. I still enjoy it. But over time it started to replace more formalized prayer. And what I mean by formalized prayer is when you sit down with the intention of praying, you may close your eyes and block out everything else and you address from start to finish, a series of things you want to give to God. I had done less of that and more of the shorter thing and I almost think that it contracted my attention span, if that makes sense. I'd shortened it so much that when it came time to really drop those cinder blocks at his feet or pour out my bucket, pray without ceasing, be anxious for nothing, I just couldn't stay on task.

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And I have to say as we get to this point and we're about to describe Revelation 4 and the difference that it makes, I sure wish that you were here with me. I wish we were in a Bible class or something. I would love to know more about your issues with prayer and what works for you and what sometimes happens that needs to be addressed. For a long time in preaching a long time. I just didn't preach on prayer. I didn't describe the throne room. I didn't talk about strategies or reevaluations or formal versus informal prayer. To be honest. I got up there and preach every week on other things and I thought, you know what, I'll bet I'm the only person in the room struggling with prayer, struggling to make it mean something, struggling to really give God the honor he deserves.

Speaker 3:

I thought everybody else in the room has got this. But a few years ago, probably about five years ago, there were some conversations that I had that caused me to start preaching on prayer in meetings and the feedback on that, well it turns out we're all in this thing together and maybe some of what I've described today is what has happened for you. Now, again, not throwing out anything we said before, reading verses on prayer. Great idea. Journaling ideas for prayer, great idea. Informally, randomly, occasionally, just saying things to God about how much you love him, another great idea. But if you really want to feel the peace that surpasses understanding, maybe today you need a picture of the throne room. If you had the opportunity to sit in a quiet place right now and close your eyes, I would ask you to imagine this. Imagine that you are standing in front of the largest, most beautiful and ornate palace you've ever seen. There are two incredibly huge doors right in front of you and you're instantly right there. There is no line and no waiting. You're at the front door. The doors slowly swing open and you walk inside. The entire interior of the palace is one majestic, ornate, beautiful room, with jewels and gold and beautiful crystal things. Around you are angels. Every pattern and form of beautiful angel you've ever read described in scripture, walking and flying all around the space, singing beautiful songs. In the middle of the room is God the Father. He's sitting on his throne. There is a brilliance to him. There is a magnificence that is described in Revelation 4 in the form of beautiful stones and there's lightning and thunder and just everything that's ever been made that's beautiful. Beside him is Jesus. You look in his direction and sometimes he appears like a lamb, sometimes like a lion, but mostly he's just standing there looking at you next to his Father. Before them are seven lamps of burning fire that somehow you instinctively connect to the power of the Holy Spirit. All around them are 24 elders sitting on their thrones. People represented by most likely the 12 Apostles and the 12 patriarchs of Genesis. There are also four interesting looking living creatures, not angels. They're different. They look like animals. One like a lion, one, a calf, one like a bird, the last with the face of a man and there's just this interesting connection between them. You instantly understand the full expanse of all that's ever been made and the control that God has over it, and there you are walking in the midst of all of this. What would you do? Well, I'll tell you this. As the doors closed behind you, you would be nowhere else. You would be completely enamored by Him. Losing focus, not even for a moment. You are completely surrounded by his Heavenly Majesty. Likely when you got up to the throne, you would bow down before it and put your face on the floor. The idea of your unworthiness would be as obvious to you as would be his majesty. You would understand how blessed you were that he would even let you in the room, much less to approach his feet at the throne. I sometimes imagine Jesus walking over, putting his hand on my shoulder and asking me to rise, telling me to pour out my heart. Anything that I need to say, anything that I need, any requests that I have that he would represent me and speak it in his own voice before the Father on the throne. If that were you in that moment, in that place, you would pour out your soul, you would ask the most beautiful questions you've ever asked. You would ask for healing and strength. You would speak the name of people that you loved, but probably not first. If you're anything like me, the first thing you would do for as long as you can even imagine is just talk about his radiance, the glory of God, offering up praise to God, adoration to God, thankfulness to God, begging for the mercy of God. And then as we said, asking for his help and his guidance. Now look, I don't know if any of that is useful to you, but I have been using it with regularity day in and day out for the last two weeks. It's not a 20 minute prayer. It's not even a 10 minute prayer. Maybe I only get about five minutes during the day, once or twice a day and maybe I don't have a chance to sit somewhere quietly with my eyes closed. Maybe I'm driving down the road, but I can imagine it. I can put my mind in that place where there is nothing but the throne scene around me and the majesty of my Creator before me. It allows me to stay completely connected to him as I pour out my bucket, as we sometimes say, or drop those cinder blocks on the floor, or just give myself over to him. Now, here's the beauty of this. You may listen and think, oh, well that's not really what this is. That's just a mental construct that helps you. Well, I've got two things to say about that. First of all, Revelation 4 was not just some mental construct to help. It is heaven. He is on the throne. Jesus is beside him. They are surrounded by the power over the living creatures and the 24 elders and the angels singing. You may not literally be there yet, but that is who God is and where God is. The second thing I would say about that is that he promises to be near you. Jesus tells us that he is near. Jesus tells us that he'll be with us now even until the ends of the age. You can't be in heaven, but he can bring the power of God and the glory of Heaven to you. When you pray, you connect with Jesus as if you were right there in the room or do you, which brings us back to where we started this thing. I just wasn't having that experience. I'm okay with informal prayer where you just casually mentioned things you're thankful for. I love that and it's great to write down and really intellectually engage, writing down things that matter to you: beautiful questions and gratitude. That's all terrific, but there was something missing for me in the last couple of weeks, something that I found again and I feel different and it has an incredible impact on everything I do. So I would say this to you if you are not praying or if you are praying, but you're not feeling the impact of that or you frequently lose focus when trying to address God, maybe all you need today is to see those doors open and the radiance of God's majesty shining before your eyes as you humbly approach your God in the throne room.