I Learned That Today Is 'Rogate Sunday' (Or 'Ask/Pray Sunday')

As you know, as a 1st Generation Confessional Lutheran (meaning that even though my entire family is Lutheran, they are "C&E Lutherans" -- "Christmas & Easter Lutherans" -- and I'm the first one in the family to even mention the Book of Concord let alone Martin Luther), I'm still in the process of learning the Church Calendar and all the new words and phrases that come with that.

Today is one of those interesting days for me since today we celebrate what is called "Rogate" or a word that means "Ask!/Pray!" ("Rogate" is the Latin word for "Ask" or "Pray") and that's why this day is often called "Pray/Prayer Sunday" in most Confessional Lutheran churches on this 6th Sunday of Easter.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to admit that we all overslept this morning and that we never would've made it to church on time even if we had left right away after jumping out of bed and quickly getting dressed.

I mention this to demonstrate that I'm by no means "perfect" (far from it!) or somehow "better" than the rest of my family members simply because I go to church and they don't. I mention it because I'm bummed to have missed our Pastor's faithful preaching of God's Word through his sermon as well as receiving the Lord's Supper, which I now have to wait two more weeks before I can receive it again.

Unfortunately, this is just another sad reality about being a 1st Generation Confessional Lutheran, in my humble opinion -- attempting to establish a new habit for myself and my family when we've been used to many years where going to church on Sundays was "no big deal" one way or another is still a real and on-going challenge!

Obviously, that's still a problem for us from time-to-time. Plus, when you know that the closest and most faithful church you've found in the local area is 30-35 minutes away, it also makes rushing to walk out the door that much harder when you're already getting an extremely late start to begin with.

Excuses, excuses, excuses! I know, right? I promise I'm really not trying to make excuses. I just want to be honest about things, especially since I think there will be a connection to today's blog post as we continue here.

It's times like this when I'm so grateful for the Internet. Thankfully, I found not one, but two audio links for this Rogate 2016. The first is a discussion about Rogate from Issues, Etc. and the other is a sermon delivered by an LCMS Pastor in Michigan from earlier this morning.

 

BIBLE STUDY AUDIO: Rev. David Petersen - Looking Forward To Sunday Morning (Rogate 2016) 

SERMON AUDIO: Rev. Kenneth Bomberger - Rogate Sermon 2016

I hope you listened to at least one of those, because both are so good.

The key text for Rogate Sunday is John 16:23-30 where Jesus talks very explicitly about prayer.

Prayer is talking to God in thoughts and words. We don't lecture God, but we want to converse with Him. We want to be in constant communication with Him too.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (ESV) Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Joy, prayer, and thanksgiving form a unity.

Even though God has other purposes for us, this triad is certainly His will for us too.

Now, I know that if you're like me, then the words "pray without ceasing" in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 probably presents a problem for you. I mean, after all, how is that even possible?

No, we cannot verbally pray at all times, but it is possible to be in the spirit of prayer and ever ready to pray for sure.

The Lord's Prayer has also been prescribed so that we should see and consider the distress that ought to drive and compel us to pray without ceasing. 

-- Large Catechism III 24

We should ask that through the same Spirit and His grace, by means of the daily exercise of reading and doing God's Word, He would preserve in us faith and His heavenly gifts, strengthen us from day to day, and keep us to the end. 

-- Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord II 16

I find it compelling that St. Paul earlier told the Thessalonians that sanctification is God's will for them (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Here, in 1 Thessalonians 5:18, that truth finds its expression in their joy, prayer, and thanksgiving.

Indeed the beauty of all of this, however, is that we could not call upon the Lord unless He has already called to us first (John 6:44).

Furthermore, to think that we can "ask the Father" anything is mind-blowing, isn't it? Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that our prayers will be answered in the precise way that we want them to be answered, but it does reveal quite of few things that we need to remind ourselves.

Here's a sermon that Rev. Karl Hess delivered earlier this morning...

Asking God The Father. Rogate, Easter 6, 2016 

It's been a long time for most of us since we asked our fathers for anything, but not for all of us. The catechumens who are here today still have to ask their fathers and mothers for help with their homework, or to let them go over to their friends’ house, or to play video games for five more minutes instead of doing their homework. 

What is it like to ask your father for something? It depends on your father, doesn’t it? It also depends what you’re asking for. 

I know with my father, who has now been gone for almost nine years, a lot depended on his mood. Since my dad didn’t talk as much as I do, I had to be able to read his mood before I could ask him for something and expect to receive it. I had to know him. And I did know him. At least I knew how to read his moods and tell whether it was a good time to ask him for something that I wanted. 

Whatever your father was or is like, I am sure it was the same for you. Knowing your father was a big part of being able to ask him for something and getting what you asked for. You had to know when was a good time to approach him. You had to know how to speak to him. You had to know what he wanted in order to frame your request. “Dad, you know how you always tell me I need to be responsible? I really think that buying me this car will help me learn responsibility.” 

Of course, often when we asked our fathers for things, we were tuned into the things they had said only as a means to an end. We weren’t thinking about pleasing them or honoring them when we asked for things. We were mostly thinking about getting something out of them for our own enjoyment. As I get older, I feel sorry about this. I know my dad had many failings as a man, as a father. Yet I owe my life to him. And many of the things in my character that are good I owe to him. And besides this, I know that despite his faults he loved me and wanted me to be blessed. And so, I wish that I had honored my father more, by not selfishly asking him for things that would give me temporary pleasure, but asking him for things that would have pleased him, that I knew he wanted to give me. 

Now, as a father, I have a different perspective than I did as a child. When my son asks me for gifts, I usually want to give him what he asks for. But I don’t always. And the reason is obvious enough. I want my son to be happy now, of course. But I’m even more interested in him being happy later in life—being happy because he is a virtuous man, a good man, who knows how to work hard, manage his money, be a husband to his wife and a father to his children, who can be a blessing to his church and a help to his neighbors. I want him to be able to use the gifts God has given him to the best of his ability and not be held back by laziness, lack of self-control, greed or selfishness. 

And even more than these things, I want my son to be happy for eternity. And because I want these things more than I want his short-term happiness, I frequently say “no” to what he asks me. When we’re at Wal-Mart and he asks me to buy him a toy, I say, “No, you have a thousand toys at home that you need to learn to pick up and put away first.” 

So is it a surprise if you ask your Father in heaven for things and He says “No”? 

If you look back at your life, you can probably remember many prayers in which you asked God for gifts you didn’t deserve and He said “Yes.” 

At the same time, I know many Christians have asked God for things that seemed like they should be the Father’s will, and He said “No.” Or He said, “Not yet,” and that not yet stretched on for years and years. 

And so when we hear Jesus say today, “Amen, Amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my Name, He will give to you,” those of us who have struggled in prayer for years may find ourselves feeling depressed at this amazing promise. Or doubtful, or cynical, or perhaps, in spite of ourselves, a little angry. If only being a Christian was as glorious and joyful as Jesus seems to describe it here. 

It’s interesting that Jesus describes praying to God the Father in a similar way to the experience I had with my dad. He says asking God the Father for gifts depends on two things—one is being loved by the Father, the other is knowing the Father. Through faith in Jesus we receive the Father’s love: I do not say that I will ask the Father for you, because the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came from God. (John 16:26-27) But also through Jesus we receive the knowledge of who the Father is, what He is like, what He desires. Jesus doesn’t promise His disciples will receive everything they ask the Father, but whatever you ask the Father in My Name, He will give to you. (John 16:23) “In Jesus’ Name” means we ask God the Father in the authority of Jesus, believing that God the Father receives us as His children because of Jesus. It also means that we ask what Jesus authorizes us to ask. We can ask the Father for anything, as long as we say, “Your will, not mine, be done.” But only when we ask for the things that Jesus has promised and taught us to pray for can we be certain that the Father will give them. 

Now if we think back on many of the prayers we have prayed in our life, maybe even most, maybe even all, we will probably discover that most of what we asked the Father in heaven has been like what we asked for from our fathers and mothers on earth. We usually asked our earthly parents for things that would please us. We didn’t think, “My father and mother have been given to me by God to raise me, and He commands me to honor them; they gave me life, so I should honor them.” When we asked them for things we often thought only about what would please us in the short-term, not about what would honor and please them. 

In the same way, even when we have prayed to the Father for godly things, often our hearts have been set on ourselves. We may have prayed for our family members, but our hearts were on ourselves instead of on what would glorify God and what would be the highest good for our family members. We were trying to escape pain and to have an easy (or easier) life. 

But even more often we haven’t prayed. And the reason was we didn’t know or believe in the Father that Jesus reveals to us very firmly. We didn’t rightly appreciate His great power and wisdom. Even more, we doubted Jesus’ word that the Father loves us and wants to give us everything that is His. We didn’t know the greatness of God’s love for us, the love that surpasses knowledge that Paul describes in Ephesians chapter 3. 

Christians don’t have a monopoly on the act of praying. When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, it wasn’t something totally new. The Jews prayed a lot. They had a custom of praying every morning and every evening, to go along with the morning and evening sacrifices at the temple. 

And today lots of people believe in a God, even though it isn’t the God of the Bible. They think of Him as being a Father, and they pray to Him. 

But Jesus gives a privilege and promise about prayer to those who believe in Him that those who don’t believe in Him don’t have. His promise is that those who believe in Him have God as their Father just as truly as He has God as His Father. The unbelieving world doesn’t have this relationship to God. God is the Father of all people, because He created us all. But those who don’t believe in Jesus don’t have the privileges of being children who are fathered by God and live in His house. They don’t live in God’s house, which means of course that they don’t have to live by the rules of His house. But it also means they don’t have the benefits of dwelling in the house of the Lord. 

As God’s children through faith in Christ, God the Father has an open heart toward us, like a loving father has toward his children, except that God’s heart is full of perfect love, where a human father’s is imperfect. Because of this love, we can make requests of God the Father and expect to be heard. 

But also through Jesus we know God the Father. No one can see God. But in Jesus we have the exact reflection of who God the Father is. Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father, Jesus tells Philip in John 14. 

As we grow to know Jesus by hearing and reading His Word, receiving His absolution and His Supper, we grow to know the Father. We learn to know His grace—that He doesn’t deal with us as our sins deserve, but blesses and honors us as though we had never sinned. We learn to know His mercy and kindness, His gentleness toward sinners—even when our lives are hard and from a human perspective it appears as if He is dealing harshly with us. We learn to know His power to save, deliver, and defend us, which knows no limits. We learn all these things especially from Jesus’ death and resurrection. There we see God deal once and for all with our sins. All of them, including the selfishness that has motivated us to try to use God for our own ends instead of seeking Him for His own sake, He laid on Jesus. All of them He judged and punished on the cross. And all of them He showed to be removed, taken away forever when Jesus rose from the dead. And because we don’t believe this, or doubt it, He continually proclaims it to us as we come to church week in and week out, burdened by our failures, our unbelief, our feelings of alienation from God. He continues to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, His testimony that our sins have been erased from His sight. 

Because this is true, Jesus tells the disciples, including us, “In that day you will not ask me for anything. Amen, Amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” (John 16:23-24) 

When Jesus rises from the dead, we are also alive from the dead. We are dead to sin and alive to God the Father. We are no longer God’s enemies in Adam, but new creatures who live to God in Christ. So when we speak to the Father, we come before Him as little Christs. 

Just as Jesus received everything He asked from the Father, so will we. 

That means that when we pray for the things Jesus promised us and taught us to pray for, we can be certain that we “will receive” those things. When we ask for God’s Word to be taught purely to us, that He will give us the Holy Spirit to believe that Word, be saved by it, and live a holy life, we will surely receive it. When we ask that God preserve us in that word and faith until we die, we will surely receive it. When we ask for God to give us daily bread—what we need to support this life—He will not fail us. Nor will He deny us forgiveness of our sins when we ask for it, nor support and deliverance from the devil’s temptations, and finally be to be brought out of this world of sorrow safely into the eternal joy of everlasting life. 

We don’t pray those things and hope God will give them to us. That’s the way those who don’t know Jesus and His Father pray. Such prayers are not heard. 

Instead we pray to the Father with certainty, not only that He hears us, but that He will give us whatever we ask, as though we were His Son. 

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Soli Deo Gloria

I know that was a little long, but I just had to share it here in this piece. See, this is why I love being a Lutheran as opposed to an Evangelical. No "Moral Therapeutic, Pop Christianity, Self-Help Sermon" here!

Finally, here's something for us to consider about prayer that's also very important. It relates to praying for our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

"In that day you will ask in My Name." 

It is impossible to mention in the intercessions of corporate worship all the persons who are committed to our care, or at any rate to do so in the way that is required of us. Every Christian has his own circle who have requested him to make intercession for them or for whom he knows he has been called upon especially to pray. These will be, first of all, those with whom he must live day by day. This brings us to a point at which we hear the pulsing heart of all Christian life in unison. A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner. This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others. There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the fellowship must enter every day. The struggle we undergo with our brother in intercession may be a hard one, but that struggle has the promise that it will gain its goal.   

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Harper San Francisco, 1954) pp. 85-86.

After reading that, I'm reminded that to live in community with other sinners always requires forgiveness and mercy as difficult as that might be at times.

One final word on prayer.

I also learned that it doesn't matter Who we pray to meaning prayer is not "formulaic" in the sense that we should doubt the "effectiveness of prayer" depending on whether we pray to the Father, to the Son, or to the Holy Spirit.

As Rev. Petersen commented in the above audio link...

We can pray directly to the Father, we can pray directly to the Holy Spirit, and, of course, we can pray directly to the Son, to Jesus. But the kind of normal, natural, mode of Christian prayer is that which we find embodied in the Collect so often, the prayers that we hear in the Church on Sunday, and that is prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. But we don't have to be formulaic, we have great freedom. It doesn't matter really to which Person of the Holy Trinity we address our prayers, because God hears them. The Holy Trinity hears the prayers regardless of how we phrase it, because we are in Christ, and we belong to Him, and we have been baptized into His name. But all of our prayers must be offered through the cross.

Thus, prayers come out of us "In Jesus' Name!" whether we offer those specific words or not.

With so much confusion in Christianity today when it comes to prayer, I hope that this brief primer on prayer deriving from a Rogate Sunday study was helpful to you as it was to me.

In a Lutheran layman's terms, the Lord has commanded us to pray, and so we desire His help in teaching us to pray, we pray as we're instructed to, we ask for His forgiveness when we don't, and we thank God that we have both an Advocate Who helps us to pray while we're here on earth, and a Savior Who intercedes on our behalf with the Father in heaven at all times.



NOTE: Please understand that I'm not a called and ordained minister of God's Word and Sacraments. I'm a layman or just a regular Christian, Corporate Recruiter, Husband, Father, Friend who lives in the "City of Good Neighbors" here on the East Coast. As another Christian Blogger once wrote, "Please do not see this blog as me attempting to 'publicly teach' the faith, but view it as an informal Public Journal of sorts about my own experiences and journey, and if any of my notes here help you in any way at all, then I say, 'Praise the Lord!' but please do double check them against the Word of God and with your own Pastor." To be more specific, and relevant to the point I want to make with this disclaimer/note, please understand that I'm a relatively new convert to Confessional Lutheran who recently escaped American Evangelicalism a little more than 3 years ago now. That being said, please contact me ASAP if you believe that any of my "old beliefs" seem to have crept their way into any of the material you see published here, and especially if any of the content is inconsistent with our Confessions and Lutheran doctrine (in other words, if it's not consistent with God's Word, which our Confessions merely summarize and repeatedly point us back to over and over again) so that I can correct those errors immediately and not lead any of His little ones astray (James 3:1). Also, please be aware that you might also discover that some of the earlier/older pieces I wrote for this blog back in 2013 definitely fall into that "Old Evangelical Adam" category (and they don't have a disclaimer like this) since I was a "Lutheran-In-Name-Only" at the time and was completely oblivious to the fact that a Christian "Book of Concord" even existed (Small/Large Catechism? What's that!?!). This knowledge of the Lutheran basics was completely foreign to me even though I was baptized, confirmed, and married in an LCMS church! So, there are some entries that are a little "out there" so-to-speak since the subject matter was also heavy influenced by those old beliefs of mine. I know that now and I'm still learning. Anyway, I decided to leave those published posts up on this website and in cyberspace only because they are not blasphemous/heretical, because I now have this disclaimer, and only to demonstrate the continuing work of Christ and the Holy Spirit in my life (Hebrews 12:2; Philippians 1:6). Most importantly, please know that any time I engage in commenting on and/or interpreting a specific portion of the holy Scriptures, it will always closely follow the verse-by-verse footnotes from my Lutheran Study Bible and/or include references to the Book of Concord unless otherwise noted. Typically, I defer to what other Lutheran Pastors both past and present have already preached and taught about such passages since they are the called and ordained under-shepherds of our souls here on earth. Finally, I'm going to apologize ahead of time for the length of most entries (this disclaimer/note is a perfect example of what I mean! haha). I'm well aware that blogs should be short, sweet, and to the point, but I've never been one to follow the rules when it comes to writing. Besides, this website is more like a "Christian Dude's Diary" in the sense that everything I write about and share publicly isn't always what's "popular" or "#trending" at the time, but is instead all the things that I'm studying myself at the moment. For better or for worse, these posts tend to be much longer than most blog entries you'll find elsewhere only because I try to pack as much info as possible into a single piece so that I can refer to it again and again over time if I need to (and so that it can be a valuable resource for others -- if possible, a "One-Stop-Shop" of sorts). Thank you for stopping by and thank you in advance for your time, help, and understanding. Feel free to comment/email me at any time. Grace and peace to you and yours!

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