The Country Church Bourbon Indiana

Discussion about prayer.

Seeing many prayer requests answered lately.

But not all of them have been answered in the way we wanted or in the way we expected.

If you’ve been praying like you should, I think you can resonate with the fact that prayer requests are not always answered the way we want them to be or think they should be. Moments like these are trials for our faith, sometimes great trials.

Theme: just because a prayer request doesn’t turn out the way you think it should, doesn’t mean that there has been some mistake or that God doesn’t love you.

Text: Luke 6:12-26

Verses 12-16 – The Calling of the Twelve

“All night he continued in prayer to God.” – What did He pray about? Was it all about the selection of the twelve apostles, or were there more subjects in His prayer?

I would love to know. I’d love to have a recording of every one of Jesus’ prayers. I’m thankful that we do have a few of His prayers recorded, but this is not one of them.

The larger part of it, if not the whole, must have been concerned with the selection of these twelve individuals, whom he named apostles.

Apostle is a term meaning “one sent as a messenger or agent.” In other words, in selecting these twelve to be His apostles, Jesus is appointing them to be His message bearers. It invests them with a lot of authority.

*Story about Roman emperor – conflict in North Africa between people and the proconsul (or ruler).*

The people send a messenger to the Emperor and the ruler sends a messenger to the Emperor. These messengers served the role of apostles.

The ruler sent his messenger right away and so he arrives first to deliver the ruler’s side of the story.

Not many days later, the messenger of the people arrives. Of course, the two stories are entirely different.

The Emperor recognizes that he has two different stories here, and so he needs to find out what the truth of the matter is. He sends his own delegate to go to North Africa to discover the truth. The Emperor was too busy to go himself and he was still waiting on the invention of the cellphone to make the proper calls, so he had to trust the person he was sending to arrive at the truth.

Well, turns out the person he sent wasn’t any good. When he arrived in North Africa, he met with the ruler there, and the ruler paid him generously to agree with his side of the story.

The delegate returned to the Emperor, told him that the ruler was speaking the truth, and the Emperor raised the taxes in the land to punish the people.

Of course, the people were not at all pleased about this, but there wasn’t much they could do but fuss. The ruler had mistreated them, and now they were being taxed more heavily because of it.

Eventually, they did get their revenge by digging up evidence of the agreement between the ruler and the delegate. When the evidence reached the Emperor’s desk, the ruler and the delegate were punished with death and the taxes levied on the land were restored to normal.

What that story illustrates is the relatively high importance and authority of messengers during this period of time. Today we have cellphones and email, so a messenger isn’t a big deal. But then, when messages could only travel as fast as a horse, you needed a messenger. And when you appointed one, you trusted him to deliver the message with 100% accuracy, because whatever the messenger says, that’s what the recipient will hear. The messenger represents you.

Considering that, that Jesus is appointing twelve people to represent Him accurately before other people, it’s no wonder that He spent the night in prayer over it. And the stories that surround these apostles vindicate his prayerful decision.

Simon – one of the most famous of the apostles. Perhaps tied with John. Simon, called Peter is the apostle known today as the one always putting his foot in his mouth, but in the early church he was one of the most renowned of the apostles. In Luke we see Peter fumble and fall, but in Acts nearly half the book is concerned with his and John’s powerful ministry. He gave his life, at the end, for the Christian message, by being crucified upside down.

Andrew – Andrew wasn’t one of the foremost of the apostles, but he is placed in this list next to his brother Peter. Andrew was a fisherman, like his brother. Church history holds that he preached the gospel in Scythia, which is a little north of the black sea. That would probably explain why we have no letters from him, as they had no written language there. Those were barbarians in Roman terms, so Andrew was a brave missionary. Eventually he also gave his life by crucifixion.

James – James was also one of the foremost of the apostles, for a time. But he was the first of the apostles to be martyred. He died in the early forties, having been killed by Herod Agrippa. The term “Santiago” means saint James and refers to him, as he is highly revered among the Spanish.

John, on the other hand, was the longest lived of all of the apostles. We aren’t really sure how he died, but he appears to be the only one who was not martyred. He wrote the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation was written when he was around 80 years old and living on the island of Patmos.

Unfortunately very little can be said of Philip or Bartholomew with certainty. Tradition holds that Philip preached in Greece and that Bartholomew preached in India.

Matthew wrote the first Gospel. It is said that it was first written in Hebrew and to the Hebrews, but was translated later into Greek. It is not known where he went or how he died.

Thomas is known as the doubter, but he believed the moment he saw the resurrected Lord. There is a fairly decent amount of historical testimony that Thomas went to preach the Gospel in India in 52AD.

James the son of Alpheus is probably the one we know the least about. Because he shared the same name as James the first martyred apostle and James, the brother of Jesus, it has caused him to at times be mistaken for one or the other throughout history. And in Scripture, most of the time we see his mother mentioned, rather than him. But, he was referred to as James the Less and tradition states that he was martyred in Egypt, where he had been preaching the Gospel.

Simon the Zealot is believed to have been part of a preaching team with Judas the son of James. Tradition states that they were both martyred in Egypt.

Judas the son of James, as mentioned just now, was likely part of a preaching team with Simon. Judas wrote the book of Jude.

Something positive could be said about all of the individuals on this list. Looking at these fellows and seeing their faithful lives and effective ministries, one can obviously see that Jesus made good choices. At the time, they were mostly fishermen with a tax collector thrown in there for good measure. They didn’t look like much. But they became great.

But there is one I haven’t mentioned yet, isn’t there? One that we’d like to ignore. One in particular that stands out amongst them and does not fit the narrative of faithful service and martyrdom for the cause. Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

Jesus spent all night praying about this decision, and up until this point, all of the selections make sense. But how did Judas Iscariot end up on this list? Jesus spent all night praying, but here is Judas. Was there some mistake made? Did He run out of time to pray during the night so He just winged it on this last one?

No, Jesus doesn’t make any mistakes. And He made this decision under the prayerful direction of God the Father, who also makes no mistakes, so how did Judas Iscariot end up on the list?

I don’t know. I can venture a guess. One way or another, Jesus had to die in order that sinners like you and I could be redeemed by His blood. Perhaps God was thinking of Satan when He selected Judas as an apostle, and how Satan, the highest angel of heaven, betrayed Him and led an army of angels in rebellion against Him. So, God, knowing what was in the heart of Judas, selected him because he knew it would set the stage for a similar event to occur. Judas was chosen knowing that he would one day betray and lead soldiers against Jesus, only this time the work of the betrayer would be turned on its head and be turned into redemption for all and defeat for the betrayer. God knew the satanic that was in Judas’ heart, and He knew that one day Satan would enter Judas’ heart to lead him to betray Jesus. But this time it would be different, and the evil purposes of Satan would lead to his own defeat.

It fits. That’s my theory at least. But what I want to draw from this is not a theory but something for us to keep in mind as we pray.

Here it is: just because your prayer does not turn out how you think that it should, doesn’t mean that God ignored you or that God made a mistake. Judas Iscariot appearing on this list is not the result that you and I would expect from a night of prayer by Jesus before God, he doesn’t fit the clean and easy narrative that we prefer – but there he is. Jesus prays all night, and a traitor is selected as an apostle.

I think we can all relate to prayers that have been answered in ways that were unexpected or undesirable. Recently there has been the need for a lot of prayer for friends and family over different health issues. Most of the prayers have been answered in the way we expect and desire, but not all.

I think of Randall, for example. I remember a couple months ago when it came time for him to have his long awaited surgery, and I remember praying the day before and the day during. He made it through perfectly and we all rejoiced together. But not long after that, infection began to develop at the site of the surgery, and then a fever developed. His body was too weak to fight the infection on his own, so he had to be taken back into the hospital. And then the news came, he would have to have another long surgery. When he heard it, he cried. And when his friends and family heard it, they cried too, and some were angry. Angry because this was not the way it was supposed to go and because the purposes behind it are a mystery. Many months of prayer from many people have been spent praying for Randall, this was not the expected result.

We are thankful that Randall made it through that last surgery. He’s home now. He’s doing well. But there have been situations like that above where the young boy does not pull through at the end and hearts are broken.

And we have another situation like this, Christine Miller. She is the young lady who developed a cist on one of her eyes. Her surgery was delayed numerous times, but finally occurred recently. The results were not the expected and desired outcome. Her understanding of the surgery was that her eyelids would be able to close completely afterwards and that the stitches used would be temporary. Instead it appears that neither situation is true and her situation post-surgery is worse than pre-surgery. We’re still waiting on further info, but the current situation doesn’t look good.

During times like these it is not uncommon for people to question God. People can feel unloved, ignored, unheard. They might even question if God exists at all. Or they might beat themselves or others up for not having enough faith or for praying wrong.

God does love you. You are not ignored and God does hear. The truth is we may never know in this life why a prayer request turns out like this, but just because it doesn’t turn out in the perfect way that we expected, doesn’t mean that you made a mistake or that God made a mistake.

Always remember, no relationship in the universe is more perfect or more sweet than the relationship shared between God the Father and God the Son. When Jesus prayed before the Father over who should become an apostle, Judas Iscariot, the betrayer, was selected. There are some things that we will have to wait till we get to heaven to get a final answer for, and this is one of those things. But God is good, and He makes no mistakes and He does not give rocks to His children who ask for bread.