How long have you been a Christian? Not how long you’ve been in a church, but how long have you been walking with God and trusted in His work alone to save you from sin? How long has it been that you’ve turned away from looking at your own righteousness and only looked to His?

How long do you think Hezekiah was a Christian before this incident? As we look at Hezekiah’s life, we see a clear pattern of a man who walked with the Lord, a genuinely good king. But this section of our text shows how it ended. It should give us some pause and think about where we are in our walk with Jesus — how far we’ve come and how we want it to end. 

Have you ever had a crisis that makes you doubt? Have you ever felt like it is easier to have faith for other people’s problems? Think about such times in your own life. Perhaps you’ve experienced a similar struggle, where you find yourself praying to God for the nations on Sunday yet on Monday, struggle to get out of bed because of anxiety about work. In this study, we will study how God’s Word addresses the prayers of the weak, and how His gospel provides hope for the sinner. We will see a raw, unvarnished, real picture of a king – the sovereign of a nation – who discovers that he is weak.  God responds to the prayers of the weak with gentle assurance rooted in covenantal grace and restores the sinner through loving deliverance unto worship. 

How would it look like for God to answer prayers? How do you expect God to answer your prayers? Is God like a genie to you? You ask for something and prayer, and the way God answers it is to give you the thing you asked for at the time you ask for it. We are all tempted to treat God like a genie approaching Him to ask Him to give us something or to get us out of trouble. Some of us may think that if we ask more sincerely, God will act according to our requests. 

In today’s passage, we will read of what God does in response to Hezekiah’s godly prayer and cry for help. We will see how God responds to prayers by revealing himself as sovereign and omniscient, by giving signs and assurances, and by acting on and keeping his promises. 

How do you pray, and what do you pray for? We pray in different circumstances and for different things — for self, others, nations etc. We approach prayer casually sometimes and seriously at other times.

Prayer forms the bedrock of daily Christian life. it is a key spiritual discipline. And if we are honest, we admit that we could all afford to pray more, and we could all afford to pray better. Those are the two big questions we want to be answering in Isaiah 37 — how and why we pray.

Who is modelling Christian behaviour for you? Do you spend time with people that are significantly older than you? Older Christians can model what it means to fight for fight. They are not always perfect, but they model what following God looks like through different seasons and difficulties in life. 

In this section of Isaiah that for, the series we are calling “The Gospel According to Hezekiah”, we’re looking at one of the kings, king Hezekiah, and how he responded in a time of crisis. In this study, we will see how the fight of faith sweats in peace time that we might stand in war time. We do not primarily war against human forces with human means, but against much more, and with weapons not of human might.