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.
Why is it so important that we answer and understand these two questions? Because prayer is important. All through Scripture we see the pattern of prayer in the daily life of God’s people — in the Old Testament and their worship of God, and everywhere peppered in the New Testament with calls to pray to God. Philippians 4:6 tells us to not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 also tells us to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
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. God has given us His word which is actually very prescriptive — not in a limiting sense, but surely as a helpful guide for us to follow. The title of our study tonight is a prayer tutorial with Hezekiah. In Isaiah 37, we want to observe how Hezekiah prays and what he prays for — the manner in which he approaches God, what he appeals to, the position of his heart, what his chief end and goal in prayer is — so that our own prayers can be shaped accordingly.
(A) How we pray: With immediacy, remembering His character, crying out to Him in humility, laying our struggles before Him, trusting that He will deliver us for His glory (Isa 37:14-20)
To understand Isaiah 37, we need to know the context. As we read in the previous study, Judah faced the threat of imminent attack from Assyria. However, under Hezekiah, Judah had 14 years of great spiritual reform. The Rabshakeh tempts Hezekiah to faithlessness, employing tactics of rationalising (“Egypt has failed, Hezekiah is weak”), replacing (“make peace with me”), and relativising God (“all the other gods of the nations have fallen”).
In light of this, Hezekiah grieves and turns to God, Isaiah speaks and comforts. The Rabshakeh sends another warning letter even while away to reemphasize the earlier points (c.f. Isa 37:10-13). War was being waged on a king that is also wrestling and trying to be faithful.
So we see where we are as we begin to look at Hezekiah’s response in prayer. He is pressed from all sides, grieved and desperate. All his worldly responses and ways (relying on Egypt, stripping the temples of silver and gold to offer Assyria to prevent war) have failed him. He has nowhere to turn. Everything that he has tried has failed.
Does this describes you tonight? Perhaps not at war with a global superpower, but hard-pressed with nowhere to turn in a dire situation. Maybe you’ve done everything you can, you’ve problem solved and looked for help and everything has been futile. You look around and you’re helpless — there is no hope, there is no way out, and all you can see is the disaster or consequence that looms ahead. Friends, God knows and sees you, and we can turn to Him in prayer.
How does Hezekiah go to God in prayer? We will take a closer look at his prayer in Isaiah 37:14-16 and see what we can learn from this pattern of prayer. We read that Hezekiah received a letter from messengers, read it and went to the house of the LORD to pray. This shows us that prayer is instinctive and immediate. Where this king previously sought his own wisdom, and even sought Isaiah first in the episode just before this, we see how he runs to God without delay. He remembers YHWH, and brings the letter and lays it out before God.
Notice how he quite literally laid his problems before God, and sought Him. Do you see that we can lay our problems before God and pray for mercy and help? Or are we too hard-hearted and proud to do the same? In our response to trials and tribulations, do we have an urgency to seek God, or a desire to fix things on our own? Do we trust and remember our own strengths, before we trust and remember our mighty God? Friends, our response and the immediacy of our response reveals much about our hearts.
Hezekiah also addresses God as “O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim” (Isa 37:16a). Hezekiah uses the covenantal name of God when he calls Him “LORD”. He knows that this is also the God who rescued them from Egypt, the God of promises made and promises kept. The phrase “of hosts” is a reference to heavenly hosts. Hezekiah recognises that the covenantal God also possesses the heavenly armies. Yes, Assyria’s army is great and imposing, but who is this God? He is the LORD of hosts!
This God is enthroned above the cherubim, a reference to the ark of the covenant that the Israelites were given and carried around with them everywhere (c.f. Exo 25:10–22). It is the manifestation of God’s presence with them. The holy God was represented as above the mercy seat and between the cherubim, and spoke to His people from there (c.f. Num 7:89).
Hezekiah also calls on God as the almighty — LORD of hosts — almost as if he’s reminding himself that while the Assyrian army is mighty and of great number, his God is the God of heavenly armies, the God of His people, the God who has delivered them over and again, the almighty and eternal and holy God.
How Hezekiah addresses God shows us much of who God is. He appeals to and remembers the person of God and His character, he remembers what God has done for His people, how God has been faithful to keep His promises, how God is mighty, how God is present with His people. All these things Hezekiah calls on as he begins his prayer.
Hezekiah also calls on God’s lordship and power as the Almighty Creator — “You are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth” (Isa 37:16b). He appeals to the exclusivity of God, almost as if in response to the Rabshakeh’s words of relativising God — where are all the other nations’ gods? Have they not fallen? Hezekiah is firm here — our God YHWH is like no other. He recognises that He alone is God, of all kingdoms of the earth. He alone is the Creator who made heaven and earth. He is not like other gods, and He will not fall like them.
Hezekiah mediates on His character and continues calling to mind who God is. This is such a great reminder against what the world tells us of our God, against what our hearts are sometimes tempted to believe. It is a reminder that God is God alone, and He is the Creator God who is above all things. Even in our prayers, we should remind ourselves as we push back on the narratives of the world.
Hezekiah shows us how we are called to pray! Do we come with this kind of reverence and respect, this sense of seriousness before this Holy God? Are we intentional about reminding ourselves of who He is? How do we pray?
What else can we observe from the rest of Hezekiah’s prayer? Isaiah 37:17a shows us how Hezekiah models crying out to Him in humility. He prays “Incline your ear, O LORD, and hear; open your eyes, O LORD, and see”. We also see that this cry is not just a cry to the universe, but is directed to a specific God. This God is a God who hears and sees, just as how God described Himself in Exodus 2:23-25. In the Exodus account, God Himself also says that He knows their sufferings and have come down to deliver His people out of the hands of the Egyptians (Exo 3:7-8).
You can hear Hezekiah’s cry and appeal to God — hear us, see us, remember us, O LORD. We see King Hezekiah in humility — pleading for God to hear and see them. His heart is bare and his position is prostrate — the king is begging and pleading for God’s mercy. He expresses his emotions but is also confident that God is present
What is the position of our hearts when we come before God? Do we come humble, or do we secretly think to ourselves that we can still fix things on our own? Do we believe that we somehow still need to fend for ourselves, because God is not enough? Do we fall back on our plans because we need something tangible? Something we can do? Hezekiah models for us what it looks like to come before God in humility.
Hezekiah lays out the problem in Isaiah 37:17b-19. The ESV Study Bible is helpful here as it explains how these verses show Hezekiah’s realism. His faith is not a blind optimism but an overruling sense of God. What does that mean? Hezekiah describes the situation and the problem factually as they happened. Yet the thread that pulls these verses together is his firm faith in who God is. Despite the Assyrians destroying other nations and their gods, he recognizes that “they were no gods” and therefore they were destroyed. Hezekiah is sure and clear — his God is the God.
What Hezekiah does is instructive for us too. He restates his theology and what he believes. We may think that it seems a bit weird to tell God who He is and what happened, but we see that there is room to do this and in doing so, we teach ourselves again about who He is. Eventually, this forms what we ask for and of God. What makes this not just an exercise of the mind is that God is living. He is not a dead God but He is the living God, who is almighty and powerful. We can trust Him because He cares.
As His people, we can lay our struggles before Him, trusting that He is our God who is almighty. Isaiah 37 shows us how we can lay our problems before Him factually and as they happen. It’s not as if we cannot or should not pray these things because God is all-knowing. Our God desires for us to bring our struggles before Him and lay them at his feet. We can trust Him and know Him, because we can be sure and clear that our God is like no other, and that He cares.
What then, should we do differently because we are not speaking to just any God and it is never a psychological exercise? How will your prayer change when you remember that you’re pleading with a holy, living and mighty God.
In Isaiah 37:20, Hezekiah prays that God will vindicate them and Himself. He asks God to save so that everyone will know what they know — that He alone is the almighty LORD, maker of heaven and earth. We will unpack it in the next section, but what we can see here is that his theology of God shapes what he asks and expects. He doesn’t just emote to get catharsis. Hezekiah is not baiting God to act. Rather, he knows that God is not like other gods and His glory is important. The thing that underpins Hezekiah’s prayer is a keen trust that God will deliver them for His glory. Hezekiah calls on God to not overlook these insults against His name, and to act. He is not daring God to respond, but he is concerned for God’s name and glory.
This has been a long section and we realise that Hezekiah’s prayer is so instructive for us. There is urgency to his prayer and praying. As we pray, we pray to an almighty God who is unlike any other — He is the creator, He is all powerful, faithful and present. As we pray, we humble ourselves — we bring nothing to the table but our needs, and lay them humbly before Him asking for His help trusting that He cares. Finally, we can trust Him to deliver us for His glory — we can and should be concerned for God’s glory.
How do you pray? When we read these words, let’s also not look at this model with guilt, but see see how wonderful prayer is. Remember who we approach in prayer. And pray.
(B) What we pray for: That God may be glorified in us as we fully depend on and trust in Him (Isa 37:20)
As we go through Hezekiah’s model for prayer, we want to pause at Isaiah 37:20 and look again exactly at what he prays for. We’ve already shared that some of us pray for ourselves, our friends and family, the nations etc. This is quite different from what we’ve seen so far in Hezekiah’s prayer. Where our prayers are more self-centred, Hezekiah’s prayer is drastically different. His chief goal and desire is that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that God alone is the LORD. He prays for God’s glory — that God would glorify Himself in and through his circumstances, however poor the circumstances may be.
That’s quite a different way of praying isn’t it? On the one hand we know this Christian-ese — we pray we’ll ace our exams for your glory, we pray we’ll win this match for your glory. But sometimes when we examine our prayers, is God’s glory a means for us to get what we really want, as if somehow God would be most glorified if we won the match or did well in our exams or received that promotion at work? Our prayers are often self-centred and we easily tag on God’s glory to our hearts’ real desire as we pray for life to be smooth, for situations to be easy, for things to be good.
Have we confused our desires with God’s glory? Do we think that if we pray with this formula, God will grant it? What do we really mean when we say help us glorify you in all we do?
How different then is Hezekiah’s prayer? Do we see how God-centred his prayer is? He doesn’t pray for his own safety, not even for his own peace. He prays instead that through these circumstances, God’s name would be glorified. What inspires this kind of prayer? A commentary on Isaiah by Pastor Ray Ortlund says,
Hezekiah understands the meaning of his life. His existence is a platform for the display of God’s glory in the world. He is not treating God as a means to his own ends but as the worthy end of all things. He is not praying, “Lord, why are you allowing this to happen to me?” He is praying, “Lord, will you not glorify yourself in this?” His own personal fate is not his concern. He’s released from that prison. He has become a God-centred man, and he is courageously undaunted because of it.
We need to pray this way. We need to see our lives this way. Why are we here? Not to play in some sandbox of our own making, but to be living proof that God saves sinners. Why is God there? Not to service our convenience and our selfish dreams, but to display his glory in our salvation. And when his glory becomes our passion, we are not robbed, we are not diminished. Rather, we are dignified, we overcome evil. Evil is secondary, derivative, parasitic, and temporary. Only God is ultimate. Let his ultimacy change the whole agenda of your life.
Two things as we close.Firstly, do you notice how jarring this is when put against the world we live in? In a world that calls us to seek our own good, to make everything about ourselves, to make all of life’s agenda the self, how jarring is it that God calls us to make our lives about Him? And yet He does, because that is what we were created for, and that is what we were saved for. As Ortlund writes, we are living proof that God saves sinners, and we are to display his glory in our salvation. We are not robbed or diminished. Instead we are fully satisfied when we do this, because that is what God made us for. We have been saved from sin not to pursue our small dreams and hopes. As we make it our chief goal to glorify God, we too are made whole, and we too are emboldened to live drastically different lives from what the world calls us to. We are not saved for nothing. We are saved to this, for God’s glory!
Secondly, this tutorial on prayer sums up the Christian life. As Christians we confess that we are sinners in need of a Saviour, and we have salvation in and through Christ. But He saves us not so that we can just continue living our lives as we did before — He saved us so that He may be glorified in our lives. That comes out in what we pray for and how we live. As Christians, do we care for God’s glory? Do we live for God’s glory? Will we pray with Hezekiah — Lord use my circumstances and my pain and my problems and my all — use me to show the world that you love and save sinners, no matter the outcome.
The God-centeredness of Hezekiah’s prayer points us to a simple truth that has echoed throughout His word, that God calls us to fully depend on and trust in Him. He alone has saved us, He alone can fulfill us, and He alone is glorified in our salvation.
What are some aspects of Hezekiah’s prayer we can learn and apply? What is something that needs to change in your life if you made God’s glory your life’s agenda?