Supplication prayer

[AI translation] Dear Brothers and Sisters!I am sure you all know that there are different prayers. As far as their content is concerned. For example, there is the prayer of thanksgiving, there is the prayer of praise to God, there is the prayer of confession, there is the prayer of supplication and there is the so-called prayer of supplication. A supplicatory prayer is when you intercede with God for someone. So we call supplicating for others supplicating prayer. As the German says: Fürbitte. Prayer for someone. In this Word that I have read, it is such a supplicatory prayer. And for this Sunday, I have deliberately chosen this Word because I want our supplications, both collectively and individually, to be directed in a certain direction. It is common knowledge that just a few days ago the doors of schools reopened. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of students are starting the school year again. Our boys and girls are going back to work to prepare themselves, to continue their preparation for life. And I believe that it is in this work that we, who pray, as elders, with our prayers, with our supplications, must stand beside our children. So it is that we should think of this young army first of all when we read the Word: "If any man see his brother sinning, let him pray, and God will give him life."
Let me begin at the very end. That is, that God gives life to the one for whom he asks, let him beg. And here we are trying to understand this as the Bible understands it. Because here in the original Greek text there are two different words, which the Hungarian Bible translates the same as life. One word sounds like "bios", the other word sounds like "dzoe". Yes, both mean life, but there is a huge difference between the two. Because bios means the life we have when we are born in the flesh. That is, life on earth, natural life, with all its joys and sorrows, successes and failures, beauty, ugliness, joys and disappointments, good and bad health and transience. So the life we live in this body. The biological life. That's what the word bios means. That is, that which can be ended at any moment by death. But dzoe, on the other hand, is the life that is given to you at rebirth. So, the life that that particular narrow path leads to is the life that we live with God. The redeemed life, the purified life. The life that Christ says I am. So the life of Christ, with its splendour, its design, its power, its liberation, is the life that death does not end, that lives even when it dies. This is the dzoe. And I think you all sense that the Word is about the latter. So to beg and God gives life to it, then it says to beg for this life. For this life liberated in Christ, redeemed by Christ. For this spiritually balanced life. That is what we should pray for, that is what we ask for our children, for our youth, and for each other, and for ourselves. In fact, this is what we all strive for, all of us who have ever become believers, and this is what God is training us to do every Sunday, again and again, with His Word and His Holy Spirit, with the Lord's Supper and with the church community. And whoever has ever experienced the beauty and value of this dzoe, this life, it goes without saying that his greatest desire is to share it with his descendants, to pass it on to his children and to be able to pass it on to others. It is so much a matter of the highest concern for our children that, not so very long ago, when we brought them here to be baptised, God made us swear that we would bring up and educate our children for this life. To live as followers of Christ, so we committed them to the dzoe.
We are all amazed that in our children the biological life of the family continues. But what believer would be content with that? Every believer longs for another line to continue. The same line of faith that we ourselves have received from the generation before us. That is, that not only the line of bios, but also the line of dzoe, may continue in the lives of our children. I know very well, and all believers know very well, how difficult it is to lead anyone, especially our own children, to dzoe, to real life. I know very well that many believing parents are bitter that, despite all their efforts, they cannot succeed in this plan. And it is also well known that today the so-called generation gap between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, is much greater than it was when we were young. The pace of life has accelerated to such an extent that today there is not only an almost impenetrable gap between parents and children, but often even between 18-year-olds and 25-year-olds. It's like we live in a completely different world. The older generation is sometimes almost completely at a loss to understand the feelings, thoughts and behaviour of the younger generation.
Brothers and sisters, just to illustrate, let me read from a short story on this subject. It's really just an illustration, but it's quite typical. Guimard has a short novel, 'Three in Paris', about a young girl who gets caught up in the dubious morals of the film world and then drifts almost unnoticed towards ever greater depths in the hope of a glittering career. Her old-fashioned mother watches her daughter's change with increasing concern. "Are you at least sure," says her mother, "that this film director is a decent man? I want you to be happy in the world you have chosen for yourself." The girl tries to answer. She would have liked to say: "Mother, you just used two words that separate us: safe and happy. I am sure of nothing, least of all of myself. I live from one day to the next, like my friends of a similar age. We are learning life now, and we have no guidebook to show us which way is best, which is the safest way to arrive. We don't know which bend is dangerous. We are vagrants without a pack. We carry nothing in our hands or in our pockets of all that you have tried to hand over to us. As for happiness, sorry, we don't care. It would be too burdensome to carry it, and we need to be very nimble. There are as many houses as there are customs, Mama, as many people as there are truths." This is what the girl really wanted to say to her mother, but she did not say it. She simply could not find words to express her thoughts that would be compatible with her mother's vocabulary. Perhaps her mother would not have understood her, because she had no idea what her daughter was trying to say.
Oh, but many mothers today wonder, as the writer writes of this daughter's mother, that no matter how hard Mother Hen tried, she could not follow her little chick in the puddle.
Brothers and sisters, I believe that we older people should read a great deal of fiction by national and foreign writers in order to try to understand the thinking and behaviour of today's generation. To be able to bridge, at least in our minds, the generation gap that I have just mentioned. And then perhaps the older would be more understanding of the younger when they hear it from him: Oh, Papa, it's not the same today as it was when you were younger! Let us try to find out a little about the minds of the young. You know, today's youth is no worse than the old youth, only more sincere! They are just living more openly the same life that in the old days was covered up by a hypocritical veneer. So understanding is a very big and very difficult thing. And that is what we all have to strive to understand in the first place. But that is not all! What can we do at all to ensure that our children can live a truly balanced life and that they too can truly walk the path of moral purity? Well, so says the Word when it says, "if any man see his brother sinning, let him pray".
Let him beg! So we can beg. And I am convinced that we should beg much more and much more for them and ask for that dzoe, that life! And this life, full of Christ's strength and beauty and purity and design, is the gift of God all over. It can be asked for! And this is what the Word is talking about: "If any man see his brother sinning, let him pray." So it does not say that if anyone sees that his brother is hungry or cold, that he should beg. No, then don't beg! Then help! If he sees his brother in some kind of trouble that God has entrusted to him to help with, then don't beg. Then don't try to trust God back with what he has entrusted to him. So then I should not beg, Lord, give him bread or shelter, but I should cut off a piece of my bread and give it to him. For I can do this and God has entrusted me with this. But he shall pray when he seeth that his brother sinneth. And this, that he sins, does not mean at all that he has indulged in some moral sin, or some great sin of a corporate nature, or that he has embezzled, but simply means that if one sees that his brother is not yet in the dzoe, has not yet attained, has not yet found the life that was just spoken of. Or, in the words of the short story, he has no guidebook to show him the best way to go and the dangerous turns to take when he is unsure of anything, least of all himself.
So when he is hesitant, when he has no spiritual support, no source of strength to draw on, when he is stumbling through the labyrinths of life - that is what the Word says when he sins! Yes, then beg. Because this is dzoe, this is life, this is the gift of God from the beginning. Beg! So, don't preach to him, don't preach to him a moral sermon that this is not the way, my son, and this is not the way. Don't quarrel with him, don't make a scene, but above all, beg! Do not say, "I will speak to the child's head," but first of all speak to God's heart.
Brothers and sisters! Parents, who are very often helpless in the face of their adolescent children's educational problems, and who are sad to see many of their fine teachings falling back on them like peas in a pod, would do well to talk to God first about their children, and then talk to their children about God. Because, you know, it is so that he who first talks to God about everything, will also be told what to say to his child. Let the other man beg his child to come before God, Who did not stoop down to the depths of the abomination of the cross to condemn the world, but that this world might be saved by Him. Hold him up, bring him up before the Lord, before the Lord, Who wills not that he should perish, but that this world should be saved by Him. Who wills that he should live in the dzoe! God wants dzoe, life for all men! So beg! Of course, only those who live in dzoe, in the life of Christ, can truly beg, can credibly beg, can ask for this life for others. That is, whose words spoken in prayer and words spoken at the family table do not clash. Whose prayer and behaviour are in harmony with each other. He who prays not only with his words, but with his whole life, let him pray for his brother just as he prays for himself.
Brothers and sisters, it only remains for me to say in connection with this Word that such prayer is never in vain! Behold, there is such an unheard-of promise attached to it, that "this is the confidence which we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He will hear us". Here it is very important that it is according to His will! Many prayers may not be heard by God because they are not according to His will. But nothing is more certain to be according to His will than when we pray for someone's life. It is certainly according to His will. For God has told us so many times and in so many ways that He does not want the sinner to die, but He wants him to live. He wants life for the sinner. God has given it in Scripture that prayer according to His will will be heard. And so the Word goes on to say, "If we know that He hears us, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him". They are there, they are accounted for, they are not lost somewhere in space, they are not forgotten. We have them! And even if we do not see the result of such petitions for a very long time, this petition was not in vain, because they are there, they are with God! And if God wills it, these prayers will come forth and be fulfilled. Perhaps that blessed hand, which every day is intertwined in prayer to beg for life for someone, will have long since gone to its grave, when then, perhaps decades later, that someone will find life and it will turn out that someone did not pray for him in vain. You may not live to see your request fulfilled, but you are not praying in vain, because you have these requests! Those for whom you are praying may still have a long way to go, they may still have big stakes ahead of them, but whatever detours they take, they will come to Jesus one day!
And Brothers and Sisters, on this promise of God, every believer and praying person can lay the life of his children, his salvation! So let us make very much and very earnest use of these occasions and opportunities to help others!
Teach us to believe, Lord, teach us to ask!
Childlike, teach us to ask for great faith!
Revive my heart, inspire it, for thee
To gather souls! Teach me to ask!
(Canto 479, verse 1)
Amen.
Date: 4 September 1966.