The Prayer of Agur

Yesterday I preached on the prayer of Agur in Proverbs 30:7-9. It is the only prayer recorded in the book of Proverbs. Here is the sermon skeleton:

Title: "The Wise Prayer of a Weak Man"

Text: Proverbs 30:7-9

Theme: A pray for a Godward life

Point: Wise people confront their spiritual weaknesses through prayer.

Introduction: You can learn a lot about a person by listening to him or her pray. So I want to introduce you to a man named Agur by way of the prayer that he prays. Proverbs 30:1 is the only place in the Bible where the name Agur is mentioned. And scholars speculate that it may have been a pseudonym under which Solomon wrote, because we do not know anything about Agur other than what we can surmise from the contents of Proverbs 30. Yet there is much we can learn about this obscure character from this chapter. And the most important things about Agur are revealed here in prayer that he prays.

There are several lessons we can learn from Agur's example in prayer

    1. We should pray with humble submission: "Two these I ask" (v. 7)

    2. We should pray with spiritual priorities: "deny them not to be before I die" (v. 7)

    3. We should pray with godly wisdom: "Two things I ask" (v. 7)

Outline:

I. Ask God to remove the things that block your pursuit of godliness (30:8a)

    A. The request

       1. Remove far from me falsehood

       2. Remove far from me lying

II. Ask God not to give you things that detour your pursuit of godliness (30:8b-9)

    A. The request (v. 8)

       1. Do not give me poverty.

       2. Do not give me riches.

    B. The reason (v.9)

       1. You need God to keep you from the perils of prosperity.

       2. You need God to keep you from the perils of poverty.