Good morning, everybody. So glad you're joining us here
on this beautiful August long weekend dead of summer, but glad
you chose to be here to worship with us today.
Turn your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 30, verses 9:00 to
11:00. If you're going to use one of
the Bibles located under some of the seats here in the
auditorium, that's page 584. Really thankful for Pastor
Andrew being here last week. Actually super thankful for the
incredible team of preachers and communicators that God's blessed
us with at Forward Church. And just a variety of voices
that we get to hear through the course of the summer and through
this series. If you're new with us, through
the course of the summer, we're walking through this series
called Ancient Prayers Present Power, and we're looking at
prayers that are found in the Bible to help us deepen our own
prayer life. Max Lucado has this wonderful
quote. He says this, our prayers may be
awkward. So if you feel like man,
praying's weird, praying's awkward, you're in good company.
All of us at times feel that. He says our prayers may be
awkward. Our attempts may be feeble, but
since the power of prayer is in the one who hears it and not the
one who says it, our prayers do make a difference.
I love that quote. I think it's a really helpful
quote to kind of get us re centered here as we enter into
this week because we've been talking about going in prayer
and the danger is as we walk through these prayers in
Scripture that we can start to see them as a formula rather
than as a teaching and instructive reality.
We can start to think of prayer like magic where I just have to
get the right words in the right order in order to make something
happen, to make God act. But that's not who our God is.
Our God is not a God who is just waiting for us to give the right
incantation for him to come and act on our behalf.
Now our God is a God who loves us.
He's active and present. He wants to act, but more than
that, he wants to come into communion, into conversation
with us. So as we go through this, don't,
don't, don't worry that you're not getting the words right in
prayer. That's not what we're trying to
teach you is the exact right words to pray.
Now we're trying to teach hearts of prayer.
We're we're trying to see who we're praying to.
I love that we just spend so much time just centering ourself
on who our God is, the greatness of our God.
That's who we come to in prayer. That's who we get to call out to
as ABBA, Father, Daddy. We want to examine the motives
of our prayer, our heart. Why?
Why are we coming to our Father? We want to see if there's some
things maybe that we've been neglecting in our conversation
with God in our prayers that we should begin to add in because
as I've said a couple of times already through this series, a
lot of us are pretty good at the God help me prayers.
We're OK with the God thank you prayers occasionally.
Remember, we remember the prayers of praise.
We know we ought to do prayers of confession, but we kind of
leave those to the side. But I doubt that many of us have
prayed a prayer like we're going to read this morning from
Proverbs chapter 30. But we're all going to pray this
morning because I'd like to start our time this morning by
reading this prayer together. It's 3 verses.
So we're going to join together and read these 3 verses in
Proverbs 39 to 11. They're going to put them up on
the screen. You can read them out of your
Bible. Let's read them together.
Speak with me as we say the words of Scripture.
Two things I ask of you. Don't deny them to me before I
die. Keep falsehood and deceitful
words far from me. Give me neither poverty nor
wealth. Feed me with the food I need,
otherwise I might have too much and deny you saying who is the
Lord? Or I might have nothing and
steal profaning the name of my God.
How many of you in this room have prayed a prayer like that
before? Like when you came to God that
was your prayer I got. I got two things for you.
One, help me be truthful. 2 Don't give me poverty or wealth.
How many of you, when we got to the part where we were speaking
out loud and it said don't give me wealth, the don't give me
wealth part, you just kind of are like you just stop speaking
there or you reverse yourself afterwards.
And you said just in the silence of your heart, God the pastor
tricked me into that. He put me up to this.
I don't think that don't make me rich is a prayer that most of
us, it's not like some of you have.
I know like prayer organizers and you pray certain things on
certain days. I bet you you don't have a
Tuesday morning don't make me rich prayer.
I know that I don't. I think I probably assumed that
was part of the deal when God called me in a ministry and I
said yes and then I found out there were other guys who didn't
think that was part of the deal. But that's a whole nother sermon
for another day. This is the only prayer in the
book of Proverbs. It's written by a guy by the
name of Agor. We all know almost nothing about
him. This is the only time he comes
up in all of scripture is in this chapter that is attributed
to him. And he comes and he says God two
requests. I this is it.
This is all. This is what I got, 2 requests.
Keep me honest, give me enough. Two weeks ago we looked at
Solomon's prayer. Those who you are with us,
you'll remember that God came to Solomon and Solomon and he said
to Solomon, Solomon, what do you want?
Ask and Solomon says, well I got one thing, one big ask for you.
Give me wisdom. This week we've got somebody
coming with two things. Now, I think a lot of us would
say when we came to Solomon's prayer, he has one ask and you
start to think through it. Hopefully by the time we walked
through it, you thought Solomon, that was a good ask, man.
You asked for that. And it was kind of like it was
the, it was the wish for more wishes prayer.
You unlocked everything with that.
But we talked about the fact that asking for wisdom is, is
about recognizing that God knows best and that living his way is
the best way to live, and that knowing what God wants will lead
us into ultimate success or the best outcomes in life.
But here's the problem. For many of us coming out of
that prayer in our regular lives, success is not defined
the way that Scripture would define success.
I would suggest to you that most of us, in fact, probably all of
us in this room to greater or lesser extents, have had our
definition of success shaped more by culture than by
scripture. I mean, if I was you speak, let
me, let me start by speaking to our teens and young adults who
are in here. I want you to think about this
because you're at the beginning of this journey and someone says
to you, what would it look like when you are like 80 years old?
So like really, really old in your mind, like super old, like
you can't believe anybody lives that age-old And you reflect and
you say my life was success, success because how do you
define that success? How would you quantify it?
Would you start listing off achievements in work or life?
Start listing off attainments. Would you go through the
checklists of experience you you knocked off the bucket list?
Is it about the fact that hey, more of my life was in a certain
emotional state than another emotional state like we we
judging by our happiness and our feelings?
Is it the quantity of relationships?
The quality of relationships is the you managed to get through
and you found that elusive thing called the work life balance.
What is it, parents? You're kind of in a different
stage here, but you're in a really important spot to be
thinking about what success looks like when it comes to
parenting and when it comes to instilling in your kids what
success is. If I was to ask you, we sat down
and we had a coffee and I said, what would it look like for your
child in your eyes to be a success?
How would you define that? So you're in the midst of work
life. What is success in work life?
Some of you are in the midst of what so many who are working see
a success. You made it to retirement.
But what is success in retirement look like?
What if success at its core isn't about attaining and
achieving, but is ultimately about knowing and being known by
God? What if what mattered more than
anything was not what you acquire, but the God that you
knew? How you define success will
shape the way that you pray. I think This is why so many of
our prayers are shaped to the way they are.
See, Agger understood that to succeed in life, he needed to
pray prayers that were more about soul shaping than about
stuff acquiring. And so the first thing that he
asked in this is this. Keep falsehood and deceitful
words far from me. I want to suggest to you that we
should be praying prayers like this, prayers that would help us
live a life of integrity. I agree.
He wants integrity. He wants to be an honest man, an
honest person. He he wants a life that isn't
deceptive. He wants a life that's real.
It's not performative. And let's be honest, our world
spends a lot of time shaping us to be performers, to manage our
performance, to manage our expectation, to manage our
reputations, not to live in truth anger saying I I don't
want to live that way, Lord, I don't want to live a lie.
I want to live a life of integrity.
I don't I don't want there to be an in real life Derek and a
social media Derek. I don't want there to be an at
home Derek and a out in the work or the school place Derek.
There can't be room to be a a Sunday follower of Jesus and a
Monday through Saturday follower of Jesus.
And I got I, I got to take a moment here because we live in
this world where I will say the word integrity and some of you
will hear the word authenticity. Authenticity is a cheap knock
off of integrity. Authenticity is about just doing
what I feel is most natural to me.
It's driven by me. It's driven internally.
Integrity is driven by God and his standards and his ethics and
his morale. It's about living up not to who
I was before Christ and the old me, the old.
So it's about living into the new creation that God has made
me to be and starting to step into that not we're not called
listen, especially young adults. Stop chasing after authenticity
start chasing after integrity. See this this is what this is
what Agger's saying clean out what's false in me.
Strip away the performance. I want to be a person who has
your heart who seeks after your heart.
Root out the self deceit in the areas where I'm I think I'm
walking in step with you and I'm not.
I think I'm being a person of integrity and I'm not.
Would you just keep lies far from me at the end of the day?
Here's here's the reality about lying in deception.
One, we all do it. 2 Lying is actually a symptom of a deeper
issue in our hearts. See, lying is what I like to
call a surface level sin. And too often we stop at the lie
and we don't dig down to figure out what the lies are actually
about. But lies are symptoms of a soul
level rot, a soul level disease, because people don't lie for the
sake of lying. Well, maybe some politicians do,
but that's again, we got another sermon for that another time.
You lie and I lie because we think the lie will do something
for us. The lie is about accomplishing
something that we really desire or want.
So you lie and you, your wife says, how does the stress look
on me? And there's a good way to answer
this and a bad way to answer this, but doesn't require lying.
But you, you say what you say just in order to kind of
preserve your own comfort and peace in that moment.
You lie to earn somebody else's approval, right?
Are you? You tell a little bit of a white
lie to puff yourself up so that somebody will think better of
you, look up to you more. You lie to acquire.
That's what cheating on taxes is.
It's this. You cheat on the taxes, you lie.
You deceive. You're dishonest because there's
something that you want to get. There's something you want to
have. You lie to control.
You lie to preserve power, you lie to protect.
But we lie for a reason. Every time we lie, there's
something behind the lie. And the something behind the lie
is this. There is something that matters
more to me in that moment. There is something that is more
important to me. There is something that I
believe is better than pleasing and obeying God.
That lie can get me something that matters more to me than
God, and something that God may not, could not, might not give
me. Fundamentally, behind the lie is
a belief there's something better than God.
Most of us would never say that, but I'm just telling you that's
what's true. Lying is just a litmus test of
what our idols are, what our real gods are.
It it, it tells us what our deepest desires in life truly
are. There's the things that we say
and the things that we lie to get, what our deepest fears are.
They reveal what we truly believe success is.
I want to take a moment to pray this morning.
I want to invite you to bow your heads with me.
And I've said this before, bow your heads does not.
It's not like you close your eyes and all the sudden the line
to heaven opens. OK, God is available at all
times in all places. You can drive in your car, you
don't have to close your eyes, and you can pray at the same
time. We bow our heads, we close our
eyes because it helps to knockout distractions in this
moment. So I want to bow your heads,
close your eyes, and I want to have you ask the Lord these
things first. Holy Spirit, what do the lies
that I tell, what are they revealing about what I treasure
most in life, what success looks like to me?
Just pray that. Ask the Spirit to reveal that.
I want to invite you to pray this as well.
God, is there anything false in me?
Is there a relationship that is dishonest and deceptive, where
I'm hiding and covering up? Is there a story I've been
spinning? Is there a part of my life that
I'm living in a different segment or section in work or
school that is not surrendered to you and I'm just trying to
segment off my my sin and keep it over here.
It's keeping me from living in integrity.
Then I want to invite you to pray this God keep falsehood
from me, keep falsehood for me by helping me see you for who
you are, that there's nothing better than you.
That the words that we sang about your goodness and your
greatness and your awesomeness and your glory, they wouldn't
just be words. They wouldn't just be concepts.
How my heart to believe that. So I would be committed to you
and you above all things. Then I'll close this off with
this Lord, cleanse us from lies. Give us eyes to see that you are
more valuable, that you are a greater treasure than anything
else, that you are what we need most.
Set us free from the fear of being seen, of being exposed by
helping us to be people who have nothing to fear in the exposing.
Help us to live in the truth that sets us free.
Amen. That was the first part that
Agar asked for. The second part is this.
Agar says give me neither poverty nor wealth.
And today I want to invite us to think about what it would mean
to pray that God would give you enough.
The God would give us enough. See money is another litmus
test. And I in our in our above ground
pool we have in our backyard. I have to test the chemicals,
the alkalinity, the pH, the chlorine in the pool because I
can't see it with my own eyes. It's invisible for me.
So I take this strip and I put it in and it tells me where
things are out of balance. And I would suggest to you that
for US, money provides one of those tests.
It tells us some things that may be hidden from us in regular
life. It reveals what we truly believe
and not just what we say we believe.
I think Paul tells us this in First Timothy 617 to 19 when he
he writes to his young mentee Timothy.
He says instruct those who are rich in this present age not to
be arrogant or set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but
on God who richly provides us with all things to enjoy.
Instruct them to do what is good, to be rich in good works,
to be generous and willing to share, storing up treasure for
themselves as a good foundation for the coming age, so that they
may take hold of what is truly life, Not what's fake life, not
what's false life, not what we believe is success in life.
See how we deal with money, I think Paul would tell us.
And what Agra's prayer is telling us is that it reveals
where our confidence truly lies. What actually is my firm
foundation upon which my feet are planted?
Where do I really get shaken? How we deal with money reveals
where we think life is really found, what it means to live,
what it means to have abundance, what it means to have a
wholeness and fullness of life. This I'll I'll tell you it's it
is OK to to pray God bless me and God prosper the work of my
hands. But there's an if attached to
that statement. It's OK to pray that if it's God
bless me so that I can be a blessing to others.
It's OK to pray God prosper the work of my hands, but don't do
it in order to puff me up and raise me up.
Do it so that everybody would understand how great and awesome
you are. It's OK to pray for God's
blessing upon us, but we should not be the end goal of that
blessing. It should be a blessing that we
receive so that we can bless others.
Hackword doesn't pray. Don't give me wealth, because
wealth in and of itself is inherently bad.
It's not. Money is a tool.
Ministry requires money. If we're going to see good
things happen. It requires investment.
If you're going to do things in this world that are going to
make a difference in this world, then we need people who would
give themselves to building businesses and to making money S
that you can fund things like, hey, providing food for starving
kids in places like Gaza and Sudan.
That takes money. It takes money to reach people
for Jesus. It takes money to fund things
like Haven Heart in Nicaragua, where Greg and Kate Isaac are
working, or the ministry that we talked about with Kristen and
Greg Brown in Montreal, reaching people from North Africa.
It takes money to be able to to partner with the school that we
partner with in Tanzania, Amani Imani School, and to be able to
provide quality education that will allow those kids to to grow
up and succeed and to raise that country.
But also allow them who are growing up in a primarily
dominantly Muslim tribe to hear about Jesus and who he is and
his love for them. That all takes money.
Money is not a bad thing. It's a tool.
But don't ask that God would give you wealth just so that you
can spend it on yourself. He says otherwise you may have
too much and disown him and say who is the Lord?
See, the reality of money is money can make us dependent on
it rather than God. It's easy when Jesus.
Jesus said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Why? Because money is a God that
promises all the things that God promises.
And it says I won't have any strings attached, but it has all
the strings in the world attached.
Money can make you believe you don't need God.
Money can me even make you believe.
Look at some of the richest people in the world.
Money can make you believe you are a God.
So here's some diagnostic questions that help us know if
we're getting to the point where we're too dependent on money and
not dependent enough on God. Is your anxiety level tied up in
a net worth number? Is your level of satisfaction
determined to buy your purchasing power?
Do you view wealth as a tool to be a blessing towards others, or
do you view wealth as the ultimate blessing?
Is your level of dependency direct on God, directly
connected to your financial independence?
Like if if your prayer life only gets real when finances get
tight, there's a problem. Do you work to provide or do you
work to purchase, to get or to give?
Abundance can make us forget God.
It can. It can begin to make us trust
the gift more than the giver. But on the other hand, pray
something else. I know you probably caught that.
Lord, don't give me poverty, or I might have nothing and steal
profaning the name of my God. See, interestingly, both sides
of the coin when it comes to wealth can cause us to reject
and abandoned God. Confidence in money can lead us
away from dependence on God, but a lack of money can lead us to
doubt God and it can lead us to compromise in our walk with Him.
The money in your bank account, however, is not determines
whether or not you have a poverty or wealth mindset.
And I think this is a really important thing to recognize.
See, there's very few people in Ontario that actually live in
desperate levels of poverty. I, I know there are some.
And by the way, if you're here today and you're struggling to
get by, please let us know. Like we want to be able to help
you. We want to be able to care for
you. We want to be able to help you
get up on your feet. We're here for you on that.
But most of Ontario does not actually have a poverty problem.
But many of us have a poverty mindset.
Lots of people in Ontario lie, cheat, deceive in order to get
more right. They have the poverty mindset
that leads to stealing because we feel poor even though we're
historically globally rich. Because money can simultaneously
do two things. It can make that make us think
that we don't have enough and it can make us think that we have
enough and we don't need God. And sometimes it does both
things in the same moment at the same time.
Like I've seen this happen so often where people feel like I
don't have enough and yet at the same time they feel like they
have enough that they don't need God.
And money can do that to us when it when our focus is on wealth,
it it, it, it constantly kind of pulls us back and forth between
dependency and despair. So Agger says, hey, God, give me
enough. Not too much, not too little.
Just give me enough. Give me enough to be content, to
be dependent on you, to not be pulled away from you on one side
or the other, he says, Actually don't make me poor so I don't
profane your name, so don't curse you.
And I have seen so many times people who felt like they asked
for something from God and God didn't give it to them, so they
walked away from God. God, I just wanted that.
That's the only thing I wanted from you.
The only thing I'm asking for you is this.
You didn't give it to me. And so I'm, I'm done.
God, I don't believe in you. Or if I do believe in you, I
don't want to believe in that type of God.
Hey, that reveals 2 things. First, you don't really want
God, you want his stuff. So be honest about it.
The stuff matters more to you. 2nd, you have no idea the riches
that God has actually given you in Christ Jesus.
That's what it reveals about our heart when we do that.
Like if if you're here today and you're searching for more,
you're saying I really do want life and, and it feels like I
can get life through money. I'm just telling you there's a
better life than money can give you, and Jesus came to give it.
Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life, and I'm the
conduit. In fact, I'm the only conduit to
the Father, the one who is the source and center of all life,
The life you long for, the life that your heart is calling out
for. That that hole that seems to be
there that's driving you to consume and attain and achieve,
it'll never be filled by that stuff because the the hole is
too big for that stuff. It's a God sized hole.
The only thing that will fill that hole is Jesus.
What we need more than stuff as a savior, what we need more than
healing is a healer. So he says give me neither
poverty nor wealth. No, feed me with the food I
need. The food we need is the one who
is the bread of life. Jesus says that he is the bread
of life and he alone satisfies the hunger in our heart and in
our soul. But also remember, if you're a
follower of Jesus, how did Jesus call his followers to pray?
How did he teach the disciples to pray?
Give us this day, Our Daily Bread.
Give us what we need today. Give us enough so that we would
know your goodness and kindness and grace and compassion towards
us, but so that we wouldn't start to put our dependency and
our hope and our trust in the bread rather than the one who
gives the bread. So I want to call us to pray
again. Let's close our eyes one more
time. Let's start with this.
If you're, if you're longing for that life, you're here today in
the state of your heart, the state of your soul, the state of
your life is I just don't feel like I have enough.
I'm not satisfied. There's no contentment.
There's no peace in my soul. That's where you're, if you've
come looking for something that would satisfy today, I want to
say to you, call out to Jesus. He satisfies.
He's the one who's come to give you a life of Lovejoy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness,
self-control. He's made that on offer through
Christ and through his Holy Spirit.
And you just have to pray. Oh, this God, I'm, I'm tired of
chasing all of the stuff that you've created.
I want to know you, the creator God.
I don't just want your stuff. I recognize what I need more
than your stuff is I need you. So thank you for sending Jesus
to bring me the life that I couldn't achieve or attain on my
own through my own accomplishments or my own
acquisitions. Thank you for sending Jesus to
die on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins so my soul
could be satisfied forever. I trust that his death has made
life possible for me. And if you pray that the promise
of Scripture is, God answers that prayer every time.
And if you're a follower of Jesus, here's what I'd like to
ask you to pray this morning. Just take a moment and ask God
to reveal if there's any area where you've been chasing after
too much. Where have you been discontent?
Where are you afraid of not having enough?
Where are you struggling in your life today, in this moment, to
believe that God is enough? What would it look like for you
to trust God with your provision and just call out to him and
say, Lord built my faith. I, I want to trust you in this.
Show me that you are trustworthy.
Prove it. Remind me, Help me see Jesus and
what you've provided in Him so clearly that my confidence
wouldn't be shaken when things come up at work or at school or
in my finances. Lord, teach us contentment.
Help us to believe that your daily bread is enough.
Free us. Free us from the fear of lack.
Free us from the pride that comes from over abundance.
And I'm just going to invite us to all do this.
Just just put your hands out in front of you.
Put your hands out. Would you just pray with me?
God, I trust you to give me what I need today.
Thank you. Amen.
Listen, this this is an ancient prayer.
It's a powerful prayer. It's a dangerous prayer because
it's going to invite God if you start praying these things.
It's going to invite him to mess with your comfort, your habits,
your desire for control, your definition of success.
But it's the kind of prayer that leads to the true life that's
found in Christ, a life of integrity, a life of
contentment, a life of dependence, a life that can
transform your life, a life that can transform your family.
And honestly, church, if we were all to get serious about praying
this way and to be people who are being soul shaped in this
way, a life that would radically transform the workplaces, the
communities, the schools, the cities that we live in.
So let's ask God not just to give us stuff, but to shape our
souls. Amen.
And ask the band to come out and lead us in one final song.
Reminding.