Good morning. My name is Daniel.
I am the lead pastor here at Res Church.
Thanks for braving the rain. I know, I know in Bakersfield,
when it rains, I mean, literally if it even sprinkles, we all
flip out like it's a welcome to the hurricane of California.
You know, we're made of sugar and we're going to melt.
We're in week two of a series on prayer.
I'm excited that you're here today.
We are we're kind of walking through last week was the was
the why and and what of prayer. And then this week we're going
to talk a lot about the how for, for me.
Let me I have in my life, just in different moments, different
circumstances I have experienced just just gruelling moments in
a, in a emergency room, hospital room, just on on the floor of
the hospital, on my knees in a in a hospital gown, just
writhing in pain. By the way, hospital floors are
really gross. I, I, I just, just just just
crying out to God in, in just extreme pain.
I, I have poured my heart out to God asking him to explain why I
lost a child. I have, I have had moments where
I'm just up to here with frustration, feeling like God's
calling me towards something, but but not actually knowing
what it is that he's calling me toward and just kind of being
frustrated that I don't feel like he's being clear enough.
And, and I'm and I'm asking, but he's not answering.
I have felt spiritually dry at times where I just, I feel like,
man, there's nothing there. And yet intellectually I know
that my feelings don't match what I know to be true about
God. But I don't understand why I'm
feeling the way that I feel in all those seasons or moments in
my life. Are, are, are kind of those real
times where I think back to just overwhelming feelings of, of
powerlessness, like I'm not in control.
I can't fix a thing that's wrong or, or or ignorance or I just
don't understand or I don't know or feeling forgotten, feeling
lost, feeling taken advantage of.
And, and in every one of those scenarios, it is, it is reaching
back toward God, like, like reaching up toward God and
going, hi, I need you to move on my behalf.
Anybody else felt that way? Oh, just, I need you to move.
I need to experience God's presence, God's power, God's
move. And so here we are Week 2
talking about prayer. If you're, if you're here or
you're watching and maybe you're new to Christianity or you're
not a Christian and you're just kind of a skeptic, you're
checking it out. Someone invited you.
And, and look, I'm glad you're here.
In fact, if you're here and you don't understand prayer, man,
what a wonderful time to come to church.
We're going to talk a lot about this every one of those moments
of my life and maybe some of you can relate even if you're not
Christian have been these times where prayer for me prayer is
simply reaching out to God in hope of experiencing him.
And so in our in our sermon last week where we we came up kind of
a working definition of what is prayer and we said it this way.
Authentic prayer is encountering God's astonishing presence
meaning, but prayer, real prayer, is just looking toward
God and beginning to experience who he is, which changes us.
And so today what I want to do is I want to take a look at a
couple prayers in the Bible and and I want to see if from there
we can build a framework for the how to pray, not why to pray
that was last week, but the how to pray.
How do we go about this? So maybe prayer seems a little
intimidating to you and it, and it shouldn't, you shouldn't at
all. So we're going to look at a
couple texts today. The 1st is going to be in Luke
18 in in Luke 18, there's a point that Jesus wants to make
about us and, and, and about prayer.
In fact, he uses prayer to make the point.
And, and so Jesus made-up a lot of stories.
I don't know if you know that or not.
We call them parables to make it sound better.
But he's made his stories up to teach lessons.
And he, he made-up a story to teach a very specific lesson in
Luke 18. And I want you to see this.
Here's what it says. We're going to start in verse 9
if you're if you're in your text, Luke 18, verse 9, he this
is Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in
themselves that they were righteous and treated others
with contempt. Say me because every one of us
struggles with this right here at some point or another.
We think that we we're righteous and we treat others with
contempt. Sometimes it's we actually treat
others with contempt because we think they're being
self-righteous, which in that moment is ironic because we're
being self-righteous. Verse 10 two men went up to the
temple to pray. 1A Pharisee. Now listen, a Pharisee, you
don't have to know much about the Bible.
I'll explain. A Pharisee was a professional
religious person. They went pro at religion.
OK, a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
Now look, I know that we don't think much of the IRS, right?
We ain't got nothing on how they thought about tax collectors in
the 1st century. In 1st century in Jerusalem, a
tax collector was the worst of the worst of the worst, an
absolute traitor. I mean, you could be anything
other than a tax collector. You could be a prostitute, you
could be a murderer, you could be a Padres fan.
Worse than that, if you could even believe that was a tax
collector. A tax collector.
Verse 11, the Pharisee, the professional religious person
standing by himself, prayed thus.
God, I thank you that I'm not like other men, extortioners,
unjust adulterers. You can fill in the blank for
yourself, right? Those Republicans, those
Democrats, my neighbor, whatever, or even like this tax
collector, verse 12, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of
all that I get. Verse 13 but the tax collector
notice where he where he's at standing far off would not even
lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, God be
merciful to me a Sinner. I tell you, the man went down to
his house justified rather than the other.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who
humbles himself will be exalted. Now this is Jesus example about
prayer. The professional prayer is
completely wrong and the amateur outcast is the honorable
example. Just consider that because today
what we're going to do is we're going to learn a framework for
prayer. A framework.
Now, it's not a formula, it's not a spell or any magic words.
It's just, it's just a way, a framework that we're going to
see from Jesus who actually teaches us how to pray.
And at the very center of this framework is this idea that it
needs to be a heart that is in need of God.
OK, and it what I here's what I mean by that.
Without a posture of humility, prayer is shallow.
In fact, our big idea, if we take nothing else out of today,
take this one concept. Prayer is a spiritual
chiropractor, it realigns the posture of our soul.
Prayer is a spiritual chiropractor, it realigns the
posture of our soul. My soul is constantly in need of
an adjustment. That's why I started talking
about all these seasons of my life that we're so desperate
because often times my heart is not humble, my life is not
desperate. And so I, I, I believe it to be
true that often times what God does is he steps back and he
allows us to experience this world and life without his hand
on us so that we can begin to realize like, oh man, this is
pretty terrible. I'm pretty hopeless.
I really need God's presence. Amen.
Let's just consider this. When are you most appreciative
of a life vest? When you're standing on the boat
and it's nice, it's sunny outside and, and, and you got
this big bulky thing on and it's actually making you kind of hot
and it's itching my neck. Like what do I got to wear this
thing? Or when the boat is capsized and
the waves are blotting out the horizon and you're just going
like, I would die right now if it weren't for this life vest,
man, I'm thinking about this life vest a whole lot
differently right now. Amen.
I I I asked myself this question about 10/10/12 years ago and it
is, it is just kind of haunted me for the last decade.
It's it's constantly on my mind. It comes back up in prayer all
the time. Here's the question.
How can I become desperate for Jesus even when things are going
well? Because look, I got no problem
being desperate for Jesus in the middle of a storm.
Amen man, none at all. I have a journal entry in my
prayer journal from the weeks right after my wife and I lost a
child. And it says essentially this,
Hey, godfather, whatever it is that I'm supposed to learn from
this storm right now, I'd like to learn it so I don't have to
go through this again. And I and I believe that the
primary thing that God has been teaching me over the course of
the last decade is how to desire his presence in my life even
when things are good. And in my experience, it's a
posture issue. Now that may not make sense.
You can posture issue. Let's go ahead say what?
See, thanks for asking when when I'm low, when I'm desperate,
when I'm screaming for God and I feel like life, life will only
be good if God shows up. But when I when I have that kind
of realization of how much I need him, then what in my life
would create that level of desperation to experience God
outside of a tragedy, apart from a crisis, apart from a disaster?
Let me just let me ask you here, we're going to do a little
survey. You ready?
Raise your hand if you would like to experience God's peace
and contentment. OK, now hold it up, Ray.
Now raise your other hand if you would like to experience that
without having to suffer tragedy in crisis.
Right. What if I could experience God's
goodness, but I'd not have to go through the crazy tragedy to get
there? And here's the crazy part, OK?
A guy named Daniel Henderson has written a number of books on
prayer. And in one of his his books, he
wrote this. He wrote this line.
It says this, most Christians pray out of a crisis or a
grocery list. See, either everything's going
wrong. So I could now I'll pray or I
gotta, you know, well, God pray for them and I want this right.
And we just checked the little boxes.
But but, but my question for you is like, what if, what if we
could change that? What if we could change that?
What if we experience God's goodness out apart from the
tragedy? What if we could experience
God's goodness all the time? And I believe, and this has been
the last decade of my life, I believe that it that if we will
begin to follow the framework for prayer in the Bible and we
will begin to actually get consistent with that framework,
consistently doing that, I actually think we will
experience God's presence in our life all the time, all the time.
That's my promise to you if you would just begin to do what
Scripture shows us to do when it comes to prayer, man, we it will
grow your faith in your pursuit of Christ like nothing else.
Let me just show you we're going to look at 1:00 central prayer
today. Jesus taught his disciples how
to pray. It's called the Lord's Prayer.
It's in Matthew 6. It's also in Luke.
We're going to be Matthew 69 through 13.
This is what it says. Our Father in heaven, hallowed
be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it
is in heaven. Give us this day Our Daily
Bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our
debtors. And lead us not in since
temptation, but deliver us from evil now.
This little tiny, short prayer has all the elements of a
framework that we're going to lay out today that we could use
for any prayer, for all prayer, for prayer every day or all the
time. And prayers can be short and
prayers can be long. Jesus shows us this, this lesson
in a tiny prayer, but it also tells us that Jesus went out
alone with the Lord and prayed for hour upon hour upon hour.
In fact, we we see him withdrawing all the time to
spend time praying to the Lord. It's the same framework.
Ji Packer says it this way. He says this prayer, the Little
Lord's Prayer, is the pattern for all Christian praying.
Jesus is teaching that prayer will be acceptable when and only
when the attitudes, thoughts, and desires expressed fit this
pattern. That is to say, every prayer
should be a praying of the Lord's Prayer of some type.
It's not just the Lord's first lesson on prayer.
It's the most important lesson. It is the lesson on prayer.
Jesus, we have a recorded ministry, Jesus has about three
years where we have stories of him doing public mission work
and a public Kingdom work. And, and in that three-year
period, of all the accounts we have in the Bible, his 12
disciples only asked him one time ever to teach them how to
do something. They did not ask him.
Hey, Jesus, teach us how to heal the lame didn't ask teach us how
to heal a blind part didn't ask teach us how to multiply all
them fishes and loaves into a bunch of food.
Man, I'm going to do Chick-fil-A.
Like didn't ask teach us how to fish like you did and, and pull
coins out of fish's mouth. Didn't ask one thing.
Teach us how to pray like you do teach us how to pray.
So I would just say you might consider that if in three years,
after all of that supernatural work, the only thing that the
disciples ever looked at Jesus and said, hey, teach us that it
was prayer, it might be important to you and me.
Yeah, let's try. Let's see.
I'm going to give you this framework up front so you can
track along with me. Here are the five points.
They're in your, your, your bulletin.
Just to give them to you up front.
Five parts of a prayer framework #1 grounded in Scripture #2
glorifies God #3 gratitude driven #4 groans of confession,
and #5 gets the requests last. Now I'm going to walk through
this and and show you and then I got a little easy way to
remember it at the end. Hopefully it'll be helpful.
Grounded in Scripture, we should start all prayer with reverence.
And if you're not sure about that word, let me explain.
Really I've been using the word posture.
And, and the idea is that we want to see how good God is and
how much we're not like that's actually to see things
correctly. And so we need our our heart and
our attitude to change toward God.
And so if we spent a ton of time on this today, which we won't,
we could actually break down every little word, every little
segment of this short little Lord's prayer and we could track
it back to verse after verse after verse in the Old
Testament. Everything Jesus is saying here
in the New Testament in this little prayer is actually a
paraphrase of concepts from the Old Testament that have already
been said and already been recorded hundreds of years
earlier. So when he says, how will it be
your name? How will it just means most
worthy be your name? That's most of the Psalms
actually say the exact same thing when he says your Kingdom
come. That's Psalm one O 3 And and
Daniel 4 when he says, give us this day, Our Daily Bread.
That's Exodus 16, Deuteronomy 8, and Proverbs 30.
When when every part of this prayer is a paraphrasing of
things God's already said. See, the fastest way to realign
my heart, my attitude, my mind toward God to get a correct
perspective is to worship God with his own words.
To worship God with his own words.
Why? Why would we do that?
Well, here's why. Because his words are perfect
and mine are not So, so, so to start a prayer with real
reverence, I highly recommend starting with Scripture.
It's not the only way. I would just recommend it.
And, and I want to show you what that looks like.
But but before I do, if you're again, if you're a skeptic, if
you're new to Christianity and you understand, why would you do
that? Why would you read God's words
back to him? We believe as Christians, we
believe that the word of God, that's the Bible is perfect and
without error. Amen.
It's perfect. And I'm not.
Someone once asked the famous preacher Charles Spurgeon.
They asked him what's more important, reading your Bible or
praying? And he thought about it for a
second and he went, what's more important to you, breathing in
or breathing out? They're the same thing, they're
the same coin. Praying to God and hearing from
God is part of communicating and experiencing God.
Amen. Reading God's word, allowing Him
to speak to us. We believe that the Word of God
is alive and active and sharper than any 2 edged sword.
Hearing from God and letting Him Pierce our very soul with His
words is as important as speaking to God and talking to
Him and, and, and, and. I want to start with something
perfect. Say perfect.
I want to start with something perfect.
And here's why. This is why it's so critical
because I am an inconsistent human being, because I'm human.
My emotions, my circumstances, my health, the people around me,
the influences are around me, the world, it all has an impact
on me. I am an inherently selfish,
mean, egotistical little creature.
In fact, if I even took my own subjective standard of morality,
I've I took Daniel's standard and then I applied it back to my
own life, I still wouldn't pass. That's how bad it is.
I need something objectively perfect, objectively true,
objectively moral, objectively holy to hold up and highlight
how far off the path my life, my distortions, my perspective have
become. Because I'm always veering off
the road when it comes to pursuing Jesus.
And that's what the Bible does. When I start prayer by
reverently reading God's word, it keeps me low where I belong
because it shows me the gap between myself and God.
And so here I'm going to do it for you and, and maybe this will
help. Just doing it sometimes helps,
right. I want you to imagine if you
can, that you're about to go to the Lord in prayer, but you're
angry that someone has offended you recently.
That's not that's happened to anyone else.
Anyone ever been offended and angry but know they needed to
pray? Yes, 410 all of us.
Yes, all of us or, or, or or I'm lonely and I'm feeling isolated
or I'm hurting. I feel like I'm being overlooked
or someone's taking advantage of me.
You know, all the feelings that are just so real to us, right?
They all affect our view of ourselves and others of God and
they affect my view of you guys, right?
And So what I do is I go to God reading his word.
It looks like this Ephesians 2 verse one, father.
And I was dead in my trespasses and sins in which I once walked,
following the course of this world, following the Prince of
the power of the air, the spirit that is now in work, in the sons
of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions
of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the
mind. And I was by nature child of
wrath, just like the rest of mankind.
But you, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with
which you loved me, even when I was dead in my trespasses, made
me alive together with Christ. By grace I have been saved, and
you raised me up with him and seeded me with him in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages you
might show the immeasurable riches of your grace and
kindness toward me in Christ Jesus.
For by grace I have been saved through faith, and this is not
my own doing. It is a gift of God, not a
result of works, so that no one may boast.
For I am His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good
works which you prepared beforehand, that I should walk
in them. Do you see it?
By what right do I have to claim being offended?
By what right do I have to claim unfairness or slander or
mistreatment? If life were fair, I would be
executed as an enemy and rebel of God.
That would be fair. If life were fair, I would face
an eternity in torment apart from God.
I don't want fair. I want grace.
Offended. Offended, if we're being really
honest, really honest, and you could see every thought I'd ever
have, you'd find out that the secret me is far worse than the
me that I want you to see. And you'd know that I'm
despicable, far worse than anything that you could ever
describe. But God.
So we start with Scripture reverence to begin to shift our
perspective, our posture before God, and then and then we
glorify God. Oh God, I may be nothing, but
you are something. So we spend a little bit of time
remembering who God is. Psalm 34 says this.
I will bless the Lord at all times.
His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
My soul makes its boast in the Lord.
Let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me,
and let us exalt His name together.
I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me
from all my fears. Those who look to him are
radiant, and their faces she'll never be ashamed.
The poor man cried, and the Lord heard him.
That's me, and saved him out of all of his troubles.
The Angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and
delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord
is good. Blessed is the man who takes
refuge in him. Amen.
What are we doing? We are gazing into the character
of God. We are gazing into Him.
We are looking at Him, and it will show us the gap.
And as we begin to see the gap between who God is and who we
are, it puts us in our place that's resetting on adjusting
our posture. That's why Jesus starts his
prayer with Father in heaven. Your name is worthy.
Worthy are you worthy? Is your name your Kingdom come?
Your will be done. It's about you, not me.
The third thing we do is, is, is we begin to acknowledge what
he's already done. It is gratitude driven that the
Bible constantly, just consistently says, hey, remember
what God has done. In fact, if you go turn to the
Old Testament, which is the first part of the Bible, you'll
find that one of the most consistent spiritual disciplines
and all the Old Testament is, hey, remember God's
faithfulness. Hey, remember what God's already
done. Hey, in fact, they told every
generation, you need to teach the next generation to remember
what God has already done because they're going to forget
you are too. So here's what we're going to
do. We're going to come up with
ceremonies and sacrifices. We're going to come up with
holidays so that you will not forget because man, are we some
forgetful people. Remember, remember what God has
already done. Don't allow the circumstances of
the moment to make you forget how good God has been.
And so, so we should do that in prayer.
This is part of the framework of prayer is to remember him.
So, so let me give an example. Let's say hypothetically, we
were in the middle of, I don't know, a financial crisis at the
church. And so I really want to pray for
God to do stuff. Come on, God, like, let's just
rain some dollar bills on this place.
But before I can get there, you know, I probably need to stop
and remember all the things he's already done.
So I, I'm, I'm praying God's word to him and I'm remembering
his character and I'm glorifying him.
And then before I go any further, let me, let me remember
his faithfulness. Let me spend a little bit of
time remembering how much he's already provided.
Father, we, we give you glory and honor and praise for all
that you are doing in this church.
Thank you for Rez church. Thank you for facilities to meet
in. Thank you for elders who love
you in this church. Thank you for raising up
deacons. Thank you for volunteer leaders.
Thank you for all these small group leaders.
Thank you that we get to see so many people come to Christ in
this church. Thank you for gospel growth.
Thank you for helping us get a foothold in this neighborhood
and sending people here to this church that we can care for a
disciple. Thank you for the gift of brand
new members who chose to go through a membership class and
and join this church. Thank you for men and women in
mentorship. Thank you for steering this
church toward partnerships that you have for us.
Thank you for faithful givers who have obediently given to
this church. Thank you for a legacy of two
separate churches who for years and many former pastors and
attenders have laid building blocks for this church to stand
upon. We see your hand at work and we
acknowledge that we could done none of this without you.
Thank you in Jesus name, Amen. We thank Him.
We should remember how good he is.
Now look it, don't you feel better?
We haven't even asked for anything yet, and I already feel
better. All I had to do was begin to
remember how good God is, how faithful He's been, all the
things that He's done, and I'm already feeling better.
There's a Psalm or a hymn from 1897.
It goes like this. When upon life's billows, you
are Tempest tossed. When you are discouraged,
thinking all is lost, Count your many blessings, name them one by
one, and it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
Remember all the things He's done #4 groans of confession.
So, so we start with scripture and we approach the Lord to
recalibrate our heart and we speak his goodness and we
remember our blessings. And then Jesus would say this.
Forgive us our debts. He's essentially saying forgive
us our sins. Now here's the thing, it's a
really short portion of Jesus prayer because he had none.
But he knows we do. And the best way, the best way
to do that is to confess them, to speak them out loud to God.
Jesus didn't have anything to confess, but I do Amen.
You do. And so oftentimes, I think they
will really only get to that point after we've spent some
time in the Word of God remembering and acknowledging
who God is, remembering his faithfulness.
Spending time doing those things begins to allow some of that
conviction to bubble up to the surface and things that we
didn't really want to talk about.
You get to the point, you realize I've got to confess this
to the Lord. David put it this way in Psalm
32. For when I kept silent, my bones
wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night
your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried up as by
the heat of summer. Salah, I acknowledged my sin to
you. I did not cover my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and
you forgave the iniquity of my sin.
Do you know what this does? It's still recalibrating our
heart. So if I started my prayer angry
and offended and and mad, and I get to the part where I begin to
realize how much sin I have to confess to the Lord, it's like,
oh, I was really angry, but then I have to look at my sin.
I was trying to find a visual for that, how you feel if you've
ever prayed like that. I found one.
Check this out and I confess it.
So before I've asked God for anything, we've we've started
with scripture, we've glorified God.
Oh man, we've practiced some gratitude.
There's some groans of confession and then we get to
request last. Now I'm ready to ask now I'm
ready to go to God with my petitions and God wants us to.
He asks you to. He tells you to heck and James,
for he says you have not because you ask not.
Why aren't you asking two things about asking the Lord.
Number one, I would say do it last.
Here's the second thing. If you'll, if you'll do this
other stuff first, if you'll follow this framework, you'll
find that by the time you get to your request, your request will
change sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot of bit because
God has been working in our heart through that whole
process. And listen, the entire Christian
faith is based on the concept that God changes hearts.
Amen. I didn't change mine, and you
can't change yours. God changes hearts.
And so in my prayer life, when I start with the things that
realign my posture recalibrate me toward God by the time I get
to request they change, here's the second thing.
We always ask, like Jesus did not my will, but yours be done.
And here's why. I know what my heart wants.
I also know I shouldn't trust my heart, so sometimes I'm going to
ask and I'm going to go. God, I don't even know if what
I'm asking for is sinful or not. I'm not sure.
God, I don't even know if I could handle the blessing.
If you gave it to me, I might mess that up.
So here's what I'm going to ask. But then I'm going to say not my
will, but yours. I don't know everything, but you
do. So I'm going to ask because you
told me to ask. And then I'm going to leave it
in your hands because I know that you know better.
Not my will, but yours be done. Now I know it might be difficult
to remember 5 GS when you sit down to pray, so I made an
acronym for you. It's space.
It's in your handout space. Scripture, praise, acknowledge,
confess, entreat. We start with scripture.
We praise Him first. We acknowledge all of the
blessing and faithfulness He has shown us in our lives.
We confess our sin. And lastly, we entreat him.
Entreat just means to plead with God or to ask urgently, I
entreat. And if we'll do that, prayer is
a spiritual chiropractor. It will rely in the posture of
our soul. And so here's what we're going
to do to end our service today is we're going to do this.
We're going to pray this way together as a church.
And then if you're willing to pray like this consistently, if
you start to practice this, there are five things that will
begin to happen as a result of this.
And I didn't have time to preach it, so I stuck it in your bone
or in your bulletin in that little outline.
There's five things in there. We're going to call that the
bone. You have the extended edition.
You need to take that home. It's a little bone.
It's a little nugget for you. You can fold it away, put it in
your pocket for later, like leftovers.
So we're going to practice this together using this framework of
space Scripture. Praise, acknowledge, confess,
and entreat. Here we go.
We're going to start in Psalm 8. We're just going to pray
Scripture to God. Here we go, ready.
Pray with me, O Lord our Lord, how majestic is your name in all
the earth. You have set your glory above
the heavens, out of the mouth of babies and infants.
You have established strength because of your foes, to still
the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the
work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set
in place, what is man that you are mindful of us, and the Son
of man that you care for us? Oh God, we stop and we pause and
we wait in the glory of your name and of your character and
of your faithfulness. You are holy and we are not.
And we acknowledge. We see what you're doing around
this church. We, we, we see the changed
lives. We see the marriages being
strengthened. We see our kids coming to
Christ. We see people getting hungry for
your word and for your presence, Father, we see real life change
and we thank you for what you are doing, for letting us see
it, for letting us notice it, for letting us participate in
your work. And we confess God, I know that
I allow circumstances of this life.
I allow the difficulty of of messy people, especially me, to
to cloud my view, to shake my faith.
Father, I am. I'm prone to doubt that you have
a plan. And I in my sinfulness, I get
anxious about the future. I get worried about not being
able to see all the steps in front of me.
And I doubt you. And so I confess my sin and I
repent to you. Wash me clean and renew in me a
clean heart. And I bring my request for our
church before you. I ask that you grow our hunger
for your presence in our prayer lives, in our desire to study
your Word. I ask God that you provide for
this church exactly what it needs financially, through the
generosity of the Saints in leadership, through the
empowerment of people you saved and equipped.
God help us to spread your gospel to every edge of
Bakersfield and beyond, for yours is the glory forever in
Jesus name and all of God's people said Amen.
May God respond to the pleas of his people for the the last
moment or two that we have remaining in this sermon.
I just get your attention for just a second.
If you do not know the God of this universe personally, if
you've never surrendered your life to Christ, I want to give
you an opportunity to do that today.
If you if you believe that you'd like to do that, I'm going to
lead you in a prayer. All you have to do is simply
repeat after me or something similar.
I'm going to use the same space framework for this prayer.
And so if you're willing to ask him for forgiveness and
salvation, just follow after me. We we bow your heads and close
your eyes for just a moment. Father, your word says, if I
confess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in my heart
that you raised him from the dead, I will be saved.
So I lift you up perfect and holy, and I acknowledge that you
created me and everything around me, and I confess that I am
hopeless and in need of a Saviour.
So I surrender everything to you and I ask you to save me.
Be my Lord, please Jesus, if you said that prayer for the very
first time, will you raise your hand for me to say thank you,
thank you, you put your hands down in Jesus name, Amen.
Real quick, Jesus loves you so much more than you realize right
now. And if moments ago or recently
you gave your life to Christ and you haven't told anybody, let me
be the first to say welcome to the family.
Will you stand? We're going to sing a song and
respond to this sermon. Our prayer team is going to be
up here. We, we love praying with you.
If you have given your life to Christ, maybe it was moments
ago, maybe it was recently and you haven't told anyone yet.
There's some tables in the back that say I raised my hand.
As we sing, as we respond to this, as we come up for prayer,
you can, you can sneak back there, talk to somebody, tell
them about your decision to follow Christ.
We would love to celebrate with you.
If that's too intimidating, you can just come down for prayer
like everybody else. We would love to pray with you
for any reason. Whether you made a decision
recently, whether you just need prayer, whether you need
encouragement, we love praying for you.
You move as the Lord leads. We love you, Church.