APR 28 2019 | Accelerate S1E5 | Prayer: the Language of Heaven

Sea Change Church · Accelerate · "Prayer: the Language of Heaven" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · April 28, 2019
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Hi, I'm Spencer. I'm one of the leaders at Surf Church, along with my wife and several other members of the congregation. And this morning we're going to be reading out of Luke, chapter 11, verses 1 through 13. One day, Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples. He said to them, When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for as we also forgive everyone else whose sins against us. And lead us not into temptation. Then Jesus said to them, Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, Friend, lend me three loaves of bread. A friend of mine is on a journey and has come to me, and I have no food to offer him. And suppose the one on the inside says, Don't bother me. The door is locked, and my children and I are in bed.

I can't get up and give you anything. I tell you, though he will not get up and give you bread because of your friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity, he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. The one who seeks, finds. And the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will you give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will you give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? The Word of the Lord. Thank you. Love that guy. Jesus' disciples come up to him, and they realize that there's this really dynamic connection between the things that they hear him praying and actually what's happening in his life.

Let me say that again. The disciples come up to him, and they ask him, teach us how to pray. Now, there was a reason that they would ask this. This prayer was an exhibition in Jesus' time. You would get these really high-profile candidates for lead Pharisee. They all want to be the lead head Pharisee. You could be that. The chief of the Pharisees. And you would try to, like a political candidate, because they were very political in Jesus' time, a lot of these people, and they would do things in order to raise their clout.

And one of the things was to go to a prominent space, a place really well seen. You could get on the steps of the temple. There's a lot of places in the Scripture where you see people praying on the steps. And they would pray these really elaborate prayers where people would say, Wow, they are so spiritual. That's amazing. Look how religious and spiritual they are. That's awesome. Over and over again. And they're raising up.

And so his disciples obviously see this, and there's a little bit of a disconnect with Jesus. Because when Jesus prayed, everything he did was so counter-current and counter-cultural. And one of those things was not to pray out in public where everyone can see you. And so when Jesus was praying, it regularly says that Jesus went away to a quiet place, or he would just bounce. There'd be some really important thing, a platform-building thing.

All the followers would be showing up for the next awesome miracle. And Jesus would all of a sudden disappear. And his handlers, his disciples, they were like handlers, you know. They were trying to manage his publicity. And they would look around and say, Whoa, where did Jesus go? And they would find him at this place praying where nobody was. And if you're building a platform, it's just a horrible way to build your candidacy for lead Pharisee or whatever it is.

And so his disciples come to him and they said, Teach us how to pray. But I don't think it was because of what they saw happening. Because they realized, with the other Pharisees, it's because they realized that Jesus wasn't doing that. When they said, Teach us how to pray, they realized that there was something very different about the way Jesus prayed. And actually, the history that they were living was being written by the prayers they heard Jesus praying.

If you want to write your future history, pray. Every good and perfect thing that has come into my life, every single thing, I have prayed for. Now, I'm not saying I came up with those prayers, because the scripture says nobody knows how to pray. There is no one. The scripture is very clear. No one knows how to pray. But I would say that the Holy Spirit has led me, or I got lucky, or I just prayed enough to I eventually landed on the right prayer, whatever you want to call it.

Every single thing, I can say in my story, I look back, was birthed in a prayer. We sat together as an elder team about a year and a half ago, and we said, Let's have some gratitude and spend the next half hour in gratitude. And we prayed in gratitude. It was when David Robinson was still on the elder team back then, and we began to pray. And at the end, we said, These are everything we had gratitude for. What had happened in the church, salvations, baptism, Pastor Harry as a youth pastor.

I mean, all the different things that had happened. A half hour, we ran out of time, and we realized, literally, everything that we had given gratitude for was something we had prayed about, either there, or in our Tuesday prayer meeting at the church. church. If you want to write your future history, begin to pray. Prayer is the language of heaven. And I want to challenge you to expand the boundaries of your prayer life.

Expand it from where it is to the next level. Now, I want the star of any sermon I preach to be the scripture. I really do. And I've been listening to my sermon, because I want to get better and better. And I was listening to my sermons recently, and I thought to myself, I just, I got to make scripture more of the star. I want to keep pointing out. So let me just look. Turn your notes over, if you would. We're going to highlight.

I mean, I could spend a long time. I could write a whole book about this topic, actually. That's a joke. I did. And there's three scriptures that we are going to focus on. First one is verse one. Verse one, we're going to look at it. It says, One day, Jesus was praying in a certain place. I love how random that is. It's so random. Jesus was just, if you look in every translation of the Bible, even the amplified, extended unicorns, and, you know, and kittens version of the Bible, it just uses the word certain.

It's just a certain place. He was just praying. One day. This says so much about Jesus' life. It was, it was somewhat, I would say it was ordered. It was, it was, it was, it was randomly ordered, if that makes sense. Because he was available and ready to play, pray at any time in any place. He would just bounce to prayer. He didn't have to like set it up. We're going to go to the guys. We're going to go. Okay. Get everybody around around noon.

I'm going to be at the steps. I'm going to wear my best white robe, like the really bright one. Not like the transfiguration one, cause I can't do that one, but I'm going to wear my best robe. And I'm, I got some really good prayers and I've memorized like a lot of the Bible. So it's going to be amazing. Make sure there's a lot of people. I'm going to speak about the Romans. No, he didn't do that. Just randomly. It says right here, just one day at a certain place, Jesus was praying.

The, the way that this verse right there can expand how you see prayer is quantum to realize, when do you pray? How do you pray? And it's great to have, I think we should have that solitary special place that, you know, they call it the war room in that movie. Maybe that place that you go. And I think you should invest in a place you love to pray in that, you know, we invest in a lot of things, new cars. We invite, invest in all types of things, but maybe investing into the place you pray, you know, save up money.

Or if you have money, go get a chair that you love to sit in, you know, buy the best coffee you can buy, you know, buy a mug, buy, buy a Bible that actually, you know, buy a paper Bible maybe, and read it again or whatever it works for you, but have that certain place. But separate of that, Jesus, because he was a man on the move, didn't have a certain place. Jesus prayed when, when it was needed. Jesus prayed at any time, in any place, in any circumstances.

And so I want, we're going to ask you to expand that. The second verse we're going to look at is verse eight. And if go, if you, if you want to go to Bible gateway.com and search, uh, this scripture, this word shameless audacity is used by a lot of different, uh, biblical teams that, that came up with their translations. We're so blessed to have so many translations these days when, you know, was it, you know, four or 500 years ago, people didn't even have the Bible.

They had to have, be told constantly about what it said. And in it, it uses this word shameless audacity, that there should be no guilt in your prayer life. And what Jesus is saying is, I want you to be more shameless in your prayers. You talk a little bit about how sometimes we cordon off our prayer life because we're, we think God's mad at us. Um, if you are in Christ and Jesus died and the wrath of God was poured out on, on Jesus because of you, because of our sin and he covered it all.

There's no more wrath to go around for you. If you are under the blood of Jesus, wrath is done. God basically can't be mad at you. Does that make sense? Because he already let his madness, so to speak, be poured out on Christ. You don't have to cordon off your prayer life because of guilt or shame or thinking God's too busy. He doesn't have time for a certain request. He is saying, I want you to explore. I want you to take your prayers out to that next level.

What if you were to take your prayer, take your, your prayers. If you have a list of prayers, and I encourage you to have a list of things you're praying for, just be aware of what you're praying for and then multiply it by 10 and pray it again. Take your prayer and multiply it by 10. Take it to that next level. I'll talk about that in a second. He says, shameless audacity. And then Jesus is offering more than you are asking for.

Verse 13. If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father? I love how it gives prayer in the context of family relationship. That's awesome. The language of heaven is a family relationship. It's around the dinner table. It's at the bedside. It's in the living room. It is family relationship. When you pray, you go to your father is a family relationship. It says your father in heaven will give you the Holy spirit to those who ask.

Now here's the spoiler alert. This is the powerful part of this text. It says, what, you know, if you need bread, ask for bread. If you need this, ask for this. If you need this, ask for this. Jesus is like, I'm not afraid of you to ask, ask my, you know, my job, your, your job is prayer creation. My job is editing and distribution. That's what God says to you. Your job, your only job is prayer creation. The Bible says that's your own.

You don't make your prayers happen. We, we partner with God to set the table for our prayers to happen, but it's, it's all about prayer creation. And Jesus comes to you in this familial relationship. And he says, ask for this, this, and this. Now, if I don't want to over preach it, but basically the thing that he's going to give you when you ask is the Holy spirit. Do you see that it doesn't say, and I will give, it does say he'll give you the thing.

You'll get the bread. He's not going to give you a scorpion or whatever, but it says what he's going to give you when you pray is not the thing. He says, I'm going to give you the Holy spirit, which is exponentially, not even infinitely greater than the thing you want. You're asking for something like this. And he's this big, and he's saying, but I'd rather give you eternity in the form of the Holy spirit. That is a powerful response.

When you pray, Jesus offers the Holy spirit. Every time you pray, no matter what you're praying for, you turn your notes notes back over. the disciples realized that there was a massive connection between the dynamism of Jesus life and his prayers. Between the dynamism of Jesus life and his prayers. Greg Ogden says that prayer is a transparent. Really? You want me to drink after you? No offense, but if I get a fresh one, that'd be awesome.

Okay. I'm not afraid. Just all family here. What if I was a germaphobe? Luckily I'm not. But, that was funny. I love you. That's all. You know how much family you have. I just have this one. Prayer. Prayer is a transparent dialogue with God. Check this out. Prayer. Greg Ogden, in this book that we're going through, called Discipleship Essentials. You can buy it online. You can get the audio version. This is what I'm preaching through.

And we're going to continue to use this as a tool for discipleship. That prayer is a transparent dialogue with God. And that's what he says. And this is what's so important. Because, oftentimes we're not transparent with God. We go to God. I want to say, there's nothing perhaps more foolish, than to go to God, and hide something from him. Matter of fact, the person you're lying to is yourself. You're not lying to God.

You're lying to yourself. And prayer is meant to be transparent. It's just a conversation. And so it's a conversation with God, that is completely transparent. And I would say, the more transparent you are with God, the better your spiritual life is going to be. Spiritual lives revolve around, time in prayer, speaking to God conversationally, and transparently, and time in God's word. When people come to me, and they say, God's not speaking to me, my first two questions, do you pray?

And do you read the Bible? And so often, the answer is, no, I do not. So it's transparent dialogue with God. Are you being transparent with God? When you go to prayer, do you say something, like, hey God, I have this sin, and I just, I absolutely love it. Like if you love, there's sin, I've been in love with sin. I've had, just love it. Sin is attractive, because at first, it's really good. You get it? Sin isn't like, like the poison, when you taste it, you know it's poison.

Sin is something that we love. Thank you so much, Chris. Fred. She was like this. Awesome. God, that Adam's pretty pretentious. Jeez. Sin is something that's so attractive. We love sin. If you, I mean, if, I mean, you're going to hate it, if you realize the results of it. So you won't hate sin at first. It's until when sin bites you, that's when you start hating sin, right? That's when you hate it. But at first, it's good.

Satan's temptation to Jesus, weren't bad temptations nobody wanted. Sin's really, we like sin, right? It's good. I'm going to offer you the world, he says. People will bow down, it appeals to your pride. I'm listening, the entire culture of the world right now, it is hyperhumanism. You know, even, I was looking at, you know, Taylor Swift's video that popped yesterday, or two days ago, whatever it was, it had like multi-million dollar views.

It's, it's, it's fun, fun video. The whole thing is, be who you are, be me, be me. I'm like, the last thing I want to be is me. I want to be the Holy Spirit, you know, I want to be the God version of me, not just what I decide me should be. Sure, it's a great song, but everything we see over and over again, is all about you. And Satan appeals to that. Sin is something we want. And so to go to God in prayer, and have a transparent relationship, and say, hey, this is who I am, you know who I am, can you at least get me to the place where I want to change a little bit?

And then take it to the next level. See, it takes courage to pray like that. It takes like massive courage to go to God, and say, hey, you know what, would you prune me back so I can do this? Would you give me this? Would you allow me this opportunity? It takes courage to do that, or to ask God to remove things from yourself, that you no longer want, or need. What is prayer then, going on? Prayer is asking in a setting of gratitude, thanksgiving, and prayer.

A little redundant, but prayer is asking in a setting of gratitude, and thanksgiving. Prayer really is asking. And everything you ask, doesn't mean you're asking for a thing. You can be asking for more of a relationship. You can ask for humility. There's a lot you can ask for. But prayer is a component of asking, and we need to ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. You are in the job of prayer creation. And the scripture says in Ephesians 3.20, that no matter how much you create, it's still not going to be as big as God can imagine.

Because it says, you cannot hope, or dream, or imagine, as much as God wants to give to you, and wants to do for you. It is, you don't have the ability. But we want to spiritually partner with the Holy Spirit. And let me give you theologically how prayer works, as I understand it. Scripture talks about when we pray, that the Holy Spirit guides us in prayer. Counsels us on how we should pray. Is there beside us, working with us, giving words from the Spirit to our spirit.

And the Spirit, it says, searches our spirit, and there's a connection of the Spirit. And then from this Spirit, it gets handed off to Jesus, who says, that goes before the Father, and comes as a perfect sacrifice. So you don't have to worry about, all that shame, and dirt, and filth, and sin that you worry about. Because when your prayers get presented, they've already been filtered by the Holy Spirit, given to Jesus, who then talks to the Father.

And the Father honors our request, back through that chain. It's like when you have the code, the code's been broke. If you've seen the matrix, you know what I mean? It's all the code. Imagine the code being broke. The Holy Spirit, because no one knows how to pray, comes in and fixes the code. And then the code is handed to the chief programmer, so to speak. And all my engineers, I saw some engineers when I did this earlier, they're all smiling, talking to each other, high-fiving, and chest bumps.

And so it's my little metaphor, which I know nothing about, actually. And gives it to Jesus, and then Jesus presents to the Father as a perfect prayer. We don't know how to pray, but whenever you pray, it is presented in a perfect form to God. And so God is asking you to pray. I wouldn't say he's begging you, but he's strongly encouraging you to pray, to have a conversation with him relationally. So prayer is listening.

Prayer is awareness. Prayer is perseverance. And what I have found is, when I pray, I've had a few times where I've prayed, and something very dramatic happened where I knew the answer right away. 99% of the time, when I pray, and I have a time where I listen to God, I hear absolutely nothing. Nothing. I get a sense of peace, maybe. More often than not, I'm just waiting for the time to end so I can get up, feel like I did my prayer for the day, check that box off, and move on.

Probably just me, not you. God doesn't speak to me. But here's what I do find, is the rest of that day seems to have a lot more coincidences. The rest of that day seems to, I run into somebody at Ikea who I had prayed for earlier in the day, and I'm not saying that God sent us both to Ikea. It's just interesting how the matrix works when we pray. Or at least I become aware of it, and I probably still might have run into them Ikea, but had I not prayed, I would have not known the purpose of why I did.

Over and over again, all of a sudden, God shows up with coincidences, and I've heard someone say, you know, they call them God incidences, or whatever. But the more you pray, the more aware you become that God is alive and real. And if you want to write, not only write your history, but if you want to know that God is a real and alive and aware, keep track of your prayers. Pray, and then watch what happens. All of a sudden, God begins to answer in ways that you never expected.

If you go to what is, prayer is not. Well, I would say prayer is not about stuff. God created stuff. He likes to give you stuff. He loves blessing you with stuff. He's into it. He loves it. Not afraid to give you stuff, but not at the expense that you're going to destroy yourself with it. It's not about stuff. Prayer is about relationship. But don't stop asking for stuff, because he says, just be audacious. Once again, he can sort your prayer out.

Your job is prayer creation. How's your creation list? You know, how is your prayer creation list? Do you even have an idea of what you're praying for? Prayer is not required, I wrote. You know, you're not required to pray to go to heaven. There's no requirement to pray. There's nothing in the Bible. You're saved by the blood of Christ through the cross. I'm going to be doing a series on the cross here pretty soon, because I think it's desperately needed for Christians to understand what the purpose of the cross is.

But it doesn't say, if you believe in Jesus, you know, and that whole, you know, and then a little addendum that says, and you pray really, really well, you'll go to heaven. No. Full stop. What Jesus did on the cross is enough. If you believe through faith that Jesus Christ, Son of God, died for your sins, rose again, and is coming back, you believe that, you begin to follow Jesus full stop, you are saved. There's nothing added.

You do not need to pray. Like I said, you do not need to tithe. All these things, Jesus fulfilled the law already. The law of sin and death has been abolished. But he fulfilled it now so that you can do it without having to do it. So now you can pray with no requirement. Now you can tithe with no requirement. You can do it because you just say, God, I love you and I want to spend time with you. Prayer is not required.

Prayer is not manipulation. Prayer is not God manipulation. He cannot be manipulated. It's about relationship. Prayer is about submitting to God. The spirit of witchcraft is manipulation. That's the difference between prayer and witchcraft. Witchcraft is control and manipulation. Jesus, in prayer, we are submitting to God requests. Submitting to a father who loves you. Let's go to those three verses and then we'll come in for a landing.

The first one is this. One day, Jesus was praying in a certain place. For Jesus, prayer was absolutely habitual. Prayer was something he did in a certain place and in a certain time and in another certain place and another certain time and another certain place and another certain time, prayer just happens. You know, I challenged the last service to think about places where you can pray. One of the most useless times that you have is putting gas in your car, right?

Now, they've tried to make it better with that incredibly poor programming they put on those screens, which are overly loud and it's always a weather report that's like 10 seconds long. That is one place. Imagine if you just said just whenever I, because you do nothing when you put your gas in, right? You just, what do you do? You can't even really look at your phone. You're just kind of there just a couple minutes. What if you said, you know what, that place, I'm marking, I'm cordoning off that territory right there as when I'm just going to pray.

I'm going to pray for my city when I do that or when I walk to work or whatever your thing is that you have these different places where at any time, any place, you can pray. This is what Jesus did. Jesus would roll around, he'd see a need and he'd say, let's pray. Have you ever been with that friend or that person who, and they're not trying to make a show and I've talked about this as we're partnering with this ministry that works with caring for the service industry and we're really going to work on helping you just start to pastorally care for the neighborhood that you live in.

When we go to restaurants, you know, when we, you know, when we pray, I would say, you know, be really wise when you pray. I mean, it's not, it's not a, it's not a service for your, for your waiter to enter into with you, you know, like a lot of times when I get, I'm praying and if the waiter comes up, I said this before, but like, just stop praying. God's not going to be mad. Let them put the food down, you know, as opposed to have to like exegete Leviticus for them before they can do it.

But at the end of that, if they did see you pray or they tell you that there's a need in their family, before you leave, you said to them, hey, you know, I'm a person that prays. I'm going to go back. Do you mind if I pray for that need you had? And next time we come in here, you can keep, keep up, you know, keep us up to date on what's happening. That is a great tool to do with people. You don't pray with them in the moment.

Sometimes I do. And sometimes you might want to if you feel comfortable, but you have to be really wise about this, this in this culture. But I will say, hey, you know, they tell me something's going on. I say, hey, I'm a person that prays. I want to, can I pray for this? And then you can start this conversation when you go back and say, hey, how's your grandma? Oh, this happened. Can you tell me what room she's in? I would love to send her some flowers.

So some of you do that just by nature. But prayer starts a conversation that end, that you enter into people's lives. You say, how are you doing? Oh, really? And if you know, when it's a little bit slower, they're not just jammed, get that conversation going and begin to care for people in that way. Prayer does that. Jesus was so good at that. Jesus would randomly walk. Everybody, his handlers are trying to push him to Jerusalem or wherever the Jericho.

And then he'd see a blind man. He'd say, hey, let me just, hang on. I'm just going to pray with you. And everybody would be going by. If you go to the Timkin Gallery, one of my favorite pictures, there's a picture of Jesus coming out of Jericho and he's coming down the hill and there's all these, it's a free gallery in Balboa Park and there's all of his disciples are like in these pastel-y colors and they're all busy.

You can tell they're all talking and Jesus is looking and then over on the side are these blind beggars. Jesus sees the blind beggar and the blind beggar needs prayer. Where are you going into prayer and implementing prayer at a certain time in a certain place? Randomly, just praying. Just unleash prayer in your life. What does it look like with your kids? You know, one of the things that I want to get better and better at is continuing to pray with my children but continuing to pray with my wife.

I would say, you know, if we're not praying, and I want to speak to men directly. Men, lead in prayer with your families. Lead in prayer with your families. Draw your wife aside. I'm actually going to be starting, coming up soon, once a month time for just men to come to pray for their families, spouses, fiancés, girlfriends, families. I just want to get men together and to pray. But men, lead. It's really hard. I don't know why.

One of the hardest things I've ever tried to do is pray with my wife. I'm good with my kids. But praying, it's just been difficult. But it's something I don't want to give up on. I want to continue to do over and over again. Jesus prayed in a certain place. Where's your certain place? Next one, Jesus is daring you to pray ridiculous, I wrote that in, ridiculous prayers with shameless audacity. Ridiculous prayers. Just stupid, ridiculous prayers.

I'm not going to pray that. That'll never happen. Jesus is like, no, maybe it will. Maybe it will. I wonder how many, you know, because the Bible does talk about, hey, when there's enough prayer in this area, I'm going to work. He wants like, hey, if enough people do this, I'm going to do this. I wonder how many revivals were missed by like four prayers. I wonder how many divorces happened for lack of three prayers. You know what I mean?

I don't know. I don't really know how it works. I wonder how many people didn't commit suicide because grandma and mom or dad prayed just over, just over. I don't know how all that, I don't know, but the Bible is very clear that when we pray in mass, that it causes God to act. And that's something we want to do. We don't want to give up. Ridiculous prayers with shameless audacity. Don't just pray for your neighborhood, you know, pray for radical things to happen in the city.

Multiply your prayers. Take it to the next level. I want to just release you to pray some absolutely ridiculous, shameless prayers this week. Jesus said to do it. He's not begging you to do it, but he's asking you to do it. He's desiring that you pray for the health of your friends, the health of your family. Over and over again, that God would move. The job of the one praying is prayer creation. It's God's job to edit and distribute as he sees fit.

Excuse me. Verse eight. Read it in a second here. Verse eight says, I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of your friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity, he will surely get up and give you as much as you need. The next thing in the final is this. Jesus is offering much more than you could ever ask for. It's a radical answer here. Let me read this scripture in verse 13. If you then, though you are evil, and I can explain that at another time, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father, who is in heaven, give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

Like I said earlier, the verse isn't written correctly. I keep finding verses that are not written correctly. What the verse should say is how many of you who know how to give good things, when your child asks for a piece of bread, you will give them a piece of bread. How much more your father will give you a lot of bread? Or that shiny thing. And if it was, he will, you know, you pray for a home. Well, yeah. And then your father, because he loves you, God in heaven, will give you that home.

That's what it should have said. It doesn't say that. What it says is, that how much more than, it gives you all this list of things you can ask for, how much more than, will God give you what? The Holy Spirit. That's radically more than you asked for. It's like coming, this isn't even a big enough analogy, but I'm going to do the best I can. You roll up to Jesus, and you say, Jesus, I'm going down to Rigoberto's, and I got seven bucks, and I need another buck fifty for the enchilada plate I want.

You got a buck fifty on you? And Jesus says, hang on, let me give you thirty-eight million dollars. No, I'm serious. He's actually saying more than that. Jesus, I need a buck fifty to get the enchilada plate, Ranchero style, with extra sour cream. And Jesus said, hang on, I got four point eight billion dollars, let me give you that. And he just gives it to you and walks away. Do you know that that is, I mean, let's get in touch with reality and understand what the Bible is saying here.

That's what Jesus is saying. You're asking for this, I'm going to give you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit has power, has access to everything, to all power, to all wisdom, to all knowledge. That's why he doesn't say, okay, if you want that thing I'm going to give you, then I will give you, how much more will I just give you that thing? Why would Jesus limit himself? Because when he gives you the Holy Spirit, you might get the thing.

You're going to get a lot more. Do you understand what you're doing when you pray? You know, when you pray, you're actually having access to talk to God. I said in the last service, imagine if you opened up a little shop downtown and you had access to God and you could give 15 minute real interview, like it was a real interview, like God shows up and you can get 15 minutes with God. And I got about eight a day I can give away, you know, per month.

What do you think people would pay for time with God? Like if they knew it was really God and they could have 15 minutes to talk to God, just pick his brain on a few things. What do you think that would be worth? What do you think? You'd be a very wealthy person, trust me, if you had God access, that you could bring him in and put people in a seat in front of God. You know, that's what prayer, the Bible says prayer is, but we don't really believe it, do we?

You don't really believe it. I mean, I have a hard time believing it. Like, I would actually like it better if there was a little place I could go and sit and look at this, like, whoever God looks like there and sit and talk. But the Bible is very clear that that's what prayer is. And when you pray, I mean, do you really, I mean, this is the crazy thing about faith. You have to be absolutely crazy. In Australia, they would call you a nutter.

You'd have to be an absolute nutter, they would say, to believe that prayer, that you actually are talking to God. I can see why people think it's crazy. But it opens you up to being more than you can ever be. Because we do believe in God. And we do believe that God is a loving Father who will give you more than you ever asked for if you ask shamelessly and audaciously. And he wants to say, I just want to say one more thing is this.

So many people have shipwrecked their entire walk of faith with God because God hasn't given them that one thing they've prayed for for so long. He's blessed them, he's perhaps given them health, he's given them a bed, he's blessed them all over their life. Matter of fact, if you took God out of their life, where they would be would just be probably a wreck. But there's this one thing that they think is the most important thing.

And realizing that God is not about the temporal you as much as he's about the eternal you. So when God works in the temporal, he's always working for the eternal and his vision of you is way beyond what you think your vision of you is and who you think you are. And he's always working that out. And a lot of people would just say, well if I don't get this one thing that I'm done with God, God doesn't answer prayer. And they discredit every other blessing that God has given them because they haven't gotten it.

And this is a tough thing that why this, if you watch that video that we made over and over again, I want you to listen to what we say. If you listen to it, it is not an easy video. And it says faith takes courage. Faith takes courage, it takes courage to never get the thing that you want and still follow God. Job says, faith, even if God slay me, I will hope in him. And I guess the question, and this is a really hard question, if you never get that thing you want, is Jesus still worth following?

Is Jesus and nothing enough for you? Faith is really hard. Faith is continuing to pray and believe that God answers prayer and wants to give me everything I ask for and beyond, but still didn't give me that. But yet, I'm still going to pray when my son passed away and it didn't happen or something happened or the cancer took somebody or the divorce happened or your husband cheated on you or your wife cheated on you and after all, but I prayed for years and over and over again and I prayed and God didn't save me or rescue me.

How do you follow when you're disappointed? That is, that is the nuts and bolts of faith. That is where the rubber meets the road. That is where the iron of the faith exists. And that is how we walk. That is how martyrs as they're being eaten by the lions in the first century look around and say, well, this isn't what I prayed for, but glory to him as they're ripped from limb to limb. That's the faith we follow. And we have to get back to understanding that it's not unicorns and Neapolitan ice cream.

And God isn't going to give you everything you want, but what he does offer you is more than you will ever need. A relationship with the Father. A relationship with an intimate Holy Spirit who wants to know you deeply, who wants to say, you're mine. And if we're going to go through something, we're going with you. And not only am I going with you, I'm going before you and I'm going after you and I'm going beside you.

And though 10,000 may fall at your right and 100,000 at your left or whatever it is, then God will be there and stand beside you. That's faith. And my question is, do you want it? Because it's more than you can ever ask for. Amen? Amen? Let's stand. Chris. Okay. Let's see. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. let's do it.