MAR 2 2025 | Genesis: Behind the Curtain S5E6 | The Story of Isaac: The Birth of Jacob & Esau

Sea Change Church · MAR 2 2025 | Genesis S4E6 - The Story of Isaac: The Birth of Jacob & Esau
Genesis 25:19-28
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

And I pray, Lord God, that the word that's going to be spoken today, O Lord God, will plant seeds within every single body, every person's heart, O Heavenly Father, and that you bless Pastor Adam as he brings forth the word today. For we thank you and we praise for it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The book of Genesis, chapter 25, verses 19 through 28.

These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son. Abraham fathered Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, the Aramean of Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean, to be his wife. And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren. And the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.

The children struggled together within her, and she said, If it is thus, why is this happening to me? So she went to inquire of the Lord. And the Lord said to her, Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other. The older shall serve the younger. When her days to give birth were completed, behold, there were twins in her womb.

The first came out red, all his body like a hairy cloak. So they called his name Esau. Afterward, his brother came out with his hand holding Esau's heel, so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents.

Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game. But Rebekah loved Jacob. This is the word of the Lord. I always thought verse 28 should say, Isaac loved Esau. And because he liked Led Zeppelin. Well, Rebekah loved Jacob because he was into the cure, is what I thought I should say. But just for a few, you just going to look at me? You just going to look at me?

A lot of staring at me today. Okay, we'll see what happens. If you have your Bibles, turn to Genesis 25. We're going to get after it today. We're going to change your life. This is a powerful passage about changing a family through prayer, changing our lives through prayer about intercession. We are in the story for the next two weeks of the life of Isaac, and then now we have finally gotten to the birth of these two sons.

The odds were stacked against his father. You had Abraham and his wife Sarah, and they couldn't get pregnant. She was 90. He finally gets pregnant. Then he was going to sacrifice his son. We saw that. He ends up not sacrificing Isaac, and God saves him from that. And then he goes and gets a wife for his son. We were there a couple weeks ago. Except new wife, same challenge.

She is struggling to conceive. And as you see, go to verse 20 if you would. Isaac was 40 years old when he took Rebekah to be his wife in verse 20. Go down to verse 27. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them, the two sons. Now, it didn't take too long, did it? Just about seven verses. That's about all it took to get from there, from the prayer and whatever, into the fulfillment of that prayer.

But it was 20 years. And as we look at this family, one of the things you're going to see is the start, the beginning as they lived together waiting for these two sons, for the answer to their prayer. They did so many things right, especially according to this passage, in regard to inquiring of the Lord and prayer and all these things. When the children were born, a lot of problems began.

You know that Jacob was seen as this deceiver, and the mom joined into that, and he stole his brother's birthright, or at least his brother sold his birthright. It wasn't stolen, but he was deceived. You had all this disunity, but the beginning you had unity. Now, Pastor Harry this week, before we go any further in the story, last week he spoke about when you read the Old Testament, you don't want to just see it as a moral allegory.

Oh, Jacob was deceptive, and he got his comeuppance because he got sent away later on in his life, and then he has to work for Laban for all those years, and this goes on and on. And you could just say, so the moral of the story is don't be deceptive, right? That's the moral of the story. And you can miss some of the greater themes where God can give you understanding from these old stories that reach into the New Testament, that reach into the life of Christ, that illuminate what God is going into the future, going to do in the future.

He's illuminating the future in the present. In the present moment then, he was illuminating the future, and God will do that for you if we're aware and we're open to understanding what he is doing. And so one of the things we see is we see Jacob, who was second born. Back in the day, if you were the first born, Esau, then you would have the blessing, right?

But we see that Esau ends up kind of rejecting what is right, being, you know, selling his birthright, and the second child, Jacob, is the one who gets the blessing. He's the one that gets the blessing, and the lineage comes through him. When you hear about the patriarchs, you hear about Abraham, Isaac, and Esau? No, you hear about Jacob, right?

And so we see this happening. Now, if you look to Christ, obviously, we have the first Christ archetype who came. Who was that? That was Adam. If you look in the book of Romans, it'll say that there was the first Adam, at least in the New Testament, there was the first Adam. And then there was a second Adam who came who was Christ. You can see this in this story.

The first born was not the one who was chosen. Esau was not the one who was chosen. But it was the second one. And so Jacob is an archetype of Jesus. You see the grabbing of a heel. So a heel is mentioned. Remember in Genesis, Christ's heel was bit. He crushed the head of Satan, but Christ's heel was bit. You see all these things happening. You see a war within the womb of Rebekah.

Two nations are coming against each other, much like the two natures that are within us. We have the nature of the flesh. We have the nature of the spirit. Which one will we follow? They're at war within us. There is so much you can see that if you look and you ask for God for illumination. So I just wanted to pick up on that. And I wanted to do a tie-in to the New Testament.

Now let's get back to the story. The setting is this. Isaac and Rebekah. He's the son of Abraham. Face both promise and struggle. Though God blesses them with children after years of infertility, Rachel's pregnancy results in the birth of the tumultuous twins. Sometimes we're praying for these things in our life, right? And we finally get that thing and we find that trying to shepherd the thing that we have been given, shepherding the blessing is sometimes more difficult than waiting for the blessing.

Now they waited a long time and it is hard to wait for a blessing, right? It is hard to wait for those things. But sometimes the marriage that we prayed for, you find out once you're married, it's a little harder to store it and it's a different kind of difficulty. And so we see them pressing through. And what did they use in order to make it through that time?

The answer is prayer. Here's the main point for today and the one that stuck out to me the most. And I felt like the one, the Lord said to me, this is going to open up doors in the listeners, in the congregants' lives that I'm going to open for them. that if people get on board and understand what it means to intercede and to inquire of me, God is going to open doors for your life.

So here's the main point. The prayer-filled life is a powerful life. The prayer-filled life is a powerful life. Big prayer, big power. Little prayer, little power. Prayer is a bridge that spans the chasm of God's power in heaven and his will oftentimes in our life on earth. And it is prayer that is the bridge between those things. We see that happen here in this story, right?

It says he prays for his wife and God did what? He granted his request. Let's say that every prayer you don't pray will never be answered. I'm currently in a basketball league and it is a basketball league where they keep the stats, right? And I am leading in one of the stats, right? I'm leading in one of the stats. So I'm in two leagues. I'm in the 55-year-old old man league where they don't keep the stats and then I'm in the 30-year-old league where they do keep the stats.

And the stat that I am leading in is most shot attempts. With the lowest percentage. I'm in the pitch. Okay? So I have, they do the rankings. I'm actually doing, I'm really, I'm actually proud of how I'm doing in the 30-year-old man league. But I take more shots than anyone else in the league, right? And I miss more than anyone else in the league. It's not gonna stay that way.

I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna get better. It's the same way with prayer. And I've told my daughter this when she played basketball. You will miss every shot you don't take. I'm not saying take bad shots. I'm currently not taking bad shots. I'm just missing shots. You will miss every shot you do not take. I wanna say the same things with prayer. Every prayer you don't pray will never be answered.

That doesn't mean that God still won't do his thing. He's still sovereign. He answers things that you should have prayed for because he's God and he's good. He gives Jacob a blessing he doesn't deserve. We get blessings that we don't deserve. How good is God? This week I was just reflecting. This is a little side note. I was just sitting before the Lord.

I'm like, you are so good to me, God. You protect me so much. Like, how good is the Lord? I was talking to somebody at the beginning of the sermon outside and I realized you see these prayers, you know, that people pray. And I have found that the prayers I had to pray for for a long time seem better to me than the ones where he does a miraculous answer. When he does something miraculous, like I pray for something in the moment I've never really thought about it before and God does it it's awesome, right?

He prayed, miracle prayer. God, you showed up, you healed that person in the moment and it's awesome and I love it. But when you're praying for a friend who's struggling with something or a spouse or a kid and you're praying for years and years and years and finally God answers and it's five years since he answered and you look back and you remember that season and you're removed from the season now, right?

You're removed, you're no longer in it. You look back and there's just a sense of like, God, you are so good. You are, I just love you so much and I want those miracle prayers but this is the kind, this is what's happening here. We have a couple that are uniting together in prayer and let me just get right to it. I want to talk about two different types of prayer that we see in this passage.

The first is prayed by Isaac. Isaac is praying a prayer of intercession. He is interceding, standing in the gap, coming alongside, being an armor bearer, asking for things for someone else. The prayer of intercession and then the second one, we see a prayer of Rebecca. Rebecca has a prayer of inquisition. One of the most undervalued prayers in Christians' lives.

It is asking God not just to fix something but why are you doing what you're doing? How should I understand what you're doing? How should I implement a plan to attack this issue in my life? God, give me wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. If you look in the book of Ephesians, God is saying to you, yes, I want to tell you about what job you should have. I want to tell you about this thing and where your kids should go to school.

But there are these things called the deep and hidden secrets and mysteries of God that it speaks about in Ephesians. It speaks about it throughout the entire Bible. And God says, there's some things I want to open up to you that I want you to begin to ask for so I can give you an understanding of the depth of my love, the depth of my glory, the depth of who I am.

So that is what Rebecca is doing here. She's coming to the Lord and she's saying, what in the heck is going on in my womb? I have these babies that are, she didn't know it was babies at the moment, she just has this one baby, she thinks, that's going crazy. She doesn't know she's having twin gen until she's told. Going crazy. Just fisticuffs. It says two nations are at war within her.

She actually, when she inquires of the Lord, she uses a word that I understood in the Hebrew. I'm going to look at it next week to kind of break it up. But it means basically, you know, why am I about to die as she's inquiring? It's that bad, right? And so she inquires of the Lord. Inquiring of the Lord is something a lot of people don't often do. You know what we end up being?

When it comes to prayer, crisis Christians. I want to challenge you, do not be a crisis Christian. What does that mean? It means exactly what it means. When you're in crisis, you're a Christian. When you're not in crisis, you're not a Christian. Not that you don't follow Jesus and not a Christian, but that you don't implement praying in the same way. I would say one of the best times to begin to pray is when the breach has been broken.

When you have two weeks in your marriage where you've been struggling but all of a sudden it's going well and it's like, oh, it's going well. No, I can just relax and have a glass of wine. Fine, relax, have your glass of wine. But keep praying. Say, I want to break. When the breach has been broken down, when the strongholds have been broken, you take ground in those moments and that's what we see happening here in this passage.

So here's the prayer of intercession. Let me just give you a quick definition. The prayer of intercession is a prayer offered on the behalf of others, although I believe it can be offered for yourself as well. Intercede in my life, God. But it's seeking God's help, his guidance, and then you can circle the word intervention in their lives. It is seeking intervention.

The prayer of inquisition is a deep and searching prayer. It asks God to reveal truth, expose your hidden motives, bring clarity to a situation that you might have understanding. If you read in the scripture with Paul all the time, he says, I pray that you have, you know, he doesn't say three things, but there's three things he always prays for. That you would have wisdom, knowing what is right and what is wrong.

That you would have knowledge, that you would, you know, that you would know knowledge of what he's doing, but then understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. Understanding is how to implement what you know. And so oftentimes, that implementation comes through inquiry to the Lord. You're asking the Lord, God, how do I deal with this situation? Have you ever known the right thing to do but done it wrong?

Known the right thing to say but said it wrong? The prayer of inquisition will be a prayer where God will give you a download download through Scripture, through a whole bunch of other ways that I'll talk about in a moment, where you understand what is happening in your life. Go to verse 21, the prayer of intercession. And Isaac prayed, interceded, is the word there, to the Lord for his wife.

Because, that because, you can circle because, that's the obstacle, right? Because she was barren. Because. First thing we see there is that he took the time to intercede. He stood in the gap for her. Intercession is coming alongside someone. It is being an armor bearer. It is coming, and it is coming alongside to help them with an obstacle. This week, at our house, we had a friend who brought a tractor up.

And on our property, we have these stumps that I needed to be removed, right? And they're literally the size of small Volkswagens. Like the little 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, right? And my friend says, I'm going to bring a tractor, and he's really good at the tractor. He's an engineering contractor. I'm going to bring a tractor. I'm going to get rid of those stumps for you.

And so he came in. I've never seen anything like it. You ever see anybody work a little, it was like one of the bobcats, but it was like a bigger bobcat. And he didn't have anybody with him. And usually, if you're going to get like a stump underneath something, you'd have to have someone push it on to like the scoop. But he would get it under, then he'd hit it, flip a stump up, like the size of a Volkswagen.

He'd flip it in the air, and it flipped in the air, and then he caught it. And I was like, whoa. I didn't know that he's been like in 10 competitions or something like this. And he's won. He said he's never lost. I guess engineer, tractor people have competitions or whatever. And then he'd fill it. He got five stumps off my property. These are stumps that people have told me we'll do it for 1,000 a stump.

Right? And I'm like, he's just, I'm just going to come and get it done for you. It was done like in an hour. Like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Separate of that, that's what intercession does. Your bobcat is your prayer. You are the person that is scooping the scoop underneath the obstacle because she was barren. And you know the specific thing. You see, intercession, when you pray for somebody with intercession, you pray specifically.

We tend to just pray these broad prayers, and God loves them, right? But it's like, hey Lord, if you're praying for your husband or you're praying for your mom, let's say you're praying for your mom. Lord, just bless my mom. I pray that she would be happy and joy-filled and blah, blah, blah, you know. And those are good. God loves those prayers. But intercessors are more specific.

Intercessors want to go to the root of the problem. Intercessors want to find out what the obstacle to God's deliverance is, to the thing that God wants to deliver. And intercessors are looking for intervention because intercession leads to intervention. When you intercede, God then shows up and we see that it says that when he interceded, why? Because she was barren.

So he prayed, God, would you make her fertile? Would you give her a baby? Specific. Intercession led to intervention. And then God shows up and it says, and God what? Granted his request. Request. You see, that's how intercession works. This week, as I studied through this passage, I had, let me see, I wrote it down here. I had, I realized I hadn't been interceding enough.

I've been doing a lot of that rando prayer. Hey, pray for my friend Greg. Bless Greg. Just ask that you just touch his life. And that's great. And God, okay, God's touching his life and blessing him, whatever that means. But I realized I hadn't been interceding and I realized I wanted to start getting specific and so I came up with about three financial requests.

I said, God, there's three financial requests I want for my life and I'm praying these. He answered two of them. There was a prayer of understanding I asked for the church. I was like, Lord, I don't know how to do this with our church and I don't know how to implement this in our church so people will be inspired. And Lord, would you give me understanding of how to do this?

And literally within two or three hours, the mail came and I looked and there was another organization. It wasn't a church. It was a non-profit and there was this letter and in the letter they were doing exactly what I was trying to figure out and I thought, I'm going to steal this. It's amazing. It is so awesome and it's just this implementation strategy to get people involved and the Lord, he just downloaded it to me.

You know what I realized? I just haven't been taking enough shots and then I got excited. I called my wife. She's on a little four-dayer right now. She would go away. We try to get away every month so she's a little four-dayer away just to seek the Lord and as opposed to say, I'm going to be praying for this because when we first got married I'd pray for her and she'd go, I feel like you're trying to change me with your prayers.

Stop telling me your prayers because I'd be like, I pray you do this, you know what I mean? So I've learned. I've been married almost, I think, 30 years or something like that. So I wrote to her. I said, hey, give me five specific things that I can intercede for you. I want to intercede and she gave me a list of five things and I began to pray and just going after them like a stump, like an old, knotted stump on your property, you know, but you got the bobcat now so I want some answers.

So we'll see how that goes. One of them was simple so she just wanted to sleep better so I said, that's easy, I'll give you that. Eight hours of sleep, made it specific. The thing that we see is that, here's one thing that it'll tell you when you're praying with people. One, intercessory prayer, you can pray for yourself in an intercessory way. I think that would just be more petition, but intercessory prayer is kind of usually the binding of people together.

Our church has just invited a new person, a congregant, not paid, to be our intercessory prayer person. Over the last two months they've been seeking out the staff and they send a monthly email to say, how can we pray for you specifically? They show up on Tuesday and they pray and I've been getting texts from this person, hey, I'm praying for you, how can I pray for this?

And here's a verse I got for you, how can I pray for that? And then they needed prayer this week so I prayed for them and we began to pray back and forth and we had this intercessory thing happen. Are you an intercessor? Do you come alongside other people? Because when you do, Jesus says something special happens. Let's look at it. Jesus says in Matthew 18, 19 through 20, again I say to you, it means he said it before, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father who is in heaven.

So you see this download from heaven to earth. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. Let me tell you, there's a lot happening in that verse and we could have an incredible theological discussion that hey, when we prayed with friends and we agreed and it didn't happen, so does God really mean what he says and we could talk about all the nuance of prayer and was that really God's will, what you put, we could talk about that.

But you kind of miss what I think is the most important thing and that's part B of that verse. Let me show you what part B says happens when you pray with people. It says, for where two or three are gathered in my name, therefore I am what? Among them. I know we focus on the prayer thing because we want a prayer that's answered, right? But the among them bit, that's where the money is.

That's the goal. That is the pearl of great price and if you want to have unity with your Christian coworkers, if you want to have unity with your believing parents, with your believing children, with your believing spouse, with your boyfriend, with your girlfriend, with your guy friends who you're praying for a girlfriend for yourself, whatever it is, if you want to have that unity together, it happens where two or more are gathered.

You see, prayer unites. And I say, few things have united me for people when I know that they're praying for me. Lloyd and Betty Hart were friends of ours. We grew up with them. They were some of the first people we met when my mom made a decision in 1979 to follow Jesus. They were next door neighbors. And he told me, we knew them for years, they've passed on now.

He told me they prayed for me and my family on their knees. They would get on their, they were like in their 80s by the time they passed, close to 90s. They would get on their knees as a couple, old school. This is OG. This is old school, right? They'd get on their knees together and they'd pray beside their bed before they went to bed every night. They prayed for my family.

He told me, for every night for 27 years. That's a lot of prayer, right? 27 years, someone loves your family enough to pray for you over and over. I am still harvesting the fruit of 27 years of Lloyd and Betty Hart. I just found a book that they had written with a, with a, a, a little note to me as a kid. He was the first one ever that told me I was gonna be a pastor when I was 12 years old.

Because, why? Because they had inquired of the Lord for me. They had prayed for me. They had interceded for us. They were praying the first year that my mom would stay sober. Just make it through one more year so we can make it to year two. Now it's 30 plus or 40 or whatever it is. I don't know how long it's been. You know it's good when you've been sober enough you don't remember how long you've been sober.

That's a good time. And that happens through intercession. Intercession, the final thing here is intercession catalyzes intervention. What does catalyst do? I said intercession, intercession catalyzes intervention. That's God intervening. It's not you intervening although we want to attach actions with our prayers. Don't just pray to financially have someone blessed.

Write them a check if God tells you to. Catalyst, when I was a surfer as a kid we would buy this thing called a surfboard repair kit because I was always dinging my surfboard. It's fiberglass, right? So they would give these poisonous chemicals that you could buy as a 14 year old, right? And you get this resin and then the resin was all liquidy and it was sticky and it was horrible.

Stunk. And you would have to put this thing, there's a little thing called catalyst. It had like drop, it was an eyedropper. And it'd say put two drops in for a quarter cup or something like that. You put two cups in, you mix it up. You had about four minutes until that hardened. You had to have that on your board and ready to go or else you were gonna have to start from scratch again.

A catalyst, what does it do? A catalyst creates a chain reaction, a chemical reaction that changes a component from one thing to another. It is an intervention that changes the resin that is a soft resin into that fiberglass substance that is hardened and that's what intercessory prayer is. Intercessory prayer is a catalyst between the things God desires because he only answers prayers he desires, a download from heaven, from the Father, into a person's life.

It is praying for a friend who is dealing with suicidal thoughts. It is praying for a community that is struggling, it is praying for education, it is praying for the openness of hearts, for the gospel, it is praying for your finances, it is praying for people that are struggling with anxiety, it is praying for whatever you pray for, but it is intercession.

It is anything that is an obstacle to what God is doing. And so once again, I wanna ask you, do you want to be a person of intercess, or do you want to be an intercessor? Do you wanna be a person who sees, who is a catalyst for the movement of God in the world? Verse 21b, and the Lord granted his prayer and his wife, Rebecca, conceived. It's powerful. It's powerful.

One more New Testament verse before we just look at the prayer of inquisition and come in for a landing. Mark 29, 929, Jesus said to them, this kind of demon he was speaking about cannot be driven out by anything but prayer. There are certain stumps in your life. There are certain rooted trees in your life that are obstacles. There are rocks and boulders in your life that are in the way of where you're going.

These obstacles that are only going to be removed by prayer, and Jesus says sometimes by fasting as well. Certain things. God says, I want to co-labor with you on these. That is the prayer of intercession. I would also encourage you to have others pray for you. Ask people to pray for you and to intercede. Start sharing your requests with each other. Now finally, the next is the prayer of inquisition, which is, I really think, I've been a pastor a long time, it is the most, besides the prayer of silence, because there is silent prayer, that's pretty underutilized.

Just sitting in silence in God's presence and praying with more than just words. But I would say the prayer of inquisition, inquiring of the Lord, not in the way of like, why God, why, I mean, that's okay. I mean, God understands when we do that. But really just asking God, hey God, my kid's got this thing going on and that teacher's not treating them fair and I don't know why.

Or I got this neighbor who doesn't like me and I don't know why. Like, can you tell me, like, I need a download. I need, give me a word from heaven, give me a coincidence, like, show me in the word of God. Like, I need to inquire of you. This is what Rebecca does right here. Go to verse 22. The children struggled together within her and she says, if it is thus, meaning, am I going to die?

Why is this happening to me? Okay. So she went to inquire of the Lord. The first thing I like, you actually see more in that moment than just like, hey God, why is this happening? She went somewhere to inquire of the Lord. So she must have gone to the temple. No. There wasn't a temple then. This is before the Mosaic Law. This is before, you know, Joseph. This is early on.

This is, like, the third patriarch is Jacob, is in her womb. So she's still, we're only two patriarchs in at the moment. Her husband, and Abraham, right? So where does she go? Does she go down to the river? I don't know. It doesn't tell us. So I don't really want to preach out of the silence. But she went somewhere, which means it was important enough for her to make a journey out of it and to make a moment out of it.

She didn't just randomly pray, oh, you know, God, why is this? No. She went somewhere. Now, maybe there was an altar. Maybe she went to the place where, you know, Isaac was going, you know, was originally going to be sacrificed. You know, there was a lot of holy spaces. There had been altars that Abraham had put up. God had moved a lot in their family's life at this point.

Who knows? But she went somewhere. And what I am saying is she thought of this inquisition as important enough to make it more than just a random word to God. That could, what could that look like? I'll look at that in the final practical takeaways of how we do that. But until I give you these last things of how we're going to seek the Lord because I really want to give you practical tools to seek the Lord this week on things you've been wanting to inquire of, here's three really encouraging verses.

Jeremiah 33, three. Call to me and I will answer you. I will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known. As I said a moment ago, most of us just want to know where our next job is going to be. Want to know these things. God's like, hey, I want to show you what my glory looks like. Are you as interested in what my glory looks like? If you began to put in your prayer list, God, show me your glory.

Or if you're a worship leader like Chris to say, God, I want to really take the church in the way of grace. Show me your grace. Show me the hidden things about your grace. There's so many times in scripture where in heaven, they'll go to heaven and have these visions and God's like, this is hidden. Actually, this is too deep for you to know but I can show you this much.

The book of Ephesians over and over again is I want you to know more about who I am, the depths of my love. I want to blow you away with my glory that is far beyond, hey, where is my kid going to go to college? Those things are so important but there is another level and I really want to get to the place where the prayers that I'm praying start with, Jesus, show me the power of your blood.

Jesus, show me your beauty. Oh, I love that prayer. Jesus, show me how beautiful you are. What a great prayer. It's one of the reasons I changed the name to See Change is because creative revelation is the first way God speaks to his people. It happens through the sun, the sea, the stars and in that, you see his majesty and you see his beauty and so when I want to know God's beauty, I oftentimes just go out into creation because I want to experience that.

Next is James 1, 5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach and it will be given to him. I love that. If you need wisdom, ask the Lord, God, give me wisdom about this situation. Where should I go? How should I do it? And then Matthew 6, 33. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and then all of these other things will be added to you.

Seeking ye first the kingdom of God. Inquire of the Lord. So the two things today. One, intercede. I told you, I think I had five total prayer requests of inquisition and intercession this week. Five things God just answered immediately. Now maybe he just, you know, was like, hey, I'm just gonna show this to you but it was pretty sweet, right? When you start getting prayers answered, you get hungry.

Like I'm just, I'm laying them out there. Now I'm just throwing my cards out now. I'm like, okay, this, I want some of that, you know. But asking God to do these things. So how do we seek the Lord? One, read his counsel of the word regularly. Read God's word. You will find that you will get answers before you need them. When you are regularly reading the word, you will show up to a situation and think, I just read that this morning.

Or God will begin to interweave that if you want to seek the Lord, God, I want to seek you on this. I've been using Google a lot on this where I'll go to Google and I'll say, I need nine verses, ten verses about interceding with someone with depression. It'll give me these verses. Google, it's still the Bible. They give them to me and then I begin to pray the verses.

It's actually pretty good at doing it, to tell you the truth. It's a pretty good Bible study. And so I start to begin to pray. I begin to pray those words and I begin to intercede with the scripture. That's key. Seek counsel. Let me give you a word about counsel. Seek the Lord before you seek counsel. We can so often be not ask the Lord and then we'll say, but my disciple is really wise or my mom's really wise.

So I'm going to call my disciple and they're going to give me all this information. The best thing to do is seek the Lord first and then when you're done seeking the Lord, you might not even need to ask anybody. That happens a lot to me. Or when you ask him, it'll confirm what you heard from the Lord. We're just kind of, it's not that we're lazy. I don't want to use that word.

But we kind of just like, it's just easier to call somebody and get an answer because we want that answer as opposed to seeking it. So counsel is key. Ask in prayer and then silence in retreat. Silence is so important. We live in a world with no silence and God speaks. It says, be still in what? Know that I am God. So here's your practical takeaways. Two of them.

One, this week, make a list of your prayers of intercession. Create a list of 10 prayers of intercession. Make sure that half of them are for other people and add a direct appeal for intervention. Does somebody trying to get into a college, well, Lord, I pray that they will be accepted to this college by this date at this time. Just make it specific. Specificity in prayer is key.

I wrote a whole book on this. You know what I learned about writing books? You can write a whole book on something and never do it. That's what I've learned about writing books. You can write books on something and then never do what you wrote, right? So I want to begin to be specific. And then the final one is this. Identify five areas or situations in your life that need illumination.

You need illumination and then ask God to implement a strategy of seeking those things out, of seeking out that information through the word. You're going to go away. But ask God, begin to inquire so that doors may be open for your life. Amen? Amen. Joe, come on up and give us communion. Thanks, brother, for bringing the word. I love that our church, if the helpers want to come up to distribute the elements, our church is about Jesus and God's word.

Thank you, Pastor Adam. Some administrative stuff so don't forget is that people on this side are going to come up and take the elements, the bread and the grape juice. And then people on this side will take the bread and the grape juice and you go back and sit down in your seat and then we'll take it together after I read Jesus' words. So let me step back here.

Jesus gathered with his apostles, his disciples, before he died on the cross, before he suffered, before his body was broken in our place, for all who had faith in him, before he rose again. And he was that great Passover lamb where the blood and the Passover would be sprinkled over the door so the angel of death would pass over that family. And if we have Jesus' blood applied to our hearts by faith, that angel of death will pass over us and we enter a state of salvation.

We are in his home. If you believe in Jesus, if you believe in his death and resurrection, this meal is for you. If you do not believe, we ask you to not partake, but we have a prayer team after that can pray for you to receive the Lord Jesus. And the Lord Jesus, on the night of his arrest, he took bread and after giving thanks to God, he broke it and he gave it to his disciples saying, take and eat, this is my body given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way, he took the cup saying, this cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me. Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the saving death of the risen Lord until he comes. If you believe in Jesus' broken body and shed blood, this meal is for you.

Let's rise together and let's come and take the elements. Seek ye first the kingdom of love and his righteousness name. And all these things shall be added unto you. Alleluia, Alleluia. Alleluia. you, you, you, you, the know, piano plays softly Father, I adore You And I lay my life before You How I love You Jesus, I adore You And I lay my life before You How I love You Spirit, I adore You And I lay my life before You How I love You I love You, Lord And I lay my voice To worship You Oh, my soul rejoice Take joy, my King In what You hear May it be a sweet, sweet sound In Your ear If Jesus is your Lord and Savior If you believe you need your sins to be covered by His blood He says This is my body given for You Do this in remembrance of Me Let's eat together And then Jesus says This is my blood shed for You For the forgiveness of sins Let us drink together Gracious God May we who've received this sacrament live in the unity of Your Holy Spirit That we may show forth Your gifts to all the world We ask in the name of Jesus Christ and all God's people said Amen Let us stand together We're going to recite the Lord's Prayer in a second We have prayer team afterwards if you need prayer And we have empanadas afterwards as a celebratory meal of our new name change Our Father, who art in heaven, hallow be thy name Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who have trespassed against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil For thine is the kingdom And the power And the glory forever Amen Church, it was awesome to be with you We all love Jesus It was great to celebrate the Lord's communion with you Come up for prayer Grab an empanada Meet somebody new