Challenging Sermon On Prayer

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If you'd like to open your Bibles to a starting text for the entire series, you can open to Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 through 13.

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Again, if you missed it, I want to encourage you over the next couple of weeks as we study in prayer,

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I want to encourage you to memorize the Lord's Prayer, that's Jesus, God, as a man telling us how to talk to the

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Father. What sort of things should you think about God? How should you speak to your

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Father who's in heaven? The fact that you can even say that is insane. What should you be thinking about when you pray?

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What should you ask for? How do you approach the creator of the universe as someone who's been brought into his family?

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So it's a good text to start with today, Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 through 13.

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Hear now the words of the living and true God. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

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Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not in temptation but deliver us from evil.

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As far as the reading of God's Holy Word, let's pray together. Father, God, thank you that you allow us to talk to you.

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You bring us into your presence with bold, confident access that we do not deserve.

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God, thank you that you have invited us to call out to you, to pray.

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Please forgive us, God, forgive us for our prayerlessness. Forgive us,

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God, for not treating you as Father.

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Forgive us, Lord, for not asking, for not believing. Forgive us,

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God, for seeing other things as more important than being in your presence. Forgive us,

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God, for knowing things about you and not ever talking to you like it's true.

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Forgive us as a church for not being a church of prayer, constant prayer. Forgive us leaders for not praying as we ought.

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Forgive us as fathers for not praying the way that we should for our families. Forgive us as mothers for not clinging to you and trusting in you.

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Forgive us, God, as your people, Lord, not striving to grab hold of you, not seeking, not asking, not believing.

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Please forgive us as a church. Don't allow this, Father, to be a sermon series that is motivational speech but doesn't actually change us.

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Please change us. Please change us. We pray all this according to your

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Spirit and in Jesus' name, amen. Martin Luther, the famous Reformer, who,

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I mean, quite literally turned the world upside down. You just can't deny it. What Martin Luther did in Wittenberg, what he did at the

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Diet of Worms, all that history, amazing stuff where God, we have this saying about the

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Reformation, after darkness, light. There was a time in history where so much doctrinal corruption had crept into the

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Christian church that the gospel, its light was diminished. It was still there. There were Christians everywhere.

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Gospel didn't die. The church didn't die. There were Christians fighting for Reform for a very long time, and Martin Luther is this example for us in history of where light truly broke in.

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Martin Luther wasn't a perfect man. Just read some of the things he said. There's actually a page, it's like Luther Insulter, where you can just get parts and pieces of Luther's insults to people, and it's just glorious.

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I mean, just do it. It's fantastic. They just spoke to one another in a very different way than we do today.

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They didn't care about tone and those sorts of things. I mean, it was amazing. Just read Luther. He wasn't a perfect man.

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He's not the hero of history. That's Jesus. However, if you look at the lives of some of these great men and women of God that God has used to literally change and reshape the world, to literally change history, the

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United States exists today in the way that it does, despite all the evils and the collapse that we see around us.

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It exists in the way that it does today because of the Reformation, which in turn means because of the

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Word of God and the biblical worldview and the gospel. That's the truth. The biblical worldview, the light of the gospel changes the world.

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But God used fallible, broken people to do it, and Martin Luther's one of those people.

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And Martin Luther said that the hardest part of the Christian life and Christian ministry is prayer.

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He said it's the most neglected by Christians. Prayer is the hardest. He says it's harder than preaching the

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Word of God. It's harder than evangelism. It's the hardest thing in the church. It's the hardest thing in the

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Christian life, and it's the most neglected in the Christian life, and then we all have to come to terms with it. You have to come to terms with it.

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What's a study on prayer if you're just going to do the theology of prayer? What's a study on talking about prayer if you're just going to talk about like the

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A's and B's of prayers, like all the parts and pieces of like this is precisely how you should talk to God?

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Like all that is really like meaningless hubbub and theological drivel if you don't actually come to grips with the fact that we fail at prayer, we're awful at prayer.

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And Martin Luther said that this is the hardest part of the Christian life, prayer. The most neglected.

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I'm talking about it in terms of Martin Luther, this giant of the faith that God used to turn the world upside down, and him saying it's the most neglected part of the

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Christian life because Martin Luther is on record, and everybody knew this about him, for praying at least two hours a day.

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At least two hours a day, Martin Luther's in prayer before God. He is the man that God used to spark so much of the

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Reformation. He was in so much trouble, brought the gospel into so much conflict with the world, and he says it's the most neglected of our lives.

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He thought he was terrible at it, ultimately. He wasn't very good at it. It was hard, and he prayed at least two hours a day.

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At least two hours a day, and here's the guy that God used to reshape the world. My point in bringing him up is that here's when

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God, this is what we see, when God uses people to reshape the world of very big things for the gospel, he uses the people who pray.

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People who pray, who talk to God, they're in communion with God. Martin Luther prayed at least two hours a day.

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Philip Melanchthon, his right -hand man during the time of the Reformation, used to talk about how

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Luther would pray for two hours a day, and there was a time when Luther had a ton of responsibilities to do the next day.

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And Luther told Philip, he said this, I have so much to do, I need to spend an extra hour in prayer.

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How many of you guys respond like that? You have so many responsibilities as a mother, as a father, in your job, in ministry.

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So much is going on, right? What's the first thing you do when you have a lot of responsibilities? What's the first thing that gets tossed out when so much is going on?

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What's the first thing? Prayer. You don't talk to God. Why? Because you have so much ministry going on. You have so much happening with your family, so much happening with work, and so what gets neglected is

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I do not talk to God. And it's insane. I have so much going on, and I totally neglect the most intimate and amazing relationship that I have with the

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God of the universe, who, by the way, orchestrates all things and controls all those things that I'm concerned with, and I never even talk to Him.

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I don't talk to Him except for a passing, God help me, right? Or God bless this, right?

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Those are our prayers. We go, well, the Lord says to be praying constantly. Pray without what?

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You all know it. See, right? Pray without ceasing. And so our interpretation of that is when we walk along the way, we're just throwing these prayers up to God, these fast moments of action, like,

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God, I need you to bless that. Thanks, Lord. See you later, right? There's no intimacy in that. And yet, Luther had so many responsibilities, and his first thought with so many responsibilities the next day is,

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I have so much going on, I need to spend more time in prayer. Totally the opposite of how we handle things.

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Luther says he'd spend extra time in prayer when more was going on. Philip heard

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Martin Luther praying once out loud. And by the way, Martin Luther said that he always wanted to pray out loud, so when he was praying, you always knew

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Luther was praying because you could hear him crying out to God. Luther said that he wanted to pray out loud because he said he even wanted the devil to hear his prayers.

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He wanted the devil to hear his prayers. And he said that when he prayed out loud, it actually helped him to concentrate on what he was saying to God.

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Now, Philip actually heard Luther at one point praying to God out loud, and he was so impacted by it that he goes home and he's broken over it because he listened to this amazing saint of God praying and crying out to God, and it so crushed him over his own intimacy with God, seeing the person that God was using to turn the world upside down.

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He goes home and he wrote down, one time I had the opportunity to hear him praying, speaking of Luther.

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He says, good God, what a spirit, what faith was in his words.

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He prayed for things with such reverence as befits God, and with such hope and faith that he seemed to be holding a conversation with a father or with a friend.

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I know, he said, that you are our Father and God, therefore I'm sure that you will destroy the persecutors of your children.

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If you don't do this, the result will be a disaster for us. The whole affair is yours.

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We're constrained to implore you for this, therefore defend us, and so on.

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I was standing nearby and heard him praying in such a clear voice using words to that effect.

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My soul was set on fire with such a singular passion to hear him speak with God in such a friendly, serious, and reverent manner.

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And throughout the prayer, he would interject psalms so that he was quite certain that everything for which he prayed would come about.

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Another example of a Christian in history that had this amazing prayer life that God was using for massive things to turn the world upside down,

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John Welch. He was the son -in -law of John Knox. He would pray for six to seven hours every single day, six to seven hours before the throne of God every single day,

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John Welch, son -in -law of John Knox. He would keep a robe by his bed, kept a robe by his bed because he actually said he couldn't understand how people could go the entire night through sleeping all those hours without getting up at some point to petition

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God and to plead with God and to have intimacy with God. He couldn't get it. He didn't understand how anyone could really do that.

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So six to seven hours a day in prayer before the throne of God involved in massive fights for the gospel and amazing things.

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This is a person who actually was the pastor of a church with 3 ,000 people, 3 ,000 people.

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And he kept a robe by his bed, and at night he would wake up, he'd grab that robe in Scotland where it's really cold sometimes, and he'd go into a cold, quiet, secluded room.

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He'd shut the door behind him, and he would get down on his knees, and he would just pray in the middle of the night, just praying for hours with his robe in his cold room.

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And his wife actually recalls that she would get up sometimes, and she would go to the door never walking in and barging in because what was happening in there was way too sacred to do that.

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She would go to the door, and she would rap lightly on the door, and she would call out to him, and she would say,

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John, honey, don't you think it's time to go to bed? And she would say, you're going to get pneumonia in there.

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And his wife recalls he would say back to her, I've got 3 ,000 souls to care for, and I'm not sure how they're doing.

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And he would just be praying for these 3 ,000 members of his church in the middle of the night, not understanding how anybody could possibly sleep the night through without talking to God.

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And what's amazing about this kind of life and prayer is that it really reflects the intimacy we have with God.

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You see, here's the thing, and I want to say this, let's be blunt, and let's be brutally honest right now because this doesn't mean anything, and honestly, doing several weeks off of our expositional work through the gospel according to Matthew is, without some real benefit in transformation and repentance,

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I mean, what's the point of doing a sermon series that's not going to change us as a church, amen? But be honest about it, really be honest.

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If your prayer life is a reflection of the kind of intimacy you really have with God, the kind of relationship you really have with God, then how is your intimacy and relationship with God?

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You know, it's amazing because you can put on a facade, we can put on a facade that, you know, I have this great relationship with God, I can say all the theologically accurate things,

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I can check all the right boxes, cross the right T's, I can look like I know a whole lot about God.

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But if I don't have intimacy with God and a prayer life before God, then what does it really say about my relationship with God?

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You see, for example, I've been a pastor for many, many years, and you can have a married couple that comes to you, like each person individually comes to you at a different point in time, and they describe this date of their marriage.

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Maybe they want to talk about, we need some counseling, we need some time with each other. And you can have them tell you how the intimacy is, how the relationship is, right, together, right?

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And you can put on the facade and say, we're doing basically all right, we have our moments as a couple, but we're growing as a couple.

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But you know what's amazing is you talk to them individually, right?

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And you ask deep questions to individuals where the other person's not there, and we're not trying to put on a charade, and you ask the wife, how's the intimacy with your husband?

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You get really honest answers that the husband may not be willing to give. And when you ask the husband of the wife, you say, how is your intimacy with your wife?

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How are things going in your relationship? How are you with your conversation, the way you talk to each other, your intimacy, what is it like?

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You get off in a different perspective that the wife maybe wasn't willing to confess, she wasn't willing to say.

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So, let me ask you this, you're in a relationship with God, the God of all the universe,

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He saved you, He's called you His child. If I were able as a pastor to walk a stairway to heaven, and if I was able to climb up to His throne and have an interview with God about you, if I was able to ask

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Him about how things are going between you and the Lord, if I was able to write it down and say, tell me what's it like, how's your intimacy with them?

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What's it like? How do they talk to you? How often do they talk to you? Do they believe what you say about yourself?

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Are they asking you for anything? Do they actually cry out to you? How are those conversations?

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What's the time period? How often do they come to you? If I was able to talk to God on your behalf as your pastor so that I was able to see what's going on, or if you were able to do it for me and ask

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God, what's it like, let me ask you this, what would the answers be? How would

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God talk about your relationship with Him? Other than the fact that He loves you and He's bought you with a price and He's redeemed you and He's forgiven you and He's washed you, what would

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He say about how you talk to Him? If God were able to tell you how

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He felt about where He's actually at in your life in terms of conversation and intimacy, what sorts of things would

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He share about your intimacy with Him? What would He say? What would the relationship look like?

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It's a good question to ask because you know, you think about like a relationship you have with God and the intimacy that's supposed to be there.

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He saved you, He bought you, He's raised you up with Jesus, He calls you a child, He's ransomed you, redeemed you, you belong to Him, you're

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His and He's yours. It's this love relationship. It's amazing, isn't it? All that's true.

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You say, Jesus is the ultimate, He's the treasure to be sought above all treasures. That's what we all would say. We would check the right box, but let me ask you this, do you operate in your relationship with the

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Lord like you do with other relationships? Let me ask you this. If you walked into a house, if your relationship with your husband or your wife or your roommate look like this, in the morning you wake up, you look over and you say, hey, how you doing?

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Please protect me today, don't let me die. And you get up and you're walking around each other saying nothing, right?

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No conversation, no eye -to -eye contact, no moments of intimate conversation and you walk out and you go about your day and every once in a while you give them a call during the day when something goes really, really wrong and you say, hey,

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I need you to bless this, thanks, click, right? And at the end of the day, no conversation, right?

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It's just ignoring one another to be on your phone or on the internet or watching television, no conversation.

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And then you go to bed, lay your head on your pillow, you look over at this person and you say, hey, thanks for today.

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Keep me safe, see ya. Let me ask you a question, how does that speak to your intimacy with that person and would you expect for that relationship to last very long?

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Would your relationship be something that could be described as intimate and full and beautiful and amazing when you literally don't talk to each other?

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You don't speak except for momentary blips where it's just crying out for help or demanding things of the other person.

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There's no intimacy and your prayer life and my prayer life really does speak to the kind of intimate relationship that we have with God.

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I want you to go to a text to see kind of what I'm talking about in terms of how God describes it. Isaiah chapter 64 is a text that is, it's painful to read.

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You already know a part of this text. You know it. All of our righteousnesses are as what?

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Filthy rags. Most of the church repeated that. You already know the text, so you've been here. Isaiah 64 in verse 4, it says this, from old no one has heard or perceived by the ear.

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There no eye has seen a God besides you who acts for those who wait for Him. You meet with Him who joyfully works righteousness.

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Those who remember you in your ways, behold, you were angry and we sinned. In our sins we have been a long time and shall we be saved?

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We have all become like one who is unclean and all of our righteousnesses are like a polluted garment.

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We all fade like a leaf and our iniquities like the wind take us away, and here's the text. This is how

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God describes His people in this time and their sin. Look what He says as fundamental to what's wrong.

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There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you, other translations say, who are striving to take hold of you, for you have hidden your face from us and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.

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Now watch. Look at the response. But now, O Lord, you are our Father. We're the clay and you're the potter.

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We're all the work of your hand. So the text in Isaiah 64 speaks to the people of God not calling on God's name and not striving to take hold of God.

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That just speaks so well to our situation as Christians, doesn't it? The people of God apparently always have this issue.

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We don't cry out to God. We're not fighting and striving to lay hold of God. We're not crying out to God saying,

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God, show up. Something Paul Washer said, he said, young ministers need to go climb a mountain and just take rocks and throw them up to heaven until God shows up.

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That's just striving for God and the answer. It's striving to God to say, God, I need you.

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I need you now. I need you to show up. I need you to speak to me, God. I trust your promises.

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I'm believing you, God. I'm not going to move from this spot until you show up. Nothing's going to happen here,

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God, until you make it happen, until you show up, God. I need you. Striving to lay hold of God, saying,

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God, you're not going to get away from me. I won't let you, God. I'm not letting you get away from me. I know you wouldn't anyways,

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God. I need you to show up now, God. And the people of God in this text, God says, there is no one who calls upon my name.

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No one crying out to God. No one asking for his help. No one asking for their father to show up, which is what it says he is.

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And it says nobody's striving to take hold of God. That's the problem in the people of God. We don't cry out to God and we don't strive for him.

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We act like, in fact, we don't even know him. We act like there isn't a relationship between him and us.

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Let me ask you, how is your relationship any different with God than before you knew him? Let's get real with that, guys.

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Let's start asking those deep questions. How is your relationship with God, in terms of how you communicate with God, how is it any different than before you knew him?

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Let's say when you were not a believer and you knew that God was there, right, but you didn't know him. You didn't have like a saving knowledge of God. You weren't bought with a price, but you knew he was there, right, and you had moments maybe as an unbeliever where things collapsed completely around you.

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What'd you do? You said, God, if you're there, please help me, right? And you just have these moments, these blips in your life where you cry out to God because of some sort of a tragedy or something broken.

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Let me ask you, as a believer now who belongs to God, he's yours and you're his. How is your relationship with him different now in terms of your communication than it was then?

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Do you sound the same? Do you cry out to him about the same amount of times? Do you talk to him like he's your father?

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Like you actually know the God of the universe? Are you barely talking to him?

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Are you not believing he really cares? Is there no intimacy? Is there only crying out when there's really trouble?

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Here's the point. He wants to listen to you. The text in Isaiah 64, 7, listen closely, please listen, is

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God confronting his people over the fact that, listen, they don't talk to me. No one's asking for me.

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No one even wants to talk to me. Nobody's striving to talk to me.

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No one's crying out for my help. I'm supposed to be your God. I'm your father.

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You're my people. I've set my love upon you and you have your backs turned on me. You don't even talk.

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I get a momentary response from you. You don't cry out to me. You don't strive for me. It's what God describes in his people and in their sin is they don't even want to have anything to do with him.

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God in their lives, listen, is very much how he is in the lives of many Christians.

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God's a genie in a bottle. You cry out to him when you need something, you rub that bottle, you hope he springs out for a moment, you have your moment with God and then you're on your way.

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There's no constant communication with him. He wants to listen to us.

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He says it over and over in his word. He wants his people to talk to him, to communicate, to depend upon him, to cry out to him, to strive for him.

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He desires in this life of affection and intimacy, listen closely, he desires to display his love and provision.

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You see, when you say, well, God is sovereign, Pastor Jeff, so why pray? Throughout the

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Bible, you see many times God calling his people to cry out to him and to pray for the things that he has already ordained to turn out for their good and his glory, but he says, you come into my presence.

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In times where Jesus would speak to the father when he's about to do some amazing feat, he's about to just completely manipulate the creation itself and he knows the outcome, he knows what's coming, and he would pray to the father and he would ask the father and speak to the father as he was about to show something amazing about who he was.

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This intimate relationship with Jesus, and look at the life of Jesus, just consider for a moment now, he was God the son, the second person of the trinity, he's always existed in intimate relationship with the father forever ago.

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Try to wrap your mind around that one. When he takes on flesh, what do you know about Jesus' life? It's a life of prayer.

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He gets up early in the morning, he takes his psalms literally, he gets up early in the morning when the sun's not even up yet and he's talking to the father, praying to the father.

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The one thing his disciples knew about Jesus is that he talked to the father a lot. He had an intimate relationship with the father, very intimate relationship with the father, and do you think it's an accident that his brother

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James is known in history as Leather Knees? James, Jesus' half -brother, is known in history as Leather Knees, why?

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Because he spent so much time on his knees in prayer, it actually altered his physical body.

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He was known as Leather Knees because he was always on his knees in prayer. Do you think that he learned that on his own, or do you think that he saw his brother and his life of intimacy with the father, and he began to believe things about prayer because of Jesus, so it put him on his knees?

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I wanted to share with you some stories because as we move forward into this, into the theology of prayer and talking about prayer,

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I want to talk to you just in terms of like the intimate relationship you have with God, and I think

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I've failed many times as a pastor in writing down just what

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God has done, and if anything, I've sort of considered over the last week is I'm going to really start writing down all these moments where God shows up in these mighty ways because there are so many stories,

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I can't even recount all of them. But in terms of us as a church and my own personal life, crying out to God and actually pleading with God to show up, there's these amazing moments in my own personal history,

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I just wanted to share, and that this isn't just a matter of the text says, and so therefore believe it whether or not you see anything, because here's the point,

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God doesn't call you into this intimacy with him in this prayer life so that he doesn't show up. Over and over again, and we're going to see it in this study,

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God calls us to pray because he intends to show up every time.

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He intends to show up, maybe not necessarily being dictated to where you're saying, God, you do this and he shows up, but he will show up every time you pray.

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In whatever the circumstances, he shows up in it to bless you and glorify himself.

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So God calls us into prayer with him to bring him glory, to change us, and to bless you with an answer.

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That's the truth of God. There's so many amazing stories in my own personal history.

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I'll talk about Apologia Church for a moment. We first decided it was time to plant this church.

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I was a pastor at another church in Phoenix. I was doing family counseling, I was a teaching pastor,

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I was doing the youth group, I was doing virtually, I was the catch -all for this church that was really struggling, and the church was actually growing and experiencing some blessing, and God gave me the opportunity to be the chaplain at this hospital, so I got to preach the gospel to all these people there who were hurting, and I was preaching to myself.

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It was all just a bunch of me in those rooms, a bunch of people who were broken, who were drug users, people who were drunks, and so I got to see all these people come to Jesus.

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It became clear over a period of time that we needed a place to care for these people. I'd call churches and say, hey, this person came to Christ, they're coming back home to Florida, I wanted to get them plugged in with you, and they would say, yeah, what do

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I do with them? I was like, what do you mean, what do you do with them? Well, they're a heroin addict, I don't know how to handle that. I'd say, well, you disciple them, you preach the gospel to them, you talk to them, you're a pastor, what do you mean you don't know?

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And there were places locally, the same thing was occurring, and it became more and more clear we needed to care for these people, we needed a place to take care of their needs and to love them, and I resisted and resisted and resisted, and Pastor Luke and I resisted and resisted, and we thought it was never in our minds to plant a church.

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I just want to be a pastor, I'm not looking to plant a church, I'm not looking to do that sort of a thing, and then God made it more and more clear.

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We started praying to God. God, what do you want? And the people would show up, and they'd start telling me things, like I had about six different people that I know, seminary professors and pastors, telling me, you're supposed to plant this church, you better plant this church, so I started asking

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God, God, if you want me to do this, you've got to show up and let someone speak into my life that'll let me know exactly how you feel about it, and then

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I get a phone call from a pastor who knows me very well, and he says, Jeff, if you don't plant this church, you're in sin against God.

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Great. And so, all right, God, we'll throw the fleece out now, we'll ask you some questions,

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Lord. If you really want this, we are not doing it on our own, so if you want us to do it, you've got to show up, and so we started throwing things out to God that were just ridiculous and stupid.

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Like, if you want us to do it, God, you've got to show us by making this appear, and then all of a sudden, it would appear, and we'd ask you, show up in this way, and give us this thing, and you'd show up, and so we did this a ridiculous amount of times.

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It got to the point where it was, I'm sure that God was like, again? I already answered that one, and then the one before that, and then the one before that, so finally,

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I said, all right, Lord, I said, Pastor Luke, this is what we'll do, we'll ask God for this. Final word, God, we already got the confirmation from other men of God, we've already got all these other answers, if you want us to do it,

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God, here's what I need, I need a place to do worship as many times as I want, and we have to have a place that will actually charge us nothing, no money.

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I can use it as much as I want, and they won't charge us a dime, and so I ended up going to Calvary, a hospital that does not allow these sorts of things to take place, and I go to the

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CEO, who actually doesn't know me very well, this guy, and I said, hey, we're thinking about planning a church to care for some of the people that are coming to Christ.

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He didn't, I don't think, really care much about that, but I said, here's the thing, we need a place to do worship, and we need to have it throughout the week, and we can't pay you anything, and I'm throwing it out there, hoping he shoots it down, and so what he basically says is, okay, you got the family building, how often do you need it?

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I said, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. He said, great. I said, I can't pay you.

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He said, that's fine. I said, for how long? He said, forever, so I left his office,

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I called Luke, I said, looks like we're planning a church. There was a time early on where we had so many needs in the body at Apologia Church, we had people that were, again, in halfway houses, people who needed food, we had expenses as a church, we needed to have a place to do worship, we needed to pay rent, we had so many needs, we had no money, none, we didn't have any money.

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We're a church of broken people, they used to call us that drug church. Some of you guys know, you were there in the very beginning, you know we didn't have anything.

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None of us did. And so, Pastor Luke and I were talking once, and we said, if we don't get, and we did the budget and saw what we needed, we said, if we don't get $15 ,000, we're sunk,

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Apologia Church is over. That's just a matter of fact. We hated even thinking that thought, but we thought, if we don't have $15 ,000, we're done as a church.

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We have needs to take care of, we have no money, God, you have to provide. So Pastor Luke and I didn't tell anybody.

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We didn't tell our wives, we didn't tell the church, we told nobody. It was a phone call he and I had, we said,

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Lord, show up, and so we put the need out before the Lord. We said, Lord, you have to show up with this need, or Apologia Church doesn't exist anymore, we know you're in this, this is your church, you've raised it up, and God, so have your way,

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God, show up, please help us. And we told nobody. About a day or two later,

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I get a phone call from a stranger, I don't know this man, he doesn't know me. I don't know, ultimately, all the details of how this occurred, but he gets my phone number and he says,

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Pastor Jeff, this is who I am, you don't know me, but I just wanted you to know that my wife and I were praying about your church,

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I said, oh, you listen to Apologia Radio? No. You don't listen to our radio show?

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No. You've been to our church? No. You've seen us online? No. Okay, well, my wife and I are praying about your church, and the

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Lord laid it on our heart to give you guys $15 ,000, and he just shows up, out of nowhere, drops it from heaven.

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In my own personal life, I can tell you that there was a time where I came out of my drug addiction.

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God reshaped my life, I hated my sin, I hated my idols, I wanted to change, and I had wrecked my entire life completely, upside down, it was done.

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I didn't have a job, we didn't have money, we didn't know how we were going to actually pay our rent, we didn't even understand how we were going to get food the next day.

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And at the time, I had so destroyed my family that we had no food money, no money for the water, no money for the electric, and when this first went down, some of you guys know, they shut off my water, they shut off my electric, my phone was shut off, the place

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I was working for said, I'm not going to pay you, sue me, there was an eviction notice on my door, and they were re -pulling my car, that was from six to noon on one day.

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God showed up in a big way to smack me down and bring me to repentance. When I repented and I gave my life to Jesus, my heart changed, and I can remember these beautiful moments in my own personal history with my wife, we're in this quiet apartment with nothing, and we're just sitting there reading the

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Bible together, we're in the Word of God, we're talking about God together again, my life is changing, and I remember at this point, we had to, because my electric was shut off, get on that SRP Empower program.

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Some of you guys know what that is? Some of you guys are like, that's the bane of my existence, right? It's actually helpful in many ways, but we were on it because we had no money, you got to pre -pay for electricity, so you have this little box, if you don't know what it is, you have this little box in your house, and what you do is you get a card, and you have to go load the card with money, and you put it inside this box, and you can see how much is there, and sometimes it's terrifying when you have no money, because it's just going down penny by penny by penny, and you're running out of electricity, and it literally shuts off.

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Done. Well, we have it because we have no money, and I have no idea how money ultimately is going to keep coming in, so one day,

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I knew I was getting paid in about three days. We're fighting to even survive at this point, and there was,

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I think, maybe 70 cents on it, and I had about three more days to go, and this was actually in the wintertime, when we were having some really cold nights, and it was actually nighttime, so it's basically everyone

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I know is in bed, we didn't tell anybody what was going on, we were too prideful to tell anybody that we're struggling like this, and so I remember that Candy and I were on the couch one night,

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I knew there was about 70 cents on this thing, and I was like, I have the Bible in my lap, and we're just thinking to ourselves, how is this going to happen?

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I just said, we're just going to trust God. I don't know what's going to happen, but we're just going to trust God. I don't know if we're going to have electric tonight.

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I don't know how this is going to work. I don't know if our kids are going to have a warm house to sleep in. We're just going to trust God. We're going to trust

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God right now for this thing, and so we would pray, and we're just together talking in the Word, studying, and every once in a while,

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I would go back into the bedroom, and I'd push that button, and I just watched that thing just going down 65 cents, 64 cents, 63 cents, and I would go back, and we'd sit down, and I'd be praying and thinking,

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God, show up, Lord. You've got to show up. I'm not going back after my idols. I'm not sinning against you.

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I'm going to trust you. I'm going to be faithful, but you have to show up with this thing, God, and I would go back in there, and I would watch this thing go down, tick, tick, tick, and I go back in.

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Candy's on the couch, and we're just thinking about it and praying about it and just giving it to God. You've got to show up, so then at one point,

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I get up after praying about it. I go in there, and I watch this thing, and I push the button, and before God, I'm telling you the truth.

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I saw the numbers, like 65 cents, 64 cents, and all of a sudden, as I'm looking at this thing, it changes before my very eyes, and it says $18 and some odd cents, which

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I did the calculations was about exactly the amount of electricity we were using for the next three days before I had money to put back into it.

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So I see it happen in front of my eyes. My first response is, praise the Lord. No, not my first response.

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My first response was to go, wait a minute, click, click, click, click, click.

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I go back into the room, and I sit down, say nothing. I get back up again. I walk back in there, and I'm like going through it again.

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I'm like, it's screwed up. It's going to go back to normal in a second, right? I go back in. I'm looking at this thing, and then finally, I go back in there because it's not changing back, and I sit down with Candy.

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I said, how much did that thing say when you looked at it, and she told me what it was. It was what I said it was. I said, it just changed to $18.

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I remember that she and I both got up together. We stormed in there. We're like, what's this thing saying? And we both didn't even know what to do with it.

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We didn't know how to even respond to that. This God shows up for this stupid little thing like electricity.

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He shows up over these little moments in our lives. We think, oh, he'll show up for the big thing, right?

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The big tragedy. He'll show up for that thing, but he shows up even for the electricity. He shows up. There are times where in this season of my life,

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God was teaching me to trust him. People would literally show up at my door. We weren't asking for help. We didn't tell people we were struggling.

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They would show up to my door at 9 .30 at night and say, hey, I was driving by here, and I really felt like I had to come over and give you this money.

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Have a nice night, and then walk away. Or one time, we'd had no money to pay our rent, and I'm just in this season where God's just like, trust me.

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I'm like, all right, Lord, I'll trust you. I won't go back and use drugs anymore. I'm not turning my life back that direction. I'm going to trust you.

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I know you're faithful. We had no money to pay our rent. Usually by the fifth of every month is where you get that notice on your door in an apartment complex, and what's it say?

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Pay your bill, or the sheriff comes and takes you out in five days. So it's

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February. We have no ability to pay our bills. We're just trusting God, and the fifth comes along.

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What are we going to do? We're going to trust God. We're going to believe him. He's going to take care of this. I don't know how, but he's going to take care of it. We didn't tell our parents.

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We didn't tell our friends. We told nobody we were struggling. We just told God. I wouldn't necessarily encourage that, by the way.

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That's just what we did. And so the fifth comes along, no notice on the door. The sixth comes along, no notice on the door.

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The seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, nothing. So we're just trusting God, and we're praying, God, show up somehow,

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Lord, get this paid. Help us with this need. We trust you. Now the 11th, the 12th, the 13th, the 15th, the 18th, the 19th, the 20th, the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and all of a sudden,

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I'm like, what's going on? Did somebody forget we're living here? And now on this one day, the toilet breaks.

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Not my fault. The toilet breaks, and now we actually have to call the office to send somebody out to fix the toilet.

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And I'm so nervous. Now I got to call the front and ask them to come fix the toilet. They're going to find out. So I go to the front.

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I'm going to the office, and I say to the woman, I said, hey, we're in this apartment. Our toilet broke. She said, oh, have a seat, have a seat, have a seat.

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I said, oh, okay. And so I sit down, and she turns the computer screen to me, and she's working on it. She's like, which apartment? And I told her which apartment.

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She says, okay, okay, so here. And all of a sudden, now I'm looking at my screen. She's looking at my screen. It says

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Jeff Derb, and it has the address, and then it tells the lease, and it says paid for each month.

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It says this month paid, this month paid, this month paid. It was the month we were in,

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February, and it said paid. He paid my rent.

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How did he pay my rent? I don't know how he paid my rent. He showed up over what

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I thought was the smallest detail of the universe, the thing he would be least concerned with. God, you know that there are entire governments out there, right?

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God, you know that Saturn needs you to keep it in orbit, right? God, you know the moon needs to be just the right distance away from Earth, and we need to be just far enough away from the sun,

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God. Don't you know you have a lot to manage right now, God? Why do you care about my rent and my electric?

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And this was a season in my life where God was teaching me, trust me. I was the kind of person that would panic and have anxiety over little details of my life, and I would freak out and run off to some other false god to satisfy the need, and God was showing up.

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I'm going to tell you one more story, an amazing story. It's very close and personal to our church about God showing up in the midst of needs.

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Some of you guys may know that Pastor Luke is the descendant of a giant of the faith.

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His grandfather and grandmother went to Africa, and they went to Africa risking everything to bring the gospel to that nation.

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And the stories, we can go on all night of the amazing stories of God showing up, and he took his family, when was this,

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Luke? In the 40s? 60s, okay. He took his family at a time where they didn't have the kind of communication we have today.

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He picks his family up to bring the gospel to Africa, and they literally got there, and all they did was start going into the jungle.

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Like, it's crazy what they did. They go into the jungle to bring the gospel to these natives there, and they end up actually preaching the gospel to all these people.

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People come to Christ, a church is born, and they build a hospital. His grandfather is a medical doctor.

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They build a hospital that is there to this day. And at a certain point, these rebels were coming to the hospital.

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They got word, his family got word, actually Luke's mother and grandparents, they got word that the rebels were coming to kill them.

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And so the natives that were there that were now Christians, and the church is there now, they told his grandparents, you have to get out of here.

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We don't want you to die. You need to go. Now, the Christians that were there, the natives that were there were only armed with machetes.

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These rebels were coming with machine guns. The story about how God preserved that hospital is amazing.

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The rebels come into the hospital, and there were all these chemicals upstairs in the hospital. They were going to destroy the hospital, set it on fire.

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And what happened was the rebels go up into this hospital, all these chemical barrels are there, they're kicking all these chemicals over because they're going to set fire to the whole thing to destroy it.

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And they didn't realize that they're kicking all these chemicals over, it formed a mixture that killed them.

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But more than that, the natives that were there try to escape with their lives from the rebels, and the rebels chase them into the jungle.

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So these Christians, these natives run into the jungle, and they're trying to flee from these people who are in pursuit of their lives.

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They're going to kill them. And they come to a split in the road, left or right. And these natives decide to go one direction, and they finally get down to the end of that, and now they're blocked.

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The Congo River is there. If you know anything about the Congo River, it is deep, it runs fast, it is infested with crocodiles.

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It's dangerous. You can't just cross it. So now they're stuck. They're on the run for their lives now, and they're stuck at this riverbank.

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There's nowhere to go. They don't know what to do. So these Christians, now there as a result of Luke's grandfather bringing the gospel to that place, they fall to their knees on this riverbank with the

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Congo in front of them, nowhere to go. And they plead to God to spare them and to rescue them and to show up.

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They're just crying out to God, Father, please help us, please show up. And when these Christians look up on the riverbank, all of a sudden these boats drift right down towards them and land right in front of them, as soon as they look up.

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And so they hop into these and they escape. They found out later that these rebels, when they got to that cross on the path, they ran the other direction.

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And when they ran up that way, they found some boats tied to the riverbank. They thought the Christians would find them.

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And so they cut them loose and those boats went right down the river and landed right in front of the

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Christians. God shows up. Now, there'd be no possible way to record all of the miraculous ways that God has shown up and responded to the prayers of His people.

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There'd be no way to write the book. The world couldn't contain all the books. It couldn't contain them.

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My plea today, as we start this, we're going to talk next week about the hindrances to prayer. Unbelief, idols, bad theology, personal and unconfessed sin, selfish motives, rejecting

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God's Word, unforgiving spirit, marital sin. We're going to talk about that.

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My purpose today as your pastor is I've been praying through and asking God, how do

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I bring this to the people of God at Apology of Church? How do I best shepherd them? My prayer is that today would be a day of repentance over our prayerlessness.

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My hope is that as we enter into the study on prayer, it would not just be something where you walk away and you say,

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I know the ABCs of prayer. I know how God intends for me to pray in sequence, in order.

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My true desire is that as we enter into the study of prayer, we would first enter into it with confession and repentance over our lack of intimacy, over our lack of trust in God, over our lack of prayer.

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And we would actually be changed now, sanctified for the remainder of our lives with the

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Lord in a way that we can be called a people of prayer. That Apology of Church would be known as a church that is dependent upon and lives upon prayer.

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That we have a relationship with God that people could look in and say, those people know

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God. They talk to God so much. He answers them. He shows up.

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They plead out to God. They cry out to Him and He's there. He answers them. I'm terrified of this

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God. The queen that John Knox was in conflict with.

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You know the story? The queen that John Knox was in conflict with. She could have done a lot of damage to John Knox.

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And she actually said that she feared more the prayers of John Knox than all the armies that could be mustered.

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She was more terrified of John Knox talking to God. She said it.

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That she was more terrified of John Knox talking to God than she was of all these armies that could have been amassed against her.

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She didn't want him talking to God. That's what scared her. And my hope is that that would be the kind of life of intimacy and prayer that we have with God, that I have with God, that you have with God.

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That we actually believe when we cry out to God, He's listening to us. That we actually believe that He is our

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Father. That we actually believe that He loves us. That we actually believe that He's going to answer our prayers according to His will.

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So let me ask you the hard question. I'm not asking you to say it out loud. Don't answer out loud.

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How is your prayer life with God? If God could tell you, this is what

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I think about it, what would He say? When you look at your day and you think about your intimacy with God, is it at all?

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Do you talk to Him in little blips and moments like you did when you were an unbeliever?

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Or do you actually have a focused time where you spend before Him in His throne room, crying out to Him, trusting in His promises, being changed?

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If you were to look at your day and you slice it up into segments in terms of what you're in pursuit of, which slice does

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God have? How do you pursue Him? What has the lion's share of your time?

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Is it God and intimacy with Him? Or is it the toy, the device, the other relationship?

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Let me ask, let me say this, and I want to just give a confession. I believe that God is using

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Apologia Church in ways that I never anticipated. I believe that He's using this little church, look at us,

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He's using this little church to change so much through the gospel. But I have to say this,

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I believe that what He has done in our lives is as a result of His love and patience with us,

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His faithfulness. Because I don't believe that as a church we have prayed to God like we ought to.

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I don't believe that in the history of seven years of Apologia Church, we've actually sought God in prayer the way that we're supposed to.

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Do we pray? Are we a praying church? Yeah, we pray. But are we the kind of church that actually can be defined as a praying church that strides after God?

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I can't imagine what other things God would have done, could have done, had we as a church actually sought

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Him in prayer the way we ought to. So first I want to ask us as we enter into this theology of prayer, and we talk about prayer,

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I want to ask us as a church, each of us individually and corporately, to confess to God our lack of prayer and ask

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Him to change us. Let's pray. Father, please hear us when we call to You.

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Help us to be a church that talks to You and prays. Father, we have to admit to You our prayerlessness.

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We have to admit to You, God, that we've sought other things in Your place and then we've wondered why

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You felt so far away. We have to admit to You that we've sought intimacy elsewhere and we wonder why we don't feel intimate with You.

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We have to confess to You that we have sought treasures above You and we wonder why we're not filled.

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We have to confess to You as a church that we haven't believed Your promises. We haven't believed what

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You've said about Yourself. We haven't talked to You as we ought to. So as Your church,

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God, we are asking for forgiveness. Please forgive us. And please,

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God, through Your Spirit and Word, change us for good.

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Change us into a praying people. Change us into a people that actually believes that You love us and You want to hear us.

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Please, God, help us to come into Your presence, Lord, with joy and confidence. God, draw prayer from our lips and make us into a praying church.