More Than Dancing

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Don Filcek; 2 Samuel 7:18-29 More Than Dancing

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak is preaching from his series,
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The Warrior Poet King, Study of 2 Samuel. Let's listen in. I'm Don Filsak.
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I'm the lead pastor here, and good morning and welcome. Just as Ben said, I'm really glad that we're all able to gather together in the name of our
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is a privilege to serve all of you. I am glad for this gathering of God's people.
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I think it's possible that when I get up here every week and kind of introduce the message and introduce myself, there really is only one of me, you guys,
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I promise. But when I introduce myself as the lead pastor, I'm wondering what goes through your mind.
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I say that mainly for the benefit of those who are visiting with us. This might be your first time. I like to know when
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I visit a church who's that guy standing up there talking to me right now. But I am not saying something like I'm the
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CEO of this church. I don't mean to imply at all in that title that I'm higher or that I'm somehow more spiritual.
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I want to let you guys in on some things that God has been working in my life as we're going into this message this morning.
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God has been leaning pretty heavy on me to define my role more precisely in my daily and weekly ministry as a pastor here at this church.
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And the reason I'm talking this way and kind of introducing the message this way is because the text this morning is going to lean on pretty heavy on one of my three primary functions here as a servant to the flock that God has placed here in Matawan.
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My increasing conviction is that I'm called to an exemplary ministry in these three primary areas as a pastor, as your pastor, if you remember here, and that is to be exemplary in prayer, to be exemplary in contemplative exegesis.
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That's a big phrase that means I study God's word and I let it wash over me and I let it have an impact on my heart before I share it.
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And then the third area is in spiritual direction. I am called first to pray and to demonstrate prayer and to spotlight the faith that it takes to pray, and we're going to see that in our text this morning.
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I'm also called to study the word of God in a way that allows it to impact my soul before I ever get up here and preach it, and that's a prayer that I had early on as a pastor and continue to pray is that God would let me never preach a message that he hasn't first preached to me.
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I always want to hear and sit under God's word first before I get up here and tell you what
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God has to say to you. I spend a lot of time meditating on and contemplating God's word throughout the week. I take the time to allow it to wash over my mind and my heart all week long.
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And then lastly, I'm convinced that I'm called to give wise spiritual direction to the flock. That means
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I value and desire opportunities to pray with you. I hear this phrase frequently, I didn't want to bother you pastor because I know you're busy.
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It couldn't be more counter to that. I am here to help guide and walk with you in life.
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That's part of my role. That's part of my responsibility. That is a fundamental calling that I have. Do not let any perception in your mind that I'm too busy to answer your questions get in the way of the spiritual direction that I'm called to help you through.
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And so, it's my calling in the text though, the first one that we're going to see our text concerned with today, prayer.
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I'm entitling this sermon, More Than Dancing, and I'm kind of tying it in to something that David was doing a couple of weeks ago in the message back in chapter 6 of 2
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Samuel. Now we're going to be in chapter 7. More Than Dancing is the title because we see David in a very different posture than we observed him a couple of weeks ago in the message in chapter 6 when he was dancing with all of his might before the
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Ark of the Covenant as it was being brought up into the city of Jerusalem. Today we're going to see
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David worshiping just like he was worshiping then, only in a very different posture, a very different stance. Today he will sit quietly in prayer and praise before the
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Lord. He will sit quietly in conversation and discussion with God. Today he will model for us prayer and I hope it has an impact on you the way that it has me.
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Philip Yancey wrote the following in one of my favorite books on prayer titled Prayer by Philip Yancey.
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He said this, and I love this quote, prayer means keeping company with God, the
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God who is already present. Keeping company with the God who was already there before you started talking with him.
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You know what I'm talking about. Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, I like this quote, prayer is a refusal.
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I love this. Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul.
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It's a refusal to allow there to be any kind of neglect in terms of my relationship with God and the acknowledgement that I am more than a physical body taking in and consuming in the world around me.
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David is going to spend our entire text this morning in prayer. And I believe that the way he prays is meant to be a challenge to all of us to enter more into the gift that is prayer.
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We have a church, we have a God who will talk with us, a God who will listen to us, a God who will hear us.
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It's astonishing. So let's open our Bibles or your devices or your scripture journals, whatever means you have to access the word of God today to 2
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Samuel chapter 7 starting in verse 18 and we're going to read through the end of the chapter.
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So it's 2 Samuel 7 verses 18 through 29 and recast. I love to remind you every week that we have the privilege right now to take in the very words of God, the things that he desires to communicate to us.
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There's no accidents that you're here to hear this word this morning. Then King David went in and sat before the
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Lord and said, who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house that you have brought me thus far?
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And yet this was a small thing in your eyes, O Lord God. You have spoken also of your servant's house for a great while to come.
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And this is instruction for mankind, O Lord God. And what more can David say to you? For you know your servant,
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O Lord God, because of your promise and according to your own heart you have brought about all this greatness to make your servant know it.
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Therefore you are great, O Lord God. For there is none like you and there is no God besides you.
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According to all that we have heard with our ears. And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whom
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God went to redeem to be his people, making himself a name and doing for them great and awesome things by driving out before your people whom you redeemed for yourself from Egypt, a nation and its gods.
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And you established for yourself your people Israel to be your people forever. And you, O Lord, became their
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God. And now, O Lord God, confirm forever the words that you have spoken concerning your servant and concerning his house and do as you have spoken.
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And your name will be magnified forever saying the Lord of hosts is God over Israel. And the house of your servant
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David will be established before you. For you, O Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have made this revelation to your servant saying
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I will build you a house. Therefore your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you.
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And now, O Lord God, you are God and your words are true. And you have promised this good thing to your servant.
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Now therefore may it please you to bless the house of your servant so that it may continue forever before you.
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For you, O Lord God, have spoken. And with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever.
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Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. And Father, it makes sense for us to begin by rehearsing your goodness to us.
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You've been at work long before we gathered together this morning. We need turn no further than just these
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Old Testament passages where we recognize that we're connecting with a deep and a rich history of things that you have done.
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Today being Palm Sunday is a reminder of just this whole King business. We're talking about King David who you promised in the text last week at the beginning of chapter 7 that he would be, one from his line would be
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King forever on your throne. And we think about Jesus entering Jerusalem in that final week, a very different kind of King.
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Celebrated, the shouts of Hosanna in the highest, the shouts of praise there.
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Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the Messiah coming into his city.
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Only to be crucified a week later, to be raised again three days later to become the eternal
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King, the one who would sit on the throne of David forever. Twists and turns to the story that you have made to bring about our salvation.
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So Father, I pray that you would impress on our hearts the great glory of an ancient plan that you have been working.
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To be saturated in the history of your faithfulness to your people, your faithfulness to bring about your promises, that we are the recipients of those things here in 2022, here in this little corner of the world in Matawan, Michigan, and we are recipients of these great and awesome and glorious truths of how you work with humanity.
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Father, I pray that you would light our hearts on fire with a holy passion for what is true, what is right, what is good for the salvation given to us in Jesus Christ and allow our praises to rise up to you in gladness this morning.
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We thank you for this body, we thank you for the chance we have together to sing your praises now in Jesus' name. All right.
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Yeah, you can go to be seated. I think everybody got that already. If at any time during the message you need to get up and I don't think there's any more donut holes back there, but there is more coffee, so take advantage of that if you need that.
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And if you need the bathrooms, they're out the double doors down the hallway on the left -hand side. And then I just ask that you please, over the remainder of our time, keep your
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Bibles open to 2 Samuel 7, 18 through 29. If you lost your place there on your device, jump back in there so that you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from his word and you can let that saturate your mind.
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I'm obviously trying to explain that text and make it more clear to us and give you the clear meaning of it over the time that we have remaining together.
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We need a really quick refresher to understand why David is praying in our text. What's he praying about? Well, context matters and what's just going on?
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Well, earlier in chapter 7, David had decided that at the very beginning he was going to build a temple for God.
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He said, I want to build God a house. But God told him through the prophet Nathan that, no, no, no, breaks on David, you're not supposed to build me a house.
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Instead, I'm going to make you and your family into a royal house. And God kind of gave him a play on words where David was going to build a physical temple for God.
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God says, no, I'm going to build a people out of you and I'm going to make your family line a perpetual eternal kingdom.
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And he pledged that there would be a forever king who would come from David's line. And so David, what we see in the text is his response to that.
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It's a response to amazing news for David. How many of you would just like to know where your family line goes?
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Like raise your hand if you just kind of appreciate that. Like it'd be nice to know that there's going to be a legacy here. There's going to be good things that come out of my family.
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Not just good things, but for David it's declared to him that it's going to be eternal things that come out of his family line.
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An eternal king that's going to sit on the throne of David forever and ever. But what might you be tempted to think that David would do in a context like this when he gets this kind of great news?
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Is it jumping up and down? Is it dancing with all of his might before God? What do you expect him to do? It's interesting that David doesn't always have the same response.
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He's a person just like you or me and he responds differently than he did back in chapter six. David doesn't dance, but look at verse 18 to see what he does.
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King David went into the presence of God and likely in the tabernacle there before the
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Ark of the Covenant that was set up there in Jerusalem. And he sat, sat down before the
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Lord. I think he's awestruck and he's in wonder and awe over God's declaration over his family line.
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So the physical context of our entire text, what's going on, the flow, the movement, all happens with the king of Israel sitting down with God discussing with his maker.
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Discussing with the almighty God this great news that he's just received from the prophet.
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So here we find our first observation about prayer as we're kind of diving into this text is that it requires some initiative.
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And what I mean is that it doesn't always require at its root cause. How many of you know that you can pray while you're driving the car?
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You don't always have to go to a special place and sit down. You can pray to God while you're between meetings walking down the hallway.
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You can pray on your way home in your commute, and I recommended that a couple of weeks ago, that all throughout our day we can pray.
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But how many of you know that it takes initiative to pull your brain away from the things that are going on around you to think of God, to begin a conversation with him?
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There's an initiative that's required regardless of how we brand our prayer. And Jesus talks about going and taking those times to go and make a concerted effort in prayer, to go sit before the
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Lord. There are times and seasons like that. If the extent of your prayer life is that quick arrows to God like in between meetings, you're missing something.
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You're missing something about the longer times in prayer that God desires of us as well. It's not one or the other, but it's both, and both
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I would suggest to you require an initiative. Here we see David doing that type of prayer that Jesus talked about where he says go into the inner rooms and close the door behind you and don't show off that you're praying and don't go tell everybody, wow, we spent an hour in prayer this morning.
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Instead, just go and sit quietly and talk to God. So he carves out time to sit before the
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Lord to have a chat. And as simple as that sounds, I think to be quite frank for most of us, if we're honest, it can be pretty intimidating.
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There is so much to be done within 24 hours. How many of you, your days fill themselves?
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Anybody with me on that? Is there always something more at the end of the day that you could have done? Go ahead and raise your hand if you're like me on that.
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There's always more that we could have done. And yet I'm confident that David, as the leader of the nation, here in this text, he carves out time to go in the presence of God and sit still before him.
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How many of you think that as a king of a nation, he had some stuff to do? He probably had some stuff to do that he was neglecting by sitting there praying.
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But it takes significant faith to believe that you are not wasting your time when you are praying.
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You get it? It takes faith to believe that that is time well spent. Well, I think that as Americans, we are doers, we are fixers, we are workers.
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Can we fix it? Yes, we can. Some of you had kids around my kids' age then, if you recognize that.
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But there's probably nothing more antithetical to our modern American business models than sitting down quietly with an invisible
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God and talking to him. This would be crazy, right? It's crazy, unless God is real, unless God is in charge, unless God is good.
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If God is real and God is in charge and God is good, then how many of you know that that changes prayer for us?
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If we believe that to be true and he is real, then maybe the best thing that you can do is talk to him, is to bring your day to him, is to reflect on him and the things that he is doing.
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I would suggest to you that it is hard to express more faith than you are expressing when you are praying.
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Let me say that again, it is hard for you to express more faith than when you are praying.
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In other words, prayer is one of the things that demonstrates our faith the most.
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When you are praying, you are purely showing that you believe God is and you're talking to him.
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All else in our lives, right? Everything in our society, everything in our culture, everything in our day, it all points to action, does it not?
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Everything in the world around us points to our activity, to change things, to do stuff.
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I would confess that just this past week, I almost responded to an email with something like this.
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Somebody shared something difficult that's going on in their lives and I said, I will pray for you, but is there anything
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I can do? I'll pray for you, but is there anything ...
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I didn't write that, but it was there and then I had to delete it. It was kind of conviction. I'm writing a sermon about prayer and the value and the power of it.
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As if what I was conveying in that initial version of that email was as if prayer isn't doing something.
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As if prayer is second to ... I have a long way to grow in my understanding of the power of prayer and the primacy of prayer, the centrality of talking to God first and I have the feeling that I'm not the only one in the room that this message is going to preach to.
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I think it's for all of us. Our text this morning breaks down into three movements of David's prayer.
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Three, I would say, even subtly shocking ways that he talks to God. The first is that he acknowledges
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God's work in verses 18 through 21. If you're taking notes, this is the breakdown. Acknowledge God's work, 18 through 21.
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The second is praise him for his works, verses 22 through 24. The third is then attach your requests to his past work, verses 25 through 29.
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What we see God do, what we see David do rather in the text first is acknowledge God's work. That's what he spends the first few verses doing.
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I've been impressed recently to see that my prayer is never a starting point. Every single time that I address the
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Almighty, I am connecting into the river, into the flow of stuff that has been going on long before I ever took my first breath.
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I want you to know that when you're talking to the God who created everything, you're connecting to something maybe a little bigger than your life, maybe a little bigger than yourself.
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You are talking to the one who was at work long before you ever breathed air.
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My first prayer in the morning is offered to the God who didn't sleep last night. I'm talking to the eternal one.
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I'm talking and speaking to the first of all causes. In prayer,
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David starts out acknowledging that God has been working. How many of you think that's a safe place to start?
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That's a humble place to start. I'm here and I'm talking to you, the
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God who has been at work from the beginning. Great starting place for us in prayer to acknowledge that we are not the start.
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That's a good place to begin. David starts with his smallness here. Who am
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I that you have blessed me so much? He begins immediately with humility. He's identifying
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God's good grace in his life and he is correctly identifying that he is not worthy of it.
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How many of you have ever been worthy of anything that God has given to you? You just haven't.
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And yet what's amazing and awe -inspiring to David, he also declares is of course no expenditure of energy to God.
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Look at verse 19. This was a small thing in your eyes. To me, it's everything. To you, just a minor thing that you would call my line and set forth to bring forward the eternal king through my lineage.
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Not a big deal to you. Everything to me. And I find two things interesting about what's going on here.
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David is rehearsing. This is where it gets a little strange what David is doing and a little bit shocking to our forms of prayer and the way that we might conceive of prayer.
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David is rehearsing with God in speech that's recorded for us in ink and paper and parchment is spent recording what
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God has already done. He's talking to God about what God has already done. How many of you know that God already knows these things?
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He doesn't need David to inform him about past and history. He doesn't need David to inform him about the promises that he's made through the prophet
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Nathan. He doesn't need any of that. So why in the world is
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David talking to him? Why is he taking up his time when he could be legislating and ruling a nation and hearing problems and solving them?
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Why is he sitting down in God's presence talking to him about the past?
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Many of you have just been guilty at times of just saying, how much does God need to hear from me in prayer? How much do
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I really need to share with him? Doesn't he already know everything? I want to say how utterly sterile and sanitized and organized and proper we want to be with our time and our relationship with God.
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Is efficiency the goal? Is that the spiritual goal of our lives, is spiritual efficiency?
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Have you ever gotten together with an old friend and rehearsed times back when? Any of you? When you get together with friends, do you rehearse past events and past experiences?
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I remember one Friday evening, I was walking over, it was dark after dark, and I was walking over to my friend
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Dale and Mike's apartment. They stayed at the student apartment at Calvin College. And I was walking over to hang out with them and play some video games or whatever.
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And on the way past the dumpster out behind their apartment, I heard something rummage around in there. So I went in there. I said, there's something in the dumpster.
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So we grabbed some sticks and some baseball bats, and you can imagine college guys going out there to just see what in the world's going on.
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I threw open the lid, and I was greeted by the unmistakable black and white stripes of a skunk.
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Now that's a story that comes up often when I get together with my college buddies, and we talk and we laugh about that.
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Nobody got sprayed, but boy, did we run fast. The baseball bats and the sticks did not prove to be helpful in that scenario.
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We have no problem getting together with others and rehearsing the past, do we not? Isn't that part of what relationship is?
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Getting together and rehearsing what's gone on. We don't find that a waste of time, do we?
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Do we have a relationship with God like that? Second observation in verse 19 is that in acknowledging
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God's work, David displays amazing insight regarding the implications of this.
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Maybe beyond his years, he's demonstrating some kind of understanding about the significance of this calling that one of his line is going to rule on the throne forever.
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He says, and this is instruction for mankind, a phrase that probably didn't make a whole lot of sense when I read it, doesn't make a lot of sense when
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I read it now, but it could be translated, such is human destiny. This calling, this thing that you're doing is like global, it's human destiny.
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It's not Israel's destiny, it's not my family's destiny. What you're doing in this promise is global.
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It's an exclamation. David understood that this promise of God to send an eternal king through his royal lineage was going to change things for all of the nations, for all peoples, for humanity, and he's expressing awe in this to God.
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Well, David is nearly speechless as he reflects on the work of God and so should we be as we reflect on what we know from our vantage point of the past history of God's work in humanity to bring about redemption.
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We ought to agree with David in verse 20 when he says, what more can I say?
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What more can I say to you? He's overwhelmed by God's kindness to him, and especially as he considers that God knows him and is still expressed, he says,
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God, you know me. That's exclamation point two in the text, he says, you know me and you've still made this kind of promise to me?
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You know me and you've still rescued me? You know me and you would still save my royal line? And you know me?
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It's crazy that he would know David's past and still call him.
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David has been acknowledging God's work. He's been sitting down as one would sit down with a friend, rehearsing past shared experiences, and David concludes this part of his prayer showing that he knows why
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God has done these things in the past. He says, I know what you're doing, I know what you're up to, but he has a history with God, and so he's seen
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God's heart, and he knows his God, and verse 21 is pretty key in this prayer, in this passage, that you are a
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God who is faithful to keep your promises. You are shining a spotlight on your faithfulness, and you have been kind to me, says
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David, because you promised me in my youth to make me a king, and now here I sit on the throne. And God is faithful to keep his promises, and further,
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David identifies that God has a kind and good heart. David is acknowledging that God has brought him into the flow of his purposes because God keeps his promises, amen to that.
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God keeps his promises, but also because God has a heart of love for his people, double amen to that, amen and amen.
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And since God is a God who is faithful, and God is a God who loves his people, and David has been rehearsing the past history of God, we come to the second movement of the prayer, and that is praise him for his works.
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Fundamental in our prayers should be thankfulness and gratitude for the way that he has worked. Notice the therefore at the start of verse 22 in the text, what comes next, that therefore demonstrates that what comes next flows out of acknowledging the past river of God's work, the past flow of God's work in human history.
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Because God is faithful, because he loves his people, David was able to discern that God is also great.
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He praises his master Yahweh, oh Lord God appears here multiple times in the text.
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It's a title that occurs seven times in this prayer. No worries on David's part about repetition in his designation and his title of God.
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He uses the personal name of God, Yahweh, all throughout this text and calls him his master.
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This is the king of Israel, identifying that he also has a Lord. And in praise with connection to a history with God, David praises
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God as unique. There is no other God besides him, says David, and David appeals to the work of God and the word of God that's revealed through the reading of the
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Old Testament, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. He alludes to that by the hearing of the ear.
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Scripture would have been read more frequently than it was, it would have been read out loud by those who were able to read versus everybody being able to read.
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In an illiterate culture, everything was spread by word, so when he says by the hearing of the ear, he's still referring to God's words being read.
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In this section of praising God for his works, David gives thanks for something that may be a challenge for many of us.
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In verse 23, he is in essence thanking God for his redeemed people. And we might be able to find that easy to say in a general sense, but it might be harder in the specifics.
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What I mean by that is that it might be easy for us to say, thank you God for pulling together a people for yourself, but it might be more challenging for us to specifically be thankful for church and for particular people at church.
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Let's pause and consider if there is within you any reticence to praise God for the way he is forging a people for his own name and his own glory.
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Any withdraw within you, any cringing within you, any pullback from gladness over God's work in pulling together his own people, that withdraw is not from God.
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Let me say that again in a different way. If you struggle to praise God for his church and the people that he's bringing together, that spirit of criticism is not from him.
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Of course, the gratitude that David offers to God for his redeemed people has more to do with the work of God and less to do with the people themselves.
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You know what I'm talking about? Eyes fixed on God and his work in bringing together a people for his glory and for his name.
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How many of you would just admit that you've encountered people as messy from time to time? Five of us?
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I mean, this is a charmed and blessed gathering if it's not more than the people who raised their hands.
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People are messy, people are sinful, people are often a barrier to gratitude to God for his redeeming work.
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I saw a meme this week that I was like, that's it right there. The other 11 disciples didn't leave
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Jesus because of Judas. Often that's the criticism, right? Like, oh, there's bad people in the church, so I'm going to leave.
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There's bad people in the gathering of God's people, so how in the world can I hang in there? But the 11 disciples stuck with Jesus because guess what they were focused on?
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Not each other, but on Jesus. Stick with him. People are often a barrier to gratitude to God for his redeeming work, but how many of you just being honest have received some level of hurt or emotional injury from people who claim to be followers of Christ?
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A lot of us have. But look at David's gratitude here in the text, how it's expressed.
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He is glad for God's initiative. In verse 23, God went. He is glad for God's redemption.
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God redeemed, verse 23. He's glad for God's inclusion. God made them his people. He's glad that God has glorified his name.
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He's glad God has done great and awesome things for his people in delivering them from their enemies, referencing
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Egypt, particularly in this case. Of course, in this context of the Old Testament, a lot of this has
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Exodus type overtones and the establishment of the nation of Israel is in mind in David's thankfulness.
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But for us, I don't think it's a stretch to apply this to the foundation and the development of the church. Are you thankful to God for taking initiative in salvation in sending forth his son?
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Are you glad for that? Are you thankful for the cross where he redeemed his people? Are you thankful for his gospel calling that even uses us to bring people into the kingdom by faith?
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Are you glad for him making a great name for himself in Jesus Christ his son, the eternal king who sits on the throne of David forever and ever?
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Are you glad he has defeated our enemies of sin and death? Not just bringing us out of slavery to Egypt, but bringing us out of slavery to sin and death.
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Amen? He has defeated some pretty significant enemies in the process of saving us.
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So, let me just ask you this question as David is reflecting on the people of God and giving thanks for them, what defines the people of God?
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Who are they? Recast, we're a church. We ought to be able to define this, right? So what is it that defines
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God's people? Is it that we get together on Sunday morning and sing some songs?
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Is it our attention to the word and that you're sitting there listening to the Bible preached? Is it our kids programming?
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We've got some great workers back there doing great things with our kids. No, we are defined first and foremost church by what
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God has done for us. It's his initiative. Plain and simple, we are defined by what he has done for us, not by what we have done for him.
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I like the way that Dale Davis highlights this in a commentary with the following story where we see
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David focused on the God who is basically drawing or painting the church. And the focus is on the artist, not on the subject.
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Dale Davis tells this story about Paul Gibson, doesn't really matter a whole lot. You're not going to really know him. He was retired as the principal of Ridley Hall at Cambridge.
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And at his retirement party back in the day, a portrait was painted to be displayed at Ridley Hall and was revealed in his honor and there was like the big curtain thing and then they opened the curtain, you know, and it was like, oh, and claps and applause and all that stuff.
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And as he gave his acceptance speech and his retirement speech at that ceremony, he said the following to honor the painter of his own portrait.
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He said, in the future when people see this portrait, they're not going to inquire who was that man, rather they will inquire who painted that portrait.
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They're not going to care who the subject was. They're going to be impressed with the painter. This is what
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God is doing among his people. The question is not who are they, but rather who has brought them together.
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It's a ragtag group. Would you guys be sitting in this room if it wasn't for Christ? I certainly hope not.
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I mean, I have joked about this over the years, but most of you, I wouldn't know were it not for Christ, right?
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Is that accurate? And we would pass each other, you know, in the cereal aisle and I'd say, excuse me as I reach around you to get my lucky charms, and that might be the extent of any interaction
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I have with any of you in the room, right? Without Christ, I mean, would we know each other? I wonder.
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But who has brought such a ragtag group of people together? Who is uniting us?
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Who has brought us into such a place where we love one another, we pray for one another, we lift one another up, we hurt when each other hurts, and we celebrate when each other celebrates?
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Who's doing that? Who holds us together in such unity? Who holds us together in such love?
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Who is forging the church? Who's doing that recast? It's God.
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It's His work. Look at verse 24, God is establishing for Himself a people to be
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His forever. So are you a part of that recast? Are you just...
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I mean, our weakest moments, we're just attending church this morning. Are we being church this morning?
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We recognize what it means to be church this morning. David offered thanks to God for his initiating work, and don't miss this, church.
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He's acknowledging all throughout this prayer that God is the initiator. David knew that in prayer, he wasn't showing up to start something with God.
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David knew he was sitting down before God and taking a pause to connect his life into the flow of history that God has already been doing.
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He's connecting himself to a broad and wide and long river that stretches way, way, way, way, way back beyond our conception, beyond our thoughts, all the way back to the very conference in the
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Trinity to determine, let's create. Let's create. That's way back there.
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In this sense, when I talk with God about someone struggling with cancer or a family wrestling with a wayward son or whatever request might come across my desk in my prayer journal throughout the week,
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I must show up in prayer. We must show up in prayer with a humility that acknowledges we're late on the scene.
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We showed up late already. There's already so much going on. There's already so much that God is doing, and God has already been doing all of the things.
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I let him know my preferences while respecting the things he has been doing and planning all along.
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I get swept up into God. I get swept up into the things that he has been doing in the past.
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The more that I rehearse the past, the more I'm ready to let him be God. The more that I rehearse his goodness, his kindness, what do you think the two -thirds of the
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Old Testament are for? Why is two -thirds of this book old stories about God working in human lives?
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It's fuel for our faith. It's fuel to see how he works with sinners just like us, jacked up people just like us, and he is faithful and faithful and faithful time and time again, amen?
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Shows his good heart towards his people, faithfulness to be patient with us.
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We look at the Old Testament, and people, it blows my mind. Anybody who ever says to you, the God of the Old Testament looks wrathful and vengeful and impatient and unkind, and I go, have you read the
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Old Testament? Nobody who's a student of the Old Testament would say that, waiting for 400 years for the sins of the
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Amorites to be filled up, saying, I'm just going to give him more time, Abraham. It's going to take him a while, and I'm going to keep giving him chances.
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Patience and patience and patience. His patience with David. Just take that as an example here in this text, looking back at the way that God was patient with him.
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David here says, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be the one who you forge your Messiah and this eternal king through.
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When we pray, we're talking to the holy, almighty, all -knowing creator.
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It is wise to acknowledge his great faithfulness, to acknowledge his immense love and goodness, his steadfast love to his people and covenant, and it is wise to praise him for what he has already been doing.
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And then lastly, in verses 25 through 29, we find something that might annoy us. It might be annoying the way that David prays here.
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It might actually get under our skin a little bit, because now, what David does to conclude his prayer is to ask
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God, are you ready for it? To ask God to fulfill what he already promised.
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To ask God to do what God already told him he was going to do, and you go, wait a minute.
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What in the world? Why would David waste the time to pray and ask God to fulfill something he already said he was going to do?
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Is this a lack of faith? Alec Mottyer says this in his commentary on this passage. He says, prayer pleads for the promises.
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Prayer pleads for the promises of God to be fulfilled. Every week, every week,
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I pray and ask God to not allow his word preached to return void. It's biblical language that means that there's a promise in the
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Old Testament that says that when his word goes out, it will not return void. It will accomplish what it was set out to do.
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Why in the world would I pray like that? It's in the word. It's a promise. But I pray every week that his word goes out with power and has an impact to change and transform us.
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That's what preaching is meant to do. Preaching is not meant to fill your heads with knowledge. It's meant to motivate.
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It's meant to move. It's meant to be fuel for the spirit to transform our lives. In this context, to pray rightly, to follow the model and the example of prayer, and to lean more in humility and acknowledging that God is already at work.
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Why would I pray for something that God promises already in his word? Am I wasting my time praying like that on Sunday mornings?
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No, I'm tying my trust in faith that God is faithful to keep his promises.
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I'm in relationship with him. I'm sitting down with him. I'm letting him know that I trust him to work it out.
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That it's not dependent on my oratory skills or my rhetoric or the passion in my voice or the fervor or the intellect or the content that I've written down on my manuscript that I'm reading to you right now.
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Trust isn't placed in that. My trust is in the God who is faithful to his word.
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That's the hope. David asks for God to do as he has spoken at the end of verse 25.
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He trusts God and asks him to bring what he has promised to pass. And David acknowledges that when
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God keeps his promise, his name will be magnified forever.
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And David offers, interestingly, in verse 26, he offers a verifiably fulfilled prophecy.
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He says, people in the future are going to praise you if you do this. If you make an eternal king through my line down through the ages, people are going to praise you for what you have promised to me and what you fulfill.
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So if you bring this about and you bring forth this Messiah, you bring forth this forever king, people are going to sing his praises forever.
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And we do. We do that in our gathering. We sing frequently here about the faithfulness of God to his promise to King David.
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Specifically, we sing lines in songs like just last week we sang, he was the root of David and the lamb who died to ransom the slave.
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We sang that in a song last week. Why are we singing like that? We're fulfilling verse 26 in our gathering, praising
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God for his fulfillment and his finishing. This very promise that we're reading about way back in 2
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Samuel chapter 7. David continues to confirm the promises of God in verse 27, and he says it's on the basis of this promise that David has been so bold to ask for an eternal throne.
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He says, I've never come to you, God, and say, please establish me eternally. You've said it, so now
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I'm leaning into it. Now I'm trusting you for it. And in verses 28 through 29 here at the end, we see a great miniature of the big picture of what
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David was doing in this entire prayer. If you have zoned out and missed almost everything that I've said this morning, tune in for just a minute, and you're going to get the whole thing encapsulated real quick here in verses 28 and 29.
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And you're like, you mean I didn't have to pay attention? I could have just waited until now? Thank you for hanging with me. But here it is.
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This is what David says in these last two verses to summarize his prayer that is just powerful. I'd encourage you to write these four points down.
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You are God. Your words are always true. You promised, so I trust you to do it.
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Model for prayer. You're God. Your words are always true. You made these promises.
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I am trusting you to fulfill them. What we have in this text this morning,
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I'm being honest, you guys, it makes no worldly sense. Without faith, it makes absolutely zero sense that we would talk like this to an invisible room.
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Think about it. He told God what God has done and what
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God has promised. He thanked God for what he has already done and promised, and he asked God to do what he has promised.
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Strange prayer? A little bit strange. Why did he do all this?
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Here's the fundamental thing, church. You need to grasp from this text, he is a man in relationship with the
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Almighty God. He talks with God about stuff, all kinds of stuff.
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He is humble enough to know that God has a big old plan that God is working on, and he is glad to know something
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God is going to do. So David's is a life that is saturated in God's past work.
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You can see it in the way that he prays, in the things that he says in his Psalms. He references the work of God in the
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Exodus, the work of God to bring about his people, and he has obviously a good handle on the past work of God among his people, and that places him in glad trust in God's continued present and future faithfulness.
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In a commentary that I read this week, anybody ever read a book that's co -authored and you just are desperate to know which one said it?
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So it's a little bit annoying, I have to give them both credit. One of them likely wrote it, but Heath Thomas and J .D.
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Greer said this in the commentary that they co -authored on this passage, on 2 Samuel.
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They said this, I love this, take this on, write it down, jot it down in a journal and meditate on it and think about it.
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The fire to do in the Christian life comes only from being soaked in the fuel of what he has done.
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How are you, you say, Don, I got no passion, I got no fire, I got no will, I got no fight against sin, I got nothing in my life that right now seems to be clicking between me and God.
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Are you rehearsing his past faithfulness? Are you looking into his word to see more and more how he rolls and how much he has loved you and how much he spent for you?
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That's where the fire comes from, getting soaked in the fuel of the past,
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God's past faithfulness. How many of you could just, probably it would do you good to spend a little bit of time sometime this week rehearsing
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God's goodness in your life? I think that's gonna provide some fuel for you and obviously that's limited.
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Where the real fuel comes from, where the real saturation comes from, where the real igniter fluid of our lives comes from is in the word, seeing his revealed way of working in human history.
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And how many of you have ever just seen like patterns that he has in the Old Testament in your own life? You read the Old Testament, you see the way that he worked with people and you're like, that's kind of like me.
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I could see how he has been faithful to me in the same way that he is faithful to them. We are tempted to ask, by the way, why pray if God already knows the future?
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It's a common question that I get surrounding prayer and do I really even need to rehearse things with him or can
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I just kind of say, God, you know, okay, we're good? Can I start the day that way? You know, you know what I'm thinking, you know what
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I'm feeling, all right. But that reveals our misunderstanding of the relational aspect of prayer that God calls us to.
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We communicate longings in our prayers. We communicate with the Almighty God in our prayers.
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And he asks us to communicate with him. Think about it. The Almighty wants you to talk to him. We keep talking, church.
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We keep talking to those we love. I'm not going to say I talked to you on our wedding day, like I'll get back to you if I need anything.
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Don't try that. That's not good. We talk to those that we love. We interact with them. We're in relationship with those we love.
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We are told to pray for plenty of things we know that are going to happen. We are even told to pray at the very end of the whole book in the book of Revelation.
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We are told to pray this prayer that some of you are going to go, why would I ever pray that? Because God told you to. Come Lord Jesus is a prayer that the church is supposed to pray.
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Even so, come Lord Jesus. How many of you know that he's coming? Not dependent on your prayer.
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Why in the world does he want us to pray like that? Because it's a longing of our hearts. I remember when my kids were little, when they were just little, and I'd be like,
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I always, I'd come into their bedroom and I would howl like the great wolf. And I would howl louder as the day approached that we were going to the great wolf lodge.
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How many of you know, how many of you ever been there and know what I'm talking about? You know what I'm talking about? So I would howl like a wolf and the kids would be like, ooh, that's a loud howl.
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It's getting louder. And I'd be like, yeah, we're going, we're going. It's coming up. And they would ask me, how close is the wolf, dad?
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How close is the wolf? Now they knew we were going. When I started howling, they knew where we were going, they knew what was going on.
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But how many of you know that there was something about that anticipation that gave me joy when they asked the question, how close is the wolf, dad?
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Could we go this weekend, dad? Is it going to be this Friday? When's it going to be?
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And how many of you know that our father in heaven is delighted when we say, could you send Jesus soon?
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Could it be today? Would you be willing to roll this all up and fix it? Because it's getting hard.
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How many of you know God delights in His children pleading for His promises? He delights in that.
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He loves it when we talk to Him. We're in an ongoing relationship with God, and we show
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Him we're eager for the future that He has promised by praying. The application here is pretty clear -cut in this text.
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Pretty straightforward. I don't think you need a whole lot of imagination to know what we ought to do with it. I encourage you to sit down with God and talk to Him.
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Maybe for some of you, this is a new thing. You might need some spiritual counsel. You might need some spiritual direction.
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I would love it if somebody here who's struggling with prayer would set up a time to meet with me and say,
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Don, I need to know how to pray. I want help to learn how to pray. Sit down with Him.
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Talk to Him. Rehearse with Him His past works. Give Him thanks for the things He has done, and tie your life into the promises that He has given.
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Now, interestingly, I put this into practice this morning. I actually prayed this way. I prayed this way for the church, and I thought about the past.
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I went way back. I went way back to the very works of Christ, and I started there in the things that He did in coming to earth, and in big, broad, sweeping brushstrokes, thanking
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Him for the way that He did that. But then I got more specific in my prayers, and I got back to God giving me classes in my undergraduate studies that I never knew
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I was going to be using this week. I took classes on how to preach when I was planning on being a missionary, but I needed them to graduate, so I was like,
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Okay, this is the only class that fits in here, so I'm taking homiletics. I'm taking hermeneutics, how to study the Bible, how to do word studies, how to really dig in to the ...
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No idea that I was going to be using that day in and day out. Thanking God for the way that He worked in the past, thanking
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Him for the team that God put together of five couples who came out here to Matawan to start a church.
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We met in a basement. We were 14 adults the first Sunday, meeting in a basement in Trestle Creek.
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I rehearsed all of those things, and I began to thank God for those things, not just saying, You did these things.
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I did that at the beginning, and then I kind of bled over into, Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. Thank you for your work.
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All of this leading up to a request that God would be faithful to allow His word to go forward to impact us this morning, that God would be faithful in these baptisms that we're going to experience here in just a little bit, to just give them strength but also testify of His great glory in saving them.
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Do you know what I was ready to do by the end of that prayer time this morning? I was ready for God to do whatever
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He wants to do. Rehearsing the past of His faithfulness set me free from clinging to the ends that I want.
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Do you get it? By rehearsing His faithfulness and saying, God, I see all the ways that you've been faithful.
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You've been on our side. You've been on our side, faithful to come. How can
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I not trust Him in the present and trust Him with the future after rehearsing His great and glorious faithfulness in my past?
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Do you see how that works? Powerful. It was one of the most powerful prayer times I've had in the morning on Sundays, but just following this.
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And this isn't magic. This is not a silver bullet, oh, if you just do this this way, you're going to just be like, oh, I'm on fire or whatever.
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But I'm realizing, and I'm growing into prayer, and I'm realizing that the big fundamental thing in prayer is to trust
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God. The big fundamental thing, the best outcome of a time in prayer is to leave it saying,
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I'm okay with you doing whatever you want to do. Not my will, but yours be done, because I know that you have a bigger plan than mine.
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You're better than me. You're gooder than me, much, much, much gooder than me.
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His grammar is much gooder than mine. I would encourage this model even now in closing moments of this prayer service, worship service, we come to communion, and I encourage you to start off in a moment of prayer, acknowledge that Jesus Christ died on the cross, shed his own blood for your specific sins, maybe even name some of those that he has washed away.
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Thank him for the sacrifice that has brought you into salvation, and then ask him to come and fix the world.
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He's promised to, but if it is truly a desire of your heart to have this world completely under the rule and reign of our
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King Jesus, then tell him, let him know you are longing for the return of your
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King. Let me just say that I may be speaking to a handful of us here, if Jesus Christ is not your
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Lord and Savior, and maybe you just came in to check things out this morning, maybe you came to support somebody who's going to be baptized,
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I don't know, your context or whatever might have led you here this morning, and you're like, I don't really know
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Jesus that well. I'm not going to call you out, other than to ask you to skip communion and just take in this song, communion is not for you, communion is a remembrance for those who belong to Jesus Christ.
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But if you're not all in with him, I would like to ask you a sincere and honest question that I want you to wrestle through in your own mind, and that's, why not?
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Why are you not embracing and being embraced by the love of God in Christ?
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I encourage you to take a bold step this morning and let me know if that defines you right now when you're seeking and you're searching, take a bold step to let me know that you're not sure about Jesus.
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We could set up a time, we could set up a text thread, we could set up an email conversation to discuss these things more,
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I would love that. But let's close our time in prayer, let's pray, and let's keep praying.
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This closing prayer is by no means the end, but let's pray now and let's keep praying throughout the week.
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Father, we thank you that you have been at work, continue to do your work, and we come even now at the end of this service as we do every service to remember, what a central thing to just remember.
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We couldn't pay for our own sins, we don't have enough blood in our veins to spill to cover our sins, we don't have enough lives to give to you.
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And so you sent forth your perfect and sinless Son to redeem us.
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He who is eternal had eternal life to give. He who is sinless could pay the penalty for ours.
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So we rejoice in that and we pray that you would guide us deeper into prayer, deeper into trusting you, deeper into relationship, that you would push out any of the murky questions about why spend time doing this, don't you know everything already, and to lean into relationship.
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We love you and we recognize your love for us, but Father, I pray that you would guide us in this week to be a people of prayer, in Jesus' name, amen.