WWUTT 2460 Q&A How to Pray, What to Pray, Why Pray

Prayer as the Answer to Cultural Anxiety

What is up with the cracker barrel fiasco that happened this week? Why should we pray even when it feels like it's not working? And how do we pray when we don't know what to pray for? Always a good reminder when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the word. Be sure to tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky.

You're welcome.

Psalm 143 and the Question of How to Pray

Psalm 143. Hear my prayer, O Lord. Give ear to my pleas for mercy. In your faithfulness, answer me in your righteousness. Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.

For the enemy has pursued my soul. He has crushed my life to the ground. He has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore, my spirit faints within me. My heart within me is appalled. I remember the days of old.

I meditate on all that you have done. I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you. My soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Selah. I did not have a psalm planned for when we opened up the program, but just right before we hopped on the mics, I opened up my small little ESV New Testament that I'm using here, which also has Psalms and Proverbs in it, and it just fell right open to Psalm 143, and I was like, that's it.

Yeah.

That's what we're starting with. We've got a question on the program today, which we're gonna get to in a moment, that's about prayer.

Okay.

And it's intriguing. This question is coming on behalf of somebody else and saying, how do I encourage my friend to pray? And I'll let Michael ask his question in a moment instead of me just kind of building up what he's going to ask here.

Yeah.

But we'll talk about prayer here in just a little bit. I just got done preaching on prayer. Well, preaching, teaching on prayer with my students at the Christian school that I teach at. So our first two lessons this school year were how to read your Bible and how to pray.

We just took a test on it.

Yeah.

So they got done with their test yesterday.

Awesome.

Every time we do a test, I make the students memorize a passage of scripture. What they had to memorize was the Lord's prayer. So they had Matthew 9, sorry, Matthew 6, 9 through 13 was what they had to memorize.

I gave out that part of the test first. So they have to write out the whole Lord's prayer.

Okay.

Then they give that back to me and then I give them the rest of the test, which they can use their notes to do. So if they've been taking good notes, then they should be able to answer those questions pretty easily.

So I was looking over the Lord's prayer and I was touched that the vast majority of them got it.

Awesome.

And it wasn't just that they wrote the Lord's prayer down on a paper, they had to write each petition. So the first petition of the Lord's prayer is this. The second petition is this. So we're gonna look at that too, because this is the model for prayer, kind of the blueprint for prayer that Jesus gave us.

Many of the major catechisms cover it. Luther's catechism does. I believe the Heidelberg catechism, also the Baptist catechism, Westminster confession, shorter catechism. We'll go through the Lord's prayer and look at the different parts of it that we may learn how to pray.

What are we asking God for whenever we pray? What sorts of things should be in our prayers? What should the attitude of our hearts be? So we'll look at that here in just a little bit.

All good things that we tend to forget.

Yeah, how often do you think about what you're praying? Do we give much mindfulness to the words that are actually coming out of our mouths when we pray? Because so much of our prayers, the vast majority of our prayers are probably routine.

Right.

Praying for your meal.

Yes.

Praying at bedtime when the kids are going down, you know.

And when the kids pray, I noticed that it sounds more like a Christmas wishlist or something, you know, like I can ask the genie for these three things, kind of thing. And I'm like, yeah.

That's where our three-year-old is.

Yeah.

I wanna go to the ostrich farm tomorrow. I wanna go to the pool tomorrow. But I will say like, it's very touching how much he always wants to pray for Omi and Opa.

Oh yeah.

And Papa and Amama.

And great-grandpa.

And great-grandpa.

Yes.

So that he won't be lonely.

Yes.

You know, he'll pray those things.

And then people feel better that he'll remember at the end of the day that somebody wasn't feeling well.

And he'll pray for them.

Yeah, he will.

I remember when Mariah was pretty close to his age, I think, maybe a little older, four or five. And she would pray like, I want everybody in the world to feel better.

She still prays like that.

Yes.

I think we even made a joke about that on the podcast once and said, hey, if you guys are feeling pretty good today, our daughter prayed for you last night, that you would be feeling better.

Every time.

The Lord loves to hear our prayers. He loves to answer our prayers. And so we'll be coming back to that, considering prayer here in just a moment. This is the Friday edition of the broadcast when you can submit your questions to us and we'll do our best to try to answer them.

Yes.

The email address is whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com or you can go to our website, www .tt .com, click on the voicemail tab and send us a voicemail. And that's what I have to play here in just a moment.

First, to give you just a brief update on the surgery situation for our three-year-old, nothing's really changed since last week. I made the comment last week, since you weren't on with me last week, I did say that our insurance wasn't gonna cover it.

So we're gonna have to look for alternative means. It's still not left to us to have to pay everything out of pocket. There are some other things that we can look at.

Praise the Lord.

Yeah, praise God. But we thank you for our prayers and for those who have given a donation that is very meaningful to us.

Yes.

Some of you have also donated to our church because we have a building project coming up in the future. We're going to be looking at building a building. I haven't pushed that a whole lot because we're still working on the land deal.

Certain aspects of this project have to be accomplished before we move on to the next phase, as has been the case with any kind of building project. So yeah, like I said, I haven't pushed the money thing that much, but some of y 'all have given a donation.

We were able to do something with the building that we've been in ever since we got here. So same building that we've had since we moved almost two years ago. Do you realize this weekend is two years since we came in view of a call?

Two?

Yeah, two years.

It feels like so much more.

This is 2025.

Yeah.

And it was the Labor Day weekend of 2023 that we came.

How crazy is that?

It was only two years.

Only two years.

That's so weird.

Personally, when I look at what I wanted to have accomplished in a year and where we are, I don't feel like I've gotten as far as I wanted to.

Oh yeah.

I can say as a pastor, I wish I was a little further along.

Don't we all?

Yeah.

It's good to set goals.

It's the Lord's timing.

Exactly.

In everything.

Let it be your will and not mine be done.

Amen.

Yeah.

But anyway, what was I saying before that? Oh yeah, with the building project.

Yes.

So with the building we have, we have finally decided just to knock out a wall and expand the sanctuary.

Instead of finding a space at the moment, temporary space.

Right.

Before we move into the new building.

Which we've been on a lookout for, for over a year. Have been looking for another space that we can meet in.

Yeah.

If you follow us on Facebook, if you follow the church's account on Facebook, you might remember that I posted a video in June of last year, saying we have finally outgrown this space. We need to be finding something else.

Yeah.

And we did have a proposal, which we gave to the congregation. Basically everybody in the church said, no matter what we do, I'm still gonna come. But I'm not crazy about it.

Right.

Like the proposal that we gave.

Right.

Which was at a, we were gonna be meeting at a different location. It was not gonna be on Sunday morning. And so we as elders just decided, nobody's really excited about this. Why don't we wait and see what else we can get?

I had conversations with several other churches. We have had, this is just wild. I had conversations with three other churches that have buildings, two to three times larger than the one that we have, that they're not even using from 10 o 'clock to noon on a Sunday morning.

And they won't let us use it.

Yeah.

Now on the one hand, I mean, I can kind of understand the hesitation.

It sounded like all of them were burned by something. You know, like something went wrong.

Yeah.

Like really wrong apparently, but nobody talks about it.

Especially with like the stories that have come out in the last year of guys like J .D. Greer or David Platt that moved into another church and kind of took it over. So I can understand why a church would kind of have a feeling of, okay, what are you gonna do here?

Right.

Are your members gonna, and our church is bigger than the ones that we were looking at wanting to.

Temporarily.

Yeah, temporarily. Be there and worship there.

Right.

While we're building our building. Can we just have a larger space? We can rent out from you guys. I wasn't asking for it for free.

No.

We'll pay. But anyway, it was the Lord's will to close the door on that.

Definitely.

And there were at least one situation and at least one situation where a church told us no. A couple of months went by and I was looking at some of the things that church was doing and I was going, you know, probably best that we did.

That didn't work out. So God and his providence knew better than we did. Yes, definitely. Because we have had those conversations and everything has fallen through and everything else that I've looked at was either too expensive or too inconvenient, just nothing.

Everything was closed doors.

Yes.

A door after door kept closing.

Yeah.

So finally we just said.

Which is fine, we only need one.

That's right. That's right. We have a long-term plan. We have a good long-term plan. We just can't find a short-term plan.

Right.

So we finally just said, hey, why don't we just go ahead and knock these walls out? Let's just do it. Yes, we're gonna lose the classroom space, but we gain more in the sanctuary and then maybe we can get a modular or something outside and try to expand the classroom space that way.

So we did knock out a wall. We got that done. This coming Sunday, we've got a little bit more extra space. We can add at least a dozen chairs or something like that. To get more people in there. My office is a little bit smaller now, but that's fine.

I didn't need as big a space as I had anyway.

It was being used as a classroom.

It was.

My office was being used as a classroom. So I just sit at my desk in the corner anyway. What do I need a big room for? And so we thank you for helping us with that and encouraging us along the way, even in some of the ministry needs that we've had in our church.

Pray for space. That's still an ongoing prayer need for us. And the building project that we have, although it's probably two or three years from being completed, but pray that those things would move along rapidly and doors are opening there in the right order.

Right.

Which they need to open for us to complete this project also. So anyway, that's the update on the surgery. We're moving along there. Don't have another date planned. Still needing to raise funds for that.

But then as I said, I've got another means to be able to help us out, even though our insurance won't cover it.

And the update on the

Update on the building.

You kind of smushed those two together.

I did.

I just kind of went from one to the next. That's the way my sermons go too. I'll give you an outline, but you catch my transition because I'm not going to tell you when I went to the next point. Thank you to everybody who's listening to the Roman series on Sunday.

And thank you so much for your donations.

Yes.

We really, really appreciate it.

As I've said, everything means a lot. A little means a lot to us. So even when somebody sent a PayPal donation and said, hey, buy yourself a pizza, that means a lot.

Yes.

You wanted to buy us food. That is, it's always touching to me every time I see something like that. Oh babe, I wanted to mention this too before we go on to the questions. So there was, I attended an ordination panel last week.

I was on the ordination panel for somebody who was being approved for pastor at one of the churches within our association. And as members of that church were coming in to sit in on the ordination panel, there was a gal that came up to me and said she was praying for Bubba because of the surgery coming up.

And she said she missed you because you weren't on the podcast, which would have been the day before.

Oh.

So this was Saturday was the ordination panel. That podcast episode dropped on Friday and you weren't on last week. So she did have to say, hey, tell Becky we missed her.

Oh, well thanks.

It was my decision to give Becky the week off.

It was.

Because she, you were having a bad headache.

Yeah, probably.

Migraine was what you were having last week.

I think so. I think that was the day that it was really struggle.

Yeah.

You probably would have toughed it out if I said, hey, let's go record.

I would have, yep. I think by then it was starting to subside.

Okay.

If I remember right.

Well, good, then you can fall asleep faster.

Yeah.

No, wait, Thursday was when I was sick.

Thursday, so it was something else.

Yeah, and then that weekend I had the migraine.

Then the weekend was a migraine.

Right, right, right.

So it was the pre-migraine.

Yes, yes.

The pre-migraine bug that you had.

Yeah, it was, this, it's been a week.

Oh, speaking of having been just a crazy week.

Yeah.

Cracker Barrel.

Oh my goodness. You're gonna open up that can of worms.

Man, just in the span of the last few days. You had this major announcement of this massive rebrand of Cracker Barrel.

Huge overhaul.

There was a huge outcry against it from the people who actually eat at Cracker Barrel.

I mean, did they not like put out feelers of how this would go over?

No, no. In fact, there was a member on the board of Cracker Barrel that when the CEO was talking about this rebrand and how they were gonna redo all the stores and the logo was gonna change and all this stuff, he wrote like 140 page thing on like, here's why this is going to fail.

Oh, wow.

And the rest of the board.

That was dedication.

Yeah, the rest of the board wrote him off as, well, he's a Trump supporter, so he's just a radical.

Oh my goodness.

And everything that he warned was going to happen.

Lo and behold.

Is what happened.

Oh my goodness.

I know you had made this comment about like, wasn't all of this just so they could get everybody's attention and now Cracker Barrel's on.

I mean, Cracker Barrel is just one of those things that you think of like, I don't know, as you drive by, it's not something that you're like, hey, I think it's a great idea tonight to go to Cracker Barrel, you know what I mean?

Like, it's always on the back burner.

It's a quiet country restaurant sort of a thing. They don't quite pop like any of the other restaurants around, yeah.

Right, and so I thought that it was just a gimmick, like so we can rile people up and get them passionate about Cracker Barrel again, but apparently it was not a fake thing.

It bombed so bad.

Oh, so bad.

That even if this was like a PR stunt, there's no way that they can recover. There's no way they can pull back.

That is so sad.

The money that they lost in their stock from this announcement. I mean, it was a massive backlash. Now I regularly eat at Cracker Barrel. So you're hearing from a regular Cracker Barrel customer. When you're listening to this podcast, I'm probably eating at Cracker Barrel right now.

That's probably true.

Every other Friday morning, me and a friend of mine, we get together and we encourage one another. We'll read a theology book together and then we'll talk about what we've read and encourage one another in our family life and stuff like that.

We meet at Cracker Barrel. That's our meeting spot. As long as I've been a pastor, I've been a pastor of three churches now. If you've been with us since the beginning of when we understand the text, you've been with us through Kansas, Texas, and now Arizona.

Yes.

And in every one of those towns that I lived in, no matter how small the town might've been, Lindale was only 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 people or something like that.

Something like that, yeah.

Much larger with Tyler right next door.

Yes.

But every town we lived in had a Cracker Barrel. So that became my primary meeting spot. It was my default meeting spot. Sometimes we would go to a Chick-fil-A or something like that, because we've also had a Chick-fil-A in almost every town, not in Junction City, but there was one in Manhattan, which was just 20 miles away.

So I might meet there too. But Cracker Barrel was kind of the default place. You can go and sit and have a good conversation, eat your food as slow as you wanted to.

Yeah, and they don't rush you.

Right.

They don't try to clean up some of the places they even get out their cleaning supplies and they're almost like cleaning your table while you're still sitting there.

Passive aggressively trying to get you out of there.

You know what I'm saying?

I mean, I've sat at Cracker Barrel long enough that the waitress has changed.

Yeah.

And we're like, oh, I'm sorry, we're still here. They're like, no, no, keep on going. I get the last gal's tip, you know.

That's true.

That's a joke. They'll split it between the waitresses. But, and I try to be a good tipper. You know, the waitresses know me over there. It's

But anyway.

It's my place to go and eat.

Yes.

You're hearing from a regular Cracker Barrel customer, not just somebody who is chiming in on this because it was what hit the news cycle in the past week.

Right.

So this was obviously absurd to me to see all of this happening transparently. I wanted to do a thing where we were gonna open up and I was gonna go, guys, major announcement to make, we're boycotting Cracker Barrel.

Right.

I'm not eating there anymore. Oh, wait, another major announcement to make. I've changed my mind.

Just kidding.

Yeah, just kidding. They've gone back, so I'm going back.

So a question for clarification, because I have not heard. They're not just going back to the, I can't say original, but the

Uncle Herschel logo.

Right.

Okay, thank you. The Cracker and the Barrel are still on the logo.

So are they revamping the inside without the antiques?

That I don't know.

Okay, that hasn't been said.

But I mean, they need a major overhaul in the entire ideology of the company.

Oh my goodness.

Because in the last several years, they become very pro-LGBTQ. They've incorporated DEI standards. They have pushed out all the stuff that I loved about Cracker Barrel. Michael W. Smith and Stephen Curtis Chapman CDs.

On the CD rack.

I remember you getting some of those.

Man.

Like every Christmas.

I ate them up.

Looking forward to that.

I'm not a country music guy, because that's mostly what's, it's either gospel music or country music.

Yeah.

But when a country, a Christian artist that I like did an album that would be commissioned by Cracker Barrel, it would be a Cracker Barrel exclusive release.

Yeah.

And I would get it.

Every time.

It was a down home American values kind of establishment. And since America has at its roots, Protestant Christianity, there would also be elements of Christianity throughout Cracker Barrel. But they've pushed all of that out and have tried to pull the world in, which regular Cracker Barrel customers don't want.

Right.

So it needs to be more than just preserving the logo or the aesthetic of Cracker Barrel. They need an entire ideology overhaul.

Yeah.

And so

Well, it doesn't sound like they're getting very much feedback from their customers.

Oh, they're getting lots of feedback from their customers.

No, I meant like before they make changes.

Oh yeah.

They're not looking for the feedback. That's what you meant.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I get it.

They're not seeking it out.

Right.

But you know, for a lot of us, the way that it would go with just about any kind of establishment, if Cracker Barrel were to change that much and we who like a good ham and egg sort of a meal would just find another place to go eat it.

Yeah.

It's like, okay, well, Cracker Barrel's not gonna be the place anymore.

I mean, why didn't they just change, like sell their brand or their restaurant to different, name it something else?

Yeah, right.

If they're gonna go through that much

It's just a whole new restaurant at that point.

Yeah.

And still call it Cracker. And when you're changing that much Just change the name.

Just change the whole thing.

Cause it's obviously not what we've come to know as Cracker Barrel anymore. Anyway, there are other bigger things for us to talk about, but that just hit my head when you were talking about what a week it's been.

It's like, oh yeah.

It's been a week.

We've had all the Cracker Barrel news in there too. But those of you all listen to the podcast, you're used to us being all over the place.

Yes.

Holiness, Cultural Drift, and the Church's Calling

One of the things to mention with regards to this, so what sort of like Christian worldview application can we make to this? The whole thing with wokeness and DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

You're used to hearing about the warnings of cultural Marxism. We've talked about it here on this broadcast as well. The inherent racism that exists in critical race theory and intersectionality, the way that it's made inroads into the church.

There's even racial divisions that have happened in the church as a result of this. All of these things are still very, very prevalent in our culture.

Yes.

Just because the more conservative president, I won't call him conservative because he's not, but just because the more conservative president won this past November, doesn't mean that all this stuff went away.

Right.

And at the end of his term, if the next conservative guy doesn't win and the liberal guy or gal ends up winning the next time and comes back in, we just go back to all the stuff that was going on before.

I see it getting worse even.

Right.

Like much worse than what it was before this president.

Yeah.

What we need in our churches is holiness.

Amen.

We can lament what goes on in the culture, but the church needs to be holy. It needs to be set apart. If we need any image change, it's that the church needs to get back to the gospel, to biblically centered preaching and to calling out Christians to be holy.

Without holiness, no one will see God as said in the book of Hebrews or as Peter says in 1 Peter 1, be holy because God is holy. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.

We have to pursue holiness, Christ likeness, growing in godliness, resisting sin, walking in those ways that Christ has called us to walk in, being a prayerful people, being somebody who calls out sin, our brother or sister that we see walking in a path that is contrary to God's commandments, that we admonish, which means to rebuke with goodwill and call them back to the path of righteousness.

Holiness is not just something that we do by ourselves, but as the church, we're looking out for each other. A verse that you often reference, Romans 15 one, we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves, but to please our neighbor for his good to build him up.

And so this is what we need to be committed to, no matter what happens in the culture, the responsibility of the church hasn't changed. Commitment to the gospel and that all of us as the saints of God would be sanctified, being made more into the image of Christ, growing in holiness and holding fast to those promises that we've been given in Christ Jesus until that day, that we will be with him forever in glory.

Yes.

Now, something that we need to be doing also, all the way up until that day, that we join Christ in glory is praying. We need to pray.