As we grow in our relationship with Christ, one of the things that is vital in understanding
the communication between us and the Lord is prayer.
Prayer has been talked about for centuries, and there's so many different aspects to prayer.
The perspective I'm going to take here with us right now is that prayer is about communicating
your heart with God, it's listening to God, it's having a relationship with God of intimacy.
Prayer is intimacy.
But I'm going to take a decidedly different perspective maybe than most in that I'm going
to say that prayer is asking and receiving.
So prayer is just not about just having a close relationship with God, as important
as that can be, communication with God, but it's also asking God to move.
It's asking God for things in your life that you need and then receiving them in your life
through faith.
But let's just start kind of with a working definition of prayer.
I think prayer is asking and receiving.
Prayer is about intimacy with the Lord.
Prayer is about you sharing your heart with God and God actually sharing his heart with us.
I believe that in most cases, God communicates his heart to us through this book, the Bible.
We've talked about the Bible because this is where his promises are.
This is where his commands are.
This is where the stories are of great men and women of God and how God met them in dire
situations.
It's a testimony of stories.
It's letters written to us in the middle of the Bible as the Psalms of worship, called
the Psalter.
But prayer is our communication back to God.
God mainly speaks through the scriptures.
Yes, he does give visions and dreams and that may be new for some of you, but if you're
increasingly open to different ways that God speaks and if you're spending time reading
God's word, we see that through the centuries, but especially even in the Bible, God spoke
through visions and dreams.
And when we go all the way from the beginning with the first five book of Moses all the
way to Revelation, God is speaking in visions and dreams.
But the main way, the main way God speaks to us is through the Bible.
The prayer becomes our dialogue with God.
That's where we share our heart with him.
And that is so key to a vital, dynamic, growing, intimate relationship.
So when I got married some 37 years ago to Liz, I learned to listen to Liz's heart and
she's learned to listen to my heart and we communicate.
And the reason we're still together after 37 years and seven kids and five grandchildren
later is because we know how to communicate with each other.
And sometimes that communication is stunted.
Sometimes it's more free than other times.
Well, it's different, but it's the same with God in that I love Liz.
I'm passionate about my relationship with Liz, but I love God now.
I have Jesus in my heart and I'm going after him and I have to communicate with the Lord.
And the way that God has given us to communicate is through prayer.
And Jesus, the kingdom of God revolutionary model that we have Jesus, spent so much time
in prayer.
When you go through Luke, the book of Luke especially, I call it kind of the zigzag life
of Christ of the private and the public and the public and the private in his life, which
would be a great study for you to do sometime is just go through the gospel of Luke in two
or three settings, reading, reading, reading, and then put a, put a P for prayer.
Every time you see a reference to Christ going to a lonely place, going into the desert,
or literally where it says he was praying, put a P there and you'll be surprised how
many little Ps are all through the gospel of Luke.
Luke seemed to be the most insightful into the private life of Jesus of the four gospels.
And so Jesus being the son of God, having all the power of the universe and the power
of the kingdom flowing through him, both fully man and fully God, yet he felt like he constantly
needed to go into prayer.
He constantly needed to seek what God was telling him to do.
And so he said in one place, I can only.
I do what I see the father doing.
So Jesus was looking at and listening for
and talking to his father, his heavenly father,
saying, Lord, what do you have for me today?
What are you calling me to?
And so becoming a Christian
is about a love relationship with Jesus,
just as Jesus had a love relationship with his father.
This is so key in growing in our faith
is to understand how to do that.
So I said earlier that I believe that prayer
is about asking and receiving.
Now this comes from Jesus.
Jesus says, ask, and it will be given to you.
Seek, and you will find.
Knock, and the door shall be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives.
He who seeks finds, and him who knocks, it will be opened.
So prayer is asking, seeking, knocking.
And as you're growing in your faith,
you're gonna find again and again
that God's gonna put you in circumstances
and situations where you don't know what to do.
You're not clear about what to do.
You're not sure about what God wants you to do,
and you're gonna have to cry out to him.
And so prayer is asking from God.
A lot of times it's asking for wisdom.
Sometimes it's even asking for financial needs in our life.
I can recall so many times as a missionary
where Liz and I were up against a wall financially,
and we didn't have the finances for language school,
or we didn't have the finances for a flight,
or we didn't have the finances
for taking the Jesus film into some islands
in the South China Sea.
I can tell you so many stories.
And then we came back to the United States
and went to graduate school,
came and planted a church here in Colorado Springs.
And again, there were times
where we just didn't have what we needed
in material or finances.
We had a large family, a lot of kids.
And one vivid story that's appropriate
is that we live out in the country.
We still live out in the country,
same house from since 1998.
And our septic tank went out.
We were tight on finances.
We found out it was gonna cost us $5,100
to fix the septic tank.
And so Liz and I would take walks,
and I would cry out to God.
And this was kind of what my prayer was.
Lord, look, I've been tithing.
If you don't know what tithing is,
we'll talk about that another time.
But tithing is giving 10% of your income to the Lord.
And I said, look, Lord, I've been tithing for 30 years.
And I need a little bit of cash back right now.
I've been putting in a lot of deposits,
but I'm gonna need to draw my account.
And so I asked the Lord for $5,100 that I did not have.
And three days later, there was a knock at our door,
and one of our neighbors in the neighborhood said,
I felt like God told me to give you,
it's kind of an odd number,
but I was told by God to give you this check.
And we opened up the envelope and it was $5,100.
And so God does the supernatural when we ask,
when we seek him, when we call out to him.
Jesus also says, let your light so shine before men
that they may see your good works
and glorify your Father in heaven.
So one of the ways that I think
that our light shines in the world is through prayer,
through talking, asking God, first off.
And we know the story of a widow who was in trouble,
and she went to a judge and she told the judge
about the situation and she knocked on his door
and he wouldn't answer and he wouldn't answer,
but she kept knocking and she kept asking him
to bring her justice.
And finally he did.
And Jesus concludes the parable by saying,
aren't I more loving than him?
Even the unjust judge did what she asked
because of her persistence.
So there's something about persistence in prayer
of constantly shining our light in different situations.
So I'm challenging you to grow in prayer.
And what I would encourage you to do,
if you have a journal, take a journal,
maybe even have a prayer journal
that's different than maybe your personal journal,
but in that prayer journal, write down what you need.
Now you'll do like I do, from time to time
I put more of my wants than my needs.
There's a difference between a want and a need.
What do you actually need God, from God, to do in your life?
Beginning with your own character,
changes that he can bring into your life,
and start writing those down.
And then make a commitment to every day
praying for those things that you need.
And I'm telling you, watch out.
God's going to show up in so many miraculous ways
by you asking for what you need and then for God
to show up in a mighty and powerful way
to answer those prayers.
That's what prayer's about.
And I want you to grow in prayer.
You grow in prayer and there'll be no obstacle.
There'll be no wall.
There'll be no obstruction to your faith
because you'll be an overcomer.
You'll be more than an overcomer.
You'll be more than a conqueror through prayer.
So prayer is key in growing as a kingdom revolutionary.
When I left a church that I had planted
and pastored for 20 years, I was hurt.
I felt betrayed.
I felt broken.
And during that time, it began a thing called prayer walking.
So I began to get up early every morning.
And sometimes I'd do it twice a day in the evening, too.
Put on my shoes, and I would just
walk and walk and walk for miles on end,
praying to God, seeking God to change my heart,
to transform me through this very, very difficult time.
And for the next four years, I don't
think I hardly missed a day as I prayer walked.
But it was through those prayers,
seeking forgiveness, wanting to give that forgiveness
away to be unloaded from the burdens
that I carried that God began to work.
Simultaneously, beginning to pray, what's the next step?
Or what are you calling us to?
We went into 40 days of prayer.
And then God began to speak about the church, the road
at Chapel Hills, and a new church
that He was going to plant through Liz and I.
And that's what's happened.
And that's now eight years removed.
To see what God did is amazing.
And so I want to challenge you.
There's areas of your life, too, where you struggle.
There's areas of your life, it might be with your job.
It might be in a marriage.
It might be with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
It might be through an addiction that you're struggling with.
Or some issue, or maybe many issues in your life,
I want to challenge you, go to the Lord in prayer.
For me, prayer walking was key.
Sometimes getting away on a personal time
alone in the mountains.
We live in Colorado, so love to go to the mountains.
But to really ask God for what you need, watch what He'll do.
It'll be amazing.
It's the key to miracles in your life, is learning to pray,
learning to cry out to God for what you need.