1 Thessalonians

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.