The Power At Work Within Us
Notes
Transcript
Lead off with communion
MEN’S BREAKFAST TOPIC FOR THIS COMING SATURDAY, the 8TH, IS GOING TO BE TITUS 1:7-9. (Read it and be ready to discuss this passage together as men!) The breakfast will be this Saturday, 8:00 am, at the Shoney’s here in Crossville!
Pick someone out of the audience and ask them the question, “If I told you that I had the map to the single greatest storehouse of treasure in the world, more gold and silver and precious jewels than has ever been seen by the eyes of men and I was going to give it to you, with the understanding that it would take some daily dedication on your part to find it and then still more work to open and gain access into the vault, would you be interested in this? Would you accept it as a gift, knowing the inexpressible value at hand, or would say, ‘No thank you’ and walk away?”
Pick someone else out and ask them, “If I told you that I could grant you access to a place, a secret place, and that once you were in that place, you would gain access to the single greatest source of power that the world has ever known. It would be at your disposal 24/7 and you could literally wield that power and walk this earth operating in total power, to where you were untouchable and unstoppable by any other force, would you want that?”
This morning, I want to go back and revisit a message that I gave back in January of this year, which was entitled, “Persistence In Prayer”. In that message, I started off by speaking of our getting out of our comfort zones and removing from our lives the mindset of having a “plan B” to fall back on. This “plan B” mentality keeps us comfortable not wanting to step out in faith and move into places where we normally would not want to go. It makes always comfortable with the “status quo” and never pushing forward to anything new and uncharted; that is, until something pushes us out of the comfort zone and removes the “plan B” option. Kind of like the “pulling the rug out from under you” sort of scenario!
This morning, I want to go back and revisit a message that I gave back in January of this year, which was entitled, “Persistence In Prayer”. In that message, I started off by speaking of our getting out of our comfort zones and removing from our lives the mindset of having a “plan B” to fall back on. This “plan B” mentality keeps us comfortable not wanting to step out in faith and move into places where we normally would not want to go. It makes always comfortable with the “status quo” and never pushing forward to anything new and uncharted; that is, until something pushes us out of the comfort zone and removes the “plan B” option. Kind of like the “pulling the rug out from under you” sort of scenario!
We are going to revisit the prayer life of the “believer” today. This is one of those topics that there is no end to how many messages a preacher could preach about this on.
There can’t be enough emphasis placed upon the prayer life of a true believer in Jesus the Christ. There are never going to be enough sermons and teachings given on this subject, to hit the mark and get us there, because if we’re there, then that means that we’ve been called home and we are with the Lord and we will no longer be praying to Him, but we will be in His eternal presence for all time!
But until the appointed time comes that Yahweh, Himself, call us off of this earth, or until Jesus comes back to claim His bride and we are raptured off of this earth, we are NEVER (everybody say, “NEVER”), never going to be where we need to be in our prayer life!
I don’t care if you are the absolute most seasoned veteran in the faith and your prayer life is a grueling 12 hours per day spent in intense, hardcore prayer to the Lord, you are NOT THERE yet, because your payer life is your direct access to the Father and to the power that He gives to change lives and alter the course of events in this world!
And as long as we are still operating out these vessels that we call our bodies, our living temples of the Almighty, then the urgency for our prayers is always going to be at the critical level!
We are always going to be at DEFCON 1, when it comes to the need for our prayers!
Show me someone who says that they’re at the place in their life, where prayer is no longer the critical part of their walk with the Lord God, and I will show you someone who doesn’t truly know the Lord God at all!
Listen to some of these quotes prayer and about the necessity for prayer in the life of a Christian.
“If you only pray when you’re in trouble, you’re in trouble.”
“Prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world.” E.M Bounds
“No man is greater than his prayer life.” Leonard Ravenhill
“Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.” Corrie Ten Boom
“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” CS Lewis
And of course, one of my personal favorites, from Corrie Ten Boom, is, “Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?”
Prayer, in and of itself, is simply, our talking with God. It’s not some difficult and seemingly impossible task, that we undertake as soon as we become a Christian. And yet that is how it’s perceived by many, many people. Your faith and your time in prayer, are inextricably linked together. Show me a person who is moving mountains in their life and who is seeing great and mighty signs and wonders happening all around them, and I will show you a person who is ferocious within their prayer life to the Lord God almighty!
Prayer, in and of itself, is simply, our talking with God. It’s not some difficult and seemingly impossible task, that we undertake as soon as we become a Christian. And yet that is how it’s perceived by many, many people. Your faith and your time in prayer, are inextricably linked together. Show me a person who is moving mountains in their life and who is seeing great and mighty signs and wonders happening all around them, and I will show you a person who is ferocious within their prayer life to the Lord God almighty!
Jesus taught us a simple model of how to pray to the Father, a guide, a framework with which we could learn of how to come before God, as He did, and then develop our own, intimate way of speaking to the Lord.
In Matthew 6: 9-13, we find the very familiar passage that we call the Lord’s Prayer, that many of us know by heart.
“Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.
‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’
And we know that Jesus showed us this prayer, not as a mantra, or as some rehearsed liturgy that we recite to the Lord God and call that our time in talking with our Heavenly Father.
This was given as an example, a framework, an outline to help someone know what areas to cover when they approached the Lord in prayer.
Jesus stated during His sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, that our prayers were NOT to be vein, repetitious mantras that we throw up to God and then expect Him to count that as talking with Him and thereby do everything that we need or want in our lives!
Jesus taught us that our prayer lives are to be intimate, quiet times with the Lord, where we go and shut ourselves in with God in our “prayer closets”, or as the movie coined the phrase, in our “war rooms” with God!
He said that we are not to position ourselves in such a way as to look for, or try to receive public recognition from others, when we are praying.
As I have mentioned before, when I was growing up, I would witness these men conversing together before the church services started and talking just like I am now. BUT, when they would be asked to come up to the lectern and pray, it was like they were quoting from Shakespearean play, with these long, elaborate and highly old English prayers! (DEMONSTRATE)
Jesus, through the use of His parabolic style of teaching, also showed us that our prayer lives were to be continual and persistent, not wavering and infrequent!
He showed this in Luke 11, with the parable of the man going to his neighbor’s house in the middle of the night, looking for some food to feed his unexpected guests that had just arrived.
Jesus said, “But I tell you this—though he won’t do it for friendship’s sake, if you keep knocking long enough, he will get up and give you whatever you need because of your shameless persistence.”
And then of course, this pairs up well with His quote from Matthew 7:7-8, where He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”
And then in Luke 18, Jesus taught the very familiar parable of the persistent widow who kept going before the judge for justice on her behalf, until the wicked judge finally yielded, just to shut her up.
Jesus’ point was that if an unjust judge, who doesn’t love the other person and who doesn’t fear God, will do what is right and requested of him by someone, because they are persistent and continual in their asking, then how much more, will the Lord God, who does love us, want to bring forth justice to us in whatever is going on in our lives?
And Jesus ends that parable with the question, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find FAITH on the earth?”
The point of Jesus’ question was simply saying that unless we are persistent and continual and passionate about our prayer time with God, our faith will become non-existent!
God, unlike the unjust judge, loves you and I and He wants us to come to Him and talk with Him and ask Him for help in our situations. BUT, God moves by our faith in Him, not our words alone!
As I said a few minutes ago, our prayer and our faith are inextricably linked together!
Your level of faith will determine your power in prayer and your time in prayer will build your level of faith!
Jesus also modeled and demonstrated for us perfectly, what a prayer life with the Father is supposed to look like, as He would get up early in the mornings and go off by Himself and spend lot’s of time talking with His Father.
In fact, His decisions and everything that He said and did during His time here on earth, was determined by what God told Him to do, as He said, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does. I don’t speak on my own authority. The Father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to say it. I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.”
Even when Jesus was deciding about who He was going to call to be His disciples, He stayed up all night praying to the Father and asking Him about this matter, as we read of in Luke 6:12.
I find it amazing that Jesus spent a whole night in choosing for Himself, the friends that He was going to spend His prime time with on a daily basis, because He wanted to know the Father’s will on this matter, and yet many people change relationships and spouses without ever consulting the will of God on such an intimate detail of their lives!
So, our prayer lives work when they are intimate and personal with God, when we are continual and never ceasing in bringing our needs before Him and when we are seeking God’s will for our lives, right?
Isn’t that basically what we have just learned by looking at Jesus and how He lived His perfect life here on earth and by the way that He taught us through His Word?
Right, so, in saying that, I want to look at another point about our prayer lives and why our prayers are either effective, or ineffective when we take them before God.
Let me start off by quoting to you the beginning of a very familiar passage found within the Word of God and see if everyone recognizes this passage. The passage that I am speaking of, starts off by saying to us, “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think...”
Let me start off by quoting to you the beginning of a very familiar passage found within the Word of God and see if everyone recognizes this passage. The passage that I am speaking of, starts off by saying to us, “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think...”
Does everyone, or most everyone recognize this passage? Hands up, if you recognize this scripture passage? (And please, don’t feel embarrassed if you aren’t familiar with this passage. One of the reasons for coming to church to become more familiar with and learn more about the Word of God, amen.)
OK, so now that you have expressed your recognition of this passage, let me ask you another question. (And please, no one look at their Bibles or look it up on their phones please.) Can anyone finish that passage for me. Just raise your hands if you know the rest of it. Hands up if you don’t know the rest of it.
As amazing and exhorting as the opening of this passage is, it’s the ending of it, that really tells us something about our prayer life.
Let me read the entire passage for you now. It is found in Ephesians 3:20 and it says,
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
I love how Paul uses the adverbs to describe the action of our asking God for something here in this passage.
As I saw another pastor point out in his message about this scripture, where he said that this passage is beautiful without the descriptive terms added in. If it just read, “Now to Him who is able to do all that we ask or think”, it would be amazing, right?
I mean isn’t that comforting and assuring to know that your God is able to do for you all that you can ask or think of?!
But then begin adding back in to the passage the adverbs that Paul is inspired to place in this verse and it becomes mind boggling.
“Now to Him who is able to do above all that we ask or think”
“Now to Him who is able to do abundantly above all that we ask or think”
“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think”
Our God and His grace and mercy are beyond what we know to ask Him for and His power for us in our lives is vastly greater in its provisional abilities than any human could EVER comprehend, or even think to ask of!
For this reason, Paul mentioned earlier in this same chapter about the unsearchable riches of Christ and then he stops and prays for the church the prayer that contains our passage today. Paul prays this prayer for the believers in his time in Ephesians 3:14-21,
For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—
to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
God’s amazing love for you and I is so much greater than what we can understand, or comprehend and because of this great love for us, He will bless us with gifts and abilities and provisions that far exceed what we can bring to Him in our prayers.
“ACCORDING TO THE POWER THAT WORKS WITHIN US!”
What is the “power that works within us”? I gave two scenarios at the beginning of my message: one was of my giving a map to someone that would lead to the greatest treasure and wealth that could be imagined and then the scenario of giving someone access to the greatest source of power imaginable. Both of these are a “type” of the prayer life of a believer. It is through your prayer that you gain access to the single greatest treasure of all time, THE LORD GOD and it is also within your prayer life, that you gain access to the single greatest source of power for your life, which again, is the Lord God!
What is the “power that works within us”? I gave two scenarios at the beginning of my message: one was of my giving a map to someone that would lead to the greatest treasure and wealth that could be imagined and then the scenario of giving someone access to the greatest source of power imaginable. Both of these are a “type” of the prayer life of a believer. It is through your prayer that you gain access to the single greatest treasure of all time, THE LORD GOD and it is also within your prayer life, that you gain access to the single greatest source of power for your life, which again, is the Lord God!
But Paul says this treasure and this life altering source of power, which is our prayer life, takes place according to the power that works in us!
In other words, there is a power already active in us, that make our prayers stronger and more effective when we pray them and this power is in proportion to how God answers us!
How many of you feel like your prayer life is endued with POWER?
How many of you are struggling in the area of prayer right now and you would honestly say that POWER is the furthest thing from how you would describe your prayers and your prayer life!
Whether you raised your hand or didn’t, if that is you right now, you’re not alone.
Studies show that many of those who are in the church of America, struggle with their prayer life and many become discouraged due to nothing happening and simply stop praying at all!
So, what is this power that Paul speaks of, that is directly related to how God answers our prayers?
Well, let me take you back to what Jesus told the disciples before He ascended back to Heaven, as recorded by Luke, in the book of Acts 1:8, He said to them,
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Holy Spirit...........He is the power that works within us!
The Holy Spirit of almighty God is available for the believer at all times and His power that is active within us is unlimited and yet, it’s restricted by how we interact with Him!
So, our prayer life and how effective it is, can be a direct reflection of our relationship with Holy Spirit in our lives!
Are you quenching Holy Spirit in your life and causing Him to grow quiet and with little to no effective prayers stemming from this weakened relationship?
Do you look for and listen for Holy Spirit when you are studying the Bible, if in fact you are STUDYING the Bible?!
And are you spending time with God in prayer, quality time and then praying throughout the day, praying without ceasing as Paul says, because this is time invested in your relationship with Holy Spirit and it is within our prayers that Holy Spirit makes intercession and begins to petition for us and on our behalf, as Paul said in Romans 8.
“According to the power that works within us”, is another way of saying “according to how active Holy Spirit is within your life”!
How you handle that relationship determines how effective your prayers may be!
Now God is omniscient and knows the beginning from the end and in times of desperation, even when you have no real relationship with Holy Spirit, God could answer a prayer, so as to bring you into a closer position to Him and His Spirit.
But as a general rule, Holy Spirit active and leading in your life is the power working inside of you that makes your prayer life so powerful.
It is a symbiotic relationship, you pray to God in faith and sincerity and read and study God’s living Word and then Holy Spirit becomes more active and more empowered in your life and through your prayers!
Mention of making the sourdough and of how the leaven is like Holy Spirit. The Word and my prayer life is like adding the flour and water to the leaven and keeping it active and strong. Then, when I am ready to use it to make bread (a.k.a. when I need the leaven), I take a small measure of it out and add it to the dough and it begins to grow and create my bread!
There is a lot more to say about the power of Holy Spirit within us and active within our prayer life and I believe that I will speak more on that next week, but for today, let me petition each one of you to begin growing in your prayer life with the Lord! Become purposeful and deliberate and timely with your prayer time. (I just bought a spiral bound notebook, to start documenting the people that I am to pray for and also specific areas that I need the Lord to move on my behalf in!)
There is a lot more to say about the power of Holy Spirit within us and active within our prayer life and I believe that I will speak more on that next week, but for today, let me petition each one of you to begin growing in your prayer life with the Lord! Become purposeful and deliberate and timely with your prayer time. (I just bought a spiral bound notebook, to start documenting the people that I am to pray for and also specific areas that I need the Lord to move on my behalf in!)
Do not stop praying......do not stop praying...........do not stop praying.........DO NOT STOP PRAYING, because God answers according to His will and for the time in which that answer is really needed!
Mention Robert Morris and his story of the woman who had prayed for 42 years for the salvation of her husband and of the man who witnessed to her husband the die that he died.
Jonathan Cahn is asking for national prayer and repentance on September 26.
