Good morning everyone. I’ve never been a pastor who has suggested that, in order to be a good Christian, that you had to vote for a Republican or for a Democrat. The truth is, I’ve known tremendous people on both sides of the aisle politically and, fortunately, I’ve never seen political parties ever be the way that God chooses to delineate between believers in him. Having said that, our nation has experienced attacks that are unprecedented this week, from its own people, on the nation’s own capital. Four people lost their lives and countless people were injured. May those who have committed these heinous acts be brought to justice. May we be united as God’s people more than we are united around any political party, and may God guide us in uniting around the things of his heart and the things of his kingdom.
I’m so glad you’re here with us this morning. My name is Neil Schori, and I’m one of the pastors here at The Edge. I’m really excited to get to help kick off this brand new sermon series that we’re going to jump into today, and it’s called The Blueprint: Spiritual Disciplines for a God-Filled Life. Throughout scripture we see a number of practices that God’s people have practiced in order to more fully experience God’s presence in their lives.
I want to be really clear about something: there’s nothing that we can do to make God give us more favor. The truth is, and it’s beautiful, that God’s favor is free to us. It’s the grace that we receive when we turn from our sin and turn to Jesus.
What we are talking about are the practices that God’s people have done in order to align themselves with God and what he is actively doing in the world. It takes intentionality to form relationships with our friends and family, so we shouldn’t be at all surprised that it takes that same intention, that same discipline, for us to be in relationship with the Lord. Jesus is real, and it’s his desire to be in relationship with us. And those aren’t just hopeful thoughts. It’s evidenced by the action of God himself. Jesus, who the Bible describes as God the Son, came to earth as a human, he was fully human and fully God at the same time, and he lived a perfect life, and he died for us to show us a new way to live.
So, today we’re going to start with one of the foundational pieces of any relationship. Any relationship that we have has to have communication or, in terms of communication with God, we obviously call that prayer. Prayer is two-way communication with God, who is the creator of all things.
I want to be very specific in saying that, for Christians, God is not some impersonal force, but he’s the deepest of personal love. God is not just a random term for what we happen to believe, as our faith is informed by what the scriptures tell us, that in the beginning was God. He is real and he came to earth personally for us as Jesus. And he’s involved in our lives today. He’s an active presence in our lives today, by the way of the Holy Spirit.
Before Jesus died on the cross and returned to God the father, he explained this whole concept to his followers. John 16:7, it says:
7 But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you (NIV).
God did not leave us alone. We’re told in the Bible that he never will, and that gives me such a great comfort in my life — to know how closely we are cared for by this incredible God who loves us so much. So for today, my goal is not to give you just a boring lesson on prayer, because if you’re at all like me, it means that you’re not motivated just by information. I need stories that push me towards divine transformation.
It struck me this week that, to be motivated to pray more heartfelt prayers, it would be good to look at people who actually communicated with Jesus in the Gospels in a way that impressed Jesus. Not in the sense of impressive language or a great vocabulary, but prayers that were close to God’s own heart, which he tells us every single time, that he will answer. 1 John 5:14-15, it says:
14 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us — whatever we ask — we know that we have what we asked of him (NIV).
That’s an exciting promise, isn’t it? But in order to claim the promise of this, we need to look closely at prayers that move the heart of God right from the pages of the Bible. So today, we’re going to look at three situations where Jesus himself was impressed.
The first is in Luke 18:9-14, and it’s a parable. But before you just quickly dismiss it as a made-up story, know that it was a strong message to the audience that Jesus had, and it really served to flip their narratives upside-down about how God works and about human nature. And it starts here, it says:
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
It continues, it says:
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
Jesus continues, he says:
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (NIV).
What Jesus said should be as shocking to us, just like it was as shocking to the Pharisees who, by the way, the Pharisees, they were well-respected religious leaders of Jesus’ time. They lived lives that most of us, you and I, would look at and say, “Those are good people.” Yet, Jesus said that the one who is actually good wasn’t the Pharisee in the story but it was the one who looked the worst. And it wasn’t because he was actually good. It was because he recognized that he needed mercy from God.
Why? Because he knew that he was someone who would be considered wrong, that he was doing the wrong things. He was bad.
The driving sin of the Pharisee in this story was self-righteousness, and it’s this idea that he had that he was good enough on his own, by his own efforts, and that his own efforts were good enough to actually please God, and that by his own virtue, he was better than other people. But we always need to turn that back around to us, don’t we?
When we act with self-righteousness, we are, in essence, showing a contempt for the grace of God because we feel that we already have it together. We don’t need anything from God and we don’t need anything from anyone else when we think so highly of ourselves. So self righteousness makes us think too highly of ourselves and too little of others. The apostle Paul echoes all of the writers of the New Testament in Ephesians 2:8-9 when he wrote this, he said:
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — 9 not by works, so that no one can boast (NIV).
Now listen, we need to do good things, but recognize that your good things don’t gain you any extra favor from God. Your favor with God is only a gift. It is nothing that you can earn. In light of that, we get this great model of how we might pray very effective prayers in 2021, and, by the way this year is starting guys, we need to be able to pray effective prayers, don’t we? We get this great model, and it’s not from the religious man who lived a good life. No, it was from the guy that we’d look at in the story and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So it teaches us to always have a humble estimation of ourselves and always to lift up the name of God. Exalt God, asking him for mercy for all of the days of our lives.
One tip that I’ve learned, in keeping the right mindset and praying effective prayers, is, before you jump onto social media in the morning, or honestly do most anything else, maybe aside from grabbing a cup of coffee, fill your mind with the words of God before you do any of those things. The truth is, we need God’s perspective about him, about ourselves and certainly about other people before we jump into the melee that we will almost always see and experience on social media, which will just feed our tendency to condemn others and to self-promote.
If you don’t have a Bible reading plan for the year, this is a great time to do it. If you would like one, I’ve got a great one that I just started just this week and it’s on the YouVersion app. So get the YouVersion app if you don’t have it, and I’m doing the plan called The One-Year Chronological Bible. It’s a great start so far.
So if you want to impress Jesus with your prayers, resist your tendency to be prideful and self-righteous, and humbly just ask God for the mercy that you need in your life from him every single day.
The second story we’re going to look at today is probably the most surprising because, in it, Jesus is actually said to be amazed. If what you say to God actually shocks God, it’s certainly worthy of us taking time to study it, as we consider our own prayer lives. And we read the story in Matthew 8:5-10. It says:
5 When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6 “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”
7 Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”
8 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
10 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith (NIV).
So what does it mean for us to have faith in God? The word faith is thrown around so casually these days. To put it really simply, it just means to trust God. According to Hebrews 11:1-2, the author defines what faith looks like, and it says this:
11 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for (NIV).
Throughout human history, God has raised up people who have hearts that were ready to say yes to his direction in faith, for this preferred future, not understanding all of the steps or not seeing the path the whole way through, but knowing that they were getting on a journey where God’s promises would be fully realized in their lives. One of my favorite examples is the life of Abraham. This man, who was a pagan, who lived in what would be modern-day Iraq, who God would call to be the original father of the faith. Abraham’s story is incredible, and here’s just a little piece of it. Hebrews 11, 8-12, it says:
8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11 And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12 And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore (NIV).
In the same way that Abraham was commended for his faith, Jesus commended because he was amazed by the faith of this Roman soldier — a soldier who would have been looked at by other Jews as an enemy of the Jews. He would have been looked at as an outsider, not welcomed to the table, yet he had heard enough about this Jesus that he had faith to ask him to come and to heal his servant and when Jesus started to go, the soldier said, “I don’t deserve to have you even come into my house but I know that if you just say the word, my servant will be healed.”
Somehow, this man had the trust in Jesus to believe that Jesus, with just his word, had command over sickness and death. Just one word from his mouth, this centurion believed, was all he needed for his servant to be healed. If only we would trust him the way the soldier did, what would he do in our lives? If you want to impress Jesus, choose to trust him, and if you’re having a hard time trusting him because life is so crazy, I’m pretty sure that life is always going to be crazy in one way or another. If you’re having a difficult time putting your faith in him, ask him to fan the flame of the tiny bit of trust that you can muster up, and I promise you this — he will make your faith grow.
Here’s the final example that we’ll look at today of prayers of people who impressed Jesus, and this is the story of a particular thief on a cross next to Jesus, as they were all being crucified. Luke 23:32-33, it says:
32 Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him [Jesus] to be executed. 33 When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals — one on his right, the other on his left.
Jump ahead to verse 39, we’ll go to verse 43. It says:
39 One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”
40 But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? 41 We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
43 Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (NIV).
This story inspires an absolute deep awe inside of me because with it I realize yet again that Jesus is far more eager to love me — he is far more eager to love you — than he is to punish us because, in his dying moments, Jesus looked at a criminal with eyes filled with compassion and a desire to save, and in the criminals dying moments, this criminal didn’t taunt Jesus. He simply asked Jesus to remember him, and Jesus said “Today, this very day, you will be with me in paradise.”
This story tells us something really important — that Jesus loves repentant prayers. And those can look different from one story in the Bible to another, and that means that they look different from one life to another — from your life to my life.
A little over 20 years ago, right about this time of year, I had just had my first encounter — that I knew of, that I could perceive — with God, and I didn’t really know what to do with it. All I knew is that my life had to change. I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do or what that change looked like, but I was invited to church with a few of my friends and I heard the gospel for the first time that I truly understood it and connected with it, and I knew this time was different because something came to life in me. I was exhilarated. I felt an excitement that I’d never felt before, and I knew, I knew that day that I had crossed from death to life. It was my repentant prayer, when I said, “God, I’m saying no to my old way and I’m saying yes to Jesus.” Jesus loves those kinds of prayers and he will always accept you fully.
Maybe today, you’re hearing this message and you know that you’ve never asked Jesus to remember you. Well, he wants you to, and all you have to do is ask him just like the thief on the cross. He will change you powerfully, and actually the Bible tells us that the angels and heaven will celebrate. Luke 15:8-10, tells us all about that. Maybe it’s hard for you to believe that God loves you so much that he celebrates when you turn to him, but this is what scripture says. It says:
8 “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ 10 In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (NIV).
I would love it if you would let me know, if I would be able to help you cross over that bridge of faith, and we’ll celebrate with the angels that are celebrating your choice in heaven.
We love to give you questions to consider after our sermon, so here are a couple for you today. The first one is the same one we do almost every week.
What is your own takeaway from this message today? What is your main takeaway? What is God’s speaking to you?
What kind of prayer that we talked about today do you feel the most led to pray — one that’s characterized most by a fresh sense of humility, or maybe a prayer of renewed faith or a prayer of repentance? Make it personal. Why does that kind of prayer stand out to you in 2021?
And what would a sermon on prayer be worth if we didn’t actually practice it? Next Wednesday, we want to fill 24 hours — all 24 hours of the day next Wednesday the 13th — with prayer. We’re going to do a Facebook post about this very soon, and here’s what we’d like you to do. We want you to comment on that post when you see it and share which hour in the comment section that you’re willing to take. Listen, we’re not worried if all 24 hours don’t get filled. This isn’t some legalistic way to drive people to pray. No, this is an opportunity for us to pursue God together and be encouraged when we see other people doing it. So sign up. We’re going to encourage you, we’re going to ask you to pray for four different areas.
The first one is for the healing of our country.
Our country is at this boiling point and we need God’s intervention.
The second thing we’re going to ask you to pray for is the end of COVID-19.
Ask God to just heal us, heal this land.
The third thing is that we’re going to pray that God would help our church, The Edge Church, become all that it’s supposed to be this year.
And the last thing is any personal prayer requests that you have, any concerns on your hearts or for your friends or for your family.
And finally, we’re going to look a little bit farther down the road, but on May 6th, put this on your calendar, save the date right now. As we’re going to have an opportunity to participate with other Aurora churches in our national day of prayer.
God bless you. We’ll see you next week.