Prayer

Good morning. My name is Adrian. I'm one of the pastors here. Thank you for being here today in the house or on the live stream. Your true battle is that our sermon series, part of our sermon series in the book of Ephesians, and we've been in Ephesians for the better part of this year. So I thought I'll do a little quick recap before we go on with what we're talking about today.

So the book of Ephesians, we got Paul. He's in a jail cell in Rome and writes to the church in Ephesus. He shares to them the blessings of our salvation. He goes on to talk about this life led in the spirit, and he really emphasizes this new unity that the church has, the church, the followers of Christ have between Gentile and Jew. And so now there we're this big family of people, and he goes on to describe how what it looks like to live that out. Live a life following after Jesus in community.

And then we get to what we've been talking about for the last few weeks. Paul warns them about oncoming attacks from the enemy, the devil. We spent the past six weeks learning about defending against those attacks and thought we'd read that whole passage. Starting in Ephesians chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Ephesians and chapter 6. If you have a phone or a tablet, you have your Bible on, you can swipe and tap and whatever you do to make that happen or tell it. Siri, hey Siri, open the Bible. Did that work? And everybody's phones. My watch said something. All right.

Here we go. Ephesians chapter 6 verse 10 says, "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground. And after you have done everything to stand, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God."

We're gonna pause there. Six pieces of soldier gear that enable us to stand firm. And today we have one final part of this armor of God section, which we've come to know it as. And Paul so far has been describing things in our battle with evil forces, and he's using pieces of armor that he can see from his Roman guard outside of his prison cell. But what's interesting is this thing we're talking about today, there's no armor. It doesn't have anything to do with any of the gear.

Verse 18, it says, "And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people. Pray also for me that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly as I should." Today we're gonna be talking about prayer. I thought, probably should, let's start with some prayer. Will you pray with me?

Father, thank you for today and for your Word. God, may you prepare our hearts open, our hearts and our minds and our ears to hear what you have for us today. God, I pray for your peace and your strength, for your anointing, Lord, to speak the words you have for us today. In Jesus' name, amen.

We're talking about prayer. You can take out your message notes if you grabbed those on your way in. There's just a few fill-ins, lots of space for all the amazing notes you're gonna want to take. This is gonna be so good. Or very empty. At the bottom of the notes, I listed a book on there. It's called Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools by Tyler Staton or Staton. He's a pastor up in Portland and just true confession. I was like, "I gotta read, I'm gonna read some stuff on prayer." And I saw the book cover and I'm like, "That looks cool. That's why I bought it." I don't know, I didn't know anything about it and then I read it and I'm like, "Oh, this is very good."

So I put that on there because one, the book is very good. Two, prayer is a very huge subject. There are so many verses about prayer, even just from Paul, that we're not gonna talk about today. There's things about prayer that you might have questions about that we're not gonna cover. We're gonna focus on what I believe God has us in this passage. But if you want to grow in prayer, you might just have some questions. I encourage you, pick up a book. This book, we had some in the bookstore. They're all gone. We'll have some more next week or other books on prayer. But just so you know, there's a lot that we could talk about. I don't have time for all of that today. But this is great. I would recommend this book.

Elizabeth, our other worship pastor is on sabbatical right now. Right before she went, I said, "I told her I read this book. You should read it." Then I ran into her a few days later. She's like, "That's a good book. I told you." Alright, prayer. I don't know about you, but I've noticed there is this negativity in the air about prayer. It's actually, it's not about prayer itself. Like, there's a negativity about like, "You shouldn't pray necessarily." But there is this thing where it's like, "Prayers don't mean anything." And in some cases, prayer, you know, saying you're gonna pray is just a cop-out from doing anything.

There are some memes I found. If you don't know what a meme is, it's a picture with words. I don't know how to describe memes. Anyways, this person's actually a comic, but this is kind of give you an idea of what people are feeling. So up here, we have this guy. He's drowning. He's like, "Help!" And the guy's like, "Oh no, that's terrible. My thoughts and prayers are with you." And then we go, and he's like, he's still drowning, but I think he's getting closer. He goes, "But!" And he goes, "Thoughts!" And then here we have a life preserver. His hand is like 10 inches away. "Prayers!" And he dies, I'm assuming. Thoughts and prayers.

The next one, I named my cats thoughts and prayers because they're useless. This is both anti-prayer and anti-cat. So we got both here. This next one's a little more balanced, I think. If you don't know what this picture is from Lord of the Rings, we're just imagining this is a zero, okay? He goes, "This is the number of people helped by thoughts and prayers, but what I like is a little self-awareness. Also, the number of people who have been helped by memes mocking thoughts and prayers." He's like, "This is not helping, nor is what I'm doing helping." The final one's a little harder to look at. Excellent news, the first truckload of your thoughts and prayers has just arrived.

Listen, I get it. People are frustrated. Maybe you're frustrated, right? Because listen, there are people out there who might say something like thoughts and prayers or, "I'm gonna pray for you," because they don't want to do anything, and they don't even pray. But you want to know something? These memes and what's in the air and hearing more and more about like your prayers don't mean anything. That's useless. Do something. You know what that is? Those are flaming arrows from the enemy to our minds and our souls. They are whispers from the devil that are telling you and me your prayers don't matter. But what I want to tell you today when I feel like God is telling us today is that your prayers do matter. Prayer matters.

Today we're gonna look at three ways prayer matters. The first is this, prayer matters to God. I'm gonna look at the first part of this passage that says, "And pray in the Spirit." Pray in the Spirit. What was Paul saying there? You know, when we place our faith in Jesus, the Bible tells us when we get saved, when we believe that he died and he rose from the dead, place our trust in that. The Bible tells us the Spirit comes to dwell inside of us. He fills us with the Holy Spirit. And then he goes on to say that the Spirit empowers us to live the life God has called us to. All the things the Bible says, like you should do this and this, the Bible says that the Spirit living within us empowers us to do that, including prayer.

In Ephesians chapter 2, if you go back in this book, Paul even tells the Ephesians, it is through the Spirit that you can even approach God. Through the Spirit we can pray. There's another aspect that I want to focus on of the Spirit. It's that he, the Spirit, reminds us of our intimacy with God. And when we're reminded of that, that helps change our posture when we pray. Because so many of us, we pray to God like he's this distant, you know, Zeus-like king in the clouds and we're sending, like our prayers, our letters that we just, like, please open my letter, you know, that's how we kind of treat God. We're like, we just send them out, you know. Some people are like, I'm just sending out a prayer to why I don't even know. And that's kind of how we treat it. A lot of us do.

But the Spirit reminds us, the Spirit, praying in the Spirit, is praying with the reminder of who God is and who you are. In Romans 8, I would say the most quintessential chapter in the Bible about life in the Spirit. Paul talks about all this and later he says this, "For those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God. You received God's Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him Abba, father." Jesus reminded his disciples of this same thing. They saw Jesus go off to pray all the time and Jesus is pretty cool and they're like, Jesus, teach us how to pray. How should we pray? And I don't know if you remember, but then he tells them, pray like this and he says a prayer called the Lord's Prayer.

Tell me, do you know the first two words of the Lord's Prayer? What are they? The first thing he tells his disciples is to remember who God is and who they are. Prayers matter to God because he is your father. He is your dad. So when you pray, you're not praying to some distant king, you are praying to your dad. Now I want to push pause for a second because there's people in this room, people listening, who you're just like me and you don't have a great relationship with your dad. Or you don't even know your dad. And when you're in church and we're talking about, you know, think about a dad, you're like, I don't know what that means or I don't want to think of it that way. The first thing I want to say is, I'm sorry. But what I do want to tell you is that God is the perfect parent. He is a good father. He's faithful. He'll never leave or forsake you. So we pray to him as our father.

You know, at the end of the day, usually at the dinner table, you know, sit together with our family and my wife Jamie's here, Penelope's here, my 9.9-year-old, almost 10, and Ella is 12. We're sitting around the dinner table a lot of times and I'll ask a question like, how was your day? Or how was school? Give me a highlight. Give me a low light. Just anything to get anything, you know, like whatever I have to say to get something out of them. But what I'm really saying when I ask those questions to my kids is this, I want to know you. What I want is I want you to share with me what's going on in your life. And I want you to know that I'm here for you.

A lot of times I'll get, you know, one or two word answers. Fine. Yes. No. I don't know. What? But occasionally, I will hear how my daughters like are maturing, how they're figuring out life in this world. You know, sometimes I'll hear about a crush or I'll hear about like the kid who's just so annoying or what. But let me tell you, those little morsels of intimate information are like sweet treats to my soul. Prayer matters to God because he is a dad who wants to hear from you. When we send up our prayers, they are those morsels, those sought after words of a child that a dad wants to hear.

Prayer also matters to God because when we pray, our relationship with God grows. We're in a relationship with God and he wants that relationship to grow. And when we pray, that's what happens. Because like in any relationship, the more you spend time with each other and talk to each other, the more you will grow close to each other. Paul says, "On all occasions with all kinds of prayer, prayers and requests." This means all the time about everything. He wants to take time. God wants to take the time to hear about all of it. Your complaints, your struggles, your joys, and your requests. He wants to hear it all.

A few years ago, Jamie and I were going through a rough patch. Our kids were younger and we were like not on the same page and we kept feeling misunderstood or underappreciated. And we got to get ahead of this. We went to marriage counseling because we're like, "We got to nip it in the bud. I'm going to work on our marriage." And so we got child care set up for our kids once a week for a couple hours. My in-laws who are here, they're like, "We'll watch your kids." And got that set up, carved out time. We have time from our work and then we went. So we're ready. Like however long this takes, a year, two years, I don't care. We're going to do it.

So we went to counseling and went through a few sessions. And by the third session, he looked at us like, "This is over." I was like, "What?" He goes, "Yeah, you don't have to come here anymore. You need to just talk to each other, okay? Just go hang out and talk." We're like, "Oh, got it. Okay." So we kept the child care things, Grammy and pop. And we had this time set out and we're like, "Okay, how about this? That time we have carved, instead of going to this place, let's go somewhere, get coffee and let's talk." That was seven years ago.

And we've missed a handful because of traveling or whatever, but it's like in the calendar and nothing, it has to happen. So every Friday, this past Friday, we go to the gym together in the morning after the kids are at school, go to the gym. We both have the day off. We're fortunate for that. And then after we go to the gym, we go get coffee and we sit and we talk and we ask the same questions. I was telling somebody, you know, it's nothing like profound. You might think like, "What questions do you ask?" These are, I'll tell you the questions. How are you? There's two questions. How do you think I'm doing? That's it. But for seven years, asking the same questions, and it's nice to have those to come and get to talk to each other.

But it is revolution. It like, changed our marriage. We aren't perfect by any means, but we have a space. We have space to work through issues and work through our problems. We have time to share our hurts in life from each other, our concerns. And then we have an opportunity each week to thank each other, to appreciate the other, to praise the other. Relationships thrive when there is proximity and there is presence. Relationships thrive when you're together. And when you're praying in the Spirit through the power of the Spirit of God, this mystery, you are spending time with the God of the universe.

When you pray, you enter into the presence of the very living Almighty God. There is, I want to say this, there is no shortcut or secret mantra or technique to enter more of God's presence. No matter what anybody tells you on YouTube, there's a lot of people like, "Listen to my, buy my book. I'll tell you the secrets of, this is the secret. Pray." The secret is spend time with God. You know why prayer matters to God? Because you matter to God. That leads us to our next point. Prayers matter. Prayer matters to me.

You know, God, while God is a good and loving father, he doesn't, like I need, like I want to talk to my kids. He doesn't need, like it doesn't need our prayers. He's not sitting around like, "Man, I hope somebody would just call me." Is this on? Okay. Prayer isn't for God's benefit. He's perfect. He's all, he has community within himself in the Trinity. Prayer is for our benefit. Prayer is for you and me. I mentioned that book, "Living Like, or Praying Like Monks." I love this quote from Tyler Statton. He writes this, "The aim," talking about prayer, "is not to get God in on what I think he should be doing. Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing. Become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation."

Prayer is the recovery of our role in God's created order, the recovery of our true identity, and the relationship that defines that identity to us. This is what Tyler is saying here. He's saying that you are invited into the conversation with God. God is having a conversation, and you're invited into it, what he is doing. And as you do that, you get to experience God's original intention for humanity. You recover your identity is what he was talking about.

What does that mean? If you go back to the beginning of the Bible, Genesis chapter one, there is a story of God creating everything, and within that narrative, that story, God creates a garden, right? We know it as the Garden of? Some people think that's somewhere here in Santa Cruz, right? There's a Garden of Eden. That's not the one, okay? But this garden that he talks about in Genesis chapter one is this picture of a perfect place that God created that he could dwell with his creation. He makes his garden, he creates people, he puts them there. The Bible says they walk together in the garden.

People and God walking together, we're like, what does that even mean? I don't know, but that sounds cool. And that was God. So God made this place, put people there so they could dwell with them there. Not only that, but he put people to work. He's like, okay, here, you're in charge. This is a garden. There is farm stuff, garden and farm. There's animals, name them. Do stuff. Check this out. God made a place that he could dwell with his people, and they could participate with what he was doing.

Did God need humans? God could have made that garden self-sufficient. He could have made plants like grow and like prune themselves, or I don't know, he could have done whatever he wanted, but he decided to make a place that needed humans to be in it because he wanted to be with them, and he wanted to work with them. When you pray in the Spirit, we recover that original identity that was lost with sin. We get to dwell with God in his presence and participate with what he is doing.

To help us see this, we can look at Jesus. In John chapter 5, we have a story of a guy who can't walk. He's lame is what that, what they call it. And in this town, wherever he is, there is this pool of water, and they believe, the people in this town believe that if this pool starts bubbling, that's the, these angels. Once a year, they come and they stir the water, and if you can get in there first, you will be healed. And so you've got this guy who can't walk, and every year he's like, this is the year, and it's bubbling. He's like, he's trying to get there, and then some dude just like who has a toothache, you know, cannonballs over his head. Sorry, buddy. He's like, oh, next year. He's been laying there for a long time.

Jesus shows up, John chapter 5 verse 6, when Jesus saw him lying there, and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, do you want to get well? Sometimes we read the Bible, it's like, okay, sure. Did Jesus need to ask this guy this question? If you read the Gospels, there are times, I'm pretty sure Jesus read people's minds. They're like talking about it, and he's like, I know what you said, and they're like, he knows, he's God, he knows. Did he have to ask him to, I mean, nobody needed to ask this guy. It's like, obviously, this guy wants to get well. I saw him inching his way to this pool yesterday. Why did Jesus ask him this question?

What I believe he's doing is he is inviting this man to participate in what God wanted to do, which is heal him. Prayer is an invitation to you to join in God's purposes for you. God wants to form you and transform you as you spend time with him, and as you pray, and you participate in some mysterious way. That's why it matters to you. Prayer matters to you because you were created to live that way, because it transforms you. And because God invites us into his purposes for us, he also invites us into his purposes for the world. Brings us to our last point, prayer matters to others.

Paul continues with this in mind, be alert and always keep praying, keep on praying for all the Lord's people. The term be alert here in the original, like the original word literally means to be intent on something. Or it also means like to be sleepless, which means like stay awake, even if you're sleepy, stay awake and be intent. What Paul is saying here, I think, you know, he's looking out of his cell. He sees this Roman soldier, and soldiers are part of an army, and they have their fellow soldiers, and they have to have each other's backs, right? They have to look out for each other.

Or maybe you've seen a movie, and there's, you know, soldiers on like on a watch, and like one stays awake, and the other one can sleep, and then they're like, "I'm getting tired." Wake up, and then they wake up, and the other one sleeps. They have to stay awake. They have to be intent. They have to be alert and look out for their fellow soldier. In this battle that we were all in together, what Paul is saying is to be intent and pray for the rest of the church, the rest of this community, the rest of the body of believers.

Well, how do you do that? How do you intent on people and pray for them? I mean, it's simple. Be with them. Be in community. You know how you can know how to pray for somebody? Know them. We're being, we're called to be together. Some of you do this so well. I know there are people in this church. I'll talk to them like, "Yeah, I got my small group." I'm like, "Oh, cool. How long have you been in that small group?" "Yeah, like 35 years." I'm like, "What?" "Whoa." That's your people, and you know everything about each other, and you know what to pray for, because you are intent upon them.

But a lot of us, you know, in this large church, it's hard to get connected. Maybe you're not in community, and it's like, "We're here, and we keep coming," but you haven't made connections. We're working. I'm literally, personally, my job is personally working on how we can do that better. But one way you can do that is we have small groups. Mark talked about it earlier. We're doing this fall study, which is really cool, and all these small groups are launching. If you are not in a small group already, you're not in community, I definitely encourage you. Go see Jim out at the table outside. Go to tlc.org/smallgroups. There are a list of small groups that are open right now, places all over our county, where you can go and join in somebody's house or different places.

Or maybe you're like, "Hey, I have a house. I'm normal." Then you can host a small group. We'd love to have you, and we will give you everything you need to host a small group. We'll train you. We'll do all of that. See Jim. Again, go to tlc.org/smallgroups. We have to be together. We do not have a choice, because I don't know, you might have heard this lie, Christianity is not a solo mission. Christianity is not this individual thing. We've made it so individual. Like, "God saved me and to me to do this thing, and I'm doing this, and I'm..." Paul didn't write the letter to the Ephesians to like a guy in Ephesus. The Bible isn't written to Adrienne. This letter, the armor of God section, isn't for one person. It is for a community.

He wrote that to a community. All of it is like, "Hey, y'all gotta do this." Like I said, the Spirit fills us. We are adopted into a family. If God is my Father and God is your Father, what does that make us? Siblings, right? Church, Twin Lakes Church, we are in this together. We are in this battle together. So your prayers, they matter to all of us. Your prayers matter to your other brothers and sisters. Like Paul said, pray for all the believers all over the world. They matter. Your prayers matter to the people in Maui who are suffering. Your prayers matter to the people in Syria and Ukraine and Central Africa and North Korea. Your prayers matter to all of them in any whatever disaster is coming, and we start praying, they matter.

Paul doesn't stop at pray for each other, like you'll see here. He's like, "Hey, don't forget, please pray for me." He asks them for prayer. He says, "Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly as I should." Paul is, you know, Paul is like on a mission. And so what he's saying is your prayers matter to the mission of God on this earth. Your prayers matter to the mission of the church.

We are praying for individuals, but we're praying for what God is doing on this planet. He invites us to pray, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." He invites us into that prayer, to the mission of what he's doing in this world. It should broaden our prayers from just like, "What do I need? What do I want? What do these people need?" We can pray big.

Mark and I were having a conversation earlier this week about prayer, and he reminded me of, there's a pastor Brian Lareitz over the hill. They're at a conference, and he was talking about prayer, and he asked this question. And I was like, "Well, that's a good question." He said, "If God said yes to all your prayers, would it change the world or just your world?" If you want to see God move in our community, pray because your prayers matter.

I have some questions for you. Do you want to see revival? Do you want to see revival in Santa Cruz? Do you want to see more people come to know Jesus Christ and the amazing love of God through his death and his resurrection? That they are welcome and into this family of God to join this community of faith. Do you want to see more people know that and make that decision? Do you want to see more people get baptized and declare their faith? Do you want to see God move in the hearts of our kids? Then pray for it because your prayers, they matter.

Pray for the church, pray for this church, pray for your pastors at this church as we work to do whatever God is calling us to do. And for this church and everybody in this church and all the churches in Santa Cruz and the other pastors here in the Bay Area, as we're joining with hundreds of churches this fall to share the amazing love of Christ to our communities. Let's pray that we see God move in a mighty way. So many years in this town, people tell me this is a dark place and it's really hard to, yeah it might be hard but we serve God, the God of the universe. Because listen, your prayers with God's purposes, they move mountains.

But this is a tragic thing. Some of us, we treat prayer as just this last resort thing that we got to tack on. We want revival. Okay, let's plan all this stuff and let's make this thing and make it cool. And oh you know what's really cool? Have cool things and people will think it's cool and they'll think God is cool and then everybody will get saved. And so we create all this stuff and like oh yeah let's pray. God I made this cool thing. Can you make it work? That's like backwards, right? We tried everything and now I guess I will pray because prayer is something but I gotta do something.

We think prayer doesn't matter. I'll end with this. Our family, we take a yearly trip to Florida and we're from there originally at Gripen Miami and we've been here 16 years now. It's a long time. And we go back to see all of our extended families there as we go. This is us, this is me on the left. This is Jamie and Ella and Penelope and we're, this is St. Augustine, oldest city in America and we like found this beach last year and like oh this is nice. So we go every we spend some time at the beach and go enjoy the beach, go into the Atlantic Ocean that's warm the way the Lord intended the ocean to feel. And enjoy that. Eat good food.

Now part of the our trip back is to visit my family. My brother's there and my mom lives with my brother now. This is my mom and she's in her 80s, late 80s now and she doesn't have much. She's living with my brother. My mom is Korean and having a Korean mom has both pros and cons. A pro is you know I'll tell my mom like hey we're coming in like July and it's January. She's like okay that's when she starts preparing food. She goes to the back she's like killing stuff and burying stuff and fermenting and I don't know like magic Korean stuff that's happening and then and we get there and there's food and really good food. It's like the food of my childhood is very comforting.

But there's a few things that are frustrating. Like there's things like I want to say this okay I'm gonna say like you know Koreans are this way. Maybe not every single Korean on the planet is this way but this Korean is this way and all my friends moms are this way and every Korean person I know is this way. So just in case. I have some in the last service I have a couple they're Korean they're like yeah they're all that they're solid. Anyway so my mom Koreans are truth tellers. They're not not necessarily about themselves or how they're feeling but they'll tell the truth about anything they want at any time they don't care.

On this trip there was a like heated thing that happened with my mom because I don't want to talk about it. I'll talk about something else but I'll tell you a different example. This is what it means. Truth teller. When I was a kid somebody would call the house like my aunt or something. You know calling from Korea and my mom's talking to her and I don't know if your parents do this but like a family member calls they'll go like oh hey you want to say hi to you know Adrian and I'm like and they give you the phone and you're like oh and so I knew this was gonna happen and I'm like tired I'm like mom I'm tired can you just tell them I'm not here I just don't want to talk she goes oh okay okay Adrian doesn't want to talk to you he told me he said he's not here okay.

I know I know so bad. I'm not good boy. I'm like thanks mom. Koreans are also gift givers. That sounds good. In Asia gift giving is like a part of the culture right. A lot of but for my mom like she doesn't feel like she has shown love if it's not coupled with some kind of monetary like something that costs money and a lot of times it's actually money like if I say I love you but I don't give you money with that do it I really love you is the kind of like the vibe of my mom. She used to visit us and she wouldn't come to church like why is like I don't have money for the offering and I'm like what that's not like admission you know they don't like take it before you get in she's like I know but I don't know I'm like I'll give you my that's not my money like nobody's gonna know like you could put it in there they don't know you're just putting money nobody knows you put it in or not god no.

I'm like okay all right but but what happens now my mom's older like I said she doesn't have she can't do that anymore. This last trip I was in in her room with her and tears in her eyes telling me how bad of a grandma she is because she can't she can't give my kids something you know like I want to I want to buy them something like they don't need anything if there is one more toy in my house and they don't need anything but she feels so bad tears are in her eyes and then I see shame come across her face when she says all I can do is pray for them because to her it's like I can't you know to her the money thing is more important and she's thinks my prayers you know they don't really matter and she doesn't believe me but I tell her it's the best thing you could do for my kids because I remember when I was a kid being woken up in the middle of the night to my mom yelling in Korean praying.

If you didn't know this Korean people pray very loudly if they're a Christian at least this one okay okay and I used to think I asked my mom like why he's screaming I was like do you think like it's because he's so far away like hey like what why I don't know but I was a kid woken up because she's praying because I wasn't a Christian and every night I could remember she prayed for my salvation. I became a Christian and then eventually I wanted to become a pastor and go into ministry and so then she started praying for my ministry she would pray every day that God would bless me and bless my ministry that I would get to go up and talk to lots of people.

Now I know that my salvation is is fully a work of God in his grace but the mystery of prayer and the beautiful mystery of prayer is that my mom was invited to be a part of God's plan for my salvation through her prayers. I don't know the math on that I don't know how that works but my mom's prayers matter. I don't know if you pray every day or rarely or just when life is crumbling but what I want you to know is that God invites you to draw near to him and to participate in what he's doing. Your heavenly father wants to hear to spend the time and hear everything from you the good the bad the ugly he wants to bring you peace and comfort as you sit in his presence in prayer and cry out to him.

He wants to transform you as you pray in the Spirit trusting that he is a good father who loves you. Church, your prayers matter. They matter to God, they matter to you, and they matter to all of us. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your love and for your grace and the great beauty of prayer that Lord as we read in scripture that it is by your spirit that we can approach you and pray to you and speak to you one on one that God you have allowed us through your through the death of Jesus his resurrection from the dead the filling of the spirit you allow us to boldly come to the throne of God in prayer.

So we thank you Lord that you listen to us and not as some distant God but as a father who wants to hear from his children. So God, I pray right now first I pray God there's people in this room who don't have the words to pray and like scripture says Lord you intercede on our behalf you pray for us the spirit within us can pray for us eat when we don't have the words to pray.

So God, I pray whatever situation is going on God I pray for healing for comfort for peace for strength we pray for your will to be done and I also pray for all of us Lord that we would remember that we are your children and what that means that we get to talk to you and be a part of what you're doing may God we take that invitation and pray pray for ourselves.

Thank you Lord that you forgive us when we confess our sins to you pray for our families we pray for this community we pray for this church for these pastors at this church all over this county we pray for this area for the explore God series we pray for what what you're doing all over the world we pray for our brothers and sisters suffering God we pray because our prayers matter and so God I pray you help us remind us of that every day when we cry out to you that you hear us in Jesus' name, amen.