-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Glory to God. Thank you for joining me.
00:40 Good to be here. Welcome to the cafe. It’s a great day today.
00:43 Amen. God has given us another day and He is so wonderful. He has not just given us a day for us to wander aimlessly, but He’s given us His Word.
00:53 As the preacher has said many times, the Bible stands for basic instructions before leaving earth. And I would agree with that. It is completely, totally our source of truth, our source of guidance.
01:06 And today we’re continuing our series in 1 Thessalonians:5. And Paul, towards the end of 1 Thessalonians, starts writing some exhorting, giving some motivation for people to follow a certain set of advice. I don’t try to think of like a better, more deeper word, but the first one was rejoice evermore, an idea of rejoicing all the time. And the next one here is pray without ceasing.
01:38 Again, advice doesn’t even do it justice. Commands, best ways to live, best practices for life, Bible living, you know, you fill in the blank of how you would look at this. But pray without ceasing is a verse that never gets old, that is never out of style, that is never something to be put away or not thought about.
02:00 Pray without ceasing is a command that we must own and live as Christians. You know, God is so good to us in that He gave us ways to communicate with Him. He gave us His living word, and that’s how He speaks to us.
02:13 If you have someone tell you that God spoke to you, I saw a video headline the other day online, it said, God told me about this person. And I thought to myself, oh, is it in the Bible? God told you what? Hopefully it’s in the Bible, because God speaks through His word. And God has a lot to say in His word.
02:34 You know, have you ever read the Bible cover to cover? It’s not small, is it? It’s quite profound and huge. And one reason why is that is the counsel of God in there. And God speaks to us through His word.
02:48 And then He gives us a way to speak to him, and that’s through prayer. And once we’re saved, we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit actually helps us pray. And we pray, I’ve preached on this recently, we pray by the Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ, the great mediator, to God the Father.
03:10 Amen. And that’s the three-in-one God, or the Godhead, or the triune God. And the idea is, the Bible actually says the Holy Spirit utters things that we can’t even utter to God. And we can’t even explain.
03:24 And I’m thankful for the Holy Spirit. Because there’s many nights I’ll lay my head in bed, and I’ll be praying, and I’ll be mumbling or muttering, and I don’t know what I’m saying. I know what I’m feeling.
03:33 But I’m thankful that the Holy Spirit’s able to take that prayer to God, and to give God that prayer as what I really need. Amen. And I’m so thankful for the Holy Spirit, and I’m so thankful that God has given us the Holy Spirit, and God has given us prayer. Think about this.
03:50 What can take away prayer from you? If you were in jail, could you still pray? If you were broke without a penny, could you still pray? If you were in the hospital, could you still pray? If you’re driving in a car, can you still pray? If you’re at school, can you still pray? Nothing can take away prayer from you. God gave you something that you have until the day He calls you home. And that’s so beautiful.
04:12 I love this verse. 1 Thessalonians 5:17. Pray without ceasing as Paul commands us.
04:18 And the first key, I believe, to prayer, this is something maybe I wish I would have heard more growing up, is that we need to get in the position of right living to have our prayers heard. You know, we are oftentimes living in a world of a watered-down doctrine that the idea is just throw up a prayer to God when you want. Or as I heard one preacher say, it’s something like a last resort, where the world will look at God as kind of, okay, well, I’ve done everything else I could do, and now the ship is sinking.
04:49 So last resort, I’ll just pray to God, and hopefully He’ll just bail me out. You know, this is all terrible and false, and patently false. And so even, you know, it’s sad.
05:03 People say, oh, I’m praying for you. I’m sending prayers your way. And the question I always have is, who are they praying to? If they’re in the world, and they’re just living in sin, and they have never accepted Christ as Savior, what kind of prayer is this? So we need to make sure we’re in the right position.
05:15 Of course, we need to accept Christ as Savior. We need to believe on Him, on His finished work on the cross. God specifically sent His only begotten Son, His beloved Jesus, to die on the cross for our sins, so that when we accept Christ as Savior, and we accept His finished work on the cross, which all that means is that we believe, right? We believe in what Jesus did for us, that Jesus was God in the flesh, that He willingly suffered and obediently gave Himself on the cross, that He was buried three days, and that three days in Jewish tradition meant that He was fully dead in the grave, and that He was risen again on the third day, and that He walked the earth 40 days and 40 nights, and ascended up to heaven, and today is at the right hand of the Father.
06:00 When we believe in the gospel message and what Jesus did for us, we’re saved and we get the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So first you have to be saved, and if you’re not saved, my prayer for you is that you will pray and ask Jesus to save you today. I’ve just given you the gospel message.
06:16 It’s also in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, and it’s very simple, and the only thing we can do is have faith. We can’t earn our way into heaven, we can’t work our way into heaven, we can’t make God a debtor to us in any way. Our righteousness is like filthy rags, the Bible says.
06:35 All we can do is believe. Once we believe and we’re in the position to pray that we have accepted Christ as Savior, and we have the Holy Spirit indwelling in us, then we need to become righteous. We need to be right with God.
06:49 James 5:16, confess your faults one to another, pray one for another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. There’s a lot in James 5 here, but the point I want to focus on is that, look, we’re trying to be healed, we’re trying to be helped by God, we want our prayers answered.
07:09 Well, it says here the effectual fervent prayer, right, the constant prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Much comes of it. And so the idea here is to get God’s ear and to really have Him hear our prayers, we need to be right with Him.
07:24 Now, how do we get right with God? Well, number one, we need to be saved, and that’s the idea of being reconciled to God. Now, that’s the idea of the ministry of reconciliation. So as a preacher, I’m preaching the gospel that you’d accept Christ and that you’d be reconciled or made at peace with God, because the Bible teaches us that we have sin in our lives and that it is enmity or warfare with God.
07:51 And so God is holy and cannot accept sin, and that’s where Christ comes into the picture, and that’s when we’re reconciled to God. So firstly, we must be saved. But we know, if you know, if you’re in the flesh here, you’ve been saved any amount of time, you realize the sin does not stop.
08:04 We’re in the flesh, we’re still sinful man, we’re saved, Amen, but our sin is persistent, so we need to repent. We need to get right with God, we need to give him our sins, we need to identify what that sin is and identify with God that it is bad. Think of a child that breaks a rule in the house, and the child comes to you and says, I’m sorry, and then goes and breaks the rule again.
08:27 What are you gonna say? You’re gonna say that child’s not really sorry. Now think of that child coming to you and saying, you know what, I know why that rule is there, and I agree with you, that is a good rule to have, and I broke it, and I don’t ever want to broke it. You know what, it makes me sick that I broke it, and I’m never gonna break it again.
08:42 You’d say, okay, that child is really sorry. That’s the ideal of repentance, the idea of acknowledging our sin before God and not doing it anymore. James 4.8, draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you.Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded.
08:59 And James4.8 here is giving us again the prescription to get close to God, draw close to God. You want to draw close to God, you want God close to you, you feel like God’s not near you anymore, whatever it is, you draw close to Him.
09:12 You get in His word, you study his word, you pray, you make sure that you’re saved, Amen, you work your salvation out with fear and trembling, you accept Christ as Savior, you give God your repentance, your repentant heart, your sins, you say, Lord, I’ve messed up, this is what I’ve done, and if you don’t even know, you can pray and ask God to reveal it to you, and that’s when we have a closeness with God, and that’s why the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
09:39 And once we have this, then we need to pray without ceasing, so we realize how to pray, we pray to God, we realize we pray by the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ to our Heavenly Father, we realize that we need to be right with God to have our prayers heard. A wild man living out there in the world, living in deep deep sin, his prayers probably won’t be heard by God.
10:03 I say probably because I’m not God, I don’t know, but the Bible tells me that he probably won’t have his prayers heard by God. Someone that is repentant, that is living for the Lord, that loves the Lord with their whole heart, that believes on Christ, that is living as best they can, I think that person will have their prayers heard by God, not because their works made them something special, but because they have gotten right with God, and the Bible tells us the righteous man’s prayers availeth much.
10:28 And then finally, pray without ceasing, routine, repetition, the idea of we need to be praying all the time.
10:36 What does your prayer routine look like right now? What would it look like if you made prayer a huge priority in your life? Think about what prayer is. It’s going to God, and it’s petitioning God for things and for others, right? Intercessory prayer, praying for others.
10:52 If you believe that it worked, would you not do it? And if you don’t ever do it, are you showing a lack of faith? Make it a priority and work it into your routine.
11:02 Repetition, how many things do you do each day just out of pure habit? Why isn’t prayer one of them? You know, I don’t think it downgrades prayer to make prayer routine.
11:14 That just actually elevates prayer to an importance or a priority in your life. You know, if it’s just routine, like for example, when we eat food, any kind of food at our house, we pray and we thank God, and that’s just what we do, Amen. Well, that’s just another way of praying to God.
11:29 And then you have your family prayer time, that’s routine. You have your morning devotional time, that’s routine. You have your evening prayer time, that’s routine.
11:36 You pray with your spouse, that’s routine. You pray with your kids, that’s routine, or your grandkids. And you build up these routines, and it’s just part of your life, and it’s part of who you are.
11:45 And it’ll be embedded in your children’s minds forever. My mom did the best she could when we were little. She went through a lot of mental problems and strife, and I never forget, as a little child, she’d have me lay on her lap and she’d read the children’s Bible to us and then ask us what it was about.
12:02 And that was a routine that we had, and that was just kind of embedded in my mind, and what a blessing that was. And again, we didn’t live in a very cohesive household or a very healthy household, but we had that prayer time with mom, and we had that time to study the Bible with mom. And so it’s important to pray without ceasing, bake it into your routine, and also part of this is to daily repent before God.
12:25 This preacher, every day, Lord willing, I repent. I ask God to forgive me my sins. I ask God to point them out so that I can understand them.
12:32 And I truly mean that, because just because I’m a preacher doesn’t make me perfect. If anything, it just exposes the fact that I’m not perfect more, amen? And so I know that I need the Lord’s forgiveness, and I know that part of this deal of praying without ceasing, part of it is staying repentant before God.
12:51 So remember, routine, repetition, and repentance, the three R’s.
12:53 We need to get right with Him to stay close to Him, and when we do these things, when we pray without ceasing, and it’s part of our routine, and we cleanse our hands, and we stay right with God the best that we can, and we just do our earnest best, God will recognize that, and He’s gonna bless. He’s gonna provide a peace that surpasses all understanding. He’s gonna lead you in the ways everlasting.
13:17 He’s going to hear those prayers. He may not answer all of them right now, but He may, Amen. God is amazing. I remember one time, years ago, I prayed a prayer in the afternoon, a very big, big prayer that I tried to work out on my own for a year, and it wasn’t but the evening or the next day, and it all had worked itself out.
13:33 Imagine that. Imagine how God moves. Can I praise Him today? Praise God.
13:39 He answers prayer today. The Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. We need to be about our Father’s business.
13:47 We need to pray all the more in these last days. Pray for your needs, yes. Pray for your family, yes, but also pray for those that you love.
13:51 Pray for your friends. Pray for the lost, Amen. Continue to seek the Lord in prayer, and maybe one day, while you’re praying, you’ll hear that trumpet sound, Amen. What a way to go out, that you’re talking to God in prayer, and the next thing, boom, you’re there with God. That’d be amazing.
14:05 Thank you so much for listening. Continue to pray without ceasing. Continue to stay close to the Lord.
14:10 Take care. God bless, and Amen.