Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] So we are over four, we are in our fifth year here, and it feels like I need to make an announcement. I thought it would wear off. I thought you would eventually stop. But I need every one of you to know you are not bothering me.
[00:00:26] You a DJ probably gets this too.
[00:00:29] Every single one of the amount of times people call me, my beloved family members from my church that I worship God with, call me and say, I'm so sorry to bother you.
[00:00:48] What?
[00:00:51] I am a full time preaching minister. I'm not doing anything.
[00:01:00] This is the only thing I do during the week.
[00:01:04] I'm so glad you called.
[00:01:07] And I mean that. I mean not, not that part, but I mean, like, it was. I remember bringing it up the first month I was here. I thought I said, it is so funny how every single member says, I'm so sorry to bother you. I know you've got a lot to do and I always have to tell them, always, you're not bothering me. You're never bothering me.
[00:01:32] It's not a bother.
[00:01:34] This is what I'm here for, is for you to call and talk to me.
[00:01:40] I will come change a light bulb at your house.
[00:01:45] I mean that.
[00:01:48] You're gonna have a busy week. Some of your, I've seen some of your houses and you need a professional. But the rest of you, like, if, if it can be reached with, I want to come do it, I want to come help. That's just kind of my nature. Like, let me know. It's always. Well, sometimes we'll hear like, hey, did you hear that person A or person B was in the hospital for two weeks last month? And I'll say, well, why am I just hearing this now?
[00:02:18] I would have loved to been a part of that, that journey with them. I would love to go and pray with them. Like, this is what I got into this for. I promise you. I did not get into this line of work to this ministry so that I could sit in my office quietly by myself.
[00:02:39] I promise.
[00:02:42] And so bother me.
[00:02:47] And I know I'm setting myself up this week.
[00:02:50] A lot of you are like, we're gonna have small groups this week and it's just a planning meeting.
[00:02:57] But I mean it. Like, I, I want that. It, it is, it's exciting for me when you call me and you're like, hey, I've got a thing. Or, hey, I want you to be praying for this. Or we put these prayer cards out and we have the prayer on the church center app. You can submit a prayer request.
[00:03:19] We mean that.
[00:03:22] We mean it. We really do want to pray for you and with you.
[00:03:30] We have a prayer team that stands at the back during the invitation song. Just for. If you want, if you want somebody to pray for you over you, I come stand here. If you want to just come down, I'll turn my mic off. I promise I'll pray with you right here.
[00:03:52] Because there is no time that is unsuitable to go to the father.
[00:04:02] We are not bothering him ever.
[00:04:10] And I know the way church has worked for the longest time is, well, okay, the things we go down front for, marital troubles, that's it.
[00:04:33] It's just things we get prayed over for are serious things.
[00:04:39] And I've had, I mean, this church has prayed over me several times this over the past two weeks as my brother is going downhill with cancer, his health is deteriorating. That means the world to me. Our Wednesday night Bible class prayed over me. Our elders prayed over me. But it doesn't have to be that.
[00:05:02] There's not a sign on the throne of God that says, well, is it serious? Or can it wait?
[00:05:13] That if you've, if you've got a lunch you're worried about with an old friend, if you've got a rough week, if you're going to be traveling, if you felt down and overwhelmed, let someone pray over you.
[00:05:38] It's not going to be dramatic or tearful. It doesn't have to be. It can be.
[00:05:44] But let us know.
[00:05:47] Let the people who are willing to go to the back every week and stand there, mostly unused, by the way, which I'm sure they're doing great things, praying over the church as they're standing back there. But then the Let them bless you, pray with you.
[00:06:08] Because what we have in prayer is not an avenue or an equation through which we get the easy things of life, but it is an open invitation to the God who is, who is happy to see us.
[00:06:27] An open invitation to commune, to sit with, to be with the God who is pleased at our presence.
[00:06:39] That is real.
[00:06:44] Jesus says to love our neighbor. And we don't always go meet our neighbor because it's much easier to love him when you haven't met him.
[00:06:55] People are easy to love. In theory.
[00:06:59] Jesus tells us to forgive our enemy and to love those who pray for those who persecute us. And sometimes that's just not something that we really want to do.
[00:07:10] But the invitation of prayer, the invitation to enter the throne room of God, to be in the presence of God. God has invited us in.
[00:07:27] Abandon the podcast and be in the presence of God.
[00:07:37] Abandon the news show and Be in the presence of God.
[00:07:44] Because in the presence of God, what we find is. Is love, peace.
[00:07:52] We are overwhelmed with the fact that the God who created the heavens and the earth is present with me right now.
[00:08:03] I am invited in, and I am welcomed.
[00:08:10] When I was a kid, we had an odd teaching on prayer, and I remember it distinctly. Bible class is tough because basically it's just young minds being absolutely influenced by amateurs trying their best. And I am thankful for all of us amateurs who have taught middle school students. And anybody who's taught middle school students knows there are no experts.
[00:08:40] There's nobody who says, I've got this, and I've nailed it.
[00:08:44] Because they are different and weird. Right, Carson? Right.
[00:08:53] Call and response. That's how our hat family works.
[00:08:58] So there's no. But I remember in middle school, they said, listen, if you have a prayer request, just make sure it's something worth praying about.
[00:09:10] You know, don't go to God and ask for a new bike or a new toy.
[00:09:16] Make sure that it's something, you know, something important, not something selfish.
[00:09:26] And what I realized later in life that really kind of I struggled with. With that. What that caused me to do is it chained up the doors to God's presence.
[00:09:39] Like, I had to pick the lock with my good intentions.
[00:09:45] And if I had good motives, I gotta check my motives and make sure I'm praying for the right thing and make sure I have the right attitude when I go to presence of God. But my goodness, is there any better place in the world to develop the right attitude than to take a wrong attitude to God?
[00:10:01] Just take it to God.
[00:10:05] Are you mad that that person talked to you that way, even though you were. You had broken into their house without asking?
[00:10:16] Those times where we're a little incensed, but we're kind of in the wrong.
[00:10:22] Oh, y'all don't have those? Okay.
[00:10:25] But to take that to God, I have found when we got fired the first time, which is always funny for me to say, I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, when I was a youth. So I was fired December of 2007.
[00:10:53] And then we got a job. I got a job in January in Teague, Texas. We had just bought a house.
[00:11:00] We had just bought a house, and they let us go. Which I know how Luca feels now.
[00:11:07] It's a joke just for some.
[00:11:11] Me and Luca are exactly the same. Yeah.
[00:11:16] So the. So we have.
[00:11:22] We were. We had to. We bought a house, and so we were trying to fix up this house to sell it. We had the ink hadn't dried on like the buying of the house. And we were trying to fix this, get this house ready. We were gonna have to get it ready to live in. Now we're getting it ready to sell. And so I was commuting back and forth from Texarkana to Teague, Texas. And every time I drove to Teague, I had to drive by the place where the meeting happened, where I got fired.
[00:11:52] And I was angry.
[00:11:56] And I remember driving by and realizing, like, this voice just kept coming back to me, you've got to forgive them or you'll find no peace.
[00:12:13] And I would pray. I would be like, may they see the error of their ways. God. You remember those prayers just tattling on people to God.
[00:12:27] Oh, may they get there. I'd never once used the word comeuppance before, but I was using it all the time now.
[00:12:36] And I would pray those prayers deeply in the presence of God and just kept being hit with, you have to forgive them or you'll find no peace.
[00:12:49] That was not me.
[00:12:52] I was 24.
[00:12:57] I wasn't wise enough to have that.
[00:13:00] Just God. In the presence of God is the place to have the bad attitude.
[00:13:08] It's in the presence of God. It's the place that we're supposed to take all of our brokenness and all of the things we wrestle with and show up.
[00:13:19] And all of a sudden, every time we go to God in prayer, the constant is that God is present.
[00:13:28] God is present in our prayer when we pray, God's there.
[00:13:34] Every time.
[00:13:37] God never looks away and says, hey, I'm sorry, can you give me a minute?
[00:13:43] Some real important stuff going on elsewhere.
[00:13:49] The thing you do to your kids. I'm on the phone. I'm on the phone.
[00:13:57] God never gives that to us.
[00:14:04] When James tells this group of people to pray and thereby tells us to pray, these questions aren't. Look at the first one.
[00:14:15] Are any among you suffering?
[00:14:19] They should pray now. Notice in James 5:13, it doesn't say, are any among you suffering? They should pray and it'll get fixed.
[00:14:34] No, Are you suffering? Pray.
[00:14:37] Are you cheerful songs of praise like we will be in the presence of God.
[00:14:45] The presence of God is the place to have the emotion. Which emotion? You might ask all of them.
[00:14:55] The Christians and worship is not some intellectual understanding of the proximity of God. It is the presence of God in our current condition.
[00:15:09] It is the presence of God in our present moment.
[00:15:14] Whether I'm excited and we've. We've welcomed a child into the. Into the world, or we. There's just nothing bad that's going on or it feels like it's just one dead gum thing after another.
[00:15:31] Sorry for my language, but you've been there where you can't even grieve one thing without another thing tripping you up in the process.
[00:15:46] In every moment of your life, joy upon joy, grief upon grief. God is present.
[00:15:59] He exudes existence with you and loves you right in that moment.
[00:16:06] And so if you're suffering, pray if you're cheerful song of praise to God.
[00:16:15] Are any among you sick?
[00:16:18] They should call the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.
[00:16:26] The prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will resurrect them.
[00:16:36] Now, sometimes they get out of bed, and sometimes they get out of bed.
[00:16:53] My brother and I were talking this past weekend about his predicament.
[00:17:01] He has stage four cancer. He's in hospice.
[00:17:05] He's 41.
[00:17:11] And we're both planners, he and I. We're both youth ministers. And that's a job all about planning and procedure and itineraries.
[00:17:22] And I'm an itinerary guy.
[00:17:25] I like to look at the maps of places I'm going to so that when it comes time to go, I will have forgotten them. But at least I tried.
[00:17:36] I want to at least be aware. And I know and Jonathan knows that there will come a day and he will be with Jesus.
[00:17:51] But what bothers us both, at least while we were talking, he was on a lot of medication and I was stone cold sober. And I don't like that we had a good conversation about this.
[00:18:05] But at least while we were talking, it bothered us that we don't know the logistics.
[00:18:13] You know, I don't want to get to the kingdom of heaven. I don't want to go to heaven and not know where to check in like in the Far side cartoons. It's just. It's a golden gate. It's obvious there's an escalator, but I don't think that's the way it is.
[00:18:35] And I don't know. And sitting there with him, I didn't know.
[00:18:41] And he wondered aloud what it would be like.
[00:18:46] And I said, you know, what's crazy is the Bible just doesn't seem to care to tell us.
[00:18:53] But I imagine that heaven's a lot closer than we think.
[00:19:04] And imagine, one of these days you're going to go to sleep just like every other day. You're going to wake up, but when your feet hit the floor, you'll Feel strong again.
[00:19:20] And then it won't be mom who guides you to the chair, but it'll be the Lord that guide you wherever you please.
[00:19:32] And your pleasure will be with him.
[00:19:40] The God who saves us sent his son to die for us, allowed us to. Allows us to be with him, wants us to be with him in the end, offers us his presence. Now some of you feel so conflicted about the world and you feel so much angst.
[00:20:12] You watch the news and you're like, I just hate this. I don't like this. Or I'm really happy this is happening. You just pick sides. My goodness Christians, go be in the presence of God and let it shape you.
[00:20:31] Quit letting your Facebook feed and your. And your really worried. My mic cut out when I said Facebook feed. I feel like we have a new conspiracy on our hands.
[00:20:43] Don't let your Facebook feed and your news channel and your. And your.
[00:20:48] Just the loud noises you have on your TV while you're trying to eat. Let it go away and let God enter.
[00:21:05] Because the shalom, the peace of God can rule.
[00:21:13] But it's only in the presence of God that we find that.
[00:21:20] I found that the closest we can say peace. And peace has this general sense of, you know, floatiness. You know, the hippies ruined it, to be honest.
[00:21:36] No offense to some of the hippies. I saw some eyes that were former hippies in the room, and I apologize. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
[00:21:49] Just messing with me.
[00:21:53] I needed to cut the tension of the rare a little bit.
[00:21:58] But peace isn't just, yeah, man, we're going along. Peace is being present and grateful. At this moment, I am present and I'm grateful for what's around me. And I can guarantee you, if you take that on, if you take that task on and decide I'm going to be present in each moment and grateful for what's in front of me, you will need every ounce of the presence of God in the process.
[00:22:34] So no matter what happens, you're sick, you'll be resurrected.
[00:22:40] We grieve with hope. We rejoice with praise. We suffer with prayer.
[00:22:48] We sin with confession and prayer.
[00:22:54] He says in verse 16, therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.
[00:23:02] The presence of God, and I understand this has not always been the case with churches, and it might not always be the case with every church from day to day. It can be tough. But when you are in the presence of God, you are safe enough to be vulnerable with your brokenness.
[00:23:21] The Ideal church is a place where, however I'm broken, I can be present, I can be open and vulnerable. But that's not always the case. And I get that. But you can be that with God.
[00:23:36] Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed.
[00:23:45] And we are healed by the presence of God. Our poor attitudes, our anxiety, our stress, our frustrations, our unforgiveness, our anger, everything can be taken to God. Our sin, our brokenness, is fixed and healed in the presence of God. Because the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Not because the righteous are doing it, but because the righteous, when they go into the presence of God, they understand how powerful that moment is.
[00:24:25] And so we pray together.
[00:24:33] I'm guessing that if you grew up church of Christ, you are.
[00:24:37] You had to figure out how to pray a little bit.
[00:24:41] I did. And maybe you had the same experience.
[00:24:46] We were people of the word. We weren't really people of emotion. And that felt very emotional. We'd pray.
[00:24:54] It just didn't. I wasn't great at it young, but when I realized, and maybe this is something you need to realize, because your prayer, you don't enter into the presence of God as often as you're able.
[00:25:12] What I realized is I didn't have to have a good five minutes to go to God.
[00:25:27] Think about what you're going to say. Say it clearly and proudly in front of the church.
[00:25:33] I didn't have to have a good prayer to pray.
[00:25:44] I just needed a song.
[00:25:52] I just needed to be able to know God is present.
[00:26:03] I just needed some silence, really.
[00:26:12] To sit in the car or on your back porch.
[00:26:21] To sit on an old tree stump with your feet in the dirt.
[00:26:28] You could be staring at a sunset or a child playing, your child playing on a playground.
[00:26:39] It doesn't matter.
[00:26:43] God's not bothered.
[00:26:47] He's happy you're there.
[00:26:56] When Rachel and I sit together after a long day, whether it's in our living room on the back porch, neither one of us ever says, why aren't you talking?
[00:27:10] Because I just like being with her. She just likes being with me.
[00:27:16] We can talk.
[00:27:18] We don't have to.
[00:27:22] When I realized that just acknowledging the presence of God wherever I am, that's how God feels about me, boy, I can go. I can pray without ceasing.
[00:27:48] You don't have to have the words to do that.
[00:27:51] You just have to have the presence and then gratitude right in the moment. Present moment. You just.
[00:28:07] You're not having to dial up God.
[00:28:14] And so when we pray, however it is you do it.
[00:28:22] I won't start the song because it doesn't. I don't do that very well. I pitch them too high because I have the voice of a young woman.
[00:28:31] But the be still and know that I am God.
[00:28:46] Be at peace.
[00:28:49] God is God. I am not.
[00:28:54] It is in those prayers and those songs and those silences and sometimes in those pleas of God. Fix this.
[00:29:06] But man, I am so grateful that God turned out not to be Santa Claus, but to be God.
[00:29:14] God isn't intent on making my path less narrow, but God is pleased to be present with me as I walk.
[00:29:29] What a beautiful thing.
[00:29:33] And that's the God we need.
[00:29:36] As the praise team comes up, I'm going to. I'm going to lead us in prayer. What we're going to do. I'm going to lead us in prayer and then I'm not going to say amen.
[00:29:52] And we are going to continue in prayer together and pray about our need for God to be present, eyes open, hands lifted, however you need, but just to know that there is no in Jesus name and amen that makes God leave these doors.
[00:30:14] That God is here. In our prayers, melodically or spoken, are powerful and effective.
[00:30:24] So let's all stand together and let's pray together.
[00:30:37] Father, we show up to your throne today knowing you showed up to our world first.
[00:30:49] You came and got us.
[00:30:53] You lived through your son. You've lived this life, you've walked this earth. You know these trials, you've grieved these losses, you danced these dances, you've celebrated.
[00:31:07] So you are not present with us, but aloof and afar. You know what we're going through, and we give you all the glory for that.
[00:31:19] Lord, I need you every hour.
[00:31:28] Father, as we continue as a church to pray to you. May your spirit fill. Fill this room. May those who need your presence be overcome by you, be overwhelmed by you. And may it continue throughout this week.
[00:31:45] Father, thank you so much.
[00:31:48] And we will sing to you now.
