Praying In A Spiritual Shake-Up I

Don't forget the outlines that are in your North Way notes. We don't do all that work just so we can fill up the bulletin. We do it so you can be helped to take something out of here other than just a few memories, but have something tangible that you can peruse and discuss a little later on with loved ones or friends as you leave the service. Acts chapter 4, beginning in verse 23. And on their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. The context is that Peter and John had been arrested for preaching the gospel. I mean, they had been faithfully preaching, thrown into jail, and were about to be tortured and perhaps killed, but the praying church had seen their release. Verse 24 of Acts chapter 4. When they heard this, that's the church, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. Sovereign Lord, they said, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them. And you spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David, saying, why do the nation's rage and the people's plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed one. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus. And after they prayed, notice again, after they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. Well, the January 6th edition of Newsweek, that's this past Monday, as its cover story carried the theme of today's message, Talking to God, an intimate look at the way we pray. Pretty fascinating, huh? They called to ask what I was preaching about and wanted to get in sync. Here's what they said in part of their article. Listen, talking to God in America, as the prophet Amos put it, those conversations flow like a mighty river. This week, if you believe at all in opinion surveys, more of us will pray than we'll go to work or exercise or even have sexual relations. According to recent studies at a major research center, more than three quarters, 78% of all Americans pray at least once a week. More than half, 57%, report praying at least once a day. Pretty fascinating stuff, isn't it? How many believe that Americans need to pray? I mean, given the condition of this nation, it's a good thing. You see, in a lot of ways, American believers need to see themselves in the same light that these early church believers saw themselves. They were in a war. Their very survival depended upon whether or not they were praying people. Their colleagues, Peter and John, the apostles, had been arrested. Their lives were at stake. And I want you to know something. I believe this, that our lives as we know them are at stake in this matter of prayer. And so they were crying out to God and as a result of their believing prayer, God heard their prayer and the apostles were released. See, here in America, it may not be quite that easy. The moral climate is slipping so rapidly and so alarmingly that even well-respected secular journalists are beginning to become perplexed and asking questions that the church should have asked a long time ago. I quote the New York Times of this week, January the 8th, talking about sin. This isn't the religion page. Sin isn't something that many people, including most churches, have really spent much time talking about or worrying about through the years of the sexual revolution. But we will say this for sin. It at least offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled and sin was taken away, guilt wasn't the only thing that fell away. We also lost the guidewire of personal responsibility. Isn't that significant? Later on, this columnist goes on to say, we might do well to capture an understanding of sin. You see, even secular journalists recognize that there's something wrong with the kinds of things we're seeing in our country in these days. Dear ones, I don't need to go into any depth about our nation. I just need to look out here and recognize that you, just as I, also have burdens and problems that haven't responded to the normal quick popcorn prayers. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to be heard by God. And I won't even raise the subject of the world's needs. The Soviet Union, China, India, the massive needs of people throughout the world. We see a need for prayer like never before. And I'm pretty much in safe ground when I say, how many of you know that you need to pray more than you do? Why is that? Why can't there be one time in my life when I say, Lord, I'm praying enough. I don't know that that day will ever come. But I want to say this. I believe that it's possible for us to be more effective in our prayers than we've been. And I know more than anything else I've said to the Lord about 1992, I do not want it to be a year of the status quo. How many of you don't want it to be the same at the end of this year as you are right now? I want to be different. I want things to change. And I want to submit to you that prayer is the way that God is going to make that happen. I'm ready for God to bring a holy shakeup into my life. Are you ready for that? Turn to someone right now and tell them. In fact, if you know them, give them a little shake. Tell them you need a holy shakeup. All right. Tell them that. Right there. Go ahead. You can touch. Shake them a little bit. Be careful. Don't shake someone else's spouse. All right. Pick on your own. How does this happen? Well, Acts 431, if we could please flash that scripture. Acts 431 tells us this is how it happens. Read it with me. After they prayed. Read it with me. After they prayed. The place where they were shaken. The place where they were meeting was shaken. After they prayed. Say these words with me. Prayer is the birth means of divine life. Say it. Prayer is the birth means of divine life. In the same way that a woman labors to open wide the birth canal to bring forth new life. Just in the same way that Pastor Scott's wife, Missy, had their baby son this past Monday. She labored to bring that baby into the world in that very same way. Prayer opens the channel for the life of God to enter into the death grip of Satan in this world. Dear ones, make no mistake. It is a travail. It is a labor. And this isn't just some picture language that I'm making up. It's the Bible. It's what the Bible says has to happen. Isaiah 66 verse 8 says that when Zion travails, she brings forth. When she labors, she gives birth. Or how about Paul, the apostle, writing in the book of Galatians in chapter 4 very clearly capturing the same message when he says this verse 19. My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. How does a man get into the pains of childbirth? I mean, I don't want to have anything to do with natural childbirth. How does a man get into the pains of childbirth? How does Paul write those words? In prayer. The labor of prayer to bring forth the life of God. That's what Paul's talking about. And here in Acts chapter 4, once again, we see the context of corporate prayer, bringing in the life of God to bring about a change, a dynamic, powerful change. Let me briefly share in this morning three things that I see in Acts chapter 4 verses 23 and following that will give us a context in which we might see a holy shakeup in this coming year. The first thing I see that happens when these believers came together is that God's sovereignty was clearly stated. God's sovereignty is stated. Now the foundation of all believing prayer, not just popcorn air-filling prayers, but believing prayer, the foundation of it all is God's sovereignty. It's not your sincerity, it's not your emotion, it's God's sovereignty. And the believers here mention three ways in which God's sovereignty was clearly affirmed. The first one is verse 24. They say, Sovereign Lord, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything. And the first place that we see God's sovereignty is in creation. God's creation tells us that he's sovereign. How many of you were up today when the sun came up? This is the sleepy service. The sun was up today very late, by the way, a quarter of eight, that's when the sun came up. Every time it's a fairly clear day like today. I have the privilege of seeing a view out of my back window over a valley looking into the east, and I watch God get out his paint brushes and paint. And a few weeks ago, I remember very clearly sitting at my little kitchen table, and God began to blow the wind of his spirit over that sky, and he painted it in these brilliant reds, and then dark oranges, and then it got brighter and more yellow, and then there's this sort of purple-y hue that's out there. And it was gorgeous. And I had that day, it was like right in between the Christmas crunch, you know, when we had eight or nine services in three days, and I was feeling like, how are we ever going to do this? And I remember watching the Lord just paint that sunrise. And the thought came into my spirit, and I know it was from the Lord. He said to me, who do you think painted that sunrise? I said, Lord, you did. Do you think I can handle your meetings today? No, I never thought of it. If you did all this, and this is the order that you've fashioned, and you've put it all into place, certainly you're capable of delivering whatever I might need from my puny little meetings. God's able. He's sovereign. And I left that place of prayer that morning. I was just, I mean, it was great. I just knew that the Lord was going to handle it. Dear ones, God's sovereignty tells us that He's in control. He's in control. The second thing that I see there is that the believer said, Lord, we see your sovereignty in the Old Testament. You made fun of nations who mocked you, and plotted and planned against your people. So the second place we see God's sovereignty is in the Word, in the world, and in the Word. And the third place they say we see God's sovereignty is in His Son. In His Son. Look at verse 27 and 28. They conspired against your Son, the Holy Servant, Jesus, whom you anointed. Dear ones, there's no clearer expression of the sovereignty of God than in His Son, Jesus. And I want to say once again, do you know Him? Have you had a revelation of Him? You see, in the world, in the Word, and in the Son, we see God's sovereignty clearly spelled out. And that is the basis of earnest, answered prayer. Rather than just declaring it as being out there, it's time that we begin to live in it. I want to share with you one of my own personal resolutions. May I, for the New Year? I mean this, I mean, this is where I'm at. I've determined before God that this year I'm going to trust His sovereignty like never before, and I'm not going to sweat it. And my theme verse is, Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken. It's Hezekiah 3.16. It was funny today. I mean, I came in today for the service, and our ushers greeted me with this nervous look, kind of shaking a bit, and wondering, well, who's going to tell him first? And they said, Pastor Jay, we don't have communion cups at today's communion center. Now they were expecting me to do what I would have done last year. Wow! You know, I would have been out in the parking lot in my car, running to the bookstore to try to find. I said, hey, it'll work out. I'm sure it'll work out. We'll find out here in about 15 minutes. Blessed are the flexible. God, you're sovereign. You're going to take care of it. Now, that doesn't mean I sit in my hands and do nothing. I lay my plans. I do my best. But dear ones, God is sovereign. I want to just ask you today, do you need to actively learn to let God be in control in your life? Why not learn with me this year to trust Him and His sovereignty? I have to say, it grieves me. I say this not with anger, but with agony today. How many people I know who are looking in all the wrong places for their answers. They're not looking to the God who created the heavens and the earth, who revealed Himself in the Old Testament and in His Son Jesus and in His Word. They're looking to horoscopes. They're looking to self-help books. They're watching Geraldo and Donahue and Jesse Raphael to try to figure out the answers to life. When all along, the Almighty God has said He would show us the way. I just want to say, dear ones, even Christians I know, something happens in their life right away. They're looking for some counselor or some thing, some work. Before you run off to a counselor, and there's nothing wrong with Christian counselors. We have them in our church. Before you do that, why not go to the One who's called the Wonderful Counselor, even Jesus. Let Him speak first of all to your heart. Then follow the leading of the Spirit and you'll find that life will begin to work itself out for you. God deliver us, church, from just the tormenting limitations of seeking the advice of people and the world's ways for doing God's work in our lives, personally and corporately. As the hymn says, Oh what peace we often forfeit. Oh what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry, you say, everything to God in Christ. So the first thing that the believing church did is they stated God's sovereignty. Then secondly, man's soul is stirred. That's the second thing that happened. The second thing is that when they got together, they began to heat up, fire up one another. Now, make no mistake about it, I'm a person that understands the importance of silence and even silence in prayer. I have some Roman Catholicism in my background and some Presbyterianism. Those are two real silent places at times. Far too many of us though need to be freed from the notion that real prayer is just the silent type. It's not really prayer unless you're being quiet. In fact, here something very unique happens. Look at verse 24. Open your Bible. It says when they heard this, they raised their voices together or in one accord to God. The word there in the Greek, to be in one accord, is the Greek word homothumadon. It's a funny word, isn't it? Homothumadon. It's really three words put together. The word homo which means same, the word thumo which is the word from which we get thermal or thermometer, and don which is the ending on that particular word. And it means to have the same heat. And so it's saying that these believers came together and they had the same heat or the same passion of prayer. Boy, that just got me fired up when I read that. I mean, have you ever been in an experience where you kind of came in dragging and people began to pray and you realized, wait a minute, I can begin to, I'm sensing something here. I can get off the dead center where I've been and begin to be lifted by the people around me. That happens to me many mornings, a Tuesday and Friday of prayer when we come together. And I want you to know, dear ones, if you're not in some kind of relationship where there's some heat happening in your prayer life, there's something missing. When's the last time you were homothumadon with your spouse or brother or sister in Christ or a small group or a large group? Something that I would yearn to see happen here that hasn't happened yet is when we finish a song or finish a prayer that we would all raise our voices together in the same heat. I wonder what might happen if the Spirit of God sensed that we were all inviting Him, speaking out loud and together. And when these believers did that, it raised their level of faith. They began to enter in together to see that God would demonstrate His presence. And that is the third thing I want you to see here, that a shaking was started, a shake-up was started, number three. You see, believing corporate prayer is powerful where it really, really counts. The hardest thing about this message is what I'm going to say right now. You see, most of us think about prayer as it applies to one specific person or circumstance. And we say, well, you know, I pray, but I don't see anything happen. Have you ever had that? You know, I prayed about my uncle knowing Christ and it didn't happen. I prayed about my job getting better and it's gotten worse and all those kinds of things. But one of the reasons that happens is we look in the wrong place. Because the Bible clearly tells us that the first thing that happens when we pray is not in the seen realm, but in the unseen realm. On the rock of revelation, I'm going to build a strong and mighty nation. What's the revelation? It's what's happening in the unseen. The Bible very clearly states that there are realms that we don't see that are just as real. That's where prayer has its initial impact. Put up 2 Corinthians, please, 2 Corinthians 10, verses 3, 4, and 5. Go ahead. And here the Bible says, For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons that we fight with are not the weapons of the world. It's not the courts. It's not a lawsuit. It's not anger and temper and threats. No, on the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. That's where the church has its greatest power. Not in the world's ways, but in the heavenly realms. And then, Ephesians 6, please, Debbie. Ephesians 6, verse 12, says, We wrestle not. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood. It's not your boss. It's not your competitor. It's not the politicians. It's not your spouse or your kids. That's not who you wrestle against. But we wrestle against rulers and authorities and against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil. Where? Read it. In the heavenly realms. Now, what is that talking about? What heavenly realms? The ones where God is seated now? No. There's no evil forces there. You mean up there where the stars are? No. Listen. The heavenly realms that I'm talking about, the Bible clearly describes as a third kind of dimension. It's just as real as what we see and touch and feel. It's right here, right now. It's the forces around us that exist, both angelic and demonic. And prayer influences the unseen realm, first of all. And when we get that in our heads, when we get that revelation, then we begin to see God move in a powerful way. And I want you to know that once that happens, then God is free to start the demonstration in the seen realm. Last Sunday, how many of you were here to hear Francis Amphusa? Then he came back in the evening and had a service, and about 300 or more of you came back. And following that service, Francis ministered in what's called the Word of Knowledge. And that is to say that he began to see some things in that unseen realm for individual people. And so he spoke to a man here and a woman here and another person back there. And he went on for maybe 30 minutes, and it was getting a little late, and we had kids and so on. So we dismissed the crowd. But I said, those who really want to wait around and maybe pray just a bit more and see if the Lord would speak a word to them, come sit over in this section over here. And you know, we nearly filled that section. In fact, we did. We had part of this section filled too. About half the crowd, 150 people, stayed on another 45 minutes or so to get a demonstration, some kind of evidence that God saw them. And I'm here to say to you, God wants to give demonstration of His Spirit's power. He wants to bring healing. He wants to bring deliverance. He wants to bring words of wisdom and knowledge. He wants to bring gifts of salvation and reconciliation. But dear ones, it comes after they pray. Notice what it says. Look at it. After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly. Hear me, hear my heart's cry. Church, I marveled last week when Francis shared. I said, you know, it's great that so many people are hungry, but I'm wondering how many more people would God speak to if we just learned to pray? I asked Francis, well, how did you receive that gift? He said, well, you know, when I was a younger Christian, I just got before the Lord over long periods of time, and God began to teach me about that. And I want you to know, God wants to do a shaking in all of our hearts so that He might do a demonstration to the world around us of His reality. How many of you are a candidate for that? Me too. Now I could draw this message to a close, and you might go home and say, well, that's great. I'd like to think about that. But not today. I have a challenge for you today, a very tangible one. I'm going to ask the ushers to get ready right now, please. Some months ago, in fact, it was August, I began to be burdened by the fact that so few of our people were able to come here on Tuesdays and Fridays as a corporate body to pray. Some would show up occasionally. Some came faithfully every week. But I knew, I knew if we were to go on and be the people in this community that God wanted us to be, that there needed to be a prayer breakthrough. And so for a couple of months, I prayed about that and thought about ways to do that. Then I shared some ideas with our elders, and then they've been praying about it for about two months. And I want to share with all of you now, as I did with our leaders last week, about a vision God has given me for what I'm going to call prayer platoons. Why prayer platoons? Why sort of a militaristic kind of picture? Because we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against rulers and authorities and powers of the air. Now a prayer platoon is a very simple little description of a group of people that will meet once a week in any location they choose to pray for 30 minutes for a number of things that we as a church would agree on and a number of things that you as a group would agree on, either personally or for your place of business or wherever it might be. I'm not asking you for three hours of prayer. I'm not asking you to pray all night. How many believe you could pray for 30 minutes if you were really pressed? Let me ask you another question. If there was a prayer meeting where you were, would you go? Well, you'd have to go if there was a prayer meeting where you were. I was just saying if you're listening. If it's where you're working, your place of employment, if it's in your neighborhood, if it's in your home, if it's in your auditorium at school, think about the possibility of having a prayer meeting where you can get there, get your business done in 30 minutes with God and then get back to where you need to be. And multiply it times a couple of hundred or more such groups agreeing on the same thing. I want you to know I believe there'd be a holy shake-up. I believe there'd be something very powerful that would happen. And I'm asking you today to consider making a difference in your life and in the life of this church in 1992 and becoming part of a prayer platoon. As the ushers come now to pass out these cards, would you consider today making a commitment? The car will go by you. Take one. Making a commitment not for the rest of your life, not even for five years, but for 12 weeks to meet once a week. You say, well, why 12 weeks? Will the battle be won? I think some battles will be won by then. But I also recognize that many of you have very busy schedules and things change and commitments need to be adjusted. So just make a 12-week commitment to meet with a group of men or women or a mixed group, students, young people, high school, junior high, whatever. And on that card, it gives you an opportunity to say, yes, I'll be part of a prayer platoon. Or number two, yes, I'd be willing to lead one. And all you need to do to be willing to lead one is to have a place to meet and be willing to follow our guidelines, which is just simply to pray for 30 minutes concerning the things that we share with you each week and not a lot longer. How many of you have ever been in a meeting when they said, yeah, we'll pray for 30 minutes, it ended up being an hour and a half? And one person thought it was really great. That was the person who prayed the whole time. No, that's not going to happen that way. We're just going to agree together. Now here's some good news. As of right now, we have 120 leaders already saying, hey, I'm going to lead a prayer platoon. I believe after this service, we're going to get close to 200 leaders. That means many of you will be invited personally by another person so that Gary might invite Dan and Bill and Keith and so on. If you get invited and it works for you, do it for 12 weeks. That's all we're asking you to do. Each Sunday, we're going to come up here and share answers to prayer. We're going to focus on some major things such as the very critical situation that's developing here in our facility and our parking and all that kind of stuff. How many of you notice that there's something happening next door? Fences are going up, lines are being drawn. What's my verse for the year? Blessed are the flexible. That's going to need to be you, too. All right? Will you consider this? Now please, don't listen to the voices saying, well, I don't know if I can do another thing. Yes, you can. You can do 30 minutes a week. You know you can. Say, well, I'm already in a lot of things. Well, maybe one of those things could be your prayer platoon. If it's your home group or a men's group or whatever, that's okay. But everyone who's not in something like that needs to say to the Lord, Lord, I'm hearing this call, and then respond. Let's stand, shall we?