Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] This is the third week in a sermon series. Call it God Sightings. I've never used that phrase before.
[00:00:07] We use it in vacation Bible camps, so we're using it here. But I think it goes along with a lot of things I have heard Christians say all throughout my life.
[00:00:15] If you've been around Christians very often, you might hear them say something like, I experienced God. I felt God.
[00:00:23] I felt God move, felt God lead me.
[00:00:27] I heard God's voice.
[00:00:30] There are a lot of different sensory words that Christians often use to describe an encounter with God.
[00:00:39] You know, Jesus said, those who have ears to hear, those who have eyes to see.
[00:00:44] And obviously, we're not generally talking about our senses in a biological way, but it's the same way we, you know, any other. Like, we talk about how we talk about our feelings in relation to other people. We don't actually mean that we're touching the other person, but we have feelings for them. We use that sensory language to describe something that happens in our soul very often in a relationship that's deeply meaningful to us.
[00:01:13] And when we say that we see God or that we cite God, that's an important thing to keep in mind that it's not just something like, oh, that's something that I. Something that I just saw. Like, I see that car over there.
[00:01:27] It has.
[00:01:29] When you use those words, you intend to say something deeply meaningful about it.
[00:01:36] To say that I saw God carries with it some weight, some substance to it.
[00:01:43] The first week, we talked about how before we. For many of us, before we ever really came to understand anything about God or Jesus or reading the Bible, prayer or anything, we might have grown up in an environment where adults around us often lived in ways that were normative for Christians.
[00:02:06] These were people that followed Christ and the way that they were husbands and wives, the way that they were dads and moms to us, the way they were neighbors and friends, Sunday school, teachers, whatever. We can remember moments in our life that we look back on now and we'd say, you know, that's not normal all the time. Like, I've been out and around other people, and I've seen the way people treat each other, and that's the way that. The way that I saw these people treat each other was different.
[00:02:38] There's something. Something unique about it.
[00:02:41] You might even say something Christ like about it.
[00:02:46] Looking back, I would say, I think if Jesus had been that person, Jesus would have done that too, you know.
[00:02:56] Well, the.
[00:03:00] The example that we have from people, I think is very important for us to understand what it means to experience God, experiencing God, citing God is almost always, not always God can. God can show up in any way he wants, but he seems to prefer to show up in and among his people, people who are bearing his image, who are have decided to follow him and he wants to cooperate with us in doing his will in the world. And so we see him at work. And this goes back.
[00:03:30] It's not just that these people did it. Those people had mentors or people that they learned from, and they had people they learned and they had people they learned from. And this goes all the way back. It goes all the way back to Christ. And Jesus says, anyone who has seen the Father, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Paul says, if you have, follow me as I follow after Christ. That's where all that comes from. So that was the first week that we see God through the people around us. The second week we talked about how Bible study is intimately important in being able to cite God. That when we look to Scripture, we can see God at work in a way that's kind of separate from our own biases. If I look around and say, if I see something that happens and my heart kind of leaps like, oh, that was really. That was gushy, or that was really nice, I might say, like, oh, I felt God in that. Maybe that all depends on how my spirit was formed. Like, if I happen to find something interesting that God wasn't on all about that he didn't like, well, then I'm calling out something that's God, that's really just my own conscience. And if my conscience isn't formed in a way that's fit to God's conscience, that I'm going to be motivated and moved by things that he's not really interested in. Just like any other relationship you have, you might have values that somebody else doesn't have. And both you two experience the same thing, you laugh at it and they get angry about it because you experience the exact same thing, but you had different values. Just because you have an emotional reaction to a thing doesn't mean that was God's emotional reaction to a thing.
[00:05:01] The Bible is the way that we begin to orient our heart over and over to kind of bring our heart back to understanding what has motivated God all throughout history. It's a story of. It's God's story of his interaction with humanity out throughout history, reconciling humans back to him, bringing our hearts back to his heart.
[00:05:20] So reading the Bible, I think not just reading it to like Bible study, But like to meditate on it and to.
[00:05:27] To let ourselves begin to feel the things God would feel in those stories.
[00:05:32] And when we do that, the Bible reading the Bible doesn't. It ends up being pretty similar to prayer. And that's what I want to talk about this week. I want to talk about how prayer is fundamental in getting us to the point that we regularly see God.
[00:05:51] E.M. bounds is one of my favorite authors. He's an American from like the middle 1800s, little dude, but man, he was feisty. He wrote several books on prayer, and I've read a couple of them. One of them was the Essentials of Prayer. He says this God's entire plan when he's describing prayer. God's entire plan is to take hold of fallen men and to seek to change him and to make him holy.
[00:06:20] God's work is to make holy men out of unholy men.
[00:06:24] This is the very end of Christ's coming into the world. And Then he quotes 1 John 3:8. The one who practices sin is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
[00:06:35] For this purpose, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the devil.
[00:06:41] So when Jesus says, when you've seen the Son, you've seen the Father, it's not just like, oh, look, I've seen God.
[00:06:48] You like, when you read the Bible, when you read the Gospels, when you even read the letters that come up after that describing people's experiences with Jesus, you begin to pick out exactly how God is working out the holiness of unholy men.
[00:07:09] The whole end, that is the whole point in him coming was to make holy people out of unholy people.
[00:07:19] What does this mean?
[00:07:21] Are you holy or are you unholy?
[00:07:26] Are you set apart? Are you the kind of person whose heart is like God's heart, that you respond to the stimulus around you the way God does?
[00:07:44] I remember when I was, oh, gosh, 23ish, something young, and I had the opportunity to. I was a youth minister, and I had the opportunity to go be a youth minister at the church. And they were paying twice as much money, and it was a lot closer to where I live, where I was at seminary.
[00:08:08] And the pastor there was really. He had been really fun to work with. It was like, you know, it made a lot of sense. It made a lot of sense to go there. And I kept.
[00:08:21] And I wanted to do it partly because they wanted me, and that felt really nice.
[00:08:28] And I was talking to Austin about it, and we're like, oh, yeah, sounds really Good. Probably go youth minister. And I said, you know what? I really want to pray about it first, because that's what people say.
[00:08:38] People say, before I make this big decision, I want to pray about it. And I was like, yeah, I should do that.
[00:08:44] I didn't have any idea what that meant, really.
[00:08:48] I was.
[00:08:49] I remember I was in my living room. Allison had just. Allison had gone that day to go see her mom.
[00:08:55] And I was in my living room, and I just started praying, like, God, what do you want me to do? And I started laying out everything like, there's this option, and there's this option, and this is, you know, here's the situation here, and this is the situation there, you know?
[00:09:08] And like, God, what do you want me to do?
[00:09:13] And nothing.
[00:09:17] I didn't hear God at all.
[00:09:19] And I was like, okay.
[00:09:21] The problem is that people. I noticed people who are really, you know, big on prayer, they pray a long time. They pray a lot. And so I just haven't done this long enough.
[00:09:30] So I began to pray some more, and I started praying. I kind of prayed out loud. I was all alone, so I figured I could try a lot of different stuff.
[00:09:38] I got kind of loud. I was kind of like, I don't know, being demonstrative.
[00:09:48] I ended up praying, and I don't.
[00:09:51] I tried to think of different things to talk to God about so that he would respond to me, and I couldn't.
[00:09:58] It all came back down to the same thing. God, what do you want me to do? You know, that was the heart. After everything that I said, what it came down to was, Ann, God, what do you want me to do? And it was like a couple of hours, and I was so tired, and I got to the point that I was kneeling down in front of the sofa with my head on the sofa. And I remember I got to the point that I just. My brain just kind of went blank. It just kind of like I was just done, you know?
[00:10:29] And I remember for the first time, just thinking, God, what do youo want? It was the first time, and I don't even know if it was something that I thought to think, honestly. But I went from thinking, God, what do youo want me to do? To thinking, God, what do youo want?
[00:10:45] And it was. If all of a sudden I could see everything.
[00:10:50] I could see what God wanted at the church I was at. I mean, individual people, like, I could think of.
[00:10:57] I was thinking of this individual kid. I was thinking of some of the kids that I met at the other church, and I was Thinking of the pastors of both places, I was thinking of Allison, like, I was thinking. But I wasn't just thinking.
[00:11:08] I was thinking about what God wanted, what he enjoyed, what he had.
[00:11:14] It was funny, the money, which, like I said, like, when you're talking about making double that amount of money, that's nothing, not nothing. You know, the first one was the first. What I was making was close to nothing. Double nothing you would still not think much of. But it was a lot for me.
[00:11:35] And it was funny because it was just like, he doesn't.
[00:11:39] I felt such a absence of want around the money, if that makes sense. Like, he's got a cattle on a thousand hill. What does, like, a few hundred bucks a week matter? Like, or a month matter? Like, what is. What is that?
[00:11:52] And it wasn't like I was reasoning things through. It's literally like I saw it, and.
[00:12:02] I had the impression that it was like I was in a fabric, and I was a thread in the fabric, and I got to, like, look up over it and got to see the whole pattern of the fabric. And I could see where God could easily put this other person that I knew at this church that was closer to the seminary. There are a lot of people that would love to take that job, and they would be great at it, probably better than me. The one that I was at. Not as many people would want. It's longer, farther away, whatever. But I had an opportunity to, like, help train up some leaders there and things like that. And I remember thinking about all the things that God wanted and where I could fit into that, and where he had so much resources to make what he wanted happening everywhere. And I just saw where I could do the most good in what he wanted. It was just like.
[00:12:48] It was such a relief. I don't know how to describe it. It was like, like I said, I was really tired, you know, And I don't ever. I don't know how much of all that was a part of it, but I will say this.
[00:13:02] I had such clarity that I knew exactly what I should do. And I spent the next two years at the church that I was at just, like, helping the people that were in that church kind of become the next small. The next youth group leaders and all that kind of.
[00:13:19] It was wonderful. And as a result, God put me in a position to come here and start a church. I doubt that would have happened if I had moved over to the other church as a youth minister. Like, everything that happened afterward, I'm guessing, happened as a result of praying till I heard from God.
[00:13:38] It was such a rigorous, difficult experience that I was like, I am not going to pray like this unless it's really important.
[00:13:46] It was so hard.
[00:13:48] It was so hard.
[00:13:51] Then later, I.
[00:13:53] Part of it was something I read from Dallas Willard and some other people taught me how to pray, how to pay attention to what God wants.
[00:14:09] And I will say that before all this, I would have thought holiness was about being a good person.
[00:14:16] And I think holiness is just about agreeing with God. It's just, God is holy. So I'm not holy.
[00:14:25] God comes to make humans holy, not by making us, like, better.
[00:14:29] I'm not a better person than I was.
[00:14:32] I just.
[00:14:34] I just know how to pray now. I just know how to hear God. Does that make sense? And so our holiness isn't about God's. Holiness is wrapped up in who he is. Our holiness is contingent on the relationship that we have with him. So when Ian Bounds talks about that God's whole work is to come and make holy men out of unholy men. It's not that he's making you into something on your own that's holy.
[00:15:09] He is bringing you to a point of relationship in prayer so that you. You can agree with God about what God wants.
[00:15:18] And I think that is the preeminent aspect of prayer. This is what learning to pray has been helpful for me in. And just about everyone else that I've ever talked to as they've grown in Christ, they would say something similar about. About prayer.
[00:15:41] Ian Bounds goes on to say this.
[00:15:45] The world judges religion not by what the Bible says, but by how Christians live.
[00:15:52] Christians are the Bible which sinners read.
[00:15:56] When we talk about seeing God, we are talking about, for the most part, seeing holy men and women.
[00:16:05] You are always bearing testimony about God. You're either lying about God or you're telling the truth about God. In Christian circles, we talk about, I'm gonna share my testimony. And usually when we share a testimony, we mean some moment where something happened that was, like, really special, where we experienced God in a powerful way. But the truth is, your life is always bearing testimony of God.
[00:16:26] You are a son or a daughter of God. Your life is the testimony. It is the way that you live that is testifying about God at all times. And so prayer organs our heart to agree with God, to act on what we begin to see in God and that we begin to be the revelation of God in the world. The church has been called to be the place that cites God.
[00:16:56] Where is the world going to see God among God's people living out God's will and God's purposes.
[00:17:04] So this is the heart of what prayer is about. This is when we go to God in prayer, we're not going looking for goodies.
[00:17:13] This isn't a magic act where we get to get some power. Like, it's not like Jesus is electricity and we've learned how to harness electricity. It's not like that.
[00:17:26] He's not magic. He's not just some power.
[00:17:29] He is the good. He is holy.
[00:17:33] And to see God means that humans in the world are agreeing with God.
[00:17:41] I wanted to look at how this happens out of Matthew chapter 6, where Jesus describes prayer.
[00:17:48] Jesus says Jesus tells his disciples how to pray in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew chapter six, starting with verse seven. He says, your father knows what you need before you ask him. Okay, Before I get any further, just appreciate that your father knows what you need before you ask him.
[00:18:12] When you pray, he says, don't go rambling on. And, like, don't think like, I did that. I was just getting my. I felt like I needed to get my, like, prayer right. I needed to get what I was asking. I needed to get this right so that he could understand. I don't know what I was trying to do, but I was kind of rambling on in my prayer, trying to get a connection with God.
[00:18:34] That's so ignorant now that I think about it. Like, he knew what I needed not just before me, but better than me. It's even weird for me sometimes to think, like, I'm gonna go to God.
[00:18:47] God, please do this thing that I want you to do. God's like, maybe, you know, like, it's kind of like going to somebody that knows a whole lot more than you about a particular topic and you telling them that they should do something the way you think it should be done. And you're like, no, I've been building websites my whole life. I think this is how I do it. You know, like, you don't know anything about this. You know, Like, I kind of feel like that sometimes because he not only knows what I need before he knows what I need better.
[00:19:19] And so when I pray, I am revealing to God.
[00:19:24] I am confessing to God what I believe and feel about things.
[00:19:30] This person that I care about is hurting. He's got kids, and it's scary to me to think about how his kids are gonna do if he doesn't get better. You know, like, when I. When I. I pray, I am praying that he's healed, but I'm not praying with the idea that I am wiser than God about the way things should go, does that make sense? Do you see the difference there?
[00:19:56] Anyway, when I go to the Father, I recognize that he knows what's needed before and better than me.
[00:20:04] So there's a certain degree of humility that isn't like I'm just lowering myself. I'm just recognizing the proper stance that I'm having with God. He is God, and I'm not.
[00:20:17] So as a result of that, he says, pray this way. Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. My whole goal in coming here, my whole. My whole goal in voicing any prayer to you at all, God is first. Whatever else occurs, I pray that the confession, the testimony of you is holy. Not just like out there, but in me. So when I'm asking that God's name is kept holy, I'm asking that my testimony, his name on my lips, the confession of who he is, speaks to his goodness.
[00:21:00] Whatever else I pray, whatever comes to this prayer, my prayer is that you are holy. Because I know that without your holiness being first in my life, nothing else that I pray or ask for is going to be any good for me or anyone else.
[00:21:15] The holiness of God is the seat from which anything good can come from my prayer. And so if I don't agree with God, if I'm not aligned to be holy in the way that God's holy, if.
[00:21:27] If his name isn't being made holy, then it's a waste of my time to be praying in the first place.
[00:21:36] He knows what I need more than I possibly could before I could. Whatever else is about to happen. God, I pray that your name is holy. Like I can't make him not be holy. He is holy. But I pray that the confession, whatever comes of me, his, his name is kept holy.
[00:21:58] This is the root of the start of my prayer.
[00:22:02] Asking that God act in such a way that he visibly demonstrates his holiness.
[00:22:13] Not how.
[00:22:14] Not that I've got worked out how he needs to demonstrate his holiness, but that his holiness is a result of whatever comes with this prayer.
[00:22:25] Then he says, Jesus says, may your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is literally asking for a God siding.
[00:22:38] May your kingdom come. God's kingdom is wherever God's will is happening. Just that's true of any king. A kingdom is where the will of the king is being done. So may your kingdom come means.
[00:22:52] I want it to be obvious, I want it to be clear that what you want is happening. May your kingdom Come, may your will be done here in this sloppy mess around me, the way that I know it exists eternally in your kingdom.
[00:23:11] In this prayer, my goal is that you are visible.
[00:23:19] Whatever comes of this will be a God sighting, will be a God experience, will be God knowledge, will be God awareness, whatever word you want to use.
[00:23:30] But I am praying that your work becomes obvious here on earth as it is in heaven. And then he says this.
[00:23:41] Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.
[00:23:49] Now I want you to look, this is what Jesus is saying. I'm praying that God will.
[00:23:54] That God will give us our daily bread, that he'll be the one that sustains us, that he will forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. But look at this from your side as the one praying. What's happening here?
[00:24:05] God is providing your daily bread as you are praying this, as you are praying.
[00:24:11] God, provide my needs.
[00:24:13] Your brain in that prayer can't help but be thinking about the ways that God has provided your needs and what will happen in that prayer. Is gratitude essential to the prayer where you're asking for God's revelation to occur? Gratitude will take place.
[00:24:29] God, I pray that you provide for me.
[00:24:33] Your brain won't be able to help but think about the hundreds of times that he's provided. A lot of times that you didn't even think about things that you didn't register in the moment. But like when you, when you stop and meditate, has God provided? When has God provided? How has God provided? There'd be so many moments where you're like, I didn't even see that.
[00:24:51] And there's a welling up of gratitude that takes place.
[00:24:56] Similar thing happens when you ask God to forgive us our debts. You, you begin to think about the ways that you have sinned, where you've missed the mark, where you've created. Maybe you want to call it indebted to God. I don't know how you want to think about it.
[00:25:18] If you're praying honestly, your brain will think about the things that you've done, where you've missed the mark, that moment that you had, that opportunity that you had with your spouse, where you responded in a way that was hurtful because you felt justified in the moment, or that time that you acted that way at work because again, you felt justified in it.
[00:25:46] You were tired and you neglected your kid that moment. And you wish you had that moment back because you would have loved to have told them this one thing that you think would have made the difference.
[00:25:56] There are these moments that you'll remember and you will find yourself confessing those sins in your prayer as you're praying that God's name is made holy in your life, that your life, your very life, is the Testament is the Bible that the people around you read. And you are praying that his name is made holy and that his kingdom comes.
[00:26:19] And you're praying in gratitude for all that he's given you and confessing the ways that you've missed the mark, the indebtedness that you have to Him.
[00:26:27] A big chunk of prayer will be praising God in gratitude and confessing to God in your sins.
[00:26:37] This is something that is normative among Christians and the same way that your conversation with your spouse might look different than my conversation with my spouse or whatever, the way that the details, the way that you pray will be different, but the basics will still be there. You will be asking that God's will be done.
[00:26:57] You want him to be made holy. You want his kingdom to be obvious.
[00:27:03] You will be noticing things that he's done for you, that you're grateful. You will be noticing, remembering the things that you need to confess. And this act of submission to God in His kingdom, praising God and confessing is the process of holiness.
[00:27:22] That entire process is where our hearts and mind become fit to His. We begin seeing the world the way he sees it. We see the things that he's done for us and we're grateful to Him. We've seen the ways that we have separated ourselves from him and we ask for forgiveness and we literally desire to be closer to him in those ways.
[00:27:42] That whole act of prayer generates in us a closeness to Him. And then he says this, he says, as we have forgiven our debtors, so in this act of prayer, we are grateful, we confess and we forgive.
[00:28:00] Even as you're praying, you begin thinking of the people.
[00:28:04] It's very tough to have a self righteous indignation and anger towards somebody else that's done something wrong to you as you were in the act of confessing your own sins.
[00:28:16] All this happens at the same time as you are deeply aware of the ways you've missed the mark. And he says, and in your prayer you're thinking about the people who have missed the mark towards you. In the same way that you have been humbled as you've confessed and received God's forgiveness as you've confessed, you become oriented towards forgiving other people.
[00:28:37] This isn't even like, And I hate to, you know, maybe I don't. If you haven't done it before. I don't know. But honestly, if you've been doing it for a while, it's not even like something you try to do.
[00:28:50] It's like you don't go to the Grand Canyon and try to be in awe of it.
[00:28:55] It's what happens when you go to the Grand Canyon, right?
[00:28:59] When you go to God and you are grateful. When you go to God and confess, you find yourself forgiving other people.
[00:29:08] You're just simply not in a position to hold that righteous judgment over the other person when you're in this state.
[00:29:16] This is what happens in prayer.
[00:29:19] It's not that you are holy in yourself. It's not that you are like this better person.
[00:29:24] You simply submitted yourself to the one that is holy. And as a result, you are agreeing with him about what he wants in the world. You're becoming like him in prayer.
[00:29:34] And then he says, do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Recognizing that I have a vulnerability, I am easily.
[00:29:45] It's very easy for my brain to distort good from bad and to begin to think, this thing seems good to me and so it must be good in the world. If it seems good to me, then God must agree that that's good. How could a loving God fill in the blank? Because we've already decided that our brain is so sufficient to figure out that a loving God must act the way that we assume that he should act.
[00:30:09] I don't want to be led to be tempted to think that I have the capacity to be able to tell God how things should work in the world.
[00:30:21] Don't lead me into temptation. I know that the lies around me are easily find their foothold in me.
[00:30:29] I need you to be my North Star. And I need to submit to you and to trust you. Because I honestly can't trust anyone else, least of all myself.
[00:30:40] This kind of is the. This is the stuff behind.
[00:30:44] A lot of times we read the Sermon on the Mount, we read the Lord's Prayer, and we think like, okay, we're thinking about, like doing these things, but we don't think about like, what is the heart, what is the person generated in the act of actually praying like this Necessarily, you are humble. Necessarily, you are grateful. Necessarily, you are confessing. Necessarily you are forgiving. Necessarily you are looking to God because you don't trust yourself.
[00:31:17] This is what happens in prayer.
[00:31:20] When a person begins to interact with God this way, they begin to be a person that other people will see God in. And I don't mean like you don't become God. It's not like you. I'm going to be very clear.
[00:31:37] You are not, in yourself, holy.
[00:31:40] Your holiness is contingent on the degree to which you are agreeing with God. Inasmuch as you are agreeing with God, you are revealing God. Like I agree with God about the way things should happen right now.
[00:31:52] When I talk to you next, if I step down here, whatever happens next, if I agree with God about that and I act on that thing, you have experienced God acting. Because I have agreed with God and have lived, have done what God would do if he were me.
[00:32:07] If Jesus were animating my very body, what would he do with it in this moment?
[00:32:12] That if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. Paul says, follow me as I follow after Christ, we become where people are able to see God.
[00:32:26] When we look around and we see people around us before us following God. When we read the Bible to really understand it, to submit to it, and when we really begin to pray next week, I'm going to finish it out looking at circumstances, and this is usually what people think about when they talk about seeing God. I saw God. God in the circumstance, this thing that happened that was very unique and interesting, that could have only been from God. That's usually what people think about. And it's true, we're going to look at that. But all of this, I felt, was important to really get to understand what's really happening in those moments and truly how special those moments are and where we fit into them.
[00:33:06] Let's pray, Father. God, I pray that.
[00:33:12] That we are a holy people, Lord, that we are your bride, that we are your church, God, not because we are good, but because we recognize that we are deficient and we are in need of our Savior.
[00:33:27] Father, we need you. We need the salvation that you've offered. And so we follow you, we trust you.
[00:33:34] We ask to see what you see.
[00:33:36] And Lord, whatever you want.
[00:33:38] Lord, give us the humility to want your wants so we can participate in your kingdom.
[00:33:46] We love you, Lord. Amen.
