Sunday's message and challenge

Sunday February 23rd This is #5 and #6 in our top ten reasons our prayers aren't answered. Cellphones are a funny thing aren’t they. We love them, we hate them we cannot live without them. They have improved tremendously through the years, we get mad when they don’t work the way we want but truth is they are a lot better than they were. One day about 15 years ago, I was driving to work, we were stuccoing a big house down on Crescent Beach. As we were driving my buddy was on the phone riding shotgun as he lost signal. He was furious, just re-dialed the number and started talking again only to lose signal. Then, he tried my phone and the same thing. I tried to explain it was just a dead area but he wasn’t buying it, that phone should talk when he needs it to. Well, later that day we climbed up a few stories on the scaffolding to get started stuccoing. We worked about 4 hours and we sent one of the guys to get some Gatorades for us at the store a few miles away. The guy jumped into my truck and my buddy realized he didn’t have any cigarettes. He grabbed his cellphone real quick and tried to call him as he got in my truck. The call wouldn’t go through and he got furious, so mad that he chunked his phone over the scaffolding onto the beach a few 100 feet away. He looked at me and said can you believe that, he is right there, right freaking there and I can’t get through what a piece of junk. What I had to explain to him is that the signal from his phone had to be sent to a cellphone tower(at the time there were none in that area) then the cellphone tower would send the signal to the other phone. Prayer is a direct line, there is no dead zone but there are a lot of times that we lift up our prayers but there is no way for the signal to make it back because of things on our side that aren’t right with God. Failure to Heed God’s Law - Prov. 28:9 If anyone turns a deaf ear to my instruction, even their prayers are detestable. Man oh man what sobering words. If we don’t follow God’s word and heed his law, live it and long for it our prayers are detestable. Detestable - causing or deserving strong dislike : deserving to be detested I just finished up a series a few weeks ago on guard rails. Guard rails are there to keep us from driving off the side of a road on steep hills, mountains or along waterways. They are also found in the middle of major interstates to avoid going into oncoming traffic. As Christians we are to read God’s word daily. If we read it, and we study it and apply it we are going to automatically put up our own personal guard rails. The problem is those of us who walk through life without any guard rails, any system for avoiding tempting situations. When I am on a low carb diet I don’t want to be in the same vicinity as pizza, I love pizza and just the smell makes me forget all of my goals, all the mornings of doing the put your too tight pants on dance, the disappointing peaks at the scale and so on. The smell of pizza can do that. Guard rails are there, but they are not fool proof they need to be backed up with an understanding of God’s word. Think about your senses, there are things that they are good for and things that they are bad for. Hearing, hearing is awesome for listening to a conversation with a friend or loved one, awesome for hearing little baby coos and sighs in the night. There are few things more satisfying than me hearing Braelyn sigh and coo or cranking up our race cars both bring soooooo much satisfaction. But, every child in America gets frantic when they hear the sound of an ice cream truck. I mean who decided to put that annoying music on full blast to sell ice cream. Whoever it was, they were genius because P.J. will play in the neighborhood for 8 hours straight without even slowing down, but once that music is playing she is flying through the door headed to her money stash. Detestable that is, to God; not only our ungodly actions, but even our outward exercises of religion, which carry in them some show of goodness and holiness; and particularly our prayers to God, which in upright persons is the delight of the Lord; yet in such an one it will be detested by him; when he is in distress, and shall pray to the Lord, he will not only turn a deaf ear to him, as he has to his law or word, but he will despise him and his prayer; That is painful, in other words if you are living completely contrary to God’s word and God’s law then anything you do from going to church to praying to reading your Bible is detested by God because you are not heeding any of it. Ouch! It also means that God has no desire to listen to our prayers if we intend to go right back to our sin. What God detests here is not the sin we committed but our intentions to go back to it again. I get asked a lot by students when I speak on campuses how they can help their friends get out of abusive or controlling relationships. When I speak I spend one of our sessions giving them all the red flags and warning signs I know of. I just tell them, you cannot make them change their minds and you cannot force them to do anything. All you can do is point out the things that aren’t right and know that eventually they will see them. Point them out every chance you get, the way they are talked to, treated and controlled keep pointing them out every day. If that is the formula to help someone get out of a bad relationship, then what is the formula for us to get out of a bad mindset, or a sinful lifestyle? Allowing God to point out the things that are not consistent with His word and the only way to do that is by reading His word and praying. Failure to remain in Christ - John 15:7 says, "If you abide in me and my word abides in you ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you." The Most Urgent Need of the Western Church What is the most urgent need in the church in America today? Is it the need for purity in sexual matters, in a culture obsessed with sex at almost every turn? Where Christian see nothing wrong with living together before marriage, where adultery is defined and rationalized in ways that are nowhere close to God’s word. Is it integrity and generosity in the financial arena where the "raw worship of Mammon has become so bold, so outrageous, so pervasive in the last ten years that many of us are willing to do almost anything—including sacrificing our children—provided we can buy more" Is the most urgent need more evangelism and church growth—when careful studies show that perhaps 4% of those who make decisions at major crusades are persevering with Christ five years later, and when the increase of church attendance is accompanied by no increase in holiness? Is the most urgent need disciplined, biblical thinking and strong biblical scholarship, when many students and faculty in seminaries and colleges and universities have an extraordinarily shallow knowledge of God, in spite of all their academic work? The greatest need in the Western churches and in America for sure is to know God better. If we knew God better the sexual problems, the integrity and financial and evangelistic needs would all be taken care of automatically. If we prayed more, read our Bibles more and spent more time knowing God it would be much easier to figure out where we went wrong. SO my challenge to us as a church is this: Let's read the BIble together. I put together a one year reading plan that will take us through Psalms, Proverbs and the New Testament by next March. I truly believe if you will just spend this 5 minutes reading GOd's word each day it will transform our ministries and bring us all closer to God and each other.