[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: I want to begin tonight with something that I think will probably be made a recurring theme throughout the quarter, and it's a principle, I think, that has to be the very foundation of any study and practice of prayer.
And here's what it is.
Prayer that has real power can be experienced when we have a true and genuine relationship with God.
Because there is not really power in prayer.
The power is in God, and prayer is the conduit to God and to that power.
So that's what we want to deal with.
To me, one of the great tragedies of the Christian life is that if we fail to have a real, true, genuine, authentic relationship with God, then we're left with what I like to call just religion.
Now, I know how we normally use the term religion, but here is the way that I'm going to define it. A sterile, antiseptic belief in God. Okay, we believe God exists, but I don't really have a good relationship with him.
And that's so sterile and it's so unrewarding.
It's kind of like having a brand new car, but you never have the gas to run it, or today the electricity.
You've got it. It's pretty, it's nice.
People will look at it and assume that it's usable and it might really impress people.
But it's just a pretty and expensive hunk of starts, say, metal, but not anymore. It's plastic.
It might really impress people.
Oh, man. Look at Mike Dozier's new car. He's got a new Range Rover, but it looks pretty. But if you can't enjoy the ride or smell the newness inside, it's useless for what we need a car for. And what do we need transportation for? It's to get us from here to there.
And I think sometimes that that kind of relationship or the Lack of it with God is kind of like that.
That's the way religion is. This definition of a sterile, antiseptic belief in God.
It's a belief without a true relationship.
It can't move you anywhere. It looks pretty, but you can't enjoy the ride. You don't get to smell the newness inside.
Belief and mental assent alone is not enough to run our Christian lives, to be what God has called us to be.
So as children of the Almighty, we have to have a relationship with him to fuel our walk with Him.
And yet there's so many Christians that live without that kind of relationship. Now, please understand, this is not an indictment of any of you.
But it's simply, I think, a warning for all of us. And that is that we regularly examine ourselves to be sure that we do have that relationship with Him.
And if we discover that we don't, then to be challenged to do whatever it takes in our hearts and in our lives to develop and to grow that relationship, a deep relationship with Him. Or if at any time we feel that that relationship is deteriorating, that can happen, too, and happens often.
Are we becoming weak that we're willing to do whatever it takes to renew that relationship, to revive the relationship?
Okay. We talk a lot about relationship with God, but how do we have a relationship with Him?
Establishing and maintaining it would be so different than having a relationship with us as human beings, right?
Even the most intimate and close relationships that we have here on the Earth.
So how do we establish and maintain relationships with each other here? How do we establish a relationship with somebody?
Give me some input.
Sorry.
Talk to them. Communication. Okay.
Spend time together.
Okay. Opening up to someone and receiving the compassion. It comes back. Okay.
There has to be verbal dialogue, exchange. You said talking, right? Okay.
We can feel a touch. We can hear their voice. We can see their facial expressions, their body language and so forth.
But we aren't able to experience those same things in the same way with God.
Now we can feel his presence. And we know that his presence is with us because of what His Word says. But I can't look God in the face.
I can't hear with my ears his voice.
So how do we have that relationship with Him? How does it become intimate? That is not always easy to think about.
And there's also the case that so many people, and even some of us as Christians, feel like that God is so far above us that he is unreachable.
And he is God Almighty. And we should never forget that.
But our God is reachable.
He listens to Scripture tells us all the way through that God hears our prayers. And prayer is the way that we get him to listen.
So as we establish and build a relationship with God and maintain a relationship, how do we do it if we can't see his face, literally hear his voice?
How do we establish and maintain a relationship with God?
Alright, through Scripture. And he has revealed Himself to us through Scripture. We'll talk some more about that in a minute. How else interact with his creation? Jeff, what you mean by that Fellowship?
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Okay,
[00:08:05] Speaker B: All right, you made a good point, Joe. We have to believe that the Spirit of God lives within us.
And if he lives within us, then we can feel, and we should try to feel his presence, his literal presence.
How do we establish a relationship with God?
Continually praying. Okay, and that was kind of my partial answer.
Two way communication.
First of all, camping out in God's Word because God reveals Himself to us through His Word. He reveals to us what he wants us to know about Him. I don't think we can ever know everything there is to know about God. And he knows that. And he hasn't revealed it to us because he is so vast and so powerful. But at the same time he has revealed to us in His Word, we what he wants us to know about Him.
And we need to camp out there in order to learn who he is and not just learn who he is, become part of him through the Spirit.
I appreciate that point. And then the second way, it's a two way communication. He communicates with us partially through His Word and then we communicate with, with him back through prayer.
Do you think of other ways that we have that relationship?
One thing that has helped me understand how to have this kind of relationship is through looking at those in Scripture who had a close relationship with God and see kinda how they did it. Okay. And there are a number of good examples in scripture of that. We could think about Abraham, we could, we can think about Noah, we could think about Paul.
But to me, David is the one that I like to look to because we have so much writing from David where he expresses himself in relationship to God.
Let's notice this briefly now. Thinking about David, it's easy for us to immediately go to David's sin with Bathsheba.
And that was a bad mistake.
But David repented of that sin and God forgave him of that sin, just like we can be forgiven of the sins that we commit.
And David is called even after he sinned. He is called a man after God's own heart.
And in fact, Paul calls him that in Acts 13:22. So I think David is a good example of. Of one who had a faithful relationship with God and one that I would like us to draw from and that I would like to draw from.
And we can find much of what of that relationship and how it's described in the Psalms.
Let me give you a couple of passages, a couple of psalms to read.
We're not gonna read those two tonight, but if you would jot those two down or take a picture of the screen or whatever, and read those two during the week and notice how David expresses his relationship with God. And not only does he talk about how he feels towards God, but he talks about how God feels towards him.
And I think that's interesting. And I think one of the most familiar psalms and one that expresses it about as good as any is the 23rd Psalm.
And most of us know that.
I hope that's large enough that you can see. Can you see the text on that? Okay.
I would like for us to recite, all of us together, that psalm tonight. Would you do that with me?
And we're going to recite it from my mother's Bible, because I think it's kind of beautiful.
Okay.
But as we recite it together, I want you to look at and notice how he says his relationship with the Father is and how the Father's relationship is with him. Let's say it together.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. And he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
I anointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Again, go back and read that during the week and notice the relationship.
That's the kind of relationship I want to have with God.
And I'm still working on it. I'm sure I'll work on it the rest of my life.
And I think that that kind of relation. I believe that that kind of relationship will help us greatly with our prayer life, that we don't have to say the words that somebody said from the pulpit last Sunday. We don't have to use the phrases and words that we've heard all of our lives.
We can just talk to God as a friend. Now, I know God is more than a friend. He's almighty God. But he also loves and cares for us, and we can have that kind of relationship with Him. So developing a prayer life that depends on God requires us to have a close relationship with Him.
Now with that foundation, I want to share with you. And Andrew mentioned this last week that the two of us wanted to start off talking about and sharing some prayer stories with you from our own lives.
So I want to do that tonight, if I have time. I hope I do, if time allows. We're going to explore some biblical narrative that go along with some of the prayers that I have prayed, especially on stories one and two and on story three, if we get to that, we'll explore some scriptures in a later class.
But all of these, interestingly enough, have to do with the collective prayer that we talked about last week, which we explored the value of. The first story I want to tell you is about my trip, mine and Sandra's trip to Ukraine in 1995.
I had been to Ukraine two times already, actually three times already. So this was my fourth trip, and it was my wife Sandra's second trip. And we went with a team of eight people.
Now, keep in mind, this is shortly after the old Soviet Union had broken up and Ukraine was still struggling, trying to get out of the communistic type of thinking and ideas.
Now, my first trip was in 1992, and a second one in 93 and then one in 94.
So I knew the people already there, and they were wonderful people.
And I could see them from 10,000 miles away in my mind's eye, thousands of people as they were going up and down those drab, dirty streets in that former Soviet Union country.
And there was a fire that burned in my soul to go back and to tell them about Jesus.
And I think it's kind of ironic. I was able to teach in a language university. And there is a picture of me.
Well, actually I had a little hair then, but I was teaching the Bible right under the pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and Frederick Engels, the establishers of rank communism.
That was pretty cool.
But that's why I wanted to go back.
Well, when we got there, we were going to do a campaign in a little town called Krasny Leman, a little village of 500,000 people.
And they called it a little village because it didn't have an airport.
There had been some other workers there several months before. And a congregation had been established. There were about 20 people. But we wanted to do a campaign.
So we were going to be there for three weeks.
And we had three ladies on the trip.
And they were going to do a vacation Bible school type thing in the daytime.
And then we were going to have preaching and campaign at night in a place they called the palace of Culture.
Oh, my goodness. It was not much of a palace, but we started having crowds. We got out, we got there on a Friday, got up on Saturday morning. We had already taken about a 15 hour train trip on this dilapidated electric train from Kyiv out to where we were over in the eastern part of Ukraine.
And so we got out on Saturday morning, started handing out flyers we'd printed up. And we had been able to do it in Russian.
That's what they were speaking over in the eastern part at that time. You don't speak Russian in Ukraine anymore, you get trouble. But anyway, so we were passing out brochures and inviting people to the campaign.
So we were going to start it. We worshiped with the congregation on Sunday. They were wonderful, sweet people.
And then we started the campaign on Monday. The ladies had the vacation Bible school. And then we had planned to have the campaign at night with preaching and with translators.
But we were supposed to go right away on Monday and register our passports and our visas.
So we all. Everybody was supposed to do your own. So we went to this place they told us to go. Well, when they got there, when we got there, they said, no, this is not the day. You have to come back Wednesday, but you can't do your campaign.
And we said, yeah, we are.
So we went ahead and did it. We were a little bit afraid, and there were some soldiers and policemen kind of milling around, but they never arrested any of us. So we went back on Wednesday and they said, actually, this is not the right place. You've got to go across town and get this done.
So we went over there and they were closed.
Sign on the door. Our translator said, come back, we'll be open Friday. Or whatever. Anyway, we kept going back and forth to places and we were there for almost two weeks and never had gotten our passports and our visas registered.
So we decided that we would just send one of our translators. Finally they told us, you got to go to another town, over to Kramatorsk and get them registered. So we said, we're not shutting the campaign down to do that. That's what they wanted us to do.
So we sent one of our translators over there with all of our passports and all of our visas.
And this guy is not a Christian. He is a nice guy, but wasn't a brother.
Well, he goes over there and he said he registered them. He got back to the train station, he laid his backpack on a table and turned around to get a cup of coffee. And when he turned around, the backpack was gone.
Our visas and our passports were stolen.
Now, one thing you don't do in a communistic minded country is you do not go anywhere, especially if you're a foreigner, without your papers, because you will be arrested and they will never see you again.
So this happened on a Friday night. He came back, he was so scared. He thought we were going to kill him.
We did not. We kind of said, okay, the Lord.
We kind of said, the Lord's going to take care of us.
And so my brother wrote a song. We had come up with a couple of guitars, and he wrote a song to the tune of Folsom Prison Blues about us spending the rest of our lives in a Ukrainian prison.
And those Christians could not believe that we would take it so lightly that we had lost our passports.
By the way, the translator was baptized that night. And we were thankful for that.
So the next day, on Sunday, we met with the church and we told the church members what had happened. They were flabbergasted. They could not believe it. There was a gasp that went up in that congregation. I mean, it was loud and verbal like that. And there were women who immediately dropped to their knees and started praying and crying.
And there were men who stood and started praying for us. They just knew that we were going to be arrested.
We made arrangements that afternoon. We took a bus and went to Kramatorsk to catch the train to go to Kyiv to get our passports replaced.
So we get to Kyiv late Sunday night.
Actually, it was early Monday morning. And they put us out to different homes. And they said, you cannot go outside of this home. If you are caught on the street without your papers, you will be arrested. You have to stay here.
So we stayed with different Christians in Kyiv that night. The next day was July 3rd, and we were going to the American Embassy to get our passports replaced.
So we go to the embassy, and there are long lines to this one window at the edge of the building.
So we stood and we stood and we stood and we stood.
And just before we got up to the window, they closed.
The next day was the 4th of July. This is the American Embassy. And you know, they're not going to work on the 4th of July.
And yet our flight was due out July 5th, early that morning, we had to get our passports replaced.
We really didn't know what we were going to do.
So we went back to those homes again. We communicated with each other. What are we going to do? We decided to go back to the Embassy on the 4th of July. We knew it would be closed.
We are praying all of this time, and the Christians in Kiev were praying. The Christians in Christ and Le Mans were praying earnestly.
And so Fourth of July, we just took a bus and went down, went up to the gate at the American Embassy, and there's this young Marine guard walking his post.
And he said, I'm sorry, we're closed. You can't see anybody today.
So we began to tell him our plight.
And he said, what church are y' all with if you're here doing mission work? We said, we're members of the Church of Christ.
And a big grin came across his face. He said, a brother.
Now, who would have thought?
A Marine guard in Kiev, Ukraine, who's a member of the church. His dad. He said, my dad is a preacher in Glasgow, Kentucky.
He said, you just hold on a minute. I've got to get somebody to take my post. But he said, I'll see what I can do. So he got somebody to take his post. We are all standing out by the embassy there.
And he comes back with a key, and he says, y' all come on in.
He had gotten on the phone and called some of the people. They were partying for the Fourth of July, came in their civvies, and they spent the next four hours getting our passports redone, praise God.
Well, the next morning, we had to be out airport early, but we were supposed to go to what they called over to get our exit visas approved. And it was all the way on the other side of town from the airport.
We didn't have time, so we just said, we're going to the airport and see if they'll let us fly out. And our translators kept saying. The Ukrainians kept saying, they're not going to let you do that. They're not going to let you do that.
We said, well, we don't have time to do this. Our plane leaves at 6:30, whatever it was.
So we went to the airport, and one of the translators, who himself had become a Christian while we were there, he was just wringing his hands.
And so we said, we need to. He said, you need to talk to somebody. He said, let me see what I can do.
And we had already made some calls back here to some congressmen that some of the people on the trip knew to try to make sure that we can get our passports redone when we got to the embassy.
So he said, hold on a minute. So he went up these stairs, knocked on the door. We were down in the lobby watching him, and these two guys come out in suits. And one of the other translators said, those are kbg agents.
And we're seeing Vito talking to them. Okay, here's a picture of Vito right here.
And all of a sudden, well, we see them going, no, shaking their head and doing this and doing that. And he's talking to them. And all of a sudden, both of them take a step back and look at each other.
And then Vito says, come on, come on.
So we grabbed our bags and went through customs or was headed through customs. He came back down the stairs. I said, what did you tell those guys? He said, I told them that your congressmen in the United States were requiring you to be on that plane, and they had to let you go.
You talking about an answer to prayer.
And you have to understand that they do not question their officials.
What those officials say goes. You don't question it. And here is this young guy, he's in his mid-20s, questioning these officials at the airport.
But he was bold. And I asked him, I said, what?
Why did you do that? He said, because of your boldness, I became bold.
And I said, bless your heart.
So we got on the plane. It was.
They had to reopen the door. It was about ready to taxi, but we grabbed our stuff and got on the plane and we made it home.
That was an answer to prayer. But to see those brothers and sisters on their knees crying out to God, that was one of the most wonderful faith building experiences that I have ever had.
My second story has to do with prayer during desperate times.
When I was preaching at the central church in dalton, georgia, just before we moved here, we had a family in the congregation. He was one of our deacons, him and his wife. And they had three small children.
They were on their way back from Chattanooga, which is just 20 miles up the road from Dalton. They had been shopping for school supplies. School was about to start. It was late in the afternoon. They were coming back down Interstate 75, and a drunk guy got on the wrong side and hit them head on.
And they were all very seriously injured. They life flighted all five of them on three different helicopters to Emory hospital in atlanta.
Well, all of this happening, and we find out about it, Me and the elders and two ministers did a zoom call, and we decided we were Going to get the congregation, of course, to pray. And so we sent out an email and text to everybody in the congregation asking them to pray.
This is a family, that their lives are in grave danger.
Do you think my brothers and sisters in that congregation prayed?
Of course we did.
And I suggested that we come up with a list and have 24 hours of continuous prayer and get people to go online and sign up to do at least 15 minutes throughout 24 hours.
We did that and within two hours that list was completely full.
And not only that, there were people, more than one person signing up for every one of those slots. There were multiple people signing up for slots to pray for this family.
Some of the people in the congregation decided that they wanted to come to the church building to pray. Not because you can't pray at home, but they just wanted to be with other Christians. So there were some Christians that came to the church building and they continued to pray.
And then word got out that there were people at the church building. And so some of the people coming to the building were praying in their slots, but they weren't leaving and going back home. They were staying while other people were coming to pray in their slots. And before, around 3 o' clock in the morning, that next morning, there were over 250 people at the church building praying on their knees, crying, begging God to save this family.
Continuous prayer.
Of course, the church continued to pray for days and for weeks.
I'll tell you some more about that in a moment.
The last story I want to tell you, I hope I can. It has to do with my wife and my son.
Most of you know, or many of you know, that my wife passed away in April of 2024 from breast cancer.
And then seven weeks later, my son Ron passed away with brain cancer.
That was and has been the most difficult thing in my life.
As soon as Sandra was diagnosed, we of course started praying and the congregation here started praying. Her name was called in many public prayers. And I know that many individuals continued to pray for San.
And then when Ron was diagnosed, the same thing happened. Ron was a deacon here then.
And we continued to pray.
She took chemo, she took radiation. They tried several different kinds of medication therapies.
They did surgery first, actually did surgery on Ron too, to remove glioblastoma tumor.
But they both continued to decline.
And then on March 30, Sandra had some kind of episode and I had to take her to the emergency room. They admitted her. We had already found out that the cancer had metastasized to the bone several months before, and then now it had metastasized to the liver and to the spleen and some other areas internally.
Sandra and I had talked often about, especially after we knew that she was terminal or thought she might be terminal.
I begged her, when you've had enough, please tell me and I'll let you go.
And every time she would say, but you'll be alone and you'll be lonely, and my girls, my family will be lonely. And I said, I know, but I don't want. We don't want you to suffer.
So she went in the hospital that March 31, and they kept her overnight. Immediately she started declining quickly. Her oxygen levels were dropping, her heart rate was dropping.
By the next day, she was not able to get out of bed by herself.
I sat on the edge of her bed that Monday morning and I asked her, I said, you remember our discussion? I said, you know, I do not want you to go, but when you're ready, would you please tell me?
And she said, I will. But she said, I'm not ready. I said, okay, we'll try to get you better.
So throughout that week, they did everything they knew to do. But she just dropped like a rock.
And by Thursday morning, she couldn't even lift her arms.
They had this huge mask on her that was forcing oxygen in.
And she took my hand and very weakly she said, I can't take it anymore.
And I said the hardest words that I've ever said in my life.
I said, okay, you can go.
So she wanted the family.
We called the family in that night.
Everybody was gathered in the hospital room.
They even Jennifer, even brought Ron, my daughter in law, brought Ron, my son. He was in a wheelchair.
His mental state had gotten really bad. But they pushed him up beside Sander's bed and he took her hand and just as distinctly as he could say. And he had not said much distinctly for several weeks.
He said, mama, if you die tonight, I'll see you in two weeks.
It was seven weeks, but it wasn't long.
And then the next night, Sandra passed away. And I was holding her hand as she took her last breath.
And then seven weeks later, I was holding Ron's hand as he took his last breath.
Now, I'm going to say some things here that may sound strange to you, but with all the prayers that went up on their behalf and all the times that I begged and pleaded on my knees and on my face with God to save their lives, and he didn't choose to do that.
Literally thousands of prayers all over the World had gone up for the both of them.
I needed them. This church needed them. Our family needed them.
I thought, so why does God choose to allow others to live? Some people that aren't even his children in similar circumstances, and not my wife and my son?
Why did they both die?
Why did God not heal them?
I even thought, is it something that I've done?
I remember David in the Old Testament, his sin would be as sheep, but God said that his baby boy wouldn't live.
Did I do something that caused that myself?
Now, I'm not trying to be mean here to you, okay?
But I really don't want to hear your answers to that question that I just posed. Because I've already heard all of them and I've already thought of them myself.
And the answers to those questions may very well be true. Every one of those answers may very well be true. But the bottom line is I still do not understand why God answered the way he did.
So have I lost my desire to pray?
No.
I still pray.
Do I still pray in faith?
Yeah.
I'm not sure why, but I had two choices.
I could either lose my faith in God and say, God doesn't care because we begged and we pled and thousands of people did that and God didn't do what we asked him to do. I can lose my faith in him, or I can choose, even though I still don't understand, I can choose to trust that he knew what was best.
I thought I knew what was best. And maybe that's just what I wanted.
Maybe it was selfish on my part. I don't know.
And I may never understand. I've always said since then, when I get there, I'm going to ask. But maybe by the time I get there, it won't even matter.
Maybe I'll get to see both of them again and it won't matter.
There's only one thing that I can leave you with tonight in regard to that story, and that is this.
And I wasn't able to get to some of the things I wanted to. My stories were too long.
Here it is. Romans 8:28.
For we know that all things work together. Together for good.
To those who love the Lord.
To those who are called according to his purpose.
That's the only thing right now that I can hang my hat on.
God knew what was best, and 10,000 people did not.
But then that's God, and that's us.
Don't let what I have said shake you in any way, okay? Because I still believe that God will do what he knows is best and right.
Whether I understand it or not.
Whether you understand it or not?
Those are my prayer stories.
Maybe there'll be answers one day.
Thank you for listening.
