Daddy I'm Thirsty

We're going to like to just open with a word

of prayer.

As we must invite God to continue being with us.

I know we've already been worshiping and this has been

a blessing to be here already.

But let's pray for God's spirit.

Let's pray for God's spirit and our pastor and his

family as they take some much need at downtime. Let's

pray that God will strengthen them. Heavenly Father, we pray

that you'll continue to be here. We pray that you

will make your word clear to us. Father, we pray

for Pastor Mike and his family. Please bless them, Please

strengthen them, give them joy and fellowship with each other

as they just take some time away from some of

the pressures of work. In Jesus' name, Amen, want you

to start out by imagining something with me. Okay, you're

a young parent. It's just you and two kids in

the car. Alice is three, John is eight, and you're

on a remote, twisting mountain road. Rocks and ruts are

battering the car. You're grinding along toward your camping spot.

Air conditioning is having trouble keeping up, but you're sure

glad you have it because you look at the dashboard

and the dashboard says it's one hundred and twelve degrees outside.

Suddenly you feel and hear a bang. The car lurch

just to stop that rut. That rut was deeper than

you thought it was, and now you're completely stuck. Turn

off the motor and listen. It's so quiet you can

feel it. Okay, they can't. You know, you can't stay here.

Who knows when another car is gonna come. You pull

out your phone call for help, and you look at

the phone and that's not gonna work either. You're far

too remote for using a cell phone. But all right,

you can't stay here. You do remember that back where

you turned off the paved road there was a gas station.

You're gonna have to walk there, so you gather up

some things. You get one of those dirty grocery bags.

You put lots of water bottles in it. You know

you're gonna need that just to keep going. He grabbed

that heavy bag in one hand. You take Alice in

the other. John's gonna have to walk and you start off.

In about twenty minutes, John says, I'm thirsty.

You look at him, he's look a little bit pale.

He's kind of tired.

You can tell you know how dangerous this heat can be.

What is your answer to John?

And as you think about your answer to John, I

want you to think about what God's answer is to

us when we pray for what we need most, when

we pray for connection with Him, for salvation, for the

Holy Spirit.

So do you say option A? No, John, you're not

carrying the water and you don't get to drink.

Any Do you say option B? Maybe later, I'll think

about it, but first beg me for water for a

long long time until I get good and ready and

be nice about it and don't give up, and.

Then maybe maybe. Or do you say option C.

I don't really want to give you water, but I

don't want to watch you die either, so I guess

I'll have to give you some. Or do you say

Option D? Here this one was in the ice box.

Let me help you open it. Which do you think

would be God's answer to you? Jesus told a story

much like that. It's recording the Gospel of Luke, chapter eleven,

verses nine through thirteen. Jesus was telling Jesus was teaching

the people, and he said so I say to you,

ask and it will be given to you. Seek and

you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds.

And to the one who knocks, it will be opened. Now,

which one of you if his father's which one of

you fathers? Will his son ask for a fish? And

instead of a fish he will give him a snake?

Or will he even ask him for an egg? And

his father will give him a scorpion. So if you,

despite being evil, know how to give good gifts to

your children, how much more will your heavenly father give

the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? So courde

to Jesus, if we asked for the Holy Spirit, what

answer do we get? A?

B C or D get D? Right?

In Acts one to eight, Jesus told his followers, you

will receive power when the Holy Spirit has.

Come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses.

Prayer brings the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit comes

in power, prayer works. Jus gave us a related.

Teaching in Luke eighteen.

And while you're looking it up, and I encourage you

to look it up with me this time.

But while you're looking.

Remember that in Jesus' day, women had very little power.

And even less influence.

So if a woman is in this world and she

had and if she had no father to protect her,

no husband to protect her, she was very vulnerable.

Indeed, So here's what Jesus has to say.

Now, he was telling them a parable to show that

at all times they ought to pray and not become discouraged.

So the gospel writer lays it out right in front

of him, says, this is the point. Sometimes you have

to study closely to understand the point of a parable.

But the gospel writer lays this one out right in

front of us. Verse two in a saying in a

certain city there was a judge who did not fear

God and did not respect any person. Now there was

a widow in that city who kept coming to him, saying,

give me justice against my opponent. Now, think about the situation.

Like I said, she's a woman, and on top of that,

she's a widow, and she has an enemy who's trying

to hurt her or do her some sort of injustice.

And to top it all off, she gets a corrupt judge.

It could heart her situation could hardly seem I can't

think of a way to make the situation set up

more hopeless, And yet she persists verse four.

For a while he was unwilling.

But later he said to himself, even though I do

not fear God or respect any person, yet because this.

Widow is bothering me, I will give her justice.

Otherwise by continual comings, she will wear me out. Now,

Jesus sets up a contrast, and what a contrast it is.

In verse six, the Lord said, listen to what the

unrighteous judge said. Now, will not God bring about justice

for his elect to cry to him day and night?

And will he delay long for them?

I tell you he will bring about justice for them quickly. However,

when the son of man comes, will he find faith

on the earth. I don't know if you've noticed. You

may have already noticed here, but there are two contrasting ideas,

two ideas in this parable that seems superficially to contradict

each other. They seem opposite. First, when you look at

verse one. Verse one tells us that we ought always

to pray, and that we mustn't become discouraged.

That means.

We have to keep at it, and it means that

discouragement is a risk. But then when you look at

that last verse, what did he say? He will give

them justice speedily, right, He won't delay, He'll bring us

justice right away. So it would be natural to ask

if God is so willing to give us justice, to

take care of us when we pray, when we ask

him for the Holy Spirit, when we ask for those

spiritual blessings that me need that will change our eternal destiny.

When we ask for those blessings, why do we need

to persist?

And why is discouragement a risk?

If God wants to and will answer us promptly. Well,

the problem here is that while God is at work

right away, the progress what he's doing is not always

visible to us, and many times, while we're seeking God,

discouraging moments can happen. Not because God is unwilling to answer,

not because he's saying no, no, I want you to

keep begging me for a long long time, and then

if I get good and ready, maybe I'll give you.

What you need the most.

It's because he's already working, and then the feature of

the work that he has to start with is such

that it won't always be obvious to us.

Prayer brings power. Prayer works.

Once you come with me on a time travel adventure,

I want to tell you about a time when God

was very much at work, even in a moment of discouragement.

It's June eighteen fifty seven.

We're in a shop in Lower Manhattan. The city around

us bustles with money and finance, with shipbuilding and commerce.

We are in one of many shops offering custom tailored clothing.

But today, today the shop looks desolate. A few odd

pieces of equipment still lie in the corner, and one

man stands in the middle of a large room. His

knee length frock coat is black and stiff, His trousers

are gray, and his top hat is glossy black silk.

Everything fits him perfectly. He must be the proprietor, the

owner of this establishment, this business.

He must be the master tailor. He's holding a key.

He takes a.

Final look around the large room and turns toward the door.

His footsteps echo in the stillness. He steps out into

the sunlight. He closes the door and turns the key in.

The lock for the last time.

His name is Jeremiah in Fear. He has been busy

making money for twenty four years. But now he has

a higher ambition. Now he wants to make a difference.

In the world.

There's a church in Lord Manhattan called the North Dutch Church.

Once it has been a thriving as a gathering place

of the most honored and powerful peace in that part.

Of the city.

But today many of its wealthy members have moved uptown

to escape the industrialization of Lower Manhattan, and the church

is not doing well. The old church is weak, and

this church has appointed land Fair as a missionary to

his own community. Soon he's visiting boarding houses and hotels.

He is inviting people to attend worship services, and he

finds that people are not interested.

He persists, doesn't get very far.

Then in August, things start to change in a way.

You see.

The prosperity of the city started to crumble. In August,

business failures started to cascade week after week and month

after month in what came to be known as the

Panic of eighteen fifty seven.

New Yorkers are terrifying when will all this end?

More and more people are unemployed, people are thinking about survival.

People are angry.

There are disturbances in the streets, but still still they

don't care about a dusty old church and they're not

interested in it's God. Finally, Landfair decided it was time

to stop and refocus. What he was doing wasn't working.

It's time to do something different. He decided, instead of

inviting people to attend worship services, he was going to

just invite people to gather and pray. So he had

some handles printed and he started passing them out in volume,

inviting people to pray at a specific place in time.

September twenty three, eighteen fifty seven, at noon in the

Consistory building on Fulton Street, and many people were invited.

Finally the big day came, and of course Landfeir was there.

He was there alone. The room seemed as desolate as

his shop had seemed on that last day. Finally, after

half an hour, six men trickled in and they did

pray together, and they agreed to pray again the following week.

Words started to go around by word of mouth.

In three weeks and by the third week there were

forty people. In six months there were ten thousand people

and they were praying every day. Similar gatherings began forming

in other cities in America, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The

movement grew into what became known as the Third Great Awakening.

In two years, around a million people gave their lives

to Jesus in the United States alone, a million people.

For a perspective, in eighteen fifty seven, there were only

twenty nine million people in the country.

Those two things here.

The movement started in a parent failure, but prayer brought power.

Prayer works, my friends, because the God that we pray

to is alive. Prayer brought power in Germany in the

eighteenth century. Let's come back in time to Germany seventeen

twenty seven.

It's early in the year and it is cold outside.

It is really cold.

We're in the estate of Count Nicholas von Sinzendorf. There's

a village here in The people here all believe in Jesus.

And they're all Protestants.

But that does not mean they think alike, and it

does not mean they're united.

You see, there are three main groups of people in

this village. There are Lutherans, who of course.

Received their religious instruction handed down from Martin Luther. There

are Reformed Christians there who are loyal to the teachings

of John Calvin. And there are Moravians there refugees from

persecution and more from Protestants from Catholic persecution Moravia. They

are adherents to the teachings of Jan huss As we

move through the village, we might hear bitter arguments.

Maybe about the nature of.

The communion service, maybe about proper forms of worship.

And sometimes all we might hear is.

I see silence. Yes, it's really cold. These people not

only disagree, they despise each other, neighbors, judge each other's spirituality.

And they accused Sinzendorf of harboring heretics. Because those people

don't agree with me, what.

Count Sinsendorf to do?

He called a meeting in May twelve, seventeen twenty seven,

and he had a message.

He had a.

Basically a twofold message for them. He said, Okay, you

don't all have to think alike. I do not insist

that you all agree with each other. I do not

insist that you all agree to any one very specific creed.

But I want everyone here to unite in spiritual unity.

I want everyone here to unite in Christian love for

each other. Is that kind of unity possible even if

we don't completely agree. I think it's essential because we

need to be thinking in the church. We're always gonna

have differences in variations, but we need Christian love.

In the church.

He had a covenant ready to propose for the people

in the village to sign, and if they were to

sign this covenant, they would agree to several things. Among

other things, they were to agree to no divisive arguments

that I'm sure that didn't mean they couldn't study the

Bible together, but they were not to use the Bible

as a weapon to prove I'm right and you're wrong,

and you're a heretic, and you're an evil person because

you disagree with me. They were to stop judging each

other's spiritual purity, and they were to care for the

vulnerable in their community, specifically for widows and orphans. People

thought about that and they willingly signed the covenant, and

that changed the nature the character of that village. They

began living the principles of Christian love, principles that Jesus

taught with the foundation.

Of the entire law of God.

Then on August twenty seven, something else happened, something that

changed the world, but didn't look like it was that

big to start with. You see, forty eight people, twenty

four men and twenty four women, agreed to pray.

They agreed to.

Take turns praying for an hour at a time, so

that someone was always praying twenty four hours a day, every.

Day of the year. They called this a prayer watch.

That prayer meeting did not stop for one hundred years.

Empowered by prayer, that community began sending out missionaries. In

twenty years, that Littel village sent out more missionaries than

all Protestants had sent in the previous two hundred years.

Prayer works. Prayer works because God is alive.

That prayer watch indirectly started another powerful spiritual movement. You see,

in seventeen thirty five, there was an Anglican priest. He

was young, brash, and unconverted. He was traveling to America

to be a missionary to Georgia.

His name was John Wesley.

While he was on the ship, he met some of

those Moravian missionaries, and he made some striking observations about them.

He noticed that they were humble. They were willing to

do chores that no one else.

Would touch, saying it was good for their proud spirits.

They worked in love refusing any reward, and if someone

mistreated them, they would calmly get up, without anger and

without complaint. Even if someone threw them on the deck,

they would move on without retaliation, without bitterness or anger.

And he was really impressed. When a huge storm came up,

water washed over the ship and poured inside. The storm

split the mainsail and started to destroy the ship. His

stomach was in a terrifying nod of fear. Passengers were

screaming the Moravians. The Moravians calmly kept singing psalms. Wesley

spoke to some of them afterwards and found that, yes,

they really were unafraid to die.

There was something different.

About these Christians, something that John Wesley at that time

in his life did not yet have.

When Wesley got to Georgia, things.

Went badly and he remembered the Moravians, and he reached

out to one of their leaders for advice. The leader

who counseled, who counseled Wesley, was not concerned about missionary methods.

He wasn't worried about liturgy or theology. He came to

Wesley with two questions. Two questions questions that we would

do well to ask ourselves. First question, do you know

Jesus Christ? The second question, do you know he has

saved you? Wessey was stunned, He hesitated, He stammered, I

hope he died to save me. Wesley kept working and

things went from bad to worse. You see, he was

he rigidly enforced church dogma in traditions.

He became very unpopular for that.

There was a woman he hoped to marry, and he

hoped to marry her for a long time, and finally

she gave up waiting for him to make up his

mind and she married someone else. That, of course, was

a bitter disappointment, and then Wesley retaliated against the influential

man that she married, started getting himself into deep legal trouble.

Things got so bad that Wesley decided he had to

sneak out of town. In the middle of the night,

he sailed back to England. Back in London, he met

another Moravian missionary, and Peter Boehler. Buler helped Wesley understand

his need for true saving faith, faith in Jesus Christ

alone for salvation. Finally, finally, it dawned on Wesley that

he was unconverted. His impulse was to stop preaching, but

Bohler had another had a different counsel for Wesley. I

think perhaps Bohler knew how much the Holy Spirit works

on our hearts as we unite with him in service.

Boler's counsel was, preach faith until you have it, and

then because you have it, you will preach faith. Still,

Wesley struggled to trust Jesus Christ alone for his salvation.

To give up on his own efforts to purify himself

and make himself good enough for God to put his

faith in time barely on Jesus was so difficult, given

his tradition, given his background in what he had been taught.

But finally, on May twenty fourth, seventeen thirty eight, the

breakthrough came. It was in a Moravian meeting again, when

the Holy Spirit gave him assurance of the salvation that

he had been longing for, the salvation that had so

transformed the lives of those Moravians on the ship. He

wrote later that his heart and his own words had

been strangely warmed. The converted John Wesley went on to

preach more than forty thousand sermons to countless people. He

called people to conversion he called people to a personal

saving relationship with Jesus Christ. By the time he died,

he had organized a movement of one hundred thirty five

thousand members of movement that became the Methodist Church. All

of that was the result of that Moravian prayer. Watch, Friends,

prayer works, let me tell you about one of the

most amazing and effective prayers of all time. For this,

we're gonna go even farther back into history. The air

is filled with shouting, with jeering, with words far too

uncouth to repeat here or anywhere. Three bodies, bloody, wounded

but still alive, or being half dragged up a slope

by a small group of soldiers. The three have been judged.

They've been convicted as criminals. They are rejects from society.

Three crosses are dropped on the ground. Large iron spikes appear.

The hamm arises heavily into the air. The soldiers start

their work and hammer blows mingle with screams and curses

from one prisoner after another. Then it's time for the

soldiers to work on Jesus. He does not scream, he

does not curse the soldiers, but he is saying something.

He's repeating something. Come closer, let's hear what he has

to say. His voice cracks with blinding pain. Now we

can hear them clearly.

Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing.

That prayer took in each of those soldiers, and took

in everyone else whose crimes put him on that cross.

It took in priests and rulers, pagans and Jews, poor

and rich, public and Pharisee. Those words echo down through

the ages to you and me, and they're relevant because

it is my sins.

And it is your sins.

To put Jesus on that cross. You and I if

we have sinned, and we all have, You and I

have that guilt. But Jesus has given us his forgiveness.

It's ours to accept.

Now we may not receive it unless we accept it,

but He has given it.

To us on the cross.

I'd like to tell you a story about how prayer

impacted my own life.

I grew up in a Christian home.

My mother read Bible stories and taught us to pray

such a blessing.

I'm so grateful for that.

As I heard these stories, I realized as a small

child that I had a choice. I could choose to

be loyal to God like some of the people in

the stories we read, or I could choose to rebel

against God.

I could choose to obey or not. And I chose

to obey.

And that was That was what I needed to choose

at that time in my life as a small child.

But I got older and I needed to grow more.

I needed something beyond my childish and praise God. Would

children give their lives to Jesus. But as we get older,

we need to keep growing. You see, I'd been doing

lots of good things. I attended church, I gave ties

and offerings. I went to work for the church in

another cu I tried to be a really good Christian,

and sometimes I have to confess sometimes I thought I was,

but it wasn't enough. You see, the work of salvation

has to go much deeper than sticking good deeds on

the outside of our hopelessly corrupt human nature. I was

like Nicodemus before he met Jesus, or like John Wesley

before his conversion. I was intellectually correct in a lot

of ways. I did a lot of good things. I

agreed with a lot of correct church doctrines. I avoided

doing a lot of bad things. I knew a lot

about Jesus, but I didn't know Jesus. I did not

fully trust in Jesus Christ for my salvation. Somehow, I

thought it was my job to make myself what God

wanted me to be, and I was never able to

get there. Good enough, was never good enough of the

things that I could do for myself. I was in

my late twenties when things came to a head.

I was recently married, My career was crumbling, and I.

Found that building a happy, secure marriage was much harder

than I expected. We attended church together, but that attendance

became sporadic as we got more discouraged. Now I didn't

know it yet, but God was already at work. I

couldn't see the result, but God was already starting to

answer my prayers. And yes, I was still praying, and

the prayers of many people, people who loved me. Around

that time, we found a praying church. In that church,

where people committed to prayer, people with experience and spiritual things,

people who taught about how to have a relationship with God.

Every sermon called our attention to Jesus Christ and his

sacrifice for us. The church prayed together, and they prayed

and more. As time went on, prayer groups started meeting

in the church every morning of the week, before people

went to work, we would gather and pray. There were

times when so many people came that we had to

divide into three groups allow everyone time to pray. Occasionally,

we would set aside weekends for fasting and prayer that

would start on Friday afternoon and end on Sunday morning.

Many people were converted, many were baptized, Some somewhere elders

in our church. Some were from far outside the church.

Many people, many backgrounds, many stories. Just one very simple one.

A man was driving past our church on one of

our prayer weekends. It was Sabbath morning, and he saw,

unusually a large number of cars in the parking lot.

He felt impressed to go in. He did come in,

and he joined the church. I heard the preaching and

the testimonies. I joined the prayers. God was working, God

was getting me ready.

Then one day.

Well, as I was alone at home with my wife,

something happened that I'm really not.

Able to fully describe.

But I can't tell you that God showed me my brokenness,

my pain, and my guilt He showed it to me

in a way that was very personal, and that was

intensely vivid, and yet I feel the gentleness of his love.

There was no shame or fear, just a call for

me to give the whole mess to Jesus, a call

to a freedom that I had never known. I gave

it to him that day. It's never been the same since.

Now.

To be clear, things did not immediately get easy in

my life.

In fact, they got harder.

I had more conflicts and more crises than ever before.

There were crises at work, there was legal trouble, there

was relationship problems. But there was a difference. I was

not facing them alone anymore. I always knew that God

had a way to get me through. My dear friend

heard of the struggles I was going through. After my surrender,

he asked me, do you want to go back?

His was absolutely not.

That freedom, that confidence that He had given me in Christ,

that God had given me in Christ, was worth more

than anything it might ever cost.

You.

See, Jesus had said peace I leave with you. My

peace I give to you. He did not promise this

a life free from trouble. In fact, Jesus, before he left,

he warned his disciples in the world, you will have tribulation.

So the peace that God gives us is not an

external peace. It's something far more precious. You see, when

he went to that cross, he gave up that internal

peace that he had based on perfect righteousness, perfect obedience,

perfect unity with his Father. He gave that up, and

instead he took on our rage, our shame, our guilt,

our sins, and he carried them for us on his cross.

So that we do not have to.

Before the Holy Spirit will take possession, we have to surrender,

We have to consent. Think about it for a moment.

The Holy Spirit is not an influence.

For us to use.

The Holy Spirit is God, and when he comes in,

he comes as God.

He comes to take possession of all that we have

and all that we are, our.

Habits, our attitudes, our addictions, the most painful chapters from

our past. This relationship that he comes in to have

with us is very deep and intensely personal.

There are moments when it hurts.

His healing touch needs to reach the deepest parts of

our soul.

In order to do what he wants to do for us.

This simply will not work without our consent and if

he were to even attempt it by force, it would

be a crime. It would violate us, it would violate

his character of love. The first stage of the Holy

Spirit's work is to call us to repent, us, to

gently help us learn to trust him, to prepare us

for surrender, for complete surrender. He works invisibly like the wind,

and we may not even be aware of it, even

though we are praying, and we could get discouraged. But

Jesus calls us to persist in prayer. Then as we surrender,

he starts working out deep changes in our lives. And surrender,

by the way, is not a one time thing. It's

something we do need to do continually. This is called conversion.

The Bible teaches about it using many many figures speech.

It's called a new birth. It's called death to self.

It's called a new heart. It's called the baptism of

the Holy Spirit. There might be a big moment of

surrender like one I just described, but there must be continual,

daily surrender. You see, the fact that you or I

might have been converted decades ago is not enough for today.

The apostle Paul said, I die daily. That's why Jesus

taught the story taught in the story that we must persist,

We must not give up in discouragement. The key to

victory is surrender. The key to victory with God is

surrender to him. What has the Holy Spirit been calling

for you to surrender? Are you willing for him to

show you? Do you even want to know? Often at

this time of year, people think about things they would

like to change in their lives. Some people will start exercising,

gym memberships and tend to.

Spike in January. They're going to start exercising.

Maybe someone will want to choose to lose twenty pounds.

Maybe someone's deciding to read twelve books, one for each

month of the year. I'm going to improve myself. I'm

going to learn to play the guitar. I'm going to

work on a relationship with someone I love. Here's what

I propose and challenge you with this morning. For this

new year. I challenge you to commit to building a

spiritual relationship with God. In Jesus Christ, we are powerless

to fight sin. We do not have the power to

fight sin, but we do have the privilege to choose.

We can choose God, and we can pray. We can

invite him in. We can give him that permission to

do in us what we can never do for ourselves,

to bring righteousness, to bring healing, to bring transformation to

our souls in the places where we need it most.

So how do we do that? How do we build

a relationship with God? It's very similar to how you

build a relationship with a family member. We listen to

God through his word, We listen to his heart what

he has to say to us, and we share the

deepest secrets of our hearts with him in prayer. And

we share experience with him by engaging with him in ministry,

in ministry through his power, like John Wesley did under

the advice of Peter Bohler. We study and worship with

fellow believers. And by the way, I offer several opportunities

for Bible study fellowship throughout the week. We have Sabbath

School at nine thirty every Sabbath morning. We have prayer

meeting at seven thirty on Wednesday evenings. I'd encourage you

to take advantage of some of those opportunities for fellowship

and prayer. God says in Jeremiah twenty nine thirteen, And

you will seek me and find me when you search

for me with all your heart.

Friends, that's a promise.

And I want to close by promising you on the

authority of God's word, every time you sincerely ask for

his spirit, his answer will be immediate and eager and willing.

Here this one was in the ice box. Let me

help you open it. Will you choose to seek Jesus

Christ this new year? If that is your choice, I'd

like to stand. I'd like you to invite you to

stand with me, and and I'd like to sing a song,

a closing song as a prayer.

And I chiege my mind.

Actually after I put the closing song in the after

I asked for the closing song and the bulletin, I'd

like us to sing together. If you'd like to join

me in this and singing into my heart. Come into

my heart, Lord Jesus, come in to stay