How To Pray For Encouragement | Becoming A Praying Church, Week 5 | Scott Dyer | New North Church

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With that, let's go right to this week's message.

Well, happy cold Father's Day to everyone.

But you know, it's not good nonetheless.

I grew up on the East Coast.

This is still really weird for me to be a cold, a cold Father's Day, but that's okay.

My name is Scott.

I'm one of the pastors here.

And uh yeah, I'm excited that you guys are all here on this Father's Day morning when you know you could be out playing golf.

I'm I'm horrible at golf, but one day, one day I will have time for that.

Um but yeah, so um today, today we are gonna talk about encouragement.

Who feels like they could need some encouragement in their walk with Jesus this morning?

Anybody?

Okay, that's at least a few hands, and if not, well, hopefully I can persuade you that maybe you actually do.

Um but today the prayer that you just heard was Paul's prayer for encouragement for the church in Thessalonica.

Paul could have prayed for a lot of different things, right?

So why would he pray for encouragement?

Well, I think he prays for encouragement for a few different reasons, but he knows that encouragement is much more than just nice words.

He knows that if a heart remains discouraged for too long, its courage to fight the good fight of faith can evaporate over time and over just times of difficult seasons of life.

And if you've been following Jesus for a while, you know that when you put your faith in Jesus, the difficulties of life don't just magically disappear.

And if anything, maybe they come even more.

And as you get older and older, our bodies start to cause more and more problems, and we have health, all sorts of different issues in our lives that can leave us feeling discouraged.

And Paul knows that one of the greatest ways that the evil one tries to work, that is Satan, is to take advantage of those moments when we're discouraged.

To put little subtle lies into our minds and into our hearts to say, God doesn't really care about me.

God doesn't really care about what I'm going through.

He does not love me.

And so that is why Paul takes encouragement so seriously.

But even if you're here today and you don't call yourself a follower of Jesus just yet, you know what it's like when you feel discouraged.

When it seems like things just haven't been going your way.

And that passion that you used to have for your job, your family, for your marriage has just dwindled and dwindled and dwindled, and you feel like it's about to extinguish.

So my hope for all of us this Father's Day is that God would give us a gift of encouragement today to be able to take with us, no matter how we're feeling about our fathers or the lack thereof, if we had a great one or a not great one, my hope is that this day would be a special day where we can all walk out a little bit higher.

And so if you would join me in praying, praying for yourself that God would encourage your heart this morning.

And praying that God would encourage the hearts of those around you this morning, and that God would encourage and speak through me as well.

Just take one little moment to pray silently.

And all God's people said, Amen, amen.

And so during throughout this series, we've been following the Apostle Paul's example and take a moment to pause and pray for other churches.

And so uh today we want to take a moment and pray for our next door neighbors, who uh Calvary Armenian Church, right up the hill.

And so, if you guys would extend a hand, not towards the stage, but up across to the parking lot as we pray for Calvin to reach out up the hill.

It's that building right there on the other side as we send this prayer of blessing and encouragement over them.

Lord, we want to pray for our neighbors, Calvary Armenian Evangelical Church.

And we ask that you would encourage the hearts of Pastor Calvin and the rest of their church leadership as they seek to do good and to share the love of Christ to the Armenian community here in San Francisco and all over the Bay Area.

In Jesus' mighty, compassionate, and powerful name we pray.

Amen.

Well, thank you guys for praying with me.

I texted Pastor Calvin this morning.

He was very excited to hear that you guys were all praying for him because as we have been learning, we all need more prayer.

And so before we dive in more into this prayer today, I want to give us a little context.

Who were the Thessalonians?

That's a mouthful of a word right there.

And why did they need encouragement?

So the Thessalonians were the church that Paul planted of all places in Thessalonica in what is now modern-day Greece.

Paul planted the church when he was on his second missionary journey.

And when he showed up in Thessalonica, he started going to the synagogue and preaching about Jesus.

And God blessed his ministry that within what tells us three weeks, he started a house church.

I mean, that's pretty successful.

But what also came right alongside that is in within three weeks he stirred up so much persecution that he was run out of town in the middle of the night.

And so now we get these two letters from the apostle Paul of 1st and 2 Thessalonians that are written in, that are written in our Bibles.

And in this context, and Paul is writing in context to what they're going through, there were three different groups of people that were keeping the Thessalonians from remaining encouraged in their faith.

And keeping them from being, trying to keep them from living out their faith to the best way that they could.

The first group of people were the same people that had been persecuting them since day one.

Then the second group of people were people that had been coming to their church gatherings, saying that they were Christians, but then we're saying that Jesus had already returned, that the second coming of Christ had already happened.

And then there was a third group of people, people within their church that were lazy, that were not living out their faith the way that they should, and were causing other people to think that, oh, maybe as a follower of Jesus, I don't really have to do anything or contribute.

And so as Paul's writing to this church that he loves so much that he planted, he bursts into this prayer that we have here.

And Paul prays, May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope.

Encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

And so if you're taking notes today, I want your title to be How to Pray for Encouragement.

And then for the first bullet point for you to write down is Paul begins by acknowledging God as the author of all eternal encouragement and good hope.

See, Paul starts the prayer by reminding himself as well as the Thessalonians that one of the main reasons that we can and should pray for our hearts to be encouraged is because of who God is, what he's done, and what he's going to do as well.

And when Paul addresses God, he addresses God by saying, our Lord Jesus Christ and God our heaven, our Father.

These words are not just simple pleasantries that you would start like saying, sir, or anything like that.

These are important words.

The word Lord, for example, Lord was the word that was used for God all throughout the Old Testament, because Lord means master.

And Paul wants to remind himself when he is praying that Jesus, through whom is praying, is Lord and master over his circumstances as well as the circumstances that he's praying for for that person.

And then when he says, God our father, he's reminding himself and the Thessalonians that God is not just some God up in the sky, some the universe.

God is a God who is our Father.

This is how Jesus taught us to pray after all.

Our Father who art in heaven, our Father.

And then Paul says that both Jesus and our Father have loved us.

And I want you guys to see why both, why these things together are important.

Why it's important to remember that God is both authoritative in our lives as well as loving for us when it comes to encouragement.

See, the tendency for a lot of us when we're going through something difficult, when we're discouraged, is to only listen to people who are going to tell us what we want to hear.

The people or the people on the internet that will make us feel and agree that we're on the right track and we're justified in how we feel.

Sometimes it's a close friend who has begun to hate your boss as much as you hate your boss.

Or maybe it's a therapist who listens to you, which is so great to have someone to process how you're feeling with, but doesn't have the courage to challenge you.

Or maybe when you're discouraged and you're confused about what to do in life, your habit is instead of talking to someone like a parent or someone that you know has loved you for a long time that could speak the truth to you, you just get on your phone, check out ChatGPT, and say, hey, what should I do if I'm feeling this way?

What should I do?

And now, although your friends, your friend may really love you, it's not the same as going to someone who loves you and also has authority and influence, greater influence in your life.

When I was just a few months out of college, uh, anyone just recently out of college?

Anybody?

Yeah?

It's a hard time of life.

When I was 22, I landed my first job as a t as a teacher, and it was the hardest and most discouraging season of my life.

I was, as you can imagine, I didn't have my credentials, so I was at a school where almost all the kids were below the poverty line.

And no matter how hard I tried, my kids were not learning.

I tried everything in the book, everything someone told me, and no success.

Failure, failure, failure, failure is the only thing I could think of in my mind.

And so I go home, get to my dinner table with my family, we start eating, and I would just see just how sad my father was.

I don't think I've ever seen him as sad in my entire life as those nights at the dinner table back when I was just 22.

He could see how distraught I was, how overwhelmed I was, how exhausted I was.

But instead of telling me, Scott, you should just quit, take away all the pain, live from home, and we'll figure out the next thing.

Or instead of saying, you know what, son, you got that job, you're an adult now, you need that salary-paying job if you want to be able to move out of my house.

Instead of saying any of that, most nights he didn't say anything.

But then periodically, he would just say to me, I'm proud of you and I love you.

I'm proud of you and I love you.

And that meant something because his love wasn't a loving and an authoritative love.

It was a love that had raised me since I was a child.

Love that was even sometimes maybe a little bit more tough than I would have liked it to be.

But because he was a man of tough love as well as faithfulness, it meant so much when he would just say, I'm proud of you and I love you.

And he trusted that my heavenly father, whom I was putting my faith in, would eventually guide me to the right thing, which he did.

And so it was because of who I knew my father was that that love meant so much.

And then Paul identifies that our Lord Jesus and God our Father, who have loved them, he identifies what the source and proof of their love is too.

Just like I needed the proof of the love of my father, we need to remember and turn to see the proof of God's love for us.

Paul writes that by his grace he gave us eternal encouragement and a good hope.

And now, as we're talking about encouragement today, I do want you to know that the word for encouragement is also sometimes translated as to comfort.

And Paul is trying to remind the Thessalonians who are going through a hard time, that the proof of the love of God is not in their circumstances, but rather in what God has done for us and what he will do for us.

So one of the temptations for us is when we go through uncomfortable, discouraging, and difficult seasons is to think that God doesn't care about me anymore.

Because he's not taking the pain away that I've asked him to take away 8,000 times.

But this is exactly what Satan wants us to believe: that God doesn't love us, he doesn't care about us.

And Paul is reminding them that the proof of the love of God is not in our circumstances, but in what God has done for us.

And then when Paul says that it was by God's grace that he gave us eternal encouragement, he's pointing back towards the gospel, the eternal encouragement, that God has won eternal salvation for us to be in relationship with him.

The Bible tells us there was nothing good about what we were, who we were, for him to go and do that for us.

But he did, because he loves us.

So we gotta remember that.

That's what Paul is trying to remember.

We can have eternal encouragement if we will but look to the cross.

That is the grace of God that can help us remember that he really does love us.

And then Paul says that the grace that we've been given is an eternal encouragement.

And it's possible that Paul could be talking about the Holy Spirit here, because as I said earlier, the the word that's translated as encouragement can sometimes be translated as to comfort.

And maybe you've heard in some of our series on the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is sometimes known as a comforter.

But it's more likely that Paul is pivoting towards what God will do in the future for all of those who believe in him, because he pairs good encouragement with good hope.

Because remember that one of the reasons that Paul is writing to this church in Thessalonica in Thessalonica right now is because there were people coming and saying Jesus has had already come back, and this was as good as it was ever gonna get.

And Paul wanted to say, no, we have a good encouragement and a good hope that we can still rely on that Jesus is gonna come back for us.

We are not abandoned.

We are not abandoned children.

Our heavenly Father is gonna bring us back and will pay back what anyone has ever done to us.

That's what Paul wants to remind them.

That is the good hope that he wants to remind everyone, all the Thessalonians and himself, before he begins this prayer for encouragement.

And so that's the first point.

Paul begins his prayer for encouragement by acknowledging that the hearers of his prayer are the author of all eternal encouragement itself.

And so now finally Paul gets to the actual prayer.

Paul prays for God to encourage the hearts of the church.

And so now, as we look at what Paul finally asked for, it resonates with so many of these prayers of Paul that we've been looking at.

What sticks out to me personally is not what is in the prayer, but what is not in the prayer.

What he does not ask for.

Paul doesn't ask God to make the persecutions go away.

Paul doesn't ask that their lives would just get easier.

But instead, he prays that their hearts would be encouraged.

So now I want you to pause.

I want you to think.

About the last ten prayers that you've prayed.

How many of them are about making your life or the life of someone that you care about better or easier?

Not gonna make you answer that question.

But I think a lot of us are guilty of praying for like a better job, a better situation, a better boss, a significant other.

Or if you're like me, the nightly prayer that I barely utter and say, Lord Jesus, make my kids sleep through the night.

Amen.

For most of us, these are the prayers that we pray.

And we've been talking about prayer all for a long time in this series, and we and the Bible talks so much about how we are more than welcome to ask God for things.

Our Heavenly Father loves to give good gifts to his children after all, right?

But it's still interesting that that's not what Paul prays for.

Rather than praying for comfort, Paul is praying that the hearts of the Thessalonians would be comforted.

There's an important distinction there.

As someone who's faced plenty of disappointment and lots and lots of issues in his life and struggles and persecutions, and the list goes on, Paul knows that difficult circumstances can discourage our hearts.

But Paul also knows that eliminating a difficult situation won't necessarily guarantee spiritual growth.

But you would think, with the amount of effort that some of us Christians spend on praying to take away more our pain and difficulty, there would be some sort of direct correlation between the ease of life and the depth of our personal relationship with Christ.

But on the contrary, in Paul's letter to the church in Rome, he writes this He says, we can rejoice too when we face, when we run into problems and trials.

For we know that they help us to develop endurance.

And endurance develops strength of character.

Character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.

And this hope will not lead to disappointment.

For we know how dearly God loves us.

See, the goal is for their hearts to be comforted so that they can persevere and live out their faith.

Not just so that their bodies would be comforted, so that they can finally take a deep breath and relax.

And this is what Paul gets at when he concludes his prayer for the Thessalonians.

He says, May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

See, lastly, Paul prays that God would strengthen the church through good deeds and words.

So rather than asking God to give the Thessalonians rest from their persecutions, Paul prays that God would strengthen them through good deeds and words.

I mean, if I'm honest, like I don't really like that prayer.

If that was, if I was one of the Thessalonians and they finally brought this letter from the famous apostle Paul who started our church, and going through the letter, and then he gets to the prayer for us, I'm excited.

Maybe he's gonna have some nice things to say, that he's gonna pray over us.

Maybe I'm thinking, oh man, I hope Paul prays that I would get a Really restful Sabbath or enough money to be able to go on that sabbatical or that vacation that I need because life is so hard right now.

That's what I would have wanted.

But instead, Paul is praying that God would encourage their hearts so that they can keep working?

I mean, come on, Paul.

Like, they have it hard enough already, right?

But the reason that Paul prays for this is because he knows that one of the ways that God encourages our hearts is by seeing God at work in the lives of others.

And by seeing God somehow work in our lives and change us to do things and love people better than we thought we ever could.

And the word that Paul uses that's translated here as strengthen is sometimes translated as to stabilize.

And I think one of the reasons that Paul prays for God to stabilize their faith through word and deed is because he knows that encouragement of our hearts alone through truth is still just a little bit weak.

And this is one of the reasons why later in the letter, Paul tells the Thessalonians to not tolerate people coming into their church and being lazy and mooching off of everyone else.

Because Paul didn't want the Thessalonians just to believe that God loved them.

Of course, he wanted them to believe that.

But he wanted everyone in their community to use that comfort and encouragement that they have in knowing that they're loved by God in order to have the courage to be able to stabilize their faith and strengthen it by one good deed after another and seeing God continue to come through even when it's hard.

But notice here too, Paul doesn't just ask that they would be strengthened through their good deeds, but also through their words.

So in their culture, just as in ours today, it's one thing to do something nice for somebody, right?

Everyone loves someone who does something nice.

It's like, oh good job, you're such a good person.

It's another thing to say, when they ask you about why you did that, to say, well, you know what?

It's because I really love Jesus.

You want to learn about Jesus?

People will look at you like you're crazy sometimes, right?

There's risk when you speak the good news, when you speak the good word.

There can be rejection, fear of being misunderstood or isolated by people at your school or at your work, even outrage by some people.

But Paul knew that if the Thessalonians didn't continue to do good and tell others about Jesus, they would be missing out on one of the primary ways that God also encourages our hearts.

By seeing God use us to advance his kingdom so that other people would know about him.

And if you're in this room and you've ever had the opportunity to share the love of Christ with someone, you told them about Jesus and they accepted it, and they were in tears overwhelmed by the incredible love of God.

You know that there's nothing more encouraging for your heart than to see, wow, God used me to save an eternal soul.

What if Paul didn't tell them to do that?

They would be missing out on opportunities of encouragement.

And I'm convicted in this too, right?

There's plenty of times where I could say something.

And I need to remember that I'm giving up an opportunity for God to use me and for to encourage my heart in a newer and deeper way.

And so that's it.

That's Paul's template for how to pray for encouragement.

Remember that the guy that you're praying to is the author of all eternal encouragement and hope itself.

Ask God to encourage your heart rather than to just make your situation better.

And then ask for God to give you the courage to strengthen your faith as you do good deeds and tell others about him.

And so, if I were to sum up this in one big, big idea for all of us today, it'd be this simple.

Pray for encouragement so that God may strengthen us to boldly live for him, even when life's hard.

So now a few weeks ago, I had one of my proudest dad moments.

I taught my my five-year-old finally learned how to ride a bike.

Um anyone like love that feeling?

It was can anyone remember that?

My my five-year-old, I was so pumped.

So um when I uh when I was growing up, I rode my bike everywhere.

The reason my mom let me borrow her Verizon Keocera cell phone is because I'd rode my bike way too far.

Um and eventually she got me a cell phone because of that, which was awesome when I was 14.

But but for me, the reason I was so excited about her learning how to ride a bike is because for me, a bike symbolizes freedom, fun, all those things.

And so when I bought her a bike with no training wheels uh before she turned four years old for Christmas two years ago, I might have been a little overzealous.

She tried it out that first day, and she she got going a little bit.

You know, I was holding holding her on, and I'd let her go, and then she'd go a little bit and then she'd fall.

And so then the next week I asked her, I was like, Emmy, do you want to try riding the bike this week?

She's like, nah.

And then she would just ride her scooter.

And this persisted for over a year.

Every Saturday, like, I'm like, hey, Emmy, you Saturday, you want to ride your bike?

She's like, no.

And I'm like, inside, I'm like super disappointed.

Um, and then one day I asked her, and she said, okay, I'll try again.

And the same thing happened as the first time.

You know, I was holding on, giving her guidance and encouragement, and let it go, and then she'd fall.

And I'm like, oh man, it's gonna be another two more years before this ever happens.

But then to my surprise, the next day, the next, or the next day, actually, yeah, next day, not even next week, she's like, Daddy, I want to ride my bike.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is awesome.

Holding, trying to keep my you know, enthusiasm down, don't want to throw this off.

And so the same thing happened, you know.

I'd I'd hold on, give her guidance and encouragement, and she would go, and then she'd fall.

But eventually, she figured out how to do it.

And eventually she was a bike rider.

Do we have a video?

Oh, this is me, my proud moment right here.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know.

Give it up for my five-year-old.

Good job.

Good job, Emmy.

Um, but in that moment, I'm not sure if I was more excited about it or she was.

Because I was like, oh my gosh, that year of encouragement and trying to get her to do something that she had now been that she had become afraid of again.

She was able, through my encouragement, to be able to do something that I knew would bring her so much joy and happiness.

And today when I told her I was gonna bring this for her to church, she was like, Can I ride it?

So we wrote it anyway.

She loves it, right?

And you know, I think the way my encouragement for her worked around in her head might have been something like this.

So she gets on the bike the first time, and she's like, Whoa, daddy thinks I can do this, and I'm giving her the encouragement, I let her go, and she falls.

And then this idea plants in her mind.

Oh my gosh, he's crazy! There's no way I can do this.

That is too hard.

And over time, she continues to hear my voice saying, You can do this.

And in her mind, she says, Wow, that guy really thinks I can still do this.

I don't want to hurt myself again, though.

I'm not gonna try that.

I'm not gonna do that.

And she continues to hear my encouragement saying, and thinking, wow, he still thinks I can do this.

Alright, I'll try it again.

And then as her loving, caring father that I am, and I hold on, she gets going, and then I let go.

And she's in her mind, I think she's thinking, wow, I'm doing this, I can do this until that moment where she thinks in herself, wow, I am a bike rider now.

I think that's what it's like for a lot of us when we're discouraged or burned out.

We're tired of looking at God saying, you can do it, because we're like, yeah, right, man, no way.

Or we think, if we're gonna turn to God, we want him to at least take away the possibility of any pain.

Put those training wheels back on at least, God.

But what if God wants to invite all of us to pray to him to encourage our hearts so that one day we might become the people that only he sees we can become right now?

If we would just listen and enter into prayer and allow our Heavenly Father to speak those words of encouragement so that we might become the men and women of God that only He knows that we can be.

So if you guys would just stand with me, we're gonna close in a prayer together.

And if you guys would just hold out your hands to receive this prayer.

Pray along with me.

Lord Jesus Christ and God our Heavenly Father, we thank you for your love, grace, and eternal hope.

We confess that too often we pray for comfort rather than courage.

We ask that you would encourage our hearts today to speak your truth and to serve your people.

Remind us that we are your beloved and that you will always be there to pick us up when we fall.

Amen.

Let's continue in worship.

Hey, thanks for being with us, and we really pray that God spoke to you through his word today.

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Thanks again for joining us.

God bless you, and we'll see you right here next time.