Sunday Mornings | Prayer | Part 2

Thank you for listening to the Kelowna Christian Center Podcast.

Our desire is that today's message will be fresh and encouraging to you.

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Welcome to KCC.

We're glad you're all here.

Today it's good.

We call this the house of the Lord.

This isn't just a this isn't just a building, any building.

This is a building where the where the church assembles.

The church comes together.

And when we come together, there's a common unity, there's a community here.

There's a place where we have faith and we believe for for people.

We believe for uh for if you're going through obstacles or you're facing obstacles, you're going through challenges.

This is a place where we believe for you.

We believe with you.

We help carry you through.

I know right now we still have, continue to have people that we're praying for who are experiencing sickness and disease.

And we're just continuing to believe, amen, for full healing for our family, for our teams here.

Well, I hope you've been enjoying this uh the start of this new year as we've been focusing on prayer.

Uh we're entering into the now our final week of 21 days of prayer.

Starting, we started January 1st and just challenging the church and challenging us together to be reminded of the pray first mentality.

That what we do when we wake up, when we face an obstacle, when we're uh addressing a challenge, our first thought is you know what, I'm not gonna try and do this in my own strength.

I'm gonna go to God first.

I'm gonna pray first.

I'm gonna go to him because he's the one who has the answers, he's the one who knows before I even know.

He knows what I'm going through.

He's there to support, to counsel, to instruct me, to help me.

And so I go to him first.

So we're praying first, and and uh sometimes we resist actually talking about prayer in church because uh people assume that when you come to church, you ought to know how to pray.

That should be like where we all have like a little star on our book prayer check.

We all know how to pray.

And the fact is, many of us don't know how to pray, but we're not gonna admit it because we don't want to show our ignorance at all.

Even Jesus' disciples, his students, went to Jesus and said, Jesus, how do we pray?

John's, the prophet John, he even had his students who came to him and said, John, teach us how to pray.

If it was good enough for the disciples, if it was good enough for John's disciples, it's good enough for us.

We have to say, okay, let's be reminded here.

How do we pray?

How many of you have been to the dentist?

And they say, This is how you floss, and you're like, I'm 40.

I know how to floss.

Well, I don't know.

I'm watching, I'm looking at those teeth of yours.

You know how to brush?

You know, a dentist talk, they said, How are you brushing?

I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like, I'm not like, is this so that I can instruct my children, of course, right?

And she's like, no, you have to turn the toothbrush, the bristles, up towards the gums.

I'm like, what?

No, you just put the toothbrush in there and give her, right?

No, there's a way to brush your teeth.

Uh there's a way to pray.

There's a way to approach God.

When you approach God, you come into his presence with what?

Thanksgiving.

Giving him praise, giving him thanks.

When you approach him, you approach him with a general heart of thanksgiving.

There's a way in a process.

Um, I have a daughter.

How many of you have daughters?

They're different than sons.

Daughters are just like amazing.

I'm looking at Mike Daigle there.

How many of you got Mike?

Four.

That's right.

Four daughters.

And De Sada, you're the one who really deserves the credit for that, right?

But um, when you're with a daughter, and you know, she's not only my daughter, but she's my firstborn.

And so she's perfect.

She was perfect from the day she was born.

She's definitely different, though, than my two younger sons.

Uh, you go on the iPad, like I open my iPad, and I know when my sons have been on my iPad because all it's like Minecraft, Nerf guns, Lego, they're like learning how to do all these things.

And Evangeline, however, is a little bit more intelligent and developed in her interests.

More mature.

She doesn't seek out those types of things.

She wants to be in the know.

What's happening in the world?

And so, and I think it's a little bit of a girl thing, but she makes sure to share with me everything that she knows.

She's going to inform me of her wealth of knowledge.

And I've just learned that this is my life now.

I'm going to be taught by my daughter life, right?

And uh the other day, for example, we were watching a movie, we were having pizza and movie night, and uh she chose a movie, and as we're watching this movie, she begins to share with me the story behind the story, and share with me all of the little Easter eggs.

You know what those are?

All the girls can raise their hands, like, this is the story behind the story, this is what's going on.

Because she knew all the detail behind what I was just watching and enjoying at the moment.

She was going to inform me of all this information that was going on.

Uh the boys and I, we just realized that this is what we've got to do.

She'll point out things that we often overlook, and she'll make sure that we know that we that we know that we didn't know, and that she informed us of it.

Um this is her new favorite thing, uh, pointing out specific things within logos.

I've got one logo up here.

Every time we drive down the highway and we pass this first logo, uh Staples, she tells us that did you know that the L in Staples is actually a staple?

Every time we're going down the road, do you know how many of you didn't see that though?

See, now I'm informing you, and I get a little bit of that feeling that my daughter gets all the time.

It's like, yes, that's right.

Come to me with all your information now, and I'll fill you in.

But the staples, you know you've got that staples.

Another one that she's she's pointed out is 7-11.

Now, if you look at this 7-11, she mentions that do you notice that all the letters are capitalized except for the N?

And now my OCD is just cranking like at level 10.

I'm like, I want to know who's responsible for that, why they did that, to torment me now every time I'm driving down the highway.

I, but now when I'm driving with people, I'm like, hey, look, check that out.

Do you notice that the N is in a capital letter?

And she just says, Oh, and I'm hoping someone has information as to why it is a lowercase N.

But these aha moments, or the special information, she knows and has knowledge of that I don't have knowledge of.

And uh, it makes her feel important, now it makes me feel important.

Now you can make other people help them make you feel important, right?

But I want to throw something out there for you today.

Put this on your radar that maybe it's possible that what you see every day isn't everything that is there.

Let the bomb drop there.

What are you missing out on every day?

What you see every day may not be everything that is actually there.

Could it be that you look at something perhaps a thousand times and maybe what is really there and what you see that's there are two different things.

Um, you may have seen this a hundred times.

Uh it's uh it's a FedEx logo.

Now, FedEx has a great story behind this.

FedEx is uh was when they were designing this logo, they had 200 applications come in for this logo.

Um, of these 200 applications, uh they they were trying to assess whether they should rebrand because the customer base was was starting to just call them from Federal Express, was shortening it to FedEx, Feder FedEx.

And so the company was like, man, what do we do?

Do we fight this cultural trend or do we just embrace it?

So they wanted to just initiate what we should do or what we should do with this uh um this idea.

So these 200, um, these 200 logos got narrowed down to five logos, and they came before the CEO, uh, Fred Smith, and as he walks into the room, um he's thinking about FedEx, FedEx, like people were even saying, hey, I'm gonna FedEx this to you, when they were like using Canada Post or like uh you know the UPS or something like that.

They were they were saying less FedEx, it's like Google.

I'll I'll just Google that, but you might use Bing or whatever it may be.

No one uses Bing.

But anyways, but they were saying FedEx, FedEx, and they were thinking about this, but as they were beginning to think about this, this logo at the time, the Fred um Fred Smith walks in and he says, Listen, I see this logo and I want that logo.

And they look at the logo and everyone's looking at different logos and they're assessing it, and they're saying, Man, I don't know about that logo.

Like, why that one of all the other ones?

He goes, Well, I like that one because of the arrow in it.

Now the arrow has been there every time you've seen it.

Between the E and the X.

You guys see it, right?

The E and the X.

That logo, that arrow has been there for a hundred times you've seen it.

It's never moved.

They've never changed it, never adjusted it.

It's he walks, he goes, I like that one.

It's got the arrow in it.

And it's there.

Now, how many of you still don't see it?

I see kids like telling their parents, hey, dad, can you keep looking?

Between the E and the X, I don't know how to tell you this right here.

Some of you are still looking at it a little bewildered.

But you may, it's possible that you're actually seeing what you see in your life and what you think you're seeing are two different things.

What's actually talking to you, what's actually speaking to you.

Now, if you jump with me into the Bible today, there's some prayers which Jesus prayed.

Some of them we talked about last week, uh, one of them being the Lord's Prayer, but there are also prayers that were prayed by others.

Uh, and those, uh, there's one of those is by Paul, who was, who wrote a large part of the the letters we read in the Bible, and he wrote this letter in a prison in Rome during his first imprisonment.

And it was written to the church of Ephesus, to the Ephesians church.

And let me read it to you today.

Ephesians chapter 1, verse 17.

Ephesians 1:17

It says this I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, in order that you may know the hope to which he's called you to, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power towards us who believe.

So Prol's prayer for us was that we would begin to live our lives with a revelation and a knowledge of the hope, the riches, and the life that God has given to us and the power and his ability to operate on our behalf.

His prayer is this that we would see that nothing is impossible with God.

We would see that our God is a God of miracles, that we would see that God has enough power and ability to forgive any sin and restore any life, that we would see his provision, that we would see his interaction in our life, that we would see him active in our lives.

That is Paul's prayer.

See his activity.

Now, how do we see it?

The only way we can see this is that if our eyes of our heart become enlightened and we begin to look at what's not there.

Have eyes to see what can't be seen.

The only way to accomplish this is this way.

Now, this year we had uh some money that had been collecting an account.

My wife works at a bank, so she spends her time sub separating all of her accounts, and one of those uh account accounts that she has is uh sub-accounts, I should say.

She doesn't have multiple accounts like all over the world, but a sub-account that she has was uh was for her, uh was for her in particular.

Now, uh ever since I've known her, she's been wearing uh contact lenses.

Ever since I've known her, she's worn contact lenses.

Without these lenses in her eyes, she was like virtually blind.

Uh the reason she never wore her glasses is because her glasses were actually very heavy.

They were they were very thick, right?

Pardon me?

Yes, they were.

They actually made her neck sore.

They would just drag her head.

I have a picture today.

Um no, I don't, Matt.

I'm sorry.

I had to play with her today.

But she would need help.

If she went to bed, she took her eyes out.

That's what she said.

I take my eyes out.

I think the first time my kids heard that, they were like, What?

Like, she took her eyes out, and she was out like she was blind.

She didn't know when it was morning time.

Like she'd wake up and be like, that's she's looking at me now like I'm in trouble.

But but it came to a place where our hope was after we had kids, and uh, she had kid uh she was able to have them.

Um she would be a candidate for laser eye surgery because they had to wait till you were done having kids.

You could actually have laser eye surgery.

So before you go into surgery, they actually take you through this orientation process.

And I'm gonna save you the agony of this orientation process because this process isn't pretty.

What they do is they say, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna lift up the lens of your eye, clean it, reform it, and put it back.

And it's like, oh, okay.

And you have to watch it happening because it's on your eyeball, right?

So after she'd been approved and the procedure happened, she walked out with uh these big, I was waiting in the lobby, I have to drive her home, and she walks out with these huge goggles on, and I thought, this is great.

And uh she has to wear these big goggles so that she doesn't just accidentally rub her eye and it scratch her this, scratch her eye because it's really sensitive.

But after she had a a nap that afternoon and she was just got over the original swelling, she could actually see 2020.

She's got incredible vision, so this is awesome.

In our life, I believe that there's situations that we try and accomplish, tasks we try and accomplish without the right lenses.

And that's why we come to church.

Because throughout the throughout the week, our lens gets filter, it gets gummy, it gets uh it gets uh distorted, our lens becomes people in the news and the media, and everyone starts saying, no, this can't isn't possible.

This is where the world is going, this is what's gonna happen, and our filter becomes all cluttered, and we forget to see the way God intends us to see.

We start feeling fear, we start feeling anxiety, we start feeling the weight and the oppression and the perhaps even the depression of the world.

And we begin to uh get strained because we can't see that well because we it becomes cloudy.

And I know this from experience from my grandfather, his his eyes became cloudy in his older age, and they said that the the eyesight, your eyesight alleviates almost 90% of the strain that your body has takes over.

Like imagine just walking without your eyesight, the amount of strain it puts on other senses and other parts of your body.

Well, when that cloudiness and when that that gunk all begins to fill up on your lens, you start, you can't see the way we're supposed to be seeing.

And the Bible talks about needing to have lightened eyes, open eyes, eyes of faith.

And the scripture continually tells us to have those eyes of faith, to keep putting those on every day.

Eyes of faith, eyes of faith, eyes that can see the way God sees, enlightened eyes.

Open your eyes.

It's these eyes that see what other people can't see, eyes that see the unseen.

Because we serve a God who's unseen.

Only He can see the unseen.

And we rely on our relationship, our connection, our our prayer with God with Him to allow us to see that thing that we can't naturally see on our own.

So, what does this mean?

It's important to have this different set of lenses because there's a deeper reality.

2 Corinthians 4.18 says this we don't look at the troubles we can see now.

Rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen.

Paul's telling the church, fix your eyes on things that you can't see.

It sounds like a really, really odd instruction.

What?

You're asking me to see things that I can't see?

Yes.

Ga on these things, fix your eyes on these things.

Gaze your your your put your focus on them.

Um, for the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

We can learn to fix our eyes, not on our troubles, our obstacles, our challenges.

We can choose to focus on the arrow inside the logo.

For the things we see now will soon be gone.

I think if we all we're looking at is dollars and cents and square footage and property and things that we touch and feel and currency, all those things, we're we're gonna be dismayed in the end.

We're gonna be let down at the end because those things are only temporal.

We need to fix our things that can't be counted or sold.

They won't rust, they won't decay, they won't be destroyed.

Those are the things that we carry on and we hold on to.

Those are the things that that give us life.

Peace.

We cannot find peace.

Money, currency, paper can't give us peace.

Joy doesn't come from what you own, the materials that you have.

This can be seen, but it will not satisfy the things that we can't with things that we cannot see.

We need the love of God, we need the joy of God, we need the peace of God.

We need that in our life, and that's the stuff that will sustain us.

That's the stuff that will carry us.

Eyes that see those things that are unseen.

Elisha has a great example in the scripture.

You can read this later in 2 Kings chapter 6, where it talks about Elisha who is working with the Israeli army, and he's working for the king, and there's this band of like this other king who's out to kill the Israeli king.

2 Kings 6 · chapter mention

And everywhere the Israeli king goes to kill the uh the the enemy king goes to kill the Israeli king, uh the Israeli king moves.

So the enemy king gets uh a word of insight, hey, this is where the king of Israel is, and every time he goes after to get him, that king will have moved, and every time he'll have moved his army, put out expenses, uh, and then just be deflated when he gets to the place where the king is supposed to be and the king's not there.

And they didn't know it, but the king had an ace in his pocket, and this ace in his pocket was a man named Elisha.

And Elisha spent time with God, and Elisha would tell the king of Israel when the enemy king was coming to get him and when to move.

And it was so frustrating to the enemy king that the enemy king gathered his war council together and said, Guys, what are we gonna do?

We're just wasting our time chasing after the shadow of an Israeli king.

And the uh the council came back to him and said, Listen, they've got this guy named Elisha, and he'll tell the king what you're even telling, what you're even saying, whispering in your own bedchamber.

Like, this guy knows everything.

So that they're like, forget that.

We gotta get this guy first, and then we can go after the king of Israel.

So at night they decide we're gonna get, we know where he is.

He just always would send a messenger out to tell the king when to move.

They said, we know where he is, let's get him.

So at night they rally an army, chariots, horses, soldiers surround the city where Elisha's staying.

And in the morning his servant wakes up, and his servant wakes up and looks out the door, and he looks, and around the mountains surrounding Elisha's home are the armies of this enemy king.

And of course, the servant runs in to talk to Elisha.

He runs in to see Elisha and he says, Elisha, what are we gonna do?

And Elisha says, Don't be afraid.

Put away fear.

Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.

And the servant thinks he's gone crazy because it's just me and him.

Who are all these people that he's thinking about who are with him?

Who's with us?

It's just me and Elisha.

And we've got an army surrounding us.

But Elisha could see what was going on in his mind and says, and he began to pray a prayer, and he said this.

He said, Open your eyes.

He prayed to God, open his eyes, Lord, so that he may actually see.

And then the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and as he looked, he saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

As the enemy came down towards him, Elisha just stood out and he prayed.

And he said, He said, He struck them with blindness, and they all became blind.

Elisha had a different perspective.

His eyes didn't see the army that was surrounding him, his eyes saw the army surrounding that army.

So when he saw that, he could walk with peace.

He could walk without fear, without intimidation, without pressure.

He could walk with the reality that God was actually for him.

Now the servant couldn't see that way, but Elisha could see because there is a veil.

And this comes, those eyes are only come through prayer.

The truly blind man was the enemy king who actually had less sight than Elisha had.

Elisha had eyes to see what others couldn't naturally see.

So these things that we touch, these things that we feel, they feel good to us because we can hold them, but the reality is in the things that we can't see.

A few years ago, we were able to go on a family holiday.

All of our family got together.

It was on my birthday.

We didn't do it for my birthday.

Yes, we did, right?

It was on my birthday.

I was turning 40, and I wanted to be in the happiest place on earth, and so I went down to Disney World.

Uh with the we were down at Disney World with the family, and one of the places where we decided to go with the kids is to a place on a little educational trip to Nassau.

And we went to a place called Cape Canaveral, this little island off the coast of Florida.

And it was quite the experience.

We heard this story that on April 24th, 1990, Nassau sent their largest, most versatile, most powerful billion-dollar space telescope into orbit.

It's called the Hubble.

Natalie thought this morning that I was talking about her glasses because I told her I was talking about the Hubble.

But no, it wasn't.

The vision was to have a telescope in the sky that would be able to see things that telescopes here on Earth couldn't see.

You see, on Earth we've got a problem.

No matter how powerful the telescope is, you cannot penetrate through the Earth's atmosphere and see clearly into space.

It's colored, distorted, changed by the lens that it's looking through.

There's, do you you know that when we sing the song twinkle, twinkle, little star, it's a lie because stars don't twinkle.

We're teaching our kids wrong.

Stars don't twinkle.

They're actually steady, constant.

The reason why they they seem to twinkle is because there's gas in our atmosphere that's constantly creating this effect that the stars are twinkling, but the stars actually don't twinkle.

There's no twinkle twinkle in a little star.

There's this burning, burning, burning constant burning in that star.

It's not as friendly to kids.

It's like in the sky, there's a burning, burning supernova is coming.

It's not uh, it's gonna get you.

That'd be my kids going to bed.

Dad, is that true?

But Hubble, what they did with Hubble is they put Hubble in a low atmosphere orbit over the earth, and it can see into the heavens unobstructed, and it reports back to Nassau what it sees.

So it reports back, it takes a picture in space and then reports back what it sees.

And let me show you an example of what it can show.

That's a picture from the Hubble telescope in space.

Now, if I was to take you outside today and and say, hey, look into the sky.

Do you see the constellations and the galaxies?

You'd be looking up at fog, cloud, what is up there?

No, but the the that doesn't change the reality that that is up there.

You just can't see it.

Because there's a distorted view from your position here on earth.

But when you get above that and you look from a different perspective, you can see differently.

So when we operate on this level, we have to have these, what the scripture calls eyes of faith that see beyond.

Now look at this next picture.

This blew my mind.

This picture here is a picture of each one of those like little circles, are galaxy, like whole systems in space.

Like our solar system fits into like one of those little spots.

And then there are more.

Look at the millions and millions and millions of galaxies that are in space.

This is what we see that we don't see.

This is what's real that we don't see.

Prayer allows us to have eyes of our heart opened to see from a different lens.

Every time you go to prayer, it's like your eyes open up to the Hubble.

That's why prayer is so important.

You cannot operate on this level and succeed.

All you'll see is clouds, all you'll see is the atmospheric cover.

But when you ask God, God, I can't see past this, give me eyes to see, that's when the eyes of the Hubble open up.

And you can see completely different.

Your vision becomes different.

Prayer is a compounding of that example.

Prayer allows you to see from a different perspective, and that's why the scripture says the only way you're going to understand the power of God, the only way you're going to understand the hope of God, the only way you're going to understand the knowledge of who He is is through this place of prayer.

You'll never experience it by the here and now.

You must move to that place of prayer where you see from that different lens.

You think I'm crazy if I look up and I say, oh, light years away, there's another system out there.

But it doesn't mean it's not true.

It's difficult for us sometimes because we can't trust what we see.

And we learn this very quickly.

You can't just trust what you feel.

Are you saying I can't trust with my eyes that I see right now?

Yes, I'm saying you can't trust that.

You mean I can't trust what my mind would conceive about what the galaxies would look like?

No, I'm saying you can't trust that.

You've got to look from a different place.

You are you saying that my senses are lying to me?

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

I'm saying your senses are lying, they're limited in their ability to translate what is coming from God.

You cannot trust your senses.

There's a symptom called vertigo.

It happens when people are on airplanes or they're underwater, and people are in a place where they're just like uh, for example, like the scuba divers where they're swimming and they get pulled over by a current, underwater current, and they come to a place where they don't know which way is up or which way is down.

Aircraft pilots who roll in the sky and they can't re they can't recall where they are.

They're in a cloud and they literally don't know if they're what side up they are.

They don't know it's it's a it's a really odd place.

And that's why they're given instruments.

And the instruments help right in the plane.

The instrument helps tell you where you're going.

Your altimeter tells you what level you're at.

Your instrument is a scuba diver, it's just like you blow out some bubbles, and it's just like, okay, that weighs up.

All right, follow the bubbles, and I'll get out of this.

We have an instrument as well that helps us retain our level.

And that instrument is the word of God.

It's his word to us.

It's and the other instrument is prayer.

It's his word specifically to us.

The scripture says if you take a step towards him, he'll take a step towards you.

When you ask of God or you knock on his door, he'll open it.

And he's knocking on your door, and if you open it, he'll be there.

It's that close.

If you're looking for God today, you can find him.

He's not hiding.

He's in the arrow.

He's in plain sight.

We just don't see him.

Through prayer, however, we can find him.

And so many times I've talked to people who have been challenged in their faith, and I've just said, let's go home.

You go home.

And before you go to bed, I want you to sit and I want you to pray.

And I want you to talk to God.

Oh, that's kind of odd.

Just do it.

And what happens is that there's a revelation, there's an openness because it becomes this conversation that opens you up to a whole different perspective and reality of something that you didn't even know existed.

It was unseen and now it's seen.

Paul was in a place where he was in prison.

And sometimes suffering and challenges, you know, the first when when do people most often pray?

They pray when they're in trouble.

Right away.

Do something.

Oh God, help.

They pray in that place.

And that's where God's found.

And that's where God can be found.

So sometimes those places of suffering aren't there to destroy you, they're there to draw you closer to Him.

And that veil, the closer you get to that veil, the more you begin to see what's on the other side.

From far away, that veil seems like a wall.

But the closer you get, the more you begin to make out what's on that other side.

Until you're pressing against that veil and you can actually see what's on the other side.

We have eyes that can see into heaven.

We have eyes that can see what God is doing.

And so we need to start looking.

Paul was in that place.

He said, I want you to have these eyes.

I want you to know what peace is.

I want you to know what joy is.

I want you to know what salvation is.

So my prayer for you today is this.

And it comes out of Psalms 119, verse 18.

Psalms 119:18

And it says this.

Open my eyes that I might see the wonderful things that are in your law.

Father, today, I thank you for your word towards us.

I thank you, Father, that you're so close to us.

You said today that when two or more are gathered together in your name, there you are in the midst of them.

Today, Father, you've been in the midst of us.

You've been here with us today.

And Father, today I pray that you would open our eyes that we may see the wonderful things that you have planned for us, our wonderful future, our wonderful destiny.

I thank you, Father, for the wonder of your person, who you are and what you can do.

I thank you, Father, for that.

Open our eyes to see today.

See from a different lens.

See from a different uh place.

Look down on the things you said you've seated us in heavenly places above earthly things, above every spiritual place that you've placed us so that we're not we can actually operate in a place that's unfiltered or filtered.

And we thank you, Father, for the clarity that you can give us.

And we ask that, Lord, for each one who's here today, that you would um create that vision for them.