Rooted in Prayer and Scripture. | Sunday Series. Our House. Part 1.

Amen.

Well, happy New Year.

So glad you guys are here and decided to join us today to worship the Father.

It was actually really, really inspiring to hear your voices.

It just really encouraged me and built me up.

So I appreciate you guys joining in with us and singing worship and praise.

So we had a great 2023 for Mercy Church.

We saw a lot of personal spiritual growth in individuals.

We started some new things.

We started a clothes closet that we do once a month, so there's a need that we can help fill in the community.

We've partnered with some organizations in our community.

Kai Alpha is a Christian college ministry at UNC and now at Ames as well.

Right, yes sir.

And then Intervarsity is also another.

It's a non-denominational Christian organization that does ministry at Ames and at UNC as well two separate groups, and we support both of them and we do some things with them.

And then we were able to up our giving a little bit because of your guys' offerings to our missionaries in Pakistan Philipus and Rebecca and then their dad and they have really started to try to encourage us like, hey, it would be really, really amazing to have a team or even just the pastors from your church come out and actually see what it is we do sometime and do church with us and do some revival meetings and conferences.

So we are planning on that this year.

We will see if that works out.

But some really cool things have happened.

We've made new relationships, and so I'm very, very encouraged and excited with what God is doing, not just in Mercy Church but in church in general.

God is moving in a mighty, mighty, mighty way.

If you haven't seen yet, if you're not a TikToker or a social media or a YouTuber, you might not have seen yet.

Revival is happening everywhere.

It is everywhere.

My college, auburn University they just had 6,000 people show up for a night of worship.

They were not expecting and they literally, spontaneously baptized over 200 people.

So that was a blessing to see on a campus that I was on years ago.

And so that's just one story.

And God is doing a miraculous thing, and so many times we might miss it.

Right, we might miss it if we're not totally clued in and glued in to God, the Father, and what he wants for our life.

Right, if we're distracted or if we're taken somewhere else, then we might miss the revival that's going to happen in our own personal life.

And so this year we want to kick off the year with a series called Our House, and all that is talking about is Mercy Church.

We have set core values up for what we believe a Christian should look like, what a church should look like, how that takes place, and these values that we have are actually a natural progression of your spiritual maturity as well.

So it's what the people that come in hand they're new and this is their first time it's what they should experience from us, right?

But also, as you're growing in your faith, it's what you should be seeing in your own life.

And so if you go to our website we're Mercy Church and you go to Vision and Beliefs tab, you will see this.

Our mission statement is helping people find and follow Jesus, and these are our core values.

And our first core value is that we will be rooted in prayer, in Scripture, and just to say that first part, we will show God our love by growing the knowledge of Him and by living according to His work.

And so today, what I want to do is cover those two topics, prayer and Scripture, and just give a little bit better understanding.

But how many of you maybe myself included, how many of us, could say I could use a better prayer life?

Right, if you feel too convicted, you don't want to raise your hand, that's okay, I'll raise it for you.

I'll raise it.

Right, like you, just, I could do better in that area of my life.

Right, I've been there.

I've felt that at times.

There's times I felt guilty because I didn't pray long enough, or I didn't pray enough this week, or, you know, I wasn't intense with my prayer, right, you know, whatever it may be, I wasn't a warrior with it.

So today I want to help you guys in that, in order to grow in your prayer life, you have to have a foundation of what prayer is.

And prayer is, in the most simple way I can state it, communication with God the Father.

Amen, it is communication with God the Father, and everybody does a different, but I want to give you some foundational things.

So it's a simple thought, but it can be hard for us to believe that we actually have access to an Almighty God.

Amen, we have a direct access to him, right?

It's hard to think.

A lot of Christians don't pray often enough, and there's some reasons they don't.

So let me give you a few of these that I've noticed or I've heard.

Maybe I've said one is, you know, not really sure how to pray.

Am I doing it right?

Was that too long?

Am I being too loud?

Is this even legal to pray?

For?

You know, or maybe you know mine is you get bored or distracted.

You know I pray and I get going and 30 seconds later it's like oh, don't forget, you need to go.

Oh, sorry, yeah, and Father, thank you.

You know.

And so maybe your brain is always going like mine and you're easily distracted.

And or you think your request is too small.

God is so big, he's so powerful, why would he care about this little bitty thing, right?

Or maybe you're not sure your prayers really make a difference.

If God's all-knowing, he already knows everything that I need.

He can do whatever he wants anyway.

So why do I need to pray, right?

And so a lot of us go through life truly believing in God, that really honestly having a half-hearted or an almost non-existent prayer life, and so I want to build that foundation with you today, with us together.

We're going to be looking at Psalm 5, chapter 5, and this is an interesting passage.

If you haven't taken the time to read through the Psalms, I highly encourage you just to take a reading through them.

King David wrote most of these and they are beautiful language, but not just in their beauty and their poetry and how he laid it out.

This is his actual heart, this is the cry of this man's heart, and it's beautiful.

He starts this one out.

I just love how, if you read the Psalms, you know how close David was with God, not just because God says he is a man after my heart you can tell If you read I don't talk to my sons this way, my sons don't talk to me this way, like there's a deepness in that relationship.

You can hear so Psalm 5, verses 1 through 3.

Psalms 5:1–3

And I'm in, I believe.

Did we find out?

I'm in the amplified, I believe.

So it might say something a little different, but listen to my words, lord, consider my sighing, listen to the sound of my prayer for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray In the morning.

Lord, you will hear my voice.

In the morning I present my prayer to you and be on the watch.

Now.

It caught me up the very beginning there, Verse 1,.

Consider my sighing.

And the reason is maybe not your family or maybe not you, but we sigh a lot as a family and so if I walk into a room, sometimes the book will just be sitting there working on something and her own brain doesn't even know I'm there.

You know she's just working on it.

It's a rough one.

Okay, I'm gonna go back in there and leave him on.

Or, you know, we just made a sarcastic joke normally Tate, you know.

And so we're sighing, oh my God, okay, hilarious.

But if you think about it in that context, for him to actually feel and believe that God would even consider him in that context, that they're so intimate, they're so close that God knows what he's going through in that moment, right, and he's implying here that they're just, they're just that tight.

So each of us relate to God in a different way.

I had a friend who he went to Bible college with me.

He did not have a dad growing up.

His dad abandoned them right out the gate, and so it was just him and his mom and he was.

Him and his mom were great and his two little sisters they just had a real tight.

He took care of that family.

But his his prayer always started with daddy, because that was the first true father that he knew.

He didn't know an earthly father.

And so at first, the first couple times, you're standing in a room with 300 people and then the teacher says, hey, hey, dave, stand up and pray for us.

And this guy starts with no problem, no problem, buy your head, daddy, what?

It's a little odd At first and then okay, but his his prayer is so sincere, it's so deep, so when I really got to know him better and I started talking to him like dude, it's so weird.

First of all, he's like 6'10", so I'm like it's so weird that you start your prayers with daddy and he's like well, you know, that's that's what we call him.

I was like I haven't, but I can start.

If that's what you're saying, like if that's what we're supposed to do, like.

I'm in, he's like no, no, no, abba is translated daddy.

Like if you go over to a place that speaks that language and they say daddy, they're saying Abba, he goes.

So when Jesus says pray, like this Abba, he's saying daddy.

He's not saying father, he's saying daddy.

And there's a difference between father and daddy, right?

If my kids called me father, I'd be like what's wrong with you?

Let's let it awkward.

But I want to give you guys a couple of ways in how we communicate with God and and this is a foundational thing for prayer how we can talk to him and how we should relate to him.

The first one I want to give you is with honesty and authenticity.

Authenticity, with honesty and authenticity.

So imagine if Maddie, my daughter, came to me and said oh, great leader of the house, I beseech the.

I'd be like what's?

What do you mean?

What do you want?

What's going on here?

Right, and that would not be authentic, because she doesn't call me that.

I mean, if you want to start, I mean it's a great title, but I'm not expecting it.

You know, maybe my birthday, and so it would be weird, right?

So we want to always be reverent, but we don't want to make it a show.

Matthew, chapter 6, verses 5 through 8, says it like this and when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray Standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.

Matthew 6:5–8

Surely, I tell you they have received the reward in full.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father, who is unseen, then your father, who sees what is done in secret, where we reward you.

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like Pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

Do not be like them, for your father knows what you mean before you ask him.

So how do we want to talk to God with honesty and authenticity?

You're not going to pull the world over his eyes just just because you say some fancy words.

Hmm, right, be honest, be authentic, be yourself.

The second way is we want to talk to God about everything that matters to us.

If it's a concern of yours, it's a concern of his.

Philippians 4 6 says do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with Thanksgiving, present your request to God.

Now.

That doesn't mean that's the only thing you do.

He's not a genie, he's not there just to grant wishes, but he does say petition, petition.

We and we've discussed this before, but petition is a little bit different than ask.

Yeah it's, it's specific.

Be specific with him.

He's willing and he'll take you there.

So we want to talk to God with honesty and not this authenticity.

We want to talk to him about everything that matters to us and then we want to pray to him continually.

First, that's an onions 5 or 16 through 18 Redress always pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you and Christ Jesus.

So I pray in the morning.

I get up and I do, I do some prayer.

I'm not like some people in this room that pray for two or three hours, that's.

That might not be me, but I I spend a dedicated amount of time in the morning, but then I include him throughout the rest of my day.

So how I pray continually is when I'm answering the phone.

If you're calling, I'm assuming something's up.

One of you guys are calling me.

I'm like okay, give me, give me your words, help me, give me wisdom, give me discernment, guide me right.

If I'm, if I'm going to an event for my kids or something, I pray.

If we're taking a long drive, I pray.

I Invite God through our communication to be a part of my whole day, from beginning to end.

When I go to bed.

I think him for what was done this day and I think him that I'll wake up in the morning and get to do it all over again, right, so pray continually.

Fourth, we want to pray according to the word.

So, whatever you pray, you must pray according to the word.

And there's a great example here.

Jesus always quoted Scripture.

If you read the Old Testament and Then you go and you read the Gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John and you see how Jesus responded to the Pharisees and responded to the disciples, what he prayed, what he showed, what he taught, was what they already knew the Old Testament.

He just brought it back into the living moments.

How do we pray?

Well, let me tell you, and he would quote Isaiah, right, he would answer them the scriptures that they already knew, because that's God's word it was.

It was not his own opinion.

What came to him was through the father.

That's why he said if you see me, you see the father, because everything I gave you came from him.

Right, and so if we look at you know, you could go to Matthew 27, 46, where Jesus is praying David's prayer.

He repeats David, king David's prayer from Psalm 22, verse 1, when he says he's on the cross and it's at the end.

Psalms 22:1

He says my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

That's how David starts his prayer in Psalm 22.

The exact same way.

So we have to know what the Word of God says about your need or your problem in order to be able to pray His words.

So that will go to the second part of scripture.

Alright, so number five believe that you receive.

In other words, express faith, pray in faith.

There are lots of different types of prayer out there that have talked about intercession, prayer, worship, submission, but when you are praying to receive something, god is very specific in His Word.

Matthew 21, verse 21 and 22 says Jesus replied Truly.

Matthew 21:21

I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say that this mountain, go, throw yourself into the sea and it will be done.

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

So he is talking about actually receiving things from God, the desires of heart.

When you pray, believe that you have received.

That also means if I believe that I receive when I ask, I don't have to continually ask Him.

That's right.

The faith part is extending your obedience to what he says.

Faith is, it's confidence in things hoped for, evidence of things unseen.

So that's my faith.

I'm confident in the things I hope for and I have evidence and what I can't see, I don't have to keep asking Him for it.

I ask Him for it, I put it on His feet, I lay it at Him and then tomorrow I wake up and I say I thank you, that it's done.

That's the faith part.

You might have to say thank you for a very long time.

It doesn't mean he's not faithful, it's in His timing and I promise you His timing is better and so you could go.

Before we used to hear all the time my mom and dad took us to church all the time when we were little and we went to a pretty Pentecostal holy roller church, as people would say, and that pastor was one of the guys that really started like the tent ministries way early in the days and so they would have like healing lines or healing nights or they would do a lot of things for healing and prayer and faith and you could go and be in that line and know that he has the anointing to heal.

He has the anointing and the ability to pray for you in my hands and you can be healed.

But if you don't believe it, you're still not going to get it.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, okay, good.

And so we have these ways that we want to talk to God, we want to approach Him with honesty and authenticity, we want to tell Him everything that matters to us, we want to pray continually, we want to pray according to the Word and we want to believe, extend our faith that we will receive when we pray, and so prayer and scripture being the values that go to our first core value, as Mercy Church.

Scripture really is one of the reasons that many of us don't read our Bible.

It actually comes from a lack of understanding or misunderstanding of what the scriptures are.

I think it's fair to say the world sees the Bible as an ancient rulebook with a whole bunch of disconnected information about God and rather than how we should see it, which is a grand story, a grand story that showcases who God is.

So the thought that an ancient book might offer sufficiency for life kind of goes against our culture.

It rubs against that, and so people might say how can one source possess all the answers for life, let alone an archaic, outdated text.

It doesn't know what we're going through.

And so here's some common complaints.

I want to read these with you about the Bible.

It's intimidating.

I don't know where to start.

The language it just sounds so old.

It's just an ancient rulebook that Christians are supposed to live by, even though most of the rules aren't relevant to the culture we live in today.

I've heard that often.

Right, yeah, that's a great book.

Let me give you a little bit of history on why.

It's way more than that.

Our hope is that we will be captivated by this grand story of Scripture.

That would actually lead us as believers.

That would actually lead us to the place where we want to read it, we want to know it and we want to discover the truth within it.

Here's a little bit of history Just to show you how authentic this word, this book, is.

It is a collection of historical documents that were written on three different continents, so the people didn't even live in the same place, which means they didn't even know each other.

It was written in three different languages, over 40 authors, many come from very different walks of life, and it was written over a 15 to 1600-year period of time.

So some of the guys that started were already dead to the guys that finished.

Yet it's one big story, one continuous flow.

From beginning to end, the Bible is set in a real time and a real place.

Most of it takes place in what we call today the Middle East Book, and I went to Israel several years ago and maybe a month or two before we got there, they had just discovered oh my goodness, I just drew a blank, they just discovered David's Palace, king David's Palace.

They had just unearthed it.

It's been proven that these are real places.

We saw one of the places where Paul lived.

These are actual places you can go walk.

They're not just made up.

God is the main character.

Other main characters are humanity, and the story revolves around the desperate need for God.

The antagonist, as we know, is the devil, who is trying to destroy the relationship between God and humanity.

Our plot at its core, the Bible is about God's endless, faithful pursuit of relationship with his most special creation, you and me.

All those scriptures sufficient for all of life.

It doesn't really provide instructions for every single activity.

How should I brush my teeth, lord, are you feeling me?

It doesn't provide instructions for every activity in life, but it does provide principles for every area of your life.

Second Peter, chapter 1, verses 3-4,.

2 Peter 1:3–4

Read by his divine power, god has given us everything we need for living a godly life.

We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence.

Because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises.

These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world's corruption caused by human desires.

This passage is declaring the sufficiency of scripture for your Christian life.

Peter's referring to the promises of God as precious, and his language demonstrates the importance and value of God's Word and the life that it gives.

First Peter, chapter 1, verse 22-25, says Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth, so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply from the heart, for you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and enduring Word of God.

1 Peter 1:22–25

For all people are like grass and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord endures forever.

Peter uses this main verb to love one another.

That's statements also used later by Jesus.

How will they know that you are mine unless you love one another?

He's not saying unless you love the world, the non-believers, the non-Christian.

He's saying how Christians love Christians, that's how they will know you're one of mine, that's how you love one another.

That's a big complaint we hear from outside the church.

Well, y'all can't even get along.

What makes you think I want to go in there?

Okay, sorry.

So how do we attain this pure heart?

The only way Peter says the pure heart here, the only way is through an understanding and a knowledge of the living scripture of Word of God.

It's the only way.

It's not by how many great things you do.

It's not how many meals you provide, how many people you clothe, how many rides you give strangers.

It's not by how many times you bow.

It's by your living, from your knowledge of the Word of God.

This Word of God is living and imperishable.

This is the only book that has the claim of good news.

There have been historians and there have been scholars, and there have been scientists that have set out to disprove the Bible.

There have been atheists.

We just watched a movie there was a documentary on this guy.

He was an atheist and he was a very intelligent person and he was a journalist and his whole life's goal at the end was I've got to prove that it's wrong, because it doesn't make sense, it doesn't work.

And he came to the end of his conclusion yeah, I was wrong.

I gave it my best shot, I gave it years, I gave it everything I had.

All the research pointed back to the same thing it's real.

The claims in that word have proven themselves time and time again.

So our goal, our job here, is to help you find and follow Jesus Christ.

One of the ways that we follow is discipleship, and discipleship looks like these values First, to be rooted in prayer and scripture.

Why?

Because you can't do anything if you don't know His Word.

That's right.

You can say really nice things, but you're not helping anyone If you're not speaking His Word.

It has no power behind it.

It has life.

Right, when we pray, we should be vulnerable, we should be transparent to our God.

It's okay to say, man, I'm having the worst day, man, that's okay.

He sees you right where you're at.

You don't have to put on a show, you don't have to have a facade.

You can come to Him just like you are, be reverent, be respectful, understand who it is you're speaking to, but you can come to Him just as you are.

That is beautiful and that is special, and so we encourage you.

We have five values in total, so we're going to do a five week series on this our house, and we'll end with generosity and then we'll move into some other things, but I really want you guys to, if you miss one, go back.

Please listen to it on the Apple Podcast or something, or go back on Facebook and watch one of them, because I really do feel this is more than just oh, this is what our church believes in.

This is how your life should progress.

The whole goal of our life as Christians, as believers, is to reach perfection.

And you may go oh no, that's wrong.

The word used in the Bible is perfection, but the word translated from perfection is maturity.

You should move from infancy to a mature believer, right?

So that is our goal to help move you through that process.

That if you ever leave here, if you ever go to do something else, or even if you just move down the street or whatever, you should have an understanding of where you're at on your spiritual journey.

You should be able to look at yourself, examine yourself and say I see myself growing.

And if not, I don't see myself growing, why not?

And that is our goal, because the world is full of baby Christians.

We don't need another one.

I know we'll get some more, but we need some mature Christians.

Yes amen.

Right, we need some mature Christians, so hopefully that helps you as we look at our values On the Mercy Church.

We start with prayer and scripture.

Prayer puts us in personal contact with the Heavenly Father Any hour, day or night.

Prayer is the divinely ordained.

This is a quote from Priscilla Shire.

Did I have it, bill?

Prayer is the divinely ordained mechanism that leads you into the heart and the power and the victory of Christ.

Without prayer, you will remain defeated and undone.

Priscilla Shire is a speaker and pastor and an author.

She has a book on prayer that is out of this world, so I encourage you to check it out.

Scripture is a sufficient guide for life.

We must read it obediently and allow it to act as a mirror for our life.

When we fulfill our call to live out these values, we can be the church that glorifies Jesus.

Amen.

We can be the church that God has called us to be.

Make sense, amen.

Jesus.

Well, Christ the Lord, because he is good.

Amen.

Amen, I love it.

Prayer and scripture I mean, that's how I am as God People ask me all the time actually at school or wherever around.

How do you do it, man?

Tell me how you make it.

How did you deal with this, that and the other going blind and whatever I'm like prayer and scripture.

right, I still close to God.

You know I love it because prayer and scripture the first thing that comes to me is community Communication relationship.

You know, I think about prayer and scripture and I think about, oh, I'm praying, god, lord, help me.

Jesus, he's like yeah, I wrote you a note, bro, go read it because I want to talk to you through my word.

You know that's how me and Bernadette talk.

That's how we've made it dang near 20 years.

That's how she was able to marry me.

Any year and a half later me go blind and she still took a look around because of communication, because I would talk to her and she would talk to me.

When we talk to God in prayer, he talks to us in his word.

When we're rooted in prayer and scripture, we can move along and grow and mature our relationship from oh, I love you, google-wise to you.

Know what I'm not feeling you right now, but I still love you.

And give me five minutes Just saying that's maturity in a relationship.

So that's what God wants for us and I love you guys so so very much that I want to pray with you and Mercy Church loves you guys so so very much that we want to believe with you.

So if you're looking to get rooted in prayer and scripture, first of all, if you're not praying every day, don't beat yourself up.

Just pray every day.

You know if you need to lose five pounds, you don't beat yourself up over it.

You just say okay, you know what, today I'm not going to the buffet.

Okay, start small, incremental changes, right.

So today, if you want to be rooted in prayer and scripture, if you want to follow God, if you want to get to know God you've never known Jesus, you've never come and said Jesus I need you, you and me this connection, this relationship.

I want to be here to join with you, to welcome you into the family of Jesus Christ, to welcome you into that relationship.

So I'm going to be here to pray with you and agree with you about that.

If there is a need that you have, I promise you there's an answer in the Word.

God has already sent an answer for you.

But we're going to be here together to agree with you in prayer for whatever it is that you might have need for, you might be believing for, because God is here and he is ready.

He's already done it, he's just waiting for us to receive it.

So I'm going to be here to join with you guys to pray.

The whole prayer team will be up here right now there's a prayer team will be up here to pray with you guys and believe with whatever it is that you need.

And so today we're going to pray to dismiss, and the prayer team will be up here.

We'll have your announcements as well.

So here we go.

Thank you, lord, jesus.

We love you, father.

We praise you for all that you're doing, all that you've done.

You brought us through so much and we're still standing.

So thank you, lord, because today, as we stand, we stand in your Word, we stand on your Word.

We thank you for the relationship and the communication we can have with you through prayer and Scripture in the Word.

And today, thank you, lord, that we will turn to you, and we will turn to your Word throughout this week to find out who you've designed us to be, who you created us to be, so that we can live out this relationship with you, that we can follow you, lord, and we can call others to do the same Lord, we can be your light in a dark world.

So thank you, lord, for walking with us through everything that we do this week.

We love you, lord, in your name Jesus, amen.