Pray First – Dangerous Prayers

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

I'm not gonna lie to you, I am not much of a sneakerhead.

I don't know if you have someone in your life who loves sneakers.

I'm a shoe guy.

I like shoes.

I generally like wearing them, but like I don't I don't really care so much about sneakers.

But um a couple couple months ago, I had a friend tell me about a website, and the website is a website where you can go and you can buy what appears to be really expensive sneakers, the kind of shoes that are sold out absolutely everywhere.

And so just for fun, I bought a pair of these shoes.

Now, if you were to get the real version of these shoes, these shoes on StockX, which is like a shoe resale site, I looked it up this morning.

This pair of shoes, if they were real, sell for$1,325.

I do not need a pair of shoes that cost$1,325.

I would rather wear a pair of shoes that cost a normal amount, and I would rather go to Texas Roadhouse and eat$1,325 East rolls.

But that is between me and my exercise coach.

And um but I but I but I bought these shoes and I bought them, I bought them cheaper than you could have bought them directly from Nike.

I like them to me.

They look cool, they look good.

And I have had friends who are sneakerheads come up and they always compliment me.

Everywhere I go when I wear these shoes, people are like, oh, my shoes, bro.

Like I like, I like those shoes.

And I think what they're thinking is that I've got like$1,325 for shoes.

They don't know about the yeast rolls, they don't know about that.

So I've had people who are are like sneakerheads that know shoes, they they've asked if they could see them, which is weird.

Don't ask someone to take their shoe off for you.

But I've taken my shoe off for people and they've like done this and they've done this and they've done this.

I had one guy do this.

And he wanted to see, would it pop out?

It didn't pop out.

It says they're fake.

Okay, but like he wanted to see would they pop back out?

And he goes, bro, I know you think these are fake.

These are real.

I'm like, they're not real.

I bought them from a site that says these are fake.

Like they're not real at all.

Whatever.

But he he claimed to know.

Now, look, let's be real for a minute.

I'm gonna have a Mr.

Rogers moment here in front of you.

Um let's be real for a moment.

There are some things in my life that I am perfectly fine having a substitute.

Okay, can I let you in on one of my personal life rules?

This is gonna reveal something about me that maybe you didn't know.

I am perfectly fine getting the off-brand of food as long as it's an ingredient and not the main thing.

Let me explain it to you.

Um I will eat Aldi or Publix or Walmart brand with green beans, perfectly fine.

But miss me with off-brand Oreos.

Anybody understand this?

Like, because it's the main thing.

I can drink any brand of water.

Some people drink Dasani water and they're like, this is disgusting.

I'm like, it's water, okay?

But don't you dare, listen to me.

Don't you dare invite me to a party at your house and try to serve me Dr.

Thunder or Dr.

Check.

I'm pretty chill, but I will come unglued at this.

Is this the real thing?

Look, um, I'm fine.

If you need a Benadryl, go buy Benadryl or go buy Walgreens, wall adrill.

Same thing.

I'm good with a substitute, right?

There's some areas I'm not willing to compromise on.

I have to have the real thing.

Let me say this to you.

As we're talking about prayer, I wonder how many of us somewhere along the way settled for a substitute of a prayer life.

We have all the picture of a person who prays.

But if we could just be honest, our prayers are so weak, they're so anemic.

Oh God, give me a good day.

It's like if God answers it, how do you even know he answered it?

So as we conclude this series, I want to talk to you about how you can have a different kind of prayer life, a dangerous prayer life.

One of my favorite authors, Mark Batterson, said this.

He said that prayer is how we write history before it happens.

Like we really believe this.

So here's what I want to do.

I want to have a quick fun game.

I'm gonna ask you to raise your hand on the first question if you believe this, and then I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand on the second question.

Question one is this How many of us believe in the power of prayer?

Okay, just a show of hands.

If you're a church person, a Christian, almost everybody's raised their hand, okay?

Second question, and this is a hard one.

You ready?

Don't raise your hand on this.

Do we actually pray like it?

Do we actually pray?

Like we believe that there is power in our prayers.

Look, look at what scripture says.

In the book of James, James chapter five says, the prayer of a righteous person is what?

It's powerful and effective.

So, so according to scripture, which we believe, prayer is powerful and effective.

Look at what the book of Hebrews says.

Hebrews 4 says, Let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God.

There we will receive his mercy and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.

We should come boldly with our prayers.

A lot of us we pray prayers, but in the back of our mind we're like, we'll see.

You ever prayed for someone who was sick?

And you prayed for them and you said all the right words.

God heal them.

God touch them.

May the power of Jesus flow through their body, may the healing virtue of Jesus flow through their body.

And we pray for them, but in our minds, we're like, we'll see.

Whatever.

I'm just doing this so I can say I did it.

Okay, I want to challenge you to pray differently.

The same man, Mark Batterson, said this.

He said, The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.

The author of Hebrews has said that we are to come boldly before the throne of grace.

Who has the courage to approach a king?

Think about that.

If there was an actual king, if you could go back to the ancient world of the Bible, who would approach a king boldly?

Only people who were invited.

Or, this is also fun, or the child of a king.

Listen to me.

According to scripture, you are a son or daughter of God.

You can approach boldly.

You can ask anything you want.

You can pray big, bold, audacious prayers because you're a son and daughter of God.

So here's the funny thing to me is we pray these anemic little weak prayers.

Oh God, give me traveling mercies to the grocery store.

You've driven to the grocery store 1.7 trillion times and been fine.

We pray things like God, oh God, give me a hedge of protection around me.

What is a hedge?

It's a bush.

You ever think about that?

Oh God, put a bush around me to protect me from the works of the enemy.

Would you stop it?

Don't pray simple prayers.

Pray big, bold, audacious prayers.

Go ahead and swing for the fences and trust God for all of it.

Let me say it to you like this: following Jesus was never meant to be safe.

And we want to live safe lives.

And I don't know why it is for you.

Maybe you prayed before and God didn't come through in the way that you thought he should, and so it's reduced your quotient for faith.

Maybe for you, you just have this sense in your mind that you can ask anything, but he's not actually a listener and he's not going to answer you.

And so, for whatever reason that we have, we tend to reduce our prayers down to a level so small that if God answered, we wouldn't even know to give him credit for it.

Okay.

Following Jesus was never meant to be safe, so I want to challenge you to pray some dangerous kind of prayers.

In fact, today, all I'm gonna do is I want to focus on three really dangerous prayers that you can pray.

And let me just tell you something.

These prayers are simple.

Two of them are four words, one of them is three words.

In 11 total words, I'm gonna give you three prayers that are so dangerous that I believe if you pray them, if you will say these things regularly, you're gonna start to see irregular stuff happen regularly.

If you pray these prayers and if you mean it with your heart, if you pray with a heart full of faith and you come boldly before the throne of grace with this in mind, I believe God is going to do some stuff in your life that people are like, that just seems so irregular.

It's gonna be so irregular to everyone else, but it's gonna become regular to you.

In the book of Acts, there's this fascinating moment.

Peter and John, who had been with Jesus, who had seen the miracles, who saw the death, burial, and resurrection, Jesus is now left.

And Peter and John are out there doing their thing.

They're out there like ministering to people, and they pray for a man who scripture says was unable to walk for 40 years.

40 years.

And they pray for this man, and power shoots back into his legs, and he's healed.

To set up the first bold prayer that we should pray, the first dangerous prayer, Acts chapter 4, verse 8, it says, Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, This them that they're talking about is the Sadducees.

Acts 4:8

It was this um, this religious governing body who was judging them for what just happened.

Like they were judging them for praying for a man and the man being healed.

Makes no sense, but that's what was happening.

Rulers and elders of the people, if we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who is lame and are being asked how he was healed, then know this.

You and all the people of Israel, I want you to see this.

It is by the name.

We've talked about the name of Jesus before, it is powerful in every other name, every sickness, every disease, every every diagnosis asked about the name of Jesus.

He said, It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed.

It was God who did it.

And then he goes on to say this.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John, when that religious body saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled and ordinary men, pay attention to this word ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

So you've got Peter and John, and they're standing before this court of people who are judging them for doing something so beautiful, praying for a person who was unable to walk, and God giving power to the man's legs and causing them to be able to walk again.

They're literally on trial for doing a miracle.

So strange.

And so Peter and John step into this moment with courage, what I would actually call supernatural boldness, and they stand before these people who should be intimidating, and they say, it wasn't even us, but it was the power of our great God who healed them.

And then on top of that, it says that these people, this religious body who was judging them, they were astonished because these were unschooled, ordinary men.

Now, I I love the Bible, and sometimes it's easy to read the Bible very quickly and to miss some of the beauty and the nuance that is woven through the Bible.

In the ancient language of Greek, in which this was written, the word for ordinary men is an interesting word.

It is this word here.

The next word for me.

It is the word idiateia.

Iriateia.

It means ordinary.

Okay, but words also have different meanings.

Words can be translated into different ways.

What do you think?

Are other examples or words that we could get from the Greek word?

Idiots.

Here is what the verse says if we were to translate it in the NJT, the New Jason translation.

These people were like, huh?

You idiots?

Did that was their response.

It's that they were ordinary.

That if if these people were not from Jerusalem, but if they were, I don't know, from like the South, they would have said, Oh, bless your heart.

Has anybody heard this before?

A few years ago, I was at a Mexican restaurant with my friend, and he got fajitas.

And you know fajitas, they are, that's the ultimate flex at a Mexican restaurant.

Because when the server comes out with that plate that's steaming hot and there's steam everywhere, just sizzling everywhere, everybody goes, ooh, they turn their head to it.

And they set it in front of my friend, and he takes a couple bites, he makes himself a fajita, and he sets his fork down, but he didn't pay attention, he set it on the plates.

And then he ate a bite or two, and then he took his fork off of the plate to take a bite of rice.

And when he did, that fork was so hot that he lit the fire out of his mouth.

And it happened right as our server came back to the table and she said, Oh, bless your hearts.

Can I translate it?

You idiot.

Last night, my wife and I, my family, we were on our way back to Lakeland from Orlando.

We were sitting on that ramp in Orlando by Disney World.

I think it's off of the 417.

You know what it is, because it's the place in Orlando where there's like a power line that's in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

Do you know what I'm saying?

And I know that's supposed to like elicit affection in our hearts for Mickey Mouse, but I hate that exit so much that I hate Mickey a little more every time I'm on that road.

And so we're sitting on the ramp.

Back in the day, there were people who would literally cut across a whole median of grass and drive to get into the i-4 traffic a little bit faster.

But thankfully they they put up these guardrails so people can't go.

So now we're sitting there.

Have you ever been driving on I-4 in bumper to bumper traffic?

And there's one person who thinks they're way more important than everybody else, and they drive along the shoulder.

Have you ever seen this before?

Last night we're sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the on-ramp, and on I-4, which is right next to us, there's a person who thinks they're more important than everybody else, or they've got IBS, I don't know, whatever it is.

And they they come driving along the shoulder of I-4 really fast.

And look, I don't believe in instant karma, that's like not a Christian thing, but I believed in it in that moment.

And um I see a car go by, and two seconds later, a cop lights him up with his lights.

And we drove past.

Celebrates in, yay, and whatever.

And we drive past.

And I'll be honest with you for a minute.

I'm gonna out my wife here.

I'm a really chill driver.

My wife thinks that her car horn is an instrument, she plays it so much.

And she laughs as we're driving past the car.

I mean, it was not not more than 10 cars in front of us.

As we're driving past it, my wife literally went, ha ha.

Which is another way to say, bless your heart, or another way to say, you idiot.

Okay, right, you understand this.

These people looked at Peter and John and they thought, these idiots, who do they think they are?

And then Scripture records a few verses later their prayer.

What's interesting is the Bible talks a lot about prayer, but we don't have a lot of actual prayers recorded here as a part of one.

A few verses down, Acts chapter 4.

Acts 4 · chapter mention

Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.

Here's the first prayer.

Write this down, pray this this week.

Four words.

Dangerous prayer number one, Lord, make me bold.

Make me bold.

If we were to do an anonymous survey of your friends, Christian friends, non-Christian friends, school friends, work friends, neighbors, how bold do you think they would say you are?

In fact, next slide for me shows this.

It's what I call a boldness scale.

How bold for the Lord would you say you are?

Look at it.

Just pick a number.

You can even circle it there in your message notes.

Like, how bold would you say you are?

You're not a 10 because Jesus maybe would have been a 10.

So it's not, you're not a 10.

Hopefully you're not a zero because maybe the devil's a zero.

I don't know.

But if you're like an eight or nine, chances are you're sitting next to someone in church that you shared your faith with and they came to faith because of you.

That's a bold person.

If you're an eight or a nine, chances are like everywhere you go, you can't help yourself, but you're talking about the love of God and you're talking about your church and how God has changed your life.

That should be normal for you if you're an eight or nine.

Maybe if you're like a five through a seven, you share your faith when it's convenient.

Uh, you don't mind sharing a Christian meme on Facebook and you feel like you're doing something good.

If you're a one through a four, there's a good chance that nobody in your life even really knows that you're a follower of Jesus.

Let me tell you what happens when you start praying bold prayers.

God is going to give you opportunities to actually be bold.

He's gonna require in you that when God gives you opportunities, you step through the opportunities and you invite people into relationship with God that you change your life.

Look how bold the prayer goes on in the verses we just read.

Here it goes on stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.

And it says, after they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God.

Here it is again boldly.

Let me say it to you like this: when you pray irregular stuff, God's gonna show up and do irregular things.

Like when you pray bold prayers, God is gonna show up and do some stuff that would only happen because of your boldness.

Let me give you two warnings.

Number one, boldness is always going to trigger spiritual opposition.

Boldness is always gonna trigger some sort of spiritual opposition for you.

Let me offer you a quick thought.

I have come to learn with some age and maturity that opposition isn't even a bad thing.

Opposition just reveals that you're living a life that is worth opposing.

Like if you feel like life spiritually is all smooth sailing and good for you, and there is no works of the enemy trying to stop you, maybe you're going the same direction as him.

Second thing is this boldness is often a prerequisite for a miracle.

Like if you if you want to see someone that you love healed, like scripture teaches, it is by the stripes of Jesus, because of what he took for us on the cross, that we are healed.

If we pray in faith according to his will, if we pray in faith and believe, according to scripture, healing is a gift that is available to us, so we should pray.

But listen, it is the prerequisite for a miracle.

Like if you never pray, you'll never get the miracle.

Let me let me offer you another way to think about it.

If you actually believed that God was truly for you, you might actually pray a little bit differently.

You would pray with a different kind of boldness.

Prayer number one is, Lord, make me bold.

Prayer number two is about to get all up in your grill.

Number two is, Lord, search me.

Lord, search me.

Book of Psalms, David says this.

Search me, God, and know my heart.

Test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

He says, God, I want you to do something.

I want you to search my heart.

And if there is anything in my heart that isn't of you, weed it out, pull it out, do whatever it takes to get it out, because I want a heart that is pure.

It is the heart that is pure that fully connects with God, that experiences intimacy with God.

Now I'm gonna be honest with you, we live in a culture that teaches the opposite of this.

We live in a culture that says things like, well, just follow your heart.

I tell you, this is the worst advice ever.

The book of Jeremiah says this.

It says the human heart is the most deceitful of all the things and desperately wicked.

Who really knows how bad it is?

Like, follow your heart is the dumbest advice ever.

That's like take fentanyl for fun.

Like it makes no sense at all.

Because your heart is going to lead you away from the things of God.

The heart is wicked and deceitful.

Ready for a question that's about to mess you up?

When you pray this prayer, you're gonna have to ask yourself a question.

Ready?

What have I rationalized?

What sin am I just okay with?

Oh, it doesn't affect me that much.

Oh, it's not that big of a deal.

Oh, I watch those movies and I talk about it candidly, and there's all kinds of graphic, disgusting sexual scenes in it.

But it doesn't really affect me.

Shut your mouth.

You've rationalized sin.

When you pray, if you're gonna say, God, search me, create in me a clean heart, it's gonna require something of you.

The David, who lived this extraordinarily polarizing life.

At times he was so close and so near to God, and other times his sin was so vividly on display.

And yet at the end of his life, it says about him that he was a man after God's own heart.

Here's one of his prayers, and I love this.

Psalm 51, 10.

He says, Create in me a pure or a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit in me.

The Hebrew word for creed is the word bara, which literally means to take nothingness and to bring order to it.

Take all the chaos that is my heart.

Take all the sin, all the shame, all the anxiety, all the things that plague me and push me from you.

And God, what I want you to do is I want you to bring order and I want you to clean.

That thing that is messing me up.

What if we prayed that prayer?

Final prayer, and then we're done.

Dangerous prayer number three: Lord, break my heart.

When I was in college, I had a professor, and we're talking now 20 something years ago.

I'm getting old.

This week I turned 42 years old, and whatever.

People used to say, Oh, you're so wise for your age, and no one says that anymore.

And uh and I had a professor in college who said this, he said, if you find what breaks the heart of God and you give your life to that, God will pour out so much blessing on you that you can't contain it.

Can I teach you a principle about finding what breaks the heart of God?

We cannot fix what we cannot see.

What are issues that break the heart of God and break your heart?

I want you to pay attention to that.

You ever notice that like you could pull up in your car next to a person who's standing on the road with a sign begging for money?

And you could be in a car with several friends and you can all see the same moment differently.

You'll get one person who's callous towards the person that's like, oh no, don't give them money.

They'll just use it on drugs or alcohol.

They say something like that.

Another person in the car might see the same person and feel so moved by them that they pull out whatever cash they have and they give it to the person.

Another person might say, let's just go help them tangibly, and so they drive into town and they find a sandwich or a meal and they bring it back to the person.

I've seen that.

Other person might see the same moment and think, listen, like we can help them like temporarily, or we can do something bigger to help them permanently.

It's like all of them saw the same moment, but they saw it in a different kind of way.

I wonder what you see that no one else around you sees.

I wonder what breaks your heart.

It could be homelessness, it could be a lack of education, it could be clean water in the world, it could be food and food insecurity that people have.

It could be sexual harassment that you see happening all around you, it could be racial issues and racial inequality, but you see something that it feels like no one else sees.

And it breaks your heart.

Let me say this to you.

If it breaks your heart, there's a good chance it breaks the heart of God.

And if you see it and do nothing about it, you're sitting on your hands and you're living out a life that falls short of the potential that God has for you.

Look what Jeremiah says.

This is so strong.

Jeremiah says, My grief is beyond healing.

My heart is broken.

I hurt with the hurt of my people, I mourn and I am overcome with grief.

Let me say this to someone in the room.

It is better to hurt with a purpose than to exist without one.

Write this down.

It's better to hurt with the purpose than to exist without one.

And a lot of us have lived a life existing without a purpose.

And if you want to know your purpose, pay attention to your pain.

Pay attention to the things that God stirs in your heart.

Why?

Because if you see it, it is very likely that God wants to use you to be the answer to the prayer that you feel in your heart.

Let me say it to you like this, very boldly.

Some of you have prayed for so long for friends, for community.

Some of you feel so alone.

You're surrounded by people and you feel alone.

Some of you are sitting in this room today and you have never felt more isolated and alone.

And there's people that you can touch literally all around you.

What if you were the answer to the prayer that you're praying?

What if you saw the need and said, God, listen, I don't even understand, but loneliness is breaking my heart.

If I feel this way, certainly someone else is.

What if I open my home and open my life?

And what if I led a group for people who have the same interests as me?

Some of you are gonna see homelessness and it's gonna break your heart, and God is gonna give you a unique vision to be the answer to the prayer of the thing that is breaking your heart.

So here's my challenge for everyone.

Today let's make this decision that we're gonna stop praying lame, safe, anemic prayers.

Like if you're gonna pray, if you're gonna spend time with God, and we've talked about this for the last few weeks, pray and seek the face of God.

Follow the pathway that Jesus gives us to pray.

Do that.

Create space in your life where you actually listen for Him to speak to you.

But when you pray, you can pray with boldness.

When you pray, you can stop praying childlike, you know, weak, safe prayers.

And you can pray some dangerous prayers.

I gave you three.

What would it look like?

If all of us just made this decision to say, God, Lord, make me bold.

He's gonna give you an opportunity.

Lord, search me.

Because I want to be pure before you.

And Lord, break my heart.

Let me give you one last thought.

We live in a right now society.

We live in a right now world.

Just as early as 10, 15 years ago, if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to like plan it.

You had to like go to a store and rent something.

Now there's so many streaming platforms, you can watch any show, any movie you want in a matter of seconds.

It's like we live in a right now society.

And so we tend to pray these prayers that are what I call ASAP prayers.

God, show up right now.

God help me to fix this situation immediately.

God, I need you to intervene like yesterday.

God, show up right now when we pray ASAP prayers.

But I want to challenge you to not pray ASAP prayers.

I want you to pray A-L-A-I-T as long as it takes.

We're gonna pray dangerous prayers, but listen to me.

We're also gonna pray persistent prayers.

We started with a verse that said, the prayers of a righteous person avails much.

Why wouldn't you go after God with everything you've got?

Why would you live a life that if you end up your life, you look back at your life and you're like, Well, I made it, I did it.

When God could literally use you to change the world.

So will you join me in the pursuit of not praying weak prayers?

But instead, will you join me in saying, God, I'm gonna pray some bold prayers.

Some of you this week, if you pray these things, God's gonna give you opportunities to pray for people who are sick, and you can believe in your heart that He's able and willing to heal.

Some of you have prayed for so long for your coworkers to find and follow Jesus.

Hey, spoiler alert, you're the answer to the prayer you're praying.

Some of you need to have some difficult conversations because you love someone.

Lord, make me bold.

You're gonna have to step into that moment.

Some of you have rationalized sin so much in your life, it's become normal to you.

If you're gonna say, Lord, make me clean, purify my heart, Lord, search me.

If you're gonna pray that kind of prayer, he's gonna do it.

Some of you are gonna say, Lord, break me.

Break my heart.

You're gonna see stuff that you've never seen before.

God's gonna open your eyes, He's gonna break your heart.

If you pray these prayers, here's my promise to you.

It's gonna change the world, but it's gonna start by changing yours.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes with me all across this place?

So, God, we ask you today to give us courage.

It's easy to talk about, it's hard to live out.

So give us the courage to stop praying these substitute weak anemic prayers.

God, may we pray dangerous prayers.

Let's pray this together.

I'm gonna say it, then you repeat after me and say, Lord, make me bold.

Lord, search me.

Lord, break my heart.

God, my prayers this week that these prayers will become regular prayers.

And as we pray these prayers regularly, I pray that irregular stuff will happen regularly.

We thank you for it, God.

We trust you.