Sermon Transcript
Well, I want to begin with a confession this morning. Confession’s good for the soul, right? So here’s my confession: I don’t always answer phone calls, especially if it’s an 800 number. Probably that one’s not getting answered. If it’s a caller ID unknown, that one’s not getting answered.
I many times don’t answer my phone calls. Now I know I’m probably not alone. I know that Bernice, my wife, she doesn’t answer phone calls when it’s It is not a phone number that she recognizes or, you know, the contacts recognize, and so she typically does not answer those calls. She figures that if it’s somebody that really needs to talk to her, they’ll leave a message, and then she’ll call them back at a later time. And if it’s somebody that she knows, then she’ll add it to her contact list so that when they call back the next time, she’ll answer the phone call.
My guess is many of you kind of follow this routine. You know, it’s just part of how you do things. You may be among the ones actually who haven’t answered my phone calls, which I’m not gonna hold it against you because I have a 602 area code. And so some of you are saying, we don’t recognize the 602 area code. It’s actually Phoenix, Arizona.
And so I could totally understand that you wouldn’t answer my calls. I want you to know I’m not gonna be hurt by that. I just assume you don’t know it’s me who’s calling you and you’re not just ignoring me, okay? Okay, I forgive you. All right, so I feel better about all of that already.
But what I wanna say by saying this this morning is, is that there are similarly times in our lives where we go to God and we pray and God does not answer our prayers. There are times when we call on God and God does not answer our prayers. Now, I’m not saying that he filters out, you know, spam and that we’re spam or something like that, not that at all. But there are times where we simply come to God and God simply dismisses misses our prayers, specifically, unexpectant prayers. Now, what’s unexpectant prayers?
Well, it’s the opposite. Unexpected is the opposite of what? Expectant, right? You familiar with the word expectant? If you’re a mom, you’re familiar at some point in your life with the word expectant.
For 9 months, you were expectant. Do I need to explain that to anybody this morning? Do I need to detail that for you? When a mom is expectant, it changes everything for a mom. It changes how she thinks and how she plans and how she works.
It just changes everything because she’s expecting something to happen at the right time. A life-changing thing is going to happen at some point in the future. That’s the case with all expectant moms. Take, for instance, these 8 expectant moms that were in the news this week. These are all nurses that work at the same hospital.
Kind of crazy, a baby boom at this hospital among the nursing staff, but each one of them is expecting and living expectant. Well, in a similar vein, God wants us to pray with expectancy, which means He wants us to pray with anticipation and excitement and hope and thanksgiving, even God-sized thoughts for what God wants to do in us and through us to bring about God-sized miracles into the world. So you can think of it this way. Everyone, men and women, boys and girls, can be delivery vehicles through which God does God-sized miracles if we pray expectantly. If we want our prayers to give birth to God-sized miracles, to breakthroughs, they must be expectant.
That’s what this Scripture teaches us. So, we’ve been talking about different ways by which we need to get in focus our prayer life. We’ve been talking about how they— our prayers need to be reliant, they need to be repentant, they need to be desperate, they need to be fervent, they need to be persistent. Well, today we’re talking about expectant. In fact, if our prayers aren’t expectant, listen, we shouldn’t expect God to answer them.
That’s what the Scripture teaches us. In fact, the book of James, James begins with a little focus on prayer and then it ends with a little focus on prayer. If you’re familiar with the Bible book, the book of James, James James is the brother of Jesus. And James wrote about expectant prayer. And in the beginning of the book, James chapter 1, verses 6 and 7, this is what he said.
He said, when you ask for something, when you go before God and you ask for something, don’t have any doubts. A person who doubts, who has doubts, shouldn’t expect, shouldn’t expect to receive anything from the Lord. So he’s right at the outset saying our prayers need to be expectant. Now, how can you tell whether or not your prayers are expectant? One, he says, well, then they’re not going to be characterized with doubt.
What’s doubt? Doubt’s unbelief. That would be like a pregnant mom-to-be doubting she’s pregnant. Okay, can you imagine a pregnant mom doubting she’s pregnant? So when people ask her, you know, are you pregnant?
She replies, well, I’m sort of pregnant. I guess I’m pregnant. Well, maybe I’m pregnant. Maybe I’m not pregnant. Maybe I have just been eating too much.
That would be a definite sign that, you know, there’s some kind of doubt there. You’re either pregnant or you’re not pregnant. You can’t be like sort of pregnant. You’re either expectant or you’re unexpectant. And if you’re expectant, you need to know that.
You need to know that. Otherwise, you might end up having an unexpected baby in your car on the freeway and end up on television like the show Dr. Oz telling your story for the whole world to shake their heads at and go, there’s something wrong here. Well, that would be what God would be doing too if you came to him with unexpectant prayers asking for his help but not really believing that he hears you or not believing that he’s going to answer or that he even has the power to do something in your circumstance or that he even cares. God would figuratively be shaking his head and saying, nope, because he wants us to come to him expectantly. I grew up in a church where we had a pastor, Dr. William Hayler, who before he would pray— and he would pray every Sunday morning, he had this pastoral prayer— but before he would pray, he would pray an expectant prayer.
He would pray this: when you pray— in fact, this is what he taught us— when you pray, expect something to happen, for you are talking to God who makes things happen. Now, is that good theology? Absolutely. That’s what James is teaching. It’s a necessary ingredient in prayer, the kind of prayer that God answers.
And so James basically is suggesting that Dr. Halor took that to heart, and it was spot-on in how he prayed. So it’s like, you know, An expectant mother is going to have a baby, expectant prayers are going to be answered by God. That’s what the Scripture teaches. So, if that’s the case, if we hope to see God-sized answers to our prayers, we need to learn to pray expectantly. And one of the best ways to learn to pray expectantly is just to look at people in the Scriptures who prayed expectantly.
And there are several in the Scriptures that we can look at, but today we’re just going to look at Elijah, okay? Many of you have studied the life of Elijah. You may have not thought about it in light of what we’re gonna talk about this morning, but I really hope that what we’re gonna talk about could help you, that could help all of us begin to pray even more expectantly than we pray right now. So, we’re gonna primarily go from James chapter 5, back and forth between James 5 and 1 Kings 17 and 18, right around there. So, if you got a Bible, you might wanna pull it out or just follow along in the message note sheets.
I wanna begin with the Amplified Bible version of the 2 verses that we’re focused on today. James 5:17-18. This is the Amplified Version where it says this, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. And if you ever read the Amplified Bible, then it has this parenthetical explanation oftentimes to help us understand what the writer is saying. So the Amplified Bible says, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and here’s a little understanding, just some interesting matters of interpretation.
In other words, with a nature like ours, with the same physical, mental, and spiritual limitations and shortcomings. James was just like us, and he prayed intensely for it not to rain, and it did not rain on the earth for 3 years and 6 months, and then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain, and the land produced its crops. And then a thought again, as usual. Now, when I read that passage, this passage reminds me of something that Bernice and I have seen as we’ve gone into the Central Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, we’ve seen all over the valley signs that say, pray for rain. And these signs have been around for the last 5 years as you drive through the valley because they depend upon rain for their crops and for their harvest and all that sort of thing.
So they’ve had these signs posted and it made sense during the 5 years previous as there’s basically been a drought. Well, now we’re out of a drought. I mean, you know, that’s pretty obvious, right? You with me on that one? But the signs are still the same.
They really should have been changed. Thank you, God, for the rain. That’s what they should say. The prayers of people that prayed, or maybe God just decided to do it, but it could have been expectant prayers of farmers who prayed like Elijah for divine intervention. And so God brought the rain.
It could be an answer to ordinary flesh and blood imperfect people like Elijah who got it right in this case and turned to God and asked for God to intervene expectantly. They asked. Normal people. But notice that, normal people. Elijah was a normal person who prayed expectantly, and God did a divine, miraculous work through his prayers.
Now, what did actually that mean in Elijah’s life? Well, it meant that Elijah turned to God in prayer for a drought, for a God-sized drought. And why would he do that? Well, because the people of Israel and the nations needed to understand who our God is. And at that time, the king, King Ahab, was a wicked king, and he had his endorsement Not on the worship of Yahweh, but on the worship of Baal, of Baalism, which, by the way, believed that their god was the god of rain.
The worship of Baal is in part to believe that God is the god of rain. And to prove that the Lord God, Yahweh God, is superior to Baal, Elijah prayed that there would be a drought so that God’s superiority and Baal’s inferiority might be seen, and then ultimately people would come back to God, especially God’s chosen people, and they would stop worshiping the lesser gods and they would come to worship the greater God, the greatest God of all. So this drought came. Elijah prayed for that. This drought came.
It got people’s attention, and people did begin to turn back to God. And then 3 and a half years later, Elijah prayed again, but this time he prayed for rain. And once again, God answered the prayers of Elijah of this— listen— of this ordinary man, of this human with shortcomings. He answered the prayers of this ordinary man. And why did he answer those prayers?
Well, it’s interesting because when you take a close look at Elijah’s life, one of the things you see is that this was a man who knew how to pray expectantly. There are expectant prayer qualities that show up in Elijah that we do well to pay attention to. And emulate. So I wanna just show you 3 of these this morning. 1 Kings chapter 18 is really kind of the end of the story, but I wanna pick it up there because there’s a quality here that really needs to be at the beginning of our prayer story.
It says in 1 Kings 18:41-42, and Elijah said to Ahab, this is this wicked king, go eat and drink, for there’s the sound of heavy rain. So Ahab went off to eat and drink, but Elijah climbed to the top of Carmel, Mount Carmel, And he bent down to the ground and he put his face between his knees. Now, what I want you to notice at this point is just Elijah’s posture, his posture in prayer. He began his prayer by bending down and putting his face between his knees. And why would he do that?
Well, because that’s an act of humility. It’s an act of respect. It’s an act of worship. So he bowed his body but he also bowed his head before the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. He paid homage to his Lord and King.
And so essentially what we see here is Elijah began his prayer with an action of respect before he went to words of respect. And quite frankly, this is an important factor in expectant prayer, that expectant prayer asks Respectfully. Now, the opposite of asking respectfully is to ask disrespectfully. And to ask disrespectfully would be to come to God and ask how I hear people asking God. Instead of asking, it’s not really an asking, it’s more like a demanding, or it’s more like an insisting, or it’s more like an assumption, or assuming that it’s God’s job to keep us happy.
Well, that’s not the kind of expectant prayer that God answers. If you look at Elijah’s life here, but even if you look earlier, he has this same attitude of respect when he comes to the Lord. In fact, 1 Kings 18:36 says, at the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are the God in Israel and that I am your servant, and have done all these things at your command. Just notice the words, I am your servant. To say that is to say, you’re my master.
I’m your servant, you’re my master, you’re my Lord. I’m here to do as you command. You’re not here to do as I command. I’m here to do as you command. I want your will to be done, your glory to be known through whatever it is that you choose to do.
Now that sounds a little bit like Jesus, doesn’t it? When Jesus prayed, you know, Father, let this cup pass from me, but really what I ultimately want is not my will, I want your will. And quite frankly, that respectful approach makes complete sense, doesn’t it? Who are we to tell God what to do? Who are we to demand that God does a certain thing in the way we want it to be done?
Really, we’re going to come before God that way, disrespectful of who he is? That doesn’t even work with our parents. Have you figured that out yet? That it didn’t work with the parents, you know, your parents? That when you were young, did you find out that if you demand freedom to do your own thing, you’re probably not going to get it?
That as a toddler, if you went outside without your jacket and you were told not to, you’re going to probably get in trouble? That if you ate a cookie instead of the eggs for breakfast, that wasn’t going to go well with you in the home? As a child, did, you know, you’re playing video games before you did your homework, did that work out okay? As an adult, you know, hopefully we’ve learned that demanding or insisting on having our way usually won’t get us our way, that there’s a better way. There’s a better way with your parents, and in this case, there’s a better way with God.
And instead of coming to God by insisting that he give it to us our way, we come to God and we request. And instead of coming to God and demanding that he does it a certain way. We ask, Lord, you do it the way that you wanna do it. What do you wanna do in this circumstance? So it’s a willingness to come to God with respect and say, Lord, I trust you because you know what’s best.
You know what’s best. Used to be a television show on called Father Knows Best. I don’t know if you ever heard of that or seen that. Probably you didn’t because most of you are young, young. And so 1954 to 1960s when it was on television, Anyway, and it starred Robert Young, and he played this part of Jim Anderson.
He was the father of these 3 children who are affectionately known by these nicknames of Princess and Bud and Kitten. Yeah, they used to name their kids like that back in those days. But anyway, and there was Margaret, and she was the wife and the mother and all of this. And this family was called a truly idealized family that viewers could relate to and emulate, okay? And the emulation here was to emulate this dad.
I mean, this is like a thoughtful dad and This dad, they painted him to have sage advice, you know, sage wisdom. And so whenever one or more of his children would come to him, and they always seemed to come to him every week with a problem, he would work it out because father knows what’s best. Now whether or not you believe that, you know, that father always knows what’s best, or Father Jim in this case, he always knew what was best, that’s not what’s most important. What’s most important is when we go to our Heavenly Father, we absolutely believe. That he knows what’s best, and we are ready to receive his advice and to trust his advice with our lives.
We come expectantly, but when we come expectantly, we, we come respectfully. Do you understand? That would change many of our prayers. We don’t come demanding. We don’t come insisting.
We don’t come saying, you got to do this. No. We request. That’s how Elijah came to God. He even showed it in his posture.
You say, why would you bow your head? Maybe it’s just a way to remind us we’re coming before the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and this is appropriate. Expectant prayer asks respectfully. Secondly, expectant prayer believes confidently. Expectant prayer believes confidently, without doubt.
We believe in God’s power and his goodness and his plans. So, that’s how Elijah prayed. He prayed for God-sized miracles, and you see this in James 5 again, verses 17 and 18. I want to just read it this time, though, in the New International Version, because what it tells us is he prayed first for the drought, and then he prayed again for the rain to end the drought. So, here’s what the verse says, or verses.
Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for 3 and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. This is called an earnest prayer. You notice that there.
You might want to underline it or highlight it. An earnest prayer. And an earnest prayer is an expectant prayer. God— or Elijah expected God to do what it was that only God could do. He expected God to stop the rain, and then after 3 and a half years of a drought, he expected God to start the rain.
He lived— he came before God with that kind of expectation. And 1 Kings 18 tells us again how it actually happened. Elijah climbed to the top. This is the end of the story. He climbed to the top of Carmel.
He bent down to the ground, put his face between his knees. And then in verse 43, it says that he told his servant, go and look toward the sea. And the servant went up and the servant looked and the servant said, there’s nothing there. 7 times, however, Elijah said, go back. And the 7th time the servant reported, a cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising from the sea.
This guy had really good eyes, you know, as he looked down at the sea. But anyway, so this servant all of a sudden sees something’s changing. Something’s changing. And this change came after Elijah prayed expectantly for God to intervene. He expected God to do something.
He believed God was going to do something. In fact, that he could do what needed to be done, and in this case, he could stop the rain.
Now, did God do that? Yes. What did that prove? That proved that God could do that. But really, with the person who’s praying, the bigger question is whether or not we can believe God will do that.
Jeremiah, who lived after Elijah, another prophet He said this, Ah, Sovereign Lord, Jeremiah 32:17, Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you. I love that passage, don’t you? Jeremiah has the perspective that Elijah had. Nothing’s too hard for God.
Certainly he could take care of that. Elijah believed what Jesus taught later when his disciples, Jesus’ disciples, asked him if the rich You know, the rich people, can they ever get into heaven? Can they be saved? And Jesus’ answer in Matthew 19:26 was this. Jesus looked at them, the disciples, and said, with man this is impossible.
No, they’re not going to get saved through us. But with God, yeah, God can save them because all things are possible. Elijah believed what Solomon wrote in the book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 3:19-20, by wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations. By understanding, He set the heavens in place.
By His knowledge, the deeps were divided and the clouds let drop the dew. What’s he saying? Creation is the work of God. It’s not accidental. Creation didn’t come into existence without a Creator.
It’s the work of God, and He’s the greatest Creator of all. And this Creator, His power, His wisdom can all come together so that He can do anything. Nothing is impossible with our God. Nothing. Nothing.
Do you believe that? Do you believe that nothing is impossible with our God? So the bigger question when we pray is, do we believe that our God is a God who can do that which is impossible?
Recently I had an experience at WindShape. I don’t know if you’re familiar with WindShape. It was with Walk Thru the Bible Ministries, and WindShape is the conference grounds and training center for Chick-fil-A. It’s in Rome, Georgia, this location. And so I was there a few weeks ago with some of the staff.
I’d been invited to be there to kind of, you know, they pep you up. What do I say? You know, they encourage you. I teach seminars for them from time to time. And we were together for 4 days and 3 nights, and on the last night they decided they wanted to just have kind of this personal sharing time to hear from the instructors some of the experiences that they’ve had over the years teaching Walk Thru that are unforgettable experiences that had an impact on them and others in some special way.
And so they’re sharing all of these stories, and Steve Keyes, who’s one of my friends there, wanted to share a story that he had that had a major impact on him. And as he was sharing the story, I said, oh wow, I got to somehow bring this back to the church here to hear this story. Because this story concerns expectant prayer and what he’s learned about expectant prayer recently. So we had a recent conversation over Zoom, and let me just bring you up in on it so that you can see what he had to say. And what— Steve, you had a recent experience actually in another country outside the United States where you saw some things happen that impacted your prayer life.
What did you see, and how has that changed how you pray these days? Well, thanks, Dave. It certainly was an amazing time. We both worked for Walk Thru the Bible part-time. We have for many, many years.
And so I got the chance to go to Pakistan to teach 7 Laws of the Learner to about 80 Pakistani pastors. And I thought that was all I was going to do. But God says in his word, he often gives us more than we ever ask or think. And so the day before I was about to leave, they said, would you like to be the opening speaker for our evangelistic and healing crusade? And I said, well, sure.
And then I stepped back and thought, what exactly is a healing crusade? I’ve never done that before. How many people will be there? They said, well, last year we had 12,000. And I paused.
I’ve never spoken to that many people in my life. And they said, don’t worry, the first night it will probably only be 6,000. So that put me at ease. They gave the invitation and then through an interpreter, I didn’t know what he was saying, but hundreds and hundreds of people just streamed down the aisles and raised their hands and accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior. And I thought, isn’t this great?
And then I sat down and they did the healing crusade, which was a Pakistani evangelist. And that night they brought people in wheelchairs, people on crutches, blind people, deaf people forward. They prayed for them, laid hands on them. And over a period of about 2 hours, I saw probably 100 people healed instantaneously of lifelong ailments and problems. And that absolutely rocked my world.
Because I kind of always thought that God could heal and often does, but probably won’t as much in our modern age, particularly here in America. I felt like I was living in the book of Acts. And as I was reading the scriptures when I came home, that’s where I felt like I was. But when I came home, I had a new boldness and a new confidence in my prayer life when someone asked me to pray for them if they were sick or needed healing, that I would do so. I think in the past with a lot of unbelief, and a lot of uncertainty and probably doubt that God could do really what he said he would do.
Now, God doesn’t heal everyone instantaneously. He can heal over time. He can heal through doctors and medicines as well. But I believe that God would give us a lot more answers to our prayers if we just expected that he would do so. I found in life you often get far more than you expect if you really just ask God to give you what he said he would in his word.
It says in John 14 that he’ll go to the Father and that we would be allowed stay here and do works, even greater works than he did while he was here. Now either we believe that or we don’t. He came to heal. He came to save. He came to cast out demons.
He came to love people. Can we do the same things? I believe absolutely. So now I look at things with a lot more confidence than I ever did before. Wow, Steve, you know, your changes in your prayer life have to have been significant.
How are you praying differently now? Well, now when I see a person, I really know by what I’ve experienced that God can do this and wants to heal and wants to encourage and wants to save and wants to bless and wants to help. And so I have so much more confidence now when I pray with people. I’ve seen some miraculous things happen as we’ve prayed as well in our Monday night prayer meetings. So I just trust God for more and more of what I call being naturally supernatural.
I mean, it’s a supernatural thing that happens. It’s not something that I can do. I can heal no one, but it’s God alone that can touch them. But he wants to use us in our human state. Naturally supernatural is how I describe it.
You know, you said something more to me about this whole matter of expectations, and you said something to the effect that oftentimes we end up lowering our expectations instead of elevating our expectations. What did you mean by that? I think that when we see a person that’s sick or has a special— an infirmary or something like that, we tend to back away thinking, well, nothing really probably will happen. But I’ll go in and say, well, if the Lord will, maybe he will touch you. Or I’ll just come at it almost just backing up, just hoping that something will happen, but probably because of unbelief, not really thinking that it will.
Well, I have a whole different mindset now when I go into a situation like that. I have high expectations that God will do what he said he will do. Steve, thanks for taking the time to share your story with us. I hope that what you’ve experienced will become an ongoing experience in our lives and in the life of Bridges Community Church. All the best, Steve.
Naturally supernatural. See you then.
You know, it just sounds to me like Dr. Hayler, I mean, the pastor I grew up under, when you pray, expect something to happen. You’re talking to God who makes things happen. And so it really comes back to what do we believe? Do we doubt? Do we believe in God’s power?
Do we believe that God can heal? Do we believe that God can change circumstance? Do we believe nothing is impossible with God? Expectant prayer confidently asks and believes that God is going to do a work beyond the work that we could do. So there are 2 matters here that we can call into our prayer life.
We can expectantly pray by asking respectfully. We can expectantly pray by believing confidently. And then let me give you one more. Expectant prayer waits in eagerly. Expectant prayer waits eagerly.
And, and this eager waiting is we know that God’s got a perfect timing, and so we want to wait on his timing. I want you to just go back again with me to this matter with Elijah here. Remember Elijah, the answer that he was praying for did not come immediately, but it came in time, which meant that Elijah had to persist. We talked about persistence last week. It meant that he had to persist.
And so Elijah persisted in praying and praying and praying, and he also persisted in getting his servant to keep checking and checking and checking to see if the prayer had been answered yet. And we’re told that this checking went on 7 times. Why 7? Well, I think God’s communicating something to us through that perfect number. There’s a perfect time for when God is going to do whatever it is that God wants to do.
And so 7 times Elijah said, go back. And the 7th time when he went back, the servant saw this cloud as small as a man’s hand that was rising from the sea. And so Elijah, 1 Kings 18:44, so Elijah said, go and tell Ahab, hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you. Now, you may be right now waiting on God. You’re trying to wait expectantly as you’re waiting on God.
You’ve been praying about something that You know that this is going to require God’s intervention. If this is going to get fixed, it’s going to be done by God. There’s no other way out of this whole thing. And so you’re waiting and you’re waiting. And quite frankly, when we’re waiting, it’s hard to wait, isn’t it?
I mean, we know that by how well we wait, whether or not we’re able to wait expectantly with this attitude: my God is good. God is good. God’s all-powerful. God’s got the answer. God’s got the perfect timing.
And so, knowing that, waiting expectantly then waits, listen, without fear. It waits without doubt. It waits without running around and trying to fix things yourself so that God, you know, you’re going to help God out. No, it waits and it waits patiently. This is a problem with us, isn’t it?
It waits patiently. What’s the American prayer? Lord, give me patience. I want it right now. Yeah, give it to me right now, Lord.
And that’s kind of how we wait. And really, there’s the difference between oftentimes godly waiting and worldly waiting. Godly waiting waits eagerly for God to do whatever it is he’s going to do with a sense of persistence in our prayers for his perfect timing. Worldly waiting gets tired of waiting and maybe takes it out on God. I’ve had enough of God.
I want nothing more to do with God. I’m, I’m gonna go do this my own way. Really, our waiting ought to be more like how we wait in lines at Disneyland. Now, how do you wait in lines at Disneyland? I mean, you get there and they show a wait time like 300 minutes, you know, and you say, that’s like 5 hours.
I don’t know if I could take that, you know. But, but you do. You get in line, you’re waiting and waiting, and you’re like, yeah, this is going to be great. So that’s why I’m waiting. Or graduating.
You know, some of you are getting ready to graduate from high school or college or whatever it is, and you have this sense of anticipation. You’re waiting well. Or it’s how some of you are waiting right now for Star Wars 9 that’s going to be released on December 20th, 2019. And you’re all like, yes! I can hardly wait for it to come.
And so you’re waiting with this sense of excitement. And why are you excited and why are you willing to wait? Because you know when it comes, it’s going to be good. And you can hardly wait for it to come. That’s the picture.
That’s the picture. You see, waiting with expectance on God is waiting with expectance for His will to be done. And that changes everything, doesn’t it? You say, well, wait a minute. I, like, don’t know the time here.
He’s not giving us the time. That’s the problem. He’s not giving us the wait time. I mean, if he gave us a wait time, then it might be a little bit easier. Something like, you know, at Disneyland, at least we got the wait time.
We’re okay, you know, at least we can look at that and hope maybe it’ll be a little bit sooner than that. I got the wait time on graduation. I got the wait time on that movie that’s going to come out when it comes out. But not knowing when the time is, how long the wait is going to be, can make us miserable, right? Miserable.
But what it should be doing, if we’re waiting with expectant prayers, is it should be adding to our anticipation and to our sense of thanks and to our gratitude. God, you’re working and it’s okay. You’ve got a perfect time schedule here. I’m just going to trust you because I know, listen, the wait will be worth it. It will be worth it.
David, when he wrote Psalm 5, Psalm 5:3, he said this: In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice. In the morning I lay my request before you and wait in expectation.
I wait in expectation. I can hardly wait to see what you’re going to do and when you do it. For years, actually for decades, Simeon Simeon was waiting for the Messiah to come, and he was waiting eagerly. He was not weary in his waiting. We read about this in Luke chapter 2.
It’s around the birth of Jesus Christ where it says this righteous and devout man, Luke 2:25, he was eagerly waiting for the Messiah to come and rescue Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. By the way, there’s one of the keys why he was able to wait eagerly. Because he was waiting in the Spirit. He was trusting God’s timing. The Spirit was working in him to give him a different power and a different perspective on who he was waiting for.
And really, Simeon could be us. We could be people who are filled with hope rather than filled with despair in our waiting. It really depends on the perspective that we have and the relationship that we share with God. And really, we don’t want to have a distant relationship with God. We want to have a personal relationship with God.
And that personal relationship is made possible through the one that Simeon was waiting on, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came to make it possible for us to be intimately connected with God so that we can, without anything in between, we could come directly to the throne of God through our prayers and know that God will hear us in our time of need. And so we come to him, and that’s the offer here. We come to Him, we ask respectfully, and we believe confidently, and we wait eagerly. On more than one occasion when Howard Hendricks was alive, I heard him ask a question several different places that I heard him speak.
By the way, Howard Hendricks was a former professor of hermeneutics and Bible exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary. He taught there as a professor for 60 years. But he would often, when he spoke somewhere, he would often help people think about their faith and their prayer life and their connection to God, and it often asks them this question. You say, what are you trusting God for that only He could do so that when He does it, He gets all the glory for it?
That’s a great question, isn’t it? Can you think of anything right now? Anything right now? Is there anything that you’re trusting God for that only He can do? Something that you’re praying about, something that’s beyond your strength, your power, your ingenuity, your training, your learning, your abilities, your experiences?
The only way this is going to happen is if you trust God with it. Is there anything like that in your life right now that’s got you on your knees? That’s a great place to be. Not on our knees just once, but on our knees time and time again, because we know that it’s not going to happen unless God shows up. And if God shows up, there’s going to be a greater work done through whatever it is that he wants to do as we see God-sized breakthroughs come our way.
This week we’re bringing our series to a close. On a personal level, this has been a great series for me, really has. I’ve been learning so much. I mean, we wrote parts of this study guide. I feel like I’ve never read this stuff before.
I’m just learning again, you know, about what we’re focused on. So on a personal level, this has been a great thing for me. I hope it’s been the same for you. On a pastoral level, this has been a great time for me. As I’ve been reading through this and thinking about all of this, I just keep thinking about, Lord, wouldn’t it be amazing if through what it is that we’re learning, we didn’t just learn this for 40 days, but it went past the 40 days.
It went with us and it transformed our lives. And if it’s transforming our lives, guess what? It’s going to transform this community. It’s going to transform this church. And hopefully it will go past this Jerusalem and it will go out to the world to other people.
It will begin to help other people through learning— through what we’ve learned about prayer so that together we’re all learning something about prayer.
I got to thinking about this series in light of Gideon.
Familiar with Gideon’s story? God wanted to use Gideon, but Gideon had an army of 32,000. You know what God said? He said, that army’s too big. So he resized the army.
He resized it to 300. To 300. Then God got their attention. He had their attention. And you know what it did?
It created people of dependence. People of dependence. Sometimes you look at small as not good and big as good. It doesn’t have to be that way. It could be that even through the small things that God is doing or the groups of people that God is bringing together, that He wants to teach them greater dependence.
And I really think that’s what this series has been all about. It’s all about dependence. Are we reliant on God? Do we come to God repentant over our sins? Are we desperate and fervent?
Are we persistent? And will we be expectant? Those are the kind of prayers that God hears and God answers. Now let me go back to the beginning. Does that mean he only answers those kinds of prayers?
And the answer is no. He can do whatever it is that he wants to do whenever he wants to do it, right? But when it comes to what he wants us to know about prayer and the responsibilities that he— that we have, he wants us to be people like what we’re talking about this morning. People that are expectant, that come before his throne expectantly, respectfully, believing that he is the God that hears and he, the God, can do anything. And trust in him and his timing, for whenever it is, he decides to act.
Let’s pray. Father, we pray that in greater ways we would be people who pray with expectant faith, and that would lead to God-sized breakthroughs so that you would be honored and you would be glorified, and we, Lord, would see you do what it is that you wanted Whenever, whatever. And Father, I pray if there’s anybody here today that right now is struggling with an area of their life that they just desperately need a breakthrough, pray, Lord, they’d turn to you, that they would not give up on you, that they would turn to you through your Son Jesus Christ, receive the gift of life that’s found in Christ. And come before your throne invited through the Son to the one who can do something about whatever it is that they’re facing. And Lord, we pray that your throne of grace, when they come before your throne of grace, would be for them a place of mercy and help in this time of need.
And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.
