This last Sunday, I was visiting my father at Bass Lake and attended the Sunday Worship Service to hear the sermon by Pastor Herk of the Little Church in the Pines. He stated that the question which we need to understand is: Are you willing to pray a dangerous prayer that if God answered it, would transform and change your life, the life of someone around you, and/or your community? If you are a disciple of Christ, then you should be willing and able to pray them. A dangerous prayer might renew your mind.
Romans 12:1-2 “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
Yield your total body and personality. The body is the instrument by which we express ourselves (the mind, the will, the affections of the soul). The Apostle Paul urges the Believer not to fashion their life and conduct by the people of the secular around us, or even people within the church. He is not asking that, but in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship– to change yourself by asking God to change the way that you think with a holy and sacrificial heart of Christ. It may mean that you lose your old godless and immoral friends that you’ve had for years. The God-rejecting world does not want to hear about salvation from sin in Jesus and the guilt associated.
Supplications for ourselves in prayer may be for God to bless us, protect us, provide for us, to be with us or simply to help us. But, a high percentage of our prayers are “me” centered, focused on what we want more than what we need. Today, let’s look at five “me” prayers that could radically transform our lives and lead us to a closer relationship to God. They are dangerous prayers if we really do not want God to answer them. We like where we are in our life right now in our comfort zone. These prayers are really going to change us, if you pray them with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. The five “me” prayers challenge us to be totally submitted to Jesus Christ as Lord and His will for our lives; to be living sacrifices.
Psalm 139:23-24 “Search me, God, and know my heart; Put me to the test and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there is any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way.”
The first prayer is “Search me”. Do you dare pray that dangerous prayer? Our omniscient Creator knows who we are at our core, all your thoughts and faults, but He may bring them to mind and feel guilty about them. In the sin nature of the fallen flesh on this side of Heaven, we all have done something that was not pleasing in the eyes of the Lord and asked for forgiveness. But, there may be things in our lives today that do not bring any glory to God. Maybe we do them because they bring personal pleasure, or rationalize it because everyone else is doing them, or maybe they are an addictive bad habit. Have you considered that some of the things that you do are offensive in God’s sight?
If you search your heart this morning, what is hiding inside that shouldn’t be there. If God searched our heart right now, what would be revealed? Ask God to search you and He will point the hidden things out to you. King David prayed to God to search his heart because he was determined to follow God and desired a pure heart to do so, knowing any offense in his life had to stop. Maybe there are some areas in your life that you need to surrender to God to stop. Would an inward core search by God reveal a heart for Jesus and sensitive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit or a heart being drawn away from the things of God, hindered from worshipping totally, being holy or bringing glory to God? Would there be thoughts of the Word, Will and Way of God or the words, will and ways of this humanistic material world? Would He find faithful trust in God or trust in this world in turmoil? Open the door to Jesus and shut the door on the devil.
Let's continue Pastor Herk's eye-opening message of truth in the next post.
In Christ, Brian
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