『Confident Prayer』のカバーアート

Confident Prayer

Confident Prayer

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
When we know and trust in Jesus Christ, we can pray confidently, expecting that God both hears us and will meet all of our needs if we pray according to his will. Well, we are in our final two weeks of our study of First John. Ordinarily, I might say I hope you’ve enjoyed it, but, enjoy doesn’t seem quite the right word for First John. When we started this series back in April, I called this letter one of the most transformational documents in the biblical library. And I stand by that. I stand by it. You can’t read this letter thoughtfully and be the same person when you’re done. There are just too many challenging assertions, too many sobering statements about the nature of faith and the call of God. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. Whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. Whoever says he abides in Jesus ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. For the devil has been sinning from the beginning. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen. Whoever has the Son has life. Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. So throughout this letter John has been sculpting, sometimes painfully, Christians. That’s what he’s doing. He’s sculpting Christians. He will not let us create a sort of false Christianity that doesn’t take seriously who Jesus is and what he did on the cross, and what His Spirit does in our hearts and how we are now to walk in righteousness. John saying the inauthentic, hypocritical, false, so-called Christian life is out there. It is available to you and I don’t want you to live it. I don’t want you to go that way. This morning, we have the beginning of the conclusion of this letter, and we know because it starts by saying why he’s written this letter. And that’s usually a pretty good indication as to the end is near in letters like this. And he wraps things up, John does, he wraps things up very confidently, despite the fact that he has presented so many challenges in this letter, it is not John’s intention to leave us in a place of fear or in a place of doubt. And that can happen with challenges sometimes. If you stack up phrases from the letter like I just did here a moment ago, you can get the impression that John wants us to be walking around constantly questioning our relationship with God. And I’ve known Christians. Maybe you are. You have this low-level, nagging discomfort about your own faith because you’re not sure if your faith is strong enough or if it’s real at all. I know people like this. They don’t rest with confidence in the grace of God and live with confidence that God is at work in them and is firmly in control of their lives. John’s challenges are meant to weed out false faith, okay? That’s what those challenges are. They’re meant to weed out false faith so we don’t fall for it, but then leave true faith with confidence. And that’s how this letter ends. Next week, we’re going to look at how to deal with sin and three very encouraging things that we know that give us confidence in our eternal life. But this morning, we’re going to look at what it means to engage in confident prayer. When we know and we trust in Jesus Christ, we can pray confidently, expecting that God both hears us and will meet all of our needs if we pray according to his will. Let me begin with a little bit of a confession here this morning, church. I find prayer to be one of the more mysterious aspects of the Christian faith. When I, when I put together the different ways that Scripture describes prayer, I am left with some ambiguity on how it exactly works. And I put works in quotes because I’m not exactly sure how prayer accomplishes what it accomplishes. It is an essential part of Christian life. Okay. We are told that prayer is powerful. James tells us the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. I don’t question at all for a moment that God accomplishes great things through prayer, but it is mysterious. And some of that ambiguity is probably going to come through as I work to describe what John says about prayer this morning. So if you have your Bibles, you can open them to First John chapter five. We’re going to begin in verse 13 this morning. John starts by sharing the confidence that he wants us to have. And then he describes how prayer is part of that confidence. And once we look at that, I want to spend some time this morning...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません