Pastor Jeff Orluck
Jeff: Hello again, church family; glad to have you back. I am speaking to a congregation of two who are actually here physically at Hope Community Church, Mike and Joel, who are running our live stream. They are producing the live stream and sound for us. So thank you guys for being here. When you amen say it loudly.
Voice: Amen.
Jeff: Amen. All the rest of you who have joined by live stream, welcome. It's great to have you here. Today is a very special day at Hope Community Church. This is our second all day of prayer that we've scheduled. We had one back in the end of July, and this is our second one. Our first day of prayer was on a Saturday, the end of July. It was such a profound experience. Many of us found ourselves in prayer, the entire 12 hours. We started at 8 o'clock this morning. All of this is happening on zoom. If you are a member of church, you should have an email with a link you can log into. If you haven't received that email, but you would like to join us, you can probably just text Jacque, and she can send you the link.
The prayer is going to start at 8. It's going to go all the way until 8 tonight. Every hour, we have a different prayer leader. Pastor Brian has given us a prayer list of things to really keep in mind as we are praying through the day, but the overriding theme of today's prayer is found in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Many of us know this scripture by heart- "If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven. I will forgive their sin and I will heal their land." I find that this scripture is so familiar to many of us, that with many things that become overly familiar, it tends to lose its impact and meaning.
My goal this morning is to just to highlight a few significant things that I find in this verse of scripture to try to bring it alive and stir hearts to cause it to really impact how we spend our day in prayer, how we approach the Lord and how we approach even our prayer lives in general. The first thing I want to point out related to this scripture… As Monk would say, if you are fans of watching, Mr. Monk TV series, he says, “Here is the thing.” So here is the thing; God always looks to his own people to make a difference. He doesn't look to sinners. He doesn't look to the rest of the world. He doesn't look to the wicked to make the difference in our world. He looks to his people and he always has.
He looks to us to begin to pray, Lord, I repent. Lord, I turn from my ways. Lord, I seek your face. You notice that all of these prayers that he is actually calling us to that we find in 2 Corinthians 7 are first person prayers. They are prayers using the word I, or we, if we are praying as a church. We repent, Lord. We come before you, Lord. We humble ourselves, Lord. The most effective prayers that I think we will ever pray for our world are first person prayers, because it's our response to the father as he is stirring in our hearts, convicting us and dealing with us that bring the most change to our lives, to the church as a whole and thus to the world.
I want to turn to the New Testament and we are going to go to the Book of Romans, because I think what you are going to find is that in the Book of Romans, there is a very interesting example of this very thing. If you remember in the first chapter of Romans... Let me just read you, verse 18. It says “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” That's a scathing rebuke to the world. You'll notice that, if you read the rest of chapter one, Paul goes through a whole list of things all the way through like verse 30 or 31, 32, a whole list of things that they, the world are doing wrong; all of the sins, all the ways they have turned from God, all the wrong things that they've embraced, all the wrong behaviors that they have acted out, but all of his discussion in the first chapter of Romans is in third-person. It's all about “they”. It's all about the rest of the world. It's all about the wicked.
And so then we moved from the end of chapter one into the first verse of chapter two, and here is what Paul says then. He says, “You therefore…”, and he is writing to the church in the city of Rome. He is writing to Jewish believers in the city of Rome. He says, “You therefore have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgment, do the same things.”
What happens is, after Paul talks about the world in the third person, he then moves to speak directly to his fellow believers in the second person. Now, he is not talking about they; he is talking about you. In order to respond to the second person exhortation that Paul is giving us as the believer he is speaking to, we need to respond not about they. We need to respect bond about I. So we have to respond to what Paul is saying to the second person group in the first person. We could talk about them; that's third person, but what guy ads really looking for as a response from us in the first person. That's the very same thing we see when we compare Romans chapter 1 and Romans chapter 2.
Let me give you some biblical examples about how now these two different responses are real. The first one is obvious. When Adam was confronted by the father for eating the forbidden fruit, he responded to the father in the third person. He said she. She gave me the fruit and I ate. He deflected what God was looking for from him, and rather than responding to the father and first person, he responded in third. Another good example of that is Saul after he had defeated the Amalekites and Abimelech was the king. He spared the king. They had taken all the animals that were supposed to have been destroyed, all the booty from the battle that was supposed to have been destroyed, and they saved it for themselves. Samuel came and confronted Saul. What is the bleeding of the sheep that I hear in my ears? Why is all of this still in existence? It should have been destroyed. Saul's response to Samuel was third person- they. It was the people they wanted this. So once again, when Samuel confronted Saul, what the father was looking for was first person response, but what he got was a third person response- they.
The third example is a little bit more encouraging. It was a horrendous sin. David had an affair with Bathsheba. She ended up pregnant. To cover up everything that happened, he had her husband murdered, so that one would think he died after she conceived with him, which wasn't the truth. His plan succeeded perfectly with the exception that God knew what had happened. So Nathan came to David and Nathan confronts him. Nathan tells a little story about the guy with the lamb and David gets in sense, and Nathan said, "It's you. How could you think that you could steal a man's wife and murder him and get away with it?" Here is a second person confrontation from a prophet of God to David. But in this case, David's reply was first person- I have sinned against the Lord. That made all the difference.
In fact, because he responded in the... Remember with Saul when Saul responded in the third person, God took away the kingdom from him. Here, even though David had sinned horrendously, when he replied to God in the first person, his son, Solomon ended up carrying on his line in the kingdom. Of course, that lineage followed all the way through to Jesus. So it's an amazing difference when we pray in the first person or we pray in the third person. What 1 Chronicles 7-14 calls us to do is to seek God, to humble ourselves before him, to be willing to let him move us outside of our box of understanding, to show us ways that we are thinking wrong, speaking wrong, acting wrong, because we all end up doing that. Many of us are blind to our worst faults.
I remember one time I was on a mission’s trip in India and the Lord, of all places... It seems like sometimes the Lord speaks to me most profoundly when I'm out of the country. I don't know what it is. In India I had a dream and the dream exposed a patronizing mindset that I had toward women. It was really profound. I remember waking up and just realizing, oh, this is horrible. Jeff, what a jerk? You are such a creep. Thank you, Father. And then I was praying and I was repenting over this dream that I had, and the Lord... or not the Lord, but then I realized that… What I ended up saying to the Lord is "Lord, thank you for showing me this. I'm sure everybody else in my life could see it except me." That's so true that there are just things in us that we are blind to. It's the father's gift when he reveals them to us so that we can change.
I don't know about you; I've been a Christian since I was 16 years old. It has been 50 years of change, change, change, change, lots of repentance, lots of opportunities to be a different person than I originally was. I'm sure it's the same for many of you. Let's not assume that we've got it all figured out. Let's expect that we have blind spots. When we humble ourselves before the Lord, what we are really doing is we are giving him an opportunity to reveal something that we can't see so that we can change again, become more like him and become more effective as his servants. So that's really what a second Chronicles is all about.
There is another piece that I really like. This is just a little nugget that I really appreciate in this passage of scripture. It's actually in verses 15 and 16. In this discussion that the father is having with Solomon, he talks about the temple and how he has accepted the tent as a place of sacrifice and as a place of prayer. Here is what he says about the temple. He says, "Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place. I have chosen and consecrated this temple so that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there." I love when he said, “My eyes and my heart will always be there.”
Here is the thing; that temple doesn't stand anymore. The people of Israel wandered away from the Lord. They engaged in all kinds of idolatry and abominations. In the end, they lost their nation and they lost their temple. So the temple that God consecrated, the temple that he accepted, the temple that he said he would always be in cease to exist, but God raised up a new temple. We moved to the New Testament, Corinthians 13. Paul writes, “Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple, and that God's spirit dwells in your midst. If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person for God's temple is sacred, and you together are the temple.”
I think it's really profound that in the absence of a physical temple, God has sanctified the temple of his people where he resides. The Holy Spirit resides in each and every one of us. When we gather to worship, when we are together in fellowship, when we gather in Zoom for a day of prayer, the Lord promises that his presence is going to be with us, but even more than that, his eyes and his heart. I think those two things, the eyes and the heart that's where intimacy is; when we connect with each other, by looking into each other's eyes, when we connect with each other because there is something we have in our emotions, in this level of feeling.
Isn't it interesting? We cannot be connected in our minds. We can actually think different things. We can be of two different political parties. We could be of two different faiths. We could be of two different mindsets about a whole variety of things. We could have two different opinions about many, many things, but we can still have a heart connection. This is what the father promises for us when we gather in his name, that he is with us to make a heart connection. This is what I shared earlier during the offering that Pastor Brian has so diligently pursued, is a heart connection with our Lord. This is what he wants more than any of us, is a heart connection. I think a couple of weeks ago, I shared something; someone that I heard said there is only one thing better than knowing God. That is being known by God.
He wants to know us. He comes to be present in our myths to know us, to connect with us, to hear our heart, to share his heart. This is what happens in a season of prayer. This is what will happen today if you join it. You actually see it, and you might find yourselves like some of the rest of us not wanting to ever leave the prayer room for the next 12 hours, because it's so good to be in the presence of the Lord.
One last thing I want to share before we close, this is kind of a closing thought here. This is one more thing about praying in the third person. I've got a scripture here. I didn't put it in my notes, but I'm going to bring it up on my phone. This is one we all know as well, John 3:16 and 17. It says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." But then he goes on to say, "For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."
I think at some point in time, when we are praying and spending our time before the Lord, we start in the first person, we respond to the challenges of the Holy Spirit, we repent of the things he convicts us of, we act out 2 Chronicles 7:14 in our prayer life, but then at some point in time, it becomes time to pray in the third person. When we start praying in the third person, we want to pray with a heart of our father who is there with us. His heart is, for God did not send a son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
When we begin to pray in the third person or even speak about our world in the third person, we want to save ourselves from words of judgment, words of condemnation. We want to save ourselves from harsh words of execution. It's easy to fall into that. We see it so prevalent right now in our culture, but as the body of Christ, we can be different and we can actually speak in a third person in a redemptive manner. We can certainly pray in the third person for God's mercy, for his power and for his great salvation, because our world is in need of salvation, and we are the ones that can bring it. We are the ones who carry the father's heart of love for the nations. Every single person was created in his image and he loves them infinitely, beyond what we can even comprehend. Let's let his heart become our heart. Let's pray in the third person the way he longs in the third person for perfect communion, for relationship, to know each and every person who lives in this world.
You may have friends and family, you may have acquaintances at work, there may be people on your Facebook page that you can't.... They just feel so far away from God, but the way to draw them back is to pray for them in the third person with a heart of the father, a heart of redemption, releasing his salvation, trusting for his mercy. We'll do that all day today. We are going to do it together. We are going to join our hearts and we are going to agree with the heart of God. We are going to enjoy a sweet communion, and we are going to enjoy communion with one another. Join us on Zoom anytime today, all the way up until 8:00 PM, and you will get to experience it as well. God bless, you all. Have a great week. It's going to be a good one because God goes with us. Bye. Bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 10-25-20. If you would like to watch the full service, click one of the links below.