How many of you were told that you needed to pray at some time in your life? Ok, But how many of you have been sat down and asked someone, “Will you teach me how to pray?” Some of us have prayed for little while, some of us for a long time. Some of us may have prayed for our whole lives, some of us maybe haven’t prayed at all, but want to start, but don’t know how – maybe don’t want to do it wrong. For those of you who have been praying already, have any of you ever considered that maybe you’re not praying right?

Wouldn’t it be kind of embarrassing if someone came up to you and said, excuse me, but you’re not praying right? Nobody here would ever do that, but maybe you’ve never thought that there was a right way and a wrong way to pray, but in the ministry of Jesus, there was a time when Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how to pray.

Now this is really interesting, because Jesus’ disciples were young Jewish men and they had been praying from a very early age. Prayer was a huge part of their culture. Praying went on in the synagogue or the Jewish temple and everyone went to one place or the other and everyone prayed. Every devout Jewish male, and everyone wanted to be devout in their culture, prayed. But the disciples saw Jesus praying, and apparently the way he prayed and the way they prayed was so different that they felt compelled to say to Jesus, Jesus, will you “teach us how to pray”. Read the rest of this entry »

You and I need to communicate. We were created to communicate. Without phone calls and conversations, without regular communications we go a bit crazy. There have been studies on this subject. If people are kept in solitary confinement for very long, they lose the ability to talk and relate with other people and they become very depressed. They go a little bit nuts. A part of them dies when they don’t get to talk and listen to others.

Anybody ever see the Tom Hanks movie Castaway? Tom is on this deserted island for years and he goes a little bit crazy because there’s no one to talk to – no animals and no people, and the only way that he stays even a little bit sane is by making a human face out of a volleyball and he talks to it, like it’s his friend. He even names his friend Wilson after the athletics manufacturer Tom had this insatiable desire to talk and be with someone even if the person was imaginary.

Imagine with me for a moment what your life would be like if you couldn’t speak? Imagine what your life and mine would be like if nobody else could speak to us? We were created to speak to others and if we’re not able, then a part of the inside of us dies. Read the rest of this entry »

You probably don’t remember the first prayer that you ever prayed, but if you’re like me, the first prayers that you prayed were prayers that someone taught you, like God is good, God is Great, or Now I lay me down to sleep. My wife and I sort of rebelled against this type of memorized prayer when we taught our kids to pray. And so, we just gave our kids some categories about what they might pray about, and then they wove all those categories together and formed their own rote prayer. They were the same every night. There’s something about prayer where we just keep going back to the same old dead, crusty prayers. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure how your week went, but I want to make a prediction. My prediction is that you experienced a moment of frustration this week. Frustration with traffic, frustration with your spouse or mom or dad or a friend, or a child, frustration with your job or the people at your job – maybe your boss. We’ve all experience frustration this week, because it’s pretty common.

You get frustrated, and I get frustrated all the time, but have you ever thought about what frustrates God? God is the all-powerful creator of the universe and yet he gets frustrated too. There are many places in the Old Testament where God reveals his frustration. There are numerous places in the New Testament where Jesus shares his frustration. If you’ve gotten frustrated this week, then you got company because God gets frustrated too.

So here’s the questions for this morning. What frustrates God?

How many of you love potholes in the road? Have any of you had to have front-end alignments on your cars this spring because of the potholes? Potholes make one of your tires turn right or left and when that happens, your car doesn’t want to go straight anymore, it wants to go right or left. You and I often times need a frustration alignment so that we begin to track in the same direction as God and when we do that, we begin to find out who we were created to be. We find some things about what God’s will is, and we find a lot about what it means to have a life that makes a difference in the world. Does anybody want that? Read the rest of this entry »