Peter Roselle: Guard Your Heart From the Sin of Prayerlessness (1 Samuel 12:23)

• Let’s look at some scripture. So go to Luke 18. And this is a different portion than what we’ve been studying in the past. But it’s part of what I wanna talk about. It says, “One day Jesus told his disciples a story.” This is Luke 18:1. And the story was that they should always pray and never give up. So can you look at somebody and say, “Always pray and never give up.” And you know, like, well, you might be saying, “Wait a minute.

00:27 - How can I always pray? I have a job. How could I pray if I’m working?” And I can say, “You better be praying when you’re working.” He wouldn’t say to always do it if we couldn’t do it. But my problem when I was still getting the reel, all messed up, learning how to fish, me learning how to pray was I thought it was binary. I’m either working or I’m praying. That’s a juvenile approach. And that’s a misunderstanding of who God is, right? And look, I know there’s a bunch of different things that prayer means.

01:03 - So I’m not trying to give you this extensive teaching on all the different types of prayer right now. What I’m trying to help you with is to understand my journey of growing in this is like, wait a minute, it’s not such a big formal thing. God loves you, Peter. He’s praying for you. You know, don’t be like the typical guy that doesn’t like to ask for help because they think it’s a sign of weakness. Well, prayer, many times for me is asking for help. How about you guys? Okay, thank you. I’m just making sure you’re awake. I’m not the only one.

01:39 - And look, if he loves me, why wouldn’t he wanna help me? I don’t run out of, well, you only have a couple of prayer requests left and then you’re gonna have to start eating into tomorrow. No, it’s not a limited amount. He’s never slumbering, he’s never sleeping, and he always loves hearing from me. Isn’t that amazing? How about you? He loves hearing from you. And anybody that has children that are older now, when they call you and ask for advice, you’re just like, “Hold the phone,” and go, “Hallelujah! Thank you God” Because that was your prayer for them when they were children is that you’d always be in a life-giving relationship with them. And that’s God’s belief for us. So one day Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up.

02:23 - I’m not gonna read the next five, six verses, ‘cause you probably know the story. It’s a story of a widow who goes to an unjust judge and pleads her case, and the judge ignores her. But she doesn’t give up. She keeps going back and going back and going back, and he keeps ignoring her. And eventually, the guy says, “You know what? I really don’t have a reason to keep ignoring this lady, and she’s so persistent.” And when one of our speakers was here, Karen Wheaton, she called it, she had found a that said “shameless persistence.

” 03:02 - (laughs) I don’t care how silly I look, I’m gonna keep asking. I’m gonna keep knocking on this door and I’m not stopping. I’m not taking no for an answer. I want justice! And, you know, God loves widows and orphans; James talks about that in the New Testament. He says that’s true religion is how you give a voice to the people who don’t have a voice in our culture. That’s what injustice is. It’s a main theme of 2020 is more justice.

03:29 - The problem is if you take God out of it, wow, then you get bunch of vengeance. And you never get forgiveness under that model. It’s gotta be God’s justice, not the world’s justice. That’s another day’s story. So some people think God is the angry, unjust judge. Like, why would Jesus talk about his father like that? God’s not the unjust judge.

03:57 - It’s an example of even in the worldly sense of you could go to that guy and finally get him to concede the point and say, “Yeah, go ahead, I’ll give you the justice.” How much more would your heavenly father give you justice? We have a much higher authority in God who loves us and loves justice. Look that word up on Bible Gateway sometime. Hundreds of times you’ll see the word justice. It’s why he gave them the law, so they would know how to rightly divide wrong and right.

04:28 - But like we know from the New Testament, we all fall short of being able to follow that in our own strength. ‘cause maybe when I sang that song this morning, what do you mean you’re not enough? Yes, you are. Well, okay, in some ways you could look at it that way, but if you don’t listen to the rest of the sentence, you might take it out. I’m not enough unless you come, that’s the line. And that’s true because we can’t do it in our own strength; that’s what Jesus said, I can do nothing without the Father.

04:57 - So pride would get in the way and say, “I am enough.” Well, the Lord said, “Why? Why would you do it alone when I’m available whenever you want me?” Prayerlessness is a sin. So why wouldn’t you just bring your needs before the Lord on a regular basis? He’s not mad at you for doing that. All right, so then he says in verse seven, in this position of saying, look, if the earthly judge even decides to give justice, don’t you think that God will surely give justice to his chosen people who cry out to him, when? - [Congregant] Day and night. - Day and night. Well, will God keeps putting you off? Like, you can say, “Well, I’ve been praying for something for many years and I still haven’t seen the answer yet.

” 05:39 - Well, look, that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong; it just means you stay persistent and you keep on praying. And I’m looking at Joe Billota down here in the front, and you just never know when the Lord is gonna move mightily in somebody’s life. And if you know anything about our church, you might’ve heard their testimony of Joe and Anna Billota. And Anna, they lost a child, their first child, right? It was your was your first child, Joseph. And he was less than two if I remember, right? And it was an accident at a family party, and it was just tragic what happened.

06:15 - And nobody should ever have to live through that, right? It’s the hardest thing that I’ve experienced as a pastor to try to help somebody cope with that kind of grief. And they’re very seasoned people. Joe’s father was a pastor and Joe has preached many sermons and was associate pastor in that church. So it’s not like they didn’t know the word, but they were having to live with this amazing amount of pain, this immense amount of pain. And prayer and prayer and prayer and lift this thing off in prayer, and someday you’ll hear the story from men better than I could say it. But what I remember in the story is that somebody invited Anna to go to a Joyce Meyer Conference in the midst of probably one of her worst seasons during that time.

06:59 - And it was really kind of just by faith that Anna decided to go because she was numb emotionally. And if I remember, I’m quoting you right, he said, “The person I picked up at the airport after she took that trip,” was it St. Louis, maybe, she went to, “was a different person than the one I dropped off at the airport.” Something happened at that Joyce Meyer Conference that caused breaking. A breaker anointing lifted the grief off of Anna’s life.

07:28 - And when she came back, it was evident without even saying a word that something had shifted. Now, that’s not a formula. We tend to do that sometimes and think, well, if it worked for her, no, what we’re doing is we’re just consistently, persistently asking. And all of a sudden, sometimes when you least expect it, the Lord shows up and he talks to you through somebody you might not have expected to do that. So that’s why, if you’re not having fun along the way, you’ll burn out in this. You know, you hold onto these things loosely.

08:02 - You don’t get so rigid and say, “But I’ve been doing this and it’s not working,” and then you get discouraged. Or, “Oh, why, bother? God’s gotta forgive me; I’m a Christian, I’m his child, so I could just keep sending, right?” Like, you all know that’s wrong. So somewhere in the middle, we wanna keep a fire on the altar of our heart burning and better that it’s blazing fire but never that it goes out, right? And that’s very much a Biblical example, and we’ll use some language in there today. But I like what John the Baptist said in Matthew 3, if you wanna go there. I’ll start with verse 11, but then we’ll unpack it a little bit more.

08:38 - John is talking to these people and it was a pretty big, significant event that was happening, ‘cause something about the anointing on John’s life was causing people to come to the river and get baptized, because they were repenting of their sins. Now that’s not easy to do, is it? Because we live in a culture that’s trying to normalize sin. That’s what they’re trying to say is like, “Well, who are you to tell me that I can’t sleep with 15 people in one night? That’s your rule; that’s not my rule.” Well, guess what? This goes all the way back to Psalm 2. So this has been out for a long time. Why do the heathen rage? Well, they’re raging because God’s trying to say there’s a better way to live than just to pursue all your passions.

09:24 - If you follow my directions, I’ll put boundaries around your life that will cause you to flourish as a human being. And they keep falling into the same trap, looking for love in the wrong places. Somebody should write a song about that. How about the woman at the well? She had five husbands and was living with the sixth guy now. She kept thinking that her thirst was gonna be quenched through the relationship with a man. Jesus said, “No, it’s not that. If you drink the water I give you, you’ll never have to do that again.

” 09:56 - See, so she was looking in the wrong place. So part of our prayer life is just continuing to zoom in, yes, get encouraged by the testimonies of others, but know what your story is. Because Jesus said your faith is not gonna fail, Peter. I’m praying for you, and then you’re gonna strengthen your brethren. So what the devil meant for evil in the Billota’s life, God turned around for good.

10:19 - And now Anna has a testimony of how grief, the worst kind of grief in many ways, could be lifted. It doesn’t mean they don’t miss their child, it doesn’t mean that they’re forgetting about Joseph. It means that God helped them have perspective on it; that we’re living in a world where sin is rampant, and sometimes in the war, there’s casualties. And I don’t mean to go lightly on this point ‘cause it’s probably one of the main things people wonder about. Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s because of sin, okay? So we can do the best we can. We can know the word. We can say it like if we’re in training.

10:54 - Then you know there’s certain things you do when you’re in training for good spiritual conditioning that you shouldn’t do, and there are certain things that you should do that you know are good for you, okay? Now, this can border up against legalism now, right? There’s all these landmines on either side of this conversation; you could definitely get too legalistic. And God said, “No, you gotta know the spirit of the law. The father is seeking for those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.” So yes, the truth, but yes, the spirit, live in that zone and be here in God. .