Dangerous Prayers: Search Me Oh God

Some of the material from this sermon comes from the series done by Craig Groeschel in his sermon series, Dangerous Prayers.: The video and audio version of this sermon can be found at newlifeatcalvary.org

Dangerous Prayers—Search Me

Psalm 139 10-24 1 Corinthians 11:23-31

Have you ever been excited about something but in a very nervous kind of a way? Have you ever approached something with butterflies in your stomach? That’s how we feel about our short new series, “Dangerous Prayers.”

If I told you, there are some prayers you can pray and God would definitely answer them, would you be open to those prayers. Our series is entitled Dangerous Prayers, because if you are brave enough to pray them, something is going to happen in your life, that you won’t expect to happen.

Most of the time we pray safe prayers. Lord bless me, my family, my children and my church. Lord please give me a good paying job. Lord let me do well on this test or on this interview. Lord heal my friend or Lord forgive me for what I did. There’s nothing wrong with these prayers, and we should keep praying for things like this.

Dangerous prayers invite God into our lives in such a way, that dramatic things can happen. We become a different person on the inside when the prayer is answered. We put all kinds of things at risk when we begin to pray dangerous prayers. We change our relationships with people, groups, and hobbies in answer to dangerous prayers. We start to grow in a deeper relationship with God with dangerous prayers.

You see at the end of a dangerous prayer is an opportunity to walk with God, and to know God in a way that you have not known God before. Dangerous prayers may lead to a great deal of amount of pain, so we intentionally avoid them in order to keep things where we can control them.

Our series will contain three dangerous prayers, and will be concluded with a prayer concert on Friday June 3rd at 12 and 6:30 in which we believe God is going to move unlike any move of God we have seen since New Life At Calvary came into its existence. The three parts of the series are “Search Me”, “Break Me” and “Send Me.” When God does those three things for us, we are going to see the reality of The 500 Campaign coming into existence.

Today we’re going to look at the Dangerous Prayer, “Lord search me.” In our Old Testament reading, David prayed this prayer in the Psalms in Psalm 139:23-24 (NIV) 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

One of the things I found interesting about this prayer is the context in which it is found. In the verses before it, David is saying, “You know God it would be good if you just killed all the wicked people, especially the murderers who take people’s live without blinking an eye.

I can’t stand people who take your name in vain. It really gets under my skin when people talk bad about you and even have the nerve to claim they are doing stuff in your name. I hate them and count them as my enemies.”

All of a sudden David has a wait a minute moment, as if to say, whoa, have I been guilty of some of those things. But he does not do a self-check, he asks the Lord to “search him, and know his heart.” How many of you know that it is far easier to see the sin of others than it is to see our own sin?

Have you noticed how you could think about doing something wrong and can let your mind entertain the thought, but you don’t go through with it? Then you come across someone who actually did what you had thought, and you just thought their behavior was outrageous.

You even say, “How on earth could they have done something like that.” It doesn’t matter if it was lying, stealing, committing sexual sin, holding a grudge, or being jealous, it just seems a lot worse when its somebody else doing it. Somehow their sin, the same sin, is worse than if we had done it.

Do you know why? Because we don’t ask the Lord to search our hearts and to show us what it is that God sees. Most of us simply look at hearts and give them an initial round of approval. If I told you to look in the fellowship hall and see if I left my keys in there, You would probably take a quick look and let me know you did not see them.