God, Is It Possible? Series

Dangerous Prayers Part 9, by Pastor Rob Ketterling

All right. We are finishing up our series on dangerous prayers, and I've got to say that I think this has been a great series. We always go into the summer series not knowing exactly how it will turn out. We're kind of, all right, we are hoping this is going to be all that we hoped it would be. This one exceeded it. And I really feel like God got ahold of us in so many different ways.

The real thing that I was praying about as I was wrapping up this week, I just thought this, I just want to make sure we are praying. That we didn't just get educated about prayer, but that we are actually praying. I want us to continue to pray these prayers and see our prayer life increase. We'll see even from this finale here that we need to increase our prayer life and make sure we are praying these dangerous prayers.

And this last one we are looking at this weekend is this: It's a dangerous prayer called "Is it possible?" Now, in the Bible it comes in many different varieties, but all of them deal with the same thing; it deals with our area of unbelief. It deals with our area of doubt. And we start praying things like, "Is it possible, Lord? Is it possible that this can?" And we even add to it. We intensify it. How many know that sometimes we intensify it and we say, "It is not possible." We've already answered, like, even while we are praying we are like, "That's not possible. I don't even know why I pray that. It's not possible." And we start to excuse away the very thing that we should be praying for. And doubt overcomes us and doubt overcomes faith, and that's not the way that we are supposed to live. We are supposed to declare our faith. We are supposed to declare God's promises. And yet we are declaring doubt. And even when we come to God with our prayer, we start to speak doubt over it, and that's not the way we should do that.

The Bible says in Matthew 19:26, it says, With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. Three people believe it. All right. We've got a lot of work to do. Hopefully at our other campuses we are on that one. All right.

I had to laugh, I was thinking about this; it is not possible, is it possible, is it not possible, it's not possible. Several years ago Becca and I had the opportunity to go to Paris, and I just want to let you know, in all honesty and full disclosure, I did not want to like Paris. I just had this thing like, I'm not going to like it, I'm not fond of the French. And I went to Paris, and I thought this place is amazing. All right, while we were there I remember one night we were ordering dinner, and we just wanted to see as many sites as we could and we had like two days there. We sat down in this restaurant, and Becca just wanted a cheeseburger. That's all she wanted. So she said, "Waiter, I would like a cheeseburger."

He looks at her and he says, "That is not possible."

And she is like, you know, "It's just a cheeseburger. I just want a cheeseburger. So you have a burger on the menu, I just want you to put cheese on it."

"That is not possible."

So she said, "Well, okay, because you have cheese, right?"

And the guy goes, "Yes."

And she goes, "And you have burgers." She goes, "I want you to put the cheese on the burger." She goes like, "You have eggs on burgers, you have all this stuff on burgers. I just want cheese."

And he goes, "It is not possible." Walks away from us. Won't serve us. Won't serve us.

And then I said, "We change our order. We'd like a pizza with cheese." Okay. And finally they served us, and he was so angry.

So our joke ever since then whenever we are facing something difficult, we are like, "This is not possible."

So here's my thing, when it comes to God's promises, when it comes to believing for miracles, let's not be like Frenchy, okay? That's what we called him. Frenchy did not want to help us out. "It is not possible."

All right, it is possible! It is possible! With God all things are possible.

And in Mark, Chapter 9, we are going to go to that story. If you have your Bibles, turn to Mark, Chapter 9. The key verse, Jesus said, "Everything is possible for one who believes." Everything is possible. And I want to take a look at this dangerous prayer, and we've got to change it from "is it possible" to "it is possible." It is possible. It can happen. God can happen. God can make this happen. And it's a dangerous prayer not to pray with faith believing.