Powerful Prayer

Sermon: Powerful Prayer

Primary Scripture Matthew 17:14

Opening Illustration– Survey about Prayer

Focus Today: 2 Key Ingredients to powerful prayer

Passage Background:

--Jesus’ ministry winding down

--The cross is in view

--Jesus spent a lot of time teaching disciples and performing miracles (including casting out demons)

--Disciples often struggled with faith

--One more example of importance of faith

--Another demon possessed man

--Disciples failed at their attempt to cast it out

--They went into “evaluation and excuse mode” as to why they failed

--They decided to ask Jesus why they couldn’t cast him out

--Jesus replies: “It is because you have so little faith”…..

Faith is one of the primary ingredients of powerful prayer (c.f., Hebrews 11)

--Faith is the currency of God’s economy

--Discussion about the role of faith in prayer

--The faith of a mustard seed

--Story of Cornelius (Acts 10)

--Prayer of a Righteous Man (James 5.16)

Fasting is the second ingredient in Powerful Prayer

--The Power of Prayer and Fasting (see Matthew 17.21 footnote)

--Discussion about fasting

--Conclusion

--Prayer

Full Sermon:

Powerful Prayer (Chuck Gohn)

Well, good morning. So was the groundhog right, are we having an early spring or not? I don’t know. Well, not yet. Anyway, if you have your bibles, you’ll want to open them up to Matthew 17:14. And before I begin the sermon, I have a couple quick questions about prayer. First of all, how many have ever prayed a prayer? I hope most of you. I know this is a church, but everybody didn’t raise their hand. How many of you pray on a regular basis, like three, four, five, six times a week? How many of you pray for the church? How many of you have seen some real answers to prayer? Some direct answers to prayer. How many of you just don’t like to raise your hand no matter what I ask? Good, honest people. Anyways, you can tell by the screen, we are going to talk about prayer today. It is good to see that I think Bellevue Christian Church is really becoming a church that likes to pray, a praying church. When it comes to prayer, there are a lot of questions that surround prayer, really too many questions to be answered today. So today what I want to do is focus on what I would call two key elements, two key ingredients to powerful prayer. We see those elements today in this reading out of the Book of Matthew. What I’m going to do is read through that if you want to open your bibles there. A little bit of a quick refresher is that we are going through the core values: worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.

Today, we are back talking about worship. I was trying to decide where prayer fits. Prayer could, I think, fit under worship, or it could also fit under the value of discipleship. I finally decided to keep it included under the value of worship because really most of the prayer that we experience as a church happens in the context of worship, either Sunday morning or first Wednesday. Anyway, a little bit of background about this particular passage. In this passage, Jesus is at a point in his ministry where it is beginning to wind down. Where Jesus clearly has the cross, the crucifixion, in mind. If you know the Gospel stories, you know that Jesus spent a lot of time, about three years, with his core disciples, his 12 disciples. During that time, he taught the disciples. He spent time with them. They were able to see him perform miracles of giving sight to the blind and walking on water and calming the storm. They were able to see his interaction with the Jewish leaders and probably they were able to see him do some activity where he cast out demons. But even though they were with him for those three years, and Jesus was constantly teaching them things, there was one thing that they really, really struggled with the whole time that they were with Jesus. It was the concept of faith. That was really what Jesus was trying to teach them all through the Gospels. In fact, in the Gospels I believe the word faith or belief is mentioned over 200 times. So here is Jesus getting ready to depart, and what he is doing is giving them at least one more example of the importance of faith, especially when it comes to prayer. I am going to read through this passage here starting again with Matthew 17.14-20 (Scripture Passage read here.)

Jesus is on the way to the cross, and this real intense situation unfolds. A situation where you have a young man that is apparently demon-possessed. Now I don’t have time to go into whether or not demon possession is a real thing today, but even though we might not acknowledge demon possession in the United States as much as other places, it is very real in many parts of the world. Especially in Africa and the Caribbean where they are very open to the spiritual realm. Anyway, we can be certain that Jesus, during his ministry, probably talked to the disciples a little bit about the demonic. He probably taught them a little bit about how to exorcise, how to practice exorcism to remove the demons. There are other passages that speak about how the disciples went out and they were able to cast out demons. But for some particular reason, they failed in this attempt.