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Most of the scriptures quoted in these sermons are copies and quoted from the New Living Translation of the Holy Bible.
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After all, it is Gods Word and not our own!
Pastor Ed Pruitt
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A PRAYER THAT WORKS PART 2
Sunday July 8 2007
1 Peter 5:6-11 (NLT)
6 So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor.
7 Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.
8 Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.
9 Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith. Remember that your Christian brothers and sisters all over the world are going through the same kind of suffering you are.
10 In his kindness God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation.
11 All power to him forever! Amen.
Because of its importance, the first kind of prayer we want to examine is the prayer of casting your cares upon the Lord.
Through this type of prayer, you can take everything that’s worrying you, tie it all up in a bundle and give it to God.
You can take your cares to His throne, leave them with Him, trusting Him to deal with them for you, and walk away from them completely carefree.
The reason we must learn this kind of prayer first is simple.
If you don’t know how to pray this prayer, many of your
other prayers will be rendered ineffective.
That’s because every effective prayer you will ever pray must be based on your faith in the Word of God.
And Jesus warned us in Matthew 13:22 that the worries and cares of this world will choke out the Word you’ve put in your heart.
Let’s say, for example, that you’ve been praying for your child.
You’ve based your prayer on Isaiah 54:13 (NLT)
13 I will teach all your children,
and they will enjoy great peace.
The more you meditate on that Word, the stronger your faith becomes.
You are praying effective prayers because
you have an inner image of that Word coming
to pass in your child’s life.
In your heart, you see him learning from God, serving Him and living a peaceful, godly life.
But then, let’s say, your child gets into some trouble.
Maybe he starts running around with the wrong kinds
of kids.
You have some genuine concern about the problems
he’s creating for Himself, so you start to worry.
Before you know it, you’re walking around wringing
your hands and thinking,
Oh my, if that boy doesn’t straighten up,
he’s going to end up getting involved with drugs.
He’s going to end up in jail.
He’s going to end up throwing his whole life away.
The more you worry, the less power the Word
will have on your thoughts.
Like Jesus said, those cares will come up like weeds
and thorns and choke out that inner image of Isaiah 54
and replace it with an image of that child in jail.
Fear will strangle your faith, and your prayers for your child will become powerless.
When you understand that devilish progression,
you’ll see why Jesus so strongly admonished
us not to worry.
He didn’t make it a suggestion.
He made it a command, because when you worry,
you’re giving the Devil the place in your life that
the Word is supposed to have.
You are meditating on his power to hurt you instead of
meditating on God’s power to deliver you.
In Luke 21:34 NKJV, Jesus was talking to His disciples about the day of His return, and He said,
Luke 21:34-36 (NLT)
34 “Watch out! Don’t let your hearts be dulled by carousing and drunkenness, and by the worries of this life. Don’t let that day catch you unaware,
35 like a trap. For that day will come upon everyone living on the earth.
36 Keep alert at all times. And pray that you might be strong enough to escape these coming horrors and stand before the Son of Man.”
Jesus knew that if they let worry overtake them, they could miss out on the time of their visitation and not be ready for His Second Coming.
The same is true for us.
We can miss out on God’s presence and power in our lives.
We can miss out on the day of our deliverance.
How?
By being so focused on a problem Satan has presented
us with that we take our eyes off God and become unaware of what He is doing.
Again in Matthew 6:25-34 (NLT)
Jesus gave us this important charge:
25 “That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing?
26 Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are?
27 Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
28 “And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing,
29 yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are.
30 And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?
31 “So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’
32 These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.
33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
34 “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
It’s no wonder that in this passage we are told five times, “Do not worry.”
Not only is worry absolutely useless, it does harm to your prayer life and your physical well-being.
Satan understands this principle so he purposefully creates situations to make you worry.
For him, it’s an easy and effective way to neutralize your prayers.
But you can defeat that strategy by learning to take those worries to God in prayer and cast them over onto Him.
It’s Not Irresponsible But wait a minute, you may be thinking.
Isn’t it irresponsible just to ignore your troubles by not worrying about them?
If all you did was ignore them, it would be irresponsible.
We’ve all known people who’ve done that.
They deal with problems by just choosing not to think about them.
They don’t worry about where they’re going to live because they figure they’ll live off someone else.
That is not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about taking a situation which you are unable to do anything about and putting it in the
hands of the Someone who is able
to do something about it.
Through prayer, you are going to give that
problem to the only One who has the
power to solve it.
And that’s the most responsible thing you can do.
There may be other people who are concerned
about your finances, but they may not have
the money or the desire to meet your need.
God has both.
Someone may be very sorry that you are facing a
serious illness, but they aren’t the healer.
God is the healer, and He’s ever ready to heal you.
Of course, before you can confidently take
your cares to Him, you must have
the assurance that God is trustworthy.
Maybe you’ve had some disappointing experiences
with people in the past.
Maybe you trusted them to take care of
something for you and they forgot
or let you down.
Before you can cast your cares completely on God,
you must be sure He won’t take
them today and forget about them tomorrow.
You must be certain He won’t say, “Oops, sorry.
Yesterday was a busy day.
I had so many things on My mind that I
lost track of your concerns in the shuffle.”
How can you gain that reassurance?
You go to the Bible and remind yourself of His faithfulness and power.
Go to verses that remind you of God’s care
and concern for you.
Meditate on Scriptures like Hebrews 13:5 AMP:
For He (God) Himself has said, I will not
in any way fail you nor give
you up nor leave you without support.
[I will] not, [I will] not, [I will] not in any
degree leave you helpless, nor forsake
nor let [you] down [relax My hold on you]
Assuredly not!
Think about Romans 4:21 AMP that says God is
able and mighty to keep His word and to do what
He had promised.
Or Psalm 34:19 AMP that says, Many evils confront
the [consistently] righteous; but the Lord delivers
him out of them all.
It’s important that you meditate on such
Scriptures before you pray the prayer of casting
your cares because you don’t want
this prayer to be just a form.
You want to pray if from your heart.
You want it to be the real deal.
Have you ever been burdened by a problem
and had someone flippantly say to you,
“Oh, well, just cast it on the Lord?”
You may have smiled and agreed on the outside,
but on the inside you were thinking,
Yeah, that’s easy for you to say!
You might have even gone through the
motions of prayer with that person.
But it was a plastic prayer because you never
actually connected with God in your
heart about the matter.
You had no clear, scriptural confidence
that God could or would handle the problem
and, as a result, there was no genuine
transaction between Him and you.
So as that person walked away gaily, saying,
“Now, just praise the Lord till it’s done!”
You were still knotted up inside, wondering,
What on earth am I going to do?
I had a woman come to me once who was facing a
very real and difficult problem.
She wasn’t overreacting to a little thing;
she was up against something very big.
She had natural reason to worry.
I knew that before I could pray with her, I needed
to help her cast the care of it on the Lord.
So we went over some Scriptures and I
reminded her of what God said He would do
about this situation.
It doesn’t bother God that we need to have constant
reassurance that He is qualified to take our burdens.
He wants us to have that reassurance.
That’s why He gave us His Word with all its
glorious promises.
He put Himself on paper so we could learn of His character.
In addition to what the Bible said, that dear lady and
I discussed what I had seen God do in my life and in the
lives of many others.
She began to get more and more calm.
Then, from her heart, she gave that
problem to the Lord.
A week later I heard how wonderfully God
had moved on her behalf.
When someone comes to you in distress and
needs prayer, remember that it’s not enough
just to get them to quit crying and then
say to them, “Don’t worry!
Cast your cares on the Lord!” Help them do it.
Give them some promises from the Word of God
that will inspire faith in them.
Faith is a real substance.
It will strengthen them and comfort them.
Be prepared to stick with them for a while.
Sometimes it takes people a little time to grasp the fact
that God really will help them.
Don’t try to get them to turn loose of their care before then.
As you feed on the Word with them, they will begin to relax.
You can tell when the Word has broken through
their fears and they are focusing on
God instead of the problem.
At that point, have them begin to pray
and they’ll be able to truly cast their
cares upon the Lord.
