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.
If I told you to search the fellowship hall for my keys, you probably are going to start to move some things and see if the keys might be underneath something. You are going to do a more thorough job of examining the situation.
We look at our hearts, and our hearts lie to us about our real condition. Our hearts tell us that deep down inside, we have a good heart. We even say of others, “she has a good heart.” But we can only say that if we take a quick look without doing any searching. God tells us that all of our hearts are deceitful and wicked. Jesus Christ is the only answer for dealing with the evil in our hearts.
Even now, even though we are in church, most of us are just one conversation from lying. If someone were to ask us, “how’s things going, we would respond,” fine”, or “just great” when in reality we have all kinds of problems in our lives, but we want to decieve each other into thinking things are better than they really are. Our hearts lie even to us, “if people know your business, they won’t like you, or they will think less of you.”
Our deceitful hearts keep us from finding the love, acceptance, and fellowship that is to be evident in the body of Christ. Our hearts make us believe we have to keep up some kind of false image of who we really are.
The wickedness in our hearts tell us, that we cannot trust one another. When we ask God to search our hearts, you’d be amazed at the kind of things that God will show us about ourselves when it comes to sin or when it comes to our motives.
Why is it when we are in an argument with someone, if we say the reason I did this was because, and we then expect the person to accept our reason as our motive. But if they say the same thing to us, we know what their real motive was behind why they did or said such a thing or such an action.
We are convinced that when we said something, we said it in a natural sounding calm voice, but they insist we said it with an attitude in our voice.
How many of us have been guilty of saying, “all I said was…. And they just went off. But the other person said, but that’s not how you said it.” This is why we need to pray, for the Lord to search us and reveal to us, where we have gone wrong, even if we think we’re not wrong.
David said Lord, while you are searching me, could you also test me to show me what my anxious thoughts are. Anxious thoughts are produced by fears. Fear of losing a job, fear of running out of money, fear of not getting into a school, fear of failing, fear of not getting married by a certain age, fear of being locked into a bad marriage, fear of losing a relationship fear of a sickness or a disease. The areas that produce fear in our lives are caused by not trusting God in those areas. Our fears show us where we trust God the least. The word of God tells us that perfect love casts out fear. The more we truly believe that God loves us, the more fear will be cast out of our lives.
We as Americans value being accepted by others. We fear being called names by others. Our society uses our fears of rejection to keep from speaking when we should speak.
We are afraid of being labeled homo-phobes and bigots. Those are two labels we should avoid at any cost. Even worse if someone tells us that we support Hate legislation.
A year ago I told you, the issue before the Supreme Court with gay marriages, was not the real issue of gays having a right to marry. The real issue was whether or not the court would tell us how gay marriage rights were to be balance with religious freedom and other first amendment rights. I told you the courts would most likely approve gay marriages.
The court did, but they gave no indication of how those rights were to balance with other rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
We have in Ga, a Dr. Eric Walsh who was offered a job by the state of Ga. He was also a preacher. When it was discovered he had preached a message on homosexuality and traditional marriage, his job offer was revoked.
We have a magistrate judge Ruth Nealy in Wyoming who has been ruled unfit to be a judge by The Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics has determined she should be banned for life from the judiciary and pay up to $40,000 in fines. because she said she held traditional marriage views and her religious beliefs would keep her from doing same sex marriages. Her job didn’t even include doing weddings and Wyoming allow judges like her to decline marriages for almost any reason.
We have a student in Michigan one semester from getting a Master’s in Counseling who was terminated from the program, because he insisted that if a gay couple came to him, he would recommend them to another counselor because of his religious beliefs.
Do we truly want a society in which anyone holding biblical principles of marriage is unfit to be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or a judge? Is our fear of being accepted going to cause us to be silent when we should speak. One day this issue is going to touch us when we lose a job or a child can’t get a job because they attend our church.
This past week, the White House issued a directive stating that boys who identify as girls and vice versa must be allowed to use the bathrooms and locker rooms and shower stalls of their choosing. They must also be allowed to play on the sports teams of their choosing. School districts that refuse to comply will lose federal funding.
When it comes to transgender students, they are loved by God as much as any of us are, but their confusion does not justify putting girls and women at risk.
Right now addiction to pornography is affecting men and women of all ages, especially teens. Do you really think, confused and sinful people will not use this to gain access to bathrooms of the opposite sex for their own evil desires?
We are told transgender people make up less than .3% of the population. Do you know what percentage of the population poor blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians make of the population. Our president is willing to eliminate free lunches in schools to all these kids over a policy that is just plain wrong. There is a difference between boys and girls and men and women. Closing our eyes to the truth does not eliminate what God has done.
Those in support of this law will not even consider the arguments of the privacy rights of others and the threat from rapists and sexual deviants. Instead they start calling people transphobic and bigots and that is supposed to settle the argument.
My friends if people can boycott North Carolina for using some common sense, I can certainly boycott Target for insisting their dressing rooms are open to all who want to freely enter. Some of us are afraid to speak against this issue because the man in the White House happens to be of our color.
I don’t know what the President’s motive is. But if he has the kind of power he’s using against the schools, why not use it against the police force. Any police department shooting unarmed civilians would not be eligible for federal dollars.
Any business that discriminates against ex cons would not get federal tax breaks. Any banks that discriminate against minorities in lending could no longer do business with the federal government. These kinds of things would deal with some real problems that we need real solutions to.
Most schools don’t even have transgendered students. Let me ask you this, what happens when an adult male contractor decides to become a female. Can she now get contracts with the government that were set aside for women?
We are turning the civil rights movement upon its head. Even worse, our silence, gives approval to actions that the word of God says are wrong; All because we fear the rejection of our society.
David ask the Lord,”see if there is any offensive way in me.” In other words, God what is in my life that is offensive to you. It is so easy for us to start make compromises with sin and the appearance of sin. Is there anything in your life that more than one person has spoken to you about, but you keep saying, that’s their problem not mine?
Has anyone ever told you that you are too short with people, but you responded with “I’m just direct that’s all.” Anyone ever said,” you are too critical of others”, but you responded,” I just call it like it is.” Anyone ever said, “that wasn’t very loving, but you responded, ”well that’s what he deserved” or even worse “well, I don’t care.” Those responses can be offensive to the Lord.
Other people can often see us leading down a path that will lead to sin, but we insist that the road is going to take us somewhere else. Our hearts will allow us to believe, I-71 south may have taken most people to Columbus, but we insist that when we are traveling on it, it’s going to take us to Pittsburg. As I said before, our hearts can be so deceitful that we even fool ourselves.
Some of us have excused our sin for so long, that we think its no llonger sin. We are not the first to fall into that trap. In our New Testament reading, Paul encouraged us to examine our lives before taking communion, because there are consequences for allowing sin to become a part of our lives without repentance. He tells that us that we come under the judgment of God and become weak, sick and even die. It’s not that we have lost our salvation, but we do rob ourselves of what God intended for our lives here on earth.
Ask the Lord right now, Lord what is in my heart that is offensive toward you. Show it to me that I might confess it and let it go.
God reveals our sin to us, so that we can see our need for Jesus Christ. We will never be good enough on our own to walk with God. Our sin will always be a stumbling block. Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins. On the third day he rose from the dead so that anyone who calls on his name would be saved and forgiven.
It’s not about sitting in church on Sunday morning. Many people come to church who are still happily on their way to hell. It’s about surrendering your life to Christ and allowing him to complete the work He wants to do in your life to prepare you for the life that is to come.
If all you’re living for is this life, just remember, your life is going to be over far quicker than you ever imagined. You will wonder, where did the time go. In the mean time you will have missed out on so much of the good that God has in store for your life.
Let’s pray this prayer together if you are willing.
Heavenly Father, as hard as this is for me, I am asking you to search me. Search me, God, and know my heart. God, test my motives. Reveal to me my anxious thoughts. Show me anything in me that offends you. God, I want to see in me what you see in me, so I can become more like Jesus. God, I ask you to search me.
