Sunday 02 • 04 • 18

And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for the father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this. Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. — Matthew 6:7-10

Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives. And the one who seeks finds. And the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you if his son asks him for bread will give him a stone. Or if he asks for a fish will give him a serpent. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him. — Matthew 7:7-11

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. — Matthew 9:35-38

Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. — Matthew 18:18-20

And Jesus answered them, truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive if you have faith. — Matthew 21:21-22

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Didn't they do a great job? Give him a round of applause. We've gotta become a little bit better at being expressive as a church. This morning, I watched as we just had that awesome baptism and two of the Van Steinberg boys did what we should be doing. We see an adult baptism in our church. They leaped over the chairs in the front row to go hug their uncle and I'm like, that's how we should be responding with that kind of joy at the way God's at work in our church. We're really grateful to see God's hand in that way.

What Are Churches Saying and Doing?

This morning, I want to start off this way. Several years ago, the indie newspaper in Seattle, Washington called The Stranger ran a story called "A Month of Sundays." It was a study on what was happening in their city with regard to Christian churches. The article was authored by a well-known blogger and writer named Dan Savage who admittedly is not a Christian and is very skeptical about all things religious and Christianity in particular. Yet they decided to do this story because he asked some really good questions. The article starts with him saying, "I look around my city and there are lots of churches in this town. Old churches, new churches, mega churches, mini churches. Just what we wondered is going on in all those churches. What are they saying? What are they doing? What are they plotting?"

So they sent out 30 reporters into 30 churches—hence, "A Month of Sundays"—and did a report on all the churches. I love those questions and I think they're helpful questions. As we consider our own city, a place with lots of churches, old churches, new churches, mega churches, many churches: What are they saying? What are they doing? What are they plotting?

I'm afraid that all too often, the answer to those questions is nothing or not much. I'm not saying that to slam any way on other churches like we've got our stuff together. The entropy of every Christian church is to turn the mission into existence. As if just being here, we're killing it. Just maintaining ourselves over the long haul is what God defines as success for the church.

Beginning today, we're taking a one month break from the book of Romans. We will be back for the hardest section of Romans, so if you really wanted that, come back in March. The next few Sundays we are celebrating the first anniversary of our "We Can't" Initiative. This has been a time for us as a church in the last year to put ourselves before the Lord and say, "God, what do you want to happen in this place?" And we've looked at ourselves and said, "God, you have to be the one who works."

You're the one who has to work here. This morning, to kick this off, I have chosen five passages from the book of Matthew that all have to do with prayer. The theme for our sermon today is: we can't ask too much of the Lord.

I chose five passages from Matthew not because they cover everything that Jesus teaches about prayer, but because if I just gave you one, you could say, "Yeah, but that's just one passage. We could take that out of context." I want you to be a little overwhelmed this morning at the scope and breadth of Jesus's teaching for his people on praying big prayers and praying bold prayers. I want to challenge ourselves to say: What are we asking? What are we plotting? What are we saying? What are we doing?

So let's look at this. Why don't we pray like this? We're going to look at the top five reasons here from Matthew. We're going to take these really fast.

The Lord's Prayer: A Prayer of Imagination

Look at Matthew chapter six. This is a very familiar passage to us. Jesus says:

Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. — Matthew 6:9-10

This is Jesus' model prayer, what's called the Lord's Prayer. Christians around the world rightly pray this. We could spend months dissecting this and looking at how this teaches us to pray. We're going to do that at some other time. This morning, though, I want to highlight one and only one thing about this prayer: it requires an incredible amount of imagination.

It requires a lot of imagination to pray those lines: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Those are rote words for many of us. Many of you probably grew up saying those in church. And yet those were seditious words in the first century. Those were treasonous words. Those were dangerous words.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray this way, he taught them to say things that proclaimed: there is a Caesar greater than Caesar in the Roman Empire. There is a kingdom that is more powerful than the worldwide empire of the day. When Jesus taught his people to pray this—come on, y'all have seen Gladiator at some point or another—there was a power greater than Rome. We don't think sometimes about the ramifications of what happens at the cross for Jesus. But Jesus died as a political revolutionary. Over his cross, it didn't say, "This guy claims to be savior of the world." It said, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." Those were words of insurrection and rebellion. There is a Caesar greater than Caesar.

It took a lot of imagination and a lot of guts for his first disciples to pray that way—to pray with that kind of imagination, that kind of redemptive imagination—to proclaim there's a kingdom that Jesus talks about here that's invisible, that has come with his arrival, and yet is coming, and will make all things new. First century Christians had a hard time having to pray that. It required a lot of imagination to say someone greater than Caesar, a kingdom greater than the one that has all of us taxed up to our ears.

It requires no less imagination today. It really doesn't. It doesn't require any less imagination for us to pray those kinds of bold prayers. There's a kingdom that's greater and more powerful than the global market. There is a leader who has more power than Kim Jong Un. There is one who is on the throne of the universe who knows more than all our collective Internet.

To pray that way, to pray these words from Psalm two:

Why do the nations rage? The peoples plot in vain. The kings of the earth set themselves. The rulers take counsel together against the Lord and His Holy One. But he who sits in heaven laughs. The Lord holds them in derision. — Psalm 2:1-4

To pray that way also requires us to say: there's something bigger than what I see. There's a power bigger than what is going on around me.

I think one of the reasons that we don't pray this Lord's Prayer with a lot of power is not that we somehow doubt that it's true. We can't imagine what it would be like. We can't imagine what it would be like for God to revamp your extended family, or to save your boss, mom, daughter, best friend. We can't imagine it. We can't imagine what it would be like to see our city captured by Jesus. We can't imagine poverty and racism and all the injustice that's around us that are sort of part of daily life—undone and all things made new. We can't imagine it, and so we pray weak prayers.

You know, bold praying is insurrection prayers. Insurrection prayers not against some Roman government but against the status quo. "Oh, this is how it is."

So that's number one: we can't imagine it.

Number two: we are unsure about his character.

This is from Matthew 7. Look at that with me. Jesus says here:

Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives. The one who seeks finds. The one who knocks will be opened to. Or which of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your own children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him? — Matthew 7

Jesus uses what is called "beggars logic" in this comparison. He's like, if you're this way and you know that you are selfish, how much more God, who is unselfish and generous? If you can be generous, how much more God? From the lesser to the greater.

Many people don't pray like this because we don't trust God's character. This passage is all about understanding God's character and that being a springboard for us, fuel for us to pray boldly to him. And yet, I think a lot of us have a theology of cruelty. God, I'd like a new job. Well, here's some extra suffering to help refine your character. I mean, don't we feel that way sometimes? Like God is somehow coaching us in virtue. And so we ask him for things, and he sends harder things. Like Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid—hey, you want to learn karate? I'll let you paint my fence and wax my car. Wax on, wax off. And that will teach you all the life skills. Right? We ask God for things when we think he's just trying to always teach me hard things. He's not ultimately good. I can't trust him or go to him and ask boldly because when I ask him for bread, he gives me rocks. I mean, to be honest, don't we think this sometimes in the back of our heads?

Can I tell you a story? When we moved here seven years ago, we moved from what y'all would think of as inner city Philadelphia. We lived in a row house, and our next-door neighbors had two very neglected pit bulls that would charge the fence when you go out in the backyard. My youngest two boys were deathly afraid of dogs when we moved here. Now, you walk around the neighborhood and it's all nice golden retrievers and labs, but they were scared to death of dogs. And I understood that. For several years moving here, they had this fear gripped them, and going to people's houses gripped them. So Susan and I began to pray about this. What do we do? We decided we're going to get a dog. But we knew that what we needed was a dog that we knew the parentage of, a dog that was going to be really chill and very sweet. So that meant getting not a pound dog but a dog from somebody who had bred it. We didn't have money for that, and we were just really challenged.

I'd been reading a book on prayer, and we were driving to a conference in Chattanooga. Susan and I are driving along, and I think it was her idea—hey, let's pray for a dog. And again, the Earth, Jesus' kingdom doesn't rest on whether we get a dog, right? This is just a small thing. So we show up at this conference and we meet Carter Ellis' parents. Many of you know Carter. First time we'd ever met them, really sweet people. And they were like, hey, what are y'all doing this afternoon? You want to come over to our house? We have a litter of black lab puppies. Really? So we show up at their house, and we just really hit it off. They're like, we would really like y'all to have one of these. And it was one of those things where that's how Lucy came into our life.

And this is a small thing, but does God care about the fears of my children? That instance in our lives preached to us. This isn't changing the fate of Raleigh. People aren't coming to Christ. The church isn't growing because of this. God cares about Ezra and Asher and their little kid fears. Do we have a God like this? We pray. We don't pray because we don't think we do.

The Harvest

Third, we have no sense of harvest. Listen to these words again from Matthew 9:

Jesus went out through all the cities and villages, teaching in all their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing every disease and affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, for they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." — Matthew 9

Is there a harvest in Raleigh? Is there? Now, looking around the number of churches in our city—old churches, new churches, mega churches, mini churches—you would say by buildings, no. There is no need for harvest here.

This is a reached place. Are there any people who are lost here? Doesn't seem like it. Seems like everybody's going somewhere or there are churches everywhere, but this city looks way more church than it is. We know statistically—I just said it in the video from a year ago—62 people are moving here every day. Seven from outside the country, which means that we could plant a CTK once a week just to keep up with population growth. That's not even winning. That's just keeping up with statistics where we are. Just staying level and even. Raleigh plays like it's more converted than it is.

So there are a lot of people here who know the Christian words. They could have said the Lord's Prayer. They know the stuff. You can go to a lot of the big steeple churches in Raleigh and they'll have like 5,000 people on membership and 500 people on a Sunday—because your name's on a piece of paper somewhere. Isn't that great? Isn't that what it means to be a Christian? No. That is not.

You know what does Jesus say? Does he say, "Well, there's a lot of people here and there's a lot of lost people here, but trust in God's sovereignty"? Now, do we trust in God's sovereignty? You better believe we do. You're coming to Romans 9 in March, okay? But after Romans 9 comes Romans 10—the greatest missionary call in the entire Bible. And Jesus calls us to pray earnestly for the harvest.

Do you know what the number one reason is why the people in this room don't pray for this? Because we're afraid he's going to make us into harvest workers. Aren't we? Who wants to do that? But look, we don't see it and we don't want to see it. The fields are white. There are people all around us. We had a conversion last Sunday after our funeral service. God's at work. Can we open our eyes and ask the question, "Lord, would you? Could you?"

We Aren't Unified

Number four: we aren't unified. Listen again to these words from Matthew 18:

Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you lose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth on anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. — Matthew 18

Okay, I know that's out of context. Deal with it, okay? You can read the rest when you get home later.

Now, I want you to remember the name of our initiative that we chose last year is "We Can't." Not "You can't," not "Me can't"—I mean, that sounds like Cookie Monster. You know? We talked about "We Can't" because Jesus's promises here are about his people coming together and being unified in prayer. About people coming and praying together.

You know, one of the reasons we don't pray boldly is we don't pray together. Husbands and wives, how often in the last month have you prayed together? Families, how often have you prayed with your children? Friends, how often have you prayed—and not just, "Hey, I'll pray for you," but actually prayed together?

We view Christianity as a solo sport, and if we happen to be part of a club, that's great. But Jesus's commands here are together commands. What would happen if every time you got together with another Christian, you just said, "We're going to pray for thirty seconds"? Thirty seconds, guys—that is really short, okay? That's not even like JV level praying. That's freshman team praying. You can do that. Thirty seconds. You don't know what to pray? Just say, "God, we don't know what to pray, but we're going to pray." What would happen?

What would happen if our prayer meeting before our 9 o'clock service wasn't such a struggle fest to get people to show up at? What if that actually became the engine room of our church? What could happen? I don't know. I think a lot of incredible things could happen. "Two or three are gathered. He is with us." Do we believe it?

We're Scared

And finally, last one here: we're scared. Listen to these words from Matthew 21:

Jesus answered them, "Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what's been done to the fig tree, but even if you say this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' it will happen. Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive if you have faith." — Matthew 21

What if Jesus actually means it? I think a lot of us pray like little boys use the urinal in an elementary school bathroom. Doesn't matter if you hit it or not. Come on, guys. That's good. That's funny, okay? Hang with me. We are not in any way aiming. I want that to stick with you this morning. You'll remember that one over lunch.

See, what if Jesus actually meant it? What if he wanted his church to pray boldly, expectantly, specifically, unified with big imagination and hungry hearts?

Man, it was William Carey, the nineteenth century head of the missions movement, who said, "Ask great things from God, attempt great things for God." We have yet to discover this as a church. What if Jesus meant it when he told us to pray in this kind of bold way with imagination? I think we have yet to see what might happen.

Here's the thing I want to let you in on: he's actually doing that. He actually is already doing stuff, and this is exciting for me. This is the one year anniversary of our We Can initiative that we started last winter. We gathered around, talked about what our church is trying to be and do, and we chose this verse on this banner:

Not by might, not by power, but by my Holy Spirit, says the Lord of hosts. — Zechariah 4:6

We chose that because we wanted at the center of this whole thing to be God's power and not ours. We said we have a vision that's too big for our church. Only God can make these things happen. We're going to have to put all of our trust in his basket. We're gonna have to lean on him. We're gonna have to have expectant faith in ways we haven't had to before.

As a church, we came together and said, "We can't." And God has spent the last year showing us, "I can. I can." I want to show you five ways that God has abundantly answered our church's prayer when we said we can't last year.

Presence

Part of our initiative was to raise money to set aside so that we could be here for the long haul in Downtown Raleigh. We had a ticking clock last year with our lease up on 03/31/2018. Last summer, our deacons and some architects began looking for a property. We found a small, weird-shaped piece of property on South Saunders that would have required a lot of money and imagination to make work. We were moving forward with it, and I thought maybe this is how Jesus is answering our prayers. But the day before Susan and I went on vacation, it all fell through. The deal completely fell apart.

I went on vacation really discouraged. A couple weeks later, I get a call from Mark Best, our deacon in charge of facilities, and he says, "You're not going to believe this. Our landlord has offered to renew our lease here for three more years at a reasonable rate." We signed that thing within twenty-four hours. To this day, I don't know what changed his mind except for God. God was ahead of the ball for that.

Serve

The second aspect of our mission is about being the hands and feet of Jesus in Downtown Raleigh. We said we're gonna raise money to start an internship program with three interns to help us get traction in this area. But last summer, our deacons came to our elders and said, "We think this needs to be a full-time hire." An internship usually helps the intern, but a staff member will help the church get traction in this area. Our elders and deacons set aside a search committee, and they've been looking for a director of operations and development. We're down to the last candidate who's here to interview one more time. We're really on the cusp of this great provision from the Lord.

Speak

If you remember, we talked about speak as speaking the gospel to the next generation, making disciples. The church is always one generation away from extinction. We have classrooms here full of kids. Stephanie Massey has done an amazing job leading our children's ministry. But as we looked at this year, we knew that Bobby Roberts was leaving and McKamey Hallway was pulling back from a staff role. We needed somebody to fill that role as a youth pastor and youth director for our church. Is God sweating this?

No, he already had a plan for this and it was such a surprise and encouragement to me that God gave us Paul Deschamps. You don't know this, probably a lot of you. Susan and I've known Paul and Lindsey for over ten years. I did their wedding in Philly. He was our first intern at our church in Philly. I can't think of anybody else I would trust my own teenagers with. Is God sweating any of this? No. He provided way ahead. He knew exactly what we needed. He—we can't, but he can.

Church Planting

Fourth, live. If you recall, this bucket's about church planting. We said, hey, the way that our church works, we don't want to just keep growing bigger. We don't want to bring more people to our church. We want to take our church to more people. We want to take church to more people. And so church planting is a missional priority for our session. We think this is the best thing that we can do, and we think it's the best thing we can do for you—sending you out. This is a discipleship goal, but this is an evangelistic goal. So we've been all about this.

This fall, as our director of operations and development committee has done their work, they surprised us by coming back not only with a candidate for director of operations and development but our next church planter. They brought to our session a guy who we think is going to be lights out and is not ready right now but will be starting Leaders Collective, Elty Grudem's Church Planting Residency in the fall, just exactly like Dwayne Davis did, our last resident. Starting in the fall, getting ready to plant in 2019. Praise God. We weren't even looking for that.

Giving

Finally, give. Again, we keep saying, you know, we can't and God keeps showing up. So last year, in response to this whole initiative, I was so encouraged. Our elders were so encouraged by the response of this congregation. We had so many first-time givers. We had so many people who have never given consistently to the church say, "I'm going to go from giving whatever's left over in my pocket to planned giving in regular ways." And it's so encouraging.

Last year, our congregation said, "We're going to give over two years $2.15 million." Well, we've seen now three quarters of that—the first three quarters, the first nine months of that—come in and we're at 30% of our goal of $2.1 million. In fact, for 2017, this is before our initiative even started. We brought in almost $1 million—$990,000 in one year. That's amazing to me. When I came to this church, our budget was $237,000 for a year. Man, God has been so overabundant again. I totally believe we're going to hit this $2.5 million. God is showing himself faithful.

Here's another story of that. A family not involved in our church, not members of our church, heard about our initiative last year and they came forward anonymously and gave our church $25,000 toward this. Just because they were encouraged about what's happening in our congregation. All I'm saying is, folks, can we ask too much of the Lord? God has been so overabundant. So this is what we're saying this year. This is our kind of theme for the next month: We still can't. We still can't. But we have a God who is way big and can. And we want to keep putting ourselves in a place where we need him to show up in big ways—to see his provision for his mission, not mine and not yours, for what he wants to do in this place.

Prayer and Leading

I am excited about the future of what God is doing. These five passages that we read this morning capture my faith. They capture my heart. They fuel my faith for praying. One of the things I've learned over the last five years is that I need to start getting out of the way so that God can work. I had to learn a whole new different way of being a pastor. Some of y'all know me well enough to know that I like to be busy. I like to do things. I can run circles around a lot of people with the number of activities that I can do. And yet, you know what? The more activity I do doesn't necessarily mean the more effective our churches or I am. I've had to learn a new way of being a pastor—not in the pulpit but in prayer. God does the biggest things in our church through his people praying.

Over the last couple years, as we've done these CVR journals, I've started using these as a way of writing down big prayers for God's work. I use the journal like you do. I fill in all the stuff over here on the passages, going through and praying those. But on this side—the blank page section—I've started saying, "What are things that only Jesus can do?" I've started praying over the last several years, "God, what are things that only you can accomplish?" And these are my Jesus-only prayers. And I have a list also of the ways that God is answering those.

I have pages filled with this stuff. God is answering my prayers and your prayers in this church. My call to us is to pray boldly—big, hairy, audacious prayers. We have big, hairy, audacious goals for our church, but as we begin praying bigger and hairier and more audacious prayers than things that we can't do, we're asking God to show up and asking God to reveal His power. So today, as we're in worship, my call to us is not to do anything except to trust more and to ask more. To ask more things of God.

Here's what I'm praying right now for our church. I ask you to join me in these things:

God, would you give us a free building in Downtown Raleigh? So we don't have to worry about that anymore. Would you convert our landlord and bring him to Christ the King? Would you fulfill all of the $2,500,000 of this? Would you give us three new elders for the next year? God, would you bring more adult converts to our church than even we have babies being baptized? Would you bring 100 new members to our church in the next year? God is totally sufficient for all these things. Would you show us where the next church plant goes? Lord, we are looking to you.

Would you join me in this? Look, I've given you today the equivalent of the top 10 David Letterman top 10 list. I'm giving you five passages to pray from, five huge ways God has shown up this year. My call is like, guys, it is time. We cannot ask too much of the Lord.

There's a scene in The Lord of the Rings where two of the hobbits meet tree people called the Ents. If you've seen this, the animation or whatever, it's a bit rough, but they're talking tree people. So this tree is named Treebeard, and he's of the race of the Ents, and they're very slow-moving people. So the hobbits meet this guy, Treebeard, and they're like, "Oh, we didn't even know you or your kind existed. Would you help us? We have this gigantic war going on. There's this great cause to get behind."

And Treebeard is like, "Okay, let me introduce you to my people." So he takes them to an Entmoot, which is where all the Ents gather together, and they spend days talking. Merry and Pippin, the hobbits, keep coming and asking him, "Have you convinced everybody there's a war on? You guys need to help us?" And he says, "No. We're still doing introductions."

After days, they spend all their time trying to figure out how to classify the hobbits. And I think it's such a parable of the modern American church. The modern American church is asleep at the wheel. We are asleep like the Ents. And the line in the movie is like, if the Ents would wake up and go to war, everything would change.

And it's only when they finally are able to help Treebeard see how drastic the damage is that the Ents actually do go to war. It's a turning point in the movies. But look, this is a parable for the American church. If we can wake up and go to war, if we can realize there is this great cause, there is this great battle going on, and God has graciously given us the invitation to be a part of it, if we can wake up and stop spending our time just discussing amongst ourselves who we are and what we're about, then things could happen.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.