WYC 2010:  In His Image

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GYC West

Soul Thirst:  Going Deeper with God

Alan Parker

Jump Start Your Devotional Life

Father God, we want to thank you for being with us, for your guidance and your blessing through WYC already.

We pray that you'll continue to lead us as we think about how to get our devotional lives back on track.

Too many of us, Lord, have experienced the frustration of not being able to connect, not being able to be consistent.

And so Lord, we pray that you will show us a way beyond that, help us to get through this valley of acorn to a door of hope.

Well, we're talking about how to jumpstart your devotional life.

So we're going to talk about some practical things.

And these are some of the things that I've heard, even experienced.

I just don't seem to get much out of my devotional time.

Have there ever been periods in your life when you said that?

I keep promising to get up earlier, but it doesn't happen.

Yeah, that may be more recent than some of the other ones.

And then I do well for a few days, but then I seem to slip back into a few rushed minutes before I get out the door.

You know what I'm talking about, those kinds of devotional experience that runs something like this.

All right, Lord, we've got to figure out what to do.

I'm sorry I can't spend much time with you today, but you know how rushed it is.

And I really would love to spend a little more time.

Maybe later in the day we could get back together, but you know how it is.

So there's a little verse I'd like to remember right now.

Not by my normal power, but by my spirit, says the Lord.

And I believe that your spirit will do it because I don't have the might or the power.

And then when you get down and the day is going miserably, Any of you had this?

And you get to the end of the day, and you kept promising yourself you'll have devotional time, but it just hasn't happened.

And then you do the loser's prayer at the end of the day.

10 o'clock at night, dear Lord, what a miserable day.

So those kinds of experiences tell me that something is going wrong in our devotional life.

And I want to suggest to you a number of things today that I believe will help us.

We've got to deal a little more philosophically at first, and then very practically right at the end.

First of all, is a devotional life important?

I had a friend who said to me, you know, in the Bible, I don't see a whole lot about a devotional life.

And so I don't think a devotional life's important.

Well, it obviously wasn't a good thing, because he eventually left the church.

Jealously, Your hours for, notice the 3 things.

Any of you ever had something on self-examination?

That means meditation, thinking about how it applies to your life.

A lot of us, we've got the prayer and Bible study down, but we don't know how to apply it to our lives.

God jealously, your minutes, oh wait, your hours, for prayer, Bible study, and self-examination, and set aside a portion of each week, is that what it says?

No, each day for a study of the scriptures and what?

Thus you will obtain spiritual strength and will grow in favor with God.

Bible study, prayer, self-examination are extremely important for having a strong relationship with God.

I want to suggest to you that there's 2 basic reasons.

And number 2, we use ineffective methods.

So very simply, that's what we're going to cover.

What's our motivation, and what methods are we using, and how could we use more effective methods than what we've used in the past?

So motivation, what drives you to have a devotional life?

It's written somewhere in the fundamental beliefs.

So you're like, how am I going to get to know God if I never spend time with him?

I've noticed that when I skip it all entirely, my day just goes pitiful versus days where I make that time, it just is so much better.

All right, so there's the practical, pragmatic reason.

I don't feel like you can show the image of Jesus and have a loving attitude towards others.

Like, sincerely, from the inmost part of my heart.

Nicole Parker

Sword or Sawdust

I am Nicole Parker and if you were here for the last seminar you saw the handsomest man in the world, my husband, Alan.

I am very blessed to be married to him and we're having fun racing back and forth here.

I told everybody, you never know which 1 of us you're going to see when you get there, but the 2 are 1, so it doesn't matter.

All right, let's start with a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we come into your presence now, asking that you will bring your word alive for us.

Lord, I am just a faulty human, but I know that you can bring a message, even through me, to every person here, and I pray that you will do that.

Help each 1 of us to come away blessed and able to see how your word can do so much more in our lives.

You know for me my journey with the Bible has been a complicated 1.

I grew up in an Adventist home, and we had worships every day and all of that sort of thing.

So I had a fairly solid foundation in biblical knowledge.

I can't remember when I learned the Bible stories, you know, David and Goliath and all those kinds of things.

And the Bible stories were interesting enough to me when I was little.

We used to listen to your story, our versions of everything, and hear all of the battles, the armies clashing, and all those great things.

But then when I got older and less in touch with God also, the Bible became just more and more boring.

And I would always be asking my mom, can we go rent a movie?

And she's like, well, you know, you could go and read, you know, we have all those beautiful red books, we have a Bible, you know.

I was like, Mom, you know, the Bible was boring to me.

I knew all those stories and just sitting down and reading it was like eating sawdust.

That's why I called it sword or sawdust because that's how I felt about reading the Bible.

I could do it and I was supposed to do it and when I listened to a sermon every now and then there would be something that was kind of like, wow, you know, that was kind of neat.

But to read the Bible myself personally just sounded like a really, really boring thing to do, especially because there were so many exciting novels to read and things like that, that that was what I really enjoyed.

And When I was 16, I went to Ouachita Hills Academy and I started studying the Bible there.

For a couple of years before that, I was at a school, a Christian school that made us have devotional time every morning.

We would sit for 10 minutes and read our Bibles or something.

So I think I highlighted Psalms and Proverbs or something like that.

And I started saying, well, you know, the Bible is kind of neat.

But the Bible was not really anything important to me.

It was boring still and hard to understand.

I knew there was some kind of something that happened in 1844 and it seemed like there was something that happened in 1888 and you know but the study in the Bible did not do anything for me.

Then when I gave my life to Christ somebody introduced me to this beautiful big thick book called Strong's Exhaustive Concordance.

How many of you have ever used 1 of those?

I'd find a verse and think, I wonder what that means.

And I'd look it up in that ponderous Greek volume and find out, wow, look at that, or the Hebrew word.

And I started getting things out of the Bible that I hadn't before.

Around that time, I decided I was going to spend an hour of devotional time every day with God.

And I felt terribly guilty if I didn't get my whole 60 minutes in.

As I started studying the Bible like that and studying the spirit of prophecy, it became more interesting.

I started getting into it a little bit more.

I started seeing, wow, you know, the Bible does have some neat stuff in it.

Started going to prophecy seminars and things like that and learning things from the Bible and seeing cool things in Bible stories that I'd always heard, but I never thought about, you know, what was it really like for Daniel to have been out in the desert all this time, so hungry, so thirsty, so miserable, and then he gets there and there's all this tremendous smelling food, you know, right out in front of him.

You know, starting to really think about the Bible stories.

That was interesting, it was refreshing, and the Bible became more interesting to me.

But then I kind of hit a phase for a while where I'd read the Bible a lot and I knew what it said.

All my Daniel section in the Bible was all marked up with all the little notes and I knew all these things about prophecy.

And I read the Bible regularly, but I can't say that it was really exciting to me.

I kind of hit this lull in my devotional time for a couple of years there, where I just didn't really get a whole lot out of the Bible.

Every now and then, I'd read a good book that mentioned something in the Bible, and it would bring out things.

But actually studying the Bible for myself didn't do a lot for me.

I would read through the book of Luke or read a couple of chapters a day or things like that.

Then, as I started studying the Bible more in a new way, the Bible started really coming alive to me.

And that's what I wanna share with you today about how devotional Bible study really changes our lives.

The first thing you've got to know about reading the Bible is it's not a novel.

I know that seems so basic, so duh, but for me growing up addicted to novels, I really had a hard time getting into the Bible.

You know, when you're reading a novel, even just most stories that you read nowadays, true stories, it tells you what the hero or the heroine looks like, and you know, the color of their eyes and how they are.

And there are all these intricate relationships that you're reading about.

The Bible, on the other hand, was written to cover thousands of years of history in a very brief space.

And just getting the essentials down, You don't know what anybody looks like in the stories in the Bible unless it's important to the story itself.

We know Rebecca was beautiful, we know that Bathsheba was beautiful, we know Queen Esther was beautiful.

We don't know what Ruth actually looked like.

Because it's not important to the story, right?

The things that are happening in the story are about character, about revealing God, and if that's not important, the details are left out.

It's hard for us in our current culture to really get into things like that.

But the Bible doesn't get into those things and if you're reading the Bible the same way you try to read a novel, which is what I used to do, you'll find the Bible dead boring.

It's condensing down all this history of things that happened over a huge period of time.

And remember, these people didn't have typewriters.

How to Pray with Passion and Power

I have no remote clicker, it has gone missing, so I'll just have to push the button every now and again.

But what we're dealing with in this particular section is prayer.

And I know that each 1 of us wants to have a deeper prayer life.

And so before we get into our main section here, we're going to give you the opportunity to spend some time in prayer.

It would be ironic if we had a seminar on prayer but we didn't pray.

And so we want to give you an opportunity to just focus your thoughts on God.

I find it useful when I'm praying to not just get into the rote prayers.

You know, dear God be with my family, be with my pet dog, I love you Lord, thanks for the weather.

But we're still praying 8 year old prayers when we're 18 and when we're 28 and 38.

So we need to change our prayers to be more meaningful.

So what I want to encourage you to do for the prayer time that I'm going to give you now is to take 1 thing that is on your heart, 1 particular area that's on your heart, and to pray about that 1 thing And continue interceding with the Lord on that 1 thing.

But wherever you are right now, just take 1 thing on your heart.

It could be an area in your life that you're struggling with.

It could be just praising God and just saying, I'm going to praise you, God, about things that you've done in my life.

It could be about a decision you have to make.

So whatever it is, I want you to take 1 thing, And I want you to pray about that 1 thing before we begin our session on prayer.

So kneel down, stand, raise your hands, don't jump up and down and start speaking in tongues, but you can do how the spirit leads you as you pray to him now.

So take 1 thing and we're gonna pray about that 1 thing for just a few minutes here.

Lord, in this moment of worship, We come to you knowing that you are a God who can do all things.

You've heard the prayer requests, the praises.

Because we believe that as we are in prayer, when 2 or 3 are gathered together, you are in their midst.

So Father, we're pleading for your presence to transform.

We're talking about how to pray with passion and power.

And how many of you have discovered that your prayer lives are often not what they should be?

If you have a perfect prayer life, then you probably should go to 1 of the other seminars.

Because this is, for us, for those of us who are struggling with the fact that we struggle to pray with passion and power.

And so I want to suggest to you that as we begin this, that you can take a method, a strategy, and that's going to work in all situations.

And you just do these 5 things, you'll have a great prayer life.

It's much more like a relationship that It's going to take time, energy, effort.

It's gonna take a commitment, but the rewards are worth it.

It's not gonna be a strategy, it's gonna be spirituality.

So we wanna deal with some of the challenges of a prayer life and how we can change.

My prayers feel like they're bouncing off the ceiling.

I don't know if God hears them or if He even cares.

Have you ever heard that said to you before?

I can't seem to concentrate during prayer.

As soon as I close my eyes, I start thinking of something else.

I find myself saying the same things over and over every day.

Lord, you know what I prayed about yesterday?

My three-year-old, OK, would you like to pray?

Well, I guess there is food, but he doesn't understand that.

I remember listening to Dick O'Phill, and he was saying when he was younger, his little baby sister used to go, didapudapan for prayer.

And it came out to didapudapan, because you just shorten it.

And so how are we going to move beyond these routine prayers and be able to go deeper with God?

And I'm suggesting in this seminar that there are 2 missing ingredients, 1 that we lack passion, and secondly, that we lack power.

What is the difference between passion and power?

And many people have dry prayers that have no emotion.

I remember going to this 1 prayer meeting and they started praying.

And the first person, they prayed some long prayer, but it was, Our Father who dwells in the heavens.

And then the next person next to them, they started praying, Our Father who dwells in the heavens and is, you know, over all the earth.

And then the next person prayed, our Father who dwells in the heavens and is over all the earth and is right here in this room.

And then the next person added to it until they had these long, complicated prayers.

Because the routine was killing my passion.

I mean, these complicated ritualistic prayers was killing the passion.

Did Jesus expect that there would be power attached to prayer.

He said when you pray, you can expect mountains to move.

When you pray in answer to faith, incredible miracles will happen.

And today, it seems that we lack both passion and power.

Say the whole prayer, none of this, et cetera, et cetera.

Crystal Fountains and Slimy Cisterns

Father in heaven, we're just so grateful to you.

Thank you that we're all here, Lord, that we can understand more deeply how your word applies to our lives.

We pray that you will send your spirit to speak to every single heart here, that you will draw us close to you Lord and help us to be changed into your image as we behold you.

This message is something that has really touched my heart as I've understood more of how God wants to help us break out of destructive cycles.

You know, I'm working on my master's degree in biblical counseling, and I spend a lot of time talking with people who are wrestling with things that they want to break free from.

And I remember 1 girl I talked to, especially, she was a Bible worker.

And she had heard some of my presentations, and she called me 1 day and just started crying.

I haven't ever told anybody this, but I'm addicted to pornography and to masturbation.

But down inside, I know I'm a hypocrite because it's not working for me.

The gospel is not setting me free of what's going on behind the scenes.

I'll pray and pray, but I can't break free.

So I started talking with her about what was going on, how this had all started.

And she had been abused, sexually abused, by someone who then, as she had fallen into this sin with this person, and she was older, she wasn't just a little kid, but it was a person in authority over her.

Some of the things that he had done with her were the things that she was now doing herself, and the kinds of pornography she was attracted to.

I'm not getting any kind of satisfaction out of it.

So I started talking with her about what was going on.

What was it that was driving her to this?

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Series

Soul Thirst: Going Deeper with God

Jump Start Your Devotional Life

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

Jump Start Your Devotional Life

53m

Sword or Sawdust

1h

How to Pray with Passion and Power

50m

Crystal Fountains and Slimy Cisterns

1h

When Truth Meets Life

1h

The Secret to Vibrant Spirituality

42m

Sound Doctrine