“So everyone who acknowledges me (Jesus) before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:32-33, ESV)

Jesus tells us we have to make a choice. We can either acknowledge Jesus with our lives, our words and our actions and be accepted into God’s kingdom or we can deny Jesus with our lives, our words and our actions and be denied from God’s kingdom.

What will you do with Jesus?

This year during Lent, we are going to Make War on the sin in our lives. We are going to claim the victory we have over sin through Jesus Christ. No longer will we allow sin to remain. We are going to Make War and launch a full-scale assault on personal sin.

Lent is the time of the year when we walk with Jesus through the wilderness and come face to face with Satan’s temptations. The battles we face may be different. But the victory over our sins is found only in Christ.

Join us beginning Sunday, February 26 at 11am or visit us on iTunes for this new message series

Make War: A Call to Personal Holiness
February 26

Make War: Man vs. Man
March 4

Make War: The Dangers of Sexual Sin
March 11

Make War: Fighting Satan and Growing Old
March 18

Make War: Take Control
March 25

Make War: Your Mind is a Battlefield
April 1

Make War: How Jesus Defeated Sin
April 8 (Easter) Free brunch at 9:45am and worship begins at 10:30am.

In Psalms 3:5-6 David encourages us to trust God.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

Prayer requires trust. Meaningful prayer requires that we trust God, that we trust God’s guidance in our lives, and that we trust that his answers to our prayers are truly what is best for us.

Dictionary.com defines trust this way – reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.

The first question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not we believe God is trustworthy? Simple. If we do not believe that God is trustworthy then why bother with prayer? We should just make our own decisions for our lives and move on. This way we can simply accept all of the successes and all of the consequences as our own. However, if we simply take Psalm 3:5-6 at face value then we should believe that God is trustworthy and we should trust him.

But why does prayer require trusting in God? Here’s why. If prayer is simply a matter of us telling God what we think, what we’re going to do, or even worse, telling God what our plans are and then asking for God’s blessings, then we’re just wasting our time. We’re not really praying at all. You’ve probably met people are like this. Every conversation you have with them is about them! On the rare occasion they ask what you think or how you feel about something they immediately begin sharing their thoughts before you can respond!

Prayer requires trusting God. Not just saying that God is trustworthy, but actually trusting God. We can’t trust God if we never listen for his answers! We can’t trust God if we’re doing all of the talking! Only by trusting God can we even begin to know and live out God’s will for our lives.

One of the greatest stories about trust in the Bible (and there are so many!) is the story about Job. Whenever we think of Job we normally think of Job’s patience. (I’m not sure he was really that patient, but that’s another topic!)

Think about Job’s story. When we meet Job in the Bible he is an older, wealthy man who is happily married with a great family. Suddenly, God allows Satan to take away his livestock and resources. Next, God allows Job’s children to be murdered. If that’s not bad enough (and it is), God then allows Job to become deathly ill from head to toe. Yet, through all of this, including the bad advice he receives from his wife, Job refuses to turn away from God.

So here’s the key question, “How does Job remain faithful through such tragic events in his life?” Here’s what I think…for all of those years leading up to this point in Job’s life he built a strong relationship with God. Through the good times and the bad Job learned to trust God. Job knew that although he was facing some of the greatest challenges he had ever faced in life, he could trust God.

If you want to experience an awesome prayer life, start by putting your trust in God. God cannot mold us and make us into the people he wants us to be unless we are willing to trust him.

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

(2 Chronicles 7:14, NLT)

Over and over again, the Bible tells the story of God’s faithfulness and our unfaithfulness. Here in 2 Chronicles 7:14 God is calling his chosen people to “humble themselves.”

The message is clear. Prayer requires humility. To put it another way, before God is willing to hear our prayers, we must humble ourselves before him. But what exactly is humility?

Christians sometimes think that humility means thinking less of ourselves than we really are. But we must remember that we are all “fearfully and wonderfully made” by God! (Psalm 139:41) Humility is not looking down on our lives or belittling ourselves. In fact, doing so contradicts what scripture clearly teaches about who we are.

However, when we have an inflated view of who we are and think more of ourselves than we should, then we have a problem. Pride is one of our greatest enemies and it is the opposite of humility.

Humility, then, is not thinking more of ourselves than we should and not thinking less of who we are than we should. To be humble means that we stand before God with an accurate measure of who we really are. E. M. Bounds, a pastor and author from the late 1800′s, wrote this about humility and prayer…

In humility there is the total absence of pride, and it is at the very farthest distance from anything like self-conceit. There is no self-praise in humility. Rather it has the disposition to praise others. Humility does not have its eyes on self, but rather on God and others.

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus tells a story about prayer and humility to a group of super religious Jews.

Then Jesus told this story to some who had great self-confidence and scorned everyone else:  “Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a dishonest tax collector. The proud Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else, especially like that tax collector over there! For I never cheat, I don’t sin, I don’t commit adultery,  I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’ I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For the proud will be humbled, but the humble will be honored.”

(Luke 18:9-14, NLT)

Jesus’ story makes it clear. God hears the prayers of humble sinners.