Tag: prayer

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Epilogue to the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 8:5-13

Am important question to ask in order to get deeper in your study of scripture is “Where is this text located?” What is the location on the page – what comes before, what comes after, and why did the author put it there? What’s the geographic location of the event and the writing? What’s the social location? What are the relationships involved? What are the power dynamics and social expectations or assumptions?

On the page, this particular story takes place immediately after the Sermon on the Mount, and serves as an epilogue that reinforces many of the themes from Jesus’ teaching, in the form of action.

Geographically, this takes place in Capernaum, a fishing town on the northern coast of Israel, a crossroads where many ethnicities mingled, including Jews, Roman soldiers, and migrants and merchants from surrounding regions.

Socially, the centurion represents the power of Rome and the oppression of the Jewish people. Beyond that, there was a strong bias against mixing between Jews and gentiles. Many aspects of this story cure against the social norms of the time. The centurion lowers himself to asking for help from an itinerant native teacher – and does it on behalf of his social inferior and servant. For his part, Jesus, a rabbi of growing reputation, ignores the social taboos and immediately offers to go to the house of this gentile, this oppressor. And then the centurion goes beyond, demonstrating an even deeper faith in Jesus’ power and authority than his own people.

This entire interaction is a demonstration of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. He has come to fulfill the law in a way that will look like overturning it. Things are being turned upside down, and the insiders are becoming outsiders and the outsiders are being brought inside the kingdom of God.

This interaction is part of a slow roll-out of what Paul calls a great mystery – the expansion of the promise of the kingdom of God to the gentiles. We see this also in the conversation with the Syrian woman later in the book, and even at the beginning of Matthew, in the genealogy. Matthew explicitly calls out the gentiles in the lineage of Jesus (and, incidentally, King David as well).

We have access to the same authority and power of Jesus that we see the centurion seek. The way to the kingdom is narrow but the gate is wide open, regardless of social status, ethnicity nationality, family. This is not a side aspect of of the gospel that can be segregated into a 2-3 week Bible study. This is central point, because it is about human relationships, and Good stepping into heal them and being reconciliation.

This also isn’t just a thing for “Bible times.” This is live and ongoing, happening right now all around us. This is something we are called to participate in, to step out in faith like the Centurion did, being a part of the work Jesus is doing. Like the Centurion, we can “interrupt” Jesus on behalf of others. We can intercede for those near us and those at a distance. May we be a people of prayer.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, August 17

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Ask, Seek, Knock in Pursuit of Christ – Matthew 7:7-12

This passage – along with many others like it across the gospels – is a challenge for many of us who have asked, sought, knocked and have not been given what we want. Think of how many things you have prayed for that have not gone the way you hoped or expected. But God does not always answer our prayers the way we expect.

Many of us have been taught false things about prayer. “If you don’t ask, you won’t receive.” “If you use specific words and language, you will receive.” “If you pray hard enough and REALLY believe God will answer your prayer as you desire.”

If you don’t ask, you won’t receive. But what about those who don’t ask and still receive? What about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field? Jesus tells us not to worry, and to trust, which certainly cuts against this false teaching.

“If you use specific words and language, you will receive.” God is not an ATM, and prayer is not a formula. God is a Person, who seeks relationship with us.

“If you pray hard enough and REALLY believe God will answer your prayer as you desire.” God does not want us to grovel. God is inherently good and desires to give things to His children. You don’t HAVE to ask. but God would like us to because that means we’re communicating with Him. God is not an ATM of riches.

Jesus addresses this question towards the end of the Sermon on the Mount, in the context of his teaching on prayer, his teaching on worry, and his teaching on the love of God.

We should ask God questions – the answers may not all come in this life, but we can trust that He will ultimately answer. We should seek Him and His gifts. We can trust that He will give us good gifts, even when we do not understand them when we receive them, even when they are not the gifts that we wanted.

God plants seeds even in the midst of sorrow and challenge. Even if we don’t fully understand how or why He does some things, answers some prayers but does not answer others, we can trust that His gifts are good. We can trust that He wants to hear from us, wants us to ask, seek and knock, because He loves us and gives good gifts to his children.

— Sermon Notes, Amanda Moffat, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, July 6, 2025

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The Lord’s Prayer – Matthew 6:5-15

Our engagement with scripture is highly dependent on our own context as well as the context of the scriptures themselves.

Jesus starts his discussion of prayer by addressing some of that context. He is not speaking into a blank slate, but rather into a context where assumptions have already been made and wrong understandings are already in place. First, he attacks public piety, prayer done in public to increase our own reputation and prestige. Today, we aren’t likely standing outside the church praying loudly, but we certainly do the equivalent on social media, bolstering our own “personal brand”. When we do that, Jesus says we’ve already gotten our own rewards. But we can trust God to hear us and take care of us.

The second lie Jesus takes on is the idea that we need to pray in a particular way to get through to God. The Hellenistic influence is clear here, as the pagan practice of long rambling prayers to distracted, fickle deities was apparently being copied by the Jewish community. But God is not distant, He is near and already knows what we need before we open our mouths.

Then Jesus walks us through step by step how to pray. He starts off simply – we pray to our Father in heaven. Not Caesar or Zeus, not the gods of the stock market or political power. Now, you may argue that we don’t do that – but what if every tab refresh is its own little prayer? Who are we really seeking?

Next, “hallowed be your name.” This is a weird thing to say in English – we never say things like this except in this prayer. The closest we come is Halloween or the “Deathly Hallows” – maybe it would be better known as “let your name be known as holy.”

Next, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Put another way, “God please show up!” We want to see God work His will in our lives, in our struggles, in our relationships.

From there “give us today our daily bread.” It’s a simple prayer, asking for just enough, calling back to the days in Exodus when God sent manna daily, but only for the day. It’s entirely counter-cultural and was in Jesus’ time as well. Why ask for so little from a God who is so rich? But by asking for only what we need, perhaps God works in us to give us more than we know.

Next, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This is a prayer about obligations and relationships. Relationships themselves are a network of obligations between people – and God’s covenants with his people are mutual obligations. We fail to meet these obligations all the time, and others fail to meet theirs to us. This prayer extends the grace of God to both ourselves and to others.

Finally, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” We will be tempted to deviate from the Jesus Way, from the instructions Jesus has been giving during the Sermon on the Mount. And we will be assailed by the real spiritual forces of evil that seek to keep us from relationship with God.

And then instead of what we expect, the doxological “for yours is the kingdom, etc” Jesus ends in a way that is perhaps unexpected. He goes back to these questions of obligations and the inevitable hurt that comes with living in relationships the way Jesus is calling. If we forgive those hurts, then we too will be forgiven. If we refuse to forgive, though, we will find our own forgiveness hard to come by.

It comes back to relationships – with God and others. Prayer is not a mechanism for building our reputation or fire seeking material gain, but for entering into relationship with God and seeking to tools to engage in Holy relationships with others.

— Sermon Notes, Tim Hsieh, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, June 1, 2025

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Bethesda – John 5:1-9

Think of something that you have been struggling with for a long time – maybe a sin or temptation, a pattern of behavior, a bad habit or addiction, a hurt, a painful memory, resentment. Something you wish God would heal but over the years He has not.

We’ve all likely heard that there are three answers that God gives to prayer – yes, no and wait. But sometimes that knowledge does not help. It seems like we’ve been waiting for so long for something that would be objectively good. Why wouldn’t He do it?

There is no formula to getting our prayers answered – if there were, we’d all be following it. But God is a person, not a vending machine. He asks us to trust him – on good days, on bad days, in crises, in peace.

We have this example in the man in this story, paralyzed for 38 years, seeking healing from this supposedly magic pool. The specifics of the angel coming down are not in the earliest manuscripts, but were likely added to clarify what the man says later.

This is from the Book of John, the one gospel where the city is Jerusalem looms largest throughout the book, rather than only at the end. The indications of different Jewish festivals help the Jewish people across the world place the stories in time and cultural context. The book of John also focuses on Jesus’ interactions with other people, and this one is notable.

We don’t know how long this man has been waiting, but it seems to have been a long time. We can imagine him younger and more hopeful, pushing and jostling to get to the pool first, and failing time after time. Eventually he gives up, and while he stays in the area he has resigned himself to the fact that he will never be first. Proverbs says “a hope deferred makes the heart sick,” and we can see that this man’s heart is sick.

Jesus steps into this story of scarcity and offers abundance. God wants healing broadly not just to those who get somewhere first. But first he asks a piercing question: “do you want to be made well?”

The man does not say “yes”. Instead, he just shares why it’s impossible, why “it is what it is.”

But that’s not what Jesus asked. That’s not where Jesus wants him to direct his gaze. Not at the superstition of the pool, but the face of Jesus. And Jesus is validating the desire that this man has almost forgotten that he has. Our desires find their root in who God made us to be. They may be misplaced or diverted to incorrect or inappropriate things, but God wants to fulfill the core of our desires, just like in this case.

So where are the gathering pills beneath the colonnades in your life? Where are at sitting on our mat, waiting out the hours but having largely given up.

And maybe it’s not even in your life. We are surrounded by needs and unanswered prayers in our own community and in the global community ended moreso. Where do we step in and how do we make those decisions? We can’t have all the answers, but we can trust that God’s power is abundant, sufficient for both the great problems of the world and our small sins and hurts.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, August 18, 2024

Images created using Midjourney.

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Prayer for the Impossible – Ephesians 3:14-21

This is the second time in the book of Ephesians that Paul just breaks in the middle of a passage and prays for people.

As a church, we are praying for opportunities to share the gospel as well as for wisdom and direction. We take cues from Paul in that we should be ready to drop everything and enter into prayer.

In that first prayer, in chapter 1, he prays that the Ephesians will experience the wisdom, knowledge, hope, presence and power of God. It often does not feel like we have access to any of these, but that’s part of why Paul is praying that they would grow in all of it.

In this part, Paul is after something similar. Paul opens with very universal language. He goes to his knees in prayer, rather than following Jewish tradition and standing. He speaks of the father, Pater, giving his name to the family, patria, and to every family in the world, not only the family of Abraham.

He asks that Christ would dwell in their hearts, much like the language from earlier in the letter when he wrote that believers are being built together as a dwelling place for God.

And that dwelling of Christ, his being deeply rooted in us, is what gives us the strength to comprehend the “breadth and length and height and depth” – something so vast that it surpasses our knowledge and understanding. The love of God is bigger than we or the world could possibly understand.

It also means that we can’t look to the world for its understanding of love. When we love in our marriages, family, friendships, we have to look to the example of Christ and be powered by the strength of Christ. It is for this, and for some dim understanding of Christ’s love, that Paul prays for here. Knowledge of that which is beyond knowledge.

And Paul prays to the one with power beyond power, able to do the impossible, and so worthy of being asked for the impossible.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, October 11, 2020

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Knowing God – Ephesians 1:15-19

Paul here is just coming down from the high of describing our relationship with God, 180 words straight of praise to God for “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.” He moves directly off of that and into 160 words straight of prayer.

Perhaps we should be more like that. What would it be like if, the moment needs came up in our minds or in conversation, we brought it to God in prayer immediately?

He begins this section be calling back to all that he said about salvation, as well as citing all the great things he has heard about the faith of the Ephesian church.

Because of all this, he prays for them constantly, both with thanks for them and prayers that they would receive the Holy Spirit.

How do we know that the term Paul uses here, the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” means the Holy Spirit, rather than a spirit of adventure or the spirit of Christmas? It goes back to what Jesus told his disciples about the Holy Spirit when he promised he would come. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would “teach you all things” andconvict the world “of sin, and righteousness and judgement,” – ultimately, to know God. And that is what Paul is praying for here.

It can be easy to think we know God sufficiently – even though we know that God is eternal, and that if we spent a hundred years learning one new thing about God every century, we would still never got to the end of Him.

So that’s the journey Paul is praying the Ephesians for, that the “eyes of your hearts” would be opened. The Jews saw the heart as being the seat of a person’s life, will and very breath. The Greeks saw the heart as the center of our perspective and bias. We know both of these are naturally set against the will of God. That is why the “heart’s eyes” must be enlightened, showing it more and more of the things of God, so that we can know God more.

This passage about hearts having eyes, combined with passages elsewhere that talk about our “heart of stone” together bring to mind the blank eyes of ancient statues. Our hearts need to be given life like Pygmalion, so that their eyes can be opened and we can see God.

And not just God, but also the hope that he called us to in eternity past. That hope is confidence in the inheritance God promises us. Jesus tells us what that inheritance is like in the story of the prodigal son.

And Paul describes it in verse 19, using four different words for power to talk about what God does for us.

And God answers this prayer – what Paul prayed for the Ephesians and what we pray for each other – by speaking to us. He speaks through his word, he speaks through the spirit, he speaks through others, through circumstances and so much more. We must check all that against what the scriptures say and who Jesus is, but God has many ways of enabling us to know Him more and more and more.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, August 9, 2020