Priscilla Shirer: YOUR Prayers Matter to God

Priscilla Shirer empowers you to trust God with the outcome of your prayers.

“If I were your enemy, I’d magnify your fears, making them appear insurmountable, intimidating you with enough worries until avoiding them becomes your driving motivation. I would use anxiety to cripple you, to paralyze you, leaving you indecisive, clinging to safety and sameness, always on the defensive because of what might happen. When you hear the word faith, all I’d want you to hear is “unnecessary risk.”
― Priscilla Shirer, Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer

Today, God is gonna give some of you solutions and divine strategies for things that are happening in your life and on your job and in your finances, the struggles that you’re facing.
And I’m saying when He answers, if the answer does not come in the package that you have expected, will you miss it because you want your way, not his way.
It occurs to me that those of us who live particularly in this part of the world where we have been overwhelmingly blessed by the presence and the power of God among us.
We’re here in this country. You and I can go on a Saturday to a Christian women event like this one or we can go to a Christian bookstore when we could pick up any Bible in any translation in any language or we can turn on Christian radio and listen the gospel.
If you like that or contemporary Christian music, if you like that, we have options available to us.
Could it be that we have lived in this neighborhood of blessing for so long that when the train of God’s glory wants to fall in an unusual way when he wants to show up in power and in glory that we have become so used to it, that we don’t even recognize His blessing anymore, that we’ve become so desensitized to God’s presence among us that it doesn’t cause us as it always should for us to fall to our knees and adoration, our arms outstretched and worshiped that God would visit us in this unique, beautiful way.
Lord help us to never be desensitized to the train of your glory and in the Old Testament or in the New Testament rather, in the book of Luke Luke’s Gospel, I love so much because Luke writes about people who encounter the train of God’s glory in the person of Jesus Christ.
He gives us story after story encounter after encounter of Jesus meeting with people and transform in their life.
He included a handful of these stories so that you and I would be not only reminded of their encounter with Jesus, but recognize that they are not exceptions to the rule.
They are examples for us of the encounters that we should also expect to have with Jesus and listen.
This should be your goal, not just hearing about Him, but experiencing Him. That should be your goal.
Like your appetite should be wet, your heart should hunger for more than just a knowledge of who Jesus is.
You ought to come to the place I ought to come to the place in my relationship with the Lord where more than anything else.
We want to see Him with our own eyes. We want to hear his voice with our own ears.
That the same God who divided the Red Sea in the Old Testament, the same God who raises Lazarus from the dead in the New Testament, the same God that did those things.
We don’t want to just celebrate it in the lives of other people.
We want to stand in line to have an encounter with God like that ourselves.
Luke writes about encounters because He wants to wet our appetite to have an encounter with Jesus Christ because listen, y’all, we have wasted our time.
If all we’ve done is come here on this Satur Saturday to applaud what Jesus did yesterday.
I’m so glad about what my God has done yesterday, but I want to see him today. Anybody interested?
I wanna see him in my own marriage and in my own finances and raising my kids and on my job and in my ministry, I wanna see and encounter the power of the Almighty living God.
That’s what today is about. It’s to make you hungry again, it’s to wet your appetite again.
It’s to not let when the day ends something to end in your life, but really to launch you forward to a brand new beginning and an adventure with Jesus Christ.
So Luke writes about encounters and he writes during a time when the nation of Israel is experiencing national depravity and decay.
They have been oppressed by oppressors who have come in and stolen from them, much of what they valued.
They are living in a, in a place of oppression and a place of destruction.
And Luke writes to them during this time when their nation is in trouble and I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but our nation is in trouble.
We are living during a time of moral and social decay and decline.
Like never before and listen, the more God is marginalized, the more he’s segmented to the periphery of society, the more He is completely ignored or disregarded, the more we will continue to see an influx of chaos and an influx of destruction in our nation.
But Luke doesn’t just write to people who have national trouble.
Luke is writing to people that have individual personal struggles. They’ve been waiting on a hero to show up.
They’ve been waiting for the kingdom of God to be at hand.
They’ve been waiting for the prophecies of all to come to fruition and that there would be a, a Messiah, a savior who would come and rescue them from all that they’ve been experiencing nationally.
But also the things that they have been experiencing personally.
So I know our nation is in trouble, but I didn’t really come to talk to you today about what’s happening in the White House.
I want to talk to you about what’s happening in your house underneath the roof of your home, the trouble that might be happening in your marriage, the thing that causes the tears to fall down from your eyes in regards to your kids or your finances or your health or on your job or in your ministry, you like the Children of Israel like me, been waiting on a hero.
Somebody who can come in and speak life to the dead places and refresh the dry places of our life.
Luke is writing for people who need an encounter with a God like that.
And I just want to tell any of you that might be in a struggle personally underneath the roof of your own house and the landscape of your own house and you’re in a struggle, you’re in a time like Luke writes to where man things are just plain old, flat out difficult.
I just want to suggest to you the possibility that sometimes sometimes your difficulties are less about the enemy being against you and more about God wanting to show you what it looks like when He’s for you.
Sometimes the stuff that you are facing, the stuff that I’m facing that are difficult.
It’s less about the enemy being against you and sometimes it’s just about God allowing a stage to be set in your life to where when He shows up, you will never ever doubt again that you’ve had an encounter with Jesus.
So the Children of Israel need an encounter with the Messiah they need an encounter with Jesus Christ.
And finally, Jesus arrives on the scene after 400 years of silence between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Jesus arrives on the scene after centuries of waiting after prophecy desiring to be fulfilled.
Jesus shows up on the scene.
There are hope has finally been fulfilled, but here’s the tragedy when he comes, he does not come as they supposed, he would, he is not on a throne.
He is not riding a white horse.
He is not coming in power and vengeance and authority that they had mirrored in their oppressors that they had pictured that their Messiah would come here.
No, he is born as a baby.
All of that deity and authority and miraculous working power that they longed for was packaged in the skin of humanity and a small human at that this is not what they wanted.
It’s not what they recognized. It wasn’t the expectation they had built up in their heads.
So when he came, they did not recognize him when he showed up because he was not in the package that they had pictured in their minds.
He didn’t come in the package. They had prayed for.
He had come in a different way because he did not meet their expectations.
When he showed up, they did not recognize him in the passage that we read.
Jesus is being brought into the temple. He is being carried by his mother, Mary Joseph.
Is along for the ride as well. They have come with Jesus about 40 days old into the temple.
They are in a religious gathering where people have come to perform their religious duties and all the people who are gathered that day are in the presence of the one they prayed for and do not know him when he comes.
Would you please notice that they’re not just anywhere they are in the temple and still don’t recognize the presence of God.
I wanna suggest to you that it is possible to be at propel and not see Jesus.
I wanna tell you that it is possible for you to be in your church every single Sunday, which I pray you are.
But you can be in your church and not have an encounter with Jesus.
I want to tell you that I’m so glad many of you are in Bible study, stay in Bible study, but you can read a verse a day to keep the devil away until you are blue in the face.
But if you read the scriptures with a hardened heart with your eyes, not open, you can be filling your days with the duty of religious activity and never catch sight of the lover of your soul.
Never have an encounter, an experience with Jesus.
All these people were in the presence of Jesus Christ and did not know him when he came because often times many times when the Lord comes to minister to you to speak into your life circumstances.
He will come in a way that is not the way you expect it. Why?
Because his ways are not our ways.
His thoughts are not our thoughts as high as the heavens are above the earth.
That’s how high his ways and his thoughts are above our own.
And what I attempt to do, what you often attempt to do, I’m sure is to dumb him down so that his ways match our ways.
His thoughts match our thoughts. We want him to answer our prayers the way we’ve prayed them.
We want the solutions that work out in our minds to be the solutions that will be best given the scenario that we see, given the prayer requests that we’ve prayed.
But y’all, sometimes we pray for growth and he answers with rain.
Sometimes we pray for oak trees and he answers with an acorn.
And when the answer comes for your marriage, when the answer comes for your parenting, when the solution that God listen today, God is gonna give some of you solutions and divine strategies for things that are happening in your life and on your job and in your finances, the struggles that you’re facing.
And I’m saying when He answers, if the answer does not come in the package that you have expected, will you miss it because you want your way, not his way.