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Jun 09, 2019

The Good Gift Giver

Passage: Matthew 7:7-11

Speaker: Brian Land

Series: Sermon on the Mount

Category: Grace Brevard

Keywords: prayer, father, gifts, needs, seek, ask

What do you do when you are desperate? God has invited us to persistent and passionate prayer, assuring us that our prayers matter, always resulting in beautiful answers in the form of loving care. The filter to understand how to pray and what answered prayer looks like is the relationship between a perfectly loving and generous Father with his needy and desperate child. He wants us to come with hungry and trusting hearts, laying our desires before him, but ultimately trusting his perfect love, wisdom and power for our needy lives. In the end, we can trust Him and His response because, when His own Son Jesus laid his passionate plea before his Father in the garden before his death, God wisely sent Jesus into betrayal and death so that Hebrews 4:16 could be true: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

ORDER of Worship

CALL TO WORSHIP: Ephesians 1:3,7-9 & Psalm 95:1

READING: Romans 8:31-32

MUSIC:

PRAYER: Kept By God

ALL:   Jehovah God. Creator, Sustainer of all things. It is our privilege is to be under the direction of Your omnipotence, righteousness, wisdom, and grace.

LEADER: It is the discovery of Your goodness alone that can banish our fears, allure us into Your presence, and help us to confess sins.

ALL: For there is mercy and exceeding riches in Your kindness through Jesus. May we always feel our need of Him.

LEADER: Bear up heart and mind. Enliven our daily walk. Work in us the image of the heavenly; the first fruits of spirituality found in Christ.

ALL: Thy kingdom come. 

MESSAGE: The Good Gift Giver

CENTRAL TEXT:  Matthew 7:7-11

ILLUSTRATIONS

BENEDICTION: 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17 ESV

ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES:

  • 1 Kings 17
  • Psalm 37:4
  • Psalm 65
  • Proverbs 8:17
  • Isaiah 49:15-16
  • Isaiah 55:6-7
  • Jeremiah 29:13
  • Matthew 26:39-46
  • Mark 11:24
  • Luke 18
  • Philippians 4:4-7
  • James 1:5-8
  • James 4:1-3
  • Revelation 3:20

MEDIA:

6.09.19 Album

DISCUSSIONS QUESTIONS:

  1. What are times in your life when you’ve been “desperate”
  2. What is your typical response to desperation?
  3. Is it ok to repeatedly “pester” God in prayer when you are in crisis?
  4. Summarize prayer. What is it?
  5. Does it feel like God’s answer to your prayer-plea is dependent on you (on how you prayed, how “good” you’ve been etc...not the “church answer” but how your heart truly feels)
  6. What is God’s answer to our prayers dependent on?

QUOTES:

  • ...for most of us the problem is not that we are too eager to ask for the wrong things. The problem is that we are not eager enough to ask for the right things.” - Tom Wright
  • “It is strange that these delightful promises affect us so coldly, or scarcely at all, so that the generality of men prefer to wander up and down, forsaking the fountain of living waters, and hewing out to themselves broken cisterns, rather than embrace the divine liberality voluntarily offered to them.” - John Calvin Institutes, 3.20.14
  • “our prayers depend on no merit of our own, but all their worth and hope of success are founded and depend on the promises of God” - Ibid
  • “Faith is the virtue by which, clinging-to the faithfulness of God, we lean upon him, so that we may obtain what he gives to us.” - William Ames

SERMONS: