Who We Are
Dear Church Family,
We continued our "Who We Are" series this week, moving from being rooted in Jesus into what that rootedness actually looks like in practice: persistent prayer.
We opened with the story of Colonel Sanders of KFC — pitching his fried chicken recipe to restaurant after restaurant, hearing "no" over a thousand times before one finally said yes. There's power and purpose in persistence — and Jesus told us to bring that same refusal-to-quit into our life of prayer: "Keep on asking... keep on seeking... keep on knocking" (Luke 11:9-10).
We defined prayer simply: communion and communication with God — not a monologue we perform, but a dialogue we enter into. We speak, and we listen. And in fact, prayer is often the very first spiritual practice of anyone who follows Jesus — how we got in, and how we stay in.
We looked honestly at what gets in the way of praying (we get distracted, discouraged, demotivated, disconnected), then walked through three things persistent prayer can change:
Circumstances — through the stories of the friend at midnight (Luke 11) and the persistent widow (Luke 18), we saw that we serve a God who can, and sometimes does, move our circumstances. But even when he doesn't, prayer always changes our hearts.
Others — Paul's prayer for the Colossians reminded us that persistent, specific intercession for the people we love matters (Colossians 1:9-12; James 5:16). We also talked about what this looks like not just individually, but as a church — praying together, persistently, for one another and for what God is doing among us.
Us — ultimately, the point of prayer isn't to get things from God, it's to get more of God (Matthew 6; Philippians 4:6-7; 1 John 5:14-15).
We closed with a question worth carrying into this week: What's the prayer you feel like God wants you to not give up on?
Don't stop knocking.
-Pastor Aaron Perry