Offering Our Whole Selves: Prayer Against Lurking Sin

God, in the scriptures and things that we have read tonight as challenging and as hard to understand as they may be, may we come away with this one simple fact that you want us to offer ourselves as we are in this moment, not hiding, not covering things up, not just giving you the shell of who we are, then may we give you all that we are. [01:02:33] (60 seconds)  #OfferYourWholeSelf

When we come to God in prayer, we need to openly acknowledge our whole selves. The sin we have done, claim it, name it, allowing ourselves to know we have wronged, and we can ask. We have the full ability to ask for god's forgiveness. Maybe maybe this story is telling us something of we shouldn't bounce around and pick and choose what we wanna offer to god, but straight up saying, god, here's what I did. I know the wrong in this, and I wanna make a change. I am willing to make a change. [00:48:18] (56 seconds)  #ConfessAndChange

And and here's what it says. If you do well believing in me and doing what is acceptable and pleasing to me, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well but ignore my instruction, sin crouches at your door. Its desire is for you to overpower you, but you must master it. Sin is lurking. [00:41:42] (27 seconds)  #SinIsLurking

And the things that are continually creating distance between us and you. Help us replace those things with the pleasures and the gifts and the blessings that come from you. And may we seek not so much to overindulge in these blessings that they too become sinful nature of we want that more than we want the relationship. [01:03:33] (47 seconds)  #RelationshipOverRiches

My next challenge is add one more, or it doesn't have to be exponential. Let's take steps in this together so that, as I mentioned earlier, this little sin thing and these little demon things and this little Satan that thinks he can rule the world, that we know how that God is on our side and that battle is being taken care of. [00:59:17] (39 seconds)  #StepByStepSpiritualBattle

Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, we're continuing this series about this wisdom that comes from being in the desert. And, essentially, the point of this whole thing over the next several weeks is, what is it that we can learn from those in the faith that came before us that intentionally took time? They took time away from the world, and I'm not talking about, you know, couple minutes. I'm talking they took years away from this world to go into the desert so that they could be still and know that God is God and to become more Christ like, and then coming out of that to share that experience with others. [00:33:25] (50 seconds)  #DesertWisdomJourney

One of the things that we've been seeking is through this act of prayer, and, I challenged you last week that as a community, we are going to make prayer essential in our daily life. We're gonna make prayer essential here in this place, that we call Wesley, where we are gathered as community. We're gonna make it core to the mission of this place and of this ministry. [00:35:08] (30 seconds)  #MakePrayerEssential

Whatever fruit it was that he did bring to God as an offering, it wasn't the best. And maybe he saved, as I said, the best fruit for himself and offered to God the rotted fruit or the fruit that was just lying around that he just kinda picked up. Maybe in our terms, in this present day, in human terms, it could be that we are only bringing the shell of the sin to God, not the whole sin itself. [00:47:00] (35 seconds)  #BringYourBestOffering