1. "You and I need to be on our knees fighting every day. We need to have a place where we are going to fight. Whether it's going and whether it's sitting down or kneeling down with the word of God and just fighting. Just praying. Just praying." [01:23] (20 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




2. "Every season that Lee and I have gone through, we have found and leaned on the Lord. And Lee and I learned to change our prayers and go deeper and further in our prayers. We learned how to pray deeper because of the events in our lives." [08:51] (17 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




3. "The more we pray and live in prayer, the closer we get to God and the farther we get from this world. So the question that we're answering is this. What is prayer? What is prayer?" [10:00] (18 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




4. "When we pray, prayer is communication with God. It's a two-way conversation and not a one-way conversation. So when we look at Nehemiah 1:4-7, we're going to look towards Nehemiah for a perspective on prayer on how to pray in 2024 today." [12:43] (19 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




5. "We need prayer more than ever. We should be like Nehemiah weeping. Weeping because we have seen guards, walls, and the list goes on of things that have fallen. And made believers in America defenseless. Though it may seem that we are. We are defenseless. We are anything but defenseless." [17:23] (26 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




6. "Prayer aligns us with God's will. Not our agenda. Not our goals. Not our advancements. Nothing about us. It aligns us up with God and his plan and his agenda." [20:10] (13 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




7. "Prayer is not about you coming and making prayer all about you. Your health. Your safety. And your life. Though it is easy to pray for these things. Instead prayer is a two-way avenue for you and I. We have to hear God's will. We have to experience God." [20:58] (16 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




8. "We need to be praying for the pastors. The missionaries. And every believer. That we will walk with God and seek God. And that God will be our main priority." [35:55] (11 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




9. "Because in Nehemiah we see that we have access to God. We see that we. That prayer is not about us. But it is about God. So here's our response this morning. May we reflect on shifting our prayer life. To seek God's will. And not our will." [36:32] (22 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)




10. "There are battles. Happening in this world every day. And you and I need to fight on our knees. We need to fight on our bedsides. We need to fight in our prayer chair. Whatever it is. We need to be praying and seeking God. And seeking his will." [37:50] (17 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)

Well, we start a new series this morning, but we're still talking through the vision of our church. We are starting this new series on what is prayer. You know, how do you fight? How do you fight? That's the question of the hour. That's the question of the day: how do you fight?

When we think about fighting, some people's mentality or mindset is it's time to flee. But for some, it's time to battle up; it's time to gear up and go to war. My thought this morning, my process this morning is this: you and I need to be on our knees fighting every day. We need to have a place where we are going to fight. Whether it's sitting down or kneeling down with the word of God, we need to just fight. Just pray. Just pray.

This past week, on Friday, Lee and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. Yeah. We celebrated, and as we were driving and talking, we were having our first date night.

Two years? I don't know. But no, not really. I'm joking. In a few months. But we had a great time together. As we were driving and talking, we were thinking back over our life, over the last 10 years. We thought about what has happened in our lives.

You know, in the first 15 months of our marriage, we lost a grandmother, an uncle, and a grandfather. In those first 15 months, we went through a lot. There was a lot of traveling, a lot of going to funerals, and all these different things. Lee was working in a school that I was serving in. It was one of those doors that opened in a public school, and I was in there preaching the gospel.

But in the midst of that, my wife was seeing some battles, some struggles in the hallway where she was teaching. People who don't know what's going on, who don't hold to Christian values. I thought over that. I also thought about something that Lee and I have been discussing: we need to write a book about some of the things that we have experienced and seen in our lives.

You know, John was born on January 4, 2018. He was supposed to be born on December 31. I thought I was getting a tax break that year, but it didn't happen. So he was born in January, and we found out in March of 2018 that he had torticollis and that he had a flat spot on the side of his head. We had to go, and he had to start physical therapy, and he had to wear a helmet. We used all of these different things, and we were starting to walk through it.

But we did not know until six months that he actually had it. Physical therapy wasn't cutting it; he had to go to a helmet at six months. At that moment, I had taken a position to go to Orlando. So my wife was home with our son, working through the torticollis, walking through the helmet situation, getting him fit. Then I left to go to Ecuador. While I'm in Ecuador, they asked me to pay the price up front to get the helmet. They asked me for $5,000 as I'm sitting in a tent. It's on a rocky road, and I had to find enough signal to call to take care of that need.

I remember that. I remember the battle, the struggle we went through with Catherine. When she was in the womb, there was a thing where they measured, they did the ultrasound, and they measured her abdomen wrong. Her stomach, they measured wrong. They had her, just some things distorted. So we had to go back and get multiple ultrasounds. I believe over the whole pregnancy, it was eight different ultrasounds we had to do.

Then they went back and did another ultrasound, and they found a spot on her heart. They sent us to a place, which is just insane. They sent us to an ultrasound place where the ultrasound is so intense that it goes inside of the baby's heart and looks at every little vein. We found out that there was nothing wrong at all. It was dust or something that was on the thing. It was nothing.

Then with Catherine, at 36 and a half weeks pregnant, Lee's doctor was fired by Orlando Health. We were waiting to find out if Catherine was breached or not. We didn't know. At 37 weeks, we got a new doctor and found out that Catherine was breached, and she might be coming out in a week.

Then Catherine was born, and I called the family and said everything was great. The doctor said everything's great. She's healthy and strong. I go, finally, I can go to the bathroom. So I go, and as I come back in, I see the doctor saying, "Are you okay? Are you going to be able to handle this?" I was like, uh-oh, what just happened? Look, you said everything was good.

I found out that she had hip dysplasia, which is very common, but her hip was born displaced. It hadn't formed, and then we had to walk through that. She had a B&L harness for three months of her life. She looked like a little frog, just sitting right there.

Then Kenzie had jaundice, and it was bad. It was the worst of any of them. We had to stay in the hospital extra. The most lights they could put on a baby, they had on her, and we still had to stay a little extra time.

Then Mary. Well, Mary's a little different. Mary was very calm, and everything was great until she was born. When she was born, unlike any of our children, she came out starving. I mean, hungry. I mean, she was wailing. Wailing at them. They couldn't get her measurements because she wouldn't stop crying, stop wailing to get food. So I, as Lee is still in surgery, had to take her out and feed her because there was no other way to calm her down.

I share all that with you because this morning, Lee and I remember all of this—the significant challenges we faced in our own lives. Battles and struggles, and some of that seems very small, very minor, but there's a lot more that Lee and I have seen and have gone through.

As I thought about my children, as I thought about all of this, there were times we felt discouraged. There were times where we weren't getting the answers we needed. There were times where we felt overwhelmed. Much like Nehemiah, we turned to prayer with heavy hearts and found unexpected clarity and strength during those seasons of our lives.

Every season that Lee and I have gone through, we have found and leaned on the Lord. Lee and I learned to change our prayers and go deeper and further in our prayers. We learned how to pray deeper because of the events in our lives.

I'd like to ask you this morning: have you ever faced a moment so overwhelming that all you could do was weep? Have you ever faced something like that before? Maybe it was a personal loss, maybe it was a crisis, or news that just shattered your heart.

I want to take you back to a man named Nehemiah, who upon hearing devastating news about his homeland, felt the same exact way—overwhelmed, frustrated, and he wept. Our text this morning is Nehemiah 1. Our key text is verse 4. Nehemiah 1:4 says this:

"As soon as I heard these words, I sat down and wept. I mourned for days, and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, 'O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father's house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses.'"

So here's Nehemiah. Just for background, he gets word that the walls in Jerusalem have fallen, that something has happened. The gates that surrounded the city are gone. When he hears the word of this, when the cupbearer Nehemiah hears this, he weeps. He weeps when he hears what has happened—that there's no defense, there's no wall surrounding Jerusalem anymore.

He weeps. Picture Nehemiah here, hearing the news of Jerusalem's walls. His face falling, his heart sinking. He sat down, the weight of sorrow visible in his eyes, fasting and praying with tears streaming down his cheeks because there is no defense. There's nothing surrounding and protecting Jerusalem anymore.

Nehemiah thinks about the people, the believers there in Jerusalem, and he is concerned because there is nothing to protect them. There's nothing to keep the people safe, meaning the people were without security. They were open to attacks. And Nehemiah mourns over Jerusalem. He mourns over it. Jerusalem was meant to be a light. Jerusalem was meant to be a beacon—a beacon of light for people, to the world.

Stan Evers writes this: "Jerusalem at this moment has become an international joke. The walls are down." I cannot help but to think about America in this moment. I cannot let our nation go by right now. We, as a nation, were founded on Christian principles. "In God we trust." How much more do we need prayer in 2024 in America and the world?

We're seeing our nation about issues that we never thought would ever be an issue or would ever happen. We need prayer more than ever. We should be like Nehemiah, weeping—weeping because we have seen guards, walls, and the list goes on of things that have fallen and made believers in America defenseless.

Though it may seem that we are defenseless, we are anything but defenseless. Imagine Nehemiah praying: "God of heaven, the great and awesome God, we have sinned. I and my house. We have turned from your commandments. Forgive us and guide us."

As soon as he hears these words that the walls have fallen in verse 4, and he's weeping for days, we realize the first thing here: Where did Nehemiah go to? He went to God. And why is that important? Because it shows us that prayer gives us access to God. It shows us that we have an avenue to talk with God.

Nehemiah's heart and mind go straight to God. He received this news of Jerusalem's walls, and he knows what Jerusalem is to be. And so he's broken. How broken is he? He is fasting, he is praying, and he is confessing. Nehemiah looks at the people of Israel and himself, and he notices that they have drifted away from God.

For you and I, the more we pray, the more we are with God. The more we draw closer to God, the further that you and I get from this world. So you and I need to have this desire. We got to have this discipline of prayer because you and I need to be drawn closer to God and further away from this world every day.

With the access that we have to God, we don't have to go to someone else to pray. We can go to God ourselves. So may we use that access. May we go to our Father and connect with Him. May we become more like Nehemiah, focusing on God through prayer.

Do you know what prayer does? Prayer aligns us. Prayer aligns us with God's will—not our agenda, not our goals, not our advancements—nothing about us. It aligns us up with God and His plan and His agenda.

Nehemiah, weeping over Jerusalem's condition, I have to ask: Do we feel the same concern over our nation drifting away from God? We need to recognize this and turn to prayer. Prayer connects us to God and shifts our focus to Him.

When we are walking with God and have access to the holy and living God, how are we using that access? Prayer is not about you coming and making prayer all about you—your health, your safety, and your life. Though it is easy to pray for these things, instead, prayer is a two-way avenue for you and I. We have to hear God's will. We have to experience God.

A.W. Tozer shares this: "Prayer is not about presenting a long list of requests, but it's about seeking God's will. It's communication on God's terms." And then Tozer ends with this: "True prayer cultivates in us sacred reverence and holiness. True prayer gets me to where God wants me to be. It opens up to me all the treasures of heaven I need to be all that God desires me to be."

We can spend our time in prayer, but it needs to motivate us until we are caught up into the presence of God. Church, when I read Nehemiah 1:4-7, I cannot help but to think about each of you and me. As you go through life, as you have everything going on, I want you to know that we, as a church, when we think about our vision, we should be walking through this together.

We are the church. And if we're the church, when we walk through life together, we should be. When we see our nation, our state, our country, our county, or our city drifting away from God, it should cause all of us together as a church to be weeping and to be praying that we draw closer to God, crying out for the sins and asking God to forgive us.

But that same goes for our household, for the house, for where we live. I want you to know that as you go through battles and struggles in your home, you are not alone. We want to be together. We want to be a partner. We want to walk beside you. When you weep, we're weeping with you.

As you or your child or your grandchild or someone in your family is drifting from God, we want to come beside you and pray for them to draw closer to God. We want to cry out with you over the sins of your household, over the sins in someone's life. Because we know that God is a God who forgives, and we want to walk beside you through all of this.

But as I was in my office this week thinking, all I hear from people the majority of the time is this: "I want to see God move in my time. In my time on this earth, I really want to see God move. I want to see God move in the church. I want to see God move in the schools." And the list goes on and on.

But as I was sitting in my office this week, I thought about this: How can we see God move if we're not in prayer? If we're not in prayer with God, how do we expect God to move? You and I, we have access to God all the time. Prayer is not our last resort; prayer is our first resort.

To use a cell phone analogy, our prayer life is a direct line to God. And here's the cool thing about God: if He is able to hear your prayer request right now and your prayer and your desire, at the same time, He's able to hear someone else's prayer and desire. Everyone in this room could pray at the same exact time, their own prayer, their own thing, and God hears each one individually. That's our God. And we have access to Him. God is always available.

So may we not treat prayer as a last resort. Instead, may it be our main line of communication with God. Imagine how our prayer life would change, how our life would change if God was our first priority, that God was our first prayer, our main communication.

So let us daily seek God and go to God as our access point to prayer, that we get to pray with Him, that we get to draw closer to Him as we pray daily to Him.

Here's our second point: Prayer turns the focus from me to God. We move from realizing that we have access to God now to changing our focus off of us and to God.

We go back to this text. We look at it. Verse 5: "And I said, 'O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Amen. Even I and my father's house have sinned. We have acted corruptly against you. We have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you have commanded your servant Moses.'"

What does a prayer life look like? What does your prayer life look like? When you go to fight on your knees in prayer, or you fight on your bedside, or you're fighting in that chair in your living room as you're praying, what does your prayer life look like?

When we come to prayer, we need to throw the agenda out the window. Yes, it's important to have 10 pages of prayer requests, sicknesses, etc., in the church—100%. We need to be praying for the sick. We need to be praying over all of those different things, all those requests.

But our prayer life is not to go into the war room, to go into the prayer room, to go into our chair, to go to battle, and try to convince God to do something. You hear me, church? It's not for you and I to go in there and think that we can say these magical words, and it's like we're taking a magical pill, and that God is just going to go, "Oh, wow, I didn't see it from your perspective. Let's do that. My will not be done, your will be done." That's not how prayer works.

So may we not try to phrase something up in such a way that we push our agenda. You guys know what I'm talking about. We go into prayer, and we bring a doctorate dissertation and prayer requests and reasons why God needs to answer it, like God needs our help or our guidance or our direction.

When we go into prayer, the main character of our prayer cannot be you and I. It needs to be about God. So let us look at Nehemiah's prayer again. Whose will and agenda is Nehemiah seeking? It's God's.

And why have they drifted? Why have they turned away from God's plan for the Jews and the Israelites? It's because of sin. They chose their focus to be on themselves and not on God. And hey, this is not the first time that the Israelites have fallen on this one.

It's not the first time that, oh, this just happened out of nowhere. If we look back at Exodus, we realize that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. These are the rules, the statutes, the commandments. In the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, there are 622 commandments, rules, statutes.

And here it is: Nehemiah, who knows the Pentateuch, knows all of that, is saying, "Hey, we've not kept the commandments. We've not kept the statutes. We've not kept the rules that you commanded to your servant Moses."

Moses knows a lot about this. In Exodus 24, Moses leaves the people for 40 days and 40 nights. He goes up on a mountain to be with God, to receive the commandments from God. And boy, do the Israelites and Aaron have a good time down there. They built themselves a golden calf.

While Moses is very close to God, the closest that he may ever be to God on that mountain, the Israelites are down there with their golden calf. We can unpack that whole message another time. But they chose something else to be their focus and chose their comfort and will over God.

I know, how could that be? How could the Israelites do that? The problem is that the same thing happens in our prayer life. Prayer is not about you and I. It is not lifting us up, and it is not a debate or a court case with God.

Prayer can realign our will and our plans with God. Prayer is personal, for sure, but prayer is seeking the kingdom agenda. You and I, we are broken. Nehemiah, the Israelites, and Nehemiah's family, they are broken.

We have a tendency to seek our agenda in the midst of our brokenness. You and I have seen Christianity attacked. We have seen brokenness in Lutz, in our community, in our families, in our state, in our country, in this world.

Every time I think about brokenness, my heart breaks because I hate to see people be broken. It reminds me of an old nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. You never thought you would probably hear Humpty Dumpty today in this message, but you are right now.

Humpty Dumpty what? Sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty. There we go. Glad we are jumping in now. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty back together again, right? We all know that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. He is an egg. An egg. An egg was sitting on a wall.

Don't get me started on that one. That's the worst place for an egg to be. It's like just sitting on the counter in my house. It's going to fall. My kids are going to knock it over. I digress.

This nursery rhyme is not about friends or betrayal of our friends. This nursery rhyme is about brokenness. For the original rhyme maker, Humpty Dumpty was intended to be a symbol of the origin of life and the world of humanity. It was designed to lament the fact that humanity had fallen and was broken.

Not even the most powerful people on earth—the king himself and his army, nor any of his wise men—were able to put the broken pieces of life back together again. One commentary wrote, "That's the world we live in. It specializes in producing broken people. And once broken, we discover that no power on earth can put us back together again, except for God. Except for God."

That's what brings us back. So this prayer of Nehemiah—he was a man who was desperately wanting the maximum attention of God. Yes, he was an ordinary man, but he had an extraordinary desire for God.

We get a glimpse into who Nehemiah was before seeing what he did through the power of God. He and others like him have discovered the truth of God's promises. Jeremiah 29:13: "And you will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart."

So church this morning, may we draw closer to God. May we, this morning, go to our God. Are we more passionate and excited about what happens on an athletic field than we are in the church? Are we more excited about kickball than we are about Jesus? I hope not.

We need to be praying for the pastors, the missionaries, and every believer that we will walk with God and seek God, and that God will be our main priority.

So as our band comes up, here's my thought: You and I need to become more like Nehemiah. We need to pray, and we need to go to God and lay it all out there and let it be about Him and not about us.

Because in Nehemiah, we see that we have access to God. We see that prayer is not about us, but it is about God.

So here's our response this morning: May we reflect on shifting our prayer life to seek God's will and not our will. Will you join me in that? Will you help pray? Will you start praying?

When you go to our prayer life, may we be praying for God's will to be done. Praying to seek Him. Praying for the lawless people to come to know Him. Praying for His hand to be over all this.

So we may shift our prayer life to be about God and not about us. And then lastly, may we trust and communicate with God. May we trust God, and may we communicate with God, and may we apply what God reveals to us.

So this morning, let's be like Nehemiah. Understand that prayer is about accessing God and focusing on His will. We need to pray with our hearts and our minds set on God.

So this morning, church, this is our response. It is never too late to become a man or a woman of prayer. There are battles happening in this world every day, and you and I need to fight on our knees.

We need to fight on our bedsides. We need to fight in our prayer chair. Whatever it is, we need to be praying and seeking God and seeking His will. We need to be praying over America. We need to be praying over our church. We need to be praying that we draw closer to God.

So this morning, I am going to be down front here. I would love to pray with you about something. Please let me know. I am here. I would love to pray with you. I would love to talk with you. If you want to know about why prayer is important and why we want to line up with God, I would love to tell you about Jesus Christ—God in the flesh, God with us.

I would love to tell you about Him. If you want to join our church, I would love to talk to you about that too. And church, we have an altar. This is not a stage; this is an altar.

I don't know a better place to fight than at the altar—at the altar praying. Wednesday mornings from 11 to 1, we are praying. We are fighting in this room. I ask you to join us.

But this morning, let's pray for God's will to be done for First Baptist Lutz. Let's pray for God's will to be done in the families of First Baptist Lutz. If we have a brother or sister in this church this morning, a family that is battling and struggling, let's go and fight for them in prayer.

Let's fight for them in prayer. Let's pray for our nation. Let's pray for our state. And let's pray that lost people come to know Jesus.

Lord, thank you for this time to be here. Lord, thank you for breaking down the walls and barriers broken down in our lives. Father, I pray that you draw us closer this morning. May you remove all distractions from our lives.

Lord, I pray for those right now, Lord, who are battling some things in their lives. I pray that you be with them and help them, Lord, to seek you. Lord, I pray that we be on our knees fighting—not for our agenda, not for our will, but for your will to be done.

So I pray over every family. I pray over every child. I pray over every student. I pray over every adult that is part of First Baptist Church Lutz. We give them to you. We pray that you'll be the number one priority in their lives.

We pray over marriages. May you be the rock of their foundation. We pray for your will to be done at First Baptist Church Lutz. We pray that people will call out to you to be their Savior.

We pray that people go through the waters of baptism. We pray that people will join this fellowship of believers as we do your business, Lord, we seek you and preach your word and do your word every day.