Glory be to the name of the Lord. Once again, dear friends it’s time to study God’s Word with Part 2 of the message, Lord, Speak a Word with Pastor Kiruba Stephen. Let’s listen.
We have to first believe the existence of God, we have to first believe the power that God has. We must have to believe that He is the Great I Am, that He can, He will. And that’s when we come to him and we say, “Lord, I know you can, Lord, I know You can do all things. And I know when You say a word, my servant will be healed. If you say a word, our problems will go away. If you say a word, my sickness can go away.” If we come to God with wavering faith, if we come to the Lord and we say, “Lord I have this problem, and this problem is so big and I don’t know what to do and I feel I am going to drown in this problem, and I don’t know what to do, Lord help me.” If we keep our problems bigger than the Lord Jesus Christ, He will not be able to do anything. He will not be able to do anything.
But on the other hand, we can come to the Lord as a child and say, “Lord, I have this problem, Lord this is difficult. Lord, I am not able to understand this, but say a word, Lord. I know You can do it. Lord, I cannot do anything but when You say a word, You have power over this circumstance, You have authority over this Lord. Lord, I come to You.” When we come to the Lord with that attitude, knowing who God is, coming to Him, believing who He is and then second part is that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6) God will definitely answer our prayers. God will definitely answer our prayers.
And this centurion, do you think, he came to Jesus thinking that, “Ok, even though He has authority, even though Jesus has authority, He may not answer my prayers. He may not answer my request.” No! He came with such confidence that when he tells Jesus Christ this, He is going to do it. That means that He had confidence in the character of Jesus Christ that He is a compassionate God, He is a loving God and He knows our heart. It’s not only that He has authority, but He has compassion. You can have all the authority you want to have but if you don’t have a heart to help, all the authority can stand in one place, and nothing will be done, nothing will be given. It’s like people who are kings, who have all the authority. If they think, they can actually make a poor man to sit in the palace but they will not. God is not like that. God has all the authority and He has the heart to bless you. God has the heart to lift you up.
When we feel like we are going to drown, we feel like, “Lord, I feel the carpet under me is going to come out. I feel as if the earth is shaking. Lord, I feel like I am going to just go down. I feel like I am going to drown. All we need to do is raise our hand and say, “Jesus, help.” That’s all. Two words, “Jesus, help.” By us saying, “Jesus, help”, we are acknowledging that He can help. And by us saying “Jesus, help”, we are acknowledging that He can hear. By us saying, “Jesus, help”, we acknowledge that He will help and the Lord will definitely, definitely, definitely do it. He will answer us.
So, when we come back to this same passage on the faith of this centurion, we are going to see what Jesus said over here. How he commended this centurion’s faith and though this message is short message, we are going to go home with one point driven straight into our heart, into our spirit what the Lord wants to convey to us is: the faith of the centurion.
When we go before the Almighty God in prayer, when we go and stand before the Almighty God in prayer, we need to know that He has the authority over everything, every situation. He has the authority over the wind and the wave. He has the authority over sickness. He has the authority over the demonic spirits. He has the authority over your finances. He has the authority over your job. He has the authority over every human being in this world. He can do anything. If we have that resolved in our hearts that God can do anything, then when we come to the Lord, we know, “When I ask my Father, He will give it to me.” That confidence that we have in God, when we enter into His presence, with that confidence saying, “Lord, I am coming to You because I know that You are here.”
When we close our eyes we should be able to see God in front of us. It’s not like, I am closing my eyes and I am saying, “Lord, I don’t where You are”, and cry and cry and cry and cry and say, “Lord, I don’t know if You can hear, I don’t know if You can see. Lord, I don’t even know if You can feel what I feel. I am the only person going through this. Lord, I don’t know. I don’t feel like reading. I don’t feel like praying. Lord, I am not going to listen to Your message. I am not going to do anything. What is the use in following Jesus? I might as well go back to where I was before.” That is Satan. That comes from Satan but we know who God is.
Two things: 1) His power
2) His character.
We need to know the power of God. If you are not sure how powerful God is, how powerful Jesus Christ is, read the Bible. Just reading the gospels will show you that He is the Lord of resurrection and life. He has the power over the wind and the waves. He has the power over death. And Jesus can bring a dead person back to life and we have seen that more than once in the Bible. So, basically He can do anything. And if you read the Old Testament, God made the sun to stand still. So, God can do anything. God can do anything for His children. He will stop the sun, He will stop the moon. He can stop anything. But, we need to know who God is. God is there. His character is same. He doesn’t change. We need to know who God is.
The third thing I want to say is, God is good. God is all powerful. The goodness of God is the character of God. And God is all powerful, that talks about his power. The third thing is: God is holy. We cannot come to the Lord, expecting something from the Lord, if our heart is unrighteous. If we have sin in our hearts, God can do once to show His glory. But, if it is a repeated pattern that we see, we harbor sin in our hearts, we harbor adultery in our hearts, we harbor hate in our hearts, if we harbor vengeance in our hearts. If we keep lying continuously and if we steal little bit here, some of the office papers, office pens and office pencils and whatever it is. And do some wrong calculations in our tax returns and lie and take little bit of change from work and whatever it is, whatever you do. If you say you are a child of God, you have no business touching that which does not belong to you. That includes somebody else’s wife also. So, when it comes to dealing truthfully in the presence of the Lord, God will look at it. Just like God sees, God’s eyes runs to and fro throughout the earth, to see whose hearts area loyal to Him.(I Chronicles 16:9) God’s ears are listening attentive to the cry of the righteous, to the voice of the righteous. (Psalm 34:15) So, if you and I become righteous by the blood of Jesus, and if we are righteous by walking in that righteous path, cleansing ourselves continuously with the blood of Jesus and living a righteous life, then we are bound to receive that which we ask of the Lord. We go into God’s presence and say, “Lord”...it’s like a child coming to me and saying, my daughter coming to me and saying, “Mommy, I am hungry.” I never say, “Ok, be quiet. You don’t need food. Go and sit down in the corner.” We don’t say that. We never do that. But if a child is hungry, we say, “Ok, I am going to give you food.” If the child comes and says, “Mommy, my socks is ripped or my shirt is torn.” We don’t say, “It’s ok, who cares how your clothes are. You can just have that.” We never say that. How much more our Heavenly Father! When we say, “Lord, I need this. Lord, I need this.” When we come and tell the Lord knowing that He is right in front of us.
Now, like I said this applies to a child of God, it applies to a child who is not in rebellion with the Lord. When we come and ask the Lord saying, “Lord, I need this, Daddy, I need this.” What does Daddy do? What will He do when He hear that. He is going to say, “Oh! My child, you need that, I am going to give it you”, provided He knows we don’t ask things that we shouldn’t be asking. So, we see right before that, in that same chapter where that leper, he came and he said, “Lord, if it’s Your will, please heal me.” (Mathew 8:2) And the Lord said, “It is my will, be thou cleansed.”(Mathew 8:3) And God healed him. It’s like my daughter coming and asking me, “Mommy, if it is your will, give me some food.” We know the will of a mother or a father is to feed the children and God’s will for us, us and our lives is to give good things. Every good and perfect thing comes from the Father of lights (James 1:17)
And whatever we need, we can go boldly into the presence of the Lord, if you are walking with the Lord to say, “Lord, give it to me. Lord, I need this. Lord, I need this.” Even if our job is difficult, we can go and ask the Lord, “Lord, make this burden light.” God is able to do that. We don’t have to think, “Oh, I am trying to ask God an easy way out. I don’t want to ask.” We don’t want to feel that way. God can do it. God can make the burden light. And if the Lord says, “I am going to take you through this, but I am going to give you the grace to take this burden, and to show My supernatural power through this”, God will do that too. So, God answers the prayer, whatever we ask according to His will, according to His will, and that is the best thing that we can receive from the Lord.
And God is good and His Word says, “Whatever we ask, when we ask in faith, He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20) So, if we ask for 5 dollars, God never gives 5 dollars, He never gives 6 dollars, He never gives 7 dollars. God gives much more, more than we can ask or imagine; that is our Daddy. That is our Heavenly Father. And we can give that Name to God. He is a God who gives more that we ask or imagine. That is His character. And when we ask for help, it says even in the Bible, in Psalms it says, “You asked me for life, and He gave extended life.” God gave abundant life. (Psalm21:4) And God is the God who gives in abundance. So, He never measures. God never measures. And we see this all the time, when we do something for somebody; say you give $50 for somebody’s birthday. Lot of times you can see, the next time when the birthday comes around, you know for us, we will get something in that range $50. You know, you give $100, they’ll say, “Oh, they gave $100, we have to give $100” you know, something. And it’s an obligation and they want to make it even. But God is never like that. God surpasses, He gives us more than we ask or imagine. That is our Heavenly Father. And no bank in this world can match God’s account, God’s bank in heaven.
So trust God, when we go to the Lord, we need to know:
1) The power and authority that God has
2) The character of God. God is compassionate.
He is all loving and He is all caring. And He sees and He feels what we go through. He is not some God who stays somewhere and He says, “Ok, I want you to toughen up. Cry some more, cry some more, I want you to see you cry until you stop crying and you get tough inside.” God is never like that. God says, “You come to me.” God knows how to grow us. God knows how to strengthen us. God gives us the strength. He never takes us through a path where we cannot walk. He gives us that strength. It’s like us with our children, if we are going to take them for hiking, we never tell them, “Ok, walk bare feet, so your feet, that will get that callous while it bleeds. So, walk with me.” We never take them like that! We make sure they wear proper boots, proper clothes and whatever cream they need. Whatever we need to put, we make sure they are safe and we take them with us. How much more our Heavenly Father!
“In this world,” (in our spiritual life), God says, “We will have tribulation.” But God says, “Cheer up, I have overcome this world.”(John 16:33) That means He is with us and He is giving us the strength and the grace and the equipment, everything we need through the Holy Spirit to walk the path that He has called us to walk. And that’s why; we are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ because He has actually set the trail. God has actually set the trail. He walked before us. And He is walking with us. It’s not that, He said, “Ok, I’ve walked before you and now you walk by yourself. I am God, so I was able to walk and now you have to somehow crawl and fall and somehow get hurt and bruise and end up in heaven.” No! God is such a good God. He walked before us and He is walking with us. Every step of the way Jesus Christ is walking with us. He is holding our hands and He is walking with us.
Oh Father in heaven, grant Your children peace Lord, as they put their trust completely in You. Heavenly Father, those who do not know You, draw them by Your Holy Spirit that they can have the relationship with You and that they may see the wonders of the living God in their lives. In Jesus’ Name, Amen!
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And please do join us next time for Part 3 of Lord, Say a word!
Until then, may the Lord richly bless you.
