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This message may be a bit uncomfortable. I may lose some of you today but that’s okay if it means that it’ll bring them closer to God even without me. There may be others of you who may just feel a bit chafed. I encourage you to keep an open mind, allow the Holy Spirit to work with you with this subject matter and be open to observation within yourself.
Today I want to talk to the people who are experiencing some challenges with prayer, Those of you who are praying and, in your opinion, are not seeing the results or outcomes that you expected. You’ve been told to bring anything and everything before God and you have and you are but for some reason it seems as though things are not going the way you expected.
First let’s touch on a couple reasons why prayers may not be answered in the way that you expected.
#1, The thing or things that you are praying for are not God’s will. I’ve talked about this and many of my messages that it’s so important that we seek God’s will in our life. He knows better than you. He knows better than any of us and so while you may feel your prayer for a particular thing is the best for you, we should not expect God to answer prayers in such a way that would lead to us being harmed or lead to circumstances that are not aligned for his will for us. This is why I encourage you to ask for his will up front!
#2, It may not be the right timing. Know that if you pray to God he has heard you and it may be that what you have prayed for is his will but it may not be the right timing for what you’ve requested to come to fruition. Trust that if it is God’s will, he will ensure that your prayers are answered with the timing that is most beneficial to you.
These are two reasons that prayers may not be answered, however the reason I like to dive into further in this message as to why a prayer may not be answered has less to do with your request in the prayer and more to do with you.
Do you agree that God is King, that God is the master creator of the entire universe?
Do you agree that he is omnipresent and that he knows any and all things at every moment?
Do you agree that he is the Alpha and Omega?
Do you agree that God always has, is now and always will be?
Do you believe that God’s holiness is present, powerful, infinite, and incomparable?
Do you have a reverent fear of God?
Do you have respect for God knowing that he is the holiest of holies and all-powerful?
Okay, cool. so this morning you prayed for God in desperation to help you. To take your mind off of the stress, tonight you’re headed to the club, planning to get drunk off your rocker and twerk and grind like there is no tomorrow. If all goes well, you will even find a hookup! Is your expectation that God should prioritize your request this morning as you venture out into the world not as God has taught us to do but as man and your flesh desires to do?
Is your expectation that God should prioritize your request this morning as you venture out into the world not as God has taught us to do but as man and your flesh desires to do?
Okay, okay, maybe I’m being a little bit too extreme. Let me turn it down a bit. Let’s say you’re praying for healing or help with an addiction or help with circumstances that are causing you angst or anxiety or stress or even pain. So you sincerely prayed to God with all of your heart this morning but as your dog spills water on the floor you release a barrage of profanities at the dog as though he knows what you’re saying. After you clean up the water, your BFF calls and you have a spirited conversation laced with gossip, profanities, and spreading of lies.
Was that uncomfortable?
Let me try a different example. So you listened to my message about partnering with God as you start your job and praying with him before you start your workday. I’m so glad that you’re doing that! So as you’re heading to work, you are jamming with your favorite Hip Hop playlist that by the way has explicit labels on all the tracks and you just can’t help but tap your hands on the steering wheel to the lyrics to that tight beat while the artist is rapping about what he wants her to do with his nether regions. When you have lunch with the ladies at work, you all talk about how you would blow the new intern’s mind if you had a night with him. This is your typical routine 5 days a week and you don’t quite understand why things are so complicated at work and difficult and dysfunctional and it seems like you are struggling to get ahead. Didn’t Steve from Walking in step with God say that if I prayed to ask God to partner with me at work he would order my steps and give me favor and influence?? Why don’t I see any influence? Why don’t I see any favor?
So I’ve given you a few examples here and I could go on, but let me get to the heart of my message. it is not my intention for me personally to judge or to condemn any of the actions I’ve listed so far. It is not the point of this message to tell you what to do or what not to do because you have free will and you can make your own decisions. As a matter of fact I will even go so far to remind you that none of us including me are perfect. All of us are fallible and most importantly, we all sin.
What I do want to say to you is that we cannot have it both ways. We cannot expect to experience the fullness of God, the peace that only God can provide, the holiness that only God can manifest in us, through us – and live as the world does.
Putting it very plainly and simply for you we cannot expect to have our cake and eat it too with God. Nor should we! If you believe that God is the creator and Master designer and King and holiest of holies end the Alpha and Omega then why would you expect him to engage with someone who prioritizes him over the world in the exact same way of someone that prioritizes the world over him. Now, God loves both of these people equally and is always the same with every single human on earth – but we must consider that the one who prioritizes the world over God has in fact dwelled in a space that is far from God and in the space of our cultural norms.
Again, I am not suggesting that I, Steve McDonald, am above all of this. I am not suggesting that I do not prioritize the world over him in every single way of every second of the day. I confess that there are times in my life that I have done things, not just things that did not honor God, but things that I am ashamed of when I think of them now. This was when I was not walking with God. I was walking in the world – far from God and doing the things that the world does including some of the examples that I shared with you earlier in this message. With walking in the world came the consequences of living in the world and the uncertainty and unpredictability and the lack of peace and wholeness that comes with walking with God. I see this as a proximity issue. When we are close to God, we can experience him more fully. When we are farther and farther from God we are more and more vulnerable to the world and less able to experience God in the way he had in mind.
I was walking in the world – far from God and doing the things that the world does including some of the examples that I shared with you earlier in this message. With walking in the world came the consequences of living in the world and the uncertainty and unpredictability and the lack of peace and wholeness that comes with walking with God.
If I’m being totally honest, the world can only provide temporary and material comforts. Only God can provide the type of comfort and peace that defies understanding.
Think of the warmth of a heater on a cold day. If you are closer to the heater, you are warm and comforted. If you are further away from the heater your comfort decreases and you have to use things of man (sweaters, coats, blankets) to start feeling comfortable and warm. Can you think of other creations of man that are designed to give us comfort and pleasure that are far from God? Notice – The heater location stays the same. God stays the same, it is we who may move farther and farther away from him. There is another angle to look at this. If we have become accustomed to being far from the heater – ie, accustomed to wearing sweaters and coats, accustomed to finding comfort from the creations of man, there is another effect when we move away from the world. As we move away from the world, we may find ourselves ostracized and shunned, ridiculed and shamed for thinking we can move away from the creature comforts of man towards God. You may be ridiculed when you stop using profanity among your friends, or attending church, mosque or synagogue instead of hanging out. You may experience an effect where your life starts to transform as you move towards God. As your life transforms, it may be that the circles that once embraced you do not or that things that once interested you no longer do.
I also recognize that in most cases, we are completely unaware we dwelled in a space that is far from the heater – far from God, especially in a culture of today’s world that is not focused on forging a relationship with God. In many cases, we are raised from childhood ‘far’ from God and know nothing different. In other cases, we may even be ‘somewhere in the middle’ and thus we see a little bit of God’s influence but there is still something lacking.
My personal experience is that if you prioritize the world and how the world does things without God, you are in effect experiencing a life that is literally and figuratively farther from God. If you prioritize the world, my experience suggests that you will not be as anointed and in union with the Lord as you would if you did not prioritize the world and the way the world does things. What do I mean by prioritizing? I mean emulating the world, in particular the world that does not prioritize God and godliness or worse – does not believe in God at all.
The holy texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have examples of how we can honor God in our day-to-day life. The focus of this message is to share with you the fact that God loves you whatever your behavior may be, whatever you do or do not do in the world.
If you find that you are lacking the peace that I and others have described. If you find that you are feeling disconnected from God. If you find yourself in circumstances that do not align with what you’ve been taught about how God can and will provide for you, I suggest you examine how you carry yourself in the world, how you show up for others, how you show up for yourself and most importantly how you show up for God.
As I attempt to do in all of my messages, I’d like to zoom in on a very tangible example that happened to me fairly recently. I hope to give you a glimpse of what I mean when I say you can’t have it both ways. When I say you can’t have your cake and eat it too with God.
I recognize when I prepare for these messages the words you hear are less from Steve McDonald and more words directed from God. I know this because before I sit down and prepare a message I pray and ask God to give me the words to speak to you. I would definitely say that when I’m preparing a message I feel anointed by the spirit of God. No doubt. 100%. So one day I was planning to prepare a message. Before I worked on the message I wanted to have lunch and watch a TV show. I decided to open up Netflix and was looking for a new show to watch and I found a new show that starred Kim Fields and Wanda Sykes. I was curious and excited because I used to have a crush on Kim Fields so I decided to watch the show while I had my lunch and before I would work on my message. I was enjoying the theme of the show until about 5 to 10 minutes. Then the profanity in the script started to unfold. Now one thing I’ve learned in my walk with God is I personally cannot watch TV shows or programming laced with profanity and feel and experience the benefits of the God’s spirit in me at the same time. I cannot do both. As a matter of fact if I try to do both if I try to consume entertainment that is abundant of profanity and or themes that are heavily sexual in nature, especially outside of the confines of marriage – I can actually feel it in my spirit. I can feel the discomfort in my spirit.
So back to the TV show on Netflix. I started to feel the tingle of the discomfort as the profanity went on in the show, and I had a choice to make. I could continue watching the show and watch Kim Fields and try to enjoy the show, ignoring and dismissing the profanity as no big deal, (in other words go along with how the world does things) or I could watch a different show.
My friends I just had to watch Kim Fields so I just kept the show on and watched it until it was done. I felt satisfied in consuming the entertainment and being able to watch Kim Fields, my old crush.
When I finished my lunch I sat down at my desk and proceeded to try and write a message. I cannot put in words the absence of spirit I felt in that moment. It is so hard to describe the absence. I felt the hole that was there. I felt like what was there before I sat down to lunch and watched that show had left me and I didn’t realize the hole that was there until I needed what was there before. I noticed it. I noticed the absence, perhaps a better way to say it is I noticed the distance between me and the source that anoints me to write these messages.
Listen to me carefully, it wasn’t that the source, God’s spirit, had moved away from me, it was that I had walked away from the source – towards how the world of man does things – to watch that TV show. Now I saw what it would be like to be further from God than I was prior to the show. It was so far that I felt the anointing in that exact moment was no longer present because I distanced myself from it in consuming the profanity. How did I get my anointing back, I prayed to God asking for forgiveness – acknowledging that I know better. I waited until the next day and I wrote a wonderful message as the anointing had returned.
I believe part of the reason I had that experience was so that I can share it now with you. so that I could give you a tangible example of what it’s like to distance yourself from God’s spirit that can dwell with you and in you when you walk in step with God.
So then, what is the take away here?
When you pray, God hears you but the fullness of God.. the ‘realtimeness’ of God the full bounty of God comes to the faithful and those who honor him. You must understand that in order to bask in the light of God and experience the fullness of God, we have to sacrifice our comforts and pleasures of what the world, and man provides.. We must detach ourselves away from the mindsets we have had for decades. We must turn away from things we thought were no big deal. We must turn away from the thought that if it’s not hurting anybody – it’s perfectly ok. If cussing my dog out is not hurting anybody, I should be ok to cuss him out right? I don’t believe that God’s will is for you to cuss out the dog. I don’t believe cussing out the dog keeps your spirit close to God. I don’t believe the the source of the profanity is an appropriate dwelling place for the spirit of the creator of the universe. Do you?
I believe God would have you exercise patience, discernment and look to him to help ease your frustration instead of using the quick fix of the release that profanity provides. What do I do when the dog spills water, I grow frustrated and I may utter a ‘grrr’ or other nonsensical utterance but I don’t use the profanity the world does, not anymore – because I know usage of a diverse vocabulary in profanities cannot coexist with the fullness of God within me. I prefer the fullness of God vs cussing someone out. Don’t you?
There is a transformation that must take place in us to move away from the status quo and the norms of the world we have always known in order to truly bask in the light of God and all of the benefits of doing so.
I’m not saying that you will never experience god. I am also not saying you need to be perfect, flawless and never ever do anything that God would not smile upon you. I’m just saying that you will not experience the fullness of God while you are immersing yourself in the sin of the world or the way the world and much of the way our culture does things. Not sure where to start? God can help you break away from norms that are the status quo if you ask him.
So let’s go back to my original questions at the beginning of this message. Do you feel like you are struggling with God? Do you sense that His presence is lacking in your life? Feel like your prayers aren’t being answered?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions I encourage you to ask God to reveal to you the ways that are keeping you from being closer to him. I encourage you to ask God to help you to understand the ways in which you carry yourself in the world, in the ways in which you treat others, even in the ways in which you carry yourself when you are just with your dog that spilled water on the floor. Ask him to reveal to you if there is anything in you, in your spirit, in your mannerisms, in your actions that are blocking your blessings and anointing.
I want to encourage you to ask him to show you how you can change for the better and grow closer to him and experience the peace and comfort that only he can provide. he loves you he is waiting for you to learn this information so that he can pour into you and be in a closer and stronger relationship with you.
God is very patient and he is willing to wait your entire life for you to learn how to practice godliness towards others and honor yourself. He is willing to show you how to honor him and open the door to a stronger, more intimate bond with him where you can truly experience him. If you did not realize these things before, I am hopeful that you can ask him right now and continue to ask him and begin the process to unblock you from experiencing him more fully, experiencing his healing more fully, experiencing his companionship more fully, experiencing his love more fully.
Bless you.
