The Power of Prayer

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. This is the second time I've had the opportunity to preach with you guys. And then I have sort of the dubious honor of starting a series. So over the next four weeks, you all will be going through a series on prayer. And so everybody has an idea of what prayer is. And I just had a quick question for you. How many of you have heard the phrase, there is power in prayer? Yeah, that's a phrase that gets tossed around a lot, right? That's a phrase I've heard most of my life. And I think for a lot of you, it brings a lot of different sort of gut emotional responses. You may think of things like televangelists. I hear, for me specifically, I hear there's power in prayer. I'm waiting for somebody to say, now set your wallet on the TV. And I will pray blessings into your life, right? Or there's power in prayer, and you see people with Facebook fundraisers. Or you see miracles on the news. Say, oh wow, look, that's the power of prayer. But I actually have a sort of a unique thing that always happens when I hear about there's power in prayer. And it actually makes me think of my grandfather. So when I was a little kid, I got to spend a lot of extended time with my grandparents. I was like one of the last grandbabies to come through. Both my grandparents were a lot older. My mom was a single mom working a lot. And so I got to spend a great deal of time. And for whatever reason, my grandfather took a unique shine to me. He took a unique shine to me. And one Christmas, he had gotten all the Christmas presents ready to give to me as I was staying over at their house. And he got overexcited. He got overexcited. And this is the grandfather. I love him. He would take me bear hunting in his backyard. So what we'd do is we'd go bear hunting and go look under the deck for bears. This is the same grandfather that one time my mom and my grandmother were out for shopping. And he turned all the lights off in the house. And we took all my action figures that were at my grandparents' house. And then we tied them up to the fans in the living room. So when they walked in, my grandfather had his hide in another room. And he flipped a switch. So by the time they walked in, all the action figures came to life and were spinning around at high speed. That's only one of two times I've ever actually seen my grandmother laugh. And in this particular instance, he got overexcited for Christmas. And he wanted to get these Christmas presents to me early. I mean, it was just like a lot of dollar store schlock stuff. He went above and beyond. And he had just like a stack of them. And so in his backyard, he had a greenhouse. And he takes them out there. He says, listen, I need you to understand this. He says, now look, there's a special dance you can do. It's a Native American prayer dance. And if you do it just right, if you do it just right, a gift may appear. And I'm like five, six years old. So I buy this hookah lion sinker. I'm like, all right. So he shows me the dance. I do the dance. He says, go check in the front yard. And I run to the front yard. He says, go look in the mailbox. I open the mailbox. And boom, pull out a lobster, a toy lobster that swims in the tub. I'm like, this is amazing. I prayed. I did this Native American prayer dance. And now there is a toy lobster for me in the mailbox. He says, it doesn't stop there. And so for the next four days, four or five days, he has me doing this prayer dance in the backyard. And every time I'd run up, and there would always be a toy waiting for me. And I thought it was amazing. Now, that's great. That's great. Until I got home. And I continued to do the prayer dance in my front yard. And I would run, and I'd check the mailbox, and there's nothing there. And it got so bad that my mom actually had to call her dad and say, Dad, you've got to stop. You've got to stop. This kid is at home trying as hard as to dance toys into existence, and they're not coming. They're not showing up. So anyway, any time I think about the power of prayer, that always comes to mind is my grandfather, that prayer dance. And that for me as a kid, there was power in that prayer, right? And there is power in prayer. There really is. I don't want to diminish this. But as we start this series in prayer, as we start this four-week series in prayer, I think too often we'll hear a phrase like, there's power in prayer. And then we'll stop there. And then we fail to talk about why. We'll often talk about how there's power in prayer, right? And then I'll hear sermons about how you can tap into the power of God or you can have access to that power in prayer. I've heard a lot. I grew up in an evangelical tradition. And so I heard a lot of that. How do you access the prayer that you're how do you access the power that you have in prayer? Right. How can you tap into that power for yourself? Bu...