Having Big Faith In Our Prayers

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. We're in our second week of our prayer series. For anybody who missed last week, for now the next three weeks we'll be looking at specific prayers that the Apostle Paul had prayed. Last week we discussed the power of prayer and the temptation for us to pray safe, small, general prayers. How when we pray those prayers we aren't really exercising our faith and belief in God. We can't have God-sized faith if we're praying human-sized prayers, right? So we'll continue to discuss the different ways that we can become more specific and faithful in our prayers. This week we'll be looking at a prayer that Paul prayed for one of his good friends named Philemon. But before we do this I'm gonna go ahead and pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, I pray that you would speak through any words that I say today, Lord, that I would not be a person up here speaking, but I would be a tool for your purpose, and that I would be a messenger of you to your people. In your name I pray, amen. Cool, so the passage today is Philemon 1, 4 through 7. So you guys can go ahead and flip there. I don't know if many of you are familiar with the book of Philemon. It's kind of a small one. It's only one chapter, not even a full page. It's towards the end of the New Testament. So as you guys are getting there you can figure that out. So when we see how Paul prays for those that he writes to, we notice a couple things. One of them is that he almost always starts his letters somewhere with an encouraging word to the person or people that he's writing to, and then shares how he's praying for them. The second is that when he shares his prayer he follows his prayer with a so that phrase, letting us know that there is always an end result to his prayer. He always shares his prayers and then what his prayer is intended to do. So now thinking about prayer this week and the ways that we pray normally in our lives, I realize that sometimes the ways that we pray are a little bit funny. An odd one when you think about it is the way that some parents pray with their children right before you go to sleep. I remember this when I was growing up. You guys are probably familiar with it, the now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take, which theologically cool, but also what the heck? What in the world? It's like, all right sweetie, you said your prayers, now I'll see you in the morning, if you make it that far. What the heck is that? We're like training our children to like, well hopefully I make it through the night. My favorite one though is the way that we pray over food. Of course being thankful for your food, awesome. You know we should definitely do that because there's there's people that don't have McDonald's on every corner to go stop at whenever you feel a little bit hungry. But when we pray for our bodies to be nourished by our Big Mac, large fries, and extra-large Diet Coke, seems a little bit counterintuitive. But hey, we're talking about having big faith, right? And maybe praying those nutritional blessings over our Big Macs is having God-sized faith. But on a more serious note, we're gonna look at one of Paul's examples of prayer. This passage is from Philemon 1, 4 through 7, so let's go ahead and read that together. I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I remember, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have towards the Lord Jesus and for all of the saints. And I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because of the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. So for those of you that don't know, Philemon was a good friend of Paul's, actually. And this is actually the only letter that Paul wrote that was to, or that we have recorded at least, that was to one specific person and not a church of people somewhere. So like Corinth or Ephesus or Philippi. So basically, a little bit about Philemon as a person. He's a pretty successful businessman, and he regularly hosted what probably looked like what we think of as a small house church every week. So Philemon, like many people at the time in his culture, had a slave. Now we're gonna take a quick side journey, and I'm gonna clarify that. So a slave in that time and culture was not like what we think of, like Civil War slaves, right? This term or phrase that they would use is actually more closely translated as a bond servant. So the difference as a bond servant... Hey, there it is. Now the difference here is that in many cases, this is not somebody who was sold into slavery or captured to use as a tool on a farm or something like that. This was more than likely somebody who owed ...