God Is Creating Weakness In Your Life - Paul Washer

it's a great privilege for me to be here with you and it is always a solemn responsibility to teach on prayer you know teaching on prayer can be a rather difficult thing because i think that we all we sometimes could appear in a way that we're not that we could have a facade of greatness when actually it is a facade in my own life prayer has been very important but i've always seen myself as rather weak in prayer and i'm always remember i always remember this one thing there's only one hero in this story and that hero is jesus christ there are no great men of god there are no great men of prayer there are only tiny weak faithless men of a great and merciful god who has granted them grace please always remember that always only one hero in this story jesus christ just with a few minutes i'm just going to read uh something and then i'm going to go on to luke but i want to read something out of the servant songs that reveal so much to us about the person and work of jesus christ and i'm just going to read one verse in 42 isaiah 42 1 behold my servant whom i uphold jesus is god incarnate god who became man but in the becoming of man he laid aside so much of the privileges prerogatives of his deity he truly was a man and he did what he did as a man in the power of the holy spirit he had to be that last adam and as the last adam he had to conquer for his people and he conquered for his people having come in the body in the likeness of sinful flesh not a body that was pre-adamic fall but a body that though incorruptable suffered all the consequences of the fall the weaknesses the pain the suffering the sorrow that could be tempted and yet it says that god upheld him oftentimes we're afraid to think that way because there are so many attacks upon his deity but we see that he was a man and god upheld him took him by the hand the spirit empowered him you see we needed we had a father who fell adam we needed a brother who could conquer who was truly man and that was jesus christ and so we have to hold that in our minds when we make our way into the gospels and see his life of prayer he wasn't just praying because he was spiritual he wasn't just praying because he wanted to show devotion he was praying because he needed prayer he needed prayer because he was to overcome as the last adam he was to overcome as flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone to draw upon nothing but his father's strength and the power of the holy spirit and that way he can be our example he can be our example your problem is not it's never that you're too weak as a matter of fact god what he does in our life from the moment we're born again to the moment we die is he's constantly working to create weakness in us the problem is not that you're weak problem is that we don't know how weak we are because that weakness would drive us to prayer as being truly incarnate drove our savior to prayer when we get over to luke chapter 11 verse 1 it happened that while jesus was praying in a certain place after he had finished one of his disciples said to him lord teach us to pray just as john also taught his disciples you know i find this very amazing that nowhere do they come to the lord and say teach us to cast out demons they never come to the lord and said teach us to preach they never came to him and said teach us to walk on water but they did one time ask him teach us and it was to pray i have to believe and the context indicates it it was because he prayed like no one they had ever heard pray no one no one now if god incarnate this perfect man in the economy of our redemption it was necessary for him to do what he did in the power of the holy spirit as a man drawing upon the father's strength how much more is it a necessity for us now i don't have time to go into a lot of a lot of doctrine on prayer maybe i'll just teach on prayer this week but i want to tell you an illustration that i hope will it's not it is rather common it's even a bit funny but the reason why i tell it is it has stuck in my mind since the moment i first saw what i'm going to illustrate to you i uh lived in peru for many years and uh have big waves in peru so someone convinced me you need to learn to surf and so i said well if you can find a beach where people have clothes on i'll try it and so i tried it did not go well first of all someone should have told me that red flag means don't go in the water because it's dangerous and i but i went into the water i had already tried a few other days to surf so i went into the water confident that i would not die and i got out there and i realized i'm in trouble i'm in bad trouble i was just praying just i don't want to go to japan from south america i was being sucked out and i was very very very afraid and i heard a noise behind me and it sounded like the gurgling of a sea lion when it's angry because we had a lot of sea lions there and so that made me even more afraid but when i turned around i found that it wasn't a sea lion it was a young man probably 20 but tiny man about this big and he was hanging on to a boogie board and i could see in his face terror he had already been knocked off the board a few times he had gotten back up on the board he was he was going to drown he was terrified and so i thought well i'm going to get my board and i'm going to go near him and then i'm going to grab him and something stopped me and i realized you know i'd heard all the stories i'm twice as big as him but if he grabs me he's going to kill me he's going to drown both of us and so i went over and i got some surfers that really knew what they were doing and i said please there's a man drowning over here and i saw their faces when they got near him i mean these were experienced guys and you could see fear on their faces when they got near him now they were all young men really good athletes expert surfers but they were scared and it took them somewhere between 20 minutes and a half hour to get that young man to shore now you say why are you telling this story i want you to think about something i was probably four times five times stronger than that kid all those guys were multiples stronger than him and yet if three of those men had jumped in there and tried to grab him without using a lot of wisdom he could have grabbed them and drowned them all now you have to ask yourself how would he do that how would someone who was less than half my size be able to drown me and a few other men was it his discipline no was it his courage no was it some strength of will that gave him such power to grab a hold of men a lot larger than and and they not be able to let go what was it it was fear what did that fear come from abject helplessness this young man knew he had no ability whatsoever to sustain his life he was going to drowned and because of that anyone who would have gotten close to him he would have grabbed on to them and you couldn't have pried him off with a crowbar it wasn't his strength it wasn't his discipline wasn't his devotion it was his need need drove him he saw need he saw helplessness he saw i ca i'm going to die unless someone else acts on my behalf so it was weakness a discovery of weakness of complete and absolute need now as i have studied i i really don't like the way we talk about men of god today i really it just makes me nauseous he's a great man of god he was a great man of this or she was a great woman i just don't believe it why did some people have unusual prayer lives well they their strength of will their discipline their devotion their godliness no no no no stop exalting men i do not believe it i believe it was this they saw their need they realized they were the runt of the litter they were the lesser one to walk into the room they realized they had nothing nothing they realized that if god did not move on their behalf it was hopeless and that's what that's what did it do you see and that's why i don't want anyone to ever look at it at anyone and think oh my goodness they're so spiritual they're so this they're so that they're so that no and if they think they're that they're not what you think they are it's need it's weakness it's seeing whoa hold it i've never done anything but fail on my own he's never failed he's never failed i can't do all things i can't even get out of bed but he can do all things and i can do all things within the context of his will when he is moving you see and that's what i want you to see and i believe that god what he does to a man he doesn't care about making what we think god spends decades seeking to do one thing to a man and a woman cultivate weakness create weakness everything that's put before us that we can't lord this time you gave me a mountain i can't i every one of those is to convince you of something that you should have been convinced about with regard to the smallest mole hill you've ever had to deal with you can't but he can he can remember this god always uses the runt of the litter so you're going to defeat the midianites and you find a boy hiding in a wine vat the lesser son of the lesser family of the lesser tribe he gets an army that even though the size is rather large in comparison to who they have to fight it's nothing and god says it's too big it's too big so finally 300 and then finally no put the swords away i just want you to have some clay jars with fire in it do you see kill goliath with a boy and some stones so what i hope is that that if you'll just look at your life you'll see all these areas you'll see where god has been continuously working in you just to make you weak j.i packer has a book on weakness and there's an introductory film i don't know how many of you have seen it any of you to the book and what it does the book is on weakness and you see this the whole video is this old man j.i packard walking up steps now he's so frail that he can barely make it up there and then he goes and types weakness and that's why we pray that's why we pray

Channel: I'll Be Honest

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Keywords: Paul Washer, prayer meeting, exhortation, weakness, Christ, excerpt

Id: pbOzYh9n4OA

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021