Pray Like This | Make Room For Prayer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
Thank you for tuning in to the New Vision Podcast. Our prayer is that this message builds your faith, brings clarity, and gives you hope. Enjoy the message.

**Kevin** (0:18)
Let's jump into today. Tuesday. Tuesday, Jordan went to Pick Up USA. He plays basketball there a lot, and he came home, and when he came home, he was like, he's kind of rubbing his eye a little bit, his red, and he was like, man, I got hit in the eye. When we were playing, I was like, what happened? He was like, well, this guy said I couldn't dunk on him, and then after I dunked on him, he got mad and pushed me, so I pushed him back, and then he swung on me, and like he just, I'm just kidding, none of that happened. Some of you are like, hold up, wait, Jordan can dunk? Maybe. I don't know.
So really what happened was, as he was playing, someone went to like steal the ball from him from behind, as he went by them, and they kind of swiped up, they hit him in the eye. And so he's telling us that as we're getting dinner ready, and then he came back up probably about an hour later, and he was just like, man, my eye hurts. It doesn't just hurt, like it's starting to burn. It's hard to keep open. And as he's talking about this, like it became apparent that he didn't just get like hit in the eye, but like he got hit in the eye, like probably got scratched. And so we started doing what most of us do when things are happening. And I got out my phone, and I started Googling like, what do you do if your eyeball is scratched? And then like Google was very, very helpful. It gave me a bunch of things to start doing and questions to ask. And so like I'm trying to figure out all the different ways that I can help him. It wasn't until later that night, as he was falling asleep, I put my hand on him and prayed over him.
It wasn't wrong to like look up all the things to do. I'm trying to figure out how to help him.
But I realized that my first thoughts were how I could gather information instead of praying. And I wonder like, would you be in the same boat as me? Like I wonder how many of us, when it comes to things happening, respond the way that I did. We begin to Google things. And when stuff is going on, we start calling friends that have a little bit more experience with what we're dealing with to see how we should respond in this situation. Or maybe we try to fix things, and when we realize we can't fix it, then we begin to worry about all the stuff that's going on. And eventually, we work our way to prayer.
But I bet, though, that if I asked everyone in the room, we took a survey right now, if I said, how many of you believe that prayer really works? The majority of us would say yes.
Then why don't we do it more?
And if prayer really changes things, we believe this. Again, if I polled you, you would say, oh, prayer changes everything. Then why sometimes is it our third or fourth or last resort? If it does work, if it is what changes things, why isn't it our go-to? Why isn't it our first response? How do we do it better? How do we walk in this? And I began to think like, man, we're not the only ones who've wondered about prayer, who've had questions, who saw things and wondered, how could they become people that pray better or pray more or whatever? And began to think like, man, what was it like for the disciples? Like think about their experience with Jesus. They walk from city to city, town to town, all these interactions with people. They hear him preach these incredible messages. They begin to see him do miracle after miracle, things that people have never seen, never heard of. I mean, like people who couldn't see can see. People that couldn't walk suddenly could get up and walk, dead people coming back to life. Like all of these incredible things are happening. But their biggest question, the thing that they wanted to know the most wasn't, Jesus, can you teach us how to preach like you? Jesus, can you show us how to do more miracles like how you do them?
It was, Jesus, can you teach us to pray? And when they asked that question, I want you to know like it wasn't because they didn't know how to pray. These Jewish young men had grown up their entire lives reciting prayer. The thing was, they knew how to pray, but they didn't know how to pray like Jesus was praying. And that's what they wanted from him. And as we start 21 days of prayer and fasting, I know that in this room, there are questions about prayer. How do I do it? How long am I supposed to pray for? What do I say? How do I guarantee that God hears my prayer?