Their are prayers that are down right scary to pray. Prayers like, 'Lord break me.' 'Lord use me however you want.'

We don’t know how God will answer those prayers, which can be scary. We tend to feel this way because His answers may be out of our comfort zones. It may be something new, and we are afraid it’ll be hard and that we won’t be able to handle it.

But God is faithful. He knows what He’s doing. He’s not out to make our lives miserable, or shame us, or enjoy putting us in situations so that we’ll be afraid or embarrassed. He is out to grow us, and push us to become the men and women we were each born to become. He is making us more like Jesus, which is far better than staying where we are.

So we should pray scary prayers, even if they are scary, because the best things will come from them. 

1. Make Me

We all like control.  We all like comfort.  We all like to see things the way we like to see them. Yet, when we pray scary prayers, we turn those very things over to God.  He takes control and we surrender.  

In this sermon, Pastor Ryan kicks off our new "Scary Prayers" series with the prayer of "Make me!"  When we ask God to make us in His image, just like King David, we are giving up the things that we finally realize don't seem to work out when we're in the drivers seat.  It's because it's not His, it's ours.  We are to surrender those things, give up control and let Him, Make Me!

2. Show Me

Psalm 139:23-24 says, "Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."

sking God to show you what's inside your heart  can be scary. There are some things, thoughts, attitudes, feelings, that are not right. They are dirty. They are not pure. And we are asking God himself to show us these impurities. That can be terrifying. But through inviting Him to show us, it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge it, and do something about it.

3. Break Me

"My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." - Psalm 51:17

Sometimes we think of brokenness as defeated or weak. But brokenness is having the strength to say, 'I'm not in control.' It's having the strength to say, 'God I'm not in control, and I'm just a vessel for you to use.'

Tommy preaches, "We're called to be broken. And in our world we are called to be broken to Christ."

4. Grow Me

Pastor Joel preaches that there are three biblical reasons for why we should pray for God to grow us.

  1. For God's glory

  2. For Others' good

  3.  For the advancement of the gospel

"If you are asking God to do more, give you more, to bless you with more, to enlarge your territory, and it's for your glory, and for your good, and nothing to do with the gospel; if it's just about you, I don't know if God wants to answer that."

It's a different kind of prayer to ask God to bless you, when you're asking so that you can bless others.