Week 37: Day 2

Intro: Hello guys, and welcome back to Orbit. My name is Josh and today we're going to be looking in the book of Mark and chapter 11. And I'm going to be reading from the Bible, verses 22-25.

Bible: “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

Thoughts: There's a lot to unpack in just these few sentences that Jesus tells us here! We're going to be looking today at faith, we're gonna be looking at doubt and we're going to be looking at prayer and the power of prayer.

Now, faith: faith is the foundation for our belief in God. Faith is where everything else we trust in God comes from. “Have faith in God,” Jesus begins with this, but then he goes on to elaborate, and he tells us what faith can do in our lives. Faith isn't something we just have, and we have to hold on to. He tells us that faith can move mountains. He says that he can do this when there's no doubt in our lives.

This is a tricky one for us. Doubt is something that is so prevalent. I have many doubts. I have doubts about my future. I have doubts about the right now. It's a hard thing to have completely – no doubt. Not even Jesus's disciples – the people who got to walk every step with Jesus and spend proper time with him – even they had doubts. They doubted he would rise from the dead after he died. One of the disciples (Thomas) is actually know now is “Doubting Thomas”, because he was so sure that Jesus wouldn't be able to rise from the dead. Yet these disciples went on and they founded the early church. The apostles went out, and from 12 they became 72. And from 72, there are the millions of Christians in the world today. And they did all this, despite their doubt. They did this because of their faith in God, and because of their faith in Jesus.

The other part of this passage, Jesus tells us, “If you believe that you have received it, you will have received it”. He tells us that we mustn't be unsure when we pray, when we ask for a mountain to move. You can't sit back and be like, “Oh, I don't think it's going to move. But I'm going to ask anyway”. There's another excellent example of this in the Gospel of Luke- in Luke 7. You see, a centurion asks Jesus to heal his servant, but he tells Jesus ‘don't come to my house, it's okay. I believe that if you want my servant to be healed, he will be healed’. And Jesus says, of this centurion, “I have not found such great faith, even in Israel”. Jesus is astounded by this man's faith because he does exactly what Jesus tells us all to do. He tells us “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe you have received it, and it will be yours”.

There are oftentimes in our life where you see mountains, you see big, scary, vast problems, and that can put us off praying for it. We might think, “Oh, what is my small prayer going to do in the face of this mighty mountain?” Jesus wants to crush that thinking. Jesus tells us that we can pray. And if we believe, the mountains will move. Jesus also gives us a little pointer here, almost as an afterthought, but an important afterthought, about how to pray. And that is that when we sit to pray, we must “forgive others so your father in heaven may forgive you”. This is a call back, of course, to the Lord's Prayer: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. When we go into prayer, we should be going in without any grudges held, we should be going in with a fresh slate, just as the fresh slate God has given us through Jesus's death. I'm going to pray quickly now. I'm going to pray that we will all have powerful prayers that our prayers won't be restricted by what we think we can do and what we think God can do. If you’d like to join me.

Prayer: Dear Lord Jesus, we thank you that your power moves mountains, we thank you that our faith in you is such a powerful thing God, I pray that you will give me

a revelation I pray that you will change me in the mindset and that we will be able to pray powerful prayers and our prayers will send vibrations through the whole world Lord. Amen. Amen.

Challenge: And now as you go out into today, as you go out into the rest of your week, pray mountain-moving prayers, pray prayers, and believe that what you're praying will come to pass. Thank you very much. I will see you again tomorrow.