Live Free with Josh Howerton - How Prayer Corrects Our Vision | Ep. 161 | Monday, September 18, 2023

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Our enemy and the culture we live in try to distort our vision. Prayer helps correct it. Learn from God’s interaction with Job and how talking with God gives us proper focus and a fresh perspective. It reminds us that He is God and we are not. For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's Word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.com. Church slash daily drive. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, welcome to the podcast. My name is Mike. And grateful that you would join us today for a few minutes. We're here, money through Friday, just kind of dive it into God's word and trying to draw closer to him. We read a verse from James, chapter 5, verse 16, that told us, the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Now, when he talks about the prayer of a righteous person, not talking about perfect people, we have no righteousness on our own. we are simply people of the second chance who humbly acknowledge that it is only through the grace of Jesus that I may write with God. He's just saying that when someone sincerely comes to God with a humble and surrendered heart and unpacks that heart, oh, it's powerful and it's effective. Hey, anybody out there wear glasses or contacts? I was near-sighted most of my life.

Things in the distance were pretty foggy, so I wore glasses since the sixth grade. I can remember getting him right before baseball season when I was a kid thinking, so that's what the ball looks like. It was awesome. And I wore glasses, hard contacts, and gas permeable contacts, and soft disposable contacts, until I had LASIC surgery over 15 years ago now. Now my up-close vision could be a little more challenging these days. But man, I can like read license plates a mile away now. And I sat in that LASIC surgery chair. And after 12 seconds on each eye, I got up out of that chair and looked at the clock.

It's amazing. I can see the numbers on the clock. I can see so much clearer now. Prayer does that for me. It corrects my vision. Every time I get up from the chair in my office or family room or on the back deck or maybe jogging with some earbuds in or sitting in a beach chair or a park bench or some big rock and a hiking trail in the forest somewhere, wherever I've been praying.

Every time I get up, I can see better. It gives me proper focus. It gives me a fresh perspective. of who he is and who I'm not. James also writes this in chapter 4, verse 10. He says, humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. And when I'm praying, when I'm talking to God, it enables me to embrace the reality of my smallness

and lean into the reality of his bignness. It enables me to see that he has this incredible view from above. He sees like none other. His ways are higher. His thoughts are higher. His wisdom is better. is greater, his love runs deeper. His view from above is so much better than mine, and prayer brings all of that back into focus for me. There's this guy named Job. You may have heard of him.

He had a lot of tragedy in his life. His stories in the Old Testament of the Bible, lost family, financial collapse, got really, really sick, and he hangs in there for a while. And then he starts honestly talking to God. He just unpacks, unloads his heart, saying, God, this world has falling apart. My life has fallen apart. He starts spewing out. So in real, honest dialogue with God. Like, hey, God, where are you anyway? Can't you see what's going on? Sure seems like you don't know what the heck you're doing.

Could you at least show up? Well, God shows up. And in one of the coolest sections of the Bible in the book of Job, God lovingly poses some rapid fire questions back to Job. Questions like, hey, Joe, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who marked off the dimensions? Do you know where the snow is stored?

How is lightning, mate? Have you ever given orders to the morning and tell the sun where to set? Hey, Job, have you ever walked in the recesses of the deep? Tell me where the darkness lives? Have you seen where the hail is stored? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain? And on and on and on and on, God goes, until Job kind of says, okay, okay, sorry I brought it up.

But prayer helps me reverse roles. It helps me recognize that He is God. And I'm not. That there is someone who is bigger, better. smarter, wiser, stronger, and much more creative than me. Prayer gives me a healthy awareness of my smallness and God's hugeness. In God's presence, I feel really, really small because I am really, really small. Now, God doesn't need to be reminded of this reality, but I do,

and I pray because I need my vision sharpened into 1080P high definition, because the culture in which we live really tries to distort the picture increasingly tries to make us believe that we are our own God. In fact, Jesus told us that we have an enemy who tries to blur our vision, throw a cloud over what's true and what's not, what's real and what's not, what's worthy of our affection and what's not. I love what Philip Yancey writes in his book simply called prayer.

He writes prayer and only prayer restores my vision to one that more resembles gods. I awake from the blindness to see that wealth lurks is a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for. That value depends not on race or status, but on the image of God every person bears. That no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond. And prayer does that for me. It'll do that for you too.

It'll bring reality back into focus reminding you that there is a better way to live. There are better things to live for, better ways to define success, much more noble passions to pursue lots of things not worth getting all worked up about. So as I pray today, I'm going to talk to God about you. I'm going to ask him to remind you to slow down and take some time and talk with him, to unpack your heart, to pray as you can, not as you can't, to just open up that ongoing line of communication. And as you do, I believe that your vision will get much sharper too. Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship,

join us for our church online live weekend services on Saturdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 9.30 and 11 a.m. Central Standard Time. Also, if this podcast was helpful to you, would you be sure to rate, review, and share this podcast to help get the word out? For more information about all digital ministries of Lake Point, visit lakepoint.compt.com.com slash daily drive.