Does God Care? Strengthening Our Connection.

[00:00:18] Speaker A: So as you can tell, the name of this message today is, does God care? And that may seem sort of. A lot of people. That may seem sort of like a. I mean, it's obvious, right? I mean, this guy, of course he does. But it's actually a question that many people who are listening this message right now may be wanting to really, truly know, but maybe they're afraid to admit publicly. So, no, we might not be in the middle of a faith crisis or something like that, or on the verge of giving up, but sometimes we struggle to really know if God truly, truly cares about me. Right? Day after day, we go through our routine and we're faithful and we serve, but we feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. Anybody gets that reference. We feel that we are doing our part. But is God really doing his? I can't find a job. I can't pay the bills. My kid is in and out of the hospital. I'm in and out of the hospital. The house is falling apart, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on and on. Does he really care about me and my needs in the grand scheme of things? Think about it. In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a little microscopic dot, little pinpoint in the universe. Do I even matter to God? Okay, so that's sort of the setup here. Let me just tell you my story. For years I struggled with this question, does God really care? Because struggling with a lot of those same situations can't pay the bills. House is falling apart. Struggling with this, struggling with that, struggling with that. And I was like, I know God is all powerful, and I'm taught that God loves. He loves me, but I really don't feel it right now. I don't have that intimacy. And knowing that he has my best interests at heart, I know that he can, but why isn't He? Does he care? And so for a long time, for several years, I would serve. I served the Lord, and I walked faithfully with Him. But one of the things that I struggle with saying is, I love you, God. Because I didn't feel loved. And so it was hard for me to return that love sincerely and genuinely. And so I struggled. Even though I know God was all powerful. God was unquestionably able to fulfill, able to help, able to do all these things, able to change my circumstances. I struggled with whether he cared for me or not. As many of you know, I have a son, Boaz, and I'm going to put him on the spot for just a little bit because it's a good story. But he struggled sort of with this same thing. We've had lots and lots of conversations over the years. And this is one of his big things. Sure, I believe God exists. He struggled a little bit with that for a little while. But his whole thing was, is God good? Because there's so much evil in the world, there's so much garbage going on in the world. There's so many people that are being damaged every single day. So many defenseless people that are getting hurt, that are getting abused, they're getting wounded, they're getting just destroyed. Think about the captives in Israel and things like that. And so the question is, and then it came closer to home, is God benevolent? Is he good to me? And so he wrestled with that for a long time. And so we've had lots and lots of conversations about that. And he has seen God's faithfulness in his life. The further he pushes close to him, the closer God comes to him. But that still, you know, we have this question, does God care? And how will we ever actually know? I mean, I can tell you my situation, I can tell you my story here in a little bit, but how do we know? And what is solution? What is the solution to know that God is care, that God actually cares? Well, I had a conversation this week with someone who's asking a lot about this same thing, about their identity and purpose, saying that they do and they give to everyone around them, to their family, to their friends, to their community, everybody. Okay? But at the end of the day, they don't feel like they have anything left for themselves. They're giving out and blessing others, but they end up empty. And so this situation right here is the number one people in ministry and even lay ministry, burnout. How many of you seen pastors and lay ministers and people working within the faith community? How many have you seen Burnout, Right? Just burnt up and burnt out. So what's the solution? I mean, typical answers are cut back, you don't give so much of yourself, learn to say, no, therapy, whatever. And all of these are probably helpful, but they're only putting bandaids. And I need to say this from my UK audience plasters on the problems. Okay, so what's the. What's the real solution to this? Unfortunately, we have the same problem in marriages all the time. We're taking care of our responsibilities as husbands, fathers, wives, and mothers. But doubt begins to creep in. Does my spouse really care about me? Why does this happen? So here's a clue. Let me give you a scenario. When Things get tough. The man says to the wife, I'm working my tail off to support the family, and you're still not happy. What more do you want from me? Generally, what's the response from the wife? You're never with us. You're family. And even when you are here, you're not present. I just want you. People ask me all the time, Darren says, how do you go and go and go and do all the things you do? How do you have the energy to keep up with all of it and the ability to continue giving, creating, and being there for people? I could never do that. And so my answer is, first of all, you have to know your calling. Okay? If you're not called to do certain things and you're trying to do things that somebody else is designed to do, it's going to crash and burn. Second is the important thing, and the key thing that I'm going to talk about today is the second thing you have to do in order to be able to do something like that is to really hone in on your calling and pursue it wholeheartedly without getting burned out. And to know that God is in the middle of it is you have to stay connected to Hashem, because the minute you disconnect, you're bailing water from a sinking ship. You're bailing water from a sinking ship. Does God care? Well, here's the secret. To know for certain that he does. And this may seem a weird, weird answer, but we're going to explore it. What's the answer? To know that God really, really cares. Prayer. What? What? I don't know if you've ever seen Kid Snippets. What? So let's think about this for a moment. What is prayer? I want to hear some answers. Somebody tell me what prayer is. Okay. Communication of the Lord talking to God. What else? Petitions, Worship. Coming into his presence. Okay. Being still before him, listening. Okay, great answers. The Hebrew concept of prayer. And where do we get Hebrew from. Is a little different, okay? It includes those. That's fine. That's great. Those are great answers, but it's a little different. The Hebrew word. And you've probably heard me teach on this before, but the Hebrew word for prayer comes from the. It's hit Palau, okay? The heat. Palau is a word that means to judge one's self. If you've never heard this before, you may be thinking, wait a minute. Prayer means to judge yourself. How does that work? Okay, so for a long time, I even taught this. I taught what it meant. And you Know, talked about it, having this root and to judge myself. But I still struggled to figure out what it was all about and how this worked. To judge yourself in prayer. The more I started studying prayer, the more I studied the prayers themselves in the Sidur, the more I learned what prayer is and what God is trying to do through prayer. And in prayer, when I connect with him, the more I understood this. And so to judge myself means basically, every time I come before the Lord, every time I stand before him, every time I see his praises, I pray the prayers of the Sidur. I pray just an intimate prayer. That's spontaneous prayer. Okay? I am saying I'm putting myself before the Lord and saying, am I who you want me to be based on who you design me to be? And your praises I'm singing because you are the one that makes all of this happen. You are the one that has created me, that has a plan for me, that has a plan for others, that has everything worked out in life and everything that I need, everything that I have need of, everything that I desire, all comes from you. You are the source. And I just need to fit into that mold or squeeze through that place that you need me to fit in before you can release those blessings or release a plan or change my way of thinking of going down this path. Okay? The BAAL Shem Tov taught that the end result of worship of God should be attachment to God. You may have heard the word, the Hebrew word devekut. This means attachment, okay? Attachment to God, which primarily is the service of the heart rather than the mind. He emphasizes the rabbinic teaching. God desires the heart as the obligation of intention of the heart, which is, if you think about prayer and you're trying to focus in on prayer and you have the improper intent and all that kind of stuff, that's Kavanaugh. He also believed that this devekut, this attachment may be attained through sincere prayer. Now, his great grandson, the Boshem Tov, he said this. And I think this is pretty powerful. Prayer is the root of all attachment and devotion to God. Prayer is the gate through which we approach God. And through prayer, we may come to know Him. Okay? So think about this. Through prayer, we come to know God. And guess what? Yeshua taught and practiced something very similar. He said, and when you pray, you can throw that slide up there. Matthew, he said, when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received the reward. But when you go to pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father, who is in secret will reward you. Now, one of the takeaways is, in other words, just don't pray when you're here, when everybody sees you praying, when everybody says, oh, he prays so well, or he's a man of prayer or whatever. We need to be attaching ourselves in the prophecy of our own homes. And there are two types of prayer I want to draw your attention to. The first is hitbodedut. And this means seclusion or solitude. This is where. And the church has a lot of this right, in a sense, especially non liturgical traditions. But this is where we just talk to God. I mean, talking to God is a good thing. And when we talk to God, guess what? He's probably going to talk back at some point. But we can pour out our heart to him. We can pour out our soul, our anguish, our frustrations, our hurts, our pain, everything, and just be honest before him. And this is needed. He tbodedoot. The other type of prayer is the type that we talk about more probably. Here is the set time prayers. We do a lot of liturgy. We do a whole morning service in liturgy, but guess what? That goes throughout the week. It isn't just on Shabbat and it isn't just this limited little snippet. And it's powerful, it's transformative. And as followers of Yeshua, we should be engaging in both because they have the power to transform us. Okay, so let me just talk about the set time prayers. How many of you guys are going through Torah club Sent ones? What do you guys think about it so far? It's incredible, isn't it? It's a very eye opening study in the book of Acts and the earliest believers and all of that diving into the Apostle Paul here soon. So you guys actually may be already in there Anyway, in Acts 2:42, and I've got a slide for that one as well. It says the disciples, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to. And this you guys talked about in the sent ones class. Most translations just say and to prayer. But it's not what it says. It says the prayers. What are the prayers? Prayers of the temple, the prayers of the synagogue. It's the liturgy that has been developed within Judaism over thousands of years. Okay, and so Darren, are you telling me that all I gotta do is pray liturgy and I'll Know that God cares. No, that's not what I'm telling you. That's a component of how it works. Our goal is to imitate Yeshua and follow the example of these early believers. This will get you started. There's a saying by the medieval Jewish poet and philosopher Judah Halevi that summarizes the essence of prayer. He says that prayer is the soul. Prayer is to the soul. What the. What food is to the body. Prayer is to the soul. The same thing or the equivalent as food is to the body. So how many of you guys are going to go five years without food? How many of you guys. I'm not. Don't raise your hands. How many of you guys have gone five years without praying outside of the synagogue? So we struggle with internalizing this. We struggle with making prayer the priority that it should be the connecting of God. We have all these excuses in the world, right? It's just not a priority for most people. And I'm not saying this to condemn anyone. I struggled with it for years, and that was part of my journey, is I would pray occasionally and not really connect with what I was praying. And therefore I didn't connect truly with Hashem. And that left me in a state of doubt of his character, of his nature, of the love that he had for me. Prayer is to the soul what food is to the body. The times that we think that God doesn't care are the times, most likely, that we're spiritually malnourished. I'll say that one more time. The times that we think that God doesn't care most likely are the times that we're spiritually malnourished. If you're doing and giving and pouring out every day, even if it's ministry, then you need to be filled back up. And I'm talking to specific people that give. There's a lot of people that give in this community, and we are so, so very thankful. I almost said we're stinking thankful, but I don't know. Anyway, we are very thankful, and we're stinking thankful, too, I guess. But if you're giving out and you're not getting filled back up, then that's a recipe for disaster. In those times of prayer where you will connect with God and begin to know or be reminded of who he is and how much he loves and cares for you, that's where you're going to find this connection. You know, as I've been studying more on prayer, writing more on prayer, there's certain things that have been very fascinating a Lot of stuff that I learned about early on, but reminders. One of the things that was reminded of the Talmud says that the person who prays for another person, their friend who has the same need. So, for instance, if I'm struggling financially, Derek is struggling financially, if I pray for his finances, God's going to answer my prayers first. That's it. Like what? It's like, oh, I'll do that all the time. Right. But no, that's not the way it works. Okay. You have to have the intent that you want his prayers to be answered first. And it's just basically saying that when you have the compassion for somebody else, God's going to recognize that he's going to reward that. So I want to encourage you, whatever problems that you have, find somebody to pray for that has those problems. Not so you can be answered first, but so that you can have compassion and not realize, first of all, that it's not just you, not just me, you can be praying for somebody else. You can be lifting someone else, connecting with God and seeing things from a different perspective. The power of prayer is really not prayer itself, because prayer is a thing. Prayer is an action. Right. The power of prayer. What's the power of prayer? The power of prayer is God. There's nothing magical about prayer. Prayer is simply the conduit which we give God permission to show up in our lives. You can put up in this next slide. Prayer is not as much about God changing our circumstances as it is about shaving away parts of ourselves that aren't aligning with his will for our lives. I think that I didn't remember if I had that as a slide or not. Let me say that one more time. Prayer is not so much about God changing our circumstances. We think it is a lot of times. God, gimme, gimme, gimme. God changed this. God fixed this. Prayer is not about as much about God changing our circumstances as it is about shaving away parts of ourselves that aren't aligning with his will for our lives. This is where it comes to hit pala, the definition of prayer. Every time I connect with God, I see something where I need to modify something in my life. Oh, I didn't realize that, oh, he is going to take care. Oh, he wants me to do such and such. He wants me to be such and such. He wants me to align myself in this capacity. So, you know, we in the messianic movement, we sort of pride ourselves in that we take scripture seriously. We work to really understand the truth underneath the scriptures and not saying that other denominations don't. But we feel that we've got maybe an edge a little bit. Come on, you gotta admit it. We have this advantage of seeing things through a Jewish context, which is more contextually accurate and original. But if people don't study the Scriptures and they just call themselves a believer or whatever, then guess what? They are serving a God of their own making. Because the Scriptures are what define God, has told us about himself. It gives us a context for who he is and his nature. So that's what happens if we don't study Scripture. But guess what happens if we don't pray. If we don't pray, we're missing out on the connection with God. We only see him from a distance. We only see him academically. We only see him in theory. He is a science project. He is a philosophy question. Prayer makes the connection and he becomes real. Rav Yisra'el Reagan explains that when we say the Shema in the morning and evening, we're supposed to achieve a level of devekut. You guys remember what that means? What does it mean? Attachment. Or in this instance, more than attachment, union. The union of our soul with the light of God, of the Creator. But you may be asking, well, I pray, but God doesn't answer my prayers. Well, that's not what prayer is about. As we said, prayer is not about asking. I mean, does anybody have a relationship? I know we all, probably most of us have a relationship with. There's some person in our life that whenever you're around him, you're like, all they do is sort of leech. They're a leech. You know, they're needing something. And while needing something is not bad, and we need to be helping people in our lives. And people that are needy are great. We need to have that compassion. We need to help them in every occasion. But if they only approach you in that situation, it sort of creates this tension within you that you're like, you know, you have this natural instinct to want to push them away or say, I don't have time for this, or I've got better things to do or whatever. Especially if their needs are not legit. But sometimes that's the way we approach God. I say, you know, a lot of times we unfortunately have this image of God as the Santa Claus in the sky. Just write out your list and he'll take care of it, you know, or the Great Lotto in the sky. Sometimes, you know, maybe we'll get it right. Maybe we'll hit the lotto or the great vending machine in the sky. You know, we do certain things. We put in our effort, put in our work, put in the cash, and God answers. But really, this isn't the way it's supposed to work. Prayer is about a relationship. This is how we know God cares, is when we spend that time in that relationship, developing that relationship. A lot of times we aren't answered prayer because of various circumstances in our life. Okay? We may not be walking where God wants us to walk. We may be asking amiss, as James says. You know, if I'm constantly praying for that red convertible, and that's not in his plan, and that's really not probably what I'm going to get. There are other things. We may have sin in our lives that is constant. He said to get rid of it. And we are not being obedient. Here is a practical example for us as husbands, as men. Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel. Not weak as in less, but more fragile, like a very fine piece of art, okay? Since they are heirs with you of the grace of life so that your prayers may not be hindered. Listen up, guys. The way you treat your wives is the way God's going to respond to you. If you're ignoring them, then he's going to ignore you. That's just the way it is. Here's some reasons people don't pray. One, I don't feel anything. Two, I don't have time. Three, I don't see any tangible results. Three, I mean, four, I can't count either. Do you know there's only three types of people? Those that can count and those that can't. Okay, Number four, I don't know how to pray. I mean, you're telling me to pray and especially pray for the throne. I don't know how. That's complicated. That's difficult, That's a chore or whatever. I don't know how. And number five, I don't have the energy of the mental bandwidth. I'm dealing with such and such. I'm struggling. I can't deal with this. I cannot devote time to pray again. Does God care? Does God care? How do we know if we're not talking to him? Have you ever made assumptions about somebody you say they said or they think or they. Assumptions. Assumptions are what get us all in trouble because we assume something about another person and that creates a whole. You create this whole story, this interpretation of what they said. You came in on the tail end of a conversation or you Saw them doing something, and then you make up a story to fill in the gaps of what happened. But if we ask them for clarification on their words or actions instead of just assuming, most likely it would turn the narrative completely around. Have you ever been in that situation? Then you find out something. You're like, oh, yeah, man, I'm a heel. The same is true for God. When we assume that God doesn't care, we assume that he doesn't really love us or he doesn't have our best interests at heart. Then it's time to talk to him and ask him if it's true. Find that connection. Prayer has the components of both discipline and relationship. And it has the ability to reconnect you to the power source and the sense. Excuse me. And your sense of purpose. So does God care? I'm going to leave you with this scripture here. I've got one more thing to say. But I want you to really focus in on the scripture from Jeremiah. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, Plans for welfare and not for evil. To give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with a little bit of effort. Is that what it says? Oh, wait a minute, I got it wrong. When you seek me with some of your heart. No, with what? All of your heart. What's interesting is it goes on. I don't have this on the screen, but it goes on. It says, I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you. Guess what? God's in control. If you're in a. If you're stuck in the mud somewhere, he's put you there for a purpose, and you have to hold on to him to pull out. And I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm sure probably a lot of people in this room have seen Fiddler on the Roof, right? Do you love me? Right. What kind of question is that? For 25 years, I've washed your clothes and you know, so forth. What kind of question is that? If you married 25 years, you have to ask the person, do you love me? Love is caring for someone. People all over the world are looking for love because they want to know that someone cares. Cares specifically about them. When Tevye asks Golda and Fiddler on the roof if she loves him, she wants to know if that she still cares about him. They spent their lives together, but he wants to know that she cares sometimes. That's the way it is with God. We have dedicated our lives to him, but we need to know that he cares. But how will we ever know when we're too busy doing things for him and not talking to Him? He cares. He definitely cares. Trust me. But he's waiting on you to spend time with him so that he can tell you himself. So I want to challenge you to rearrange your schedule. Carve out time that you need for the most important time of your day so that you can spend quality time with the most important person in your life and reconnect. Because he cares. [00:32:39] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom Please Visit our website shalommacon.org to learn more about us. Join our Live Services Access other Teachings Sign up for our Newsletter Join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world or contribute to the work of Shalom Macon. Thank you for watching and we look forward to connecting with.