Praying in Five Dimensions — Part 2

This is Pastor Rick Warren’s Daily Hope. If you’re new, we’re so glad you found us. And if you’re a daily, daily hoper, welcome back.
Today, we’re going to continue with our series called 40 Days of Prayer. Such a great series because Rick is going to help you cultivate a powerful prayer life, so you can experience breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in your relationships, breakthroughs in finances, health, and really every area of your life.
So don’t miss a day of this life-changing series. And now let’s join Pastor Rick with part two of a message called Praying in Five Dimensions.
The way you see God will control your life more than any other thing in your life. The way you see God will determine, as I said, whether your prayers are fruitful and fulfilling or not. It’s how you see God.
And when Jesus says, pray our father, he means it. If you only make one change in your prayer life, and you simply start calling God, not God, not Lord, not creator or any other to call him Father, it’ll radically change your prayer life. Because what you call somebody sets the tone.
If somebody comes in and calls me Reverend Warren, I know this is going to be a formal meeting, and they haven’t the slightest idea. Somebody walks in and goes, hey Rick. Now I know we’re on the same level.
We can talk. You see, what you call God sets your tone for the prayer. And a lot of you, when you pray, you act like you’re applying for a loan at a bank.
And a loan officer is God. Or you’re given a deposition to an attorney. And you’re scared to death you’re going to say the wrong thing.
Or you’re taking a lie detector test with the FBI. How you see God will determine how much you enjoy prayer. It’s your father, and he loves you.
And the Bible says you’re to call him your father. That one change will make a major difference to your prayer. Stop calling God God.
Stop calling Lord Lord. It’s okay, God is God and Lord is Lord. But start until you build it in your mind that God is my father.
In fact, he’s not just your father. Repeatedly, Jesus uses the term daddy. Much more intimate.
In Romans chapter 8, verse 15 to 17, it says this. Talking about prayer, it says, you should not act like cowering, fearful slaves. Like, oh man, if I go to God, I’m gonna get beat.
You should not act like cowering, fearful slaves, since God’s Spirit has adopted you as children into God’s family. That’s what happens when you’re saved. You get adopted into God’s family.
So, you’re now a child of God. You’re in the family of God. You’re adopted.
So, it says instead, instead of being cowering and fearful, by his Spirit, we simply cry out, Abba, Father. And God’s Spirit affirms that we really are his children. And since we are now God’s children, we’re also heirs with Christ.
It means we’re in the family. It means you’re gonna inherit everything. And we will share both in his suffering and his glory.
Now, friends, this verse is so packed with life-changing truths. If ever I asked you to memorize a verse, you ought to memorize that one right there. It’s long.
But when you understand all the truths in it, it’ll change your life, it’ll change your prayer, it’ll change everything about you. First, he says, I’m no longer the slave of fear. We sing that song.
You shouldn’t act like fearful slaves. As I said, whatever you think God is like determines how you pray. And if you think God is an uninteresting creator or an unpleasable deity or an untouchable stranger, your prayers aren’t gonna be worth what you waste your time on, your breath on.
You know, it’s always easy to tell what people think about God. It’s real simple. Listen to their prayers.
Listen to how they talk to God. Do they talk to God like he’s their father, their Abba, their daddy? Do they have a family relationship, or is it much more a formal thing, or do you feel like the guy who’s talking to God right now in prayer is really more of a stranger, and he’s reading the speech to the teacher at the front of the class.
For many people, God’s the schoolmaster and it’s the teacher, and he’s like, please, sir, may I go to the bathroom? God is your father. Now, this passage gives us three very important points about prayer you need to learn, memorize, and never forget, okay?
Three ways God wants your prayers to be. If you want to pray prayers that God likes to listen to, and if you want to pray prayers that you get answers to, and you pray prayers that you enjoy praying, it needs to have these three things. Number one, God wants my prayers to be personal.
Write that down, personal. He says, when we come to God, we don’t just call him Father, we call him Abba. Abba is the most basic root word in the Aramaic language, which Jesus spoke.
If you go to any Middle Eastern city right now, and you see a little kid walking down the street, you’ll hear him say, Abba, Abba, Abba. It’s the word for Daddy. It doesn’t mean Father.
It doesn’t mean Dad. It means Dada. In fact, it sounds like it.
Abba.
It’s the easiest thing for a baby of a man. It’s like Abba, Dada, Papa. When my grandkids were born, they said, what do you want them to call you?
They said, Papa. Why? Because they learned to say Papa before they could say Father or Mother.
Papa, Mama, Dada, Abba. It doesn’t even mean Dad. It means Daddy.
It’s not the term of even like a five-year-old or a seven-year-old. This is the term of a baby. Papa, Dada, Abba.
Jesus says, that’s how you address God. Oh, would that change the way you pray?
That’s the most intimate. God wants intimacy with you. He created you for intimacy.
It’s a baby term. He says, when you come and pray, your prayers are not to be flowery and beautiful and erudite and cool. Your prayers are to be simple, childlike, unpretentious, just what you see is what you get.
Honest, unpretentious, unassuming. Is a toddler worried about making a good impression? Abba, papa, dada.
God says, when you come to me, that’s how you come to me. If you don’t come to me like that, you don’t know me. You don’t know God.
Oh, thou most grace and holy potentate. God’s going, huh? I told you to call me dada.
Abba. That’s the kind of intimacy I dare you to start using the word Abba. Papa.
To refer to your father in heaven. Unpretentious, unassuming, honest, childlike. When you settle this issue, it’ll change the way you pray.
Because who you think you’re talking to sets the tone. Every misunderstanding of prayer is a misunderstanding of God. So, my homework for you this week, and I’m serious about this, I want you to start every prayer with daddy, or papa, or father.
Every prayer.
Why?
That’s how God says he wants to be addressed. You need to change the way you talk to God. Jesus did not come to earth for you to not use the term he told us to use.
When you pray, say, our father, daddy. So, he said, well, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. Well, that’s your problem.
That’s why you suck at prayer. If you can’t say dada, or papa, or abba, or daddy to God, you suck at prayer. You need to grow up.
And start saying dada.
So, God says, number one, more than anything else, more than what you say, I want it to be personal. I’m your father. So, stop talking to me like I’m your boss or your recruiter.
I’m your daddy. When you come and talk to your daddy, you’re not worried about being cool. You just come and talk to your daddy.
Number two, he says, ought to be not only personal, it needs to be passionate. And he says, when we pray, we cry out, Abba, father. Notice, we simply cry out.
Circle that. We simply cry out. You know, I’ve noticed that children cry a lot.
They cry out a lot. In fact, they’re not even embarrassed to cry in a mall or in line at a store. They couldn’t care less.
If they’re unhappy, they cry out. And they let everybody know. They are totally unpretentious.
Are you that way in prayer? Are you more worried about what other people think about your prayer than actually talking to God? Your prayers are not gonna matter much as long as you’re worried about what other people think of your prayer.
He says, when you come, it needs to be personal, but it also needs to be passionate. Cry out. Put a little oomph into it.
God, I have got to have this. God, I need you. Daddy, help me.
I am being tempted like nothing else. Daddy, I need your help. And I’m going under.
And I’ve got bills to pay. And I can’t make the decision on what to do, whether I hold on or I let go. How do you know to do that?
And do I accept job A or job B? And do I marry this or that, or don’t marry, or whatever? And daddy, I need your help.
I need your help. Have you ever gotten emotional with God? God loves it when you share your emotions.
Why? Because God is an emotional God. The only reason you have emotions is because God created you in his image.
God shares emotions. The Bible says God gets angry, God gets frustrated, God gets jealous, God loves, God gets impatient. Why do you do that?
Because you’re made in his image. There ought to be some things in life that make you mad. There ought to be some things in life that frustrate you.
And you cry out to God. You put some feelings in your prayer. You’re not meeting with your tax preparer.
Well, did I do line 482? Personal passion. The third thing is it needs to be a partnership.
Now, some of you, this is gonna be a big surprise for you. Did you know that when you pray, the Holy Spirit actually prays with you? Yeah.
Every time you pray, God is actually talking to himself with you about you. Look at this verse up here on the screen. Romans 8.26.
The Holy Spirit helps us with our weakness. We often don’t even know how to pray as we should. Anybody agree with that one?
You know, some of you go, I don’t know what to pray, I don’t know what to say. Okay, we often don’t know what to say. We don’t know how to pray as we should.
But the Spirit himself speaks to God for us, even begs God on our behalf with deep groanings and feelings. He’s passionate, the Holy Spirit’s passionate about you. I mean, you may be, God, I’d like to have this passion, and the Holy Spirit’s going, God, they need this.
Even begs God on your behalf with groanings and feelings that words cannot express. Okay, now what in the world does that mean? Let’s first cover a couple things.
First, your loving heavenly father understands that you often don’t know how to pray. Your loving heavenly father understands that you often don’t know what to say. Your loving heavenly father understands that you often don’t even know how to say it.
You can’t put it into words. Any parent understands that. When my kids were little and they would come to me, and they would try to say something, and they couldn’t even put it into words themselves, but I knew what they meant.
And as their loving father, I knew even though they couldn’t even say, they didn’t know what they were talking about, I knew what they were talking about. They didn’t know what they were feeling, I knew what they were feeling. I knew the answer before they even made the request.
That’s called being a dad. And so God is not upset when you go, you go, God, I don’t even know what to say, God, but I’m just checking in. God says, good on you, great, that’s my girl, that’s my boy.
I don’t even know what to say, I’m just checking in, Father. Well, that’s good, great, thanks for checking in. Just hang out for a while, you don’t even have to say anything, just hang out.
You don’t always have to be moving your mouth to pray. I just want to sit here and be in your presence for a little bit. And then the Bible says that God joins with you and talks to himself when you talk to him.
You go, is that a little weird? God prays to God? Oh, come on, you never talk to yourself?
You do it all the time. Let me ask this, how many times is somebody talking to you and while they’re talking to you, you’re talking to yourself about them? How often does that happen?
All the time! Why? You’re made in the image of God.
And while you’re talking to God, God can talk to himself about you. When you talk to God, it’s called prayer. When God talks to himself, it’s called self-talk, not prayer.
But the Holy Spirit, the Bible says, talks to God in relationship. Father, Son, Holy Spirit is one, three God, three person in one God. It’s just God.
I’m a father. I’m a son. I’m a person.
I’m just one guy. But God talks to himself about you. You need to know that.
So that when every time you pray, you’re not just praying on your own. God goes, ah, they’re talking now. My daughter’s talking.
My son’s talking. That’s great. What a joy it is when your kids take their first words, and you carry on conversation with people, well, with yourself, while others are talking to you, and your heavenly father does the same.
Sometimes I’m out on the patio after service, and I’m talking to you, and you’re talking to me, and I’m smiling, I’m listening, and I’m talking to God about you while you’re talking to me. And I’m saying, Lord, I don’t know what they need, but you do. And I don’t know the hurt that’s hidden, but you do.
And God, would you bless them? And I’m talking to God about you while you’re talking to me. Okay, number three.
We’re talking about multi-dimensional, five-dimensional praying. I pray looking back to the cross. I pray looking up into my loving father’s face.
Number three, I look inward, this third dimension, I look inward when I pray to Jesus living inside of me. Did you know that Jesus is in you? When you become a Christian, when you step across the line, he puts his spirit in you.
Jesus is in you. Well, for that matter, this may shock you. The Trinity is in you, because you don’t get God piecemeal.
When you got Jesus, you got the Holy Spirit. When you got the Holy Spirit, you got the Father. The Trinity is inside you.
You say, well, that’s a dimension I don’t understand, I don’t even feel. Got it. But it’s the reality, whether you feel it or not.
The Trinity is in you. You might write this down. All three in me.
The Father is in you. The Spirit is in you. The Son is in you.
If you have invited them in. Now, if you haven’t invited them in, they’re not in you. But that’s what salvation’s all about.
And so I look inward to Jesus living inside of me. Because Jesus isn’t just in heaven. I said he’s multidimensional.
He’s everywhere, including in you.
Now, since Jesus is in me and the Father and the Spirit, and I know that I’m unconditionally accepted by my Father, it gives me the freedom and it gives me the courage to honestly face up to my faults. And the third part of prayer, I’ve turned from the cross to the Father to now what’s inside me. Christ, you’re in me, but there’s some stuff in me that’s in there with you that I don’t like.
There’s some bad attitudes, there’s some secret sins, there’s some compulsions, there’s some fears, there’s some hurtful memories, there’s some resentful thoughts, there’s some unforgiveness. God, there’s some stuff in me, I don’t even know how to clear it all out, and it’s in there with you. And so I’m gonna ask you to help me do some house cleaning.
And this is a third part of prayer. Second Corinthians 13 verse five. Examine yourself, this self-examination, do a heart check up.
Examine yourself to see if your faith is real and growing. Test yourself. Remember that Jesus is living in you, of course unless you failed your test, and you never asked him in.
Now, let me ask a question. Would anybody here, besides me, like to be better than they really are? Of course you do, I love you so much for this.
That’s why you’re here. You want to be better, you want to be better than you are. Well, I can’t get any better until I face what needs to be challenged and changed.
And so, before I can get better, I gotta admit what’s bitter, what’s bad. I gotta, you see, the truth will set you free, but first it makes you miserable. Because the truth you like the least is the truth about you.
The truth I like the least is the truth about me. And I don’t want to be honest to myself, much less anybody else. But I can’t change, I can’t grow, until I’m honest.
There is no change without trust, and there is no trust without truth. And so, first I have to be honest. Well, it starts with I look into the face of my loving father, I know he’s gonna accept me, no matter, he already knows all the gunk and the junk that’s in my life.
And knowing that he already accepts me unconditionally means he’s already inside of me, so he knows what’s everything inside of me. So I can now be honest to God. This is the third dimension.
I look inward to Jesus living in me, and then I ask Jesus living in me to help me do a little house cleaning of the junk in my life. Proverbs 28-13 says this up here on the screen. If you try to hide your sins, you’ll never succeed.
Hmm, I wonder why, if that’s why I’m not succeeding. What am I trying to cover up? If you try to hide your sins, you will never succeed.
But if you humbly confess and reject them, you will receive mercy. I love the living Bible says you get another chance. Ask any politician and they always tell you the cover up’s worse than the sin.
If you hide, if you don’t be open, if you don’t do the self-examination, you don’t face it, nothing’s gonna happen. But if you confess it and you reject it, you receive mercy, you get another chance. Now here’s the big secret.
God already knows what you need to work on. It’s not gonna go, oh, I never saw that one coming. He knows all the stuff you need to work on, still loves you anyway.
But when you start being honest to God, it takes you to a new level of intimacy. Now let me pause here and just talk about this. If you’ll learn to be intimate with God, it’s gonna give you the courage to have intimacy in any other relationship.
You can be married for 50 years and never have intimacy. Intimacy is not sex. Sex is the mingling of bodies.
Intimacy is the mingling of souls. And it only happens when, like in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, it says they were naked and unashamed, there was no cover up, there was no mask, there was no faking it. You know for certain, you have things in your life that are secret from your spouse.
How in the world can you have intimacy when I’m not open, when I’m not honest? Well, how do I get there? Well, first I gotta be honest to God.
And before that, I gotta be honest to myself and go, I need work on this area. When you start being honest to God, it takes you to a whole new level of intimacy. Everybody craves intimacy, whether they know it or not.
Everybody craves it. They want it. But the only way you get intimacy is by be willing to open up.
And so what you do is you invite God into what you think about you. He already knows. It’s no surprise.
You see, there are levels of intimacy. Sharing our frustrations one level, you can share that in a small group. Share your fears, that’s a deeper level of intimacy.
Share what you don’t like about you, that’s an even deeper. And only as you go through the tunnel of conflict do you come out to deeper intimacy.
You spell intimacy. I just thought this up this week. Somebody should tweet this.
Here’s how you spell intimacy. Into me see. That’s how you get intimacy.
When you invite somebody into your life and you say, okay, warts and all, good and bad. Into me see. When you let somebody into your heart that deeply, now into me see becomes intimacy.
Thanks so much for listening to Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope. You know, your prayers and financial support have a huge impact on millions of people here and around the world. So we really appreciate that.
Thank you. And now Rick’s going to share a letter from one of our listeners who says Daily Hope is making a real difference in their life.
Hi everybody, today I want to introduce you to Allison. She recently wrote me to tell how God had saved her from a life of prostitution and used Daily Hope to help her grow as a young Christian. Here’s what she wrote.
I grew up in an atheist family, and I was taught that people who believe in God are crazy, stupid, and brainwashed. I ended up being in a hardcore drug addict for 15 years, and to pay for my habit, I sold my body on the street, and I was homeless. But I found a Bible in a hotel room where I was working, and the Lord radically saved me through his word.
Then an amazing church family embraced me fully and helped me to grow in the Lord. One day, Pastor Rick, I came across your TED Talk on the Internet, and I was blown away. So I looked up your website, and I downloaded the Daily Hope app, and I started listening to your sermons every single morning.
I then bought the book, Purpose Driven Life on audible.com. I’ve enjoyed it immensely. I am so blessed to give a monthly donation so you can share your message all over the world.
Your Daily Hope messages have meant so much to me in the past year, and I’m just an infant in Christ. I appreciate all the encouragement that I get from listening to you. Thank you, Pastor Rick.
You know, Allison, I just I can’t thank you enough for writing to me and sharing your story. We live to get these letters, and it’s so exciting to hear stories from people like you who have been radically touched and transformed by the message of hope through Daily Hope. And of course, I appreciate you giving a monthly donation.
Thank you for your prayers for this ministry, that we can pass this good news of hope on to others. I just want you to know that I’m going to be praying that God continues to use you in the lives of other people and to use Daily Hope to help you grow more like Jesus. God bless you, Allison.
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