Cleansing From Within | Authentic Prayer

Rabbi K.A. Schneider: We can be confident that what the Lord began in us, He will complete. Paul wrote, "He that began a good work in you will complete it." There's a lot of confusion about what prayer is, and people are feeling a lot of pressure as to how to pray, as if there is, you know, one correct way to pray. There's so many things that could be said in this series. And I did say some of these things on the earlier episodes, beginning with simply talking to God. That's authentic prayer. What we're doing today is we're going to continue in one of the most authentic prayers in the written Word of God. It's the prayer of David in Psalm number 51. The reason that we're spending time here is that we can learn some lessons that have real value for us, because we know that David was a man that knew Yeshua, He knew Jesus, and He was led by the Spirit. In fact, Yeshua, Jesus, quoted David when He was arguing with the Pharisees, and the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus and they asked Jesus a question. And Jesus said, "I'll answer your question, if you answer this question." And then Jesus said to the Pharisees, "Who was David talking to when he said, 'The Lord said to my Lord, sit here until I make thine enemies a footstool under your feet'?" And so it's a miracle, I mean it's so incredible to me that David, in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, he knew the Messiah. So David said the Lord, Father, said to my Lord, speaking of the Son, speaking of Yeshua HaMashiach, "Sit here until I make thine enemies a footstool at your feet." The point that I'm making is that David, the Hebrew king, knew Jesus. And so knowing that David knew Yeshua, knowing that the Psalms were inspired by the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit, there's valuable insights that we can glean and apply to our own life as we study David's prayer walk. I want to launch right into where I left off last time, and I'm going to pick up where David said in verse number six, he said, "Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being." So think about this. What is the Lord after? He's after connecting with you in the innermost being of your soul. Let's listen again, Psalm 51, verse 6. "Behold," David said, he's in the spirit, "You desire truth in the innermost being and in the hidden part, You will make me know wisdom." I want you and I to consider this aspect of connecting with God at a deeper level. David said, "In the innermost being." How many of us are even faintly aware of our innermost being? How many of us are so connected to the outer world, we're not in touch with who we are on the inside? Eternal life spreads from the inside out. God wants us to return to living from the inside out. He wants to draw us back in to our innermost being. But as I said in an earlier broadcast in the series, ever since Adam and Eve sinned, mankind has been running from himself. Remember Adam and Eve sinned, and what was the next thing they did? They ran from God, and they ran from themselves. Why? Because they felt such insecurity inside, they felt shame and nakedness. So ever since that time, humanity has been in a plight of running from themselves, and running from God. And the only way to be fulfilled is to stop running, to stop trying to cover up that nakedness, that guilt, that insecurity that plagues humanity with the things of the outer life. And instead, just practice sitting before God. And by doing that, He's going to help get you in touch with what David called the innermost being. See, the Lord said, "Be still and know that I am God." Let me say it again. "Be still and know that I am God." So in order to know God, we have to be still. And being still involves fasting from those things in the outer world. Many of us can't be still. We have to have that phone. We've got to have that phone in our hand. It's amazing to me how the devil has so succeeded in capturing humanity through their smartphones. I mean everywhere you look, people walking around all day long, connected to that smartphone, constantly being drawn outside of themselves to seek some type of satisfaction from the outer world. We know that every time people get an email, every time people get a text, it causes their endorphins to secrete, so that they get some kind of little high from it, as if there's some kind of answer there. There's no answer there. Eternal life is found on the inside. So David said, "You seek truth." He was speaking to the Lord. Let me read it again. "Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part," not out here, but in the hidden part, he said, "You will make me know wisdom." What did Paul say in the book of Colossians? I know I quote a lot of scripture, but, you know, it's the Word of God that sanctifies us. It's the Word of God that washes us. Paul said in the book of Colossians that the mystery of the gospel is Christ in you. And so all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ. And where is Christ? In you. Jesus said He would become within us a well of living water, springing up to eternal life, so we'd hunger and thirst no more. So authentic prayer has to do with connecting with God, listen now, in the hidden part of your nature, in the innermost being. This is why Jesus speaks about going into the prayer closet to pray. What does it mean to go into the prayer closet? It means that you go into a secret place where you're alone with God. So there's a price to pay for this. There's an excruciating pain that many of us experience when we disconnect from the outer world to sit before the Lord, so that we can get connected with Him in our innermost being. But if we're willing to die to ourself and go through the pain to get connected with God on the inside, if we're willing to fast those things from the outer world that are connected to the flesh, then we might discover God on the inside. The reward and the fruit of that is that we're going to be able to drink of the well of eternal life that's not found on the outside, but it's found on the inside of man where the Lord has placed His Son, His Spirit and eternity. See, eternity is found within. Paul prayed that the eyes of our heart would be enlightened, that we would understand the riches of God's inheritance in the saints. In other words, there's something in you. God's inheritance is in the saints. It's not of the world. It's not something you can see on the outside. It's invisible to your eyes. It's in you. And that's the place we need to connect with the Lord in prayer. Now, remember, I said that it involved fasting to get in touch with this place that David referred as the innermost part in Psalm 51. It takes fasting, because fasting has to do with disconnecting with those things that the outer man is connected to. Fasting involves cutting ourself off from everything in the material and the visible world. Remember Jesus said, "He that loses his life for my sake shall find it." So there's a price to pay for this. There's like a dying to the flesh. Jesus said, "Unless you pick up your cross, deny yourself and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple." So I'm calling God's children to a place of radical obedience, of denying the flesh in order to get connected to HaShem, in order to be fused with Father God's spirit that lives on the inside of you. But as long as our energy is looking out there somewhere, as long as we're looking outside ourself, we'll never get connected to where the mystery of the gospel dwells, which is inside us.
Guest (Male): You're listening to Discovering the Jewish Jesus, and Rabbi Schneider will be right back in just a moment. First though, I want to invite you to explore our Messianic content on our website. You can dive deep into topics like the Feasts of the Lord, the prophetic significance of Israel, and how Yeshua fulfills prophecy. Visit discoveringthejewishjesus.com and click on our Ministry and Messianic Content tab, helping you understand the roots of your faith today. It can be easy to spend money on small things without thinking twice, but have you considered how big of an impact if all of you listening right now give a small gift? Maybe you thought about it and said, "One day, if I have enough, I can give a big gift," but any gift matters, and maybe God is calling you to invest in His kingdom right now. So please give today. Call 800-777-7835. And now, back to Rabbi Schneider.
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: "Behold," verse number six, Psalm 51. "You desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part, You will make me know wisdom." I like this, "In the hidden part You will make me know wisdom." Do you know that in Judaism, wisdom is the chief attribute? For example, if you look at the book of Proverbs, God is speaking to us there personified through wisdom. So wisdom is the ability to understand. Wisdom is beyond even knowledge. Wisdom is the most primordial way of knowing God. It's just an understanding that's deeper than an objective fact level. It's a knowing. And this is what God wants to do. He wants to bring us into a place of knowing. But there's a price to get into this place of knowing. And I'm certainly not someone that is fully arrived. I'm on the journey to experiencing more and more fullness of this that I'm proclaiming. Just as we're all on the road to perfection. That's what Paul said. He said, "It's not that I've obtained it," Paul said, "or that I've become perfect, but one thing I do is I press on towards the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." So Paul had the vision of what was possible, and he was pursuing it with his whole life. And as he was, he was entering into more and more fullness of it. And that's what I'm calling the saints to today. That's what I'm appealing and calling you to. There's more. There's always more in HaShem and Father God for us. Let's continue on. David goes back, he realizes that in order to enter into this reality, this fullness, he needs a deeper cleansing. So he continues on this theme of cleansing, which he already spoke of earlier in Psalm 51, but now he returns to it in verse seven. He says, "Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear joy and gladness. Let the bones which You have broken rejoice." And so I want to make the point, let me say that again, "Make me to hear joy and gladness. Let the bones which You have broken rejoice." What's the point? David realized that he could not experience God's joy until he was first cleansed. Notice the connection. David said, "Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." So he has to be washed and purified. And then he says, "Make me to hear joy and gladness. Let the bones which You have broken rejoice." David understands that there can't be any joy without first being cleansed. But how many of God's people inside the church building walls are trying to have joy, and yet they've never been washed? They're living lives of fornication, some, living lives of spiritual mediocrity, and yet they want to rejoice and have joy. And they can do it as long as the worship music is playing at a decibel that's making everybody lose their hearing. And they think that's joy, but that's not joy. They're just being thumped up by some material fleshly drumbeat, just the way people get out of their mind at a rock concert. No, the truth is, is that true joy is not dependent on the volume of the amplification in the sanctuary or on the percussion. True joy is in the innermost being, and it is connected with being clean on the inside. And so David said, "Give me joy," but he realized he couldn't have true, lasting, real joy, real strength until he was first washed. And so as we're talking about authentic prayer, I'm touching on some themes that we should be really praying about. And again, prayer does not have to be out loud. Prayer can simply be the crying of your heart, whether it's silently in your soul, whether it's in your thoughts. It's your reaching out to God, asking Him to wash you and asking Him to cleanse you. I oftentimes pray what David prayed when he said, "Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to You, O God. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to You, O God." That should be one of our deepest prayers every day. We wake up in the morning and we realize the battle that we're in. We're not only dealing with the world, the flesh and the devil. You know, we're just dealing with ourselves and our own soul and what Paul described as the evil inclination, the evil dwelt in him, the one that wishes to do good in Romans 7. So every day we wake up and we're overcoming, overcoming evil, overcoming our flesh. This is the battle. This is why Jesus said, "To him who overcomes, I will grant the right to sit with Me and to eat with Me in the paradise of God." And so it's this battle to overcome, beloved, and to watch ourselves every day, to examine ourselves every day. Because we know that God is always watching us and He's always looking to see what we're going to do. And how much effort we're going to put in to living for Him. I'm not talking about fleshly effort. I'm talking about effort that's produced because of the divine activity of the Holy Spirit. And to balance what I'm saying, I want you to have confidence that the Bible also encourages us by saying that we can be confident that what the Lord began in us, He will complete. Paul wrote, "He that began a good work in you will complete it." So at the same time that we are endeavoring and doing our best to overcome every day practically, know that God is also working by His Spirit within us, changing us and transforming us. Not by the deeds of righteous which we've done, but according to His mercy, and through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. So there's this partnership between God and man. And then David goes on to say in verse number 10, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." It goes along with this same theme. This is authentic prayer. (singing)
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: Create in me a clean heart, oh God. And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Create in me a clean heart, oh God. And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Cast me not away from Your presence, oh Lord. Take not Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of my salvation. And renew a willing spirit within me. I love you, beloved. Much more importantly, Jesus loves you. Father loves you. And even as He gave His full life for us, the call on you and I is to give us back completely to Him. By the grace of God, Cynthia and I together are a really strong team, and our anointing and gifting is almost opposite of each other. I'm really good up in the air, a visionary, big concept person. Cynthia is really gifted on the ground. So for example, if we're traveling somewhere in our automobile, I'll be completely lost, but Cynthia has a great sense of direction and can navigate us to get wherever we're going. So I say that to say I'm a big concept person. And one of the things that I realize is that in the Spirit, in order to grow and to be released in the goodness of God, we need to stretch ourselves and do what feels unnatural. This is why Jesus said, "Even sinners love their friends." He said, "I'm calling you to go beyond that. I'm calling you to stretch yourself and love your enemies." And this pertains, beloved, even to our finances. We need to stretch ourselves and honor the Lord with our finances. We need to let go and let God. Will you do that in your life?
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Rabbi K.A. Schneider: The words from the Aaronic blessing in the book of Numbers chapter 6, verses 22 through 27, helps us to realize how good God is to you and I personally. So receive His blessing into your life and then, beloved one, go bless somebody else in Jesus' name today. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift you up with His countenance and the Lord give you, beloved one, His peace. And now, in Hebrew. (singing)
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: Y'varekh'kha Adonai V'yishm'rekha. Ya'er Adonai Panav Eleikha V'yunekha. Yisa Adonai Panav Eleikha V'yasem L'kha Shalom. God bless you. And shalom.
Guest (Male): This program is produced and sponsored by Discovering the Jewish Jesus, and I'm your host, Dustin Roberts. Come back next week when Rabbi Schneider talks about God's fall holy days and how they point to the return of Jesus. That's Monday on Discovering the Jewish Jesus.