Grassroots Church | Thunder Bay, Ontario

Ryan shares part 1 of a two part series on shifting the paradigm from trivial to timeless through focusing on the relationship rather than the task.

27 sermons on prayer, Psalms, and the presence of God later, we now say Amen! Psalm 33 will help us see the big picture, with its praise for creator God, reminder of the humility we need as humans, invitation to open our hearts to God’s presence, and instruction to desire God above all things. We’ll finish off with the big list of practical to-do’s and a final invitation to pray together with our...

In our final look at Jesus’s prayer as our basic pattern, we finish this part of our exploration of prayer with the healing of sin. Jesus tell us to ask God for forgiveness of our sins, just as we extend forgiveness to others. As a basic prayer of love, confession invites us to fear God properly AND feel the utmost safety in his Presence. Check out Psalm 32. How does David show us the way here? We...

As we near the end of our prayer series, we come now to prayers for needs. Jesus’s prayer leads us from adoration to Kingdom praying, and then into our basic physical, emotional, and community requests. David’s Psalms give us these kinds of prayers: “May God arise”, and “God sets the lonely in families”, and “praise God who daily bears our burdens.” Check out Psalm 68 and its invitation for us to...

“Let Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” As we continue to learn the building-blocks of praying, we turn our attention to prayers of abandonment. Check out Psalm 141 and its prayers of devotion: teach me, set a guard, keep watch. What might it look like for us to learn how to pray “Your will be done.” The LORD’s prayer teaches us to abandon ourselves to God rather t...

This week, we begin the final leg of our journey into the Psalms, the presence of God, and the life of prayer. Taking a cue from David’s shameless dancing, we explore prayers of praise.  Check out Jesus’s prayer and how it starts with praise “Our Father, in Heaven, Holy is Your Name.” Jesus collects up all of the praises of the Psalms ––of God’s actions and characteristics (his name)––and teaches...

Before we return back to training in the active phase of prayer, to Jesus’s template of praying, we remind ourselves again of how important it is to expect and aim for making contact with God in prayer. We are not simply asking God for things, we are not simply pouring our hearts out, though we do those things. We are seeking the God who we believe is searching us.

“Those who look on God are radiant,” says David in his Psalm 34. After we prepare and concentrate, prayer in the school of David is incomplete without us spending time in repose looking at God, making contact with him in our spiritual senses. It’s in this phase of praying where activity ceases and as one writer describes it, we “allow the Holy Spirit to act in the secret depth of our souls.”

Pastor Keith continues exploring King David's school of prayer. With Psalm 5 and its mixture of lament and honesty, we see how David wanted more than anything to bow down toward God's holy temple. If we want to pray like David, we will come to God in sincerity and create the atmosphere of prayer, embedded in the middle of our life and its conflicts.

As we kick off our second phase of our prayer series, we enroll ourselves in David's school of prayer. Everything about David leads to God: he notices God, he loves God, and he is never more alive than when he is encountering him. David's style of praying leads him to make contact with God, and that is how we should aim our prayer lives, if we want to develop in David's school of prayer.

In our yearly look forward, Pastor Keith opens Isaiah 11 once again and talks through Grassroots' vision and our desire to anticipate God's new creation now on earth as it is in heaven. Keith focuses on the branch of David, delighting in the fear of the Lord with a spirit of knowledge. Biblical knowledge is an encounter, not just information, and so we look to the cross to see just how dependent J...

In our social media, self-image, control-focussed culture we struggle to discern God's call to examine ourselves in light of His mercy, grace, justice, and purposes. Through the messages of the OT prophets, the NT writings of Paul, and the words and life of Jesus, we can break free from patterns of control and consumerism and resolve to live out the love of Jesus in all areas of our lives.

This week, in our continued exploration of the Nativity story, we meet Simeon and Anna––two elderly Israelites who devoted their lives to prayer and waiting. They waited for the long-anticipated return of God. They waited for Israel to be free again to worship and rule with goodness over all the earth. We learn just how strong the Psalms were to inspire hope over hundreds of years of sorrow and su...

This week we delve deeper into Luke's Nativity story and see just how Psalm-saturated Zechariah's prayer actually is. With a look into Psalm 72, we see Solomon's prayer, hundreds of years before Jesus, for an heir who would free people to worship God with purity of heart. Solomon prayed that Jesus would help make people whole and poised and marked by peace. Finishing with a focus on Zechariah's ho...

Kicking off our Advent series on the prayers of the nativity, we follow Mary, Jesus's mother, to the country estate of her elder cousin Elizabeth. Here she composes here nativity psalm, fashioned after Psalm 103 and other Jewish prayers. We find ourselves challenged again to enter into Christmastime prepared and our hearts filled with praises and psalms.

Finishing off a season of sermons on praying, we take a look at Psalm 139 and its teaching on God's nearness to us. Delving into the Psalms, we find that prayer matters: scriptures tell us, Jesus thinks so, and experience suggests it. Prayer is not something we evolve out of; it is something we mature into and is a significant tool in our mission to help undo death.

In the first of two parts in our next section on prayer, Pastor Keith talks about God's closeness to us, and how pain in our lives causes us slowly to shift God further away from us, in our perspectives. This shift causes us to ask if prayer really makes a difference, if after all, are we not too small to matter, and if praying really changes anything other than our perspectives.

Ryan Whatley shares his perspective on wrestling with unanswered prayer, the process of healing and moving toward God in the midst of our pain.

We know what's needed to pray regularly so why don't we? One of the reasons is because our lives don't reflect need for prayer. The pattern of scripture suggests that when we live in pursuit of the things God loves and despise the things he despises, the disorientation that ensues will force us into intimacy with the Father.

Using Psalm 118, Pastor Keith explores being hard pressed and how most everybody resorts to prayer when desperate. He explores how as we encounter some of the great obstacles to prayer, our default mode is often self-reliance, rather than prayer.

As we finish off our mini-series on the Psalms and praying with others, Pastor Keith turn to Psalm 45 and discusses the centrepiece of any marriage: prayer. Keith explores how praying with a spouse may be more intimate than sex.

Pastor Keith continues our mini-series on Praying in Community, focusing specifically on praying with children and providing practical advise on how to pray with kids from the Psalms. He looks at the role of the family in the life of prayer, Why God wants us to tell of Him to generations to come and asks what does this mean for our family prayers?

This week we begin a small sermon series on praying in community and why communal prayer is so important in developing a prayer life. Pastor Keith looks at how praying with family and friends can guide us into the heart of God even when we cannot get there on our own.

This week we open up Psalms 136 and 137 to see the ranges of emotions expressed by the Psalmists and why simple praying opens us up to the heart of God like nothing else. God doesn’t want our pious words without heart. In this sermon we move deeper into the simply human praying that resets us in dependence upon God’s presence, guides us into our feelings, humanity, and desires, and teaches us to l...

Turning to Psalm 22 and Jesus' choice of Psalm 22 for his cross Psalm, we tap into a second powerful theme of the Psalms: God's silence. Although we must come to God with all of our childish needs, we cannot enter into the heart of God with our entitlements and demands.