This is a short YouTube teaching by Jonathan Cronin focused on John 16:24 ("Ask and you will receive; your joy will be complete"). Jonathan teaches that prayer is fundamentally about asking, that God first enables desire for Him, and that simple, practical requests (e.g., help to love, hunger for Scripture, strategies for family/work) deepen intimacy and produce joy. He warns against apathy and complacency in the church, encourages writing priorities and prayer goals, leads a declarative prayer against spiritual apathy, and closes with typical YouTube call-to-action (subscribe/alert).
Hey everyone, it's Jonathan again. I'm so excited to share with you this morning. I hope you enjoyed the last video. One of the things I realized you can do to stay updated and stay on top of the videos is press the Bell on YouTube right next to subscribe. There's a bell to help you stay alerted whenever the videos come out. So you can do that. I am so excited to share with you this morning about something that's actually one of my favorite things to talk about. Simply because it's in my life. It's born the most fruit. It's simply from the verse in John, chapter 1624. I'm going to read that to you about asking and it's so exciting. If you'll notice, a lot of this series is coming from the book of John. It's coming from the Word and that's something I'll be touching on soon. In a video coming up about reading the word of God and letting this stir yourself in the place of prayer and actually reading it to understand and reading it to apply and letting the Word come to life, letting it grow as you read it and actually stir yourself up. You know John chapter 16, verse 24. I want to go ahead and read that to you. It's actually one of my life verses right here. It says, until now, you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive. Your joy will be complete. Okay, so just to preference, this the first key point. You cannot do anything without Jesus allowing you to in the first place. So I cannot even love God without Him actually giving me the ability to. To love Him. So it's actually pretty relieving. In and of ourselves, we cannot do anything. We cannot even create hunger for God. We don't even desire the place of prayer. We don't desire anything unless he first gives it to us. So he first loved us, so we can love Him. But even in this place, this is what's really cool. We can just simply step in and ask God for things and then this is the amazing place of the journey with the Lord. We ask, we receive, and then our joy is made full. So we can simply step in and ask the Lord for things and then he begins to do it and you're stirred even more. Your joy is made full and you just step into it. This one verse right here, I'm telling you, I've. I've declared it like one or two, my top one or two verses in my life simply because I've seen it. It's so simple. It's so simple right here. It's nothing complicated. There's no striving in the place of prayer. There's no deep intercession. I've got to strain really hard. What's so cool? It's simply about asking. It's simply about stepping in to his core. Stepping in and saying, God, I want to love you more. And I start right there. A lot of times will start right there and just say, jesus, I ask right now that you would help me to love you more. I want to grow in passion for you. I ask simply today that you would grow me in hunger for your word, Grow me in hunger for the place of prayer. Caused me to want to get up really early. Like, just. Just ask him for the things that you desire, and I promise you, you're going to begin to see them take place. So all these issues, all the struggles that people have when it comes to prayer and all these different things, it's simply about coming Back to John 16:24, right there in the word of God, it says, ask anything you in my name, and it shall be done so that your joy will be made full. That is the journey that God desires us to walk and to actually live in. And what it does is it creates this place of awe and wonder of God. And I start right there. And a lot of people say, well, you know, Jesus says he will give you the desires of your heart. And one of the things me and Jess have been doing lately is, is we've been writing down our priorities. We've been writing down in life, like, what's our main priorities in life? Well, of course, the top priorities for God is going to be our top priority. So loving him with all our heart, all our mind, all our soul, all our strength in the place of intimacy with him, that's number one. And then we've been writing these things down. And what that allows us to do is begin to reprioritize our time, you know, during the day. And it stirs this place inside of your heart. I would encourage you to do that because it stirs us to begin to go after. Like, this is what I'm desiring. This is what I want my life to be, to amount to. We're even writing down our goals like, what's our main goals? And it gives us, as we map out our goals, it gives us this list of things to ask for in prayer. And it's the way God meant for this thing to work. He desires intimacy above all else. We talked about that in the previous video. He desires intimacy. Many will Come to him and say, lord, Lord, we healed in your name. We prophesied in your name. We've done all these things. He's going to say, depart from me, for I never knew you. God's ultimate desire for us is intimacy with him. And what that looks like is communing. Asking him for those things that you feel like he's directing you to. And start with the simple things like what we just talked about. God, I want to know you. I ask that you would cause me to grow in intimacy with you. I ask that you would cause me to love my wife more, my husband more. I ask you to allow me to love my kids in a deeper way. To Lord, give me a strategy. Ask for something very practical. Say, give me a strategy to help my kids or to help my co workers or to help, you know, whatever, whatever it may be, give me something and then watch it unfold. I'm telling you, you're going to run back to the place of prayer. You're going to say, oh my goodness, look at God. I'm telling you, I've seen it unfold. And you look for him throughout the day. You begin to look for God throughout the day. The last point, and this is just something that I think is really crucial because beyond the simplicity of asking, we remain in that heart posture, we come through, we get excited, and this is what it looks like to grow from faith to faith. We begin to ask for these little things like, lord, let me love you more. Oh, he loves to hear. He loves that. Because you know how he's going to answer that prayer? He, he's going to show you and let you feel his love for you. Because when you feel his love for you, you're going to cause yourself, you're just going to fall more and more in love every time you sense his love. That's why it says in First John, because he loved me, I can love him. Because he first loved me, I love him. But there's also the place where we do have to intercede. There's right now apathy. And that's one of the reasons we're doing these series. Apathy and complacency has spread across the body of Christ and in detrimental ways to where we're seeing the church look just like the world and many things that are happening across our nation and there's no relevance in the, the church today to actually solving issues because there's an apathy, there's a complacency where we don't seek the things that Jesus did in the Gospels and we're going to talk more about the Word and the reality of the Word in another time. But I think there's a lot of times where we have to come from this place of John 16:24 and literally go after and command the walls of apathy and complacency to come crumbling down. We have got to step into that. I'm telling you, I believe as we all come together and we begin to seek the Lord on this, I'm telling you, he's going to do it in our own hearts. Let's just pray right now, Lord, I just declare in Jesus name that every person watching this, that every person that is in that place of desiring a deeper prayer life right now in Jesus name, that they will begin to step into the revelation of John 16:24. They will begin to step into that revelation, God, and begin to step into awe and wonder. They would come out of boredom, they would come out of apathy, they would come out of all that stuff. They would be fascinated by you. And they would step into complete fire and passion for the place of prayer and for intimacy. And they would begin to see, receive visions for their life. Lord, I just hear without vision my people perish. And I just declare right now that there would be outrageous vision implanted in the body of Christ in Jesus name in the prayer life. God. Would there be dreams and visions in Jesus name, Lord, I just declare over every person watching, Lord. Would you? And over myself, Lord, that there would be just complete devastation to the place of apathy right now, Lord, that apathy and complacency would completely be rid of our lives. And Lord, let it spread like wildfire over the body of Christ in the world today. In Jesus name. We love you, God, and we thank you for that. Bless all my friends here, Lord, in Jesus name. Amen. All right, guys, thank you so much. Click the subscribe button or like I said, the alert button will keep you informed of what's going on. So bless you all, have a great day.
