12: BELIEVE - How Do I Grow By Communicating With God?

Welcome, Church Fam!

This week on The Dig we will...

D - Deepen our understanding on this week's BELIEVE Key Idea: I pray to God to know him, to find direction for my life and to lay my requests before him.

I - Ignite our curiosity towards next week's Key Question: How Do I Study God’s Word?

G - Grow as fruitful, God-glorifying disciples in our time of discussion and learning together!

Scripture References:

• Psalm 66:18-20
• Psalm 107:8-9
• 1 Chronicles 29:11-12 NLT
• Psalm 32:5 NLT
• 1 Timothy 2:1 NIrV
• Ezekiel 11:19-20
• Psalm 46:10

Resources & Links:

• BELIEVE, Randy Frazee 
• TACOSS Prayer Method

Transcript

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Welcome to the Dig, Church Family. This podcast will serve as a way for the church and the home to connect outside of the church building, providing parents and spiritual families with a resource to connect what we learned this past week to our everyday lives and prepare our family for what we'll be learning next week. As always, when we dig, we're deepening our understanding, igniting our curiosity, and growing as fruit-producing, God-glorifying disciples. During this season of the dig, we'll be digging into our learning from the Believe series by Randy Frazy. Believe is our church family's focus for 2026. Like a lot of our episodes, each time we're together, we'll spend some time recapping or deepening our understanding of what we learned this past Sunday during our Sunday school hour and during our worship services. Then I'll share some things for you to think about as a parent or a spiritual parent to help your household warm up to next week's belief, practice, or virtue from the Believe series. Like you'll hear today, I'll be pausing within the podcast, giving you a chance to pause where you're listening and reflect and journal on your own or talk about your learning as a family. When this episode comes out, we'll be celebrating the Lent season. Lent is a 40-day window of time that starts on Ash Wednesday and leads the whole way up to Easter. It is time for Christians to prepare their hearts for the time of remembering Jesus' death on the cross and the celebration of his resurrected life. Oftentimes, people give things up during Lent, sacrificing comforts to focus on Jesus. As a church family, we are challenging ourselves to take up a different spiritual practice each week of Lent. So instead of giving up, we're taking up intentional challenges, attitudes, and actions during each week of Lent. These taking up prompts will connect to each week's believe key idea too. This week's key believe question asks, How do I grow by communicating with God? Our key believe verse for this week comes from Psalm 66, 18 through 20, which says, If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But God has surely listened and has heard my prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me. So, like every other week, we can answer our key believe question with our key verse and key believe idea, which says, I pray to God to know him, to find direction for my life, and to lay my requests before him. Remember, we're talking about how we act like Jesus in these recent believe episodes on the dig. One of the ways we act like Jesus is by talking to our Heavenly Father through prayer. We've learned in previous episodes that God is a personal God and he wants to have a real relationship with us. We get access to this relationship with God because of the sacrifice of his son Jesus. When we embrace the forgiveness of Jesus, we become children of God and gain access to Him. Prayer is a conversation between God and His kids, and that's us. Sometimes prayer seems hard. How do we do it? Do we pray out loud or silently? What do we say? Do we have to use all the these and thou's in my prayer? How long do I have to pray? Where should I pray? When should I pray? The list of prayer questions could go on and on. But there's a lot of really great ones. I just mentioned how prayer is a conversation between God and his kids. Prayer can be formal, and maybe you feel most comfortable with words like our Father, who are in heaven, and that's great. Or maybe you feel more comfortable saying, Good morning, Lord, and that's good too. It's a conversation with God. So maybe you'll talk out loud to him while you're on a walk, or maybe you'll pray silently in your head while you lay in bed at night. God, our Heavenly Father, just wants to talk with us. And this is how we grow our friendship with him. So some days your conversation with him might be really long, and some days it might just be really short, and maybe your day is just full of lots of little conversations with him all day long. No matter what, it's just about talking with God. Now I'm recording this episode close to lunchtime and I am hungry. In fact, I'm kind of hungry for tacos. Actually, did you know that tacos can help us learn how to pray? Maybe that's why I'm hungry for them. Okay, so we spell tacos T A C O S. And tacos help us pray because T stands for Thanksgiving, A stands for applause, C stands for confession, O stands for others, and the S stands for self. Let's build our lunch. I mean, let's build our taco, prayer together. T in tacos stands for thanksgiving. When we start our conversation with God, we should thank God for some of the many, many, many, many reasons we have to thank him. Psalm 107, eight through nine says, Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Did you wake up this morning? Do you have ears to listen to this episode? Can you taste yummy tacos? There are so many reasons to thank God. Pause the podcast and make a list of five things you want to thank God for today. Okay, so T is for Thanksgiving, and now A is next, and that stands for applause. First Chronicles 29, 11 through 12 says, Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty. Everything in the heavens and on earth is yours, O Lord, and this is your kingdom. We adore you as the one who is over all things. Wealth and honor come from you alone, for you rule over everything. Power and might are in your hand, and at your discretion people are made great and given strength. Don't hold back. Give a shout to the Lord. Cheer. We are his number one fan. Give it up for God. Pause the podcast and take some time to applaud God for all the ways that he rocks. Write these down or share them out loud as a family. T is for Thanksgiving, A is for applause, and next comes C, which stands for confession. We've talked about confession and repentance before on this podcast. Confession is tricky. It's probably the easiest part to skip over in our taco prayer, but every ingredient matters. The Bible tells us that we need to take time to confess our sins to God. Psalm thirty two five is one of those places it says, Finally, I confessed all my sins to you, and you stopped trying to hide my guilt. I said to myself, I will confess my rebellion to the Lord, and you forgave me. All my guilt is gone. God responds to our confessions or our apologies for our sins with forgiveness. Thank you, God. Pause the podcast and take some time to silently come clean before the Lord. He knows it all already anyway, but he wants to hear it from you. Let it all out. Even ask the Lord to reveal areas of sin that you are unaware of so that you can be right before God. So far we've talked about Thanksgiving, that's what the T, A for applause, C couldn't for confession, and now we're at O, which stands for others. You can probably guess what this part of the prayer is about. This is when we share our requests for other people, our friends, family, neighbors, and people all around us. We can ask God to heal people, help people, or draw them closer to Him. First Timothy 2 1 in the early readers Bible translation or the NIRV challenges us to pray for others. And this is what Timothy says to his readers. First, I want you to pray for all people. Ask God to help them and bless them. Give thanks for them. Pause the podcast and pick three others or three people in your life that you want to bring before God in prayer. If it's helpful, write down their name and your request for them. We're almost finished with our taco. T is thanksgiving, A is applause, C is confession, and O is others. We put an S at the end of taco because you can never have just one. S stands for self. God cares about the whole world and he cares for you. He wants to hear your requests and needs. It might feel really easy to pray for yourself, but maybe it feels really awkward. How can I pray for me when there are so many other needs out there? Well, even Jesus, God the Son, prayed for himself. However, he always submitted to the will of God the Father. When we pray, God changes us, just like what we read in Ezekiel 11, 19 through 20. And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statues and keep my rules and obey them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. You probably know what's coming by now. Pause the podcast and take some time to talk with God, however you feel most comfortable, out loud, in your head, quietly, on your knees, walking around. Share your requests and needs with him. God loves to hear from his kids. The more we talk about tacos, the hungrier I'm getting. We added one S to our spelling of tacos because you can never have just one. But I'm so hungry that I'm putting another S on the N. So now we have T-A-C-O-S-S. This S has meaning to our prayer method, though, don't worry. And it fits into our church family's taking up lunch challenge for this week, too. This week our challenge is to spend time in silence and solitude. Did you catch our last S? It stands for silence. Why not end your time of prayer by having some time of silence before the Lord? Let him speak to you too. It's hard to get in a word with someone if you never get a chance to respond. Give the Lord space in your life to communicate with you. Remember that God speaks in various ways, but a lot of times through his word. Remember Psalm 46, 10 while you practice this week's taking up challenge and our final S in our tacos. It says, Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. Prayer is one of the ways that we can communicate with God. It's how we talk to him, but it's also one of the ways that God talks to us. We have to be quiet and still to hear his voice sometimes. One of the other ways we can hear from God is by studying the Bible, his word for us. Next week we'll tackle the key believe question, how do I study God's Word? Until then, while you're praying this week, you can thank God for His the gift of His Word, the Bible, to us. You can applaud Him for the beauty and wonder of the Bible. You can confess for the times that you have not been obedient to what His Word says. You can ask God to make His Word alive and special to the others in your life. And you can ask the same for yourself. And then be still and silent, and let God's word soak over you and change you and make you more like Him. Prayer is not only a practice, it's a privilege to have direct access to the one true God 24-7, proves He is a personal God who loves to be in relationship with us. Prayer, talking, listening, and resting in God's presence is an effective way to know God better and find direction for our life. Before we pray together to close out this episode, pause the podcast about our tacos T-A-C-O-S-S prayer method and put it into practice. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this amazing day. Thank you for giving us ears to hear this episode and brains to learn together. God, you rule. You are king over the whole world. You have a perfect plan for my life. Thank you, Lord. I'm sorry for the ways that I've chosen to live my life opposite of what your kingdom represents. Please forgive me. God, be with each of my church family listening to this episode today. Encourage them, Heavenly Father. Lord, grow a hunger in me to know you more and more. We love you too. In your name we pray. Amen.