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Hello everyone, thank you again for joining us on another episode of the Dorsey Ross Show.
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Today we have Dr David CHotka who is the founder and director of Spirit Equipped Ministries.
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He has served on the chair of the Alliance Player Team, the national player equipping team of the Alliance Church in Canada, for more than 20 years.
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He is an author, conference speaker, director of a renewed society and an associate and as a lead pastor of multi-staff churches in the Canadian province of British Columbia, alberta and Ontario.
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Dr David, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Well, I'm thankful to be here.
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It's a delight to be on your program and warm thanks for the invitation.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah, I saw your bio and saw your thing on Podmark I was like, hey, I've got to have this guy on my show.
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Well, thank you, I'm glad to be here.
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What is your biggest passion?
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Actually, it's to mobilize prayer in every way, shape or form, and it's to teach people not to do this way, shape or form, and it's to teach people not to do this.
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So hold your nose and say if it be your will, without an expectation of an answer.
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So I had a funny.
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So I've written a series of books actually I've written five, and all of them are on are some form of prayer, equipping one form or another.
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And I actually believe this jesus ministry was entirely rooted and grounded in the practice of prayer, and every single thing that he did has to do with him being in a prayer relationship with God, the Father and the Holy Spirit imparting to him whatever he needed to be able to accomplish what was in front of him.
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If you look at it, he was in this Hebrew framework.
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Now, our culture doesn't understand this, but if you were in a French village or a German village or a Dutch village 150 years ago, there would be a bell that would be rung halfway through the day and everybody would stop and pray, and then the bell would be rung again in the evening and everybody would stop and pray.
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They would do that in the morning as well, and everybody would stop and pray, and it didn't matter if it was Lutheran, if it was Methodist.
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If it was, if it was a Catholic or whatever all the people would stop it.
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There was a culture of prayer that was built into the rhythm of life, and when Jesus came to earth, he came as a Jew, and Jews would always pray a minimum of three times a day together, and on Shabbat, on Sabbath, they would pray four times, and there would be a special series of things that they would do in the evening, and then on festival days, they pray as many as seven times in the day, and when the scripture says that Jesus prayed, jesus went off by himself to pray.
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It was over and above a prayer-saturated culture, and so we don't get it, because we don't live in that kind of a world anymore.
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It's just not part of secular American or Canadian or Australian society.
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It just isn't part of what we think about, although you still have hints of it in places like England, where the queen actually now the king would actually talk about calling on the name of the Lord.
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So you have these kinds of things happening.
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So my passion is to restore the prayer principle to the Church of Jesus Christ across the planet, and I honestly don't care what kind of Christian you are.
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So I mean, whether you're a Presbyterian or a Baptist or a Pentecostal or a Catholic, it doesn't matter to me.
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What matters to me is that the ongoing dynamic of being engaged with God on a regular basis through interactive presence toward the presence be taught and learned.
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And evangelicals and of course I'm in the evangelical tradition evangelicals tend to reduce prayer to words and, by the way, if you run out of words, you finished your prayer and some people aren't wordy.
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So the bottom line is, when Jesus prayed all night, I don't think he just kept talking.
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My own personal view here is that he was present to the power of the Spirit.
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He was present to the presence and he would sense the nearness.
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He would probably have seasons of silence, seasons of worship, seasons of interactive conversation, and sometimes he would lie still and sometimes he would just be present to the Lord.
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He'd meditate on scripture and so on.
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So when he chose the 12, I don't think he spent the night talking to God.
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I think he spent the night present to the presence.
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How do I say this?
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When you pray?
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In scripture there's all kinds of different ways of praying.
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There's prayer of lament and there is the prayer of silence, there's reverential awe, there is praise that involves music, and there is reflection on the Scripture, and there is prayer walking.
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You have all these kinds of things going on.
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I want to see every aspect of prayer restored to the Lord's church.
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That's what I want to see.
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What do you think?
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Maybe not now, but 20, 30 years ago we would have at least in the churches that I know of, they would have prayer nights, yes, nights, where you would go and, like you were saying, they would go and worship and they would have time to go up there.
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But now we don't seem to have that anymore.
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Yeah, you only have isolated pockets and most churches, if they call a prayer meeting, they get five or six people, even if your church is 1,600.
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It's just crazy and it has to do with the way that we shape praying.
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What we've done is we've reduced it to the assignment of the desperate.
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Oh, by the way, there's nothing else we can do now.
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We better pray, or they reduce it to, and you get these kind of strange things where the only person who shows up for the prayer meeting is grandma and she's got three grandkids and she's praying for their salvation and she always prays the same prayer, what you see going on inside the framework of the early church.
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Now, there was an exception that just happened.
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There was a revival in asbury seminary.
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I don't know if you saw that in the news.
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Was it two years ago or a year ago, somewhere in that?
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region yeah, the one you want to conduct you.
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Yes, actually it was young people and they prayed for uh, I think it was 10 consecutive dates.
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Now I went there I, as it turned out, I'm only about a six-hour drive from there and I was teaching a class and there was another pastor up the street from me and he said David, do you want to go to Asbury?
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And I said it's six hours there and six hours back.
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You want to do that?
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And he said, well, listen, this is amazing.
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It's incredible.
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We should see what it's like.
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Now, as it turns turns out, my co-author in the healing prayer book, maxie dunham, used to be the principal of asbury seminary, and so there's a warm bond with uh, with with me and asbury, that kind of thing anyway.
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So so this guy steve, he calls me up and he says you want to do it?
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Nice?
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I looked at my calendar and the only window I had to do that was the very next day.
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He talked to me on a, a Thursday, and we had to go on a Friday, right?
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So I said the only time I can go is tomorrow, otherwise I've got appointments booked in, you know, next week, et cetera, et cetera.
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And he said, oh, and then he hesitated and then talked to his wife and he said to his wife this thing he said I was talking to the Lord and I felt I was supposed to invite David to go and if he could go I was supposed to drop everything and go with him.
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But Friday was not my go-to.
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So his wife said you mean you told Jesus of Nazareth you'd go with David?
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And David said yes, you're now going to say no to Jesus of Nazareth.
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And he said I don't want to do that.
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And she said you better go.
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So we all drove to Asbury.
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And so we all drove to Asbury and actually this is what happened we walked into that town and you could not get into the town.
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You could hardly get there and we had to park.
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Now, I'm Canadian so I think kilometers, so I'll try and translate this into miles.
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About two miles away we had to walk two miles to be able to get into that town and when we got there there was this enormous line snaking around all kinds of blocks with people waiting to be able to get into the main chapel.
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And as we arrived they were setting up an audiovisual chapel just across the street and thankfully we could get into that, but it was thousands and thousands of people crying out to the Lord, and it was interesting to watch.
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You had these old timers who believed in the old Methodist holiness principle of consecration and separation to God, that kind of thing, and the old timers were watching the young bucks and the young bucks were leading it and you could see that the old timers were being guardians, but they wanted to inculcate and nurture the faith of the younger generation.
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They were being very careful and so you didn't have ditzy crazy happening.
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What you had was focused devotion, centered in on a closer walk with Christ and centered in on winning the nation for the Lord and winning the regions from across the planet, et cetera.
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And so I saw that and that was amazing.
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And what they, what they did there there, was completely biblical.
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They would praise, they would worship, they would pray for the advance of the kingdom, and after they prayed for the advance of the kingdom, they'd celebrate what God was doing and it was a remarkable kind of thing.
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Now that's prayer as it's described by Jesus.
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In fact, I've written a book called Living Out the Lord's Prayer, line by Line.
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I'm just on the verge of publishing the book.
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I'm doing a test group right now.
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It is based on a book that I wrote years ago.
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Just a minute, let me see if I can find it here.
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Hang on.
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Oh, here it is.
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This is the one.
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I wrote this in 2008.
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It's called Powered Praying and it's based on the Lord's Prayer, and I'll just tell you how this journey of this book happened.
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So we had a conference in my church building, and my church building at that point could seat 1,200 people, and so it was a national gathering of the denomination that I was in, and my building was big enough, with a large parking lot, and we had inexpensive housing, et cetera, et cetera.
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So we did the conference at my church and we had booked in Dr Carl George, who was from the Fuller Institute, and back in the day he was talking about the power of small groups and how small groups are going to replace the big church, et cetera, et cetera, because if you want intimacy, you have to be in a small group and he was basically teaching what the New Testament teaches they would have large groups for instruction and they would have small groups for Christian life.
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That's what he would basically do, and he had just been to Korea, south Korea, and he had just met the pastor of the largest church in the history of the Christian world.
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It was a congregation of 850,000 people and they were all in small groups.
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Everybody in that church belonged, yeah.
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So I mean, this is what this incredible kind of thing.
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And the lead pastor of this thing had gotten terribly ill in the 1960s and he was unable to do his work, and so he asked his deacons and his deaconesses to organize small group prayer meetings, unbeknownst to him.
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I mean, his inability to be able to lead eventually made him sit.
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He had to lie on his back because he had terrible back trouble and while he was afflicted he would create curriculum and he would preach into a microphone and pass it to his deacons and his deaconesses.
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They would take the teaching off to these small groups and he went from a church of a thousand to a church of 10,000 by the time he got better, and then he realized that what he was doing when he was flat on his back was praying for three, four hours a day.
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Anyway, in the middle of this.
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So Dr Carl George goes to Korea and now his church is 850,000.
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Now put this in perspective In the day my church was 800 people and that was a big church in the Canadian context.
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I'm a Canadian and so if you wanted to see me you would call the office and you would book in for a week out, and sometimes two weeks out, to be able to get one hour with me.
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That's what you'd have to do, right?
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Because otherwise my time was filled with staffing and with visitation and with preparation of program or getting the sermon ready or whatever the issue was.
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So you know this pastor, so can you imagine somebody getting an appointment with a pastor of a church of 850,000?
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So Carl George gets an appointment with this guy and he knows he's never going to get another one.
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It's just not going to happen.
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And so he says he has to figure out what he's going to ask.
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He's got one hour to ask him, right, him, right, and he prays and he feels that he, the lord, would have him talk to him about, about what it means to, uh, to pray for three to five hours a day, because he heard the guy prayed that much based upon the needs of being sick.
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So he sees the guy crossing, this korean leader, and he looks him in the eye and he says um, I understand, you pray three to five hours a day.
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And the man said well, I do.
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And so carl george asked him uh, what, how, what?
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How do you pray, what?
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What method do you use?
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Do you have an approach, etc.
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Etc.
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And the guy said oh, it's very simple.
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For the first three hours I use the lord's prayer and after that I use other models.
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Then carl george and I'm sitting on the platform next to carl george.
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This is three weeks after carl george has been there and he's still processing his pain based upon this conversation.
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And so he said three hours praying the Lord's prayer.
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And then he asked the question you and I would ask what do you do?
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Repeat it.
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And the guy said oh, dr George, have you never studied what Jesus meant by the term father?
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And George, who'd been a Baptist all his days, and he grew up, you know, he had the Bible in his mother's milk.
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My heavens, the guy.
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The guy was a born again disciple, thumping the scripture all the time, but he got saved when he was five and he's now 55, right, 50 years walking with God.
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And so so he looks at him and says you know, I call him father, but I've never studied what it meant.
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And then the Korean guy looks at him and says well, how can you pray our father if you have not a clue what father means?
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So now I'm sitting next to Carl George on the platform and I'm looking over this congregation of my pastoral friends and peers of years.
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All of us are in the same denomination, we all know each other and they're all struggling with the same issue.
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They've done exactly the same thing as Carl George.
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And then this Korean guy says to George well, what about heaven, dr George?
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Have you ever studied what Jesus meant by heaven?
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And George scratched his head and he said well, no, I believe in it.
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He said well, how can you pray father in heaven If you don't know what father means?
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You don't know what heaven means.
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And what about name?
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You can see where this is going right.
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So I was sitting on the platform and I am processing Carl George's pain, because he'd been a believer for 50 years and hadn't done those studies.
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And I had been a pastor for 20 and I hadn't done those studies.
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And I looked at my peers and everybody was in the same boat.
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We're all scratching our heads because we hadn't done that work, and it seems so utterly obvious.
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So, anyway, the only time I had consolation I had studied the doctrine of the kingdom.
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And so I had a passing.
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I was able to say, yes, I have studied the kingdom.
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When he got to the kingdom, come and we'll be done.
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But the deed was done, it was sealed forever in my soul.
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I needed to understand what Jesus meant by the principal words in the Lord's Prayer, and then the defining moment came right here.
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He said how can you obey Jesus to pray?
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He didn't say pray any way you want.
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He said when you pray, pray this way Say Our Father who art in heaven.
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And he said this is not a memory prayer, this is a highway to all of Jesus' teaching.
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And so Carl George shares that in this assembly with all these pastors.
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And I make a commitment.
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So I got myself a great big three-ring binder and I bought a bunch of little notebooks, you know, with all the three.
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And so the first one, I wrote down Father.
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On the second one, I wrote down Heaven.
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On the third one, I wrote down Name.
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On the second one, I wrote down Heaven.
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On the third one, I wrote down Name.
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On the fourth one, I wrote down Kingdom.
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The next one, I wrote Will.
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And so I went all through the key words of Jesus' prayer and I assigned a notebook to each one of these words.
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Then I said to the Lord, I'm going to open up the Gospel of Matthew, because that's where the longer version of the Lord's Prayer is, and every time I run into one of those keywords I'm going to circle the word and I'm going to open my notebook and I'm going to journal what that word means in the context that Jesus is using it.
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And I said I think it's going to take me about three months to faithfully do this.
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Oh, dorsey, three months.
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No, no, no.
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I got through Father in three months.
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That no, no, no, I got through father in three months.
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So and then I realized you can't just take one word, one gospel and look at the meaning.
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You have to look at the whole package.
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So I decided to look at all the synoptics and john.
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I looked at actually the apostles and paul, and after I finished the new testament, I thought I got to understand the old testament background to these words.
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And here's what I discovered.
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This was incredible.
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The word father was never used personally in any Jewish prayer at all until Jesus of Nazareth came.
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Not one person in Hebrew Scripture or in Hebrew writing.
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There was a scholar by the name of Yoshim Yeremias, who examined all of Hebrew prayer that was extant, every manuscript that was Hebrew that was Jewish in any way, shape or form.
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He examined every prayer inside the whole context of Hebrew Scripture and Hebrew writing and he discovered that there was a reference to Messiah attached to calling God father, where God would call them son but, and so Jews would use the term metaphorically.
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And my favorite one is Malachi 1.6, where this is where God is telling off the Levites.
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You know what he says hey, you give your daddy's respect.
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How come you don't respect me?
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That's that kind of.
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That kind of analogical thing is shows up in scripture and, like Psalm 103, as a father is compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.
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You know, there's these, there's these analogies.
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Right, there's about 14 of those analogies in scripture where God's called father, but there isn't one.
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There's where God's called Father, but there's two places, one in Deuteronomy and one in Isaiah, where God is called Father and it's kind of like metaphorical Father of the Nation kind of thing.
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So Americans would say George Washington, canadians would say Sir John, a MacDonald, by the way, you're our Father, you're our Creator, kind of thing.
00:18:21.470 --> 00:18:24.107
But there's none of this personal thing.
00:18:24.839 --> 00:18:26.006
And then I found this out.
00:18:26.006 --> 00:18:52.145
I found out from psalm 2 and psalm 89 and there's a couple references in chronicles that one born from the line of david would call god father and god would call him son, and he would put his hand on the rivers and the seas, he would raise the righteous dead to create a mighty army, he would bestow the gift of the spirit, he would restore the land, he would be the overseer of the nation.
00:18:52.145 --> 00:18:58.853
In other words, to call God father was to claim that you were the Messiah.
00:18:58.853 --> 00:19:05.788
And so when Jesus starts to, the first time Jesus calls God's father.
00:19:06.148 --> 00:19:07.092
He shows up when he's 12.
00:19:07.092 --> 00:19:27.686
He's in the temple and I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding or not, yet If you've been to a Greek wedding or a Ukrainian, one of these ethnic Italian weddings all the relatives come and they're second and third and fourth and fifth cousins and they all do this big party and the kids sleep in the center and they all do this big party and the kids sleep in the center and they're with all their cousins, you know, and the couples dance around them.
00:19:27.686 --> 00:19:36.686
It's completely safe for the kids because it's a tribal society and the Italians still have it, the Greeks still have it, you know the big fat Greek wedding kind of thing.
00:19:36.686 --> 00:19:45.229
Anyway, getting back to this, jesus is part of that kind of a travel society where everybody goes on entourage to his bar mitzvah when he's 12.
00:19:45.229 --> 00:19:48.673
And they assume he's with the cousins and they lose him.
00:19:48.673 --> 00:19:54.030
They look for him for three days and then when they find him I don't know if you ever lost a kid, my heavens.
00:19:54.030 --> 00:19:59.480
My son wanted once on me in a grocery store and when I found him I didn't know if I should hit him or hug him.
00:19:59.500 --> 00:20:01.784
So Mary looks at Jesus and I don't know what her feelings were at the moment.
00:20:01.784 --> 00:20:04.667
But so Mary looks at Jesus and I don't know what her feelings were at the moment.
00:20:04.667 --> 00:20:08.294
But she says son, son, how could you do this to us Three days?
00:20:08.294 --> 00:20:09.434
What did you do with three days?
00:20:09.434 --> 00:20:14.240
And he looks at her and says didn't you know?
00:20:14.240 --> 00:20:14.901
I had to be in my father's house.
00:20:14.921 --> 00:20:22.265
Now, of course Mary knew he was Messiah, she had the virginal conception, but nobody hears that except Mary and Joseph and him.
00:20:22.265 --> 00:20:33.392
But when he receives the spirit at his baptism, the voice says this is my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased.
00:20:33.392 --> 00:20:40.576
And from that point forward, every prayer of Jesus calls God, father, except one, the death on the cross.
00:20:40.576 --> 00:20:42.657
Or he says my God, my God.
00:20:42.657 --> 00:20:43.417
Why have you forsaken me?
00:20:43.417 --> 00:20:48.941
Put brackets around that?
00:20:48.941 --> 00:20:49.982
Because I think he's quoting psalm 22.
00:20:50.002 --> 00:20:52.928
But if you look at all the other prayers of jesus, in every tradition he doesn't call god anything else.
00:20:52.928 --> 00:20:57.095
There's not one single reference to any.
00:20:57.095 --> 00:21:00.625
He doesn't say creator god, or sustainer god, or or even just god.
00:21:00.625 --> 00:21:04.653
Every prayer that he prays has one of three appellations in front of it.
00:21:04.653 --> 00:21:09.105
It's either Father, my Father or Holy Father.
00:21:10.989 --> 00:21:16.724
Now he says to the disciples, when they say he teaches to pray, he says I want you to pray this way.
00:21:16.724 --> 00:21:18.431
When you pray, say Our Father, now wait a minute.
00:21:18.431 --> 00:21:22.049
Listen, dorsey, I think you're a wonderful human, but I don't think you're the Messiah.
00:21:22.049 --> 00:21:24.932
You're a wonderful human, but I don't think you're the messiah.
00:21:24.932 --> 00:21:30.717
So and I, every now and then I have a delusion of grandeur and every now and then I think I'm more important than I really am.
00:21:30.717 --> 00:21:34.568
And then something happens and I discover I'm not right.
00:21:34.568 --> 00:21:35.730
We're not the messiah.
00:21:35.730 --> 00:21:38.945
Let's just, let's just blow up the stereotype and let's eliminate that.
00:21:39.406 --> 00:21:47.942
So what's jesus of nazareth telling us to pray, father, for that title, when everybody in Judaism knew that to call God father was to claim you Messiah.
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