[0:00] Well, last week we started a series where we talked about the things that we believe, the things that we affirm as a church, the things that we believe are important to every single believer.
[0:12] And last week, Evan kicked us off with a wonderful message on we believe in the authority of Scripture or we believe in the power of Scripture in the believer's life and that we should be committing ourselves to reading God's Word, diving deeper into God's Word, and letting God's Word transform us.
[0:32] Well, today we're going to be talking about we believe in the power of prayer. And I just want to go ahead and invite everyone to come back tonight as well.
[0:43] Tonight, right here in the bridge at 5 p.m., we're going to have a time of prayer where we come together as a church and we pray specifically for things in our community, in our state, around the nation, around the world.
[0:58] We'll be praying for other churches in our community. We'll be praying for all kinds of things. And we're also going to be praying how our church can be used by God to reach our community, to reach our state, to reach our nation, to reach the world.
[1:12] And so I want to encourage you to come back for an evening of worship and prayer where we bring these requests to God. And so this morning, we're going to be discussing how we believe in the power of prayer.
[1:26] I heard a pastor say one time, he says, if our prayers are not intimidating to us, they may be insulting to God. If our prayers are not intimidating to us, they may be insulting to God.
[1:39] Now, I don't want to minimize the fact that God wants to hear all of our prayers. He wants to hear the things that we have going on in our life. He wants to hear all of those things. But oftentimes, I think prayer just becomes the pleasantries for us, where we're just meeting somebody and passing in the hallway.
[1:56] Hey, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Hope you have a great day type thing. But God wants us to bring our requests to him. He wants us to pray big prayers to him, prayers that depend on him.
[2:09] And so we want to be thinking through it in this way. Think of it like this. If God were to say yes to all the prayers that you prayed over the last month, how would the world be different?
[2:23] If God just gave a blanket yes to all of the prayers that you prayed over the past month, how would the world be different? Would a different team have won a football game? Would you have gotten all green lights on your way into work one day?
[2:37] Would you have found that parking spot that you were looking for? Would all of these things happen? Or how would the world be different? Would there be churches planted all over the world where the gospel has not gone?
[2:49] Would your neighbor come to faith in Christ that you've been praying for? Would God be working in this community in powerful ways? Would we see revival taking place in this state that spills over into this nation that gives us a renewed sense of dependence on God?
[3:05] How would the world be different if God were to answer all of our prayers? Several years ago, as a church, we read through the book, A Praying Church by Paul Miller.
[3:17] And this book was really transformative, not only in my life, but I know in many of your lives from the conversations that we've had about this. But in one of the first couple of chapters, Miller talks about the decline of prayer in the church and ultimately the decline of prayer in Christian homes throughout our country.
[3:37] And much of the reason that he gives for this is there's a focus that has been taken off of God and placed on things of this world where we are constantly consumed by trying to get more and more and more.
[3:49] And we fill our lives, we fill our time, we spend our money and our resources on those things of this world. We are busy and often wealthy people and we attribute that success to working hard, setting goals, and staying busy.
[4:09] This is how our society tells us to find success. And whether we admit it or not, praying sometimes feels like a waste of time, where we're just sitting around doing nothing.
[4:22] In fact, Miller in this book points out, he says, but the church, he says, we aren't a yoga community burning candles to get in touch with our feelings. He says, we're a praying community.
[4:33] We're a praying community living in a personal world where the Father by his Spirit is constantly making Jesus come alive in our midst.
[4:45] We are called to live lives that depend on prayer, where if God doesn't move, if God doesn't show up in a miraculous way, then our plans are going to fail. We're called to live lives where we attempt great things for God and depend on God to work and to move in those things.
[5:03] And when we begin to live lives like this, then we become dependent on prayer. Then we become dependent on God to work and to move in our midst.
[5:14] And so I hope and pray this morning as we discuss this and we think about the importance of prayer, we're not just looking to God to say, help us to do some easy things that we feel comfortable doing.
[5:26] But we're going to God and saying, God, we want to attempt great things for you. Because we know that with you, we can accomplish this. And so many of you may recognize the name Tim Keller.
[5:40] Tim Keller was the founding pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City. And he recently passed away just a few years ago after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. And at the end of 2021, he did an interview with World Magazine.
[5:55] It was a pretty long interview. And he gave some pretty long, extensive answers to some questions that they were asking him. But there was one question in particular that the interviewer came to him and asked him that Keller gave a very short answer to.
[6:09] And the question was this. The interviewer asked him, he says, looking back, is there anything that you wish you had done differently in ministry? And Keller answered, he said, absolutely.
[6:21] I should have prayed more. No question. This is a man who had much success as a pastor, who had much influence in this country and around the world, wrote many books, had a lot of influence.
[6:38] And he says, if I could have done something different, I would have prayed more. I would have gone to God more. Prayer should be essential to the Christian life because it was essential to Jesus' life.
[6:51] Throughout the gospel accounts, we see many times that Jesus was praying. And there was obviously something very different about the way that Jesus prayed.
[7:02] And I say this because in our passage today in Luke chapter 11, we see his disciples asking him to teach them something. And this is the only account where we have in scripture of his disciples specifically asking Jesus to teach them to do something.
[7:18] Now, obviously, Jesus taught them to do many things. That kind of goes with being a disciple of someone. You have someone who is teaching you how to do things. But this is the only time that we see recorded where the disciples go to Jesus.
[7:33] They see him doing something. And they say, teach us to do that. Teach us to do that. And so in this passage, we see they ask Jesus to teach them how to pray.
[7:46] And so if you have a copy of God's word, I want to invite you to open with me right there to Luke chapter 11. And we're going to read the first 13 verses this morning. This is what God's word says.
[7:58] It says, now Jesus was praying in a certain place. And when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray. As John taught his disciples.
[8:09] And he said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins.
[8:20] For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation. And he said to them, which one of you has a friend? Will go to him at midnight and say to him, friend, lend me three loaves.
[8:35] For a friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set before him. And he will answer from within. Do not bother me. The door is now shut and my children are with me in bed.
[8:47] I cannot give up to give you anything. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend. Yet because of his impudence, or some of your translations make his persistence, he will rise and give him whatever he needs.
[9:04] And I tell you, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives and the one who seeks finds.
[9:17] And to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead give him a serpent? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?
[9:28] If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?
[9:41] Verse 1 here, it tells us that Jesus was praying in a certain place. And one of his disciples saw him and said, Lord, teach us to pray.
[9:54] One commentator notes, he says, that request means that prayer is not something learned automatically. Prayer is not natural. Effective prayer has to be taught and learned.
[10:07] He says there's no shame in not knowing how to pray or feeling uncomfortable in prayer. Prayer is not natural. There's only shame if we don't ask to be taught and as a result, spend years of our Christian lives ineffective in prayer.
[10:22] And so I want to encourage us this morning. Let us come to this passage as the disciples were coming to Jesus, wanting to grow in our prayer lives.
[10:34] And so the first thing that I want us to bring our attention to this morning is that we see in this passage the pattern of prayer. There's a pattern of prayer that is taking place here in these first few verses.
[10:46] In this passage, there's going to be several observations about how to pray. But to begin with, I want us to see that Jesus opens up with a bold statement about our relationship to God.
[10:59] He opens up teaching us how to pray with this bold statement about our relationship with God. He says, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. This is how we are to come to God.
[11:11] Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Now in this abbreviated version of the Lord's Prayer, we see Jesus teaching us to pray to God as our Father.
[11:23] We're going to spend more time talking about this fact than anything else as we talk through this scripture because I think it's important for us to understand and to wrap our minds around the significance of what Jesus is teaching us right out of the gates when we are to address God as our Father.
[11:44] We're to address God as Father. Prayer is something that happens between a father and his children. It's a family conversation. There's a sense of intimacy that is associated with it.
[11:57] And it's become so common for us today to start our prayers with Father or Heavenly Father that we almost always lose the significance of what Jesus is telling his disciples here.
[12:13] Kent Hughes made an observation that really brings this to our attention. He says, you can search from Genesis to Malachi. In other words, you can search the entire Old Testament. And he says, and you will not find an individual speaking of God as Father.
[12:31] Moreover, in Jesus' day, his contemporaries had so focused on the sovereignty and transcendence of God that they were careful never to repeat his covenant name, Yahweh.
[12:42] So they invented the word Jehovah, a combination of two separate names of God. Thus, the distance from God was well guarded. You can imagine the controversy that Jesus caused when he came on the scene and pretty much only used Father when he was addressing God.
[13:02] All of Jesus' prayers, he addresses God as Father. The Gospels record him using Father more than 60 times in reference to God. Jesus is clearly showing that his followers have the ability to experience a relationship with God that is far different than anything anybody had ever known.
[13:25] They get to address him as Father. When we pray to God and address him as Father, we need to understand the significance and the privilege we have to address the eternal creator of everything in such a personal way.
[13:41] Many of you know that one of my favorite books is Knowing God by J.I. Packer. And in this, J.I. Packer says, he says, You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase if you speak of it as a revelation of the fatherhood of the Holy Creator.
[13:59] And he says, In the same way, you sum up the whole of the New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy father. He says, If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father.
[14:22] If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and the whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.
[14:35] For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God.
[14:49] Father is the Christian name for God. And it's so important for us to see God as our father. Tim Keller once said something along the lines of, he says, Do you know the only person that's not afraid to wake up a king in the middle of the night?
[15:08] He says, The only person that's not afraid to wake up a king in the middle of the night is his children. Because they have that unrestricted access to him. As a parent, I'm sure some of you can identify with this, there have been many times where I've been sound asleep in my bed in the middle of the night, and then all of a sudden, I'm just, I can feel, it just feels like somebody is standing over me watching me.
[15:31] And then you open your eyes, and there's one of your kids right there in your face. And you say, What's going on? And they say, I can't sleep. I'm like, Well now I can't either.
[15:43] Thank you for that. Or they come to you, and they're just standing right over you, and they say, I'm thirsty. Can I have some water? And I say, Of course. Go around, wake up your mom, and go get some water.
[15:55] You know? And so, those kids, they have this unrestricted access. Now, if one of you came to my house in the middle of the night, and was standing over my bed, and somehow made it into my house, and into my bedroom, and was standing over me, and just, I woke up to your face, then all of a sudden, I would probably have a lot of things that I'd have to ask forgiveness for later.
[16:16] Some of the things that I said, and probably the things that I did, there'll be a lot of things that I'll have to ask forgiveness for later. But not for my kids. Those kids, they have unrestricted access to me.
[16:27] They can come to me at any time. And so, when we see Jesus telling us to address God as Father, there's a significance to this.
[16:38] There's a deep meaning to this. There's power that comes in this. My kids can come to me with boldness. And this is how God wants us to come to Him as His children.
[16:53] And so, as we begin to recognize that we are praying to our Heavenly Father, who is also Creator, Sustainer, and Savior of the world, we begin to realize that ultimately, we want His kingdom to come, and His will to be accomplished.
[17:10] And so, as we recognize who God is, our Father, we naturally want His kingdom to come. And this has a strong missions emphasis that goes along with this.
[17:22] This statement is very both personal for our lives today, and something that we look forward to it being complete one day. I want God's kingdom to come in my life.
[17:33] I want God's kingdom to come in my life. I want Him to be King and Lord of my life today. I want Him to rule and reign in my life today. And also, I look forward to one day when His name is honored among all the nations for all eternity.
[17:50] And so, when we pray to our Heavenly Father, and we say, Your kingdom come, we are saying very boldly that, God, I want Your kingdom, not mine.
[18:01] I want Your name to be honored, not mine. I want my life to reflect the ultimate purpose that You give it, and not what this world says it should be.
[18:12] And this is really easy to say, but it's incredibly difficult to mean. Because closely tied to this, Your kingdom come is Your will be done. In fact, when we see the longer version of the Lord's Prayer back in Matthew chapter 6, this is what it says.
[18:28] It says, Your kingdom come, Your will be done. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've heard people come to me, or I've said it myself, where I say, Lord, God, show me Your will.
[18:41] Help me to find Your will for my life. Well, guess what? It's not lost. God, it's not something we have to find because it's not lost. So we have His word right here that tells us God's will and God's plan for us.
[18:57] You want to know God's will for your life? Pick up the Bible and start reading. We know that it is His will for lost people to be told about Jesus. In 2 Peter 3, 9, it says, The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
[19:21] repentance. And so what we are saying, if we mean it, what we're saying when we say, God, Your kingdom come, what we're saying is, God, I want Your name to be proclaimed everywhere.
[19:32] I want Your name to be proclaimed to my lost neighbors. I want Your name to be proclaimed in this community. I want to see revival taking place. I want to see Your name being proclaimed to the millions of lost people that are right here in our state.
[19:46] I want Your name to be proclaimed to those areas of our country where the gospel presence, is minimal at best. Lord, I want Your name to be proclaimed. I want Your gospel to go forth to places that have never heard the name of Jesus.
[19:59] And when we say, Your kingdom come, what we're saying is, God, I want to be a part of that. Not only do I want to see that happen, but God, I want You to use me to accomplish Your will.
[20:13] Your kingdom come. Your will be done. His will for your life, at least part of it is proclaiming the name of Jesus wherever it is that He's called you to be at this time.
[20:27] I'm afraid all too often when we pray, God, show me Your will, what we are really saying is, God, here's my will, and here's my plan, and I need You to make me feel good about my plan and my will, and act like it's Your plan.
[20:42] And this is completely backwards to the purpose of prayer. Packer, reflecting on this statement, Your will be done, says, Here, more clearly than anywhere, the purpose of prayer becomes plain.
[20:57] Not to make God do my will, but to bring my will into line with His. Now, I want to be very clear. Praying Your kingdom come is a dangerous prayer.
[21:09] And I encourage you to pray it, but just understand that it will cause many changes in our lives. It means that you willingly submit your life to be molded and shaped by another.
[21:24] It gives control of your life to God. And I also want to encourage you, if you truly want to find God's specific plan and will for your life, start by doing the things that you know He's called us all to do.
[21:36] If you want to know God's specific plan for your life, well, a great place to start is what He's called all of us to do. Look to God's Word and follow His call to all believers and watch how God starts shaping and molding your life.
[21:55] But parents and grandparents, I want to encourage you to pray something that is even harder to pray. We just had a lot of kids walk out of this room and go back to children's church and go back to studying God's Word and what it has to Him.
[22:12] And so I want to encourage you something that's even harder to pray. Pray for God's kingdom to come and His will to be done in your children's lives. But also pray that God will begin to work in your heart to support wherever God may lead them.
[22:28] We want our kids to follow Jesus, but often we teach them to do that with parameters. We say, yes, we want you to follow Jesus, but here's some parameters to go along with that.
[22:41] Many times in wanting the best for our kids, we advise them to follow comfort and not God. As we raise them, what are we telling them is most important in life?
[22:54] Yes, we can tell them, we can say that Jesus is supreme and that He is the most important, but what are we telling them with our actions?
[23:04] Are we telling them that money is supreme or sports are supreme or a certain grade is supreme? Or are we teaching them that following Jesus is greater than all of this?
[23:17] Next in this prayer, we see Jesus teaching us to ask our Father for our needs. Give us each day our daily bread. And through this passage, we see Jesus is concerned with our daily needs.
[23:31] The request for daily bread is a reminder of the manna that God provided for Israel in the desert. If you remember, they were instructed to gather enough manna, to gather enough bread for that day.
[23:43] And so this gave them this deep sense of dependence on God every single day to provide, to provide over and over again. And this is a foreign concept for most of us because we've grown up in a first world context.
[23:57] Because most of us not only have what we need for today, but we have enough stored up in our homes that will last us for weeks. And if you're like me, even when that runs out, you've got enough stored up to last you a little while longer after that.
[24:12] And so this is a hard concept sometimes for us to understand. But Danny Akinos, he says, we must not let the availability of food trick us into thinking that we are self-sufficient and do not need God to provide for our daily needs.
[24:29] Because we do. We're reminded here of physical needs that we have, but also of a much greater need that Jesus is telling us to pray for.
[24:39] And so the final observation in this section that we're talking about here is ask God to not only forgive us, but to protect us from temptation. He says, And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.
[24:58] And I must admit that this sometimes can be a little bit confusing for us because in the Bible, we are told that as believers, we are justified that our sins, past, present, and future, are paid for.
[25:12] And now we see a need to ask for forgiveness. Is this something that we need to do? And the answer is yes. As believers, our sins are paid for, past, present, and future.
[25:23] And yes, it is important for us to ask for forgiveness. Packer, again, was very helpful in understanding this. He says, the Lord's Prayer is a family prayer in which God's adopted children address their father.
[25:39] And though their daily failures do not overthrow their justification, things will not be right between them and their father till they have said sorry and asked him to forgive the ways that they have let them down.
[25:54] So not only is our need for forgiveness addressed here, but we also see our need to forgive others. For the believer, we must always remember that we are to forgive others.
[26:06] Ephesians 4, 32, forgiving one another just as God also forgave you. Our Lord certainly does not mean here that forgiveness of others earns us the right to be forgiven.
[26:19] It rather that God forgives the penitent and the one of the chief evidences of this is a forgiving spirit. And so finally, Jesus says, lead us not into temptation, but to deliver us from evil.
[26:35] Obviously, God does not tempt anyone, but the request comes from a place of understanding our weaknesses and our need for dependence on God each and every day.
[26:46] We need God's strength and power to resist Satan and the wisdom and the direction to not be put into situations where Satan can easily lead us away.
[26:56] And so what we see at looking at the Lord's prayer is a need for remembering who it is that we're talking to and with that, what an incredible privilege it is to call God our Heavenly Father.
[27:10] And from that place, we begin to bring our requests to Him, our daily needs, our understanding of our greatest needs, showing complete dependence on God for everything. And so after teaching them how to pray, Jesus follows this lesson with a parable that is where I want us to spend just the last few minutes that we have together this morning.
[27:32] I want you to listen to these words from this parable. And He says, And He said to him, Which one of you has a friend? Which one of you has a friend? Will go to him at midnight and say, Friend, lend me three loaves for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set before him.
[27:50] And he will answer from within, Do not bother me. The door is now shut and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, and yet, because of his impudence, he will rise and give him whatever he needs.
[28:12] And so in this passage, we are reminded to be persistent in prayer. To be persistent in prayer. Now, I'm not a Greek scholar and I don't claim to be one, but I did have a professor in seminary who was one of the leading New Testament Greek scholars in the world.
[28:29] And he was actually the one who wrote or translated the ISV, the International Standard Version. And he taught us the importance of looking at verbs and looking at the tense, looking at the mood, the person, the voice when translating.
[28:44] And so I want you to listen to how he translates verses 9 and 10 here. He says, And so I say to you, keep asking and it will be given to you. Keep searching and you will find.
[28:56] Keep knocking and the door will be opened to you because everyone who keeps asking will receive and the person who keeps searching will find and the person who keeps knocking will have the door opened.
[29:09] Jesus is telling us to be persistent in our requests to God. Just having a pattern of prayer doesn't make you a prayer warrior, we also need determination to truly pray.
[29:22] Jesus wants us to understand that we must be persistent in our praying to God. Here in this verse, the story is of a persistent friend who goes to his neighbor in the middle of the night after his neighbor has gone to bed, after his children are asleep around him and he begins knocking on the door.
[29:41] Clay, Josh, can you imagine if I came to your house right now with two new babies that you had just gotten to go to sleep at night and I just started banging on that door, you would probably, Clay, yeah, yeah, but yeah, you would probably be pretty annoyed with me and you made to begin with by just ignoring me and say, please just go away.
[30:02] If we ignore him, maybe he'll just go away and then I keep banging on the door and I keep banging until finally you get up, not because you're happy to see me, not because you're glad to see me, but because I'm persistent, I keep banging on the door, finally you'll give me, get up and give me whatever it is that I'm needing because of the persistence there.
[30:22] Now again, Jesus gives a very similar parable later on in chapter 18 where we are told in Luke 18, he says, and he told them a parable into the effect that they ought to pray and not lose heart.
[30:35] He said, in a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man and there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, give me justice against my adversary and for a while he refused but afterward he said to himself, though I neither fear God nor respect man yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.
[31:05] How many parents in here have made terrible parenting decisions because they've been beat down by their kids coming to them and asking for something? Whoever thought to put all of the candy at the checkout line is a genius or evil all at the same time?
[31:20] But we've all made those terrible, no you can't have chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese again tonight. No you can't do this and finally after they ask and asking you like, you know what, I don't care if you have it every single night for the rest of your life, here just eat and be done asking me.
[31:35] We've all made bad parenting decisions because our kids come to us and beat us down and continue asking and these are a couple parables that Jesus gives us on prayer. Now it's important to note that Jesus is not, he's not comparing God to an irritated neighbor or a unjust judge but rather he's contrasting God to these people.
[32:01] He's not saying God is like this but he's saying, he says, if these people who are annoyed by you, if these people who are irritated that you're coming to them or this unjust judge finally gives you what you want because you keep coming to them, he says, how much more will our heavenly father who loves us more than we could ever imagine want to give good things to his children?
[32:28] How much more will our heavenly father want to give us this? Persistence in prayer is not the challenging part in this message to interpret. The challenge comes in verse 9.
[32:42] He says, and I tell you, ask and you will be given. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. There are obviously many instances in life where we can see that God did not answer a prayer that we were praying.
[32:59] I want you to listen to how Martin Lloyd-Jones describes this. He says, there is no difficulty in showing that this statement, far from being a universal promise that God has pledged to do for us anything that we may ask of him.
[33:16] It actually is something very much bigger than that. He says, I thank God, let me put it more bluntly, I thank God that he is not prepared to do anything that I may chance ask of him.
[33:29] And I say that as a result of my own past experience in my past life, I, like all others, have often asked God for things and have asked God to do things which at the time I wanted very much and which I believe were the very best things for me.
[33:48] But now, standing at this particular juncture in my life and looking back, I say that I am more profoundly grateful to God that he did not grant certain things for which I asked and that he shut certain doors in my face.
[34:04] But perhaps the best commentary on this passage and honestly any passage in the Bible is the Bible itself. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 tells us that he prayed for this thorn in the flesh to be removed multiple times.
[34:20] Now, we don't know exactly what this thorn in the flesh was. Some people think it was a temptation that he kept struggling with. I tend to think it might be along the lines of poor eyesight that he was dealing with and that was very difficult for him.
[34:33] And in this passage it tells us, he says that he kept coming to God for the answer to this prayer. And we realize and we know that God didn't answer this prayer the way that Paul wanted.
[34:45] And we may think, well, God, why aren't you answering these prayers? And I think that we can probably all safely say that the Apostle Paul was probably a little further along in his sanctification than any of us here today.
[34:57] After all, this is the man who had a handkerchief that he had touched was going around and people were being healed by touching handkerchiefs that had touched the Apostle Paul here. God used him in some mighty ways.
[35:10] In this passage it tells us, it says, he says, three times I pleaded with the Lord about this. And I don't think this means three times like, Lord, take away this thorn, take away this thorn, take away this thorn.
[35:23] Well, he didn't do it, I guess. No, I think this is seasons of pleading to God for him to remove this thorn in the flesh where he desperately went to God praying for God to remove this from him.
[35:39] And he says this, he says, three times I pleaded with the Lord about this that it should leave me. But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.
[35:51] For my power is made perfect in weakness. Sometimes what we need on the other side of our prayer is not the answer we are hoping for, but what we need on the other side of that prayer is God himself.
[36:06] That we need to know that we have a heavenly Father who is walking through this with us and we have that assurance that he will be with us.
[36:17] And we can always assure ourselves that his grace is sufficient. So as we pray and we believe in the power of prayer, as we pray, let us pray boldly to our Father and let us pray persistently to our Father.
[36:35] And I want to encourage any of you to come back tonight because this is exactly what we're going to be doing as a church. You know, it's easy for us to say we believe in the power of the prayer and we would all check that box and say we affirm that statement, but let us come back together tonight and show with our actions that we believe in the power of prayer, that we believe that God wants us to come to him, that we believe that prayer changes things, that we believe that God is in using this church in some powerful ways and we want to be dependent on him for it.
[37:11] So I want to encourage you to come back tonight as we come together as a church, sing praises to God and go to him desperately asking God to work not only in this community, in this state, in this nation, around the world, but that God would use us and use this church to accomplish his purposes.
[37:33] Father, thank you so very much for who you are. Thank you for your word, for what it clearly teaches us about you, for what it clearly teaches us about the importance of prayer, something that was important to Jesus, so important that the disciples looked at him and saw that they needed to learn how to pray like Jesus was praying.
[37:55] So Lord, help us to pray as you do. Help us to pray as being dependent on you. Help us to pray right recognizing the great gift it is to call you our heavenly father.
[38:08] And so Lord, help us to pray bold prayers. Help us to pray prayers that seek your kingdom to come. And Lord, when we say that your kingdom come, we mean that.
[38:19] We mean it that your kingdom come, and Lord, we mean that we want to be used to help bring into us in your kingdom as you see fit. And so Lord, we thank you for all that you do for us each and every day.
[38:31] And Lord, I pray that if there's someone here today that has never placed their faith and their trust in you, Lord, that their prayer today will be a prayer of salvation, showing that they are dependent on you for everything.
[38:48] Lord, be with us. Help us to honor you with everything we say and do. And we ask all this in Jesus' precious name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[38:58] Amen.