Why Do We Pray?

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Well, a few weeks ago, we began a message, a lesson entitled, Introduction to Prayer, and the reason why we are looking at this subject is because we have been in a broader lesson on the book of James.
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If you'll turn in your Bibles to James chapter 5 and verse 13, you will see from verses 13 to 18, which brings almost to the end of the book, James finishes his epistle talking about the subject of prayer.
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He has already dealt with so many things in the Christian life, from having joy in our trials, to understanding that faith without works is dead, and understanding that we need to be humble and not prideful in our behavior as Christians.
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He has talked about so much in the Christian life.
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He ends this epistle, or draws to an end, on the subject of communion with God, prayer, conversations with our Father in Heaven.
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And I want to read again verses 13 through 18 as the introduction to tonight's lesson, as we go through our study.
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Verse 13 asks a very simple question.
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Verse 13 says, Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.
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Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
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Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.
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And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.
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And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
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Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.
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The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
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Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain.
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And for three years and six months, it did not rain on the earth.
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Then he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
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And we'll end there at verse 18, because verse 19 will take us to the end.
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So ends the reading of God's Word.
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In our last lesson, we talked about an introduction to prayer.
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And I said, before I give an exposition, a complete exposition of all that James is saying here, I wanted to deal with the subject of prayer as a subject on its own.
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Because there is so much misunderstanding about the subject of prayer in the Christian world, and it seems to me that it's only getting worse.
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I have people who come to me all the time who are misunderstanding what the Bible says about prayer.
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Often it doesn't come from within our church, but it does sometimes, but most often it comes from people outside of the church.
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And they'll come to me and they'll say that they've heard God's audible voice promise them thus and so, and I have to consider the reality of that.
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I don't believe that God audibly speaks to people anymore, not the way that He did to the prophets of old.
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I think Hebrews is pretty clear.
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It says, In times past, God spoke to our fathers and to the prophets, but now He speaks to His Son.
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In my understanding of Scripture, God doesn't speak audibly to individuals anymore.
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I think He speaks to us through the Spirit of God who lives within us.
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But I don't think that there's this audible voice from heaven.
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But there are people who believe that, and so when somebody comes and tells me, Well, God told me this person's going to be healed.
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You know, my immediate thought is, Are you willing to bet your life because in the Old Testament, if you said someone was going to be healed and you were wrong, you were put to death because false prophets were put to death.
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Are you willing to say if that person isn't healed that you're willing to die with them? Because that's what you're saying.
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You said God told you this.
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Did He really? Or are you just willing to say that because it's what makes you feel good? Serious business, isn't it? When you really think about what it is to speak for God, and to speak on behalf of God, that's serious business.
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So like I said, the subject of prayer, and Jennifer and I were talking about this yesterday, this Sunday I'm preaching on false prophets, because that's where we are in 2 John.
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Deceivers have gone out in the world.
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And John talks about that in the 2nd epistle.
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My wife gets previews of my sermons.
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She has to hear them twice.
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Isn't that great? And so oftentimes when I'm writing, I'll say, Listen to this, does it make sense? And I'll read what I've written, and she'll say yes when it makes sense, and she will definitely say no when it doesn't.
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And I'm glad, because I'll go back and rewrite it.
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But we were just talking about a false prophet died this week.
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I'm not going to name her, but I'm mentioning only that a very prominent television person passed, and her proclamations about Jesus and about the Gospel were false.
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Not a little bit, but a lot.
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And Jennifer said, you know, I've never heard her say anything.
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So I immediately opened up just a quick audio file, because nowadays you can get stuff very quickly.
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And I just pulled up an audio file.
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And I said, listen to this.
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And she was talking about prayer, incidentally.
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And she was talking about how you women, with your little bit of grocery money, need to take that little bit of grocery money, and you need to send it to her, because God wants your little bit of grocery money, so that you can essentially, and did she not say, buy His blessings? Send your little bit of grocery money, and essentially, and I don't think she actually used the term buy His blessings, but that was essentially what it was saying.
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Send the money in, so that God will bless you, because you are giving your money to Him.
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God is not able to be bribed.
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He who owns the cattle on a thousand hills doesn't need you to bribe Him with your little trinkets.
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It reminds me again, I told the story last time I taught this lesson, or the last time we were here, about the man who says, when I speak, God sits up and takes notice, and He listens when I put a demand on His will.
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That's just the exact phrase.
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He says, when I speak, God sits up and takes notice, and He listens when I put a demand on His will.
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What kind of hubris would believe that you could demand the God of the universe? That you could command the God of the universe to take notice? Again, the whole idea of what prayer is, and why we pray, and the purpose of it, has been so maligned, and so misunderstood, that even to have this conversation, I felt it was necessary to begin with an introduction to prayer.
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First of all, in our last session, we talked about the idea of changing God.
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We do not change God in any way by anything that we do.
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There are people who believe that we do.
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People who believe that God will be going one direction, and we pray, and He switches and goes another direction.
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That's not what happens.
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God doesn't change.
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He does not change because He's perfect.
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Remember what we talked about perfection? That which is perfect doesn't change, because if it's perfect and it changes, it becomes imperfect.
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If it changes for the better, it wasn't perfect to begin with.
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If it changes for the worse, it ceases to be perfect.
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And if it makes a lateral change, the very need for a change shows an imperfection.
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God doesn't change.
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This is why the Scripture says in Numbers, God is not a man that He should lie, or a son of man that He should change His mind.
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1 Samuel 15, And the God of Israel will not lie or change His mind, for He is not a man that He should change His mind.
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Malachi 3.6, For I the Lord do not change.
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Scripture is clear.
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We talked about last time that there are places where it seems that God does change His mind.
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And from our perspective, it does seem as God has changed His mind, because we see things from our perspective.
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But from God's perspective, He knows the end from the beginning.
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He's already at the end.
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He's still at the beginning.
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He's not bound by time.
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And so God doesn't change, because God is in a realm of time and space that we don't even understand.
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God is not bound by time, as we are.
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God doesn't see into the future.
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God's in the future.
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That's the difference.
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God doesn't look down the corridor of time to see what's going to happen.
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He doesn't have to.
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He's already there.
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That's really deep thinking, but it's the reality of it.
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This is why Arminianism is false.
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Arminianism says that God looks down the corridor of time, sees what you're going to do, and then bases His decision on what He's going to do on what you're going to do.
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God doesn't have to look down the corridor of time.
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It starts with a false premise.
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That's a side issue.
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I'm not going to get into Arminianism and all that tonight.
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But the point is, we've got to the subject of the evening.
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What is prayer for? If prayer is not to change God, if prayer is not to change God's mind, what's it for? Well, I have three things.
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And we looked at the first one last time.
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But there are three things that prayer has been appointed for that have nothing to do with changing God's mind, but they are important for us to understand as believers.
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One, prayer has been appointed as an act of worship.
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This was our conversation.
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This is where we ended last time.
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Prayer has been appointed as an act of worship.
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Years ago, Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul was invited to a church to preach.
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And before he preached his sermon, the minister of the church came up to the pulpit to introduce him, as is normal.
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If there's a guest speaker, often I'll come up and introduce the speaker to the congregation.
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Some people might not know him.
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It's courtesy to introduce whoever the speaker is going to be.
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Well, the man came up to the pulpit, and he said, Ladies and gentlemen, now that worship has concluded, we will have Dr.
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Sproul come and bring the sermon.
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Well, Dr.
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Sproul, with his typical wit and humor, in a loving way, rebuked the man as he walked up to the podium, to the pulpit, and he said, No, worship has not concluded.
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Worship continues with the preaching of God's Word.
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You see, we have so connected worship and singing that oftentimes people think that the part of service that's worship is the singing, and then you have the praying, and then you have the preaching.
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But that's not the way it is.
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Worship is all of those things.
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Worship is in the singing.
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In fact, what is singing? Singing is praying together to God.
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Think about the songs that we sing.
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We're either singing praise to Him, we're singing about our need from Him, we're singing about what He has done, or what He's going to do.
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Is that not prayer? But music? Prayer is worship.
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This is why there are some churches who only sing the songs.
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Have you ever heard of that? There is something called exclusive psalmody.
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Exclusive psalmody is they don't have any music unless it is directly taken from the 150 psalms.
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There are 150 psalms in the book of Psalms.
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All of those psalms have been set to music, usually played on an organ of some form or a piano.
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And they have a book, and you can purchase the hymnal.
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It's a hymnal, but it's a psalm hymnal.
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And they only sing those psalms.
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I don't necessarily agree with that.
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I don't think it's wrong or right.
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I think it's an issue of conscience.
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I think it's beautiful if you've ever heard some of the psalmody which is sung.
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But I do think it's somewhat limiting.
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I think that there are other psalms that have been written, and the New Testament talks about psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.
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The New Testament sort of broadens it, but this limits it to psalms only.
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But my point is simply this.
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What are the psalms? The psalms are prayers.
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Read Psalm 51.
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And what do you hear? You hear David crying out in repentance for what he did and stealing the wife of Uriah and giving him a death sentence by sending him out to the field to die when the other men withdrew from him.
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Right? It's a prayer.
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Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your loving kindness.
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Right? This is how David prays.
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That's what the psalms are.
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They're prayers.
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Praying is worship.
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Prayer is an act of worship.
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And people say, well, if God's sovereign, why do we pray? Because prayer is worship.
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Or they'll say, if God knows what He's going to do, why do we pray? Well, because it's...
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Do you think that you're praying so you can tell Him what to do? Do you think that's what prayer is? No, prayer first is worship to God.
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He deserves to be worshipped, and that's what prayer is.
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It's worship to Him.
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This is why oftentimes I'll encourage, and I've talked to our deacons recently, and I've mentioned this to our elders, and I try myself to do it when I'm praying, to pray Scripture.
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And this is something that we could spend a whole lesson on, so I definitely don't want to sidetrack myself, but the deacons recently had a meeting, we were talking about praying in the church, and I said, one of the ways that you can pray is just take some of the Scripture and memorize it and use that in your prayers, because that's just speaking God's Word back to Him.
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That's a form of worship.
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And it really is.
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If you read through the prayers of men like John Bunyan and Charles Spurgeon and the Puritans, and you read their prayers, it's saturated with God's Word.
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Because it's worship.
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We don't get up and pray fancy prayers because we want to show off.
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We don't get up and pray fancy prayers because we want to make you all think we're super spiritual.
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That's not the reason.
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I mean, I hope it isn't.
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I don't think any of the men that pray in our church do so for that reason.
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But we pray God's Word, and we pray in such a way that we are seeking to catch the majesty of God in our prayer.
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Oh God, who art in heaven, hallowed be Your name.
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You know, that's not the way you talk to Joe Smoe.
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But you ain't talking to Joe Smoe.
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You're talking to the God of the universe.
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You know? Now, I'm not saying everybody has to be articulate and speak in King James English.
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Not everybody can do it as good as Mr.
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Paul.
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I'm just, yeah, they're good.
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Not everybody does it as good as others.
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I'm not saying you have to be a scholar, but prayer is worship.
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The more we know about Scripture, the more that we're able to articulate God's Word back to Him, the more our prayer life will be saturated with worship.
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All right, that's enough.
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I think everybody understands.
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Prayer is worship.
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And we talked about that last time.
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Now let's move to the next thing.
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Prayer is a means of spiritual growth.
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Prayer is a means of spiritual growth.
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And what do I mean by that? Well, first, it causes us to humble ourselves.
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What is a life lived without prayer, if not a life that's lived in pride? Let me say it again.
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What is a life lived without prayer, if it's not first a life lived in pride? The man who doesn't call out to God in the morning, the man who doesn't call out to God in the evening, the man who doesn't call out to God at all, what does he presume about his life? That he is in charge.
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That he doesn't need God.
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So the first thing prayer does is it forces us into a state of humility.
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And humility is one of the virtues that God seeks in His people.
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He resists the proud, and He gives grace to who? The humble.
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Prayer to God is an affirmation of our need for God.
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It's an affirmation of our inadequacy.
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You know, 200 years ago, and some change, our nation signed a document.
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It was called the Declaration of what? Independence, right? And that's fine as far as nations are concerned.
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We were identifying our independence from Britain, and our independence from another nation, and our sole authority as a sovereign nation.
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But the reality is none of us are independent.
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There is no such thing.
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Independence is a myth.
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It's something that we put in our mind, well, I'm an independent man, or I'm an independent woman.
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There's no such thing.
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Every one of us is dependent on all kinds of things.
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You're dependent on the air you breathe.
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You're dependent on the food you eat.
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You're dependent on your skin, holding your body together.
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You're dependent on your bones, holding the skin together.
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You're dependent on all kinds of stuff.
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Your atmosphere, water, all these things are necessary.
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You're an absolutely dependent being.
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But when we fail to pray, we begin to live as if we are independent, and we're not independent.
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We're absolutely dependent upon God, and prayer helps us to grow in our understanding of our dependence.
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I think I'm going to get this quote wrong.
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It's not in my notes, but I'm going to say it as best as I can, and later on somebody can challenge me if you want to get...
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It was Martin Luther, one of my favorite men from history.
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He said one time, he said, I have so much to do today that if I couldn't pray for three hours, I would never get it all done.
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He said, I have so much to do today that if I couldn't pray for three hours, I'd never get it all done.
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Now I know for many of us, the idea of praying for three hours in a day seems like, wow.
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But if you were to take your computer and ask it how many hours you spent on it in a day, or the television, again, prayer causes us to recognize who we need the most.
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God.
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And the second thing is, it forces us, as a means of spiritual growth, it forces us to exercise faith.
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Faith is a gift from God, but faith is not something that sits dormant within us.
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Faith is something that we have to exercise.
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Faith is meant to be exercised.
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We read in this chapter, and we're going to talk about it more next week, the prayer of faith, which has great power.
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What is that? Like I said, we're going to talk about it next time, but prayer in and of itself is an act of faith, because we actually believe that someone's hearing us.
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We actually believe that someone is responding to what we're saying, and that he cares enough to listen.
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You realize that when you pray, that there's a God on the other end of the line.
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You're not just speaking into the air.
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It's so easy to think that you are.
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It's so easy to just simply think, well, this is just me talking.
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But you're not.
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You're talking to God.
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But there's faith involved in that.
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You're growing in your faith as you're praying.
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So it's a means of spiritual growth.
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It helps to decrease your pride.
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It helps to increase your faith.
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So it's a means that God used to grow you.
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Decrease pride, increase faith.
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Thirdly, prayer has been appointed as worship.
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Prayer has been appointed as a means of spiritual growth.
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Thirdly, prayer has been appointed as an avenue for petition.
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It has been appointed as an avenue for petition.
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Throughout the Bible, prayer is seen as the way in which God's people ask God for things.
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Now, I'm not in any way, shape, or form contradicting what I said earlier, that you're not going to change God.
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I'm not.
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I promise.
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I'm not speaking out of both sides of my mouth.
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I'm not a hypocrite questioning what I said earlier.
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I want you to hear me out.
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When we go to God and we petition God, that petition is known by God before it is ever made.
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Do we agree? I mean, doesn't the Bible tell us, Doesn't the very Bible tell us that God knows what you need before you ask? And yet, He still wants you to ask.
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He knows what you need before you even need it.
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And yet, He wants you to acknowledge your need and bring your need to Him.
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In Jesus' model prayer, the model prayer for all believers, it goes how? Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Your name.
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Thy kingdom come.
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Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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That's what we would call the introduction to the prayer.
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It identifies who God is, where God is, and what God is.
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He's sovereign.
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He's in heaven.
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He's our Father.
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And, His will is done in heaven, and we pray that His will would be done on earth.
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We pray that His will, that His perfect will, that will which is in Scripture, would be done on earth, that people wouldn't disobey Him.
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And then what's the very next line? Give us, what? This day our daily bread.
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Why do we say give us this day? Why not say, God, why don't you take care of this whole week? I'm going to pray on Monday, that you take care of the whole week, and I'll see you next Monday.
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Actually, we do it on Sunday.
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Then I don't even have to do it.
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The preacher will do it for me.
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Or one of the elders, or one of the deacons will do it for me.
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We'll just let them take care of it.
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God, take care of the week.
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You know, there's actually biblical foundation behind the whole give us this day our daily bread.
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If you remember in the Old Testament, there was the time in the wilderness, and they got something every day.
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What was it called? Manna from heaven.
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And they only got enough for one day.
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If they tried to hold some over to the next day, it would rot.
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If the only day it would go for another day was on the Sabbath, so they didn't have to collect on the Sabbath, but every other day it would rot before the next day.
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Why? God was teaching them dependence.
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Remember what we said earlier? Nobody's independent.
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He's teaching them dependence.
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This is why we're told to ask every day.
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The model prayer is really valuable.
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I think we miss it as what it is.
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Jesus was asked by His disciples, teach us to pray.
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He gives us this prayer several times in the New Testament.
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We have it in Matthew.
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We have it in Luke.
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A little bit different, but it's basically the same prayer, and it has the same foundations.
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We go to God knowing who He is, and we ask for our needs, trusting that He will supply them.
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You were going to say something earlier.
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What was it? Okay, I thought I saw your hand go up.
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I'm sorry.
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But like I said, for some people, though, this part can be confusing.
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Because if God has foreordained all that shall come to pass, how do our petitions have any effect? Doesn't the belief in doctrines like election and predestination make petition in prayer simply an exercise in futility? Well, the answer is no.
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Because Jesus would never describe, or rather Jesus would never prescribe anything that was simply an exercise in futility.
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If God told you to do something, there's a reason for it.
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That's...
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We must understand that.
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God told us to pray.
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As a result, there's a reason for it.
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Furthermore, to say that because God has ordained the future means we shouldn't pray would be as inane as being because saying that God knows what we are going to ask that we shouldn't pray.
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And Jesus dealt with that in the Scripture.
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As we already said, your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
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And that passage is Matthew 6, 8, by the way.
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Matthew chapter 6 and verse 8.
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So if God knows what we need, and He's already ordained our good, why do we petition Him? Because prayer is not meant to furnish God with knowledge, but rather it is designed to furnish us with an opportunity to confess our need.
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Prayer is not to provide God with knowledge.
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It is to provide us with an opportunity to confess our need.
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And in confessing our need, we demonstrate our dependence on Him.
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Even further, one needs to consider the concept that the reason why we make prayers of faith is because God has led us to those prayers by the Spirit who indwells us.
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I want to share a little bit of testimony.
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My wife can testify to this, and she would, I'm sure, given the opportunity.
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In the last 10 years of ministry, and even before that, 15 years of being in this church and ministry of some sort, because it all started right around 9-11, and that was 6-15, can you imagine 9-11 is 15 years ago? There's gray in my beard, guys.
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Anyway, I'm sorry.
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It's getting there.
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9-11 is 15 years ago.
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It was a watershed moment in American history, and some of the children in this room weren't alive.
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It's interesting that this is the first generation that will vote.
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This vote, this presidential voting will be the first time that people will vote who do not remember 9-11 because they were too young.
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That's scary, by the way, and it's a testimony of where we are where we are because people don't remember.
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It's how quickly we forget.
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But in the last 15 years, there have been times where I have seen God work through the petitions that He Himself laid on my heart to pray.
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And that's something I want you guys to understand.
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When there's something on your heart that you have to pray because it is so deeply concerning your soul and you're a believer, the Spirit is the one leading you to that prayer.
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That does not always mean you pray for the right thing because we can make mistakes, and that's why Paul tells us that the Spirit prays for us when we don't know what to pray.
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But I'll give you an example, and Jack knows this story, and a few of you know this story, and I hope that it's...
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When I first started as the minister of this church, we had a female elder, and I was opposed to that from a scriptural perspective.
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I didn't dislike the person.
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It wasn't personal.
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It was a matter of simply what I believe the Bible taught.
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And I became seriously convicted about serving together because I felt like it was unbiblical.
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I was away at a Bible conference and it rained upon me the conviction to the point that I was ready to tender my resignation as the pastor of this church.
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I remember talking to my wife on the phone, crying on this subject because it had so disturbed my conscience that I realized that I was serving in an unbiblical way, I felt.
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And so I prayed, and I was on my knees before God.
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I was begging God for an answer.
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I didn't know what to do.
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I didn't want to leave.
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I've never had a desire to leave this church, hopefully not for a while, but I haven't yet.
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Just God has me here, and I don't have any desire to go anywhere else.
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But at this moment I was convicted, steadily convicted in my soul, and I was driving back, and I was praying, and I was just crying, and I didn't know what to do, and I said, well, God is going to have to be in charge of this, and I'm going to have to leave it with Him.
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The Tuesday after I got back from our Bible conference, we had an elders meeting, which we still have elders meetings regularly, but that night we had an elders meeting.
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I walked into the elders meeting ready to resign, and I sat down at the table.
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My heart was broken, but I was ready to stand for what I believed was right.
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At that elders meeting, without anyone asking her to, she resigned without any questions.
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She said, I know that it disturbs the pastor that I'm in this position, and I need to resign.
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Praise God.
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I don't know any...
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I didn't call her and ask her to do that.
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Nobody knew, except for Jennifer, and one other person I talked to I know didn't have any conversation with her, but it was a personal conversation about this issue.
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But the point is, she didn't know.
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She had no idea.
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Why did God put it on my heart to pray for that thing? Because He had a plan, and He was working it out.
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My petitions didn't change God's mind, but my petitions showed me what God could do if I trusted in Him.
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You see, that's what I mean when I say it's an avenue for petition.
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It's a place to get down on our knees before God, and say, God, I can't do this.
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I need You to do it.
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I need You to change this situation, because I can't.
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It's a place to demonstrate our dependence.
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That's what prayer is.
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I want to end tonight with a quote from A.W.
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Pink on the subject of prayer.
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Prayer is not so much an act as it is an attitude.
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An attitude of dependency upon God.
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Prayer is a confession of creature weakness, yea, of helplessness.
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Prayer is the acknowledgement of our need and the spreading of it before God.
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We do not say that this is all there is to prayer.
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It is not.
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But it is the essential, the primary element in prayer.
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We freely admit that we are quite unable to give a complete definition of prayer within the compass of a brief sentence or in any number of words.
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Prayer is both an attitude and an act.
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And human act.
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And yet, there is the divine element in it too.
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And it is this which makes an exhaustible analysis impossible as well as an impious to attempt.
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But admitting this, we do insist again that prayer is fundamentally an attitude of dependency upon God.
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Therefore, prayer is the very opposite of dictating to God.
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Because prayer is an attitude of dependency.
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The one who really prays is submissive.
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Submissive to the divine will.
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And submissive to the divine will means that we are content for the Lord to supply our need according to the dictates of His own sovereign pleasure.
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Beloved A.W.
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Pink got it right.
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When we pray, we don't pray to dictate God.
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We pray to demonstrate our dependency on Him.
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Let's pray.
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Father in Heaven, I thank You for the opportunity to discuss the subject of prayer.
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Having looked at Your Word in the weeks ahead, look even more intently at what James had to say.
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I pray that tonight's lesson has been in accordance with Your Word, that it has been in accordance with the truth.
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And Father, that You would lead us to a spirit of dependency whereby we would pray morning, noon, and night, and confess our need of You knowing that there is no way that we can go through this Christian walk without confessing that need.
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We thank You for Christ and all that He has provided for us.
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And it's in His name we pray.
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Amen.