Commanded to Pray Together

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So today we are resuming our series on corporate worship, the corporate worship of the local church and I have made it my task today to teach on and to exhort each one of us to be a people who rightly understand, who rightly esteem, and who rightly commit ourselves to corporate prayer as one of the chief elements of this church's assembled worship.

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And I don't think I need to say very much to any of you to convince you that the corporate prayer or that corporate prayer in general in the church is a woefully neglected aspect of church life in most of our modern western churches.

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Over a hundred years ago, a well -known theologian wrote this, he said, we are too busy to pray and so we are too busy to have power.

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How true are those words, even though they were written before the invention of the automobile or the airplane or the internet.

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He continues, he says, we have a great deal of activity, but we accomplish little. Many services, but few conversions.

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Much machinery, but few results. Why? Because there is no prayer.

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Now, moving a little bit closer, half a century ago, a British preacher,

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Leonard Ravenhill, you might have heard of him before, he was asked at one point if he ever prayed for the dead.

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It makes me wonder how would you answer that question if someone said, do you pray for the dead? And Leonard Ravenhill responded sharply, he said,

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I don't pray for the dead, I preach to them. I think every pew in every church,

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I think this is hyperbolic, is death row. Think about that, he said. They're dead.

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They sing about God. They talk about God, but they're dead. They have no living relationship with God.

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I have to caution that I think that's a bit hyperbolic, but is there not a grain of truth in that saying?

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The point that he is making, that he was making, is true nonetheless. That there are very few

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Christians, and even fewer churches, who prioritize walking with God in prayer.

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And you can mark those Christians and you can mark those churches who do not pray, they are in fact dead.

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And then a little bit closer still, a few weeks ago, I heard Scott Brown, actually the author of that book that we're promoting for families, who said this, he's a

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Reformed Baptist pastor in the U .S., he said, the corporate prayer meeting has died in the

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North American church. When many churches meet, there are many activities, but prayer, prayer lies now at the fringe of all that the church does.

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Prayer has become, I would respectfully submit, a transitional activity.

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Only a perfunctory prop in worship. Now kids, I want to ask you, what does that word perfunctory mean?

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Maybe adults, do you know what that means, the word perfunctory? It means this, it is an action or a gesture carried out with minimal effort or reflection.

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Such as the prayer life of the local church. And for the last several weeks,

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I felt, as I've been preaching on this topic of the regular principle of worship, I felt that I've been preaching to the choir.

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I don't think I need to convince most of you that expository preaching is important.

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I don't think most Christians subject themselves to an hour of preaching straight if they didn't think that at least preaching was somewhat important to the worship of the local church.

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I also don't, I also think that I don't have to convince you that singing true words about God is important.

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Forgive me, I realize I had my iPad on dark mode and I'm thinking, why am I getting glare like never before?

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I've got to figure it out. I don't think I have to convince you that singing songs that are true about God is important.

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Or that we should cast away all songs that undermine the gospel or that contradict the word of God.

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But I do think today that the word I have to preach to you today is especially important for you and for me and for this church.

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I'm certain that every single person in this church, myself included, needs to be taught and reminded, even rebuked and then exhorted to commit again to go deeper, deeper in our walk with God through prayer and especially through corporate prayer.

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We hear all the time about a climate crisis. There is, let me suggest, there is a climate crisis in the church.

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And that is a climate of prayerlessness amongst every, or the believers within the church and then the church itself corporately.

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A prayerlessness amongst God's people that has resulted in prayerless worship in Christ's church.

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And what I want to do today as we look at 1 Timothy 2 is I want to confront that destructive force of prayerlessness in Christ's church.

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That destructive force of prayerlessness in your heart and in mine. That destructive force of prayerlessness even in the corporate gathering of the local church.

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And so, from 1 Timothy 2, these first eight verses, I'm going to remind us.

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There's a lot of reminding here and we'll get to why that is. Remind us that we not only have the privilege, oh the privilege, of walking with God in prayer, but we have a

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God -given mandate, a scriptural duty. We are compelled by the full force of the

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Bible to pray together. We have, in fact, been commanded by God Himself to assemble and to pray as we worship

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Him. We could go so far as to say that prayerless worship is godless worship.

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And so we want to develop today a theology of prayerful worship. And we're going to see that obedience to this command and the manner in which we pray actually determines whether or not

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God is pleased with our worship. I think all of us, when we meet on the

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Lord's Day and we sing, and certainly when I preach, when you hear the preaching, we want to please

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God. For all of us who are children of God, we want to please God. And today we will learn, in fact, one of the keys in our worship to pleasing

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God. And that is God honoring prayer in our worship. And so we're going to look at six truths concerning our corporate prayer life that come directly from 1

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Timothy 6. And I urge you this afternoon to carefully listen, carefully hear what this passage teaches us.

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And by God's grace, make the necessary course corrections to align your life with the truths that we are confronted with in God's Word.

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Hear it, please, that God would make us a prayerful people. And so let's look then at the first truth of six that I want us to examine, and that is found in verse 1.

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Paul says to Timothy, First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intersections, and thanksgivings be made for all people.

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The first truth that I want you to see with me here is this, that we have a command to pray.

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We are commanded by God Himself to pray to Him in our worship. You see,

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Paul here is writing to his child in the faith, his young disciple, Timothy.

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And these are now, if you don't know the chronology of Scripture, these are now the sunset years of Paul's life.

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It's about AD 62, AD 63, only a few years before Paul is going to be killed by the

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Emperor Nero. And as we've looked at in times past, when Paul is writing the last of these letters, they come with a special kind of gravitas.

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These are some of his last letters to his church and to his young disciple,

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Timothy. And in this particular case, Paul is now writing letters to Timothy who had stayed behind in Ephesus to deal with issues that were happening in that particular church.

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So to put this, if you're thinking about where this falls into the book of Acts, this is after Acts chapter 28.

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Paul has already spent time with the Ephesian elders. You'll remember, on the shore outside of Miletus, on the bank or the shore of the

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Mediterranean Sea. There he exhorted them. He prayed with them. He went through his first Roman imprisonment.

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He's now been released. Timothy is in Ephesus and he is writing to him to address serious concerns that are in the church.

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And the themes of this letter of 1 Timothy are threefold. It's important that I go through this so that you understand the greater context.

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First, Paul writes to deal with false teachers and false teaching, false doctrine.

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And this theme, if you look at 1 Timothy, punctuates the whole letter. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, chapter 4, and chapter 6, we see a great deal of effort being devoted to that, to these false teachers and the false doctrine that they are bringing.

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The second theme that we see in this letter is that Paul writes to give instruction on orderly worship.

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We find that in our chapter today, in 1 Timothy chapter 2. And we'll see how he's dealing with prayer.

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We're not going to get to it today, but the role even of women in the church at the end of the chapter. Without a doubt, this is a chapter that is meant to be applied specifically to the corporate prayer life or the corporate life of the church.

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And then thirdly, Paul addresses church leadership. And we find that for those of you who are in the

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Institute or have been in the Institute, that's in 1 Timothy chapter 3. 1

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Timothy chapter 3. And so the context of our passage has to do with the assembly of God's people.

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And it's answering questions like this. What is our aim when we meet? When we meet, what do we do?

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What should be taught? Who are the leaders of the church? What are the qualifications of those leaders?

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Who should speak in the church? Even who should be silent? And the purpose of everything that is written in this passage,

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I think can be summarized if you look just over to 1 Timothy 3 in verse 15. I think it can be summarized in this verse, 1

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Timothy 3 .15. Paul says, If I delay, you may know how one ought to behave.

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Behave where? In the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.

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And so we are studying this passage today because it deals specifically with how the church should function and the great question of this series.

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How then should we worship? And so beginning in chapter 2, Paul brings a matter before us that is of primary importance.

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How do we know that? Because in verse 1, he starts with these words, First of all, then.

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Now this could be a matter simply of chronology, but I think it would be odd for Paul, if it was chronology, to start well into his letter with the instruction first.

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I am convinced and other commentators are convinced that this is not a matter of chronology, but of importance, of primary importance, of first importance.

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When he says, first of all, he wants to grab our attention with something that is very important.

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And what is that? This command, this urge.

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Paul says that he urges the church to pray.

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Now that word urge, it can be translated a number of different ways. We see it in the Bible used sometimes to indicate an imploring to plead or to summons.

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It's closely related to the English word command. That here we have a divine summons from God.

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Brothers and sisters, you and I, to pray. Oh, to pray to God when we meet.

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God himself calls us, exhorts us, even commands us to pray to him in the corporate life of the church.

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When the saints of God meet, prayer is not optional. I know that goes without saying, except that it's not the practice in many modern

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Western churches today. Prayer is not optional, but is to be one of the primary activities of the local church when we meet to worship.

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We ought to recognize that it is one of the greatest privileges in all the world to pray. Yes, but more than that, it is one of our greatest duties to pray to God.

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If I could fast forward for a moment to verse 8, Paul says there, I desire that in every place men should pray.

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This is a summons not only to Timothy and to the church in Ephesus, but to the church in every place and in every circumstance that we would pray.

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What more do you need? What more do we need to ensure that each one of us is making prayer an integral part of the

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Christian life? We have been commanded, brothers and sisters, to pray. Now, I could just leave it there and say,

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God has commanded it, end of first point, we move on. But I think for the sake of pastoral counsel for you, so that you might know why it is that we neglect prayer, why it is that we don't obey this command to pray,

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I'm going to ask the question and try to answer it. Why is it that so many churches neglect prayer?

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Why is it, to use that P word that I used earlier, why is prayer treated as a perfunctory prop?

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Something that we use at the beginning and at the end and to transition between activities, rather than as part of the meat and the potatoes of corporate worship.

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Why did churches neglect prayer? And I'll ask the question, I'll drill a little bit deeper.

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Why do us, why do we individually neglect prayer? I thought for a moment that perhaps

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I would do a survey and ask for all of those of us who are satisfied, who are overjoyed with our prayer lives, raise your hands, but I don't think many would.

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And if someone did, we would probably doubt that, if they were to raise their hands. That most of us know that we are woefully neglectful of prayer in our lives.

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Now we might say, if someone were to ask us, why do we not pray? We might say it is because we are busy.

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But brethren, you and I both know, I'm a busy man, many of you are busy, but we're never too busy to eat.

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We're never too busy to drink. We're never too busy to get a little bit of sleep. That in and of itself is not a sufficient excuse.

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Some of us might say, I struggle with prayer because it is hard. And I would say with you, yes, absolutely, prayer is hard.

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And yet how many of us do hard things because they are important to us? How many of us go to the gym, run marathons, listen to one hour sermons?

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I don't know, because it's interesting, because we want to do it. Brethren, to our humiliation,

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I believe that we neglect prayer in our personal lives and in the church. Because like the

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Ephesians, like the Ephesian church, and like every other Christian, hence this command, it's because we have a big view of self and a small view of God.

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And it's because, again, to our humiliation, we reckon that it is a very small thing to spend time communing with the living

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God. That to do such a thing is not worth our time, is not worth our effort, is not worth our energies.

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But dear ones, what could be further from the truth? We know, and we know, oh we know, that when we have spent time with God, communing with God, that there is nothing, almost nothing greater in all the world than just to be in the very presence of God, in his word, in prayer, knowing and walking with God.

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So why it is then, why is it that we neglect prayer? As I prayed earlier, we are new creatures, but we are fallen ones.

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And I think that we are subject to one of the most hideous forms of spiritual amnesia that causes us to neglect time spent with our

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God. And hence, God has not merely suggested then that we pray.

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What would we do if God, in his word, said this, I suggest that you pray? Would that be to our benefit?

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But no, God has commanded us to pray. And friends, he has commanded us to pray for our own good.

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Do you know something? That God gains nothing from your prayers.

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I'm sorry to say, but an immutable and self -existent God gains nothing from your prayers.

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And that the command to pray, in fact, only benefits one party in the equation.

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And who is that? But it is Christ's church. Hence the command that when

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God commands us to pray, it is for our good. He gains nothing from this command.

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But we stand to gain everything from the command. And how many of us need to be reminded of these truths?

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There are few things in this life that are as sweet and as precious and as good as walking with the living

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God through prayer. And I'm standing in this pulpit this afternoon to remind you of that truth.

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And you'll need to be reminded again that, brethren, one of the best gifts that God has given us in all of the cosmos is that when we get alone, we can be alone with God.

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And that when we come together, we can come together and be with God, with the living

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God to talk to him and to bring him our needs and to bring him our cares and our requests and our thanksgivings and a number of other things that we'll look at here in a moment's time.

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I'm standing here to remind you, brethren, to walk with God in prayer.

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And that you will not, for a moment, not even for a millisecond, regret that.

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I spoke to a friend who is a pastor in another church in our city a number of years ago.

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And he was telling me a story about a woman that he was going to visit fairly regularly because of a degenerative condition.

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She had gone blind. She was bedridden. She was destined to spend, and I'm not sure if she's still alive or not, destined to spend the rest of her life horizontal on a bed, unable to move, unable to see.

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And as he would go and visit her, one of the things that she would regularly lament is that she felt useless to God.

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Useless to God and useless to Christ's church because she said, what can I do?

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I can't do anything anymore. She felt as if her life had no more purpose.

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And my dear brother who was counseling her, he said to this, this to her, after comforting her in a variety of other ways, he comforted her with these words.

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He said, God has opened up for you one of the most vital and one of the most meaningful, one of the most privileged ministries that a

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Christian can ever engage in. And that is the ministry of prayer.

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God has freed you up so that you can be alone with him. That woman will never hit the streets with us on White Avenue and preach the gospel.

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She will never care for the poor. She will never again be able to go and visit sick church members.

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She cannot care for the orphans or the widows, let alone herself. She will always be from this point on, from that point on, the woman being visited.

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But I'll tell you what she can do. What she is commanded to do. What we are commanded to do.

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To go to God in prayer and ever live to pray to the living

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God. I quoted from Leonard Ravenhill. I'll quote from him again. He said, there are few ministries more important and more indispensable than the ministry of intercessory prayer.

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In our good God, he commands us to pray. So next, let's turn our attention to the second truth.

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We're first of all urged to pray. And we're urged to do this. Supplications, to make supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings.

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The text says for all people. Here we see the elements of our prayers.

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The second point, the elements of our prayers. I would suggest to you that so many people have a one -dimensional view of prayer.

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Perhaps you do as well. Even for myself, as I was reflecting on this.

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That I read the scriptures on prayer. I study prayer. I read extra biblical books on prayer.

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I preach on prayer. I lead the congregation in praying. I think about every

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Sunday. How I can lead our church in the adoration of God. The confession of sin. The assurance of Christ's pardon.

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Thanksgiving and of supplication. But then what do I do when I go to pray alone with God?

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I skip all of that and go immediately to supplication. As if that is the only thing, the only way to pray.

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Supplication is something that we are commanded to do. We'll talk about it in a moment. But if that is all you do, that is the great impoverisher of your prayer life.

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That God has so much more for us than just coming to him like the cosmic

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DJ of the universe and giving him requests. That there is a

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God to be known through prayer. That there is a God to be praised through prayer. Thanked through prayer in many other such ways.

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And so for our good, even as God commands us to pray, we see that he has given us just a small sampling in this first verse of how we are to pray.

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We see that word supplication. That word implies a lack on our part.

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We are lacking something. And so we come to God bringing our need to him.

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Trusting that he will provide for our lack. We see there that generic word that we are to make prayers.

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What does it mean to make prayers? As we are supplicating and as we're interceding, as we're thanking. That word really denotes a sense not only of bringing our requests to God, but of speaking to God.

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Of speaking to God at an intimate level or at an earnest level.

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Our brother read from James 5 how... Oh goodness,

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I'm losing my train of thought. In James 5, how there was earnest prayers made.

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And that's the same word that we see here. That we are to pray earnestly seeking God. We see that we're to make intercessions.

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Now what does it mean to intercede? Is that the same as supplication? No, it isn't.

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To intercede is to speak to someone on another person's behalf.

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When we make intercessions, we come to God for another person's need.

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We're to offer up thanksgivings to God. How often do we come to God and just give thanks and praise him for all that he is?

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To love and adore him and to reflect on all of his attributes. To pray the descriptions of scripture back to him.

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Or even more so, how many of us keep a tally of God's answered prayers in our lives?

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How often Thanksgiving is lacking from our prayers because we fail to account.

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It's like what the Lord said of the Israelites. He said, I filled your stomachs and then you forgot about me.

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There is a scriptural illustration of this in Luke 17. In Luke 17, you might remember that Christ heals 10 lepers.

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They stood at a distance. They lifted their voices. They said, Jesus master, have mercy on us.

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And later after he had healed them all, there was one Samaritan, an outsider. He came back to Jesus and he fell at his feet.

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What does it say? He fell at his feet to give thanks. And Jesus answered, we're not 10 cleansed.

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Where are the nine? Was no one found to return to give praise to God except this foreigner?

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And he said to him, rise, go your way. Your faith has made you well. Brothers and sisters,

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I would encourage you like George Mueller. What a wonderful testimony that would be to keep a journal of your prayers.

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And then to keep a record, not only of the prayers that you have made to God, but then of those answers to prayer.

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And to go back and to say, oh, the Lord has answered that. And be like the one leopard from Samaria and give the

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Lord your thanks. And to fall at his knees, fall at his feet and give thanks to God.

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And we're commanded then, lastly of all, to pray for all people. All kinds of people.

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All kinds of people in all kinds of places. Now, what's really interesting, there are a lot of debates here that Calvinists and Armenians have to deal with in this particular passage.

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We're not going to wade into the weeds. But one thing I want us to see is this. For those of you who are

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Calvinists with a capital C, we're to pray for all people.

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All people everywhere. And it is true, verse 4, that God our

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Savior desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Now, I'm tempted to wade in a little bit deeper.

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What I'm going to say is there is a difference between desire and decree. I'm going to leave it at that.

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But we're to pray for all people. All people everywhere. And verse 2 leads us a little bit deeper into that.

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For kings and for all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

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And so we're to pray for our friends. We're to pray for our enemies. We're to pray even for our politicians.

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Even for the politicians that we didn't vote for, don't support and find ourselves regularly criticizing.

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And let me just challenge you that if you find yourself particularly critical of a politician, and I'm not going to name names at all, but if you find yourself particularly critical of modern politicians that are in office and you frequently complain, then

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I issue the challenge. You've heard me say before, quoting from Robert Murray McShane, for every one look at self, take 10 looks at Christ.

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For every one complaint, let there be 10 prayers for that man. That woman's salvation. For their governance.

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To what end? That we might live peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way.

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One commentator says that what is being commanded here is all kinds of prayer for all kinds of people.

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And so when the church meets, some might ask, why does that guy pray for like 10 minutes, 12 minutes in the middle of the service?

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It's because we have a lot to pray for. We're praying for all people. We're praying for all the politicians.

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And we're not just bringing our supplications, but we're bringing our thanksgivings, and our adorations, and our confessions, and our intercessions, and all these things and more to God.

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And brothers and sisters, let me just encourage you, exhort you. Perhaps even the

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Lord has an admonishment for you here. That if you find yourself just bringing requests to God, diversify your prayer life.

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Come here to 1 Timothy chapter 2 and just say, well, at least I will pray these things.

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Supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings. And how that will help us all to be a little bit more self -forgetful.

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And to focus on not just on our own needs, but on all that God would have us to pray for.

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I think of one story of a pastor a number of years ago who went to visit a man, who was a church member visiting him.

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He was suffering in the hospital and was near to death. And this pastor asked the man, he said, how can

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I pray for you? Now, if you were suffering, really suffering, in the hospital, on the edge of death, what would you request?

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I'm not too pious to admit, I would probably ask, please pray the Lord would stop my suffering.

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I'll pray that I would be more comfortable. Pray that the Lord would heal me, and that I would jump out of my hospital bed and run out the front doors and go and be with my family for another 12 years.

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What did this man ask for? He said, pray that the kingdom of Christ would advance.

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Well, let us develop a diversity in our prayer lives. So that when we pray, and when people ask us how they can pray, we're praying for things not only that are temporal and individual, but eternal.

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Number three, I want us to look at this third truth, the very God of our prayers. And we see this in verse five.

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There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man,

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Christ, Jesus. Our prayer is not just a transitional activity.

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You've heard me say that now a few times, to fill space between the elements of our worship.

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Sometimes prayer is treated that way, not only by the prayer, but by the congregation. That, ah, yes, we're praying because the sermon is starting.

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Ah, yes, we're praying because the sermon is ending. Oh, we are praying now because of the Lord's Supper. But these are to be real prayers, not just put out for the sake of transitioning and in place of music or some other invention, but these are real prayers made to the living and true

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God. And brethren, how we need to be reminded that when we pray, we're not to pray for men, but we're to pray to God.

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Our prayers are certainly uttered to the benefit of men that we will consider in a moment, but they are offered only ever and always to God and to God alone.

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And that God that we pray to, he is a holy God. When you think about that, have you ever given thought to that for a moment?

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That when you say, Father, or our Father in heaven, or God, or Lord, you are not addressing a mere man.

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You are not addressing one who is like yourself, but you are addressing the transcendent, thrice holy

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God of the universe. You'll see in the back of our bulletin, I've put a little quote from our friend,

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Mac Tomlinson, when he was asked about praying to God. And his reminder is that, oh, we are praying to God himself, the very

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God who inspired the Bible, the very God who created the heavens and the earth.

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I recall at one point, standing on the coast, looking at the ocean and watching the roaring waves of the sea pound the sand at the edge of the ocean and to think how powerful the ocean is.

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That ocean does not hold a candle to the living God. When the

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Westminster Assembly met, for you kids who are doing catechisms, this was a different catechism, not your catechism, but when the

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Westminster Assembly met, they were drafting what's called the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

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If you were a Presbyterian, you'd memorize that catechism. And there, this group of Puritans, as they met at the

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Westminster Assembly, they came to question number four, not very far into the catechism, when they had to pose this question, what is

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God? And as they pose that question, I ask you, if you were in the

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Westminster Assembly, what would you stand up and answer when asked, what is

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God? And there was tremendous silence in the Assembly as all of the men considered this.

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How do we, in a succinct fashion that even children can memorize, how do we describe the living

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God? The living God to whom we pray, the living God to whom we offer our worship.

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There was absolute silence. Some of the greatest theological minds that have probably ever existed were in that room.

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If you own Puritan paperbacks, any of those Puritan paperback series, or you have an introduction to the

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Puritans that does the biographies, a lot of those men that wrote those books that are categorized in those

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Puritan biographies, they were in that room, and there was silence. And then eventually, they asked the youngest man,

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I think that's fitting, they asked the youngest man in the room, George Gillespie, they said, would you pray for help?

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Would you pray that God would help us to answer this question, who is, or what is, who is

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God? And he began his prayer, oh God, you are spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in your being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

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Those are the words that he prayed. And little did he know as he was praying, some of the members of the assembly were feverishly writing it down.

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And today, if you were to go online and search up question number four in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, that answer to what is

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God is this. God is spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

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Why? Because how do we categorize a God who is far above our ways, who is holier than we can fathom, who is more loving and gracious and kind than we could ever imagine?

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This was the best that they could come up with from a man's prayer, perhaps out of reverence to the holy

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God. And such is the God that we approach every time that we pray. Some people have bugged me today about wearing a tie.

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I didn't work this into my sermon, but why would I wear a tie today and not on other days?

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I suppose it is because we are worshiping God. And so I dress for the occasion.

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And so we prepare to approach God with our very best. Don't take that wrong if you're wearing shorts.

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I can tell you a story that happened on our trip about that. But when you're in Florida and you wear shorts to a fancy place, 1

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Timothy 6 .15 says, Who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings and the

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Lord of lords? This is God, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.

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To him be honor and dominion. Amen. We approach God in our prayers. And let me say, brethren, that we approach

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God and not dead saints and not angels and not any other created being because it is

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God and his power and his resources alone that we need. John 15 says that apart from him, we can do nothing.

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In my studies this week, I saw John MacArthur in one of his commentaries compare us to a sea creature that lives in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean.

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I'm not sure how you like being compared to one of those weird -looking creatures that lives in the total darkness that can only be accessed by robot -operated submarines.

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But he said that Christians are like these cetaceous creatures. They inhabit the deep places of the ocean.

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The sea is their home. They never leave the sea. They rarely ever leave the deep, dark depths of the ocean except for one purpose.

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And what is that? That at regular intervals, they come to the surface and they pop their head up into the blinding light of the sun that they can take a breath and then they go back down into the deep.

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So for us as Christians, we should come up often. We must come up often for the life breath of our souls, which is prayer itself to God himself.

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John Bunyan said, not John Bunyan, I'm going to quote from Thomas Watson, prayer is the soul's breathing itself into the bosom of its living father.

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Now, I believe at least once I heard someone say there was a visitor that came to our church and they said, you pray way too often in your church services.

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Maybe you have thought that before. Why do we pray so frequently? And brethren, it is because we are so weak and we need to come to the surface for a breath again, for power and strength and help from the living

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God. John Bunyan said, pray often for a prayer as a shield to the soul, a sacrifice offered up to God and a scourge to Satan.

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That every time we pray, we come to God for life and breath and help and power and strength for all that we are doing.

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And even as we do it, we're turning the screws in Satan's personality, in Satan's day to just turn the knife a little bit more.

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It is a scourge to Satan and an offering to God to pray to God. Leonard Ravenhill, I've quoted him a lot today.

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He says, smart men walk on the moon. We visited the Kennedy Space Center and saw the lunar landing modules a couple of weeks ago.

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And you look how they're charred and burnt and all the buttons. And we can debate the veracity of those claims later.

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But smart men walk on the moon. He said, daring men walk on the ocean floor, but wise men walk with God.

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And how then are we to approach such God? That's truth number four I want us to look at.

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And we read that in the second part of verse five. There is one mediator between God and man, the man

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Christ Jesus. Verse six, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

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Brethren, how do we approach a thrice holy God? With confidence, with our requests, thanksgiving, supplications, intercessions, our earnest prayers of communion with him.

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It is with great confidence in the one and only mediator,

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Jesus Christ. When I have occasion to speak to Catholic friends, maybe you have

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Catholic coworkers, ask them, who do you pray to? Almost without pause, they will tell you about their patron saint.

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I remember one of our Catholic friends, she has died and has answered to the

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Lord. I remember her saying, Saint Anthony is my favorite saint. I always pray to him.

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Others pray to Mary, who is, they see it as the mediatrix, the co -mediator with Christ, who they come to, they say,

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I go to Mary out of reverence for God. I go to Mary and then Mary goes to God for me.

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Or I go to this dead saint and then this dead saint goes to God on my behalf. Dear friends, in Christ, it's like a bad movie.

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We come into the throne room of God and the doors bust open and we come, not irreverently, but boldly and with great confidence, we're into the very presence of God.

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Through what? Through our performance, through our deeds, through our own merits, through our own prayer lives, our own

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Bible reading, our church attendance. No, but we come to that God through the one mediator between God and man,

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Jesus Christ, the savior of our very souls. In 1 Peter 3, what does

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Christ say in verse 18? He says, for Christ suffered, Peter says of Christ, for Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous.

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Why? That he might bring us to God. Jesus said in John 14, 14, if you ask me anything in my name, in my name,

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I will do it. In John 16, 23, he said, in that day, you will ask nothing of me.

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Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the father in my name, he will give it.

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Christ died. Oh, Christ died that we might approach God boldly, confidently, joyously, frequently in prayer.

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Why then do we think that God would turn us away when we come to him through his son?

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Many of us, our prayers are hindered by our own consciences, our own guilty and weighed down and heavy consciences.

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But let me tell you something unbelievably radical, that you can be in the very midst of sinning, realize it, and through Jesus Christ, come directly to God and say,

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God, stop me now. I must stop. I repent at this very moment.

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It's one of the things I used to regularly tell our campus ministry students, that we don't have to put ourselves in the penalty box.

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We don't have to prove that our repentance is sufficiently genuine, but that we come to God immediately immediately in the name of Jesus Christ.

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Amy Carmichael, she one day was writing a letter to a friend of hers who was in dire straits.

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If you know who Amy Carmichael is, she was a missionary to India. And she wrote this letter to this woman who was facing this insurmountable obstacle.

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She said this, she said, I woke between one and two o 'clock in the morning and I prayed, oh, such poor prayers for you.

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Oh, how often do we feel that we pray poor prayers? She said,

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I was troubled about the poorness till I suddenly remembered in whose name

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I prayed. That was enough. The father so loves his beloved son that the poorest little word that rises in his name touches his heart.

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That you can pray poor prayers, weak prayers, feeble prayers. I dare to say even sinful prayers and that you're forgiven in Christ and that the

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Lord hears you. Now there is, there is qualifier, there is a qualifier there.

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And I'm going to, I'm going to add to that now. In verse eight, we read this,

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I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling.

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So we look at four truths, the command to pray, I'm going back now to refresh my memory here, the elements of prayer, the

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God of our prayers, the mediator of our prayers. And now I want to look briefly at the prerequisite for our prayers.

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Now when we read here that the Lord wants us to pray, men to pray in every place, lifting up holy hands.

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What does that mean? Does that mean that, that when we pray, we must lift our hands?

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Is the hands part of the equation, the operative word? I would suggest to you that, that the holy in the hands is the operative word, the operative way that we pray.

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They're certainly mentioned. It was, it was customary in Jewish tradition as they pray to, to pray with hands lifted.

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And friends, if you are earnest in your prayers and you lift your hands, praise God, lift your hands as you pray, but you don't have to lift your hands.

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What's more important is the holy aspect of it. In Psalm 24 verse four, we, we read what, what holy hands represent.

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It's speaking of Christ who may ascend the hill of the Lord and says, he who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.

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In Psalm 26, just a couple of chapters over Psalm 26 and verse six, it says, I wash my hands in innocence and go around your altar,

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O Lord. There are some of us, we are praying prayers.

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The Lord is not answering because our lives are a contradiction to that prayer.

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Now, does that, does that contradict with what I just said about, about the, the glory of the gospel and the, and, and, and all that Christ has done that we can come confidently.

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I, I say not. In Hebrews 10, 21, we read about this reality that we have a, a great, it says a great high priest over the house of God.

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Therefore, let us draw near. How? With a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

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Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering for he who promised is faithful.

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There, there are prayers that, that are not answered by God because our lives contradict those prayers.

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In 2nd Chronicles 7, 14, it says this. If my people are called by my name, if they humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then

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I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins. And heal their land.

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Our brother read from James chapter five, what this, that the prayer of a righteous person has great power, 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. And for three years and six months, it did not rain on the earth.

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A righteous man or a righteous woman, someone who is seeking actively to be sanctified in the

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Lord, who gives himself or herself to prayer is a dangerous weapon in the hand of God.

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Dear saints, if we want not only our prayers to ascend to the Lord, but, but to commend those prayers, we do so by believing in Christ and by living according to his word.

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There was such a man you might've heard of him. His name is John Knox. He was a Scottish reformer and he was often in such agony for the people of Scotland that he could not sleep.

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And one night he cried out to God. He said, Oh God, give me Scotland or I die.

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I'm such a man who had understood the true gospel, who had placed his faith in Christ and who was living to please that God.

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Bloody Queen Mary, that the woman who was responsible for the mass murder of a multitude of Christians in England.

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She said that she feared the prayers of John Knox more than all the armies of Europe, not preaching a works righteousness here.

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But what I'm saying is this, that the Lord wants us to believe in his son, that we are justified in believing his son, but our prayers are hindered when we are living an unholy life.

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For you men, you'll know in first Peter, where Peter says, why are our prayers hindered? Because we don't live with our lives in an understanding way.

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So we believe on Christ. We seek to live for him and we pray with power. And then last of all, the manner of our prayers.

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In verse eight, it says in every place. And I want to make this fairly quick that I'm not going to address today the idea of our private individual prayers, but of our corporate prayers.

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That there is a time for prayer in the Sunday gathering of the church. That we ought to, when we meet together to worship

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God, to prioritize prayer and that we should expect people to pray out loud.

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I remember as a new believer, I read Matthew six about how when we pray, we shouldn't pray on the street corners.

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We shouldn't pray to be seen by men, but what should we do? We should go into the inner room and pray to the

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Lord who sees in secret and then he will reward you. I remember reading that and going, and that is the end of my public prayer life.

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I'm only to pray in private. That is absolutely wrong. That has to deal with motives, not with location.

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But that there is a time when the church meets as a whole. For men, you'll see in second, first Timothy two verse eight, for the man to stand and to pray.

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You'll see that we have a, we try as best as we can to have a diversity of men who pray at different times.

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But there is a time to pray publicly. In Acts two 42, it says this, and they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

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In John 11 verse 41, when Christ was standing for the tomb of Lazarus and they took the stone away,

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Jesus lifted up his eyes to heaven. And he said, father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me.

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The Lord always hears us even when we pray in silent. He says this, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.

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That there were times even in Christ's ministry when he prayed aloud, not because God heard him better, but because the people around him heard and could join him in the prayers, could witness then the answer to prayer.

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When we pray on Sundays, on the Lord's day, it is not one man praying and the rest of the church spectating, but it is one man leading the whole church in prayer.

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And so we don't passively listen to that man praying, but we get behind, we get with that man as he prays with and for the church.

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And a prayer, or sorry, a church I think that rightly understands corporate prayer will then utter their agreement with that man when he prays.

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And what I mean is this, you have full permission when during the pastoral prayer or the opening prayer or the prayer at the

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Lord's supper to say, yes, amen. Let's hear some mm, yes, that's exactly right.

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Some agreement as we come together, if only for a pragmatic reason, it keeps the rest of us awake.

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But certainly at a far more basic level, it is because it's not just that man praying and me listening,

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I am praying with him. And so without interrupting, without inappropriate prophetic utterances, let us shout our amens to God as the man prays in the front.

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I look forward to hearing that in just a few minutes, to agree and to agree out loud.

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And there are times when the church then, not only on the Lord's day, but on other days of the week, meets for what we call prayer meetings.

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Acts, it has been said that Acts is a short recounting of the early church's prayer meetings.

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That there are 28 chapters in the book of Acts. There are 29 references to prayer.

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And what that means is that there is a reference to prayer for every chapter of the book, and then one for good measure.

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It's a baker's dozen. And what does this teach us? That when we look at the example of the early church, what do we see?

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But that they prayed and they met together during the week, at special occasions, at particular times for particular needs to pray.

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In Acts chapter 12, we hear how James was killed by Herod and how

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Peter then was arrested and being held in prison, probably likely to follow

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James in a future execution. And in Acts chapter 12 and verse 5, so it says this, so Peter was kept in prison, comma, but earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church corporate.

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And then in Acts 12, 12, it says this, when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary.

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Peter realized that he was free. He went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, probably John Mark, whose other name was

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Mark, and says where many were gathered together and were, I'm going to insert the word still, still praying.

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It's been said that the angel moved Peter, the angel rescued

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Peter, but it was God's people's prayers who moved the angel. That we would commit ourselves to praying before Pentecost, before the spirit descended on God's people.

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In Acts 1, 14, where do we find the people? All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer.

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Listen to all the corporate language here, together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus and his brothers.

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Matthew Henry said, when God intends great mercy for his people, the first thing he does is to set them a praying.

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And my heart's desire, and I don't say this to coerce you or to manipulate you, but I look at all the people in this room.

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My heart's desire is that there would be as many people at our prayer meetings on Thursdays. As there are in our corporate meetings on Sundays.

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I know that circumstances don't always allow for that. And so this is not me trying to force your conscience, but simply that my prayer would be that we would see the value of meeting during the week to pray.

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And I promise you that it is always a good time. Whether there are two or three of us or 12 or 14 of us,

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I think of our sister Preet, her first experience. I hope you don't mind me putting on the spot sister, that she reached out to us, asked when she could visit us and we gave her the time for our

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Sunday meeting or for our prayer meeting. And our sister Preet came, not to our

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Sunday gathering, but first to our prayer meeting. And not to pump our tires, but she said,

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I will come back because there are very few prayer meetings like this. The Lord has been very kind to us in the way that we've been able to seek him in prayer during the week.

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And so some practical counsel really quickly. Commit to praying with God's people during the week.

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Commit to coming to the prayer meeting. And this is some really wise counsel that I heard from another brother.

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Don't decide every Thursday if you're going to come to the prayer meeting. Make one decision once.

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Commit, I will go to the prayer meetings because I guarantee after work on Thursdays, you're not going to feel like coming to the prayer meeting, but then you will not regret being there once you are.

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And so commit once, make one decision. If I can say this, prepare. Just as I have exhorted you to prepare for the meeting of the church on the

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Lord's day, prepare for the prayer meeting of the local church. Now you might say, but Shane, I get off work at six o 'clock.

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I race to get here. There is zero time to pray. Let me tell you, pray on the way. I have the privilege at this moment of,

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I get out of Greek class at 6 .15. I am up to my neck in Greek paradigms and translation exercises.

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I leave that class every Thursday at 6 .15, thoroughly humbled and questioning if I should ever go back.

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It takes me 15 minutes to drive to the prayer meeting. That is my time to pray, to ask the

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Lord for help, to confess sin. It might sound funny, but listen to hymns.

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Sing those hymns in your heart to God and in your car to God. Warm up your vocal muscles, warm up your facial muscles so that you can speak so that when the time comes, when the church meets for prayer, that you are ready to pray.

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There are times when there is holy silence in the prayer meeting. When a brother or sister,

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I think, I'm not gonna name names, but it's not me, but there are people in our church who when they pray, it's just like,

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I must stop and think about what was just said. I wish

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I could pray like that. Not that it's a competition, but there are times when there is holy silence in that prayer meeting and we ought to be silent.

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And then there are times in that prayer meeting when there is silence because people have not prepared to pray. And so I say, come and pray.

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And you don't have to pray the best prayers, the most eloquent prayers.

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It is not a competition as to who can utter up the wisest and most spiritual words to God.

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But it is coming to give our little prayers, our best prayers, our hearts to God.

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We're to pray short Nehemiah prayers, Nehemiah arrow prayers. So pray short.

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In Nehemiah chapter two, he went to the king and the king said, what are you requesting?

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And the very next sentence is this. Nehemiah says, so I prayed to the

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God of heaven and I said to the king, you can't fit a very long prayer between being asked a question and answering the question when you're standing before the king.

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And so he shoots an arrow prayer, a small, a poignant, a succinct prayer.

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And we see so many of these. Matthew 14 30 is as the wind and the waves are tossing against Peter, he looks at Christ and he says,

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Lord, save me. That is an arrow prayer. The tax collector in the temple.

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God be merciful on me, a sinner. That is an arrow prayer. I like what

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John Newton says about long prayers. He says, the chief fault of some good prayers is that they are too long.

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He says, not that I think that we should pray by the clock or limit ourselves precisely to a certain number of minutes, but it is the better of the two that the hearer should wish that the prayer had been longer than spent half or a considerable time wishing that it was over.

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Pray short prayers. I'm gonna make this quick. Pray to God for help.

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It's been said, prayer is our extension cord to heaven. It's our wartime walkie talkie to call in reinforcements, go to God for help and pray from the heart.

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In Psalm 62, it says, trust in him at all times, oh people, pour out your heart before him.

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God is a refuge for us. We're not here to impress anyone, but simply when we come together corporately to pour out our heart to God, to make our request known to him, to be self -forgetful, to cast aside our pride and to give ourselves to God in prayer.

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Andrew Fuller, a famous Baptist, Reformed Baptist guy, he was at a conference one time, a big conference.

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And again, if Andrew Fuller is there, there's probably some important people in that room. And they asked one man, imagine being in a room, perhaps with all your heroes of the faith.

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And they asked one man, would you lead us in prayer? And he looked over at Andrew Fuller and said, I don't know how to pray.

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I don't know what to pray. And Fuller just whispered, no one else could hear, he just said. And tell that to God.

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And so the man stood up and poured out his heart that he didn't know how he ought to pray.

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And in asking God for prayer, it was said later that of all the prayers that were prayed at that conference, that was the most memorable.

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That was the most powerful. Why? Because he went to the Lord just with the cares of his heart.

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Not worried about the audience, but communing with God alone. So the best words you've heard all day in conclusion,

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I'll close our time with these borrowed words. All who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, come and join us.

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You who are men and women, come. You adults and children even, come.

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Invite the millennials and the amillennials and the premillennials and the postmillennials too.

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Come you who struggle. Come you who are in the prime of life. Come sit beside those whose minds and bodies are passing away, but whose souls never will.

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Come together to this great privilege, this heavenly gathering, this means of grace, this vital task.