Asking for Those Too Deluded to Ask for Themselves

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the 16th chapter.

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Hang on a second here. The pages flipped while I wasn't looking. There we go.

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Jesus said in that day, you will ask nothing of me. Truly truly I say to you, whatever you ask of the

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Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name.

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Ask and you will receive that your joy may be full. I have said these things to you in figures of speech.

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The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the

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Father. In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the

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Father on your behalf. For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

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I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the

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Father. His disciples said, ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech.

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Now we know that you know all things and do not need anyone to question you. This is why we believe that you came from God.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Here again the words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. He says that we are to ask.

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Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. By the way, saying in my name is not some kind of a magic spell or formula you throw at the end of a prayer.

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Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes -Benz in Jesus' name and expect the Mercedes -Benz dealership to deliver a

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Mercedes -Benz to your driveway. That's not how this works. To pray in Jesus' name is to pray according to his will.

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To pray according to the precepts of his kingdom. You'll note that James, this half -brother of Jesus, he says that you have not because you ask not, and then you have not because you ask evilly.

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You ask for things that you shouldn't be asking for, right? And so don't expect God to give you things that you shouldn't be getting.

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That's kind of the point. But you're going to note that in our day, the doctrine of prayer has been severely perverted.

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I would say not only from Rome, who has people praying to Mary and to dead saints as if they can somehow check their email and answer your prayers, they can't.

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There is one mediator between God and man, and that is Christ Jesus, our epistle text says. But in our day, within kind of the broader spectrum of American evangelicalism, there is a growing, and I mean growing, perversion of prayer.

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And it's this belief that somehow we can decree, that somehow we can declare, that somehow we can bind and we can loose.

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And the job of Christians is to bring heaven to earth through their declarations and their proclamations.

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I would note, let me give kind of a metaphor here. Those people who are snakebit, it seems like I'm off on a tangent, but I'm not, those people who are snakebit, dying of a snake bite is not a fun experience, by the way.

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You'll note that snake venom kind of runs throughout the entire body, including getting into your brain.

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People who are snakebit have tendencies to hallucinate and have fever dreams and things like this before they go.

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They slip out of reality and into the world of fantasy and delusion, the world of cloudy images and things that really don't have anything to do with reality.

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And you'll note, we're going to use this metaphor today, that scripture teaches quite plainly that we are all snakebit.

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We'll kind of work our way through that. That being the case, we have to come to grips with the fact that there are people within the visible church who have the venom of Satan, the serpent itself, still running through their veins, and as a result of it, they are bringing into the church demonic doctrines.

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And I would note, this doctrine of prayer, so many people think prayer is no big deal.

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It's not that big of a problem. And of course, you'll note that when it comes to the daily discipline of praying, your sinful nature doesn't seem to be keen on that.

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Have you ever noticed that sometimes you think when it comes to prayer, it's just like a to -do item list on your list of things to do during the day.

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Oh, I forgot to pray. And then what do you do? You speed your way through, you know, the Lord's Prayer really quick.

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Our Father who art in heaven, hallelujah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It slips into tongues or something like that, right?

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Well, I did it, you know. Ah. Okay. Mm. Okay.

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This is not a way to approach prayer. Christ says, whatever you ask of the

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Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name.

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Ask and you will receive that your joy may be full. Ask. So let's deal with this diluted doctrine that's running through the church today.

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And I don't normally do things like this, but I'm going to read from a book, a book called

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Reckless Christianities, written by Doug Guyvet and Holly Pivick. And it's an expose on the false doctrines of Bethel Church in Redding, California, that are really becoming prominent throughout much of the visible church in our day.

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And Bethel Church does not teach people to ask God for anything.

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There is no asking. There is binding and loosing. There is decreeing and declaring, but there is no asking.

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In fact, they think that asking is kind of a way of demonstrating that you don't have faith.

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If you had faith, you would just command and control, decree and declare. So Holly Pivick and Doug Guyvet write regarding the doctrine that is, like I said, running like a cancer through Christianity today.

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They ask the question, what is binding and loosing prayer? It's based on teachings that originated with the leaders in the prosperity gospel, the word of faith movement, and that are embraced by leaders in the new apostolic reformation.

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According to these teachings, believers have been given spiritual authority to bind or to forbid the works of Satan, including sickness, addictions, fear, troubled family relationships, and poverty.

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I had no idea I had the ability, the authority to bind poverty. So many times

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I've gone through life barely getting by when all I had to do was bind up poverty and I would have been wealthy.

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Likewise, they believe that they've been given authority to loose or to permit God's blessings, including health, peace of mind, strong marriages, successful businesses, and abundant finances.

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Oh, that's your problem. You just haven't loosed those abundant finances yet through your declarations.

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So this authority then to bind in the loose, they claim was conferred upon Christians by Jesus when he gave

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Peter, one of the 12 disciples, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. If you think about it, all right, that's an interesting thing.

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Now, when we talk about rightly understanding God's word, you know, context, context, context, three rules are very important.

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But there's more to it than that. And that is that when we deal with a doctrine, we have to actually deal with biblical texts that deal with that specific doctrine.

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So for instance, all right, there's a bunch of people running around the landscape today saying we need to ordain women and they need to become pastors.

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And you sit there and go, how do you figure? And they sit there and go, well, it says in the book of Galatians there's neither male nor female.

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There's neither slave nor free in Christ. So there, the women can be pastors. And you sit there and go, did your mother drop you on your head?

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Down with the toxic matriarchy. You people are twisting the scripture. And so you sit there and go, we're going to deal not with that text because it's not talking about ordination and who's qualified to be a pastor.

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Those passages say that pastors are to be men, the husband of one wife.

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Things like this, not given to drunkenness, their children need to be obedient, and pastors need to teach what's in accord with sound doctrine.

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And all the pronouns regarding those who are qualified to teach in Christ's church are all masculine.

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You need to abide by God's chosen pronouns, you weirdo, right?

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And you sit there and go, what's the problem here? They've taken a text that's not dealing with the topic, and they've made that their core text, and they are ignoring the others.

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So when you look throughout the scriptures, doctrine of prayer, all of the texts say ask.

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They all say, in fact, there's no example in the entire Bible from Genesis to the book of Maps.

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There's not a single text that says anything about going and binding and loosing and decreeing and declaring.

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So the question is, what are we to do with the text in Matthew chapter 16, where Jesus says, you are

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Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom.

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Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

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What are we to do with that? It says, whatever you bind, whatever you loose. You sit there and go, cross references.

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Matthew 18 comes into play, passage regarding church discipline.

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And then in the gospel of John chapter 20, you have Jesus breathing on the disciples and saying, the sins you forgive are already forgiven.

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The sins you retain are retained. The office of the keys has nothing to do with binding poverty.

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It has everything to do with forgiving penitent sinners. And I would remind you, at the beginning of our divine service,

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I said, I forgive you all of your sins. It's important to note that all of the verbs in John chapter 20 are very strange verbs because the way it reads in the

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Greek, the sins you forgive will have already been forgiven. In other words,

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I'm really not doing the forgiving, Jesus is, right? I'm just as lacky pronouncing what he's already declared in the courts of heaven, that you are forgiven by virtue of his shed blood for you on the cross.

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So we can see what's going on here, and that is that the folks at Bethel have taken the binding and loosing passage and unbuckled it, they've unbound it from forgiveness of sins, and now they've bound it to something that it's not meant to be bound to.

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Holly Pivick and Doug Guyvet continue, Johnson's appeal to this passage in support of his doctrine of binding and loosing of prayer, he claims that this type of prayer is the primary focus of all prayer.

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Here's a quote from Johnson, from Bringing Heaven to Earth, this is the primary focus for all prayer.

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If it exists in heaven, it is to be loosed on earth. It's the praying Christian who looses heaven's expression here when the believer prays according to the revealed will of God.

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Faith is specific and focused. Faith grabs hold of that reality, such an invasion causes the circumstances here to line up with heaven, and again, through prayer, we are to exercise the authority given to us.

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I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

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Notice the phrase, shall, will have been, the implication is that we can only bind or loose here what has already been bound or loosed there.

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Complete mishandling of the text. So, Pivock and Guyvet continue, believers exercise their authority to bind and to loose through their spoken words.

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In faith, they make verbal affirmations that are believed to be in line with God's will, and that release his power to create their desired reality.

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In much the same way God spoke and brought the world into existence, believers today who are created in the image of God also have the power to bring things into existence through their spoken affirmations.

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This is delusional, by the way, absolutely delusional. Go back to the snake bit metaphor, you need some anti -venom because your brain is doing weird things to you if you think this.

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We are not little deities. In fact, if you think back to the Garden of Eden, what was the big temptation?

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When you eat of that tree, you will be like God, knowing good and evil, and so human beings still to this day, under the influence of the venom of the serpent from the

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Garden of Eden, believe that they can be like God, and that their words can create reality when in fact they cannot.

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And you sit there and go, well, what's the big deal? Why is this such a problem for you,

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Roseboro? The problem is this. Some of the folks here at Kongsvinger, we've picked up on the side of the road as beaten sheep who've nearly lost their faith, because here's what happens.

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All you need is one good long -term illness, one bad report from the doctor, and the doctor says, it's terminal.

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This is not curable, or you're going to have to live with this the rest of your life. And what does that person then do?

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They go to work, decreeing and declaring against the thing that they've been diagnosed with.

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And how does that work out for them? It doesn't. And so what ends up happening is that this doctrine shipwrecks people's faith, if they had any faith in Christ at all.

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And they basically say, this doesn't work. I was told I have authority over cancer. I was told that I have authority over obesity.

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I don't, by the way. The only authority I have is to get on a treadmill, but that's a whole other story, right?

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I was told I can use my words to create a desired reality. And then that desired reality didn't show up when

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I used my words. So Christianity is bogus. And they walk away from it.

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That's the danger here. And we have to sit there and say, you know, the problem was you were never really taught

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Christianity. And I want you to think of this also. I've used the metaphor before, you know, in those horror movies, right?

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In a horror movie, you know, they always, that always takes place in a cabin out in the woods somewhere, somewhere far away from, from technology.

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And the only connection you have to the world outside is a phone line, okay?

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And kids are going, phone line? What's that? Okay. It's like, well, back in my day, there was these things called telephones.

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And you would have to actually have them connected to your wall with a wire, okay?

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And then when you picked up the phone, there was this like pigtail kind of thing, you know, this curly

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Q kind of thing. And you actually talk on the phone and there was wires involved and you can like get wrapped up in this thing.

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Yeah. It was crazy, right? Okay. They weren't wireless. But the idea then is, is that in, in the movies, when the evil maniacal murderous person is going to go on a killing spree and kill the people that are in the cabin there in the woods, what's the first thing he does?

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He cuts the wire to the phone so that they can't get help. Satan does the same thing.

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As soon as Satan gets his hooks in you with bad theology and bad doctrine, he cuts off your communication with God so that you cannot cry out to him for help.

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You think about all the Roman Catholics out there praying to the Virgin Mary, leave the poor lady alone.

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Okay. She died in the faith and she's not hearing your prayers. In fact, prosuche, the

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Greek word for prayer, is to petition a deity. If you're praying to the

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Virgin Mary, the Greek word prosuche says you're petitioning a deity. You've exalted Mary to being a goddess.

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You sound like a Gnostic, knock it off. She ain't hearing your prayers. Again, hear the words of our epistle text.

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It's so clear what the scripture says. There is one God, there is one mediator between God and men.

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You sit there and you go, well, that's Jesus and the Virgin Mary. No, no, no, that's two, okay, let's dial this back.

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There's one mediator between God and men and that's Jesus Christ, full stop.

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So why on earth would you be praying to dead saints or to the Virgin Mary? Answer, because Satan has cut off communication between you and God.

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Why would you be decreeing and declaring rather than asking God for the things that you need?

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Answer, because Satan has cut off your communication with God. That means he's into you good and you should consider the danger that you are in because the danger that you are in is eternal, not just temporal.

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So all that being said, let's kind of work with our main metaphor here. Our main metaphor in our

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Old Testament text, which is also a prayer text, has to do with being snakebit.

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Now, I'm one of these firm believers in the idea of types and shadows, but I have a good text to kind of help me out with this as well.

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Here again, the words of our Old Testament text. From Mount Hor, they, the children of Israel, they're well into the exodus at this point.

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This is not, you know, at the beginning. This is kind of somewhere near the middle of it. They set out by the way to the

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Red Sea to go around the land of Edom, and the people became impatient on the way, and the people spoke against God and against Moses.

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Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There's no food, there's no water, and we loathe this worthless manna.

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Okay, I would note that I kind of get the idea that variety in our diet is kind of an important thing.

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This is why we have Taco Tuesday, right? Things like this, okay? And maybe that was kind of the problem, is that what can you do with manna every day?

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Should you come up with a version of Taco Tuesday for manna? On Wednesday, we're going to do Italian, we'll have pizza or something with our manna.

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On Thursday, we'll do oatmeal. I don't know. And so, the problem here is that there's a lack of variety, but note the question.

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Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? That is more than a question, it's a statement.

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It's a statement that says that God's intent for them was not for good, but was for evil.

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And you sit there and go, how on earth can these people be talking this way? Are these not the same people who, with their eyes, witnessed the ten plagues of Egypt?

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They saw the Nile turn to blood. They saw the frogs. They saw the gnats.

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They saw the hail and the lightning. They saw the darkness, and they themselves were saved when they put the blood of a lamb on their doorpost and the destroyer went through, and they heard the wailing and the weeping of those people in Egypt who did not heed

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God's word and lost their firstborn that night. They themselves crossed the

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Red Sea on dry land with a wall of water on the right, wall of water on the left, and they saw the armies of Pharaoh when they pursued them into the

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Red Sea. God caused the Red Sea to collapse upon them, and the entire army and their charioteers died and were drowned, and they saw their wrecks and their bodies rushing ashore there on the

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Red Sea. They saw Mount Sinai with their own eyes and its burning top in the glory of God.

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They heard the trumpet blast and the voice of God when God said, these are the ten commandments.

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You shall have no other gods before me, right? They heard and saw these things with their own eyes and ears.

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They experienced it. Does this not count as some kind of huge miraculous series of events over and over and over?

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God himself led them by day with a pillar of smoke and a pillar of fire by night.

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God himself was among them. How on earth could they come up with the idea that God had brought them out of Egypt in order to kill them in the wilderness?

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Answer. They're snakebit. They're deluded. They're suffering from a satanic, sinful, fever dream.

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That's kind of the scary part about sin, is it deludes us. It deludes us into thinking that we are good people.

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It deludes us into thinking that we've got it all right and God has it wrong. It makes us believe that it's okay to just take this part of Scripture and do that and ignore this other part.

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I mean, there's some crazy things that go along with this delusion of sin. And so they're snakebit.

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And again, I'll prove it to you from the text. So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, the nechashim seraphim, and they bit the people so that many of the people of Israel died.

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And at this point, they begin to have a moment of lucidity. The fever dream all of a sudden vanishes and whoosh, they can see reality.

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And so what do they do? They come panicking to Moses. We've sinned. We've spoken against Yahweh and against you.

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And listen to the words, pray to Yahweh that he take away the serpents from us.

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Now that shows that they're starting to come to their senses. And so Moses prayed for the people.

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It doesn't say what he prayed, but the one thing we can take out of the equation, he didn't decree and declare.

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You'll note that Moses didn't sit there and say, you nechashim seraphim, I bind you, be gone.

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Nope, none of that. Nope. Instead, he prays humbly to God. And so God says, all right, here's the answer to your prayer.

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I want you to make a fiery serpent, a bronze one, set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten when he sees it shall live.

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That makes no sense. This just makes no sense. So let me kind of help out here.

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God commanded Moses to make a sacrament. That's legitimately what's going on here.

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What is a sacrament? Well, a sacrament is when God takes his word and attaches it to something physical here on planet earth.

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Baptism is a sacrament. Why? Because it's a washing of water with the word. The water does nothing, by the way.

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I'm just going to point this out. At our baptisms here, we just use plain old Minnesota tap water. You know what we do with the water afterwards?

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We pour it down the drain. The water doesn't do the thing. What does the thing then?

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The word of God does the thing. And so God caused his word to be attached to a bronze serpent, and he said, so Moses made the serpent, set it on a pole, and if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and he would live.

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That's quite a miraculous bronze serpent, right? It's a sacrament, if you would, kind of a prototype of the sacraments that we have in the

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New Testament. But when we take a look at the cross reference to this, Jesus himself speaks about that bronze serpent, and he does something fascinating with it, and something that helps us understand that this idea of being snake bit is something that we need to consider because all of us are, and that was the problem with the people there grumbling against God in the wilderness.

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And so the text in John chapter 3 says this, starting at verse 13, no one, and these are the words of Christ, no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the son of man.

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And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

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Christ is the serpent on the pole in his crucifixion.

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That's when he was lifted up. And just as the children of Israel were snake bit and needed to be healed, we also are snake bit and we need healing from God.

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And so Christ then is the one that we are to look to, him on the cross. He is the one who, if we look to him and believe in him and cry out to him to have mercy, he who believes in him will have eternal life.

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Rather than die as we all deserve, we shall instead live. So when were we snake bit?

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Garden of Eden. And the venom of the serpent still runs through our blood, mine and yours alike.

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This is the reason why you have sinful passions that desire evil rather than good.

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This is why the daily Christian struggle seems to be like being at war with yourself.

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The new person that you are in Christ is at war with your old sinful nature that has a lust for and a desire for the things of evil because of the effects of the venom of the satanic words that were spoken to our parents in the garden that brought us into corruption.

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But then the text says this, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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We all know that text. And so you can see here that the reason why God did this, sent his son, is because of his great love for us.

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God had pity on us. Rather than give us all what we deserve, he instead chooses to send his son to bleed and to die to fulfill

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God's wrath and his justice so that you and I can be forgiven, pardoned, and redeemed and be given eternal life, contrary to the fact that we do not deserve that.

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What we deserve is something else. And so note then, I would note, a little bit of a subtext,

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I feel like the sixth Sunday of Easter is Contra Calvin Sunday.

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The reason I say that is because here in John 3, it says, God so loved the what?

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World. God loved the world. And Calvinist says, well, the world means those who

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Christ died for. No, world means world, right? God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever, whoever, believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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Also note here, in our epistle text, it says this, this is good, it is pleasing in the sight of God our

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Savior who desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.

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The scripture is clear. It is not God's will that any should perish, but that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.

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Christ only died for the elect, only for a small group of people, rather than the sins of the whole world. And then, how do you read this text?

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Because it says very clearly here that it is not God's will that any should perish, but that all should be saved.

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That is what he truly desires. And that Christ himself, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

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The text also says, God did not send his son into the world in order to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

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Whoever believes in Christ is not condemned. Whoever does not believe is condemned already because he is not believed in the name of the only

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Son of God. And so this is the judgment. Light has come into the world. The people love darkness rather than the light because their works are evil.

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For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.

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Whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.

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Brothers and sisters, this is good news. And having heard these wholesome words, God the

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Holy Spirit has worked in us contrition, sorrow for our sins, and lament even for the things and the wickedness that we have done.

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And we have cried out to God for mercy and we hang on these words that just as that serpent was lifted up in the wilderness,

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Christ our Savior has been lifted up on the cross and we now look to him and we are forgiven.

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And so hear the words of Christ, again, Christ then tells us as his forgiven children, as his pardoned and redeemed citizens of his kingdom, that we are to ask him for things.

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Ask. Hear again the words of our epistle. Paul says, first of all, then

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I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people.

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Supplications. Boy, that's a highfalutin Christianese word, isn't it? I think we should do some supplications.

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And you sit there and go, I have no idea what that means, right? You know, it sounds so important.

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Have you noticed that like when you go to Starbucks, you have to learn a different language just to order a coffee? It's the stupidest thing ever.

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I went to Starbucks, you know, I was at a Starbucks on my travels and I went in there and I'd say,

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I'd just like a large cup of coffee. And they said, oh, you want a venti decaf

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Pike place? Sure. Sure, that's what I want, right? Okay.

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It's like, I just wasn't in the mood to speak Starbuckianese, okay? But you'll note that in Christian circles, we use a lot of words, we don't even pay attention to what they mean.

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If I were to ask many of you, just to put you on the spot, all right, what's a supplication? I know some of you would sit there and go, it has to do with prayer, good, yeah.

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So what is a supplication? A supplication is an urgent request made on behalf of somebody with an urgent need.

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From time to time, if you check your email, because you all should be on the Kongsvinger email list, you might hear, urgent prayer request, see something like that.

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When you get that email and there's an urgent prayer request, that actually is a supplication.

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We are lifting somebody up who is in an emergency, a dire situation, when somebody is in a car crash or finds themself unexpectedly in the emergency room or things like this, and we offer up prayers for that person, that's what a supplication is.

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And so I urge that prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.

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A cross -reference to this is actually found in the Epistle of Philippians, chapter 4. And let me see if I can pull that up.

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Yeah, hang on a second, let me go back this way, there we go. Here's what Paul writes in Philippians 4, he says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, listen to the words, let your requests be made known to God.

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No decreeing, no declaring, no binding, no loosing, ask and let your requests be made known to God.

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The scripture is clear on this. So brothers and sisters, I would note, we're going to be convicted about this because so many of us are just tempted and given to the temptations to think that prayer isn't that big of a deal, but Christ says to ask.

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In fact, when you read the Patristics, it's kind of funny, in the early part of the

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Christian church, you know, in the days right after Christ's death, in kind of the first and second generations of Christians, they were so bent on praying that they had set up particular times of the day to do it.

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And so the minimum, the minimum amount that Christians would pray in the first and second generation of Christians was three times a day.

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They would pray at nine in the morning, they would pray at noon, and they would pray at three in the afternoon. And you're sitting there going, why those times?

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Christ was nailed to the cross at nine in the morning, the sun went dark at noon, and he died at three.

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And the early Christians legitimately, there's quotes in the church fathers that if somebody didn't pray at least three times a day, you would be suspicious, you'd be sus as to whether or not you were truly a

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Christian, right? I think that's fascinating, that's how well, that is how seriously they took it.

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But unfortunately, back in our day, not a lot of people take it that seriously, and worse than that, they consider prayer to be something that's just a task that has to be done, it's a thing on my to -do list, rather than the great, wonderful privilege that it is.

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Because Christ himself says, ask of my Father anything that you ask in my name, he will grant that to you.

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And yet we rarely take him up on the offer, right? So let me kind of throw it at you this way.

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As somebody who pays attention to a lot of heresy, we've taken a look at the major doctrine that is running through the church today, which is a counterfeit form of prayer.

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And you've been duly warned against it, and some of you have even given in to that temptation and listened to that kind of prayer, and tried it out for yourselves and it didn't work out for you.

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So you are duly inoculized, is that a word, inoculated, inoculized, you are duly inoculated against that false doctrine.

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But what are we to do? How are we to think of those who are under this false doctrine's sway?

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Who are so deluded right now that they think that they are praying when in fact they are not asking

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God for anything, right? I want you to think of it this way. Each and every one of us, we are here today, we have been granted faith by God.

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We have been regenerated, and we are here to hear the wholesome words of Christ, and God the Holy Spirit continues to help us increase in the fruit of the

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Spirit. That being the case, I would say none of us are here today, aside from the fact that people in the past have prayed for us.

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That's the truth. Grandmothers, mothers, fathers, friends, concerned colleagues, each and every one of us, we have been prayed for.

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And at the moment, we are not experiencing the fever dreams and delusions of the snake venom.

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We are here sober -mindedly hearing the sound words of God, but we wouldn't be here if it weren't for the prayers of others, of other saints who had mercy on us and lifted us up before God.

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We being here are that today, that's the answer to their prayers. And so may

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I ask you this, with all the wicked doctrines running through the church today, and the false teaching regarding so many things, including prayer,

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I would ask you to have mercy on those people who at this moment are so deluded that they are not asking

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God for anything. And I would ask you to do this, ask

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God for them. Pray urgently that God would open their eyes, that God would help them to see the truth, that God would set them free from the delusions of the serpent, that he would give them the lucidity that comes from sound doctrine, that they would see that they are in dire need.

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They can't ask for themselves right now. They can't. They are that far under the delusion of Satan, so ask for them.

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Is that not what it means to pray in Jesus' name?

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It's not his will that any should perish, including heretics?

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So pray for them, ask for them, and maybe, just maybe,

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God will hear these prayers and set them free. In the name of Jesus, amen.

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If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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