5 - Lesson 2: Prayer, Part 1

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Discipleship and we are in our lessons.

We thank you for joining with us as we are trying to train you on how to disciple others.

And those who watch live get to know why

I am so frantic right now. And that is one of the advantages of watching live when we do a live show on Ustream.

Right at 8 o 'clock we start with some spiritual transitions. We start with some discussion with those in the chat room.

It's a bonus to those who are watching live. And then we start the recorded class.

So for those of you who watched live, you know what happened to me on the way to studio.

And you know why my nerves are a little bit jittery. So we're going to see what may happen in class today.

But we are in the class on an introduction to discipling.

An introduction to discipling. And we are, as we've been saying, we've been going through the book

Growing in Grace. Now what is Growing in Grace? That is a discipleship book that was written actually by a church called

Gospel Light Baptist Church. That's where we, actually it probably was even before that.

It probably was from Emmanuel Baptist Church with Pastor Coker. He may have been the one that actually had started, who knows, maybe even before him may have been his first pastor.

But it's not in my first church that we used, that we had edited and rewrote and made changes and swapped things around, did a whole bunch.

But it's right over there. And it is the book that we're going through.

Now what we keep saying with this is that it is something that we have for, just to kind of facilitate discipleship.

But discipleship is not about a book that you use, okay?

Want that to be clear. It is about the relationship that you form, which is why pastors do not disciple from a pulpit.

I know some men that say that, sorry, that's not where discipleship occurs. That is a one -way communication that you only get feedback if people share it with you.

Quite frankly, people only share the negative stuff with their pastors, which might be a hint to you is encourage your pastor this week.

He usually only hears the bad parts that he said in his sermon, doesn't hear anything good that he said. But I'm still trying to catch my breath.

And those of you who saw the class live know why. So yeah, so we're going through the book,

Growing in Grace, and this is just a tool that we make available at Striving for Eternity for you to use in discipling.

Now it's really meant for discipling new believers, but you can use it as one individual who contacts us this week and says, listen,

I'm a homeschooler and I got a chance to take a look at your discipleship and I would like to go through it with my kids.

I said, that's a great thing to do. I had done that with my children when each of my children were young, 10, 11 years old

I think. I had started going through this book, Growing in Grace, and they still have their copies with their notes in it.

And so you can do this with your children, you can do it with new believers that come in your church, you could do it with family members, you could do it with people that even have been in church for a while.

But sometimes as I just heard someone that shared a story with me that they had someone who had been in the church for many years, just got saved, even though they were in the church for decades, sitting in a pew, and yet never knew

Christ and didn't realize it. And just came weeping realizing that they'd been sitting in a pew and never knew

Christ. And so I tell you that to say this, let it be an encouragement to you that you may go through these lessons.

That's why we said the first lesson, let's look at all the lessons actually if you put them up. The first lesson you see there is salvation, and you could start on the issue of salvation and you can share with people that you might find that some people don't actually know

Christ. And so it's a good thing to share with them, to go through with them.

But you see here the lessons that we'll go through in this book. What we want to do, we didn't get a chance in the last class, and that's to do really what is kind of an overview.

This is something that I will be sending out to the students by email. Those of you who have enrolled in the class will be getting the overview sheets, and that's not in the book, but it's one that you can use and print off.

It's one of the advantages of being an enrolled student. In other words, if you go to that website down there and you pay to get a syllabus, you pay to get a syllabus and you say, well

I get the same stuff everyone else gets. Not really. You get some extra stuff.

And this is going to be some of it. So we're going to go through the first overview, last week's thing, last week's overview from last class.

And you have an opportunity to use these PowerPoints that we'll send to you.

And the advantage of you having them is that you can do what we're going to do now. We're going to go over the homework as if I'm discipling you.

How would I go about it? Well I want to review what we went over last week. And so then

I'm going to ask you if you did your homework. So here is an overview, and this is, if you look, this has got a lot of information in it.

It might be, it may be a little hard to read on the screen, I don't know. I don't know if it catches everything in the screen.

But basically what you see here is up on your upper left you'll see salvation, reconciliation with our

Lord. You see the mechanics of salvation. You see there, salvation, it gives you the

Greek word there and that it means to deliver or protect, to heal, to preserve. So this is getting into a little bit more information.

And the way this actually came about was that someone who, the gentleman who designed this actually used to teach this in his church in Sunday school.

He'd go through it and he'd put these slides up and talk through the lesson. You see there that it talks about the three elements you have of salvation is justification, atonement and redemption and gives you some definitions of those things.

And then you kind of see this idea where everyone, there's all people there, it's kind of a step that goes up.

I would think of it to go down, but maybe I'll redesign it sometime. But all people have a need for a relationship with God.

Why? And you see there because of sin and it says what is sin, gives you some verses.

Do all sin? Well, the answer to that is yes. We looked at that. Penalty of sin?

Well, we looked at that in the last class as eternal death or spiritual death, physical death and it could be eternal death.

What's the requirement to be saved? And you also see there this individual put the Romans Road.

If you're not familiar with the Romans Road, Romans Road is this idea of some verses in Romans that you can walk through that go through these steps of salvation.

So, everybody needs a relationship with God. So, there's a path as you follow the arrow, a path to God which is repentance and receiving

Christ. If you do that, you see the arrow following up as we talked about in the last lesson is the blessings of a relationship with God and then following that is the assurance that comes from that relationship.

Now, I would, if I was sitting down with someone, I would actually review this in detail at the end of the lesson and then probably kind of just review it again in the beginning of the lesson.

One of the other things I would ask and I'm going to ask this of you now, those of you who are watching, whether it be live or not, what

I would like you to do, not me because you're supposed to have memorized this, the homework lesson for last week and the first thing you'd ask a student to do is they were supposed to write out their salvation testimony if they had one and what

I would do is review it with them. You want to look at that and I ask those of you who are online to post that in the

Striving for Eternity Facebook group and some of you have done that already. Even if you have a written copy of it, you can take a written copy and post that, just take a picture of it and post it up in the

Facebook group if you want but what I would encourage you to do is to do that. What are you looking for as a discipler when people write that?

Well, you want to look for a couple of things. You want to look for them describing their old way of living, how they used to live.

You want to see a point of salvation or at least a change in life. Now, you want to take into account some people got saved very early.

They don't recall, I have one friend of mine who says he can't remember when he got saved like he can't remember when he started loving his mother.

He grew up in a Christian home and never really had a point where he rebelled against the gospel and so he doesn't have some wicked lifestyle that he talks about and then a conversion.

You got to take that into account with people. But you want to look that whether they have a point in time or not, depending how young they were, if they're older, you want to look for a change in life.

You want to look for a point where they at least a recognition that there's a need for repentance and receiving

Christ, that salvation is by trusting in Christ alone not by works. You want to look for those sort of things.

You want to look for them living a life now that is in line with scripture, where there's a hatred for sin, not the consequences of sin, things like that.

After you go through that, the one thing you also want to do at this point is ask them to recite 1

John 5, 12 and 13. So I'm going to ask those of you now, if you're watching live, this will be a little bit harder, if not, if you're watching on YouTube, hit the pause.

I want you to actually recite it. I can't hear it. I understand that. But I want you right now to be reciting that.

Do you have it memorized? Pause it. Say it.

Then come back. All right, let's look at it. I'm going to assume that you guys did that. I'm trusting you online and it says, whoever has the son has life.

Whoever does not have the son does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the

Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. You can take the opportunity to go through that verse again, explain the importance of it.

It's good to have the repetition when you're discipling. There is no time frame here. Don't feel compelled to, we've got to get through this lesson in a week.

It's good to do that and try to make sure you allow enough time that if a student wants to go longer, you spend more time there.

Maybe it's two hours a week instead of an hour. Fine. Remember, it's about the relationship that you're building.

This is just a facility, a way to facilitate the relationship. You may have someone that comes into your church and you start discipling them new and you know nothing about them.

You want to try to pair people up that have something maybe in common, but I've had times in my church where we would always disciple people.

Someone came in new in our church, they were being discipled. That's the way it was. There was going to be a discipling relationship.

People got paired up. Sometimes you knew something about the person, sometimes you didn't. Because of that, there would be times where we would disciple people that you didn't know anything about them.

And so, with that, we want to just say that you want to take that into account. You want to use this just to be the facilitating aspect of the relationship, but not the defining aspect.

With anything that you're going to do, you could be lifting weights together. Maybe that's what you have in common. You could be knitting.

Maybe that's what you have in common and you can disciple while you're having that time.

You're sitting there knitting and just talking. And in that time, you're talking to the things of the

Lord. That might be a good thing for, I know a lot of ladies, what they do is they have a knitting kind of club or a craft club and everyone's just kind of sitting around and doing the crafts.

And meanwhile, really what one person's doing is kind of leading discussion in asking questions, in talking of things of the

Lord, and guiding conversation. And in that guiding of conversation, what they're really doing is they're sitting and kind of directing how things are going.

And so, it's an amazing way of doing it where you're actually discipling as you do things that just seem, you know, you're having enjoyment.

This is one way and we're going to use this guide. So now we're going to look into prayer. And I don't know, we probably could finish this in one lesson, but we'll see.

Again, I'm not in a rush to get through these lessons any more than you should be in a rush of discipling someone.

Why would it take me longer than we have in a class period? Well, A, in these classes, we are trying to keep it limited to about 50 minutes.

Okay, so that's basically what we're going to work toward. The other reality is that we're trying to teach more than just a lesson, we're trying to teach you how to approach things, what type of things you want to look for, okay, when you're going through these lessons, what kind of things you may want to ask a student as you go through.

So let's look at our syllabus. We are now in lesson number two, which is access to our

Lord. And in here, we see here the introductory paragraph that we have here, and it says, prayer is a very important part of the

Christian life. It's important to see how much time

Christ spent in prayer. Now, you may be talking to someone that has never even read through the

Gospels yet, but if you have someone that's familiar with the Gospels, ask them, have you ever thought about how much time

Christ spent in prayer? I mean, there were times where Christ spent all night in prayer before He chose

His disciples, because the importance of choosing the right disciples was that important.

Now, if you're anything like me, you'd be going, uh, why? You know everything.

Why do you, did it ever dawn on you, did you ever think about why did Jesus need to pray?

I mean, He didn't need to pray to get answers to prayer. He knows everything.

He knows all the answers to prayer before He was born. Why would

He need to pray? Well, clearly prayer is not for the purpose of just getting answers.

But Jesus, being in a human form, probably had some different, a different type of relationship now with the

Father and the Holy Spirit than He had previously. Things changed.

He's now in time. He's now in a body. He's now one place at one time, yet He's everywhere present.

Can't comprehend that, I know. But, did you ever think that Christ spent a lot of time in prayer?

Some people say, well, Jesus prayed just because He wanted to set an example for you and I. I think there's some of that.

There's some of the fact that Jesus wanted to provide an example for us to follow.

Yeah, that's true. But I think there's probably more. I think really, Jesus, the relationship, there's a difference in the relationship between God the

Son and the other members of the Trinity and that fellowship that they had.

There were some changes. I think that Jesus was constantly, I think Jesus was praying without ceasing in a true sense.

But, we see that Jesus devoted long periods of time to nothing but prayer.

Before He chose the disciples, you see all night prayer. Before His arrest and going to the cross, we see

Him praying with just such a fervorance that He was sweating.

Now, I don't know about you, if you've ever had prayer that was so stressful or,

I don't know what would be the right word, that you were sweating like that. But that's what was happening for Jesus.

He was praying in such a way that it was like great drops of blood.

And I know that when I preach, I do work up a sweat.

I do. And I know that a lot of it's a nervous energy. I'm proclaiming God's Word and I hold that very high.

And because of the fear of not saying anything wrong, I do break out into a sweat.

And so, ask the person you're discipling, have you ever considered the importance that Jesus put onto prayer?

And so, even though God knows our very thoughts,

He desires us to express our praise, our gratitude, our requests before Him.

And really, it's emphasized in Jesus. We're going to look at 1 Thessalonians 5 in just a moment, but think about this.

Jesus who is God and knows everything there is to know in the universe, yet He brought requests and prayers to God the

Father and through the Holy Spirit. And you think about that and go, I mean, was there anything that God the

Father didn't know about the life of God the Son? No. Just like us.

I mean, He knows everything, yet He desires that fellowship in prayer.

So let's look at 1 Thessalonians 5, specifically verses 16 to 18.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

And what you see here is that we should be praying always.

And that's something we kind of need to think through. We don't, if we're going to be honest, we don't always pray all the time.

We kind of set a time aside for prayer and then we kind of put it into bucketing categories.

Sometimes we pray a lot, sometimes we don't. And so, it's something that we want to take into account.

And so, we want to keep that in mind.

We want to take into account that we want to be praying without ceasing.

And so, let us take a look at the first point here.

And just as a note to those of you who are watching live, you guys already know that there's been some changes here.

We ended up noticing, I just at least got the note that we had to shut a couple things down, including the chat room, at least for us seeing what's in there for now, just because of CPU utilization.

New operating system, first show with the new operating system, and I guess there's just some things that they're saying is causing, they're not sure why.

So just so you know. Alright, that being said, first question that we have that maybe you want to ask is when, right?

When should we pray? Do we only pray in the morning?

I remember having someone ask this. Should I be praying first thing?

Is it wrong if I don't pray, if I don't have a set time aside, first thing in the morning?

And the argument that the person had was, I'm not just not a morning person. And so, first thing in the morning,

I'm a little groggy. And because I'm groggy, I just,

I fall asleep. I mean, I've tried. I tried praying first thing in the morning and I fall asleep.

And so they felt bad because every time, they were told that they had to pray soon as they got up in the morning.

And what they would do is they'd find that they kept falling asleep in their prayer. They were just wired to where they felt better praying in the evening.

So let's take a look at this. When is the best time to pray? Well, every born again believer has the privilege of entering into the presence of God at any time.

Okay? However, it's a good idea to set aside a special time and place for prayer each day.

Let's take a look at Psalm 55. And it says there, Now what you're seeing there, what many see that with the psalmist is, the psalmist is saying there's a set time that the psalmist says, in the morning, in the evening, and at noontime, having a kind of a set time.

You would see this in the life of Daniel. I don't have this verse. But you could see Daniel had a pattern of three times a day that he set aside for devotion in the morning, sometime in the afternoon, and in the evening, that he had set aside for prayer.

So much so that when those that hated Daniel and wanted to kind of get rid of him, they were kind of jealous as the new regime kind of came in.

Daniel was from the Babylonian regime. And as the Medes and Persians came in, here comes

Daniel. And Daniel is still, you know, he's being well -received and being uplifted.

And kind of the other Medes and Persians maybe got jealous, who knows? But they came up with this idea. And they said, hey, to the king, they said, hey, there's a law, once you make a decree, we can't change it.

We want you to decree that no one should worship any other god. And if they do, they should be fed to the lions.

And knowing why they do this. And I ask you this, and this is one of the things I would put to someone

I'm discipling as a challenge, it's a challenge to me as well, I make sure to mention that. But do you and I live a life like Daniel, that the only thing our enemies can say about us is say, you know, the only way we can find something bad about this guy is if we can make it where it's a law against his god.

In other words, Daniel was not, they knew Daniel well enough to know Daniel was going to pray every day, three times a day, openly, and it wasn't going to matter.

In other words, if the government said, you know, hey, we're going to make a law, we want to get rid of, we don't like those

Christians praying in public, and we're going to make a law that says you can't pray at a public restaurant anymore, are you going to bow your head quietly, or maybe pray with your eyes open so no one notices?

Or are you going to continue just doing what maybe you always do? As a family, you gather around a table and you pray publicly, and you pray out loud.

Or are you going to just bow your head and pray because that's what you do? Well, they knew

Daniel was going to pray openly, and so what did they do? They said, king, make this decree.

King makes the decree, and they sat outside Daniel's house waiting. Oh, there he is!

He's openly praying to a god other than the king. They knew he was going to do it.

And as you read Daniel, Daniel, the king really didn't want to throw Daniel into a lion's den. I actually think the king didn't sleep all night.

Come first thing in the morning, Daniel, did your god save you? I mean, I think the king was actually praying to the god of the universe, the real god, that he would save Daniel, and Daniel's testimony was such that I think that was the case.

But what do you have? What you end up with is you end up with an example of Daniel setting aside, it was a pattern of his life from his childhood, that he set aside time three times a day for prayer.

We should set aside time. Also look, if you look in your syllabus there, make this a private time as Christ did.

Let's look in Luke 5. But he would withdraw to a desolate place and pray.

So Jesus would go to places where it was private. Why is this?

Well, this is a contrast and this might be good to explain to someone you're discipling is the contrast between the

Jewish mindset and what Jesus was actually teaching. See, to a Jewish person at a time, they would pray publicly so everyone could see.

With these long and loud prayers, you know, prayers that everyone would go, oh, listen to that prayer.

There are some great prayers of the Puritans. I would often read a book called Valley of Vision, a great book,

I recommend it. It's just a bunch of prayers from Puritans and you read these things and I'm like, wow, such deep and thoughtful prayers.

I'd love to, I mean, there's some men I know who read those prayers and people just, you listen to that and you're like, it just brings you in such a sweet state of recognizing how great

God is and you're just amazed with it. And so, I would say you take those times and it's like, wow, amazing.

But at the same time, we look at those prayers and we don't want our prayers to be on display.

When I went to the UK once, I went to Spurgeon's Church and Dr. Peter Masters was the pastor at the time

I was there and they had like a 20 -25 minute prayer where everyone's standing. Your eyes are closed and he's praying and I can't remember a time that I heard someone pray like that.

I was like, wow. I mean, you really, that prayer was a sermon within itself but it was just such a deep time of prayer.

And some people made an art form of that in the first century. Some people can pray like that and I think it was either

Tozer or A .W. Pink. A .Z. Tozer or A .W.

Pink, I forget which one of them. There's a story of someone that came to visit the church for a prayer meeting and they weren't there.

And someone said, you know, why is he not here? I forget if it was Tozer or Pink. Why is he not here? I came to, you know,

I've heard about his prayers and why is he not here? And as the story goes is that people said they had to actually ask him not to come to prayer meeting because when he would pray, people would be weeping and being in such awe that after he got done praying, no one would pray anymore.

And so for prayer meetings, they were like, look, you can't help yourself in prayer meetings. You desire to pray.

But when you pray, everyone else shuts up and no one else wants to follow you. And now it's not that we should be trying to pray for others to be heard.

OK? We want to make that known. Some things at this point that I bring up because of this is because I'll say you don't want to be praying to be seen by others.

That's why Jesus would pull aside. Now, do we pray publicly and corporately as a church? Yes. There's plenty of times we pray publicly and corporately.

If you come to one of our Spreading the Fire events, we pray publicly for the outreach and it's a great time of prayer, thoroughly enjoyed.

It's the only conference I know that has a time of public prayer where everybody is welcome to pray, not just select people.

I don't know of any other conference that does that. But it's something that we say, we don't, you want to be praying for the ears of other people.

Maybe you hear the people that pray in King James language. It's usually not good

Elizabethan English, but they pray with the these and the thous and things like that as if it's somehow more spiritual, if it's in an old

English. Some people use the term Lord or Father as punctuation.

You ever hear those people that pray, Father we just want to, we thank you Father that we can come into your presence

Father and we just, we want to lift up to you Father. Sometimes that can get annoying.

Some people are not even aware that they do it. Now that's something you're trained with. You're trained to do that because you hear other people do it.

You hear other people pray in old English, so you pray in old English. You hear other people pray using

Father or Lord or Jesus repetitionally as if it's the end of a punctuation.

You know, it's the period or the comma. Lord, we just want to praise you Lord, we want to thank you

Lord for coming Lord and for everything you've done for us Lord and for helping us Lord and for being with us and giving us your word

Lord. You don't have to do that. Do you speak to other people that way? I mean, would it seem strange to you if I kept using your first name at the end of every sentence?

It would get annoying. Now, I'm not saying that God is annoyed with our prayers in that sense, but at least when you pray publicly it does get annoying to other people that are listening.

I'm not saying you can't do that, but you want to think through that. You want to talk to God. Prayer is you speaking to God.

You can do that intimately. God says you can call him Abba, Father. It means Daddy. Abba is the

Aramaic or the Hebrew. Baba would be in Hebrew. Aramaic would be

Abba, which would be Daddy. It's a term of infection.

Infection? Affection. Affection. A term of affection.

And so, it means you can be intimate. You can go talk to him about anything. God's going to listen to you talk about anything.

And so, you want to be talking to him in such a way where you have that closeness and you want to make that clear.

You don't want to be praying in some mechanical way. And we're going to get into this in a moment.

You don't want to be praying in a way and you want to teach people not to be praying in a way that's somehow conjured up.

It's taught. Prayer should be very natural. Prayer should be something that comes from the heart.

Okay? So, you don't want to be praying and at this point, yes I know, we're never going to get through this lesson.

That's fine. Prayer is something that you're never going to, you never want to be for display.

Does that make sense? You don't want to be praying to be heard by others. You want to pray to be heard by God.

If others are listening, so be it. Alright? So, I bring that up to say when you look at Jesus, Jesus, his prayer was a little bit different.

He prayed, his prayer was such that he prayed in a way where he really was praying because of the fact that he was speaking directly to his

Father because he missed him in a sense. Now, how did he miss him? I mean, I can't fully comprehend.

I'm saying that up front. But just so that it's known that when

Jesus prayed, it wasn't to be seen or heard by men and that's important because the

Jewish people would pray to be seen and heard by people. So, we want to keep that in mind, alright?

We want to be praying to be communicating to God, not to be heard by our fellow brothers and sisters.

Okay? Alright. I kind of went long on that, but I hope that's helpful for you.

I hope that you picked up on some of the things you want to try and teach folks as you're going through and you're praying with them, okay?

And so, just so you know that. Alright. Alright. So, let us look now.

So that's the when, next we talk about how should we pray and I kind of went into some of this already, alright?

How should we pray? Good question. Glad you asked.

Alright. So, let's look at our syllabus that we have here and what it says here is, okay, and I'm just being told just so you know that I figured out what was the lag in and fixed it and so the chat room is back up just so that those of you who may have questions, although I'm being told that there's some problems with it, okay, there's problems with it and it's not, when you do

Q colon for the question, it's not quite showing up. Don't know what UStream did with their chat.

I'm sure they think it's helpful. We'll try to figure it out and get that kind of fixed for you.

So, I'm sorry for that. Alright, so how should we pray? Looking in your syllabus here. Christ's disciples had the same exact question.

Isn't that good? Isn't it good that the disciples had the same questions that we have? And they asked

Jesus, they came to Him and said in Luke 11, 1, Lord, teach us to pray.

What was their example? Well, you end up having that the disciples of John, and this was something that would be true, is, remember

I said in a Jewish mindset, they would be taught to pray publicly. And the

Jewish disciples would teach their people to pray publicly. And so, what you'd have is, you would have them teaching their disciples, pray this way.

And so, there was this expectation, so John the Baptist would teach his disciples how to pray.

Well, the disciples of Jesus came and said, will you teach us how to pray? Now, and if I didn't say this when

I talked about the when should you pray, I should have said this, thank you. There is no set time.

We can go in God's presence any time, but you want to have a devoted time, okay? It doesn't matter if it's first thing in the morning or at night, sometime in the middle of the day, whenever.

But try to set a time. If you don't have a set time aside for prayer, chances are you're not going to pray.

Just saying. In a great book, The Enemy Within, Chris Lungard says this, why is it we can watch, and he just picks

Tom Cruise, I don't know why, maybe he likes Tom Cruise movies, but he says, why is it we can watch a two hour Tom Cruise movie, but five minutes into prayer we fall asleep?

And he makes the point, a lot of it's because we don't have a set time and set place, so it's a special thing.

You want to do that. Have a set time aside, a set place, and this kind of is going to come into this, how do we pray?

All right? So Christ taught His disciples the disciples prayer. I know everyone calls it the

Lord's prayer, but it's really Jesus teaching His disciples how to pray, so I think it's the disciples prayer.

Sound fair? Okay. Christ responded by giving them a model prayer.

He was not saying, pray this way. How do you know that? We're going to look at Luke 11, all right?

But if you look at Matthew chapter 6, which is similar to this, Jesus gives a similar model of prayer in Matthew chapter 6.

And in Matthew chapter 6, you know what you see? Just before He gives this model prayer,

He warns against praying repetitiously to be heard by men with the vain repetition of words.

And you know what ends up happening? Right after that passage of Scripture you have in Matthew chapter 6, the most vainly repeated prayer.

That's what cracks me up. More people in more churches recite the Lord's prayer without thinking about the words.

They call it the Lord's prayer, the disciples prayer. Just vainly repeating it because that's what they do every week in church.

Now if your church does that, please do not take me the wrong way. I'm not saying it's sinful. I'm not saying it's wrong.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. But I'm saying that it is a model and what we should do more than sitting here and just repeating it without thinking about the words, it's a model that we should structure all our prayers on.

In other words, as we're going to go through these steps, there's going to be five points that we're going to look at. We're not going to even probably get to them this week and look at them in detail this week.

But as we look at these five points, we want to see this as kind of five major sections of how we could be praying, okay?

So let me give you the five points and we're going to read the passage. We're not going to be able to get into it, but we should be praying reverently.

So there should be a time set aside to focusing on God, speaking to God in reverence for God, submissively seeing that God's in control and looking for God to direct us according to His will, dependently, recognizing everything in our lives depend on Him, thanking

Him, having a time where we give thanks for Him, forgiving our daily provisions and looking at all the things we could have gratitude in, honestly, in other words, a time of confession of sin, recognizing we fail

Him. We should have a time of confession of sin and then basically preventively, if that's really a word, but recognizing, asking for help to prevent us from falling into sin.

So you'll see that as we look through it. Let's take a look at this and this is what Luke 11 for.

Now, Jesus was praying in a certain place and when He finished, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples, as John taught his disciples.

And He said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for as we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.

As you look through that prayer, you see the five points that I mentioned and as you pray, and we're going to look into this and spend much more time next class on this, but we're going to look into each one of these points to see how we should be praying.

My encouragement to you is not to just recite the Lord's Prayer or the Disciples Prayer, whatever you want to call it, without thinking through it, just praying it as wrote, as just memorization.

Some of you may be able to recite it from memory because you have recited it so many times.

What I'd encourage you to do is see it as an outline, as a model, and we want to follow the model.

It's often what people do, they end up reciting things from memory which should really be a model, an outline.

We want to do that. We want to follow it as something that's a model for you to follow after.

We're going to look into that next class. We're going to go through that and we're going to spend time.

Again, don't be in a rush as you're discipling someone. You're seeing how much more that I'm providing into each lesson.

We spent a good portion of 50 minutes and we only looked at really the first point.

That's okay. When you're going through and you're discipling someone, take your time. It's about the relationship, not the lesson.

Just remember that. If you have any questions from the class, I want to encourage you to let us know at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

If you want to enroll, you can email us if you want to know how or you can go to strivingforeternity .org

and you can go on to there and look up the Striving for Eternity Academy.

You can always email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org. We love to hear from you guys. I'm not always the one that answers questions but sometimes

I am. If you're missing a syllabus or you want to just get the Growing in Grace book, you want to get multiple copies of the

Growing in Grace book, please go to our store, store .strivingforeternity .org.

You could pick up the book and get a copy on your own. Now, speaking of stores, there's something new that we're really excited about.

I think this may be the first time we're talking about it here. We really, really are going to push this every week, we hope, and try to encourage you.

Go to Amazon Smile. The site should be down there. It is. Yep, I see it.

Okay. Smile .amazon .com slash ch, that stands for charity, slash 80 -0620169.

That's our code. Go there, register at smile .amazon

.com and then all the things that you purchase at amazon .com,

Amazon will actually give us half a percent to help the furtherance of the gospel and discipling.

That's amazing. It's kind of like you're just doing your regular shopping and you're helping to further the work of God.

So, I want to encourage you to do that. To go to Amazon Smile and register that, and then every time you're going to go to Amazon, go to smile .amazon

.com like I do and you would be helping to further the ministry here in supporting us.

Now, I will strongly recommend if you, most of all if you can, go to Striving Fraternity and go to the donate page and set up for monthly donations.

It really helps us. It helps us to pay staff if we have monthly giving, not yearly giving.

That way we know how much is coming in. Otherwise, what we have to do, if you don't do that and people, we have a lot of people that donate yearly at our

Spreading the Fire events, what we end up having to do is raise enough money throughout the year to say, okay, we can afford someone for one year and that's how we end up having to look to do that.

And so, it really is, it does make it hard. Yeah, someone's posting in the chat room.

Okay, thank you. Someone's posting, hey, great idea for Christmas presents. If you're going to buy your Christmas presents at Amazon, go to AmazonSmile and register us.

We do appreciate that. Can't count on that and that's why I encourage you to sign up monthly. If you want to save us the money from PayPal, go to your bank and from your bank, what you could do with your bank is at your bank you can set up and just send checks monthly.

That's what I do because I want to save us the cost of the PayPal. And so, what

I have with my bank account is they just, I have it scheduled, they send a check every month. The first of the month, they send a check to Striving for Eternity and they send it to P .O.

Box 189 at Jackson, New Jersey 08526 and you can send a check there for any amount and just set it up monthly.

If you have online banking, you can send that. So, that is something you could do.

Now, I want to bring up the Brother of Encouragement. Is he watching? He may not be watching, alright.

So, as most of you know who are not new and we do thank all of those of you who are new to the

Striving for Eternity Academy. I hope this won't be the last time you watch. Hope I didn't put you to sleep and bore you or anything like that.

But I hope you found it educational while being somewhat lively with some, maybe some poor humor.

But one of the things that we want to do and as anyone that knows me seems to know that I try to pack as much in to anything that I do with lots of ideas.

Just came back from the NorCal Fire where we have a great brother

Michael Coughlin who runs that event and Michael jokingly says, now more often than not, that working with me he's realized that I have a thousand ideas a day and what

I just need is a thousand people around me to make them all happen that I'm constantly coming up with different ideas.

Jokingly he says that but I don't think he's too far off from the truth. We do a class here where you go, well we're sitting here and we're trying to disciple people.

We're trying to do online training of things and yet at the end of every class we want to encourage you to encourage people.

Why? We think encouragement is important. I've been to enough funerals where I see that people say the nicest things at someone's funeral.

I just found out today about someone, a colleague that I worked with in a secular work for many years who, there's a question of whether he's a believer or not,

I'm looking into figuring that out. But he just passed away, I just found out today.

And so, because I don't work with him directly anymore, you know, I don't know.

So I just found out he passed away. So you know, he'll go at his funeral and hear these wonderful things said about him.

I don't know about you but wouldn't you like to hear, wouldn't you like to know the things people are going to say at your funeral?

I certainly would. I'd like to hear the encouraging things now so that you know the impact that you're going to leave behind.

And that's what we want to do. We want to encourage you to encourage others. Now, we want to encourage you to build it into a pattern of life, encourage everybody every day.

I'm really trying to do that, I'm not so good at it, that's why I've got to work harder at it. We want to encourage you to encourage this week,

Ryan Muniak. I know we've asked you to encourage him in the past, we're asking you to encourage him again because, well, somebody sent us an email at academyatstrivingforeternity .org

and said, hey, can we encourage Ryan, he's a great brother, he does Witness Radio, that's down right there, witnesstalkradio .org,

you can go and hear his radio program. He jokingly says it's the only program where he doesn't care about an audience or listeners, you know, about how many views, but he does,

I mean, he wouldn't do it if not, he wants to be heard, so I encourage you to listen. But he really, he's trying just to get people out witnessing.

And he now works with Christian Collegian Network, so he's on a college campus trying to train students in the areas of evangelism and apologetics to go out and share the gospel.

It's a great place to go and share the gospel, so he's out doing that, he's regularly witnessing.

He and his wife call themselves Missionaries to America, and he is a faithful brother who is doing a lot for the gospel.

He is a state representative for Living Waters, that's known as Way of the

Master Radio, or Way of the Master, I mean, and they've got the TV show and all that. Encourage you to encourage

Ryan, just give him a plug, if you don't know Ryan, go onto his website, go onto Facebook, and just tag

Ryan, say, hey Ryan, I want to encourage you, I hear you do a lot for the Lord, I hear you're witnessing, I hear you train people to witness,

I hear you go to churches anywhere in Ohio, and you'll bring tracts, and you'll bring an evangelism training, hey, if you're in Ohio, I encourage you to contact him and have him come out and do that, okay?

But encourage him as he's going out and trying to train others, alright? Ryan's a great brother,

I get to see him a couple times a year, I love this guy, even though he digs on me every time, he rips on me something awful on Facebook, but I know that he loves me and he's doing it in a joking way, but I look forward to seeing him each year, even though he rips on me.

He's one of those guys that, you know, if you're around him for any length of time, you really can't help but to just laugh, to enjoy the time, to be encouraged, he's just one of those kind of guys, he's one of those kind of guys that you can be away from for a year,

I get to see him every year at the Ohio Fire, and he's one of many people that every

April I look forward to coming to Ohio to seeing him.

I got to find more ways to get in his neck of Ohio so that I can see him more, but really just a sweet, sweet brother, trying to raise his family just in a godly way, and so I want to encourage you to encourage him this week if you can.

We'll be back next week and I want to let you know, I didn't put a slide,

I know, I'm bad, I don't actually, I'll try to post this online on Facebook, I don't know the exact site, but I will be doing a show, a live show,

Saturday, 3 o 'clock Eastern time, it is with a professing atheist,

I don't know the name of his channel, I'll get that for you, post it on Facebook, we're going to be doing a live show,

I'm actually, here's the thing, I will be coveting your prayers, I will be going to his house to do the broadcast.

It will be live, in person, he's going to be doing it there, at his home, and he lives about 50 minutes from me, found out he doesn't live so far, and because of that, he and I got together, been chatting, seems like a relatively nice guy, so we're going to do the show and then have dinner.

He's a gentleman who's heard the gospel over and over and over again, but just like guys in New York City who've heard me open air preach for seven years now, and after seven years of hearing the gospel thousands of times, they eventually,

God saved them, some of them. We now have two individuals that supposedly have been saved in Union Square, New York after years and years and years of open air preaching, and, oh, who is it?

Let me look, hold on. His name is, someone's asking who it is that is,

I'm doing the show with, so give me a second here to look it up, yeah,

I should have it, I know, I know. His name is Chris, and I just want to get the pronunciation of his last name right,

Chris Maute, M -A -U -T -E, so search for Christopher Maute, M -A -U -T -E,

I better get the pronunciation right, probably give him a call and get that right before I meet with him, but, you know, it shows some trust that he's inviting me into his home, we're going to have some dinner,

I hope it does develop into a good lasting relationship, that we might be able to get together in a regular time, and I've heard some good things about him from different people, that, yes, that's, did someone just post that, okay, yeah, the thing you just sent me is right, that's,

Christine, you got the right person, so, Maute, Maute, okay,

Chris Maute, and so I'm going to be getting together with him, and be praying for that, be praying for how the conversation goes, one of the things, one of the reasons he's actually invited me on his show, and he said he wants to do something with me, is he said that he really respects my character, he said he's been watching me for a while, and respects the character, he knows that I won't go soft on the gospel,

I won't backpedal and things like that, and he said he wants someone that is going to say it the way it is, and not, you know, not, not placate, is, you know, but at the same time, someone who's going to be doing it in a respectful way, and, you know,

I've watched him for a while, I've done some interactions, done some Google Hangouts with him, and, you know, got to watch him in, you know, in a

Google Hangout, and then an after Hangout, where he had a bunch, I mean, there were like,

I don't know, a dozen people in there, all attacking me, and, you know, he came to say, hey guys, let's give some respect here, and so I really,

I really want to, I really found him to be someone that, off air, that I've talked to, on air, talked to, just really come to, just respect as a person, and so,

I like that about him. Obviously I don't agree with him when it comes to his views of who

God is, but we're going to talk about that. The, the, okay, so I'm being asked,

I was just asked, what are the topics that I'm going to be talking with, with Chris? So here's, here's the topics that Chris, these are

Chris' topics, I asked him the same thing, so he said, potential topics, atheist dogma, the value of apologetics, and science.

It's going to be kind of fun. I'm looking forward to that, especially the first one, the dogma of, of atheism.

You know, I think some atheists, professing atheists may have a problem with that, because they're going to go, hey, we don't have dogma, we don't have teaching, we're not a religion.

Chris and I have talked about this, and how atheism's more of a political thing, sometimes, more so.

You want proof of it, there's a show, The Thinking Atheist, I've got to listen to this before, before I go out there, but I loved it, because it said, can an atheist be a

Republican? Now, think about that, and it tells you something about the way professing atheists think about themselves.

You know, can they be a Republican? In other words, as if, you know, is it because they so hate Christianity, and Christianity is associated with Republicans, because they're more conservative?

I don't know. Or, or is it that, you know, they're arguing it because, you know, those that profess to be atheists are so against God, they're against everything that seems to be conservative, and therefore they seem to be more liberal?

I don't know. I'm going to listen to that program and see, but I do think that one's interesting. But I do ask for prayer for that.

I know I've gone over time quite a bit now, talking about that. Oh well, for those of you who haven't tuned me out now, you've gotten that.

So until next week, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. See you next week.