Good afternoon, turn in your Bibles to John chapter three and verse 16. John chapter three and verse 16, one of the most famous verses in the word of God, one of the most famous verses ever preached upon, probably one of the most preached verses in the last hundred years. John chapter three and verse 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. This great and powerful scripture was given by Jesus to a religious man named Nicodemus, as Nicodemus was seeking instruction from the great rabbi, the master, the prophet, Jesus Christ, but he failed to understand that Jesus is God in the flesh, not only a man, but fully God. God in the flesh, the creator God, made incarnate through the work of the Holy Spirit of God, conceiving Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and bringing Him to a human form. Jesus is said in Philippians to have been in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but was made in the likeness of men, the Bible says. So Jesus Christ here, God in the flesh, died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried, rose again the third day, and he said to Nicodemus, he must be born again to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This promise of being born again revolves on this subject of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. There was nothing else that Jesus had Nicodemus do. It was to believe or to perish. If you look at chapter 3 down there at the end, Let's see, verse 36, He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. And so here, this whole question of being born again hinges on the idea of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart. This is what we chose to open this discussion of praying for the lost with today. The primary thing that people need to have in order to pray for the lost is, first of all, to be born again themselves. Secondly, once someone is born again, in order to pray effectively for the lost, someone needs a burden for the lost, a desire for others to be saved, and usually people who are born again are very quick and very responsive to that burden, and it isn't very long before they want everyone else to find the peace and joy that they have found through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the burden for the lost comes very quickly and very easily. The next thing that comes, in order to pray effectively for the lost, there must be an attempt to reach the lost. If somebody has not tried to reach the lost, their prayers will be very shallow and sporadic. They won't even really know what to pray for the lost. They just kind of... strike out to the left and to the right as one that beats the air, praying for the lost. And then eventually as the burden mounts, I believe every young believer goes through this, they eventually go out and begin to share the gospel as simply as they can, because that's all they can do. And they don't know much about it, but they do their best. And a lot of times the efforts of young Christians can cause chuckles to go through a audience that hears the story Preachers like to share illustrations of young Christians who share the gospel because so often their illustrations can just be from out of this world. You don't even really know where they get some of the ideas that they get, but you can see their zeal. You can see their desire. You can see their burden, and you can see their love for the Lord, and all of that makes a lot of things forgivable that would not be forgivable in a much older Christian and one who's had much more time to mature. As that Christian begins to share the gospel with people, he finds an interesting phenomena, and that is that in spite of the incredible grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the mercy poured out upon lost sinners, and the open nature of salvation, whosoever will may come, Yet sinners consistently reject the gospel, they reject the cry of the Savior, whosoever will may come, and they go on in sin. And then every new Christian goes through pretty much the same thing here. You go through a period of disillusionment. At first, it's not a disillusionment of your own salvation. It's a disillusionment about the world. Because whenever you got saved, you knew you had found eternal life. You knew you had found the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, heaven and earth. You might not have been able to put it in those words, but you knew God was real. You got saved and you wanted everybody to know. And as you start to tell everybody, and suddenly hit a brick wall of satanic opposition, and you find people consistently rejecting the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, it tends to disillusion a new Christian about sharing the gospel. what can easily happen is that that new Christian can then begin to retreat and kind of crawl back into a shell, having suffered some persecution for Christ's sake, which is not what God intends for you to do. He doesn't want you to crawl back into a shell, but so often that's what is done. And then what tends to happen next, and bear with me, is that that Christian, instead of being a faithful witness, they will lose their zeal, they'll lose their fire. Older Christians will come along beside them and tell them, listen, when I was a young Christian like you, I did things like you too, and listen to me. I'm not trying to push you away by telling you this, but the older Christian will say, if you go about doing things the way you're doing it, you're just going to push people away. And the young Christian then struggles with guilt. They struggle with doubt. They wonder, what have I done to push people away? How have I sent people further down the road to hell by my attempts to share the gospel with them? And the fear of messing up then enters in on top of the disillusionment and works to silence the new Christian. And pretty soon they realize that the good Christian way to handle the lost is to give a prayer request saying, God, please save Sally. And that's where you leave it. You don't go any further than that, and you just kind of leave it up to God, and you learn from older Christians to not expect your prayer to be answered. You learn from older Christians that you can expect to pray for God to save Sally for maybe 30, 40 years, and that faith means continuing to repeat the same prayer over and over again without any any at all visible results, and to be content with the lack of results." Now, this is a position that most so-called mature Christians have taken in our American Christianity, but it is completely unbiblical. There's no basis or foundation for such a position. The Bible says, ask and you shall receive. James says, you have not because you ask not, and when you ask, you ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your own lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that friendship with the world is enmity with God." And so Christians settle into a friendship with the world, they're enmity with God, they settle into a complacency, they settle into an apathy, they settle into a humdrum of offering up these kind of like sacrifices of incense of prayers. Prayer is an incense. God talks about it in Revelation. But instead of it being a sweet savor in the nostrils of God, we find that we are defying the commands of Christ. Jesus Christ said in Matthew, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. And I challenge you today, Christian, to consider how your prayer lines up with that command from Christ. Is your prayer a vain repetition? I understand that we should lay hold on faith and believe, but I wonder how we justify vain repetitions in the name of faith. You see, if God wants us to have faith and believe Him against all odds, it does not and will not fly in the face of other scriptures that command us to not use vain repetitions. And yet our prayer meetings tend to be vain repetitions. We tend to ask the same basic prayer over and over and over and over and over again. Now, I'm not jumping on anybody. I'm just pointing out some scriptures. I already know, getting this far into it, that I'm more in trouble than I was when I preached that short little message that I did, oh, six, eight weeks ago on prayer. We were under time constraints. I preached fast. I brought some scriptures. I brought quite a few scriptures. I did not bring many qualifying statements. We did not have time to qualify it. I didn't have time to explain things. We were blitzing through a bunch of scripture and trying to see what God had for us. I believe God sent that message in order to challenge our false assumptions and presumptions about praying for the lost and to challenge us to reach to a higher plane of effectiveness and power with God. Our goal here today, if we're born again, and this message is to the born again, if you're not saved, you can get saved. You can be saved. Repent of your sins and believe with your heart on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. We're not getting into more of that now. You can check it out in other messages. Got lots of resources on the same link you went to to get this message. So here today we began looking at praying for the lost because the goal and the heart of every believer that really loves God is that they desire other people to be saved too. They have an inward desire that's deep within their hearts to see their loved ones, their family members, their friends, to see them come to repentance before God and to obtain mercy from God and be saved. And that is a good desire. It's a godly desire. But so often, just like when we were baby Christians and we ran out and we would maybe use off-the-wall analogies to try and win somebody to Christ. I've heard of baby Christians even basically trying to pay somebody to get them in ways, you know, don't act shocked, you've done worse, probably just like me, but bribing people with either friendship or fellowship or a better life or something like that to try and get them to get saved, and we've all used carnal means to try and accomplish God's will. The difference between most Christians that really separates one Christian from another is whether or not any given Christian has been allowed God to work in their life and begin to break them of their carnal means and obtain spiritual means from the Word of God to do spiritual work. That's really the difference. between Christians. That's the difference between a carnal Christian and a spiritual Christian. It's one that has allowed God to chasten him and break him of his carnal mindedness and his foolish carnal ways of doing God's work and bring him into subjection and submission to the Holy Spirit of God to work in cooperation with the Holy Spirit of God. So praying for the lost. Why do we pray for the lost? What's the motivation there? Well, if you truly saved us, love. You love these people like God loves these people. Just like God loved you when you were a sinner, now Christ in you loves these lost people and you want them to be saved. Why do we ask But why do we ask the lost people to pray? So often we're asking lost people to pray to be saved, and that's not actually a biblical command either. So often we are mixed up on things. We pray for the lost, We ask the lost to pray, and so often we don't understand prayer or the purpose of prayer. Let's look at a few prayers here in the Bible, John 17 and verse 9. This message will be basically a slow down, expand, widen, broaden, qualify, message. The short 20-minute message I preached can be found, I believe, at LibertyFaith.net or Sermon Audio under the Liberty Faith Bible Church website. That's where I preached that message. You can find that and listen to it if you'd like. John 17 is Jesus's prayer. This really should be called the Lord's Prayer. Matthew chapter 6 and 7 and 8, the Sermon on the Mount, that contains the model prayer where Jesus told them, after this manna pray ye. But in John chapter 17, we have the longest prayer that Jesus ever prayed recorded. And so here he opens his prayer. Father, the hour has come, glorify thy son, that thy son also may glorify thee. As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth. I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world. Thine they were, and thou gavest them me, and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee, for I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them, I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me, for they are thine, and all mine are thine, and thine are mine, and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee, Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name. Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled. And now come I to thee that these things, and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." Circle that world there in that text, and notice also, oh, what verse was that? Where he says, I pray not for the world, there in verse nine. If you underline the word world throughout this text, it sheds quite a lot of light on this subject. He says, they are not of the world, The world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also, which shall believe on me through their word." That's us, you and I, believer. If you've been born again by the power of God, we are those that have believed on Christ through the word of his disciples. So here he includes us in this prayer as well. Verse 21, that they all may be one as thou father art in me, and I am thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. and the glory which thou gavest me, I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one. I am them, and thou and me, that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them as thou hast loved me. Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me, for thou lovest me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. Now in John chapter 3 and verse 16, our text that we began with, it states that God so loved the world. that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Christ died for the world, but Christ prayed for His own. And this is quite an amazing distinction. Christ's death on the cross, His burial, His resurrection provided a way of salvation for all men. The Bible says that God commands all men everywhere to repent. The Bible says whosoever will may come. The Bible has sent the Word of God, proclaims that the Word of God is available, and this gospel is a free gift given by God through His Son Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world available to all men, and that Christ is the Savior of all men, especially of those that believe." So we find that there is a clear distinction between those that believe and those that do not believe. Whereas Christ died for all men and His atonement is unlimited, it is available to all men, there are no limits on Christ's atonement. Yet there is a limit on the application of the atonement, and that limit is based on the condition that God has set of faith. He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. The just shall live by faith. By grace are ye saved through faith. It is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. The Word of God has limited the application of the atoning blood of Jesus Christ to only those who believe. While this blood has the power and the ability and the open door, the availability to atone for the blood of every sinner that has ever sinned and every sin that any and every sinner has ever done, yet the application of that blood is limited to those who believe. on the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ's prayers for his own that the Father has given him are different from Christ's prayers for the world. In John 17, when Jesus Christ opened his great prayer there in the chapter of John 17, Jesus said, I pray not for the world, but for these that thou hast given me. And you can read that through again. Jesus Christ prayed for their converts in verse 20, those that would believe on him through their name. but Jesus did not pray for the world. And that may be slightly perplexing. Let's look at another passage here, Matthew chapter six. You see, and I'm going to kind of spoil this thing a little bit right up front because I'd rather you learned than got wowed by some kind of idea. And I've only want to share with you what I have learned and not that I am better than thou. I am made out of the same dirt that anybody else is. If I have learned anything, I've received it from the Lord. Here, we're going to see an extreme distinction as we go through this study between the world and the church. And God has given the work of sharing the gospel, of preaching the gospel to the church. He gave the work of atoning for the sin of the lost to Christ. And the work that we do is to go out and give the gospel to those people. This is not to say that it would be wrong to pray for the lost, but we will challenge this idea of prayer for the lost. because this idea has been used by the devil, has been twisted by the devil, and has become the go-to, hide-from-the-enemy, behind-the-walls-of-our-Christianity solution to persecution. So instead of actually carrying the gospel instead of actually faithfully preaching the word, what we do is we go and lob carnal, often shallow, flare prayers across the wall at the enemy and hope upon hope that perhaps somebody out there will come to Christ without the bright and shining light of our on-fire witness for God that we have been commanded to be. And such is falling. and such is foolishness and such will affect nothing. You see, so often we pray carnally. So often we pray shadowly. So often we pray for God to do things that God has told us to do. And I have news for you. If you haven't figured this out already, you're probably not been saved very long or you're in rebellion to God. I hope that's not the case. But for most people who have been saved very long, you find out pretty quick that if you ask God to do what God told you to do, he's gonna just not answer that. He's just gonna be quiet. Most of the time he just doesn't say anything. And then you go back and you ask him again to do something he told you to do, and he's quiet. And you go back again, and you beg, and you plead, and you fast, and you pray, and you beg for God to do what God told you to do, and God just is quiet. And in his mercy and his grace, eventually God may answer, and his answer as in my personal experience has always been that he reiterates the command that he gave me at the beginning and gives me another opportunity to obey him and go and do what he's called me to do. So Matthew chapter six, we have what is commonly referred to as the Lord's Prayer. I prefer to think of it as the model prayer simply so that I can keep a distinction between it and John 17 and put John 17 kind of on a higher plane because for me as a young man, I just never even really noticed John 17. It just kind of was lumped in there with everything else, and frankly, it's the longest prayer that Jesus Christ prayed that's recorded in the Word of God, and I believe it deserves its own notice. So here in Matthew chapter 6, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, And when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy father which is in secret, and thy father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking." And this is so common. This is, every new believer goes through this. I've gone through this. I still struggle with this. I ask God to do something, and then the next day I ask him again, ask him again, and ask him again. A jaded Christian will make an excuse and say, you shouldn't use vain repetitions. You can just drop to your knees and say a flair prayer. You don't even have to put any heart in it. You don't have to travail. You don't have to get along with God. You just kind of burp up a prayer to God and God's duty bound and obligated to obey you because you named it and you claimed it. and now God's gotta do it and you don't need to worry about it. Go get your snow cone and sit on the beach and get a suntan while you wait on God to answer because you've flashed your prayer up to heaven. So that's the jaded Christian's way of dealing with the lack of answers to our vain repetitions. The young Christian will often just persevere in the vain repetitions, waiting underneath this weight of a constantly growing list of repetitive prayers that he has to pray over and over and over again. I could cite several helpful sources that I have found over the years. I'm not going to today. I'm trying to come straight from the Word of God with this stuff. And besides that, most of the time people have one reason or another to discount what you say if you say that somebody else said something. So we might as well just stick with the Bible anyway. Let the naysayers say what they say. So he says, use not vain repetitions. The jaded Christian says, so just pray once. There's no such thing as travailing or prevailing prayer. There's no such thing as a prayer burden. You just kind of pray. And if you have real faith, you walk on down the street eating a candy bar because you know God has to answer you because you prayed and God said, ask and you shall receive. And they throw out hundreds, if not thousands of scriptures that deal with God's nature and God's character and how God deals with Christians and about prayer. Honestly, dearly beloved, this is way too big of a subject to handle in an hour. Twenty minutes that I did the other day no wonder caused questions, an hour's not enough time. I've gone through twenty-one message series before on prayer that haven't even touched the surface, hardly, of prayer in the Word of God. This is a deep subject. It's a huge subject. So please don't attribute to me snap judgments where you think that because I say something, I must mean this or that. Please just let me, hear me out for Christ's sake and listen to the scriptures that I'm giving and think about it and try and ask God to make some applications to you. And don't let the devil make me out to be a heretic unless I really am. And if I am, then bring me the scriptures and show me why I am. Don't just say it and walk off. so many people are apt to do. So it says here, be not ye therefore like unto them, for your father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him. After this manner, therefore, pray ye. Our ears should all perk up right there. Jesus just told us how to pray. After this manner, therefore, pray ye. Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. So first, he calls on God. This begins all the way back in Genesis when Enos was born. I believe that's, yeah, Genesis 4, I think 16, "...then began men to call upon the name of the Lord." Here Jesus calls upon the name of the Lord, our Father, which art in heaven. This is a turn on it from the Old Testament, whereas in the Old Testament they would call on the name of the Lord as perhaps Jehovah, or, um... Ah, my mind's slipping. Already. Not that old yet. Jehovah would be the primary name of the Lord that they would know. There's the great I Am, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and many other such things they would call on as the name of the Lord. Now, Jesus Christ is teaching the disciples here in Matthew 6 to call on God as Father. Our Father which art in heaven. Of course, you can chase that down through the book of John. Several good references to the Father God through especially John 6 through 9 and 10 in that range. where Jesus makes a distinction between children of their father, the devil, and children of our Father in heaven. So, our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. We have the greeting to God, the speaking to God, the addressing of God. God is not some kind of impersonal object. God is the person of God. Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. So you have the benediction of God, the blessing of God, when he says, hallowed be thy name. Then you have the submission to God, thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Jesus is teaching us that first you come to God with respect and reverence. Then you come to God in submission to his will. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. You don't just come to God popping off your list of needs and your list of desires, though God has great mercy. Again, there's that scripture, the Holy Spirit knoweth, knows our needs, it prays for us with groanings that cannot be uttered, makes intercession for us because we don't know how to pray. I understand that. But nevertheless, the purpose here is to pray in accordance with God's will and not to, and to grow up in Christ and get beyond the prayers of a babe in Christ. So he says, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. So our primary, our primary concern, whenever we come to God, after we first acknowledge who he is, worship him for who he is and what he is, then the second thing that we come to him about is to submit ourselves to his will and his plan, both for our life and for the lives of others. And then thirdly, we have our needs shown here. Give us this day, our daily bread. We know from the book of John that Jesus is that bread sent down from heaven. There's a physical application here, but if you look at the rest of this Sermon on the Mount, we find that Jesus tells us not to take thought for the morrow. What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Wherewithal we shall be clothed. So for this bread, for Christ to be telling us to be praying for physical bread here would be in contradiction to his other teachings though there is some application and the God understands that our feebleness he understands our weakness he understands that even though he tells us not to pray for the things that we need tomorrow that we probably will and he's not going to send a lightning bolt from heaven whenever we get desperate and fearful like little doubting children and begin to show our true colors and our true carnality. God's not up there with a hammer waiting to beat you. That's not the point of this teaching either. The point here is not to say you better fix your prayers or God's going to slam you with a hammer or something. That's not the case. The point here is let's get our prayers in line with God's Word. The Bible says the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." That means that some prayers are not effectual. Some people are not righteous. Now, that's pretty obvious. But the other side of that is that some prayers are not effectual. Some prayers are wasted breath. Now, some people don't believe that. I know that, and that's you know, I'm not trying to pick a fight, I'm just giving you scripture. There are effectual prayers and there are, therefore, ineffectual prayers, as Jesus just said, vain repetitions, being an example, vain being empty, useless, worthless. There are prayers that are nothing but a waste of hot air. So he says, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread. You have the physical aspect there, but the primary application of verse 11, give us this day our daily bread, is a spiritual application of the daily partaking of Christ. This has to do with what Paul said when he said, I die daily. So whenever I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me in the life that I now live in the flesh. I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. So my daily dying to myself and being raised again daily in the newness of Christ daily with a fresh anointing from heaven, a fresh partaking of Jesus Christ for the day, A fresh partaking of the nature of Jesus Christ for that day is our next concern. So we have the addressing of our Lord. We have the reverencing and worshiping of our Lord. We have submission to our Lord. And then as we pray for submission to our Lord, verse 10, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We get to verse 11, where we pray for an impartation of our Lord, an infusion of our Lord, of his character, of his humanity. of his spirituality, of everything that he is so that we can be what he is to this lost and dying world because we realize that we cannot bring about his kingdom. We cannot do his will on earth as it is in heaven because the flesh is at enmity with God. The natural man is at enmity with God. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. So we're asking God for our daily bread to give us again a daily dose of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, a daily impartation. The next thing that he directs us to is forgiveness, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And this forgiveness is right after the daily bread, because as Christ enters, sin exits. Anywhere that the light enters, the darkness has to flee. Darkness always submits to light. The only way that anything can be dark is for there to be an absence of light. Darkness is inanimate. It has no form. It has no shape. It has no person. It has no physical characteristics in and of itself. It is an absence. And anytime the light enters, the darkness flees because the light has entered. So the daily bread Jesus Christ's nature imparted today reveals my sinfulness and my wickedness. And in the light of the glorious face of Jesus Christ, my sins suddenly loom like Herculean monsters. And all of a sudden, that unkind word that I said is intensely painful to my conscience and to my mind because Christ liveth in me. Not just deep in my spirit, but in my soul. He's moved out of the spirit, into the soul, and is now changing the effect of my body by the manifest living Christ in my life that replaced my life being replaced with Christ's life. So here we have, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, which is much easier to do when we see our own sin as so very sinful. The reason we do not want forgiveness of sin is because we do not see ourselves as very bad sinners. The next thing that he asks us to pray or teaches us to pray, commands us to pray, and lead us not into temptation. but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. He asks for preservation from this present evil world, as it will say, I believe, in 2 Thessalonians, that we be delivered from wicked and unreasonable men, for all men have not faith. Here's a request that we be delivered from temptation, and then a declaration of the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the prayer closes. I honestly, I must say, we are challenged as Christians. We must confront the fact that in both of these prayers, there is an obvious Galerian lack of any kind of prayer for either physical sickness or for the lost, which makes up 90% of the prayer requests in the average prayer meeting. And yet those prayer requests are missing from this place. We're gonna keep moving here. I wanna look at some scriptures in the book of Acts. We want to look at biblical prayers for the lost. Hopefully your mind will begin whirling, thinking about places in the Bible that men prayed. You can always get a concordance and look up pray and prayer. I did. I didn't finish the study. It's huge. There's so many places and to get the context and read them all, I intend to in the future, but I have not Donnock done a complete and comprehensive study on the words, a word study that is, on prayer or prayed or praying in the Bible. It would be a very valuable study. Acts chapter 4 and verse 23 we have the disciples praying. Actually they were praying in the upper room whenever the Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost. and it resulted in a great ingathering of souls. Now, I wonder how often, please hear me today, how often do we pray for people to be saved when if we were praying in accordance with the will of God, those very people would get saved? Cricket, cricket, chirp. Let that thought rattle around in there for a little while. Think about that. What if we got right with God ourselves? Maybe we would be, as Pastor said the other day, removing stones just by getting right with God. And maybe we would start seeing some of these people on our prayer list getting saved if we would be more in line and in tune with God and with His will and with His direction for our lives instead of throwing up prayers that have Very little biblical basis. Acts chapter 4 And verse 23, the disciples, the apostles, were let go. And being let go, they went to their own company and reported all the chief priests and elders that sat under them. And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord and said, Lord, thou art God, which has made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is. Again, this is a corporate prayer that is recorded. This is the early church praying together. Unless I missed something here, this is the first recorded prayer of the early church in conference together. This is the church assembled together in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, praying as a body. It's the first recorded prayer. We're going to read it here. They said, Lord, thou art God, which has made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is, who by the mouth of thy servant David has said, why did the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy holy child, Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done. And now, Lord, behold their threatenings, and grant unto thy servants that with all boldness they may speak thy word, by stretching forth thine hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child, Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place was shaken, where they were assembled together, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. And they spake the word of God with boldness, and the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul. Neither said any of them that of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. and with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all. And then it goes on there, we'll stop there. This is the third great prayer that's recorded in the New Testament that's of any great substance here. We have, of course, other prayers like Jesus' short prayer whenever he rose Lazarus from the dead and others. But here, as far as any substantial prayers, this is the third great prayer recorded in the New Testament. And in this prayer, we have again a complete lack of praying specifically for the lost to be saved. The lost are prayed for, but they're not prayed for specifically to be saved. How are they prayed for? First of all, they're prayed for in accusation. The church comes and says, the kings of the earth stood up, and it says, our rulers have put to death your son, Jesus Christ. They basically accuse the council, and then they tell the Lord that the lost are threatening them and telling them to not preach anymore. So they asked God for boldness that they may speak the word. In verse 30, they asked God to heal people miraculously, to give weight and validity to their gospel message. And also that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child, Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. The prayers back in chapter two, Or in chapter 1, they're all of one accord and one mind here, and they're praying here in the upper room in chapter 2, and in verse 1 it says, and suddenly there came a sound from heaven. Of course it doesn't say that at that moment they were praying, they were all of one accord in one place, and they heard a sound of a mighty rushing wind. and it filled all the house where they were sitting, a rushing mighty wind. And there appeared to them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost." The result of this was a powerful manifestation of the Holy Spirit of God, which accompanied the bold preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and thousands of people were saved. And this pattern repeats itself throughout the book of Acts. This prayer in Acts chapter 4 has a complete lack of prayer, of general prayer. Oh God, please save the lost. You see, the early church knew something that we have forgotten in our day. All power is given unto me. Go ye therefore into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But he had said, tarry ye in Jerusalem until you receive power from on high. The early church tarried, the early church received power, the early church went out to preach the gospel, and people were getting saved. They did not need to ask God to save people because God was doing it already, even as God had said that he would do, as they moved in obedience and submission to the will of God. So you find a marked lack of praying for the lost throughout the Word of God in the book in its entirety. I actually issued a challenge almost two months ago for anyone to give me a scriptural example of a direct, specific, I'm not saying praying for the things that accompany the working of God in salvation, I'm saying a specifically general prayer of, oh God, please save lost people. Where can you find that kind of prayer? Where can you find, God, please save Grandma in your Bible? And I challenged people find the verse find the passage show it to me. I want to see it. I'm not being snarky I've just been looking through my Bible and I can't find it and I want to pray in Accordance to the will of God and so far I can't find anything in there that matches most of my prayers that I've prayed most of my life now Here's where and again try to stay on task here but this is where a lot of times our experience gets in the way because we say oh we prayed for grandma and Josephine for 40 years and she finally got saved. Well, praise God, hallelujah, she got saved. I'm rejoicing with you, but let me ask you a question. How do you know she only got saved because you prayed? How many prayers did you have to pray before she got saved? How hard do you have to pray? What conditions of prayer do you have to meet? What promises of God are you going off of? Usually, it's usually, in my experience, it's a very shallow prayer. Usually it's a salve for our conscience because we know we don't have the power of God on us. We know we don't have the power of God on our message. We know we don't have the power of God moving on our people. We know that God's not convicting people whenever we share the gospel. And so instead of dealing with the problem, which is a lack of power where God said there should be power, we instead turn to a simple, shallow, simplistic prayer and shift the burden of responsibility back to God. Instead of taking responsibility for being powerless and for failing to preach the gospel with boldness we often shift the Responsibility back to God and we make a long prayer list of people that we want to see saved and then we just patiently Oh so patiently wait on God to do what God has commissioned at the church to do Which is to go into all the world and preach the gospel You notice here the prayer in Acts chapter 4 was that God would grant them boldness that they may speak thy words They did not ask God to save the lost. They asked God for boldness to preach to the lost. The difference is night and day. One of them is in accord with God's will, and the other one very likely is not. And again, I'm not making blanket statements. There are many. Again, we could take 24 hours on this subject and not cover it. So again, this is a general discussion of praying for the lost. If the boot fits, and I'm talking about you, then wear it, man up or woman up, own it, and get right with God. If the boot don't fit, then say, bless him, Lord, and help him preach, and maybe there'll be something in there you can use later. Acts chapter seven and verse 59. Here they stoned Stephen, calling upon God and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down and cried with a loud voice, here we go, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. Now this also lines up with what Jesus Christ prayed, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. So here is a prayer for the lost in the Bible, but we find this is not the general flare prayer for the lost that we're used to. This is a prayer for forgiveness of debts. This is a forgiving prayer. So Jesus on the cross asked God to forgive the lost for what they did to him. Stephen here is asking God to forgive the lost for putting him to death. In both cases, while they are praying for the lost, they're not praying for the salvation of the lost. They're praying for God to lay not this to the charge. Just like Jesus said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. God don't kill them for doing this to me, even though it's so very wicked. I forgive them and I'm asking you to forgive them, Father." That lines up also with the teaching in one of the epistles of John. I believe it's 1 John. He says, if any man see a brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask and he shall give him life for him that sinneth not unto death. There is a sin unto death. I do not say that he shall pray for it. So there, in the Bible, God instructs the church when they see a man sin, instead of going and grabbing him by the shirt collar and browbeating him about it, you start by praying and begging God to give him life for the sin, which is what we find Stephen doing here, and we find Christ doing it on the cross. Go on to Acts 8. 24. Simon here wanted to be prayed for in Acts 8, 24. This is a common anomaly. Well, that's not a juxtaposition either. Boy, my words are all tangled up now. Oxymoron. That's an oxymoron, a common anomaly. Okay, so here you have a man trying to get someone to pray for him when he's rebuked. Verse 24, then answered Simon and said, pray ye to the Lord for me that none of these things which you have spoken come upon me. This is a common occurrence. When you get out on the street, you're sharing gospel with people, knocking on doors, and you tell them the gospel, they say, pray for me. I had a guy just yesterday put his arm around my shoulder, pat me on the back with it, and say, pray for me, man, pray for me, and walk away. This is a very common thing. This is what the unregenerate say to the regenerate instead of getting saved. They say, pray for me, man. Pray for me. Why? Because your witness is convicting to them. The boldness with which you approach them about the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was used by the Holy Spirit of God to pierce, using the Word of God that you spoke to pierce even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and now they're squirming, and to get out of conviction, they say, pray for me, man. Honestly, I've stopped saying that. Alright, please forgive me for saying this. I'm going to say it. One of the worst things you can do for a sinner is tell them you're going to pray for them. You can't save them. Your prayers can't save them. Now, in Baptistic world, fundamentalist world, evangelical world, we know that prayers to the dead and to saints can't save anybody. And we're quick to point out to the Catholics that you can pray till you're blue in the face for Mary to bring you forgiveness and you'll still go to hell. But we Baptist minded people are equally quick to put lost people on the prayer list as if that's going to save them and we are being their saints. I know that's not the intention, but that's what it rolls out to be. Forgive me for saying it. I don't apologize for saying it. I don't apologize for the truth of it. I'm just asking you to forgive me because it's going to break the context of normality. This is not how we think about prayer. It's not how we think about the Bible, but I'm trying to just give you the Bible and I love you and I forgive you even if you don't forgive me. Where does the Bible say, wait to be saved? You ever hear that one? I heard a lady say once her son came to her under conviction, weeping, Mommy, I need to be saved. And she said, Oh son, you just got to wait on God to call you. And she's weeping. And she wanted her son to be saved, but she didn't believe in a present salvation that could be grabbed by anybody that wants it by simply calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I'm not going to get into all that right now. I can't. I don't have time. We've got to keep moving. We've got messages on that. We just preached in 2 Thessalonians on the call of God, called by our gospel, I think is the name of the message, and it's just as we go verse by verse. We hit it. We preached on it. We're going to dive deep on that one. You can look it up, Bible Time Podcast Sermon Audio. 2 Thessalonians 2, I can't remember the verse. So, we don't tell sinners to wait to be saved, but so often our, we're praying for you, translates into a wait to be saved. So often a lost person will look at a saved person and when they say, I'm praying for you, they think that they have extra leash from God. Now they've got a longer leash. They can do more sin because God is being held off. Judgment's being held off by this saved person that's praying for them. So now they can run further from God. And how often do we see that happen? Whenever we start praying for a sinner and they know that we're praying for them and they harden their hearts against the gospel and run the other way. Now experientially, so many people are going to say, but we've prayed for people and we've seen God save them. And again, I would say, I would have to say, dearly beloved, how do you know that they wouldn't have gotten saved if you hadn't prayed for them? I'm not telling you you can't pray for the lost, but your experiences are not the basis of doctrine. If you prayed for somebody and they got saved, it does not prove anything. Do you hear me? Nothing, squat, zilch. I'm glad you prayed for people. I'm glad people got saved, but it doesn't prove anything. You cannot base your theology, your doctrine off of your experiences, or you will end up in a mess every time. So Acts chapter nine, we've got Ananias. Let's check out this prayer here. Saul of Tarsus has been blinded by God, and he's now waiting in Damascus for God to visit him as the scales are still on his eyes. And God visits Ananias and tells him to go to Saul. Verse 13, Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem. And here he hath authority from the chief priest to bind all that call on thy name. But the Lord said unto him, go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel, for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake. Here's a great example of praying for the lost in the Bible. Ananias said, not him, God, send him to hell. Did I misread that? Check it out. And God said, go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me. God said, I'm going to save him whether you want him saved or not, Ananias. Ananias' prayer had nothing to do with Saul being saved. If it was up to Ananias, Saul would be Saul burning in hell today, not the Apostle Paul. But God said, he's a chosen vessel unto me. You go preach to him, Ananias. I wonder what God would have said if Ananias said, okay, God, I'll add him to my prayer list. I'm going to pray him into heaven. He is a chosen vessel unto me. Acts 10, same thing happens. Cornelius is praying. Peter never sees it coming. He's up there waiting on them to cook him some stew. He just had a dream where he argued with God about lizards and snakes and a net coming down, and a sheet coming down from heaven. He's been arguing with God, and all of a sudden these Gentiles show up, and they say, Peter, you're wanted at this house, and the spirit bade Peter to go. Peter gets to the house, and he says, okay, guys, God told me I shouldn't call any man common or unclean, otherwise I wouldn't even be in your house. Peter, listen, I know this is a paraphrase, and it is, read Acts 10. Peter literally tells them, you guys aren't good enough for me to be here. It's unlawful for a Jew to be in the house of a Gentile. I shouldn't really be here. You guys don't qualify. I don't have anything for you. I don't know why you sent for me, but God told me not to call you common or unclean, so I'm here. What do you want? This is the great apostle Peter, the evangelist of Pentecost. He has a house full of people who want him to preach to them, and he doesn't even know it. Cornelius says, I've been praying, I was fasting, and God said to send for Peter who will tell me things. Who will pray for me? No, Peter who will tell me things. What does Peter do? He opens his mouth, he begins to preach. While he's preaching, they get saved. And Peter says, whoa, I didn't even know these guys could get saved. They're dirty dog Gentiles. I didn't think God liked them at all. There's no way they could have gotten in. But here God did it. Who can forbid water that these men should be baptized as we are? Look, they've got the gift of the Holy Ghost. If you don't think I treated that fairly, then read it. Acts 12, there's prayers for Peter, a saved man, and this is an amazing one. Acts 12, here's the reason. The whole church is gathered praying. Peter's in prison, chained to soldiers. An angel comes, releases Peter, and the soldiers get killed by Herod. As far as we know, they go to hell for eternity. Hmm. It doesn't seem like that was the spiritual thing to do. Maybe Peter should have not walked out of the gate. He should have said, no, I don't want to pick on anybody. I was getting ready to. Maybe Peter says, no, I can't escape. I've got to stay here and witness to these jailers. No, he booked it. He hightailed it out of town and Herod killed the jailers. they went to hell, as far as we have any reason to believe. So 2 Corinthians 9 tells us of prayer for the brethren. I don't know how that got in there, that's out of order. Acts 14 23, We have prayer for a newborn church and leaders, Acts 16, 25. You have Paul and Silas. Here's another amazing one. See, this is going to illustrate part of what I'm saying. It's not that we don't pray. And it's not that the lost are not a burden. And it's not that our prayers cannot have any effect on the lost. It's that we are not commanded in the Bible to generally pray for the lost. We're commanded to preach to the lost. And our prayers should be centered around the work of the evangelism of the lost rather than asking God to do that work for us. Our prayers need to be specific. Our prayers need to be on target. Our prayers need to be in accordance with the will of God. Our prayers need to be working together with the Holy Spirit. We always use the Holy Spirit. We say, oh God, the Holy Spirit makes groanings that cannot be uttered and so I can pray whatever I want. Well, if you have that attitude, then maybe the Holy Spirit is groaning because of you instead of with you. You see, the Holy Spirit's groanings should be groanings where you are agreeing with the Holy Spirit, but you can't pray it the way it needs to be prayed. You don't have the ability to pray The way that God wants it to be prayed to bring him the most glory and the Holy Spirit in you, prays through you, translates your prayer, brings it into the heavenly speech and courtroom dialect of God and makes it pleasing and acceptable in the sight of God so that God can answer it in the way that brings him the most glory. That verse about the Holy Spirit praying for us with groanings is not designed by God as a free pass to pray cheap, prayers and push your responsibilities off on God and expect him to do whatever he's supposed to do. God doesn't like presumption. Look through the Bible at situations of presumption, where men expected God to do something and then demanded it of Him. And look how it turned out for them. Presumptuous praying does not please God. Now, if I had started out this thing by saying, I'm gonna give you 10 reasons why name it and claim it is heretical, I'd probably have a big fan following by now, because lots of people hate that stuff. But we do the same thing with praying for the lost. that the name it, claim it crowd does with pink Cadillacs. The only difference is we salve ourselves because we supposedly have good motives because we love the lost. Whereas in reality, how many times are we actually praying for the lost, quote unquote, because we're not walking holy enough and close enough to God that they're under conviction like they need to be. And there's no effect on them. Our testimony has no effect on them. Our words have no power on them. Everything that we've done is useless and we say we can't even get another word in. All we've got left to do is pray for them. Is that really true? I wonder if it is true. I think it's rarely true in my own life. Acts 20 and verse 36, Paul prayed for the church. He gave a big farewell to the church. Nowhere in there, by the way, this is an amazing one, he didn't stress evangelism to that church either. You see, we've had this, we've gotten our balance, everything's so out of balance. We have praying for God, praying God would, oh, I'm sorry, praying that God, praying to God, Paul praying to God in Acts 22, and he's reciting this to the Jews, and he's telling them about praying for them. Paul was praying for the lost, and he tells them about his praying for the lost. He says, I was praying there in Jerusalem, and God said, get out, Paul, they won't listen to you. Hmm. Paul argued with God. God said, go, I'm going to send you far hence to the Gentiles. Paul didn't like it, but he obeyed. Guess what? The Jews didn't like it either. They got mad whenever he said it, but they didn't listen, did they? Isn't that amazing? The loss that Paul was praying for didn't get saved. You see, we only want to look at one side of this thing. The skeptics and the scoffers, they know that. The scorners know that. They'll hit you. You get out there, they'll hit you with this kind of stuff. They'll hit you with it. And that's where the average Christian will throw out some kind of shallow, name it, claim it, Pentecostal level of reasoning from the scriptures. and they'll say that they've got some kind of great faith to believe God whenever they don't actually have Bible to stand on. The faith is taking God at His word. Faith is believing God, by the way, His word. So in Acts 27, we have prayer for, excuse me, a physical deliverance from a shipwreck. Paul's praying there during that great storm. You're a Clydon, and Paul answered. God answered Paul's prayer for his glory, and every man on that boat made it safely to land. But if you look at the story, they did not all get saved from their sins. In Acts 28-24, some believed and some believed not. Romans 1, 9-16 deals with this. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek, and it tells us that it is to them that believe. Paul's prayers for Rome were pointed to the preaching of the gospel, not for the salvation of the lost. Not that the salvation of the lost isn't important. And not to say that Paul had no burden for the lost. Paul had a burden for the lost. But Paul's burden for the lost was expressed in preaching to the lost. And that expression of preaching to the lost resulted in the salvation of the lost. And his prayers centered around an effective ministry to the lost instead of asking God to do the ministering. The problem is that we want God to do our work for us. God has given us a commission. He's given us a commandment. We find ourselves ineffectual. We find ourselves unable. And instead of carrying the burden to the Lord because of our ineptitude and admitting our failings, admitting our complete frustrating failure at being able to communicate this gospel truth to the lost in a way that they can receive it. We instead resort to making a long prayer list of names of people that we read back to God. Usually it will devolve down into a monotone. I know, I know this from personal, my own personal life, you can start out with a lot of zeal and a lot of Desire and you labor and labor and labor in prayer, repeating these names over and over to God until finally, as the years, months turn into years and years turn into decades, you find yourself just repeating the prayer because it's the thing that you do. And such is a stench to God. The problem is not, again, the whole point of this message is not to say that you should not pray for the lost, but what we laid a foundation for here, we intend to do some more messages on this line, what we laid a foundation for in this message is that we have some false assumptions about prayer that lead us to make false presumptions in prayer that cause us to have a failed Christian experience where we are expecting God to do for us what God has told us to do. It's an amazing thing because God has promised to give us power to be his witnesses. God has promised to give us the boldness, to give us the utterance, to give us the power in our lives that will show the light. God has given us commandments to keep that if we just obeyed would be such a light that it would shake the world and turn it upside down for God. but we neglect all of those things and we neglect our job. And instead we go to God and say, God, you do it. You save the lost God. We're praying for you to save them. And we act as if we're super spiritual because we have done this. And the reality is it is most of the time presumption. There are biblical prayers for the lost and biblical ways to pray for the lost. Lord willing, we will have another message coming up with a lot of scripture and a lot of different aspects of biblical prayers for the lost. Lord, I pray that you would bless this message and use it. I pray, Lord God, that you'd give people forgiveness for me. Father God, that they would not be hung up on me or my personality, but rather, Lord God, that they would hear the truth of your word. And Lord, you chose this mess of a person and the mess of a personality to preach your word. So I pray, Lord God, that you'd use it the way that only you can use it. And Lord God, increase the effectiveness, the power of your church. Lord, turn our prayer life into a power life. Father, turn it into something wonderful. Turn it into something on fire. Something that, Lord, everyone that we meet will know they've met someone who's been with Jesus. Lord, that's what I need in my life more than anything. I need that right now, Lord. I confess so much lack of it right now. And I ask you to rekindle that fire in my heart and to do it in our churches, Father. In Jesus' name and for Christ's sake, amen.