This is the foundation, the promises of the Word of God. That's the foundation we're gonna pray from. But you'll never get off the foundation with sin in your life. We gotta eliminate that right off. There's nothing else to build. If you say, I like my sin, I like living like I'm living, I like doing what I'm doing, then just go ahead and resign yourself. Say to yourself, I'm never praying no more. I ain't gonna pray. That's oughta be the mindset. That's the trade-off. Well, I like my sin. You're trading your prayer life in for it. You say, well, I like my sin. That's okay. Don't expect to have any power with God. Don't expect to be able to get a hell to heaven. What if, hey, if it's in the middle of the night and the youngins is sick, you're just well to not even call on God. Hey, if it's the middle of the day and you get a phone call and your mom or your dad is on the way to the hospital, you're just well to forget it. You ain't gonna get a hold of heaven when you got sin in your life. If I regard iniquity in my heart, he'll not hear me. That's the truth of the Bible. And we live in a time where everything is soft-pedaled. And preaching like I'm doing this morning, ah, it's old-fashioned. Let's leave that behind. Who needs that stuff? I mean, we like to think that we can run around with our friends on Friday night And if the car runs off the ditch and flips upside down and we can't get out of the seatbelt, we can say, oh Lord, help us now and use God like a spare tire that we pulled out of the trunk somewhere and throw him on and get on down the road. But it's simply not the way it works. Now, if we're gonna get by this, Billy, number one, We've got to acknowledge our sin. We've got to acknowledge it. There has to be an acknowledgement of it. Problem is, in our day, we're taught and we're teaching our children there's no such thing. Everything's right. Everything's one giant gray area. God is some kind of a loving teddy bear up there in heaven and he just accepts everything. Nothing's wrong. It's okay. That'll be okay. But I'm telling you that the God of that Bible still has standards and his standard is holiness. You can't live up to it. You can't do good enough or be right enough. That's how high his holy standards are. Now, the first thing getting better is to say, you know what? I ain't living where I ought to be. And I'm talking to somebody this morning. I ain't living where I ought to be. I think about a few people. I think about Isaiah. We see Isaiah, during Isaiah's time, You know, just prior to Babylonian captivity and all that, there was a lot of people in Israel that were saying, God's arms are short, they can't save. God's ear is deaf, for some reason he can't hear. Isaiah came on the scene and he said, let me tell you about that. He said, behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that he cannot save, neither is his ear heavy that he cannot hear, but your iniquities, that's sin, your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins has hid as his face was from you, that he shall not hear. Isaiah said it's not that God's arms are short, It's not that God's ears are heavy. He said it's your sin that's caused God not to hear and caused God not to work. And you must first acknowledge your own sin. Isaiah. Interesting character. Let me tell you about Isaiah. Read the first five chapters of that book. Seven woes. Y'all know what woe means? Woe, woe, woe. Oh, he looks at everybody and he says, y'all are sinning, y'all are sinning, everybody's sinning. We're in a terrible shape, sin on every hand. Woe unto you Israel, woe, woe, woe. Then Isaiah gets a good, in Isaiah six, he gets a good glimpse of heaven, and you know what he said? He said, woe is me, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. I would to God that we could get a fresh vision of God and look at ourselves and say it's not our brother. It's not the one down the pew. It's not the church down the road. But it's me, it's me, it's me. I need to do better. I need to live right. I need to get sent out of my life. It's me, I've got a problem. We gotta first acknowledge it. Ezra. Ezra's another unusual Old Testament Bible character. Ezra was a priest, a prophet, and a scribe. He shows up at an unusual time. The children of Israel have been in Babylonian captivity for 70 years. A remnant has come back to Jerusalem. Nehemiah is rebuilding the walls, and then Ezra shows up. They don't think yet. You would think that this bunch that has come back from Babylon, they're the cream of the crop, Neil. They're the top. They're the advanced. They believe God. They're doing right. They're the Sunday morning church crowd. My goodness, they might even be the Sunday night church crowd. But look what Ezra says to him. He stands up to preach. Ezra, he gets up, as a matter of fact, you can read it. In Ezra 9, he gets up at a pulpit made of wood, kind of like this. They're probably setting our brother out and going, boy, we're the redeemed that have come back. We're doing right. Well, boy, the preacher, he gonna get up and he gonna brag on us. Listen to what he says, verse six. He said, oh my God! I'm ashamed and blessed to lift up my face to thee for God, my God, for our iniquities are increased over our head and our trespasses are grown up into the heavens. Ezra said the problem is we're sinning. If you know to do right and you do it not, sin. Let me say this about it. If you can't ever get to the place where you say, you know what I'm doing is wrong, then you won't never do no better. You gotta get to the place. See, Ezra said, we've got sins. I could talk to you about Daniel. Daniel, over there in Daniel chapter number nine, he gets his wonderful vision of that 70 weeks of years. And you would think it would make him throw his chest out and he'd run and tell everybody, but you know what? It drove him to his knees and he said, Oh God, hey, we've got sin, there's sin. That's the experience that God will impress upon you. I was thinking about our youth group yesterday and I love them. and they were up here and we were singing songs and doing our videos and all of those kind of things. I've got a prayer altar. I've got a prayer altar come out of the old church back there in my new office and it's stained with tears from teenagers as they cried their eyes out I thank God for a work of God. I saw about our young people, and y'all know how I love you. I do, I love our young people. But I see them slipping and it breaks my heart. I watch it, I see it happening. I see them slipping away. and they're starting to get out a little further and a little further and a little further. I see them start dwindling down on Sunday morning. I see the enthusiasm starts to wane, and I tell you, it breaks my heart. It hurts my heart to see it happen. I can see it happening. I know it's happening, but you know why it's happening? Because they're living lives. Outside of this church house, they're having all to be living. You say, well, that's direct. Y'all want me to preach, right? Y'all brought me up in here to preach, right? We got young people that wanna live one way during the week, and then they think they can hop up in here on Sunday and God still bless it, and it falls flat. Oh my. And it'll never get any better until we go, you know what, that's me. That's on me. There's been times over the years I've totally phoned it in on Sunday mornings, totally phoned it in. There's been times, Brother Neil, where I've went and I got something out, you know, I've got archives of things I've preached. 25 years of preaching, I got a lot of outlines. I'll fall back on an archive. Maybe I've not lived up to a standard this week. Maybe I've not had my mind and my heart where it needs to be. And so I'll go and get an archive message and I'll bring it in here and I'll preach it and it's good preaching and it's sound and it's biblical, but let's just be honest. There's no unction to it. There's no help with it. It's just words being said. God doesn't like it. He doesn't approve of such things as that. You see, God wants righteousness. You see that word fervent in our verse? If we're ever to get to fervent, we've gotta first be righteous. If we're ever to have unction, we've gotta live a life that's above reproach. Noah, they'll tell you things like, You can do these things and get by, but I want you to hear what I'm telling you. I did things when I'm 17 and 18 years old that still haunt me today at 43. It wasn't just sowing my wild oats or making a bad decision. That wasn't it. It was sin. Let's just call it what it is. And I know better. People say, well, they're young. They don't know any better. I knew better when I was doing it. When I was out living like that, I knew better than do what I was doing. I knew I didn't have any power of God in my life. I knew I couldn't pray my way out of a paper bag. I knew I was in trouble, but see, when it came down to it, I looked at God and said, God, I'd rather have my pets in as I have your power and your presence. I'd rather be able to get out here and sin. Has to be able to ring the prayer bells of heaven when I'm in need. God, help us. We gotta first recognize our problem. I got a little knot right here on my neck somewhere. Rachel looks at it all the time. She says, that's getting bigger. Better have that seen about, that's getting bigger. Better have that seen about. And so last time I was at the dermatologist, I told him, I said, what do you think is this? He poked around on it. He said, that's a cyst, that ain't nothing. I said, should I have it removed? He said, if it ain't bothering you, it ain't bothering me. I said, okay. It don't bother me enough to get that thing cut out, I'll tell you that right now. But now, if in a few months after I saw him, I ended up with some kind of neck cancer that had spread down into my neck. And I went back and they said, look, Mr. Boone, if you'd had that took out a few months ago, we could have done something about this, but now it's too late. You know what? I'd be mad at that doctor. I said to him, why didn't you tell me? Well, I knew it was bad, but I could tell you was already having a bad day. I didn't want to hurt your feelings, and we could have cut it out, but that would have been painful, Lord help. So I decided I'd let that go. I said, listen, you've done me a bad deal. I should have had that cut out when it was small. Sometimes God sends the preacher to up in the apple cart and say, you know what, that growth you've got in your life is going to kill you. That's just the facts. It's going to kill you if you don't cut it out. If you don't get that straightened out, you're never gonna be that righteous man. So that means you're never gonna have that prayer life that availeth much if you're not righteous. So there's the acknowledgement. There's the acknowledgement of sin. Then notice this. Not only is there the acknowledgement of a sin-hindered prayer life, but there's the abomination of a sin-hindered prayer life. I was reading a book this week, and this preacher said he's riding down the road to a revival meeting, and there's a sign on the church, and he said, it's the most unusual sign I've ever seen. He said it had the preacher's message for that Sunday, and he said, the message said he's preaching on sinful praying. He said, I thought to myself, what in the world? He thought, for a little, I'd go hear that. I'd like to hear what this fella's gonna preach on. How is praying ever sinful? Well, I want you to think about this. How presumptuous is it for us to hold sin in our heart and then think that we are good enough to go and tell God what we want? Let me put it to you this way. Let's say for a moment that I'd been unfaithful to my wife. Let's say I was