Well, take your Bibles and open up with me this morning to John chapter 15. We're looking this morning at abiding in Christ through prayer. We're gonna be referencing, of course, R. A. Torrey's How to Pray, and also going to be looking at part of the preface to A. W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God. I wanted to start, actually, Waiting for the live stream to reconnect here. Okay, we're back. Wanted to start with a hymn from Josiah Condor. This is a hymn written in 1836. So for those of you who know, that means this hymn is as old as Texas. But the title of the hymn, Lord for Thy Name's Sake. He writes in the hymn, Lord, for thy name's sake, such plea with force triumphant fraught by which thy saints prevail with thee by thine own spirit taught. Now for thy name's sake, O our God, do not abhor our prayer, but while we bow beneath thy rod, thy chastened people spare. O for thy name's sake, Richly grant the unction from above, fulfill thy holy covenant, and glorify thy love. As we're looking at abiding in Christ and what it means to abide in Christ as we pray and through prayer, In John 15, we read there, starting in verse five, I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up and they gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. And we have a promise here from the Lord and it seems to be just an absolute blank check. Ask what you want and you'll get it. The question is, is that what Jesus means here? There are those that when we were memorizing Scripture in junior high school and memorizing in the book of Psalms, delight yourself also in the law of the Lord and He'll give you the desires of your heart. Well, of course, if that's not explained, or as it was wrongly explained, it was if you delight yourself in God's Word, and this is how this was actually taught, if you read the Bible every day, then God will give you whatever you want. You know if that were true, people would read the Bible every day. Now, number one, that's not the motive for reading the Bible. Number two, that's not what the verse means. When we are delighting in the law of the Lord, that law is conforming our desires so that when it says, He will give you the desires of your heart, that means He will put the desire in your heart that should be there so that you want what you should want. And when you want what He wants, then we know that God is going to answer. What we've got here is, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. This comes from the reminder that we have to be abiding in him as the vine, we're the branches. That means we draw our life from him. We should draw our desires from him. We should learn what his will is for us and want what his will is for us. As we talked in the last few weeks, we do that by discerning the promises of God. When we know what he promises, then we know what He wants for us. But when we are reminded here, If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. We're reminded, Torrey says, that the whole secret of prayer is found in these words. Here is prayer that has unbounded power. Ask what you will, and it will be done unto you. So there is a way then of asking and of getting precisely what we ask and getting all that we ask. Christ gives us then two conditions for this all-prevailing prayer. The first condition is, if you abide in Me, we must be abiding in Christ. Well, then that leads us to ask the question, what is it to abide in Christ? Torrey says, he has been comparing himself to a vine, his disciples to the branches in the vine. Some branches continued in the vine, that is, they remained in living union with the vine so that the sap or life of the vine constantly flowed into these branches. They had no independent life of their own. Everything in them was simply the outcome of the life of the vine flowing into them. their buds, their leaves, their blossoms, their fruit were really not theirs, but the buds, leaves, blossoms, and fruit of the vine. Other branches were completely severed from the vine, or else the flow of the sap of the life of the vine into them was in some way hindered." That's why Jesus can say back in verse 5, apart from me, you can do some things Doesn't he say, outside of me, you can get a little bit done. You can do a little bit right. You can do a little bit. No, he says, without me, you can do nothing. Now that's a blow to our pride, isn't it? That's a blow to our flesh. Nothing! There is nothing we can do that can be pleasing and acceptable to God on our own, outside of Christ. Torrey goes on, he says, now for us to abide in Christ is for us to bear the same relation to Him that the first sort of branches bear to the vine. That is to say, to abide in Christ is to renounce any independent life of our own. To give up trying to think our thoughts or form our resolutions or cultivate our feelings and simply and constantly to look to Christ, to think His thoughts in us, to form His purposes in us, to feel His emotions and affections in us. It is to renounce all life independent of Christ and constantly to look to Him for the inflow of His life into us and the outworking of His life through us, For when we do this, and insofar as we do this, our prayers will obtain that which we seek from God. Listened on the way in this morning to a message preached last week by my brother fire pastor, Chris Cookston in Prineville, Oregon. And he was preaching on what it meant when Paul tells us in Galatians to boast in the cross. That the only thing we can boast in is Jesus and His finished work. To look at that means what Torrey has said here, we renounce any independence from Him. How un-American of us. But if we're independent from Him, we're in danger. We have to be in Him, walking in Him, drawing our life from Him. He has to be our boast. When Chris preached this last week, he said Christ has to be our everything, in our every thought, in our every moment, in our every purpose, in our every decision. We have to think first of Christ. As our Master, what does He want for us? And that needs to be what we want for ourselves. This is a life of surrender and of dependence. It is to yield to Christ, to be filled with His Spirit, to be subject to His Word. In order to be obedient to what He tells us, we have to know what He's telling us. So yes, we have to be in the Word, but we're not in the Word so that from that we can get what we want. We're in the Word so that from the Word we learn who Christ is and He then conforms our desires to His desires. Torrey says, then our desires will not be our own desires, but Christ's. And this is what we're striving for. In abiding in Christ, we are desperately seeking to have His wants become our wants, so that we are in union with Him. It's not our desires. It's Christ. And our prayers will not in reality be our own prayers, but Christ praying in us. And we've talked about Christ praying for us. Have you ever thought about Christ praying through you? That happens every time you pray the Word. Have you ever just prayed the Word? Pray the Word back to God. I do this especially in the Psalms. Go to the Psalms, read the Psalms, pray the Psalms, sing the Psalms. Make that your prayer. Then that is Christ praying in you. People say, well, wait a minute, those aren't the red letters. The Word of God is the Word of God. All the letters are red. Every word in the scripture is there to point us to Christ, to reveal Him to us and to reveal Him in us. And Torrey says, such prayers will always be in harmony with God's will, and the Father heareth Him always. When our prayers fail, it's because they are indeed our prayers. We have conceived the desire and framed the petition of ourselves instead of looking to Christ to pray through us. To say that one should be abiding in Christ in all his prayers, looking to Christ to pray through him rather than praying himself, is simply saying in another way that one should be praying in the Spirit, as we talked about last week. When we thus abide in Christ, our thoughts are not our own thoughts, but His. Our joys are not our own joys, but His. Our fruit is not our own fruit, but His. Just as the buds, leaves, blossoms, and fruit of the branch that abides in the vine are not the buds, leaves, blossoms, and fruit of the branch, but of the vine itself, whose life is flowing into the branch and manifests itself in these buds, leaves, blossoms, and fruits. If you look at a grapevine or any other kind of vine that is growing, if you cut the branch off, what does the branch do? Does the branch continue to bruise fruit? No, it withers up, it dries up, it dies. Now, you can prune a branch. You can prune a rose bush. You can prune a tree in order to increase its fruitfulness. And that's exactly what Jesus tells us He's going to do. But if there's a branch that is not bearing fruit, that means it's not drawing its life from the vine. It's good just to be cut off and burned. It's dead. Because a branch does not and cannot have life in itself. It must draw that nourishment from the vine. Torrey goes on to abide in Christ. One must, of course, already be in Christ. Through the acceptance of Christ as an atoning Savior from the guilt of sin, a risen Savior from the power of sin, and a Lord and Master over all His life. We cannot come to Christ and have Him only as Savior. This has been a big controversy in the last 40 years in the church, that the free grace movement has said that all you have to do is pray this prayer, trust Christ, and nothing has to change in your life, and you don't have to follow Him or obey Him. Once saved, always saved. Lived however you want. You've got your hell insurance in your back pocket. You're fine, because God's grace is free and doesn't make any demands on us. God's grace absolutely makes demands on us, but here's why it's grace. God's grace gives us everything we need to obey those demands. The first word of the gospel is what? Repent. It's the first thing John the Baptist preached, the first thing Jesus preached, the first words recorded that they preached. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. We can't repent without Christ, by His grace, giving us repentance. The book of Acts tells us over and over, that's a gift. What's the second word of the gospel? The flip of that coin, believe. You turn away from your sin and you turn to Christ in faith. We reject ourselves and we run to Christ. Repent and believe. And that faith is a gift. That faith is something He gives us by His grace. And so if we come to Christ as Savior, we can only have Him as Lord. And here is the truth. There were those who then preached, well, you need to ask Jesus to be your Savior and you need to make Him your Lord. Wrong answer. You can't make Jesus Lord. God made Jesus Lord. He highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every name. We either worship Him and follow Him as Lord, or we rebel against Him as Lord. Those are the only choices. He is Lord. We don't make Him Lord. But the question is, are we obeying Him? This is how Jesus even described His disciples and some of the problem with those who are following Him. He said, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and then don't do the things I say? Because Lord means master. If I'm your master and I tell you to do something, you should do it. And here is the good news of the gospel. He tells us as our master what to do and then by His grace empowers us through His Spirit to do what He's told us to do so that now we can want what He wants and do what He wants for His glory, for His pleasure. So that He is Savior and He is Lord and He is master over every aspect of our life. Torrey says, being in Christ, all that we have to do to abide or continue in Christ is simply to renounce our self-life. Utterly renouncing every thought, every purpose, every desire, every affection of our own, and looking day by day and hour by hour for Jesus Christ to form His thoughts, His purposes, His affections, His desires in us. Abiding in Christ is really a very simple matter, though it is a wonderful life of privilege and of power. When Brother James preached on abiding in Christ, he preached two messages last year on abiding with Christ and his serious union with Christ. In those messages from John 15, these were his points to remind us. What does it mean to abide in Christ? First, abiding in Christ involves a willing submission to the Father's pruning. We should expect pruning. We should desire pruning. We should, at times, walking in the Spirit and reading the Word of God, recognize the areas of our lives that need to be pruned, to be brought into submission to the Father. Secondly, abiding brings a growing awareness of utter dependence upon Christ. It means we can't think at all about making it through the day without utter dependence on Him. Not just thinking about Him, not just praying to Him, but depending on Him. I don't recommend everything that Oswald Chambers wrote, but one thing that he did stress in his devotional was that we have to abandon ourselves to Christ, to be abandoned to Him, meaning we don't hold anything back. Number three, James preached abiding issues forth in a sacrificial concern for the brethren. If we love Christ, we're going to love the sheep. We're going to love those who are His. Fourth, if we're abiding in Christ, that involves the expectation of persecution from the world for Christ's sake. We should not be shocked. We looked at this from 1 Peter last week. We should not be shocked or surprised when we suffer, when we're persecuted, when we are opposed. If we look like Christ, the world is going to hate us because it hates Him. And understand, Something else that Brother Chris preached last week, again, in the message I listened to this morning, he said, we have to realize that it's the wide gate that leads to destruction. It's the door that everybody wants to get through. He said, that's the highway to hell and people are flocking to it. Jesus said it was the narrow gate that leads to life. And Jesus said, there are few that find it. Don't follow the crowd. Don't think it's all about numbers and excitement. The larger and more excited the crowd is to follow after a teacher, the more I want to be discerning to know what that teacher is teaching. Because I promise you this, you might have a purpose-driven life, or a porpoise-driven if you're a dolphin, but when a book is a bestseller in the world, it can't contain much of the gospel. It simply can't. because the world has no stomach for the gospel. James went on and he said, abiding in Christ is maintained by a life of faith, obedience, and prayer. These are daily disciplines, believing, trusting, obeying, and praying. Six, the abiding involves experiencing Christ's love as we seek to please Him by obedience. It is to express our love for Him and to know that we couldn't even express love for Him if He didn't love us first. The point that we can love Him is the fruit of His love for us. If He didn't love us, we would not be able to love Him. We couldn't and we wouldn't. But because He has loved us, we love Him. And that love is expressed in obedience. He says that in John 15 verse 9, just as the Father has loved me, I also have loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. Love is synonymous with obedience for Christ. Seventh, abiding produces a radical identification with Christ's purposes. What did Christ come to do? To seek and to save that which is lost. You ever wondered what drives James in his evangelism? He's simply doing what Christ came to do, to seek and to save that which is lost. It's a radical identification with what Christ wants. He wants the lost saved. He wants the church sanctified. This is all, by the way, through the preaching of the word. It is the preaching of the gospel that's the power of God to salvation. And Jesus prayed, sanctify them by truth. Your word is truth. Our ministry, whether it's apologetics, whether it's evangelism, whether it's equipping, whether it's discipleship, it is a ministry of the word. preaching the Word of God, teaching the Word of God, singing the Word of God, sharing the Word of God, giving counsel from the Word of God. Why? Because the Word, the written Word, reveals to us the living Word. James concluded, abiding in Christ is essential to be ready for His return. We should be wanting His return, desiring His return. Daily, the prayer of our heart should be Maranatha. Even so, come Lord Jesus. From what James taught, we took away a summary there that abiding is not merely resting in Christ, it is actively pursuing Him in every moment. That reminded me of something that A. W. Tozer wrote in the preface to The Pursuit of God, and he wrote this now, 80 years ago. In this hour of all but universal darkness, one cheering gleam appears, Within the fold of conservative Christianity, there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct interpretations of truth. They are thirsty for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the fountain of living water. There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest presence. nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy." He writes, "...the hungry sheep look up and are not fed." Have you been there? Hungry and not being fed, and then you get fed? It's like your first time at a really nice restaurant. I have to tell this story. I thought I was a picky eater growing up. I was not a picky eater. My mother was a horrible cook. I know this because I met my wife and found out what good cooking was and then she taught me how to grill and it was on. It no longer offered burnt sacrifices. Here we are enjoying the animals that God gave us to eat. Amen. Sheep are hungry. This is how you know, by the way, that they are sheep. The sheep are hungry for the word of God. And if they don't get fed, they will look elsewhere until they find a place where they will be fed. This is why we say that people can be saved in churches that aren't preaching the truth. As long as there is some gospel there, some word there, the word, the gospel is the power of God to salvation. And many times we see that people can be saved in a church that we would not consider to be very balanced at all. In fact, Brother Vita's testimony is that he was saved shortly before going to prison while he was reading the porpoise-driven life. It drove him to the Word, and in the Word he found the gospel, and the gospel was the power of God to salvation. But here's the truth. If they're really a sheep, they're going to be hungry, and if they're not being fed, they won't stay there long. They'll leave. They'll find some place where the Word is being preached. Tozer says it's a solemn thing and no small scandal in the kingdom to see God's children starving while seated at the Father's table. Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold right opinions, probably more than ever before in the history of the church. Yet I wonder if there ever was a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the church, the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the program. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us." Tozer wrote two other books, by the way, that I got on my bookshelf at home on the dangers of confusing worship with entertainment. He finishes in his preface, Sound Bible exposition is an imperative. It's a must in the church of the living God. Without it, no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of the term. But exposition may be carried on in such a way as to leave the hearer devoid of any true spiritual nourishment, whatever. It's not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself. And unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience, they are not the better for having heard the truth." You understand, this is absolutely true. If you hear the truth, but from that truth do not grow in your walk with an understanding of who Christ is, then that word that you have heard will serve to condemn you. It'll harden your heart. The word will either crush us, break us, and make us usable, or the word will harden us and then condemn us. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts." The rest of that book, then after that preface, Tozer goes on to talk about what it means to pursue God, to chase after Him. to want Him, to be consumed with a passion for knowing God. If we go back to Torrey, Torrey adds a second condition there from John 15, for being able to ask whatever we want and to get it. The first was, if you abide in me, that is, if you are walking with Christ and dependent upon Him. Secondly, he goes on, if you abide in me and my words abide in you. Torrey says, if we are to obtain from God all that we ask from Him, Christ's words must abide or continue in us. We must study His words, fairly devour His words, let them sink into our thoughts and into our hearts, keep them in our memory, obey them constantly in our life, let them shape and mold our daily life and our every act. Here is the reality. If you claim to be a believer, a follower of Jesus Christ, and you do not crave the Word of God, you need to take your spiritual pulse. you may not even be spiritually alive, because a sign of that life is a desire for the Word, because in the Word we find Christ. We learn about Him. We know Him. We should be meditating on Scripture. We should be singing Scripture. We should be memorizing Scripture. We should be listening to sermons, listening to devotionals. We should be in the Word so that those words are in us. This was what David wrote in the Psalms. This is our protection against sin, isn't it? Your word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Because His word defines for us what obedience is and what sin is, and by that our heart is instructed. Tozer says it's through His words that Jesus imparts Himself to us. The words He speaks unto us, they are spirit and they are life, he says in John 6.33. It's vain to expect power in prayer unless we meditate much upon the words of Christ, and let them sink deep and find a permanent abode in our hearts. There are many who wonder why they are so powerless in prayer, but the very simple explanation of it all is found in their neglect of the words of Christ. They have not hidden His words in their hearts. His words do not abide in them. Now, we have to be clear too, and I said this earlier, we have to know this, that when we talk about the words of Christ, we're not just talking about the red letters. In fact, the latest Bible I had, the previous Bible I was preaching from actually had the red letters. Nothing wrong with that, but I decided I wanted a Bible without the red letters. There actually are some people who would say, and actually I heard someone say this, they posted this this week in a discussion about the Word of God and Sola Scriptura. They said that whatever the Apostle Paul wrote was subordinate to what Christ said. So we should start first with the red letters, and then understand that what Jesus says is what Jesus says, and what Paul says is what Paul says, and it's not on the same level. That's not what God says. All Scripture is inspired and profitable. All Scripture is sufficient. If you want a red letter Bible, really, every letter should be read. And there's a pun in there too. You should be reading the red so that then you've read it because it is the word of God. It is Christ through His Spirit who has given us His word. And it's not just His words recorded by the disciples. It's His word preached with His authority by those same disciples. That Christ said, go and teach them everything that I have said. And they went and they taught it. So what Paul teaches us is on par with what Jesus said. And what Jesus says is on par with what the prophets said. What the prophets said is on par with what Moses wrote so that we cannot say that there is a God of the Old Testament who's angry and hateful in all law, and there's a God of the New Testament who's all love and grace. No, that's the heresy of Marcionism. God is God. His Word is His Word. It is unified. We see the Old Testament and the New Testament. We see the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, and we try to make divisions where there are not divisions. All Scripture is inspired. If we want to know then the words of Christ, we need to know the Bible. All of it. And I know, I know everybody started there through the year Bible reading. How's that going for you now that we're into February already? How many of you are already off track? Now you know when most people get off track? About the time they hit the book of Numbers. We're gonna look after we finish this series, we're gonna look at Hebrews. From Hebrews there's gonna be quite a bit of dependence on the book of Leviticus. Leviticus. But all scripture is inspired and profitable. And there are things, I like to do this, just to go through and to show people things they've missed in those lists. God gives us the lists, the numbers, the names for a reason. Ultimately, it's because all of that points to and foreshadows the coming of Christ. Look for Him on every page. You'll find Him when you do. Torrey says it's not by seasons of mystical meditation and rapturous experiences that we learn to abide in Christ. It's by feeding upon His Word. His written Word is found in the Bible, and looking to the Holy Spirit to implant these words in our hearts and to make them a living thing in our hearts. Do you realize the Bible is not a dead book? The Bible is alive. It's described as active and alive, not able to be bound, like a two-edged sword. If we thus let the words of Christ abide in us, they will stir us up in prayer. They will be the mold in which our prayers are shaped and our prayers will be necessarily along the line of God's will and will prevail with Him. Prevailing prayer is almost an impossibility where there is neglect of the study of the word of God. He goes on, mere intellectual study of the word of God is not enough. Now I've known people, I've had people in my life, family members in my life that read the Bible every day. Every day. But it was a legalistic bondage that they thought if they didn't spend a certain amount of time in prayer every day, then God would not hear their prayers, would not answer them, would not bless them. And so their motivation to get what they wanted from God was to read the Bible every single day. And yet there was no fruit of the Spirit. That word only served to harden them because they were coming to the word for what they could get God to do for them instead of to learn what they needed to do for God. We have to meditate on the Word of God, to ruminate upon the Word of God. Torrey says, the Word of God must be revolved over and over and over in the mind with a constant looking to God by His Spirit to make that Word a living thing in the heart. The prayer that is born of meditation upon the Word of God is the prayer that soars upward most easily to God's listening ear. If you don't know who George Mueller is, we've got a book of his, a biography about him. If you don't know who George Mueller is, you need to read it. He is a man of faith from the past that you need to know about. He was one of the mightiest men of prayer, Torrey says. When the hour for prayer came, He would begin by reading and meditating upon God's word until out of the study of the word a prayer began to form itself in his heart. Thus God himself was a real author of the prayer and God answered the prayers which he himself had inspired. Here's what Mueller did. He ran multiple ministries and many orphanages. And he had lots of needs in those ministries, as you can imagine. And he never asked anybody for a thing except for God, and made it a point that said the only person that he would ask for what was needed for that ministry to be accomplished was to take it to the Lord in prayer. And when he started in that prayer, he would start in the Word of God, reading and meditating on the Word of God, that would lead him into a season of prayer, and God provided. And by the time you look back at his life, without ever running a campaign or begging for money, he raised literally the equivalent in his day to our day, billions of dollars for the care of orphans and the needy. Or is it at one point they came to him in one of the orphanages and they said, we don't have dinner for the children. Should we put out a request? Should we go out to the neighborhood and see who can help? And Mueller said, no, I'm going to go pray about it. And he went and he prayed and he took it to the Lord and he said, we're only going to ask you to provide so that you get the glory for what you have provided. Now, not that it's wrong to share requests with one another so that we might pray for one another, but he was convicted that he would take this and depend solely upon God. And while he was in his room praying, A bread truck pulled up at the door and said, we've got an excess shipment. We have nothing to do with it. Could you use this truckload of food? And that's only one story. Stories like that over and over and over through his life. Spurgeon Hudson Taylor, other men like this who knew Mueller and knew of him. In fact, Spurgeon often sent support to Mueller and followed his example. And actually, Spurgeon then had several orphanages under the care and the ministry of their church. That's where Sunday School originated. And as they ministered, they were determined to be dependent upon God. Now, does God want to care for the orphan and the widow? He tells us so. That's one of His priorities. So for Mueller to abide in Christ and have His words abide in him, and then to ask God for what God had promised to give, we should not be surprised that God gave him exactly what he prayed for. Because Mueller knew how to find what God's will was, and to ask Him for it, believing, and God answered. Torrey says, The Word of God is the instrument through which the Holy Spirit works. It is the sword of the Spirit in more senses than one, and the one who would know the work of the Holy Spirit in any direction must feed upon the Word. The one who would pray in the Spirit must meditate much upon the Word, that the Holy Spirit may have something through which he can work. The Holy Spirit works His prayers in us through the Word, and neglect of the Word makes praying in the Holy Spirit an impossibility. He finishes then, "...if we would feed the fire of our prayers with the fuel of God's Word, all of our difficulties in prayer would disappear." The takeaway there is to realize that to neglect the Word of God is to neglect half of the conversation with Him, to neglect half of prayer. Without the Word, we can't hear God speak. If we're to come to Him and speak to Him and commune with Him in order to hear Him speak, we have to be in the Word because that's how He speaks to us by His Spirit. That's how He leads us. So if you want to ask, if you want to receive, Remember that he's the vine and you're the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me is thrown away as a branch and dries up and they gather them and cast them into the fire and they're burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. Next week, we're gonna pick up with Philippians 4.6 to pray with thanksgiving. this week, realize that you are commanded and invited to abide in Christ. It is necessary for you to abide in Christ. And if you are not praying and in the word, you cannot abide in Christ. Let's pray together. Father, how we do thank you for your word, for the instruction that we received from it. We thank You that it is Your heart's desire to give us what we want when what we want is in line with Your will for us. We thank You that the secret to the power in prayer is conformity into the image of Christ. It's to know Him through Your Word, to be conformed to Him through Your Word as You sanctify us by grace. so that our wants come in line with what You want, so that it's not our desires, it's not our prayers, it's not our wishes, but it's what Christ wants for us. When those things become our wants and when we find that at the bottom of it all, what we really do want and what we really should want and all we really do need to want is to want Christ, how we thank You for giving Him to us freely and fully by Your grace. so that through him we can come and call you father. We can bring our requests and our petitions and that you delight in answering them as we spend this time in fellowship and dependence upon you. We thank you for the finished work of Christ and for the work of the Spirit to give us the word through which you reveal yourself so that we might know you. I pray this week that you would drive us to pursue you, to want to know you better, to obey you joyfully, to share you with others, to simply walk in communion with you. How sweet that is. We thank you for these things in Jesus name. Amen.