Hello again, and welcome to the program. We're here with a little strength for today. We're going to talk a little bit about prayer. Does God really answer our prayers? Yes, he does. Hang on. It took me a long time to learn that God answers every prayer that we pray. Most of the time he says no, and sometimes he says not right now, and sometimes we get what we ask for. But we got the idea in our head that God doesn't answer prayer unless we get what we want. How about we're driving along in the car and the kids would say, oh, there's an ice cream store, I want some ice cream. And we say, no, they don't understand that supper's only a half an hour away. And so God understands what's good for us. Sometimes he says no, sometimes he says yes, but he always answers our prayer. Immediately after trusting Christ as my personal savior as a 12-year-old boy, I made a prayer list. Two of the people on that list were my dad and my uncle that they would both be saved. Both of them were drunks. I put their name on a little piece of paper and I put it in my shirt pocket and several times a day I would pull out that paper and pray that God would save them both. My dad would go to the hotel every night after work with his friends and get drunk before he'd come home and argue with my mother. Our home was in shambles. Ten days after I started praying for my dad to trust Christ as his Savior, while he was driving his car to the hotel with his friends, he received Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. He later testified that as he pulled up in front of the hotel, he actually had a distaste in his mouth for beer. He told his friends he was not going in that night and headed for home. Dad smoked two packages of cigarettes a day. The first thing he did was to throw those cigarettes away. He came home, walked to the closet where he kept his beer, dragged several cases into the bathroom. He then came out to the kitchen, got the bottle opener, and dumped all that booze down the toilet. He came out and looked at us and said, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Why did he throw his cigarettes away? Why did he dump his booze down the toilet? He had heard no sermon on why Christians shouldn't smoke or drink. He did that because, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. All things are passed away and all things are become new, 2 Corinthians 5, 17. Dad usually spent Saturdays at the hotel with his friends. However, Saturday, October the 22nd, 1955, Dad asked us to get into the car. We drove about two hours to a farm in Northern Ontario where he used to work as a teenager. The people on the farm were Christians, and they had witnessed to my dad when he was working there with them. However, his response was to ridicule them for being Christians. Prior to coming to work on this farm, he had lived with 14 brothers and sisters. Their father was a minister in a modern denominational church. Obviously, their home was a very religious environment, and most of the family found no reality in religion without Christ, and my dad was no exception. During dad's teenage years, when these folks on the farm talked about God, he wanted no part of it. One of the people on the farm would go up in the hay in the barn after work and have his devotions and pray. My dad would go out and play turkey in the straw on his mouth organ just to make fun of them. The people who owned the farm were standing in the yard when we drove down that long driveway. They did not recognize him after all these years, and he told them who he was and said, I have come today to tell you that I have received Jesus Christ as my Savior. They wept for joy as they said, we have prayed for you ever since you left this farm that you would get saved. He was a teenager. He was now over 40 years old. They prayed. Why else does a drunk get saved while driving his car to the hotel? Why else would God put it in the heart to drive for a couple hours to tell these people he was saved? From the day Dad was saved until he died, he talked about the Lord. His favorite song included the words, I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus. Since I found in him a friend so strong and true, I would tell you how he changed my life completely. His favorite Bible verse was, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And what about my uncle? I continued to pray for him for several years. One day a pastor in the area who I had never met before came by and introduced himself. We visited together for a while, and then I suggested we go out for lunch. He said he would like to, but it was the time that he had scheduled to go and knock on doors and just witness the people for the Lord. He drove to a neighboring town about 10 miles away, picked a random street to park on, walked up to a house and knocked on the door. The first door he went to, He led my uncle to the Lord. My uncle never visited the hotel again after being saved. He was in church every time the doors were open until he went home to be with the Lord. You know, we pray, we usually say, in Jesus' name, amen. What does that mean to say, in Jesus' name? It means Jesus wants it. Now, we can ask for a lot of things that we don't know for sure if Jesus wants it or not. I want a new car. I want this certain thing or that certain thing. We know that he wants people to be saved. And so we can pray and pray earnestly and keep on praying and say, Lord, in Jesus' name, would you save this person?