Yeah, right. But Liberty Council had some suggestions. Maybe you sent this to her. I didn't see what it said. It was just a site. Right. So here, it's like if you would make some sort of a sample of it. Right. But I want to block out these articles here, because I'm sure they're not going to do this. But if you don't tell us, we'll keep coming around to you. I appreciate it. Don't. I can hurt all of us. I can affect you so much. But they didn't use it. I don't know, maybe there's different angles. There are different angles, but on Earth, I can show you. Yeah. I know what art is. I'd say it's not acceptable. Yeah, I know. It has, like, all this stuff, and that's what it's all about. It doesn't teach you anything. All right, good evening, folks. I know. At least they're speaking to one another. It could be the Hatfields and the McCoys. Okay, good enough, glad you are here. This looks like a good lesson for us, huh? Maybe we ought to start all over again. Power with prayer. And I did give you a little sheet that lists some of these books. Not that we have to run out and buy them all, but I do, they're just the ones that I have up here. I would say I've blown them all to you, but I'm guessing there's probably a lot of these that are out of print. But one of the, there's probably a set out there somewhere. I think it's the complete works of Ian Bounds. He's written a lot of books on prayer. And he wasn't a preacher either, sorry. He practiced law. And this was, He was a chaplain during the Civil War, so he's way back in ways. But everybody that's read any of his books said, those are really good. So anyway, there's some other ones, too, if you want to just take a peek, see whatever. Like I said, these are old books, but if it's something you want to read on. And I guess others are doing that, too. I was in the car a little bit this morning, Heard a little on VCY, and MacArthur was reading some letters. And one of them was telling how much they had learned from his series on prayer. So if you want to listen to more on prayer, you might check out MacArthur's archives or something. There are probably some things there I didn't hear any of, but yes, sir. I was so impressed with him years ago. I don't know how many years it's been, but my Bible buddy wrote this quote. He said, in doing God's work, there is no substitute for praying. People of prayer cannot be replaced with other kinds of people, people of financial skill, people of education, people of worldly influence. None of these can possibly substitute for people of prayer. You can do a lot, and there's a quote, something like that. Basically, you can do a lot of other things, but you can't do anything more powerful than prayer. Because that would get God involved. And one plus God's the majority, right? Okay, well, let's pray and then we'll start here. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening. We thank you for the subject of prayer. The fact that you even allow us to talk to you is quite something. We just pray that as we go through this lesson, and this is by no means everything there is to know about prayer, but it does give us some insight from this particular passage, things that we need to be reminded of, may not be new truth, but we need to be reminded of things from time to time. So we just pray that you'll use us to encourage our hearts, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Okay, so we're on lesson three, praying with power. Okay, not just mindless repetition, but praying, knowing what you're talking about, and your mind's engaged. You're in a conversation, in a sense, with God. And he's listening. And so he talks about three different things. We touched on two of them, but let's do a little bit of review here. First thing was to pray constantly. Okay, and I don't mean to be making fun of people, but it's just kind of comes to my mind as, And sometimes you'll see people standing at the bus stop or whatever, and maybe they got the earphones in and they're singing. I don't know. But their lips are moving and there's nobody around. It doesn't mean that we have to be nonstop prayer. If you're going to work, your employer is expecting you to get your work done, not Have your mind somewhere else. You want to be focused in on what you're supposed to be doing. I look at this as constantly in the attitude or the ability to go to prayer at any time. It isn't like, OK, we pray three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or maybe four if we do our nighty-night prayers kind of thing. No, it's any time during the day. And it doesn't have to be some long, drawn-out thing. The length of your prayer doesn't make it any more powerful. It's who you're talking to that makes it powerful. But we can make God a part of our everyday life. And it isn't like we only need help, you know, morning, noon, and night during mealtime. It's when you're in the middle of something and, Lord, I need your help here. Give me wisdom. Help me make the right choice here, whatever the case might be. And there's other passages, one of them there was, it's just kind of flipping back a page, we touched on that. 1 Thessalonians 5, 17, pray without ceasing, okay? Sometimes you'll talk to people or you'll read something about them and they're saying, wow, they're in a real difficult situation. So bad that they're 9-1-1, we're going to break out and talk to God in prayer. Lord, I haven't talked to you in a long time. Well, God doesn't want long times in between. He wants regular conversation there with us. And he talks to us through his word, but he wants to hear from us, hear from his kids. Does that sound familiar? You want your kids to call, want them to check in from time to time? Believe it or not, one of these days, your house is going to be quiet. If we live that long, and you'll be waiting for the phone to ring, hoping that it's one of the kids checking in, you know. I don't even know who, or I went to get a haircut the other day. How's it look? Other than the sideburns going up, but anyway, they never get that right. The guy was sitting in the chair, he was talking about North Carolina and Bryson City. Really, you were there? And yeah, well, Jonathan was there for the summer. You know, nobody knows where Bryson City is at, you know. So we got talking a little bit. But it was, I think, back in the time, Sunday night, what was it, 8 o'clock, something like that. He would kind of set this time, and he'd try to give us a call. It wasn't always a long one, but let us know what's going on. So we'd kind of hear from him once a week. And tried to do that when he was in college, but sometimes that didn't work with working home. But yeah, God wants to hear from us. And so Paul talks about this. And he says, as he's mentioning this here in 2 Thessalonians chapter 1, And he says there, verse 11, wherefore also we pray always for you. So every time he's thinking about them, he's praying for them. And we touched on this too, you know, God brings somebody to mind, that might be somebody that God wants you to pray for. And so you might use that when somebody's name, face, whatever pops into your head, you think, well, maybe they need to be prayed for. And you may not know the particular need, but you can still pray. We also talked about the fact that if God's omniscient, he knows everything. If he is, why do we need to ask God for it anyway? Do you remember? What do we come up with on that? Yes, Gail? Yeah, we acknowledge that we're dependent on God. We need you. We need your help, whether it's wisdom and choices or whatever. What else? Anything else? Why do we pray? I cheated a little bit. One of these books, well, I think it was the first one there. It was a Sunday school series on prayer, and they had a lesson in there on why pray. And it didn't touch necessarily on the ones we talked about, but it said it's a sin not to pray. Because back here again, that verse, 1 Thessalonians 5, 17, pray without ceasing. That's just a gentle suggestion that God's telling you, that's a command. And so when we don't pray, we're not doing what God tells us to do. And again, he's commanded us to pray. Hebrews, we don't look all these up, but Hebrews, and this isn't in your lesson, Hebrews 4, 6, Matthew 7, 7. Remember the Matthew 7, 7, knock, you know, and you shall receive. And so he also talked about our job as believer priests. to pray, to talk to the Lord. I also said because we owe it to our family. Now we might just think of it's our immediate kids or mother, father, whatever, but we're part of God's family. We're his kids. And he's saying if we're not praying for one another, we're not doing what God wants us to do. So he wants us to uphold the rest of the family. And folks, we all need it, don't we? And then he also said it's because we owe it to the unsaved. Where would the unsaved be? Where would we be? We were on somebody's prayer list somewhere along the line. You know, maybe it was our moms or dads or aunt or uncle, brother, sister, Sunday school teacher, whatever. Somebody was praying for us that we'd understand the gospel and get saved. And so we have that responsibility to pray for others. You know, and you've probably found that out. Sometimes you try to talk to somebody about the Lord, and, I mean, maybe it's just something that kind of popped up, and you haven't prayed about it, and sometimes you kind of stumble your way through it, and, you know, and then, oh, wow, it didn't go so well, you know. But, you know, God can create opportunities, though, so that we're thinking about it. It doesn't take us by surprise. But anyway, it helps us to show we're dependent on the Lord. And so we need to constantly be praying, constantly in the attitude of prayer. And we touched upon this too, remember? Okay, we're driving down the road, it's, okay, got to use your imagination. Six months from now, we won't have to imagine it. It's snowing outside, the roads are slick. And you're going down the road and all of a sudden somebody swerves into your lane and is coming at you head on. That happened to me. And you don't have a lot of time if you're not prayed up, Lord, I need to ask for forgiveness for this and this and this and this, you know, get rid of the sin problem. So he's going to hear and answer our prayer. No, you got to have already taken care of that. So you can just say, Lord, help crash. You know, and I was real cute there for a while. Big fat lips with my mouth smacked against the steering wheel. Didn't really get hurt, but they told out the car. But yeah, so we need to be praying. Be ready to run into prayer and You never know when that time might be. He also touched on the fact that we need to pray specifically. Remember, we don't want to just, and if somebody does it, you know, don't jump on them because they haven't done this lesson. Now, if you do it, God bless the missionaries wherever they're at, all over the world. Okay, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but God's kind of like saying, well, how do you want me to bless them? How about Lord help the missionaries, if they're in a foreign country, to be able to understand the culture, to be able to speak the language well enough to be able to communicate with people, supply their financial needs. keep them healthy and strong. Nowadays, that maybe this COVID will pass so that they can get back to meeting together, you know. But we can put a name with some of these, with some of our own missionaries. I was thinking about that. In what other, you know. Okay, so we want to get specific. We don't want to just a general prayer. And I was thinking, in what other ways might we do that? And some of you ladies might have experienced this. Mom, I'm hungry. For what? My mom would play that. Mom, I'm hungry. What would you like? I'm going to fix you a grilled cheese sandwich. No. You want this? No. And then she'd say, you're nice hungry. In other words, you want just, you know, ice cream bar or something, you know. You don't want something really good for you. Or how about you go to the doctor and you say, Doc, I'm sick. Does that give him much to go on? No, he's going, what, where are you sick? You know, what hurts? How can I help you? Or you go to the pharmacy and you say, give me some medicine. He only got three rows of them, okay? Which one do you want? Or the mechanic, my car, it doesn't run right. Well, he wants a little bit more information, doesn't he? What's it sound like? Doesn't it start? What's the problem? So when we go to God, we need to give him some specifics to work with. Again, it's not that God doesn't know, but he's saying, you want me to answer this, but tell me what it is you're after. You remember, we have not because we ask not, and we need to ask specifically. Tell him what we want, you know? And so, again, it says under this specific thing, we need to pray for others, pray specifically for them. Now, there are times when you just don't quite know what's going on. You get the call, so-and-so's in hospital. You don't really know what's happening. You know, but you can pray for the doctor, you can pray for the patient, other family members or whatever. And the thing is, too, he also encourages us to pray that God's will might be done through their life. You know, we're not just here taking up space, sucking in oxygen. God's got a plan and a purpose for us. Are we doing it? And, you know, he gives us talents, he's given us abilities, spiritual gifts, and so we can pray that the other person would utilize those as well as we ourselves. It touched on also, I think we probably stopped there, but, you know, sometimes we pray for people, that they'll get saved, you know, and we're pretty excited about that, and we ought to be. and they're obedient when it comes to baptism and they get baptized. And then we just kind of let them drift along. God says, that's not the end of the lesson here. We need to disciple them, to encourage them, to help them along. You know, it's kind of like a baby. It's not just getting the baby here. You know, they need some help. You know, they're pretty helpless. And even, well, One-year-olds, maybe going up to two, you know where that, where everything they find they put in their mouth? Well, not everything's food. You know? And so, yeah, you got to help them out a little bit. And so we as Christians, as believers, need to help them along so that they don't just learn by their mistakes, the school of hard knocks that we, you know, it's kind of like, well, one of these I'm going through with Jacob, you know, and we don't have to make all the mistakes Jacob did. we can learn from his mistakes. And like this discipleship study that I've went through with some people that one by one go through the various Bible doctrines, and then it's kind of that's half the book, the other half is I call practical Christian living, prayer, and just different other areas of your life. Eventually you'll pick the stuff up. But this will speed up the process and also help you to get grounded a little bit. So the first time the Jehovah Witness or somebody else comes knocking on your door, you don't buy into a hook, line, and sinker because you know better. You've been exposed to some of this, some of these truths. And so he encourages us, too, here to pray this way. there in Matthew 26, 41, he says, watch and pray that you enter not into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. And this watch, it has the idea of being alert. You know, it's kind of like the watchman on the wall, the sentry duty. Be alert and pray. and pray for one another that we don't fall into temptation. Okay. As he says here, spirits willing, you know, maybe we really don't want to sin, but flesh is weak, you know, and we can get sucked into stuff, you know, or peer pressure or something else. So we pray for one another, just like we would hope that others might pray for us. And he says here too, For us to be able to live the Christian life, we can't do it alone. We need God's help. I think most of us know that. But sometimes baby Christians don't know that. And so we can help them. And he also talked about the fact that Jesus said he's the vine and we are the branches, okay? Or like he's the trunk of the tree and we're the branches coming off. If we're not connected to the vine, we're not connected to the trunk, we're gonna shrivel up and die, okay? But that's where our strength comes from. And that's why we need to be really connected to the Lord Jesus. He's the source of our strength. Familiar verse that we sometimes use, found there in Philippians chapter four in verse 13, says I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Okay, so we can do it through Christ, through his help, because he's the one who's going to strengthen us. And so we need to be vitally connected to him. We need to be looking to him for the strength and health and wisdom that we need on a regular basis. And then he says, too, we need to pray biblically. There in verse 12, he says, that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and ye in him according to the grace of our God and Lord Jesus Christ. So, what do you think? We have not because we ask not. Okay, so we're gonna ask God. But if we ask, is it, well, I mean, that's, Pretty self-explanatory. Is it a good idea to pray and ask God for something that we're pretty sure is not biblical? You think God's gonna say, oh, well, we'll cut you some slack this time, you know? I probably shouldn't do this, but I'll do it anyway. It's kind of like if you know something is illegal and you just go ahead and do it anyway, Like our president, they say that this eviction notice ended on July 31st, and the Supreme Court says you can't extend it. Well, we're going to extend it anyway. It'll take a couple of months to go through the courts, and by then we'll have handed out millions and millions of dollars. He's the leader. I'm sorry. You know, so if you know something's wrong, don't do it. If the speed limit says 70 and you're running late, that doesn't justify doing 80 or 90, OK? Bad things can happen. And I'm going to tell you about a car wreck that was over by us. But within a very short space, somebody was doing about 60 miles an hour. hit a truck and knock the back wheels clear out from underneath it. The pickup truck is sitting in the rear and sitting on the ground. The wheels are gone. You've got to hit a truck pretty hard to knock the wheels out from underneath it. Did they probably know better? Yeah, they did it anyway. Other innocent people get hurt when we don't do what we're told to do. And so we can't. Try to box God in. God, you gotta do this for me. No, God doesn't have to do anything. And just like healing, God's gotta heal. No, he doesn't. There's times in scripture where you see that he didn't heal. He didn't heal Paul. My grace is sufficient, right? And so God's not going to go against his word, but that's one of the things we need to know. We need to be students of God's word so that we know what the word says, and we're not asking for the wrong thing. You know, because the Bible talks about this, because sometimes we ask amiss. I don't remember the exact verse of that. You know, you have not, because you've asked wrongly, asked for the wrong things. And so, but here he's saying we can pray, we can pray in the name of Jesus, but that's not a, that's not a magic word, you know. I don't know, did you ever do that when you were a kid? What was, I don't even know where it came from, probably some movie or something. Abracadabra, you know, and the garage door's supposed to open or whatever, or something's supposed to happen. Well, you know, it isn't, if you ask anything in Jesus' name, that it's going to happen. No, if it's against God's Word, He's not going to make an exception for that. He says what we ask, we ought to bring God glory, ought to bring Christ's glory. If we can't ask for something and it bring Christ's glory, what's the likelihood of it happening? Not real good, is it? OK, and so you might think of it this way. OK, whatever I'm going to pray, I'm going to run it by Jesus first. And if he says amen to it, then it's probably OK. Could Jesus say amen to our prayers for what we ask for, what we want him to do? You know, I mean, it's, what is it, Facebook and everything? People say, amen, amen. They're in agreement with it. Well, we want Christ to be in agreement with what we pray and what we ask for. And so he's saying we want to pray for things that ultimately is going to bring Christ glory. to uplift him, to, as it says here, magnify, to extol or to praise. And so our prayers ought to be those things that would be pleasing unto the Lord. We're to glorify, as I like what he says here, we are to glorify him with our words. You know, some people, they are silver tongue, so smooth, you know, but he says also with our works. People listen to what we say, but they're also watching what we do. You know, and it's kind of like, they talk about that. What do you remember about some of your grade school teachers? Was it something they said or something they did? And more often than not, it's something that they did that you remember, okay? And, you know, it's, well, As parents, we have to be careful. You've probably heard people say, do as I say, not as I do. I'm sorry, that doesn't fly very far. And I've told you that one before. My one and only example. My dad's got a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Tell me, I better never catch you drinking or smoking. OK, Dad, whatever you say. Yeah, I mean, if it was good enough for Dad, the kid's going to follow suit. So we want to glorify the Lord in what we do, what we say, how we pray. And he says, it all comes about by grace. God's undeserved favor. We receive everything. Let me just read this last phrase or sentence. Everything we receive in the Christian life is by grace. God saves us by grace. He keeps us saved by grace. He empowers us to serve him by grace. And so he says, what does Jude 24 say? Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, or protect you from falling, not just physically, but spiritually, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. God's gonna do that, not because we deserved it, not because we earned it, it's because of His grace, His undeserved favor, He does that for us. And the thing is, I'm not saying you would want to, but if you were to want to, and you called, somehow you got the phone number, maybe there is a phone number out there somewhere, I've never tried, for the White House, and you ask to speak to the President, what do you think? What's the likelihood of you ever getting the President on the phone? Now maybe back in Lincoln's day, because they said, you know, the door was open, you could go in and talk to him, but that's not happening now. Okay, we're not talking about the President of the United States. We're talking about the creator, the sustainer of this universe. And we don't have to... Okay, there are times when I try to call other pastors, and there's one of them in particular, but it's a bigger church. But I've never got to him I always get screened by the secretary. When we get your number, we'll have him call you back at his convenience. I want to talk to him now. No. You know, you can't even get a hold of the preacher. You're not going to get a hold of the president, but you can go bang and talk to God. You know, and why would we want to, no offense to any other preacher or me, why would you want to talk to the preacher or the president when you can talk to God himself? You know, it's kind of like, if you've got a problem at Walmart, do you think it does any good to talk to the guy that greets you when he comes in? You know, or the kid pushing the carts out in the lot? You know, is he going to help solve the problem? maybe customer service, but not necessarily. Sometimes you got to kind of work your way up to get somebody that actually has the power to do something other than just listen to you make you feel better, you know? And so, you know, again, we get to go directly to God, and we can tell Him whatever it is we want to say. And He's going to listen, and He knows exactly how to respond to it. He knows the right time to respond to it. What are the answers? Yes, no, and wait. A no isn't always never, but it's maybe wait. Maybe just now is not the right time. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, and there'll be a reason for it. God most likely won't tell you why there's a delay, but there's a reason for it. It's not just being, I'm going to let them sit and stew on this one a while. No, he didn't do that. He loves us. And so he's going to do what's best for us. Well, power in prayer. I hope that's just whet your appetite a little bit. But you know what? God only answers the prayers that we make. Okay? In other words, If we pray, God responds. We don't pray, there's no response. And it's back to that same verse. How much of maybe ways that God wanted to bless us throughout our lives and we missed out because we never asked for it? You know, we don't have a little dinky God that we got to ask little dinky prayers for. You know, sometimes we need to kind of bust out of the box and ask for something big. Now that doesn't mean, I'll pick on John, haven't picked on John for a long time. What year is your truck out there? A 13, okay. Doesn't mean you have to ask God for a 2022 here in a couple months with the biggest tires, the biggest lift, got to have a ladder to get into this thing, the biggest engine, pass everything but the gas station. No. I mean, no. How about maybe asking God to work on some unsaved relative that's like talking to a brick. They won't listen to you. God, tenderize them. Soften them up. You know, there's nobody out there too hard for God. There's nobody too far gone for God, you know? If he can save Paul, and there's some other pretty rough customers out there through the years that God's got a hold of, gangsters and hoods, and what's the guy that was in New York City? Wilkerson, you know, I mean he was a pretty tough customer. You know, you got Hitmen, different ones that God got a hold of. Sometimes they go to prison before God gets a hold, gets their attention. You got Coulson, you know, Yeah, the list goes on and on. They don't want nothing to do with God, and everything's going great. The bottom falls out, and they're looking through the bars. Then it's kind of only one way to look up. And God got their attention. A little time out, let's talk about this. And God took Moses to the backside of the desert for 40 years. Little on-the-job training, little rehab there, and then he put him out front. And so who knows what God might have us to do. Pray about it. Let's close. Heavenly Father, we thank you for loving us. We thank you again for the avenue of prayer, being able to come into your presence because of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work. He's wiped the slate clean. He's cleansed us of our sin and made us a child of God once we've trusted Him, a Savior. And because of that, we can come in and talk to our Heavenly Father. We thank you that you know our needs before we ask for them, but yet at the same time, you know just exactly how and when to respond to them. And we just pray you'd give us patience as we wait upon you in your answers, in Jesus' name, Amen.