How about now? Oh, yeah. Good.
About thirty minutes—say, thirty-five minutes—from now, will someone who has a watch just raise their hand? That way I’ll know I only have one more hour to speak after that.
Actually, I’m not going to do that. I know we’re tired, but I do have some things to share tonight, so may the Lord help us to listen and to receive what He has for us.
I am so glad to be here with you this weekend. One reason I am so glad is because I believe—I really believe—that the Lord is doing something and desires to do something big, not just this weekend, but in this season that I think many of us are in. I think many of you are in a kind of spiritual season right now.
A spiritual season is a lot like a regular season, only it has something different about it. A spiritual season is not like a season on the calendar. On the calendar, they can say summer begins on a certain day and ends on a certain day. For many of you, summer begins on the last day of school and ends on the first day of school.
But a spiritual season is a little different. It has a beginning and an end, just like a calendar season, only a spiritual season begins when the Lord begins to do a specific thing in your life. It ends when that thing is accomplished.
So, a spiritual season might last for a month or might last for a year. It lasts however long it lasts. I believe that many of you are in a spiritual season where the Lord desires to do—and, in fact, is doing—something specific and different.
Tonight, I am going to share a little bit about prayer. As you already heard this morning, and as you have gathered from the ministry, we are not so interested in the technicality of how to worship and how to pray. We are more interested in the nature of these things—the spiritual nature of prayer. That is what we want to stress tonight.
First of all, what is prayer? Some Bible dictionaries I looked at give a very basic, factual, honest definition. Basically, they say prayer is asking, seeking direction for yourself, or intercession for others. The dictionaries stress that prayer always includes the element of need: asking from the standpoint of need.
I want to talk about why need is so important and what need has to do with prayer. My own spiritual definition of prayer is a little different. Prayer is simply spiritual communication with the living God. It is really just that: spiritual communication with the living God.
What has need got to do with prayer? It is interesting: if you read the biographies or autobiographies of famous Christians—people who have affected us and our circle of influence—such as Amy Carmichael, Oswald Chambers, Watchman Nee, Andrew Murray, Margaret Barber, and many well-known missionaries, you see a common theme throughout their stories.
In every one of them, there is a season when there was a difficulty in their life, a need that they could not answer by themselves. That need and that spiritual season became a turning point in their life. That is what they say about themselves.
Something happened in their life that they could not control, and it increased their sense of their own need. It brought things into a different perspective.
When you read in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, have you noticed that practically every heroine struggled with either getting married or, if she was already married, especially with having children—what the Old Testament refers to as bearing fruit?
We are going to talk a lot tonight about this matter of bearing fruit, because spiritual communication is really all about bearing fruit. The Lord is after something in our relationship, and it has to do with bearing spiritual fruit.
Having a child in the Old Testament is a type and picture of the spiritual reality of bearing spiritual life, of bringing forth fruit. Over and over, with Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and practically all the women in some fashion—even in the Lord’s genealogy—you see an issue concerning this matter.
With these women, you see desperate desire to bear fruit. It became not merely a sense of need, but travail. It became something you want so desperately that you cannot control it. That brings about a sense of travail. That is what prevailing prayer is all about.
When there is something in your life that the Lord allows—an unfulfilled desire, a difficulty, something that you cannot control—it sharpens your senses, doesn’t it? It sharpens your spiritual sense.
Man, does it change your prayers. Does it change your idea about bringing things before the Lord. It brings about a kind of desperation. Nothing brings about a sense of spiritual desperation more than having a strong desire for something that is out of your control.
There are certain things in our lives we can control, or at least we think we can. Frankly, in those issues, sometimes we are under the false illusion that we do not really need the Lord.
Because the Lord loves us so much and wants fellowship with us, He allows things to happen in our lives that bring us into reality. The reality is that we need Him desperately in everything. This is really what prayer is about: bringing us into the spiritual sensitivity where we have relationship and communication with the living God.
A couple of things about spiritual communication: first, it involves relationship. I want to look briefly at John 14.
John 14:21 says:
He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me:
and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father,
and I will love him,
and will manifest Myself unto him.
Spiritual communication and love are directly related. They are not cousins; they are brother and sister. I mean, it is a closely related thing.
I have heard that the average American knows three hundred people on a first-name basis. I do not know whether that is true, but let us pretend it is. Let us say you know three hundred people, and let us make a pyramid.
At the bottom of that pyramid are two hundred people whose names you know and who know you. If you saw them and they said, “Well, how are you doing?” you would say, “Fine. How are you doing?” “I’m fine. Nice to see you. Okay, bye.”
As you go up that pyramid, to people who are closer to you, you might tell them a little more about how you are really doing. As you go further toward those who love you most and whom you love most, what you reveal becomes more and more.
For those of us who are married, that pyramid stops, humanly speaking, at our spouse—the one who loves us unconditionally, who knows everything about us, where there are no secrets. That is the one with whom I want to share everything. I want her to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about her.
To the one with whom we have that love relationship, everything is out in the open. But you would be a fool if you shared your intimate secrets with someone who did not love you. You would be foolish to share the intimate things of your life with a stranger or someone who did not have your interests at heart.
Guess what? Neither does the Lord. Those who love Him will be loved by Him, will be loved by His Father, and He will disclose Himself to them.
The more you know about someone, the more you know how to pray for them. The more someone knows about you, the more they know how to pray for you. The more we have this love relationship with the Lord Jesus, the more He reveals to us, and the more we know how to pray.
There is another thing about spiritual communication. It separates us, as Christians, from all other people who do not have it, and it separates us from all other religions.
Prayer is not merely going through the motions. Let me give you some examples of things prayer is not, so I can get a little of the negative out of the way.
I have close relationships in Asia. Most people know I am very close to some people in Japan and China, and I am going to both places in a few weeks. I love going to Japan. I have gone there pretty much every year for eight, nine, or ten years.
One thing I love about Japan—and this is partly just my personality—is that there are little gardens and beautiful parks everywhere. In every neighborhood, even a crowded neighborhood in a big city, there is likely a little Buddhist temple within walking distance.
Those temples usually have beautiful, well-kept grounds and gardens around them. I like to go there. The saints always say, “No, Sonny, we can’t go there.” I say, “Oh, come on. I like to go there. I like to walk around the grounds. I love it.”
A few years ago, some dear relations took me to Kyoto in the autumn. Kyoto is the historic place where the emperor’s palace is. If you saw The Last Samurai, it was filmed there. It is a beautiful place.
I am a garden person, a bonsai-tree person. I really appreciate this. The gardens around the emperor’s palace in Kyoto have been continuously maintained for more than six hundred years: trees pruned, plants watched over, everything kept in the right place, fish fed, ponds cared for—everything continuously maintained.
There are many temples in Kyoto that are nine hundred years old, with beautiful gardens. In one garden, on a clear, beautiful night, my friends and I walked along little paths lit by candles and lanterns.
There were little speakers planted in the ground, with a kind of New Age music coming out of them. There were fires burning, incense burners by the pond, fragrance in the air, music, wind chimes, and the glitter of lights. It was so wonderful and appealing to my soul that I almost became a Buddhist right on the spot.
I am telling you, it really does something to your soul. It creates a certain feeling, and it is wonderful. I made my own backyard into a kind of Japanese garden, but with no Buddhist stuff in it.
That kind of thing makes you feel something. By the way, the reason they have all these gardens in Japan is that it is a Buddhist country. It has to do with Zen Buddhism. It is designed to make you feel a certain way.
But though it makes you feel a certain way, it has nothing to do with spiritual relationship. It is all soul relationship.
When my wife and I first got married, we spent a summer in Europe with a militant evangelical organization, going door to door and passing out tracts. It was very scourging. The saints from Memphis have heard this a hundred times, but that whole summer really affected my life.
Sometimes we were in a foreign country, going door to door. I could not speak the language. People would slam doors in my face, laugh at us, and say, “You naïve, idealistic young people, you don’t know anything. You Americans all believe in God. We’re Catholic. Don’t you understand anything?” Even priests would laugh at us.
I would get discouraged. Every village had a giant old Catholic church, and sometimes I needed peace and quiet—a place to hide out. I would go sit in one of those churches. I would pray there too, but I would also go in simply to sit.
Those European Catholic churches had huge ceilings. You could say the slightest thing—“Hello”—and hear, “Hello, hello, hello.” Everything was so awesome: beautiful stained-glass windows, little cubby holes containing icons, images of baby Jesus, Mary, or angels, all with eyes looking at you.
The whole thing created an awesome atmosphere. I have heard people say, “When I go into a Catholic church, I just feel closer to God.” It is designed to make you feel that way. Why do you think they invented stained-glass windows?
It makes you feel something, all right, but that is not necessarily being closer to God. It does the same thing as being in that Buddhist temple. I am sorry to be so negative.
It elevates something in your soul. I am not saying that all Catholics have nothing to do with God. I am talking about creating a man-made aura to make you feel something.
If that were being closer to God, I would feel much closer to God when I went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or visited the Library of Congress. When you go into some awesome place, it may make you feel closer to God, but it does not have anything to do with God. It is a man-made thing that does something in your soul.
Brothers and sisters, among all of God’s people, we have this in common: we can have spiritual relationship with the living God. We can pray real prayers—not to dumb idols, not merely to the air, not to the atmosphere, and not to an aura that makes us feel a certain way.
You and I can pray real prayers to the living God. It is an amazing thing.
Maybe you do not have much experience with your spirit being connected to the throne of God. Maybe some of you are like me with my computer.
One of John’s sons bought me a computer at a garage sale a few years ago and hooked it up so I could get email from all of you. I have spent half my life answering email ever since. As far as I was concerned, the only thing a computer was good for was receiving email and sending email.
Then some saints from Asia came to visit me, and I discovered my computer could do all sorts of things. It could tell me the weather all over the world. It could show me movies. People could send me slideshows. My little garage-sale computer was amazing. I just had no experience with all that.
Many of us are like that with our spirit and our prayer life. There is a whole lot more there than we know about. Just because we do not have experience with it does not mean it does not exist. It does exist.
I want to encourage you tonight: there is a great realm of spiritual reality that is ours to experience. It is ours to enter into.
Spiritual communication involves relationship. It separates us from other religions. Actually, we are not really a religion. Other religions are trying to please God or do something for God, but as Christians, we are having a relationship with the living God.
There are three things prayer is not. First, prayer is not speaking to the air.
Second, prayer is not asking for things with false motives. If you ask for something with a wrong motive, it is not real prayer. It is just your idea.
There is a big difference between my needs and my wants, and sometimes I get the two confused. I am always telling my wife, “I need a new pair of Nike Super Flyer, whatever the latest tennis shoe is.” She reminds me that I do not need it; I just want it. There is a big difference.
Sometimes we go to the Lord with our list of what we want. Most of us have probably done this many times. Those prayers are not answered because they are motivated wrongly.
If you prayed to win the lottery, first of all, the Lord would not answer that prayer because He loves you too much, and it would destroy your life. Also, a lot of people pray that prayer. And if you are really following the Lord, you will not buy a lottery ticket. That is an extreme example, but it is a wrong motive.
When we pray with wrong motives, our prayers hit a brass ceiling. Here is why: true prayer is not your idea. Real prayer is not something initiated by me. Real prayer is initiated by the Lord. It comes to me and goes back to Him.
In John 6, there is the story of the Lord going to a mountain and praying all night. In English translations, it says He prayed to God. But when you look in the Greek interlinear, it is very interesting. It says He prayed the prayers of God.
True prayer comes to you. It is initiated in heaven, comes to your spirit, is processed in you and me, and is prayed back to the Lord. That is what real prayer is.
Third, true prayer is not a religious activity. It is not merely, “Oh, I’d better go to the prayer meeting. The brothers are gathering. I’d better get out there and pray some prayers.”
I am not making fun of that. It is a good thing to do. But if you go to the back room, downstairs, or wherever you go, and you are just doing it to do it, it is not real prayer.
Real prayer is when something is initiated in your spirit and you pray it to the Lord. It is not a religious activity; it is a relationship activity. There is a difference: spiritual relationship and spiritual communication.
Guys, this is our birthright. It is our birthright to know these things, to have this as our reality and possession.
If I do not want to pray with wrong motives, if I do not want to be religious, and if I do not want to pray to the air, how can I avoid it?
I believe most of us in this room, if not all of us, have received the Holy Spirit. Do you understand that at the instant you believed that the Lord Jesus is who He says He is, a miracle happened?
You did not have to understand it. You did not have to explain it or articulate it. But when you believed in the Lord Jesus, His Holy Spirit came into your human spirit and made you alive to Him.
You have the Holy Spirit dwelling in your human spirit. When that happened, the same thing happened to you that happened to Jacob. You became connected. There is a highway of light from your heart to the throne of God, with angels ascending and descending on it.
You cannot see it with your natural eye, but it is real. You are connected personally, and it is not merely a metaphor. You are connected by the Holy Spirit to heaven. Isn’t that amazing?
You can receive from the Lord and send back to the Lord. That is real. That is your reality. The Holy Spirit enables you to hear the prayers that come from God, agree with the Lord, and return prayers to Him.
The other thing you received at salvation, besides the Holy Spirit, is a measure of faith.
Faith is simply believing what God says. It is not positive thinking. It is not hoping in things God did not say. Faith is also a kind of spiritual communication. It is believing what God says in Scripture and what He says in your spirit.
Hebrews 11:1 says:
Now faith is assurance of things hoped for,
a conviction of things not seen.
That is what faith is. You have it so that you can agree with the Lord and understand what He is doing.
I think about the spies going into Canaan. Everybody knows the story, but it is worth repeating. If you think this is too elementary for you, I am not talking to you; I am talking to the person sitting next to you.
When Moses sent the spies into Canaan, the Lord had already told them, “I am giving you this land.” They went over and saw that it was a good land, a land flowing with milk and honey. They brought back great fruit from the land.
But they said, “Here is the problem: there are giants in that place—big, scary giants—and we are like grasshoppers in their sight.” Yet Caleb said, “Wait a minute. Silence, everybody. This is a good land. We can go and take this place.”
They all saw the same thing. They all heard the same thing. They all saw the fruit, the giants, and the promise of the Lord. What was the difference? Caleb and Joshua exercised faith.
You have a measure of faith. You got it at salvation along with the Holy Spirit. But are you exercising it?
If you had seen Arnold Schwarzenegger and me as babies lying in cribs next to each other, you would have just seen two babies that looked, I guess, just alike. But if you had seen us twenty or thirty years later, you would not have said, “Arnold, your muscles just grew and grew and grew. Sonny’s just did not grow so big.”
Actually, Arnold exercised those muscles. I exercise mine too, by the way. He just exercised his more. When we were born, we both had muscles, but they were small and unexercised.
When you were born again, you were not born again with no faith. You received a measure of faith. As we exercise it, our communication increases. We become able to hear better, understand better, and have greater sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
I want to mention three facets of spiritual communication. The first is humility.
I think people who have real, mature spiritual communication have a sense of the fear of the Lord and real humility—not pretend humility. Humility simply means lowliness and meekness. These things apply to worship as well.
The second facet is abiding. Abiding means staying in a place, dwelling, living, and really experiencing the place where you are.
When you abide somewhere, you are not merely existing there. In spiritual things, some of us are camped out somewhere but are not abiding there. Some are just passing through, always looking for the next thing.
When you are always looking for the next thing, you are not spiritually abiding, and you may miss the thing right in front of your eyes. There is something about abiding in the place where the Lord has put us.
I am talking about the spiritual place, but it also applies to the geographic place. Wherever the Lord has put you, there is something there that He wants to give you.
Humility and abiding go together. The third facet of prayer, which Andrew Murray stresses greatly, is persistence: perseverance, continuing on, not stopping, and continuing to ask.
You may ask, “Why should I pray for something and keep asking? If I pray, believe, and the Lord hears my prayers, why must I keep asking?”
When you are praying prayers the Lord has given you to pray, and you are exercising faith, knowing it is His will and the right thing, you want to keep asking.
I do not think the Lord is playing games with us. He created us in His image. Your longing for companionship, your need for friendship, your need to express yourself, to be loved and to love back, and even your need to be appreciated are because you were created in His image.
Sometimes the Lord makes things in such a way that He wants to be asked. He wants to be sought out. He is not playing games with us. He wants to answer our prayers. He is waiting to answer them. But He is not Santa Claus; He is holy God, and He wants to be sought out.
The problem with most of us is that we are not so meek, we do not want to persevere, and sometimes we do not abide. The Lord has a provision for that. Sometimes we are so sure of ourselves that our prayers are not answered.
A real issue, and I think an issue in this season for some of you and a coming issue for all of you, has to do with weakness. You know the Scripture: “When I am weak, then am I strong.”
My life has been like a character in a pinball machine. When things are going well, I am on top of the world, and I have a tendency to forget about the Lord. Not so much lately. I have gotten a little smarter in my old age.
When I was younger, if things were working out, I felt on top of the world. Then I would walk into a mountain and go back the other way. Then I would recognize how weak and needy I was, become humble, throw myself on the mercy of the Lord, and become sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
He would begin to bless me and build me up, and then I would feel good again and start going my own way again. Then I would walk into another wall. He would pick me up, I would recognize my need for Him again, and I would say, “Lord, save me.” He would help me, and He does.
When we are strong and everything is going our way, we sometimes forget the Lord. I believe with all my heart that the Lord allows difficult situations in our lives.
Some of you have already experienced personal difficulty deeply. Probably most of us will experience, in some form or fashion, a season of extreme difficulty that brings us to weakness.
I want you to turn to Genesis 4. I am going to begin around verse 16 and comment a little on each verse.
This is Cain. You know the story of Cain and Abel, the first brothers. Cain was the older brother. Personally, you do not have to believe this, but I believe Cain represents, at least in part, a type and picture of the natural man.
I believe Abel is a type and picture, in part, of a man of faith—not a strong man, not a super-capable man, not Superman. Perhaps a weak man, but a man of faith.
I believe the Lord has a plan and purpose for both, but only one can be pleasing to Him. Only one can truly know Him and communicate with Him.
Cain became jealous because his offering was not accepted. I believe Cain’s offering came out of his natural mind; he leaned on his own understanding.
Both men made an offering to the Lord, and I believe both heard the Lord. Cain’s offering seemed to make good sense. He was a tiller of the land, so he brought the fruit of the ground. That was what he did for a living. Should that not have been acceptable?
I think it was his idea. It was not sacrificial, and it was not what God told him to do. The Lord did not accept his offering.
What Abel did was not natural. He brought one of his animals, one he cared for and loved, and sacrificed it before the Lord. It involved self-denial, and it was an acceptable sacrifice to the Lord.
Let me begin with Genesis 4:15:
And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
And the Lord appointed a sign for Cain, lest any finding him should smite him.
This is grace. Then Genesis 4:16 says:
And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord,
and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
Nod is the place of wandering. People who live in their natural strength, who lean on their own understanding—even God’s people, even Christians who live in natural strength—live in a place of wandering. They never land. They never arrive where they should be. Do not do that.
Cain had relations with his wife; she conceived and gave birth to Enoch. This is not the good Enoch. Cain built a city and named it after his son. This is pride.
The natural man wants to do something that is simply self-exaltation. He builds a city and names it after his son. Some people worship their children, but when we worship our children, we are really worshiping ourselves. It is self-exaltation.
It is natural life, not Spirit. It is self-life. That is what naming that city is about: pride.
Then Lamech took two wives. Until then, I think everyone had one wife. Suddenly Lamech took two wives for himself: Adah and Zillah. Adah means beauty, and Zillah means shadow—beauty and shadow.
I can see him walking into a club with two gals: “Hey, I got two wives, Beauty and Shadow. Say hello to everybody.” It sounds like a rock-and-roll band to me.
He was the first polygamist. Up until this point, none of the women in Scripture had a name except Eve, whose name came through the ordinance of the Lord. Then here is a man with two wives, and he gives them names.
Divine order has been broken. It is natural man doing what he wants to do. It is pride, breaking the Lord’s order, and self-exaltation.
Then Adah gave birth to Jabal, the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. This is not dwelling in tents and living in pastures as a type of spiritual life. This is having livestock in a kind of industrial format: raising animals in pens, not grazing on pastureland.
The natural man invents a way to make his life easier, but it is not God’s way. Jubal was the father of those who play the lyre and pipe. Tubal-cain was the forger of implements of bronze and iron. Then Lamech boasted to his wives that he had killed a man for wounding him and a boy for striking him.
The Lord had been gracious to Cain, but Lamech perverted that grace for pride. He was saying, in effect, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then I will be avenged seventyfold.” It was self-exaltation.
Do you think there is spiritual communication in that kind of pride? Be honest: do you think you are immune from self-exaltation? Do you think the Lord communicates with you as a beloved son when you are exalting yourself? Clearly, the answer is no.
Then something changes. Genesis 4:25-26 says:
And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth:
For, said she, God hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel; for Cain slew him.
And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enosh.
Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.
Enosh means weakness. Weakness leads to spiritual sensitivity and spiritual need. When we come into the right place, we begin to call upon the name of the Lord.
Do not despise it when the Lord begins to work in a way you do not understand. It is not punishment; it is love. It is intended to bring you into another place.
There are three things I have personally seen the Lord use over and over in the lives of His people. He is using them in some of your lives right now, and if you continue to follow the Lord, I believe He will use at least one of these things in your life in a big way.
The first is health. There is nothing I know of that creates a sense of desperation, at least for me, more than my health.
When your body is touched and you cannot control the outcome, it lets you know how weak you are and how much you need the Lord. It brings prayer, does it not? When you are sick, in pain, or have a problem and cannot find the answer, it drives you to the Lord.
It is not punishment. Some dear ones in Richmond and Memphis have suffered in unusual ways. It is not only for them; it is for their family, and we know it is for the Body of Christ—to bring us into a different level of spiritual understanding and spiritual sensitivity.
The Lord loves you enough and is committed enough to you having a real prayer life—a life of prayer—that He will allow this in your life. It is guaranteed. It may touch you personally or a loved one, because the Lord is determined to bring us into a place that we would otherwise stray away from.
When we are weak, that is when we are strong. It is amazing.
The second thing is finances. I have seen the Lord use finances in people’s lives many times.
I am a Type A personality. In my natural life, I wake up every morning at war. When people cut me off in traffic, I do not merely want to yell at them; I want to follow them home and break all the windows out of their house.
When it came to getting work, I was not a person who lay around waiting for someone to call. I was ready to go, out knocking on doors. If you hired me, I promised I would be the best employee you had ever had. Just give me the job and watch me go.
Once I moved to Seattle, Washington, with twenty other people to build a church, start a church, and raise up something for the Lord. Boy, was that a failure. We thought we were ready to start something for the Lord, but we discovered we could not get along with each other, much less do something for the Lord.
The icing on the cake was that I could not get a job. I could not find a job anywhere. I had been living in California, the land of milk and honey, sunshine, and everything else. My whole wardrobe consisted of Hawaiian shirts, T-shirts, and blue jeans. I was in construction.
Then I moved to Seattle, where people did not just have jobs; they had careers, coats and ties, and Volvos. I had a Volkswagen with no lights or something. It was a difficult time, and I could not find a job.
I went from place to place all day, getting lost in a new city, and it was cold. Once, I went to a job interview and had to borrow a suit from a friend who was six feet tall. I looked like a child wearing his dad’s suit. I did not get that job.
Finally, I interviewed with a small warehouse that imported and distributed teas all over the country. They wanted someone to head shipping and receiving. I thought, “Man, I can do this.”
About sixty people lined up for the job. The owner called about ten of us back. She interviewed me again and said, “I really like you.” I said, “Well, I really like you too.”
The next day she called two of us back: me and one other guy. She said, “I really like you a lot, John”—my real name is John—“and I really like this other guy. You both would do a great job. But I can’t make a decision.”
She was a Christian. She said, “I’m going to go home tonight and pray with my husband, and I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
I came back the next day, desperate for a job. She said, “John, I like you so much, and I know you would do great. I have no doubt. But I cannot make a decision between you and the other guy. He is not better than you, and you are not better than him. I prayed, and I don’t know why, but I just feel it should be the other guy.”
Oh, man, it is funny now. It was not then. I walked outside into that parking lot and wept. I said, “Lord, why are You doing this to me? All I want is a job. I am willing to do about anything. I want a job.”
The Lord used that season in my life to increase my understanding of what He wanted to have with me. You know what it was? He wanted me to trust Him with everything.
He wanted me to be sensitive to Him, love Him, have a loving relationship with Him, communicate with Him, and receive from Him. That is all He wanted. But I was so busy being a go-getter that I did not do the very thing the Lord wanted me to do.
The third thing the Lord will use in your life, and probably the thing He uses in everyone’s life, is relationships.
He may use health. He may use finances. He will almost certainly use relationships to bring you to a different place—to show you how much you need Him and how weak you are.
Sometimes your feelings will be hurt. Sometimes people will mistreat you. I am talking about your brothers and sisters.
A stranger cannot hurt my feelings much. I do not know him, and I do not care what he thinks. But you can hurt my feelings—deeply—because I love you. Because we are close, we have great effect on one another.
Sometimes I get angry at how a group of perhaps one hundred and fifty people can have such effect on my life. We live in a nation of millions of people, yet what this small group thinks about me, how I am getting along with them, seems to wrap up my whole life.
It is because the Lord has placed us together in spiritual relationship. Man, does He use it in our lives. He uses these relationships in the deepest way.
A tremendously significant thing concerning prayer is sacrificial love. Remember the Scripture: those who love Him will be loved by His Father, and He will disclose Himself to them.
If you want to close the door on your prayer life—if you want brass heaven, where your prayers go up, hit the ceiling, and fall back down—start not loving the brothers and sisters. Just decide not to be loving.
The biggest problem in the church, I believe, is unforgiveness. Just decide you are going to be offended with someone. Sometimes people do things they should not do. They talk about you behind your back or mistreat you. Humanly speaking, you may have every right to be offended. Do not do it. It will close heaven.
Does the Lord Jesus have a right to be offended? Man, nobody knew who He was. The people who should have loved Him most could not stay awake for one hour in His greatest time of need.
We are coming to the end. Turn to Luke 11. I am going to read the first part that most people know by heart.
Luke 11:1-4 says:
And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place,
that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him,
Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.And He said unto them, When ye pray, say,
Father, Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins;
for we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And bring us not into temptation.
I want to focus on two things. First: “Thy kingdom come.”
When you received the Holy Spirit and the measure of faith, you began a relationship with a King who has a kingdom. Why did the Lord Jesus tell the disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come”? He was the King, standing right there with them. They already had the King, and in one sense they had the kingdom.
When we were saved—when we were born again—the King, the Spirit of the King, came to reside inside us. But His kingdom has been increasing since then.
Here is a rhetorical question: you have the King; I have the King. His Spirit lives in my spirit. But how much of the kingdom has come? Who is on the throne, really? That is the real issue.
How much is the kingdom reigning? It is a good question to ask—not a question to feel guilty about, but a question that enables our prayers to be answered, our relationship to increase, and our communication to increase.
Then notice this statement: “For we ourselves also forgive every one that is indebted to us.” It is assumed.
Do you want your prayers answered? Do you forgive everyone who is indebted to you? Do I forgive everyone who is indebted to me? That is a good question to ask.
Have you ever sensed that a brother or sister had a problem with you? Finally, you went to them and said, “It seems there may be a problem between us. I do not want there to be a problem. Did I say something insensitive? Have I done something?”
Then they say, “Well, as a matter of fact, you did. It was ten years ago, and I have never forgotten about it.” Mercy me—ten years ago. You poor thing.
Sometimes people do not want to forget things. Sometimes we do not want to forget things. There is a strange perversion in it. You get offended, and that offense is first like a neighbor. Then it moves in, becomes a buddy, and you begin to identify with it.
Every time you see the person you are offended with, the offense never goes away. Maybe that person has completely changed and does not even know what they did, but you are still offended.
My wife and I have a little practice. If I am offended with some brother or sister, I do not tell my wife. The reason is that by the next day or the next week, that person and I will probably work it out. There will be forgiveness and everything will be fine, but I may forget to tell my wife that part.
Then that brother or sister stands up in the meeting and shares the Lord, and my wife is sitting there with the offense I passed along. It is a terrible thing to be offended on someone else’s behalf. My wife is not like that, by the way.
But that is the human condition, is it not? Brothers and sisters, we need to be forgiving. It is a key matter.
The last Scripture I want to consider is James 5. If you are going to take a Scripture into memory, this would be a good one.
James 5:16-18 says:
Confess therefore your sins one to another,
and pray one for another,
that ye may be healed.
The supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working.Elijah was a man of like passions with us,
and he prayed fervently that it might not rain;
and it rained not on the earth for three years and six months.
And he prayed again;
and the heaven gave rain,
and the earth brought forth her fruit.
Brothers and sisters, the point of prayer is to produce fruit. Spiritual fruit is what the Lord wants to bring about. That is what prayer is all about.
Do you think Elijah was simply so powerful and strong that he could pray that it would not rain, and then it did not rain? No, of course not. Elijah was so sensitive to the Lord that he prayed the very thing on the Lord’s heart.
He simply agreed with the Lord and prayed the thing that was on the Lord’s heart. Then, at the right time, he agreed with the Lord again and prayed that it would rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit.
It is significant that Elijah was a man with a nature just like ours. He was not Superman. I like the translation that says he had “like passions with us”—the same temptations, problems, and weaknesses.
But he knew what it was to pray and produce fruit. The Scripture says, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
Prayer is not merely something we do. It is spiritual relationship. We are foolish if we think our spiritual life is merely human religious activity.
Paul said to the Corinthians that because they did not judge the body rightly, some were asleep. He did not mean taking a nap. There are spiritual consequences when we fail to recognize that we are personally attached to the living God and to one another.
Pray for one another, and confess your sins to one another.
One final thing about confessing sins: I am not talking about having a big confession party.
Sometimes, in assemblies, meetings, or certain denominations, where there is a lot of emotion, you can have a confession party. My wife was saved in a particular Pentecostal denomination where there were many wonderful people, but much of what they did was only emotion. It did not lead to spiritual life.
In our natural life, the last thing we want others to know about us is whatever it is we do not want them to know about us.
We had a friend from the old days, a brother among us. We were all zealous for the Lord. One night this brother came and said, “I have to make a confession. I have a problem with smoking cigarettes.”
This is a true story. Do you think any of us thought, “Oh, you terrible person. How dare you have a problem with smoking cigarettes?” Oh, no.
You know what it did? It made us respect him more, love him more, and pray for him more.
When you confess something in spirit to the person you are supposed to confess it to, at the time you are supposed to do it, it breaks the bond of something that has a stronghold in your life.
Sometimes there are things that need to be confessed. Sometimes our prayers are unanswered because we are holding back.
How do you know what to share and what not to share? I have had people confess things to me and ask, “Should I share this with everyone?” I have said, “No. I do not think you should share it with anyone else. You have done exactly what you ought to do. That secret will remain with me.”
That person did what they were supposed to do. They acted in spirit, brought out a hidden thing, and broke a bond.
How do you know when to do that? You have the Holy Spirit, you have a measure of faith, and the Lord can reveal it to you.
Brothers and sisters, let us be spiritually sensitive. Let us make sure we are forgiving. Let us make sure we are loving the brothers and sisters, because when we do that, we are loving the Lord.
If we want effective prayers that produce fruit, we will not be religious. We will not be talking to the air. We will not be going through the motions. We will make these things spiritual reality by loving the Lord and loving one another.
Our prayers will be answered. The Lord will be satisfied, and we will produce fruit. May it be that we become fruit producers.
May it be that in this season, perhaps even this weekend, some of our lives really turn—not merely an emotional corner, not a temporary thing. May the Lord reveal Himself to some of us this weekend, capture us, and set us on a life-changing course.
Let us pray.
Lord, I just want to thank You and praise You for each one who is here.
Lord, we ask You to accomplish all of Your will in our lives. Those who need encouragement—oh Lord, would You encourage us. Those who need a touch from You—Lord, would You touch us. If we need conviction, would You convict us.
Lord, we want to entrust ourselves to You. We thank You for loving us and keeping us, for not forsaking us. You have been so faithful and so good to us.
Lord, we want to give ourselves to You. We want to keep hearing everything the Holy Spirit is saying to us.
Lord, bless everyone who is here with Your presence and with the fullness of Your Spirit. Oh Lord, be satisfied and gain glory for Yourself and Your people.
Lord, in Your precious name, we pray all these things. Amen.