James 5, verse 16, a well-known verse
that says that the effectual, fervent prayer of
a righteous man avails much.
One translation says it exerts a mighty influence.
It avails much.
What kind of a prayer?
The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man.
I'm speaking on the subject of prevailing prayer,
and prevailing prayer is not necessarily long praying,
it's rather praying that gets results.
To some people, prayer is sort of a
spiritual PT.
It's a good exercise for the soul, but
it really doesn't accomplish anything other than that.
I rather prefer somebody else's definition.
I read it in a book on prayer.
This brother said that prayer was backing a
three-ton truck up to the warehouse of
heaven and driving away with a full load.
First of all, we have to be, of
course, on praying ground, which means that I
must be saved.
It's very possible in a crowd this size
that there are some who have never really
been born again.
In revival work it rather frequently happens that
people, and sometimes office holders in churches, occasionally
even preachers, will discover they have never been
born again.
If I have never received Jesus Christ and
do not have the assurance that my sins
are forgiven and I am God's child, then
I am not on praying ground.
Then I must be walking in the light
in order to be on praying ground.
Psalm 66, verse 18 says, "...if I regard
iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not
hear me."
One translation says, "...if I conceal iniquity, if
I hide it in my heart."
What's the use of trying to hide my
sins, my iniquities, when in Psalm 90 we
read this "...thou hast set our iniquities before
thee, our secret sins, in the light of
thy countenance."
So then with God there is no such
thing as a hidden sin, it just aggravates
our own sin to God, before God, that
we try to hide it after we have
done it.
So the Bible says, "...he that or whoso
confesses, see, he that covers his sins shall
not prosper.
You may prosper materially, but spiritually you cannot,
if you cover your sins.
But whoso confesses and forsakes them shall have
mercy."
And it's that combination of confessing, that is
of admitting, acknowledging, as Jeremiah 3.13 says,
"...only acknowledge your iniquity."
Or Hosea 5.15 where God said, "...I
will go and return to my place till
they acknowledge their offense and seek my face."
The marginal reading says, "...until they be guilty."
Until we are willing to confess and forsake,
I say again, that combination, admitting and forsaking,
then we are on praying ground.
And then thirdly, to be on praying ground,
we have to know something of the promises
of God.
Psalm 65.2, it's not exactly a promise,
but you could claim it as that, it's
sort of a title for God, and it
goes like this, "...O thou that hearest prayer,
unto thee shall all flesh come."
The God with whom we have to do
is a God who hears prayer.
I repeat it again, "...O thou that hearest
prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come."
In 2 Peter 1, beginning from the third
verse, we read these words, "...according as His
divine power has given unto us all things
that pertain unto life and godliness through the
knowledge of Him who has called us to
glory and virtue, whereby, or by whom are
given unto us, exceeding great and precious promises,
that by these, that by these, you might
become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped
the corruption that is in the world through
lust."
Then he goes on to talk about adding
to your faith virtue, well, when he talks
about faith at the top of the list
there, of course, he's taking us back to
the exceeding great and precious promises.
You know, there's a beautiful thought over in
Genesis, when Joseph's brothers came back to their
father Jacob and said, "...Joseph is yet alive,
and he's a ruler in Egypt."
The Bible says that Jacob's heart fainted and
he believed them not.
But when he saw something, it says, "...the
spirit of Jacob, their father, revived."
Do you remember what it was that caused
his heart to revive?
It says, "...when he saw the wagons."
What wagons were these?
These were the wagons that Joseph had sent
with his brothers back to carry Jacob and
his household into Egypt again.
And those wagons, to me, they represent the
promises of God.
A wagon may be slow, may be a
little dusty, and they may be going by
you in LTDs and whatnot, but I'll tell
you something, they'll get you there when the
car won't get you there.
All right, the promises of God, exceeding great
and precious promises of God.
And these promises we ought to plead back
to God in believing prayer.
What about conversational prayer?
There's a place for that.
I don't think we have to always very
formally address God.
Sometimes when we're praying, we're just saying words,
we're not talking to God, we're maybe talking
to the people around us, or perhaps even
talking to the chair.
But there's something in the Bible that needs
to be understood.
In 1 Chronicles chapter 17 and Daniel chapter
9, people say when you pray, you shouldn't
keep on saying, God, Lord, God, Lord, Jesus,
Lord, God, Spirit.
You shouldn't do that.
I've read books that say you shouldn't do
that.
You should always talk conversationally to God.
But dear people, that's not the teaching of
the word of God.
In 1 Chronicles chapter 17, in a prayer
that takes less than two minutes, David used
the name of God 17 times, O God,
O God.
And Daniel did the same thing in the
ninth chapter of his book.
By reading the book of Jeremiah, Daniel came
to understand that the 70 years that God
had said he would visit his people in
captivity in Babylon were just about ended, and
so he began to pray to call upon
God to fulfill his word to his own
people.
And in that short prayer, which doesn't occupy
two minutes, he used the name of God
18 times, O Lord, hear, O God, hearken,
O God, forgive, defer not.
He calls upon God with all his soul.
Now that's not what you call conversational prayer.
And there are times, dear people, when you
pour out your soul to God in importunity
because your soul is so burdened, there's no
other way you can pray.
You cannot talk conversationally, and there ought to
be many times in a person's prayer life
when this is so.
Now, what are some characteristics of prevailing prayer?
Well, I'd say, first of all, perseverance, and
I think here of Ephesians chapter 6 and
verse 18.
Praying, it says, praying always with all prayer
and supplication in the spirit and watching thereunto
with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.
You know, sometimes we teach people, well, now,
just pray once, take it by faith, and
you've got it.
That's not necessarily true.
What about all perseverance?
It's not that God forgets, I understand that,
but there are some things for which we
may have to pray a long, long while,
watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for
all saints.
And then Paul adds, and for me, there's
the element of perseverance.
The first year I was out preaching as
a very young preacher, we got into a
kind of a revival situation.
I think there were 70 people saved.
I had an evangelist come to my church.
We had to move to a larger building,
and of all things, I was the song
leader.
Can you believe it?
They were really hard up.
Anyway, we were having a great time, and
one night, a young man from our church
came down the aisle, got saved.
Then he said to me, let's go and
get my brother Abe.
He's up in the balcony.
So we went and got his brother.
I mean, we got him on his knees,
and he professed to accept the Lord.
Then the two of them said, will you
come on home and talk to Dad?
And I knew that Dad was a hard
cuss, and I didn't want to talk to
Dad.
Oh, I said, it's 10 o'clock at
night.
He said, Dad doesn't go to bed until
12.
So I was sort of trapped.
I was a young preacher, scared.
My heart was pumping and jumping.
And I went home with these two fellows,
and we walked in the front door, and
the father was sitting there reading a newspaper.
And when the three of us walked in,
he never looked at me.
He looked at the one son.
He looked at the other son.
He quietly folded his newspaper and dropped on
his knees and called on God.
Then there was a girl sitting over here,
a kid about 12, and she was reading
a book, and the old book began to
shake.
And so I got to talk to her,
and she fell on her knees and started
to call on the Lord.
And the mother, oh, she said, I've been,
she was just so happy.
And she was literally dancing around the room,
clapping her hands, and she said, I've been
praying for years to God, for God to
work a miracle in my family.
He's doing it.
Brother McCloud, she said, there's two more upstairs.
Go and get them.
So, well, I flew up those stairs, and
these two kids, they were about 17, 16.
When I got there, they were already kneeling
by their beds.
They'd heard the racket downstairs, and they were
already on their knees receiving the Lord.
But that mother prayed for years.
I had nothing to do with it.
If I'd had my way, I wouldn't have
even been there that night.
Perseverance, with all perseverance, that's an element of
prevailing prayer.
And then importunity, in that parable Jesus told
us in the 11th chapter of Luke, it
was his response to the disciples' request for
him to teach them how to pray.
Importunity.
The little parable, it's very simple.
Which of you shall have a friend, and
shall go unto him at midnight, and shall
say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves.
For a friend of mine in his journey
has come to me, and I have nothing
to set before him.
And that's where prayer starts.
When you tell God, I don't have anything,
God, I'm absolutely empty.
I'm a hole in the ground.
I don't have any power, no influence to
these people at all.
God, I have nothing.
You've got everything.
A friend of mine has come to me
in his journey, and I have nothing to
set before him.
And he from within, here's God's first response,
maybe God's initial response to your prayer to
mine.
He from within shall answer and say, Trouble
me not, the door is now shut, and
my children are with me in bed.
I cannot rise and give thee.
Now there's the simple story.
Then Jesus Christ said, I say unto you,
though he will not rise and give him
because he is his friend, just because God
is my friend doesn't mean God's going to
answer my prayer.
There's another element that has to enter into
it here.
Yet because of his importunity, and somebody has
called importunity shameless asking or asking that will
not be denied, that's importunity.
Yet because of his importunity, he will rise
and give him as many as he needs.
And I say unto you, Jesus went on
to say, and I say unto you, ask
and it shall be given you.
Seeking you shall find not, and it shall
be opened unto you.
And the context closed with a 13th verse
where he says this, if you then being
evil know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your heavenly
father give the Holy Spirit to them that
ask him?
If you and I are ever to have
an effective prayer life, we're going to have
to have a prayer life, as Brother Bill
Lang was saying at the close of his
message this morning, a prayer life in the
power of the Holy Spirit.
He's going to have to be the author
of my prayers.
That's what it's all about.
When they said Jesus teaches how to pray
as John taught his disciples, he said you'll
have to learn something about the power of
the Holy Spirit.
You'll have to learn how to pray importunately.
The initial response from God may seem like
no, as if God isn't listening and nothing
is happening, but keep on praying.
It's a very important element in prevailing prayer.
And then there's wrestling.
And there's wrestling.
This has to be looked at from two
angles.
You remember how that Jacob, it says there
wrestled a man with him.
A heavenly visitor came and wrestled with him
until the breaking of the day.
And God has to wrestle with you and
I before we can wrestle with those demons.
He talks about there in Ephesians chapter 6,
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of
the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness
or wicked spirits, one translation says, in heavenly
places.
But before we can wrestle effectively in our
prayer life and our work for God against
the powers of evil and darkness, God has
to wrestle with us.
You know what was wrong with Jacob, of
course, was he was so strong for self.
And you know what the Lord did to
grind him down?
You know, Jacob was something like a big
grindstone and God brought him up against another
grindstone, just as tough and hard as he
was, a man called Laban, who had all
the characteristics that Jacob had.
And many times when God wants to show
you what self looks like, what you really
look like, he'll bring you into a relationship,
sometimes a very close relationship with a person
just like yourself until you see yourself in
another person.
And then you realize what the self thing
is all about.
And God ground him down year after year,
seven years, 14 years, longer than that, with
a man just as cunning and just as
self-centered and just as grasping, as materialistic
as he was.
And then there finally came a night of
decision and there wrestled a man with Jacob.
And I have no doubt God is wrestling
with hearts here because self doesn't die easily.
It's very, very strong.
It takes God himself to wrestle it down.
You can't do it.
You can try.
You can be willing.
But God has to do it.
They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh
with the passions and lusts, but other hands
have to nail you and I to the
cross.
I cannot do it myself.
I can by faith implore my God to
do it for me, and my God will.
But God has to wrestle that self down.
I like something Charles Spurgeon said about self.
He said, self is like the sucker that
winds itself around the plant and robs the
plant of nourishment so the plant is always
weak and sickly.
And he said this.
He said, where self is strong, faith will
always be weak.
And he said there's only one way to
deal with a problem of self and that
is cut it up.
Cut it up.
But only God can do that.
I can be willing to say, God, I
want to die, and then I put it
in the hands of God by faith and
then God will begin.
Maybe God will start immediately.
Often I think almost always he does, but
he may do, as we know that he
did in the case of Jacob, bring you
into contact with circumstances and people just to
make you see what self is all about.
It isn't going to happen overnight.
You can claim it in a matter of
minutes, then God has to work it out.
So there's this element of God wrestling with
me.
Thank God he deigns to do it.
Why should he bother?
The Bible says God is so great he
has to humble himself to even look at
the things that are going on in the
earth.
Does that speak to your heart?
God is so great that the things that
are happening on earth, it's no more interesting
than a bunch of ants really running around
on an ant hill.
How long would you stand beside an ant
hill and watch the ants running around?
Well, that's not very interesting.
They're scurrying in all directions on top of
an ant pile.
That's not very interesting.
We're going to look at something more interesting
than that.
And dear people, as far as the things
that are happening on earth is concerned, our
God is so great.
It's just like a bunch of ants or
something even less than that running around on
an ant hill.
He has to humble himself to behold the
things that are on earth.
That's not all it says.
It says he has to humble himself to
behold the things that are in heaven.
Our God is so great that even to
watch the things that are going on in
the heavenly places to God, they're so mundane,
so small, and so little in his sight,
that he has to humble himself to even
look at the things that are going on
in heaven.
Oh, it ought to do something to our
pride.
It ought to.
Well, this element of wrestling and then there's
the, in this matter of perseverance or this
matter of prevailing prayer, I have to learn
how to wrestle.
The walls aren't going to go down overnight.
The opposition we face is very cunning and
it's very powerful and they're not going to
give up overnight, but they will give up
if you keep on praying and trusting God,
calling on him.
The walls will go down.
If they don't go down, then your experience
will be something like David's who said, by
my God, have I leaped over a wall.
Either the walls go down or you go
over the top of them.
It doesn't matter which.
God will do it either way.
As you and I keep praying and trusting,
it's part in a prevailing prayer, wrestling against
the powers of evil and darkness.
And they may win one battle, but then
you'll win two.
They might win another, then you'll win three.
And God will keep on.
If you've allowed God to wrestle with the
self-problem, then God will allow you to
wrestle successfully against the powers of evil and
darkness.
And then another element of this type praying
is just the element of fervency.
I think it was Billy Sonny used to
say that the average Christian prays like a
jackrabbit nibbling at a cabbage.
And oftentimes that's how we pray.
There's really no heart in it.
It's a sort of a form, but our
text says the effectual, fervent prayer of a
righteous man avails much.
But just be sure that the channels are
clear when you pray.
To come to that for a moment again,
you read about something over in Malachi 2,
and if you took it out of context,
it sounds like a real hot revival meeting
or a real hot prayer meeting or something.
Here's what it says.
This have you done again, covering the altar
of the Lord with tears and with weeping
and with crying out.
Now doesn't that sound like a good hot
revival meeting of some kind, or at least
a good prayer meeting?
Listen to it again.
This have you done again, covering the altar
of the Lord with tears and with weeping
and with crying out insomuch that he regards
not the offering anymore, nor receives it with
goodwill at your hand.
God didn't like this kind of praying.
He didn't want their weeping and their tears
and their shouting and their groaning and their
moaning.
I wonder why.
Well, the context explains why.
Three times in the context, he accuses these
people of dealing treacherously with their life partner.
And when that problem is not solved, you
know, in 1 Peter 3, likewise you husbands,
dwell with him according to knowledge, giving honor
unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel,
and as being heirs together of the grace
of life, that your prayers be not hindered.
And men, if your relationship with your wife
is not right, then your prayer life is
crippled.
No use to think about prevailing prayer.
It isn't going to work.
So you can pray and cry and shout
and all the rest of it, and God
won't listen until the channels are clear all
around.
Then fervency in prayer has its proper place.
Why does it take God so long to
answer sometimes?
Has it ever discouraged you?
I think one of the main reasons why
is because prayer is not to change God.
But prayer, as someone has said, is to
change me so that God can, consistent with
his own holy and moral nature, do the
things he always wanted to do but could
not do because my life wasn't right.
If God answers prayers for me when I'm
living in known sin, this would be encouraging
me to continue on living the way that
I am.
There's a verse in Psalm 66 that says,
"...the rebellious dwell in a dry land."
And if you're rebelling against the will of
God in some aspect, your area of your
life, then you'll have a very dry experience.
It can't be other.
You can drill a hole 10,000 feet
deep, you won't get one drop of water.
It'll be everlasting drought until you deal with
the problems that God is talking to your
heart about.
The rebellious, I say again, they dwell in
a dry land.
The promise of the Lord Jesus in John
7, "...he that believes on me, as the
scripture has said, out of his innermost being
shall flow rivers of living water."
That's a wonderful promise, but it's qualified.
If you abide in me and my words
abide in you, you shall ask what you
will and it shall be done unto you.
Herein is my Father glorified that you bear
much fruit, so shall you be my disciples.
But dear people, we have to be walking
in the light, walking in sweet fellowship with
the Lord if we're ever going to prevail
with God in prayer.
So one of the reasons why it seems
to take God so long is because the
old self is so strong.
And God, I say again, He doesn't want
to encourage me in sin.
He will not compromise with my sin.
The Spirit of God has declared eternal, unrelenting
war against sin in a Christian's heart.
It says so in Galatians 5, "...the spirit
lusts against the flesh."
That is the Spirit of God He wars
against the flesh, against that self, in you
and I.
That's the problem.
It's not that God wants to keep us
waiting, keep us dangling, it's not that at
all.
We take so long just to die, and
so we prevent God from answering our prayers
sooner.
Then, dear people, there's the problem of unbelief.
Do you remember how the Lord Jesus in
one chapter in one of the Gospels, He
gave His disciples the power to cast out
devils, among other things?
And in the same chapter, the very same
chapter, later on, they tried to do it,
and they couldn't do it.
It didn't work.
Do you remember that?
And to make it worse, in the same
chapter, it says they saw a man casting
out devils in the name of Jesus Christ,
and that really embarrassed them and mortified them.
Here were twelve men.
Jesus Christ had given them the power to
cast out devils, and they couldn't do it.
And here was a man to whom Jesus
Christ had not given this power authority, and
he was doing it, and they were mightily
embarrassed so much so, they told this man
to stop doing it.
Oh, their ego was really hurt.
And after Jesus cast the demon out, they
said to Jesus privately, why could not we?
And He said, because of your unbelief.
Then He explained, this kind only comes out
by prayer and fasting, and sometimes as we're
thinking of prevailing prayer, we're going to have
to add to our prayers the element of
fasting.
Someone has called fasting praying without words.
The verse in the Bible suggests that the
Lord said, when they fast, I will not
hear their cry.
Well, it didn't say when they fast and
pray.
It says, when they fast, I will not
hear their cry.
So fasting is praying without words.
Of course, if the relationship is not right,
fasting isn't going to help either.
But there are times when our unbelief is
strong, and fasting then, according to what Jesus
Christ is teaching us there, is an antidote
for unbelief.
I noticed Daniel praying over there in chapter
9 and chapter 10 of his book, how
he fasted well for three weeks, he ate
no pleasant food, flesh and wine didn't come
into his mouth, he didn't anoint himself at
all until three whole weeks were fulfilled.
He was calling upon God, and at the
end of this three-week period, God came.
God answered.
In other words, he prevailed.
So unbelief is often a problem.
You pray for a few days, you pray
for a couple of weeks.
And nothing happens.
What do you do then?
Well, oftentimes we conclude, well, I guess I
shouldn't have started praying this way.
It likely is not the will of God
at all.
And then we forget, and we start the
same kind of a program all over again.
Praying always with all prayer and supplication in
the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance
and supplication for all saints.
My unbelief must be dealt with.
Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the
Word of God.
We know that verse.
Here's a verse.
Do you know this verse?
It says, faith works by love.
It comes by hearing the Word of God.
But my dear friend, if the love relationship
in my heart to other people and to
my God is not right, then faith will
not work.
I say it comes by the Word of
God, but it only works in an element
of love.
And if that is not right, then God
can't answer my prayer.
So unbelief may be the problem.
Jesus said, have faith in God.
This was after the disciples had expressed great
astonishment at something he had done in the
area of the miraculous.
He said, have faith in God.
He talked about unbelief.
In the same context, read it.
In Mark chapter 11, he said, what things
soever you desire when you pray, believe that
you receive them, and you shall have them.
James chapter 1 puts it this way.
If any man lack wisdom, and you could
take the word wisdom out and put any
word you want in there, if any man
lack anything, if any man lack wisdom, let
him ask of God that gives to all
men liberally, and upbraids or reproaches not, and
it shall be given him, but let him
ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that
wavers is like a wave of the sea
driven with the wind and tossed, for let
not that man think that he shall receive
anything of the Lord.
And the next verse says, a double-minded
man is unstable in all his ways.
So in faith I am to pray, and
I am to keep praying if I am
to prevail with God.
There are these other elements then to consider.
The problem of self, and the problem of
unbelief, and in the problem of concurring circumstances,
that is, God has to work things out
for this prayer to be answered.
For example, Jewish people prayed for hundreds of
years for a Messiah to come, but it
says in Galatians chapter 4, when the fullness
of the time was come, God sent forth
His Son.
He isn't going to make you wait centuries
for answers to your prayers, but there has
to be a working out of circumstances on
God's part.
About a year ago, a mother came to
me.
Her family were all grown.
Her youngest was 22, none of them in
the house, meaning they're all away from home.
She told me, she said, my youngest is
an absolute rebel against the things of God.
I can't talk to him at all.
And she said, I'm broken-hearted.
None of my children have professed the faith.
She said, what's wrong with me?
Well we talked about things.
She experienced a renewal in her heart.
I explained to her how to commit her
family into the hands of God and how
to take her hands off her family.
I explained all that to her, and she
saw it clearly, and we knelt and prayed
together, and she put all her family in
the hands of God.
Now remember, the youngest is 22, and he's
the worst of them all.
And then God, within about three months, began
to work.
And one day she got a phone call
from the youngest saying, Mom, he says, I
don't know, something's wrong with me.
Doctors don't know what it is.
I can't hold down my job anymore.
Can I come home and rest for a
while?
She said, certainly.
Come on.
She knew God was working.
The circumstances were starting to work out now,
see.
And he was lying there in his bedroom,
and she said, Brother McLeod, she wrote me
a letter.
I have it on file.
And she said, you know, I remembered what
you said.
You don't have to be belting the gospel
into them all the time.
If you've told them once, they understand what
it means to be saved.
You don't have to tell them 50 or
500 times how to be saved.
Then you pray.
You leave them in the hands of God.
So she said, I was just praising the
Lord, leaving them in the hands of God,
believing the Lord, praying about Him every day,
but just believing, thanking God.
I knew God was working, and that she
was prevailing in prayer.
And one day she said, I was walking
past the bedroom door, and he called up
and said, Hey, Mom, could you come in
here and show me how to be saved?
And she led him to Christ.
It only took God three months.
She'd fussed over that, you know, all over
all her kids for years on end, but
she never ever committed them.
And so the Bible says in Psalm 37,
five, commit your way unto the Lord, trust
also in Him, and He shall, and He
shall bring it to pass.
Sometimes we quote from Isaiah 44, three and
four, and then people will interject a little
question here.
It's a promise.
The Lord said, I will pour water upon
him that is thirsty and floods on the
dry ground.
I will pour my Spirit on your seed,
on your children, and my blessing on your
offspring.
And people say, sadly, well, yes, God's kept
His part of it.
I know God has poured His Spirit on
my children, but they haven't responded, and you
can't do anything about that.
So then I say, all right, let's look
at the next verse, and it says, and
they shall spring up as among the grass,
as willows by the water course.
That's all part of the promise of God.
He'll pour water on my life if I'm
thirsty, and then He'll pour His Spirit on
my children, and they will respond.
They shall spring up as among the grass.
If you prevail with God in prayer, put
them into God's hands, and keep them there.
If it takes fifteen years, just keep thanking
God each day that you know He's working
in their hearts.
He has His hand on their life, and
He's going to bring them to Himself.
It's one of the great elements.
But it takes God a while to work
circumstances out, so don't get discouraged because it
seems to take a long while.
I'd rather have God do a good work.
Someone said the big trouble with the average
Christian is, I'm in a hurry, and God
isn't.
God isn't.
It may take God time, but listen to
this verse.
It says, Whatsoever God does, it shall be
forever.
Nothing can be put to it, nor anything
taken from it, and God does it that
men should fear before Him.
And I'd rather have God Almighty do it,
and do a perfect work, than try and
help it along myself and get it all
fouled up.
So it takes God a while for these
reasons.
In closing, to go back to John 15,
7 again, the Lord Jesus Christ said, If
you abide in me, that means if I
walk in a sweet, unbroken fellowship of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and my words abide in
you, Colossians 3.16 says, Let the word
of Christ dwell in you richly, in all
wisdom.
Have I fulfilled the conditions there?
Am I walking in a sweet, unbroken fellowship
of the Lord Jesus Christ?
If I do sin and become aware of
it, I confess it and forsake it immediately.
Am I living this way?
They that dwell under His shadow shall return.
They shall revive as the corn, and grow
as the vine, the center of shall be
as the wine of Lebanon.
You know, if you're living, dwelling in the
shadow of the Almighty, living, walking in fellowship
with God, truly our fellowship was with the
Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ.
Notice what happens then, to go back again,
Hosea 14, 7, They that dwell under His
shadow shall return.
They shall revive as the corn, and grow
as the vine.
First of all, you return, then you revive,
and then you grow.
It doesn't end with revival, it begins at
that point.
Then you grow.
But it all happens, dear people, when we
come into that sweet fellowship with our God.
Song of Solomon, chapter 2, I sat down
under His shadow with great delight, and His
fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house.
The marginal reading says He brought me, that
the Hebrew says He brought me to the
house of wine, and wine is a symbol
of the Holy Spirit, and there's no way
that you and I can be filled with
the Holy Spirit if we don't have this
sweet, unbroken fellowship with Jesus Christ, because He's
the one who gives us the Spirit.
And so they that dwell under His shadow
shall return, revive, and grow, and as we
sit down under the shadow of Jesus with
great delight, and eat the fruit that He
brings, then He brings me to the house
of wine.
He fills me with the Holy Spirit, and
His banner over me was love.
If you abide in me, and my words
abide in you, you shall ask what you
will, and it shall be done unto you,
herein is my Father glorified, that you bear
much fruit.
So shall you be, my disciples.
O dear people, let's learn how to prevail.
Pastor pray for God to revive your church,
and don't ever quit until God does it.
Parents pray for God to save every member
of your family, don't ever quit until God
does it.
What is it you want?
Abide in Jesus, and let His word fill
your heart and life, then you can ask
what you will, because then you'll be praying
in the will of God for the things
God has promised to give, and take your
stand on those exceeding, great, and precious promises,
and learn how to overcome a seeming reluctance
on God's part to answer, overcome that by
importunity, shameless asking, asking that will not be
denied for the glory of God.
May He bless you.