Exodus chapter 32, if you'll go there please.
It's the last verse of Exodus 32 and
the verse 14 of Exodus chapter 33.
The message title is, When Someone Decides to
Pray.
When someone decides to pray.
Father, I thank you Lord for the abiding
presence of your Holy Spirit.
I thank you God that you validate yourself.
You don't validate us.
You don't validate our ministries.
You don't validate even this house.
You validate yourself by coming as you did
today in the worship to tell us that
what we're about to read and partake of
is true.
Help my heart, Lord Jesus Christ, to embrace
and to be an embodiment of everything that
I'm about to speak on.
Help us as a congregation to recognize a
moment of hesitation when you have come to
us and you're speaking to us and you're
inviting us into something of yourself, Lord, that
cannot be found with human effort.
It's only accessed by invitation.
I pray God that you would override my
frailty, that you'd cover me with your grace,
that you'd speak to this church solidly, strongly,
to each of our hearts.
Father, I thank you for it.
Give us the grace to follow where you
lead in Jesus name.
Exodus chapter 32, beginning at verse 35.
So the Lord plagued the people because of
what they did with the calf, which Aaron
made.
Then the Lord said to Moses, depart and
go up from here.
You and the people whom you brought out
of the land of Egypt to the land,
which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
saying to your descendants, I will give it.
I will send my angel before you and
I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite,
the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the
Jebusite.
Go up to a land flowing with milk
and honey, for I will not go up
in your midst, lest I consume you on
the way for you are a stiff neck
people.
And when the people heard this bad news,
they mourned and no one put on his
ornaments.
For the Lord had said to Moses, say
to the children of Israel, you are a
stick stiff neck people.
I could come up in your midst in
one moment and consume you.
Now therefore take off your ornaments that I
may know what to do to you.
So the children of Israel stripped themselves of
their ornaments by Mount Horeb.
Moses took his tent and pitched it outside
the camp far from the camp and called
it the tabernacle of meeting.
And it came to pass that everyone who
sought the Lord went out to the tabernacle
of meeting, which was outside the camp.
And so it was whenever Moses went out
to the tabernacle, that all the people rose
and each man stood at his tent door
and watched Moses until he had gone into
the tabernacle.
And it came to pass when Moses entered
the tabernacle that the pillar of cloud descended
and stood at the door of the tabernacle
and the Lord talked with Moses.
And the people saw the pillar of cloud
standing at the tabernacle door and all the
people rose and worshipped each man in his
tent door.
So the Lord spoke to Moses face to
face as a man speaks to his friend.
And he would return to the camp, but
his servant, Joshua, the son of nun, a
young man did not depart from the tabernacle.
Then Moses said to the Lord, see, you
say to me, bring up this people, but
you've not let me know whom you will
send with me.
Yet you have said, I know you by
name.
And you've also found grace in my sight.
Now, therefore I pray, if I have found
grace in your sight, show me now your
way that I may know you and that
I might find grace in your sight and
consider that this nation is your people.
And he said, my presence will go with
you and I will give you rest.
You know how quickly we forget our own
history, how quickly we forget the holiness of
God and his right and his power to
judge sin.
In this scene, we see a people who
were recently delivered carrying with them the outward
adornments.
It's called ornaments here, but it were the
adornments and spoils of a victory, which they
had not won by any measure of their
own effort, their own human effort.
In Exodus chapter 12, verses 35 and 36
says the children of Israel had done according
to the word of Moses.
And they asked from the Egyptians, articles of
silver, articles of gold and clothing.
And the Lord had given the people favor
in the sight of the Egyptians so that
they granted them what they requested.
And they plundered the Egyptians.
For those of you who don't know the
history, for 400 years, the people of God
had been in Egypt.
And for many of those years, the final
part of those years, they were treated violently
by the leadership to the point where their
firstborn sons were thrown into the river to
die.
Even the people of the land of Egypt
so feared the people of God of that
time that they felt we've got to take
away the next generation because they are more
and mightier than we are.
And if they ever find out that they
are, they'll take away our authority and our
power, but God gave them deliverance.
And most know the story through plagues, through
wondrous signs and wonders, God gave deliverance, led
them through the red sea.
And as they were led into that place
of freedom, they wore the spoils of victory.
When an enemy army would go in and
spoil an army that had been set apart
to destroy them, they would gather the spoils.
And quite often they would wear the clothing
and wear the jewelry as a sign of
their victory.
And this is what the people of God
were adorned with.
You know, the story that Moses went up
into the mountain to commune with God and
because he hadn't been there for a season
and the word of God was not really
alive yet in the people's hearts, they took
off the gold that was some of the
gold that was this part of the spoil
that they had at their previous captivity.
They threw it in this cauldron and Aaron,
Moses' brother fashioned a golden calf.
It was a terrible thing that they did.
And this is the case of this nation,
the United States of America.
Many, many people fled here to escape bondage
and others who were not so fortunate, nevertheless
found freedom here in spite of that, which
tried to hold them in captivity.
In a short season of time, America became
arguably the envy of the nations.
There's hardly a land in the world where
people would not take the opportunity at one
point, at least in history to live here.
America became a place of opportunity, a place
where people who were cast out even by
other societies or oppressed because of their belief
in God could come.
God brought people together from all nations, gave
an intelligence that caused through this nation technology
to be throughout the world.
The whole space program came because of this
nation, a young nation called America.
And being the envy of the nations, we
were adorned with the trappings of freedom of
thought, freedom of will, freedom of worship.
Freedom became what America represented.
No matter where you came from, you could
come to this country.
And if you worked hard, you could be
free to be everything that you were born
to be or destined to be.
And just as Israel did when she experienced
her freedom, Israel sought to intermix gold and
self-will with the worship of God.
And that's what America did.
Mixing gold to the point where gold is
even part of much theology that's even promoted
in our generation.
False worship is always accompanied with gold.
Look in the old Testament, study it carefully.
When you see gold in the mix, the
talk of gold, gold in the air, gold
in all of its forms, it's always represents
using God in some measure for personal gain
and self-will.
The scripture tells us that even though Israel
was outwardly adorned, she'd become inwardly spiritually naked,
unable to go forward in former victories, victories
of grace over her enemies.
Verse 25 says, when Moses saw the people
were unrestrained for Arad had not restrained them
to their shame among their enemies, the barriers
had been broken.
They'd come into the thinking that there are
no consequences to behavior, that somehow we can
behave any way we want.
And grace simply just covers it.
That we can willfully walk away from what
God has revealed to us clearly in his
word should be our future, should be our
character, should be our value system.
We can somehow simply walk away from this,
craft our own religious ideas about God and
not suffer a consequence for it.
They were naked.
Moses came down from the mountain and he
knew that if the enemies that were so
amassed against them and that they were so
numbered by came against, he knew they couldn't
stand.
They'd lost their strength.
The outward seemed to be intact.
The clothing was still there.
The victory was still fresh.
The adornments, the jewelry were still very much
a part of their daily living.
The story of the plagues and the mighty
deliverance and the coming through the red sea.
All of those things were still very, very
much alive.
They'd walked in the miraculous, but Moses had
spiritualized and he looked and he saw a
gathering of people purportedly called to be the
people of God in the earth.
And he saw they were naked.
They had no power to stand before their
enemies.
And you and I can't help but wonder
what kind of a situation do we find
ourselves in today?
And so the Lord plagued them.
Verse 35, the people, because of what they
did with the calf, which Aaron made, he
plagued them.
Their victory was hollow.
Everything was history.
There were troubled.
No doubt that people became troubled in their
mind, trouble in their homes, trouble in their
families.
Yes, they still knew about God.
Yes, they still had the history.
And yes, they could still rightly say they
were the people of God, but there was
a troubling now in everyone's heart.
And then came the most shocking news of
all chapter 33 in verses one to three,
it says the news that you said, God
said, I'll send messengers.
And through these messengers, you're going to always
know a measure of victory, but I will
no longer be with you as I have
formerly been.
I don't think there's anything would scare me
more in this church.
And it should scare the people of God
in this nation.
When all that there are in the pulpits
are messengers, thoughts about God's strategies for the
future, seven steps to victory, three steps to
being a better parent.
There will be victory because the principles of
God do bring victory, but that victory will
come through human effort.
And there will be something hollow in that
victory, something missing in that victory.
And what will be missing is the presence
of God for when God is with his
people, when God is with us, the victories
are supernatural.
When God is with us, the weak become
strong, the blind are given sight.
Destinies are formed in the hand of God.
The things of the past no longer govern
our future.
We are delivered from having to figure it
out with our own minds and our own
strength and our own strategy and our own
power.
We go into the presence of God.
God speaks.
We move with God.
The miraculous begins to happen and worship begins
to come to the fore again.
Verses four to six, tell us in Exodus
33, that when the people realized this truth,
some refused to put on their ornaments and
others took them off in obedience to the
word of the Lord.
In other words, they put off the pride
of their former victories, the pride of thinking
that there are no consequences to forbidden behavior,
the pride of thinking that somehow our value
system can become different than the value system
of God.
And yet we can still prosper and still
know his presence and still walk in the
miraculous and still subdue nations.
But something was beginning to happen that had
the potential to change the future.
Folks.
I want you to hear me like you've
never heard me.
Something was beginning to happen.
In Exodus 33, seven, there was a man.
Moses says he took his tent and pitched
it outside the camp far from the camp
and called it the tabernacle of meeting.
It was his house.
He took his house and he took it
out of that place of common thought, common
religious thought.
It says, I'm not dwelling here anymore.
I'm not staying in this place of defeat.
I'm not content to be in a place
where there's only thoughts about God, but not
the presence of God.
I'm not content to be there.
And it says everyone who sought the Lord
went out to the tabernacle of meeting that
was outside the camp.
Now I have no doubt.
I have no doubt that Moses was dealing
with a deep inner sense of failure.
The scripture doesn't tell us this, but I
know it in my heart because Moses had
once set out to deliver the people of
God.
And he set out to do it in
his own strength and in self-will and
anger, the scripture tells us he slew an
Egyptian.
And because of it, he ended up 40
years in the wilderness until his heart was
ready that God could use him for his
glory.
Coming down from the mountain and now looking
at his people in another form of bondage
and almost an inconceivable spiritual ignorance had come
into the hearts of the people of God.
After all they had seen and all the
history they had to turn from it and
to fashion this other God of gold, he
was overwhelmed and he held in his hands,
the laws of God given to him by
God himself.
And in anger again, he took it and
smashed it.
And I know in his heart, he must've
felt, I've failed again.
I failed again.
The second time God gave me another chance,
a moment of grace in my life.
Maybe I shouldn't have gone as long as
I did.
Maybe I shouldn't have thrown down the tablets.
I actually broke the law of God.
God had written it with his own finger
and I smashed it in anger.
And maybe I shouldn't have done these things.
There's only one thing that Moses knew that
God is a God of grace and God
is a God of mercy.
And he doesn't call the strong into his
presence.
He calls those who know they are not
to come into his presence, to find the
strength that can only come from God.
Moses would have remembered the season where he
was in that backside of the desert with
a few sheep.
And the Lord appeared to him in the
midst of a flame of fire in a
bush that was burning yet not consumed.
He would have remembered his own heart when
he said to God, God, I have lived
and longed in a sense, I'm paraphrasing him,
but I know what was in his heart.
I've longed for the freedom of the people
of God, but I'm too old.
I'm too far gone.
I've lost my power to speak.
I stammer now.
I can't handle a sword.
I've got no influence in Pharaoh's palace, but
he had an encounter with grace.
God called him not in his strength, but
in his weakness, God called him not in
his success, but in his failure.
And he knew it in his heart.
And he knew if there was one way
forward for the people of God and for
the testimony of God in the earth, he
had to go back into the presence of
God again.
The God that he'd come to know as
a friend, the God that had exhibited such
mercy in his life.
And so he moved his house away from
common thought and went far from the camp
and pitched it there and basically said, I'm
deciding to pray.
I'm going to pray.
You see, somebody knew it was time to
pray.
Somebody thank God decided to pray.
And Moses started a prayer meeting.
And when he did, the people started to
take notice of it.
In verse eight, it says, so it was
whenever Moses went out to the tabernacle, that
all the people rose, each man stood at
his tent door and watched Moses until he
had gone into the tabernacle.
When you make the choice to pray, people
will start watching you.
When you get up in the morning and
you go to that special place of prayer,
your children who don't want to go to
church, don't want to live for God, your
children will watch.
Or if they don't see you, they'll hear
your footsteps.
Go down the hall.
Your family will see you Tuesday night.
When you get up and you get your
subway token, you head down the street in
your pocket.
I'm telling you, people stand up and they
start watching out their window.
Somebody is going to the house of God
to pray.
And I love the fact that it says
that each man stood in his tent door.
There was this reverence of God that began
to return again.
When you go into the workplace and you've
spent your day in the house of God
on Sunday, and you've come out to pray
Tuesday night, and you've gotten up Wednesday morning
and spent time with God.
And you let it be known that you've
been in prayer.
People, whether or not they rise physically, there's
something that wants to stand at attention because
the reverence of God in your life starts
to produce that testimony of who God really
is.
And the question begins to come into people's
hearts.
Why would this person go to this limit?
There's never been an awakening ever in history
without somebody building a tabernacle somewhere and starting
to pray.
Never.
You research it as I have over the
years.
There's never been an awakening, whether it's been
in South Africa where a group of people
just met in a cow shed for two
years.
Somebody, somebody moved their tabernacle away from this
common thought of this is just the way
it is.
And this is just the way we're going
to have to live.
Somebody says, no, God still is.
God still is alive.
God, God.
God who made the universe by the word
of his power.
God who holds everything in the palm of
his hand.
God who sent his son to redeem us
from all of our enemies and all of
our sins.
God who sent his Holy Spirit to dwell
us and to make us into what we
could never be in our own strength.
God still is.
And so I'm going to meet with God.
And when Moses went to meet with God,
not only did the people stand up, but
in verses nine and 10, it says it
came to pass when Moses entered the tabernacle,
the pillar of the cloud descended and stood
at the door of the tabernacle.
And the Lord talked with Moses and the
people saw the pillar of the cloud standing
at the tabernacle door.
And now look what happens.
All the people rose and worshiped each man
in his tent door.
When people see the presence of God in
your life, they will begin to worship.
It might be behind a closed door, but
they will begin to worship because history does
repeat itself.
Human behavior does repeat itself.
When they see you standing in the marketplace,
when they hear the confidence in your voice,
in your own home, they will stand not
only and watch you, but they'll stand and
begin to worship in their heart.
Even if that worship is just a cry,
if it's just a whisper, a whisper that
says, Oh God, can you help me?
It's the whisper in your teenage son, your
teenage daughter that have ignored everything you believed
seemingly thus far.
And suddenly they're behind their door and their
bedroom and the presence of God.
They watch you go out and they watch
you come in.
No, you're not perfect.
They don't expect perfection.
They expect reality.
They see you come home with the presence
of God.
They see that the source of your strength
is not dissipating in spite of your circumstances
and prayer begins to form.
They stand in their bedroom and they say,
Oh God, can you help me like you
helped my mother?
Can you do for me what you've like
you've done to my father or my uncle,
my friend, people who've been watching you through
their windows, your neighbors whose houses are in
turmoil, begin to see the presence of God
in your life.
I believe there's a day coming when on
the subways, people won't necessarily have to preach.
They just start to pray.
Just bow your head.
Say, God, will you have mercy?
Please have mercy on these people.
Will you give them the strength that I've
come to know?
Will you help them in their homes and
their schools and their finances?
Would you help them to find their future?
Would you help them to be free from
what oppresses their mind?
Can you imagine sitting in the subway next
to somebody like that?
And you're going through struggles and trials and
difficulties.
And the third thing that begins to happen
when one man decides to pray, says the
Lord spoke verse 11, the Lord spoke to
Moses face to face as a man speaks
to his friend and he would return to
the camp.
But his servant, Joshua, the son of none,
a young man did not depart from the
tabernacle.
The next generation, when we pray begins to
rise up and follow.
What will we leave the next generation, you
and I?
I'm getting to the point where my prayers
is similar to the prayer.
I think it's Psalm 78 of an aged
person who says, Oh God, don't take me
until I have showed your power to the
next generation.
The children we dedicate to the Lord in
this church, what will we leave them in
the future?
I dare say not much.
If we don't pray, we leave them messengers
and strategies, songs and a hopeless feeling overpowered
by a society that's hell bent on its
own destruction.
Now I say it all with all my
heart.
It's time to take everything we are.
And it's time to pray.
Not in our strength, but in our weakness,
not in our success, but in our failure,
not in our everything, but in our nothingness.
It's time to meet with God.
It's time to do what Moses did and
talk with him face to face.
Moses said to the Lord, I know you
by name and you found grace in my
sight.
You spoke these words to me.
Now, therefore, I pray if I found grace
in your sight, show me your way that
I might know you and I might find
grace in your sight and consider that this
nation is your people.
God guide me, empower me, enable me, help
me to be a city set on a
hill that can't be hidden.
You said that I'm the light of the
world.
Well, God turned that light on.
Have honesty with God.
If you don't really have a heart for
him, just tell him he already knows anyway.
You're not hiding anything from God.
Say, Lord, I really, I don't want to
go to hell, but I don't want to
live for heaven.
I want to turn from sin, but I
like sin.
Just be honest and say, but oh God,
if I found grace in your sight, you've
already told me I have.
That's what Moses said.
You've already told me I've found grace.
He remembered the burning bush.
You must remember the day you came to
Christ.
You must remember everything you've learned and you've
heard because we are living at a special
moment in history now.
The Lord is not looking to the strong.
He's calling the weak.
He's calling the marginalized.
He's calling the nobodies, the nothing.
He's calling those that are willing to take
off their ornaments and stand and say, God,
without you, I'm nothing.
Without you, I have nothing.
Without you, I'm going nowhere, but with you,
I possess all things.
So now, Lord, show me your way.
Show me your way, oh God.
Lead me, guide me, empower me, strengthen me.
That was his prayer because I can't do
this on my own.
I can't even gain victory.
Moses had a terrible temper and his temper
got the best of him 40 years before
and his temper got the best of him
again when he came down from the mountain.
Don't get discouraged because you fight with besetting
things in your life.
God's Holy Spirit will give you the power
that you will not be dominated by anything
that's birthed or born of sin.
He will give you the power.
Show me your way, oh God, that I
may know you and find grace in your
sight and consider that this nation is your
people.
God, be merciful to your people was the
cry of his heart as you have been
merciful to me.
You can change the mind of God in
prayer.
God had already said, I'm not going up
with you.
I'm not going with you.
By the time Moses was finished praying, he
said, my presence will go with you.
There are many people that say that America
has gone too far.
We've crossed some line, some place of no
return.
I don't believe that can happen until God's
people refuse to pray.
If we will hear the call of prayer,
we can be on the verge of one
of the greatest awakenings this nation has ever
known.
It doesn't mean our sandcastles will stand when
it's all over.
It doesn't mean that the ship won't fall
apart as it did in Paul's day.
It doesn't mean the Dow Jones will go
on forever and everybody's retirement plan will still
be there.
It doesn't mean any of these things, but
it does mean the house of God will
be filled again.
It does mean there'll be life and light
in the people of God.
It does mean that thousands and hundreds of
thousands and perhaps millions will turn to God
in this last hour of time that we're
living in.
If my people who are called by my
name will humble themselves and pray and seek
my face and turn from that which is
wicked in the sight of God.
God says, I will hear their prayer.
I'll forgive their sin and bring healing to
their land.
It's not too late.
Jesus Christ is still on the throne of
heaven and earth.
All things are still in subjection to his
name.
Yes, men will do what men will do.
They'll rail into the wind.
They'll spit in the face of God.
Yes, they'll do what they do, but God
is still God and we can still move
his hand when we pray.
If I found grace in your sight, oh
God, go with me and remember that these
are your people.
Moses was no longer there to judge anybody.
He realized as the Psalmist once did, oh
God, if you marked iniquity, who would stand?
And so I thank God for the privilege
of being part of a nation that has
such a rich history.
The ornaments of great preachers, great revivals, giftings,
intelligence, prosperity, safety, security, victory in our battles,
and even in our struggles, in our failings,
the willingness to deal with it at some
point and bring it to the light.
It's really what has made this a great
nation.
Now we stand at a crisis moment in
history.
I believe the greatest days, not financially, not
militarily, but spiritually, the greatest days could be
before us when God's house is full again.
And it all starts when somebody decides to
pray.
There's a call today going out to the
weak, but you have to make the choice
to leave that place of common weakness and
come and talk to God about the future.
The Lord is saying, will you let me
use your life for great good in spite
of your past failure?
There's great power in mercy, great power in
grace, and there's great power in prayer.
Will you step out of your failure and
step into strength?
You step away from your past and step
into the future that God says that I
have for you.
Will you simply come and talk to me?
Will you believe that I'm good and that
my mercy endures forever?
Will you believe that if I pray, if
you pray that God can move mountains?
We sang it this morning.
Do you believe that God can change society
as he has in the past?
Sometimes at the darkest moment, they say in
England at the time, just prior to the
rise of Wesley and Whitfield, two great preachers
who brought the nation to her knees in
that generation, that people were fornicating in the
streets in some parts of the cities.
Debauchery had reached an unprecedented level, drunkenness, fighting,
theft.
Society was breaking down and suddenly somebody rises
up and begins to proclaim the goodness of
God.
The people were tired of their sin.
I believe Americans are tired of their sin.
I do.
There's always a percentage that just are going
to wallow in the muck and they're going
to stay there.
But as a whole, many people are not
happy.
There's an inner sense we've lost something.
The good news is that God is more
than willing to give it back.
Thank God for this.
I want to give an altar call this
morning to the weak.
All of us are weak and know that
we're weak.
Those who are willing to take off their
ornaments, pride, pretense of coming in and pretending
to be something we're not, all of us,
myself included, the willingness to say, God, without
you, we're nothing.
We're going nowhere.
It's been a wonderful past, but we live
in today and we have to go into
tomorrow.
And without your presence, we're not going there
in victory.
I'm not willing to just hear messages about
God that have no power.
I'm not willing to be in a place
of false worship and prayerlessness where my life
is of no account in this generation.
I just live to survive and to hide
as Gideon once did in his own backyard.
I'm not willing to live like that.
I want to step into the open.
I want to be strong.
I want to make a difference, but God's
going to be you that does it in
my life.
But if you're inviting me, I'm deciding to
pray.
We're living it at a moment in history,
a moment when God is calling the weak
to prayer.
If that's you today in North Jersey and
the annex here at Times Square Church, those
that are listening online and here in the
main sanctuary, I'm going to invite those in
the sanctuary to come to this altar and
others to stand between the screens.
And remember the scripture says they stood in
their tent door.
So you stand in your home, if you're
listening online today, and we're simply going to
meet at this altar and we're going to
take a few moments to pray together and
to believe God for the strength to go
into the future.
Would you stand, please stand in the balcony,
go to either exit to make your way
down here in the main sanctuary.
Just come join with me here.
We're going to pray together.
You know, for those that want to pray,
remember that the scripture says that God spoke
with Moses and Moses with God as a
man speaks to his friend.
It means you don't have to speak a
hundred miles an hour and come up with
all the conversation and repeat phrases.
Talk to God like I'm talking to you
right now.
That's prayer.
You can start by saying, God, I know
you're great, but I'm having a lousy day.
That's prayer.
You don't have to be fancy.
You don't have to interject it with a
bunch of phrases.
Just talk to God and let him talk
to you.
If you have a friend and you do
all the talking, you're not going to have
that friend for very long.
You'll let your friend talk and just be
quiet in his presence and let him say
what he wants to say.
Let him show you your future.
Let him show you his mercy, his keeping
power, his strength, things that he plans to
do that you've not even dreamt of.
You've not even thought of it.
Don't let prayer become another burden.
It's not meant to be.
Talk to him as a friend talks to
his friend.
You can change his mind.
Father, thank you, Lord, that you're not calling
us because we're strong and we make no
boast of being a strong church.
We need your strength as much as the
least of the least in your kingdom does.
Without your covering, without your grace, without your
leading, we are nothing and go nowhere.
Lord, thank you for the victories we have
known, but that will not become the source
of our strength.
It's your presence, Lord, that makes the difference.
Your day-to-day presence with us, your
promises, the whispers that you speak into our
heart guide us and guard us and teach
us to pray.
Help us, Lord God, to live outside of
our own struggles and as Moses did, to
pray for other people.
Thank you, Lord, that in this church, people
from over 150 countries are standing in their
doorway watching us pray now.
We are living in a divine moment.
Give us the grace to accept it, to
realize it, to embrace it.
Thank you for this with all my heart
today.
Oh, Jesus, you are so good to us,
Lord.
You are so good to us, God.
That's our whole message.
That's everything we're required to say.
God is good and his mercy endures forever.
Thank you for this church.
I thank you, God, for these wonderful men
and women of God.
Give courage, Lord, to all of us to
press in and find the fullness of what
you would have for us here on this
side of eternity.
Help us to put away the gods of
gold and to get away from the camps
of weakness.
Father, we thank you for this with all
of our heart.
I ask you, Father, in Jesus' name to
bless this congregation.
Bless our coming in and bless our going
out.
Bless our understanding of the ways and the
person of almighty God.
Bless us with hearts, Lord, that want to
live for you and serve you and love
you.
Bless us with kindness to other people.
Bless us, oh God, with a vision for
the future, with faith to believe that mountains
can be moved.
Bless us with these things, oh God.
Bless us with homes, Lord, where your praises
are sung.
Bless us, oh God, with children who want
to live for you, with the Joshua's of
the next generation who won't depart from the
place of prayer.
When our time is done, God almighty bless
us by giving us a generation who will
live for you and follow you.
I ask about this church, Lord, that this
church may live long after we're all gone
into eternity.
May this church live.
May the testimony burn.
May there be a whole other generation here
living for you, God, because we asked for
it.
Thank you for these things, Lord.
Thank you, God.
With all of our hearts, Lord, we thank
you.
Lord, you did shed your grace once on
this nation.
We ask one more time for your glory.
One more time because you're good.
One more time.
You would shed your mercy and call more
than we can count into your house and
into your kingdom.
All over the nation, give us the grace,
Lord, to turn and to turn to you.
Father, we thank you for these things and
we praise you.
We bless you in Jesus' mighty name.
Amen and amen.