This message by Glenn Meldrum was originally produced
by In His Presence Ministries for the Radical
Truth Podcast.
You can listen and subscribe to the Radical
Truth Podcast by going to www.ihpministry.com
You are welcome to reproduce this message for
free distribution.
This message is part of a series entitled,
The Radical Jesus.
Last week we ended 2015 beginning to look
at the radical nature of prayer.
I took the whole podcast to firmly establish
that Jesus is the ultimate example of what
the prayer life of a true Christian should
resemble.
We also looked at some of the differences
between how Jesus prayed and how we pray,
and the substance of that difference centered upon
the fact that Jesus was God incarnate and
we are mere mortals in desperate need of
God.
Nonetheless, Jesus was the perfect model of the
prayer life for those first disciples, and that
standard and calling has not changed for true
followers of Jesus to this very day.
Prayer is not an option for the genuine
follower of Jesus.
It is a mandatory requirement.
In our pop church culture of cheap grace,
such a statement may make you very uncomfortable,
but that does not change the truth of
the matter.
When Jesus was teaching the people on prayer
in the Sermon on the Mount, he did
not say, if you pray, but when you
pray, because prayer was and still is an
expected part of being a true follower of
Jesus.
Living a prayer life is a non-negotiable
part of true discipleship, which means that if
you want to be a follower of Jesus,
then you must become a person of prayer.
We are called to live a prayer life,
which means that prayer is to define our
lives, that everything we do comes out of
our prayer life and the relationship we have
with Jesus.
Most people pray at some time in their
life or may even do so occasionally, but
that does not mean that they are a
follower of Jesus or will make heaven their
home.
As I said last week, those who do
not live a life of prayer cannot be
true disciples of Jesus because discipleship is all
about relationship and true prayer is always relational.
Not just that, salvation itself is all about
relationship.
All real Christians were once enemies of Christ
due to their willful rebellion against God.
Through the cross of Christ, repentance and the
forgiveness of sins has been offered to us
so we could be forgiven of our sins
and be adopted as sons and daughters.
Paul told us in Colossians chapter 1, If
you continue in your faith, establish and firm,
not move from the hope held out in
the gospel.
Salvation is all about being reconciled to God,
which equals fellowship with the living God.
And notice that Paul presented a very important
condition, if you continue in the faith, which
means we must remain in a living fellowship
with God.
With all the false teaching on cheap grace
that is spewed from pulpits today, the necessity
of living in holy fellowship with a holy
God has not changed.
Through the preaching of cheap grace, the demands
of the cross and of the true faith
are replaced with a spineless religion that does
not place upon the people any obligations, or
at least any that would be costly or
upset their selfish lives.
Since everything in the lukewarm religion of the
day is all about our best life now,
the preachers of cheap grace keep people from
the very truths they need to make heaven
their home.
Look at the lukewarm church today and you
will see a prayerless church.
Without much prayer we cannot know God as
we should or walk holy before him, because
only through prayer do we have access to
God's throne of grace.
I am so very glad that when we
look at Jesus, we see the total opposite
of what the cheap grace easy-believers and
preachers are advocating.
He is not afraid to command people to
count the cost of their salvation and that
they had to pick up their cross to
forsake all to follow him.
Prayer is also an integral part of counting
the cost to follow Jesus.
Anyone that believes or advocates that because we
are saved by grace, we do not have
any obligations placed upon us is thoroughly deceived
and demonstrates their gross ignorance of God's word
through such assertions.
We can see from the life of Christ
and through his teaching that he fully realized
that the effectiveness of prayer is directly tied
to the quality of our relationship with God.
To build a quality relationship with God demands
the investment of our lives, heart, mind, strength,
and time.
Jesus even said in multiple ways that it
would cost us everything, and I just happen
to believe that Jesus knew what he was
talking about and fully meant what he said.
Many times what people claim that works with
God will not work with men.
Let me make an example here.
Just as there cannot be a real relationship
between two people that do not know each
other, so there cannot be a real relationship
between God and those people who do not
want to invest their lives in knowing and
loving God.
To know God in a real and intimate
way will cost you everything.
The Lord told us in the 55th chapter
of Isaiah, Come all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters.
And you who have no money, come buy
and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk without money and
without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen to me and eat what is good,
and your soul will delight in the richest
affair.
What Jesus offers us is absolutely free.
Yet we cannot get away from the fact
that it will cost us everything.
And those preachers that do not preach the
truth offer their hearers a cheap grace that
costs nothing and can give nothing.
To the lukewarm church of Revelation 3, Jesus
declared, I counsel you to buy from me
gold refined in the fire so you can
become rich, and white clothes to wear so
you can cover your shameful nakedness, and salve
to put on your eyes so you can
see.
The Laodicean church claimed to be rich, wealthy,
and in need of nothing.
And so you would have found that they
were a prayerless people and they were part
of a prayerless church.
But Jesus stated the truth.
You do not realize that you are wretched,
pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.
Because they did not see their tremendous need,
they were not a people in prayer, because
it takes a clear understanding of our neediness
for us to become a people that are
much in prayer.
The history of the church offers clear and
numerous proofs that those saints who knew how
to move heaven to change earth lived in
close fellowship with their beloved Lord.
This is just a fact, and that is
the only way it works.
Some may claim that there are exceptions to
this rule, but this is not so.
The God that does not change has established
that the only way how people enter into
fellowship with Him, and how they sustain that
fellowship, and how they advance the spiritual kingdom
of God, is through the spiritual means He
has established.
The Lord will not negotiate over these unalterable
truths.
Either we say yes to God and prove
that yes by our lives, or we say
no to Him either by words or deeds.
Those saints that knew and used the power
of prayer had entered Christ's school of prayer
and learned how to draw near to God.
They sat at Christ's feet and learned the
power of sweet communion with the living God.
This is where powerful prayer begins, in the
place of deep abiding fellowship with God, where
people grow to love Him more than self
-sin pleasure in the world.
It is in Christ's school of prayer that
we learn how to intercede for the souls
of perishing humanity, like Abraham of old, who
agonized over those who would perish in fire
and brimstone because of their persistent pursuit of
evil.
The Lord shared with Abraham the just judgment
He was going to pour out upon the
inhabitants of Sodom and the city of the
plains.
Why was He going to show this to
Abraham?
Because Abraham could be moved by the heart
of God because he lived near God.
If the Lord shared with you the fact
that people are rushing to hell, what would
you do with such knowledge?
Would you intercede like Abraham or sit in
front of the TV to watch another football
game or some immoral movies or TV series?
In Christ's school of prayer, people also learn
how to live like the apostle John, who
leaned his head on the Savior's bosom and
heard the heartbeat of God.
The fact is that most Christians do not
have God's heart for a perishing world because
they have not gotten close enough to Him
to lean their head on His holy bosom.
They live at a distance and do not
comprehend what they have lost as a result.
To be so busy with the world that
we have no time for Jesus will leave
us in a spiritually bankrupt condition.
When people live at a distance, there is
always a price to pay for their lukewarmness,
and the price that must be paid is
that they will not know the joy of
living near Jesus.
And in Christ's school of prayer, we will
learn why Paul turned the world upside down.
Did he turn the world upside down because
he was a brilliant thinker, a highly motivated
man, or a great administrator or organizer?
No, it was because he was a man
who had the cry, I want to know
Christ, which is all about relationship.
He was a man driven to know the
Lord in a deep, profound way, and the
results of that relationship we see in the
spiritual fruity bar.
The power Paul possessed came about because he
was mighty through intercession, and that is what
opened the world he ministered in to the
gospel.
Everything, and I mean everything, of true eternal
value comes through prayer, which totally depends upon
the relationship we have with Jesus.
And whatever we truly lack in this life
is because we have not been much in
prayer with him.
Let me ask a rhetorical question here.
What does it mean to be a true
Christian, a bona fide follower of Jesus?
It simply means that a person has entered
into a real relationship with the living God
through the blood of Christ, and is growing
in Christ's likeness day by day as he
or she seeks to know Christ and the
power of his resurrection.
This is why it is absolutely impossible to
have an ongoing relationship with God if we
have little or no communication with him.
There is no such thing as a prayerless
Christian.
They do not exist because they have never
existed.
We are told in Luke 11, verse 1,
one day Jesus was praying in a certain
place.
When he finished, one of his disciples said
to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just
as John taught his disciples.
One thing we can learn from this verse
is that prayer is taught in one way
or another.
Praying pastors produce praying churches, while prayerless pastors
produce prayerless churches.
Both kinds of pastors are reproducing themselves in
the lives of the congregation, and the size
of the congregation does not determine the spiritual
condition of the pastor.
There are men that pastor tens of thousands
of people, but do not preach the gospel.
And if you had a prayer meeting, you
would be hard-pressed to find even 20
to 50 people attend.
And I will almost guarantee you that the
pastor would not be there.
Prayerless pastors produce prayerless churches, because they can
only reproduce what they are.
Prayerless churches teach people to be prayerless people.
In the end, this means that the pastor
is growing a church of unsaved people.
This is a very scary thought.
When you see praying churches, it's because the
pastor has a passion for God, and that
passion for God will do one of three
things in the people.
They will either become praying people in passionate
pursuit of God, like the pastor, or they
will leave the church to find a dead
congregation that is not bothered by their lukewarmness,
that is a byproduct of their prayerlessness.
Or they will strive to drive a praying
pastor out of the church, so they can
have a prayerless dead social club, instead of
a living congregation that is part of the
living body of Christ.
It is a fact that the prayer life
of a church rises or falls upon the
prayer life of the pastor.
This also means that the pastor is totally
accountable before God with what he does with
prayer.
Prayerless pastors minister out of the flesh or
sinful nature, not through the power of the
Holy Spirit.
They may shout, spit, and jump when they
preach, but that does not mean they are
anointed.
Prayerless pastors can only give their congregation death,
because the flesh or sinful nature can only
give death.
This is why Charles Spurgeon declared, it should
be one of our first cares that we
ourselves should be saved men.
If the preachers, teachers, and professors are not
praying men, then they are not saved men.
Let that thought sink into your head and
heart.
Paul has some very strong words to say
about this in Romans chapter 8, verses 5
through 8.
Those who live according to the sinful nature
have their minds set on what that nature
desires.
But those who live in accordance with the
Spirit have their minds set on what the
Spirit desires.
The mind of sinful man is death, but
the mind controlled by the Spirit is life
and peace.
The sinful mind is hostile to God.
It does not submit to God's law, nor
can it do so.
Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please
God.
What Paul is speaking about concerns pastors as
much as it does the rest of the
professing church.
The situation is only scarier for a pastor
because when a pastor is prayerless, then he
infects the entire congregation with the spiritual death
that has taken hold of him, and he
will answer to God for this.
This indicates that all his sermons come out
of the flesh or sinful nature.
Let's take this a little further.
A prayerless pastor can only minister out of
the flesh, so all his ministry, counseling, planning,
and outreach are actually works of the flesh.
They may be religious functions, but that does
not mean God has any part of what
the pastor and people are doing.
It also means that a prayerless pastor cannot
lead a church into the will of God
because a prayerless pastor will never know the
will of God.
His prayerlessness leads him to do the work
of ministry through the flesh, which will never
accomplish the will of God.
John Anderson made this powerful point.
The lawyer's mistakes go to jail.
The doctor's mistakes go to the cemetery.
But the minister's mistakes go to hell.
That's a serious issue, isn't it?
Those people that can sit under a prayerless
pastor and be part of a prayerless church
are in that kind of church for a
reason.
They do not want to be spiritual people.
They do not want to live a life
of prayer with a praying people.
They are rushing to hell and doing so
by going to a dead church.
People can justify why they attend spiritually dead
churches, but the simple fact is that they
are in dead churches because they do not
want to be in on-fire praying churches.
Those who are in any kind of ministry
but are not in constant communion with the
Lord are not men and women of God.
Like I said earlier, the size of the
church, personal income, position, or fame does not
mean a person is living a life of
prayer.
And if they are not living a life
of prayer, then they are not a man
or woman of God, no matter who they
are or what they say.
Because a person hosts a Christian TV show
as part of a Christian band or pastoring
a megachurch does not mean they are living
the prayer life.
And if they are not living a life
of prayer, then they are not men and
women of God.
Only a person of prayer can be called
a man or woman of God, period.
There are no exceptions.
There are no shortcuts.
There's no other ways.
The anointed preacher George Whitefield powerfully stated, For
I am verily persuaded that preachers talk of
an unknown, unfelt Christ, and the reasons why
congregations have been so dead is because they
have dead men preaching to them, O that
the Lord would quicken and revive them for
his own namesake, for how can dead men
beget living children?
What a powerful statement.
Some people may be mad at me over
what I have just said, but you need
to ask yourself why.
Have I said anything that is unbiblical?
Or has the truth I spoke grated against
your lukewarm version of Christianity?
The Christian life rises or falls upon the
relationship we have with Jesus.
I dealt with that at the beginning of
the lesson, so I'm not going to repeat
it all.
When we love Jesus, we want to be
with Jesus.
And when we do not love him, we
will not want to spend time with him.
It's just that simple.
Men and women of God are made on
their knees, not in Bible school, seminary, or
in front of TV cameras.
Education may provide a person with some helpful
knowledge for ministry, but it does not qualify
a person for ministry.
There are a lot of educated pastors, teachers,
and professors that are prayerless men and women.
And though they may teach out of Scripture
and be experts in ancient languages, it does
not offset their prayerlessness.
There's a very important principle here that we
need to lay hold of.
We cannot divorce a person from the work
or the message.
The anointing of God rests upon men and
women of God, and men and women of
God are always men and women that live
a life of prayer, which signifies that all
they do flows out of their prayer life.
So prayerless pastors, teachers, and professors can only
give out of the flesh because the anointing
does not rest upon them.
They may give facts and orthodox doctrine, but
without the anointing, all that comes out of
them is death.
I like what Leonard Ravenhill said, Ministers who
do not spend two hours a day in
prayer are not worth a dime a dozen,
degrees or no degrees.
All those who have failed in the school
of prayer have failed in every aspect of
ministry in Christian life.
To be a man or woman of God,
we must be like Jesus.
And Christlikeness also means that we are much
in prayer like Jesus was.
We cannot be Christlike and prayerless, since the
very idea is the total opposite of all
that Christ was and did.
Through Christ's example, we learn that we need
to be much in prayer if we want
to walk in the power and victory of
the Spirit.
His example also teaches us the joy that
is found in prayer.
By sitting at Jesus' feet, we learn how
to enjoy the awesome presence of God.
And as you learn how to enjoy His
wonderful presence, you will never want to live
without it again.
When the life of God is pulsating through
our inner being, then prayer will be the
driving force of our life.
I have seen churches that were houses of
prayer because a praying pastor was correctly leading
the congregation.
These churches were alive, and the presence of
God was there in a tangible way.
I have also known of college professors that
after being confronted by the power of the
Holy Spirit and authentic revival, realized that they
had been hypocrites by teaching God's Word without
the power of God.
One such professor repents to all of his
old students whenever he comes across them because
he came to understand that he had failed
them by not being a man of God
himself or by being a man of prayer.
I have known of a prayerless pastor that
pastored a large prayerless church.
He attended an authentic revival and came to
the knowledge that he had never known Christ
even though he was raised in a Christian
home, went to a Christian college, and was
ordained by a Bible-believing, Spirit-filled denomination.
He got genuinely saved, and I knew that
he would not be in the church he
pastored for very long before they kicked him
out.
They had an unsaved pastor who pastored an
unsaved congregation, and the last thing such a
congregation would want was a truly saved pastor
calling them to get saved when they thought
they were right with God.
Now the principle I have been sharing about
how the spiritual condition of a pastor directly
affects the congregation is also true when it
comes to families.
According to the prayer life of the father
and mother will be the spiritual climate of
the home.
Homes that are filled with contention and strife
are not homes filled with the Spirit of
God because they are not homes defined by
prayer and the pursuit of God.
I actually put the greatest responsibility for successful
marriages upon the husbands because they are called
of God to be the priests of the
home that leads the wife and children into
a right relationship with God.
Paul told us in Ephesians 5, verses 25
and 26, Husbands, love your wives just as
Christ loved the church and gave himself up
for her to make her holy, cleansing her
by the washing with water through the word.
There's a very important powerful principle that is
presented to us in these verses that husbands
are to love their wives as Jesus loves
the church.
How does Jesus love the church?
He gave himself up for her.
In other words, he loves the church with
a selfless love which tells us that he
loves them for their own well-being, not
for his.
Apply this truth to marriages and you will
have fantastic marriages.
And every time a marriage fails, it fails
because in one way or another, the husband
failed to live out this biblical truth.
When husbands and fathers fail to be men
of prayer, then all they have to give
their wife and children are the works of
the flesh which can only bring death, death
to the marriage, and the spiritual death to
the children.
Selfishness always destroys.
And unless we walk nearer to God, the
prominent feature of our fallen character is selfishness.
Every sin that we can commit is selfish
in nature, and I mean every sin.
The only way we can conquer our selfish
fallen nature is to walk near to Jesus
so that we can experience his transforming grace.
And to walk near Jesus, we must be
a people that live a life of prayer.
I've seen this all the time while ministering
across the U.S. and into Europe where
the wife walks with Jesus while the husband
lives a worldly or outright unsaved life.
Here you have men that refuse to walk
with Jesus, and they do not care what
ramifications it has upon his wife and children.
A wife will never be as strong in
the face as she could be if her
husband walked with God.
And when the husband fails to be the
godly head of the home, he will define
his home by his ungodliness, which will negatively
affect the rest of the family.
The way God designed marriage to work can
only be accomplished when the husband and wife
walk with Jesus, with the husband being the
spiritual head of the home.
Apart from a Christ-centered marriage, the marriage
will never be what God created it to
be.
When the children are raised in a home
with one saved parent and the other unsaved,
they are torn between the worldly parent and
this godly one.
This is a terrible thing to put children
through.
Children should not be forced to choose between
one godless parent and a godly one.
When a selfish husband and father continues in
his selfish life, he greatly harms his wife
and children.
This is also true when a godless mother
refused to walk with God.
She will do tremendous damage to her children
and to her husband.
This is a very sad thing that happens
far too often.
Jesus made the startling statement in Matthew chapter
10, verses 35 and 36.
For I have come to turn a man
against his father and a daughter against her
mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother
-in-law.
A man's enemies will be the members of
his own household.
A family can only function correctly when it
comes under the rule of God.
And the Lord would rather tear a family
apart to save some than for the entire
family to go to hell.
The Apostle Peter told us in 2 Peter
1.3, His divine power has given us
everything we need for life and godliness through
our knowledge of him who called us by
his own glory and goodness.
This is a wonderful promise that the Lord
will give us all the Holy Spirit power
necessary to live the victorious Christian life.
We must grasp the truth that Peter is
saying here, that the divine power that makes
people victorious over sin, compromise and the world
is only available through our knowledge of Jesus.
How does that knowledge of Jesus come to
people?
Through a strong growing knowledge of the scriptures
and a vibrant life of prayer.
We have at our disposal the infinite power
of an infinite God.
So why do so many people that claim
to be Christian live defeated lives and have
defeated marriages?
You could have sitting in your garage a
million dollar Maserati that can go over 200
miles an hour.
But if you do not fill the tank
with gas and turn the ignition on, then
it will do absolutely nothing other than sit
in your garage and collect dust.
You may boast on how fast the car
can go and how fun it would be
if you could drive it.
But you would not be speaking from experience
because the car only sits in your garage.
All that power, but no ability to apply
it to your life.
We have at our disposal the fullness of
God's divine power so that we can live
the victorious Christian life.
But if we live defeated lives, there's no
one to blame but ourselves.
The principal reason why people do not walk
in victory is because they do not want
to walk in victory, since they love their
sin and do not want to forsake all
to gain Christ.
If they pressed into Jesus by living a
life of vibrant prayer, they would be tapping
into the only source of infinite power available
so that they could live the victorious Christian
life.
And they could, through the power of the
Spirit, touch a perishing world.
The choice is ours.
The promises have been given.
And God is faithful to keep His promises.
Either we walk in the victory that Jesus
owns by divine right as God and through
His death and resurrection, or we will live
defeated lives, have defeated marriages, defeated children, be
part of a defeated, lukewarm church, and live
in a pagan, defeated nation.
At the center of this issue is what
we do on our knees.
Let me close with a powerful statement from
William MacDonald.
God seems to place a special value on
prayer when it costs us something.
Those who rise early in the morning enjoy
fellowship with the One who likewise arose early
to receive His instructions for the day from
His Father.
Likewise, those who are in such deadly earnest
that they are willing to pray through the
night enjoy power with God that cannot be
denied.
Prayer that costs us nothing is worth nothing.
It is simply a byproduct of cheap Christianity.