Prayer

He makes no mistake.

We believe that and we know it and we say amen.

But sometimes it takes faith when things happen to say to ourselves, God makes no mistakes.

He never says, oh, if God could change anything, then he couldn't be perfect because he'd have to improve.

God can't improve anything.

And so we need to live by faith and not by feeling.

Because every day things happen and we wonder why.

And God keeps saying, trust me, in due season you shall reap.

If you faint not.

Take your Bible and go to the book of Exodus, chapter number 32.

I want to share something with you tonight that was life changing for me a number of years ago.

It changed me in my prayer life.

I was 14 years old when I got saved and I began praying.

And I've prayed a lot of prayers through a lot of years.

But not long ago, God showed me something.

And I know I'd read it before, but it changed the way I prayed and the way I thought about prayer.

Who can measure the power of prayer?

I mean, how would you measure it?

It's this.

This powerful or this powerful.

I mean, how could you.

How could we even fathom the.

Think someone said, more things are wrought by prayer than this world ever dreams of.

Of.

The Bible says the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

How much is much?

How much does prayer accomplish?

We sing the song, oh, what peace we often forfeit oh, what needless pain we bear all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

The Bible says you have not because you ask not.

And he said, if you ask, sometimes we can ask amiss that we might consume things upon ourselves.

I teach a class on prayer at the Norris Bible Baptist Seminary.

Brother Stewart and I couldn't find any school in America that taught a semester on prayer.

And I said, well, that's kind of strange if prayer is what we believe it is.

I think it was DL Moody.

I'm not sure.

You may remember, he said, I would rather teach one man how to pray than 10 men how to preach.

And we got to thinking about that.

I said, I mean, what.

What would be more important for a preacher to learn than how to pray?

I'm still learning how to pray.

You never graduate the amazing doctrine of prayer.

And then the devil hates prayer, doesn't he?

You know, that solves a lot of things when you stop and think about, well, whatever the devil hates must be pretty good, and what he doesn't hate must be pretty bad.

Amen I know that sounds a little simple.

I preached Sunday about simplifying.

Does the devil fear your prayer?

Does he get a little nervous when he sees you getting alone and beginning to pray?

Are your prayers exciting?

Are they fervent?

Do you look forward to a time of prayer?

Are you driven to prayer or are you led to prayer?

Do you follow after prayer?

What do you think would be greater than teaching our children how to pray?

When I was growing up, my grandfather was in the home where we lived in his house.

And he did all the praying.

But when I got old enough, I learned to pray.

And it was the only prayer I ever heard, ever knew, till I got saved.

God is good.

God is great.

Let us thank him for our food.

Amen.

That was my prayer life.

But when I got saved, I prayed all the way home.

I had to walk about two miles from the church home and I prayed the whole way.

And I'd never prayed before like that.

But when we get serious about prayer, Satan begins to send out his demons of doubt.

They just kind of hover around.

You really think God hears you?

Do you really think God could answer that prayer?

Well, that's impossible.

That'll never change.

Come on.

You ever had that voice ringing in your ear?

Doubt?

Years ago, God showed me this passage in Exodus, changed me drastically.

And I want to share it with you.

It's in Exodus chapter number 32, and we'll begin.

Verse 7.

The Lord said unto Moses, go and get thee down.

He was in the mountain.

He said, for thy people which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves so God was watching.

They have sinned.

They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them.

They have made them a molten calf, you remember that, and have worshipped it and have sacrificed thereunto.

And said, these be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

Now watch this.

The Lord said unto Moses, I've seen this people.

And behold, it is a stiff necked people.

Now look what this is God.

Look what God says to Moses.

Now therefore, let me alone think about that for a moment.

God said, I want you to leave me alone.

Because Moses was a man of prayer.

He prayed great prayers and God gave great answers.

And God knew the heart of Moses and he'd heard many of his prayers.

But here, as strange as it seems, maybe not to you, but when I first read that.

Let me alone, Moses.

Don't try to influence me with your prayers.

Don't bother me that my wrath.

He said in verse 10 may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them.

Wow.

And I will make of thee a great nation.

How about that?

He said, moses, I'm getting ready to wipe every one of them out but you.

And we're going to start over, all over again.

And you're going to be the head of the new nation.

Is that what it said?

And so Moses didn't pray.

No.

Verse 11.

And Moses besought the Lord his God.

Now, I don't understand all the theology here, because God said, leave me alone.

But Moses didn't do it.

Did he disobey?

Well, I don't want to get into an argument about that, but Moses prayed, and he said, lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?

Wherefore should the Egyptians speak the enemy and say, for mischief did he bring them out to slay them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth?

Turn from thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil against thy people.

Remember Abraham and Isaac and Israel, thy servants to whom thou swearest by thine own self and saidest unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven.

And all this land that I have spoken of will I give you unto your seed, and they shall inherit it forever.

He's quoting God in his prayer.

He says, God, you said this.

And the Egyptians are going to falsely accuse you.

Your name's going to be mud.

God, if you do this, you're going to look bad.

That's basically what he's saying.

He said, you made a promise.

You made a covenant.

You brought him out.

You did mighty things.

Miracles.

Look at verse 14.

And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

Period.

Now think about that.

We think of repentance as repenting of sin.

But actually the word repent means a change of mind.

When a person's lost, they only think about themselves.

But when they get under conviction and realize they've offended God and they're in trouble and they're facing hell, they repent.

They change their mind.

They say, lord, I was wrong, you were right.

Well, God doesn't sin.

So he wasn't repenting of his sin, but he changed his mind.

I don't even want to debate with anybody because I know God doesn't change.

And what I mean by that is, God's attributes doesn't change his feelings doesn't change.

He's the same God yesterday and Today and forever.

And what makes him sad back then makes him sad today.

And what makes, what makes him glad back then made him happy, still makes him glad today.

But Moses prayed, and God said, okay, I won't do it.

Now, maybe that doesn't excite you, but it changed my prayer.

I don't know.

I can't explain it.

I just said, wow, maybe my prayer could make a difference.

Maybe what I thought God was getting ready to do, he won't do it.

Or maybe what I thought God wasn't going to do, maybe he will do it.

And it seems to me that God created prayer primarily for fellowship, to commune with us, to enjoy us.

God's people are his portion.

He doesn't need our wisdom.

But God wanted to confer and walk and talk with his creation, with men and women.

He wanted to talk to them, and he wanted them to talk back.

That's what prayer is, talking back to God.

And God takes pleasure in that.

He doesn't need us.

We're not indispensable.

None of us are indispensable.

If something happens to us, God's work will go on.

Somebody else will take the place.

But this tells me that God hears and God cares.

And that my prayers could have an effect on God that is deep, the Creator in Him.

We live and move and have our being, and God holds the world in the palm of his hand.

And to think, a little speck like me could say a prayer and God may hit the brakes.

God can still accomplish his will, but he can do it all different kinds of ways.

He doesn't have to do it one way.

He may get ready to do it one way, and you pray.

And God may say, okay, he'll still accomplish his will, maybe through another way or somebody else, but God's will will happen.

He's in total control.

And even if when we pray and he changes his mind, he's still in control, it's not because he wasn't really sure, he couldn't make up his mind.

No, it just means God loves us and he gave us the gift of prayer because he wanted to hear from us.

He knows our hearts.

I know that.

But prayer affects God.

We just read it.

Something you're praying about, you've been praying about maybe for years and waiting on God, and maybe something in the last year or two, maybe the last few months, maybe the last few weeks, and you think it's maybe hopeless, but you're still praying.

And God notices not the length of our prayer.

But the depth of our prayer, the sincerity of our prayer, the honest yielding surrender to our prayer.

That Lord, not my will, but thy will be done.

Could your prayers change God's mind?

Evidently God.

And for lack of better word, I'll just say it anyway because it makes sense for you and I to understand.

God knew that Moses prayer would be pretty powerful.

You may not think of your prayers as powerful prayers.

I don't know.

Sometimes our prayer life can get stale and repetitious and not very deep.

They're still important to God.

Sometimes we pray like when we got saved, like babies.

And maybe we grow a little bit, but our prayers doesn't grow.

Sometimes our prayer life maybe could get boring or what's the use?

Or all kinds of things can happen to our prayer life.

You need to guard.

We need to guard our prayer life.

We need to pray about our prayer life.

Moses besought the Lord.

Moses was determined.

He wasn't rebelling against God.

He wasn't saying, don't tell me what to do, I'm going to pray anyway.

No, that wasn't his heart.

God knows our heart.

Moses was just being human.

He was a man that believed God.

He had seen the work of God, the hand of God through all that had happened before.

The Red Sea, the manna from heaven, the water out of the rock.

I mean, the people had seen it.

Moses had seen it.

Moses knew a lot about prayer.

I wonder if he was to speak here tonight, said Moses, could you come up and give us a sermon on prayer?

He said, yeah, I think I could do that.

I don't know that he would brag on his prayer.

I wouldn't brag on my prayer line.

I wouldn't say tonight that I've got my prayer life is right.

I mean, it's everything it ought to be.

And if everybody'd pray like me, we'd be great.

No, I'm still growing in my prayer.

I'm learning better about approaching God and searching my heart.

You see, the world is not pre programmed.

God didn't wind it all up and put it in all the stuff and then just throw it out there in the universe and let it happen.

No.

Some of you may remember Doris Day movie star and singer and one of her old songs years and years ago.

Que sera sera, Whatever will be will be.

And that's the way a lot of people live their life, including some Christians.

Oh, I want to pray.

But it really doesn't matter that much because whatever will be, will be.

We wouldn't maybe dare Go there publicly or verbally.

But I think sometimes it crosses our mind if we'd be honest and say, I don't know if it's really going to work or not.

I've been praying for 10 years and it hadn't happened yet.

So I guess whatever will be, will be.

You don't find that in the Bible.

You find out that God created us with the freedom to choose.

Am I right?

We're not robots.

He gives counsel, but he still gives us the freedom to choose.

Almost weekly, at least, maybe more.

I don't know.

But sometimes I.

On a regular basis, I. I think about deuteronomy chapter number 30.

Very interesting to me.

When he was speaking, he said, God said, but the word is very nigh unto thee in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

And then God says this.

See, I've set before thee this day life, good, death and evil, in that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, keep his commandments, his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply, and the Lord thy God shall bless thee.

And he said, but if thine heart turn away, there's the choice.

They had a freedom.

They weren't slaves.

But if thy heart turn away so that thou wilt not hear, thou shalt be drawn away and worship other gods and serve them.

He said, I denounce you this day that ye shall surely perish.

But here's what I want you to hear.

He said, I call heaven and earth to record this day against you.

This is in Deuteronomy 30.

He says, I have set before thee life and death, blessing and cursing.

Now listen.

He says, therefore choose life.

He didn't make them choose, but he told them to choose.

Some of you may remember that old game show of let's Make a Deal.

And at the end they'd have the three doors.

Remember that?

They had to choose.

And they knew, everybody knew ahead of time that one of those doors is a pretty big deal.

The other one.

So.

So.

And one of them was a goat tied to a post.

I mean, it was ridiculous.

So they had to choose.

It was a guess.

You remember how it went?

God said, I don't want you to do that.

I'm going to let you choose.

But he said, I don't want you guessing your way through life.

I don't want you crossing your fingers and say, okay, okay, okay.

Two.

I'll take door number two.

Wrong choice.

God says, here it is.

Choose this one.

Choose this one.

You See, God gives us all the counsel we want, but he's not going to make the choice for us.

He's going to, but most people don't know their Bible.

That's where the counselor comes from.

God doesn't speak to us in an audible voice.

He speaks to us through the word of God.

And God says, call unto me and I'll answer thee over and over, Lord, what do you want me to do?

God wants us to talk to him.

And then we do that many times when we pray.

You don't have to get on your knees.

You don't have to say, dear Lord.

You don't have to say, Amen.

You can say, lord, there's something on my mind.

I need to talk.

God understands that.

He doesn't say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not using the right words.

God wants you to tell him how you feel.

And he listens, and he might change his mind of what he was going to do in your life.

Do you really believe that?

I think some of you are looking like a. I don't know about this.

Interesting, but I don't know.

Well, I understand that.

I'm not saying I'm right.

I'm just saying God changed my prayer life when I began to realize that how I pray and why I'm asking and what I'm asking for and my motive for asking it.

God could say, you know, I hear you.

Okay, I'm going to give it to you.

I'm going to answer your prayer.

I wasn't.

I was going to do something else.

That's basically what he told Moses.

I was going to wipe them all out.

I changed my mind.

I won't do it.

What if Moses had not prayed?

He was too tired to pray.

Or what if he prayed with the wrong motive?

I mean, he could have said, you're going to make me the father of the nations instead of Abraham and start all over.

And I'm going to do it.

Yeah, God is watching.

He's watching the world.

He's watching our country.

He's watching this church.

He's watching our homes.

He's watching us individually, if you have any doubt about that.

I know I quote from this a lot since I've been here, but it's my favorite portion of Scripture.

Psalm 139.

And David said, O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me.

Thou knowest my down sitting, my uprising, Thou understandest my thought afar off, Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

There's not a word in my tongue.

But.

But O Lord, Thou knowest that altogether.

Thou hast set me behind and before and laid Thine hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

It is high.

I cannot attain unto it.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me.

Do you think God thinks about you?

I think sometimes it doesn't really grab ahold of us.

We think, well, God, there's a lot of people, billions of people in the world, and I'm just one.

I don't know how he could think about me.

Well, God is omniscient.

God is omnipresent.

Amen.

I mean, you give yourself a headache.

You try to figure that one out.

That how can God hear everybody praying at the same time and know each ever thought we have and the hairs on our head.

We want to put God down where we can kind of get him in a box.

But it won't work.

It'll never work.

We got to read the Bible and take it literally what it says.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God.

How great is the sum of them.

If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand.

When I wake, I am still with thee.

God's watching.

He's watching you and he's interested.

You don't bore God.

God's interested in you if you'll get hooked up with him and talk to him and listen when he talks to you.

Get excited about God.

Don't just put him on a Sunday in your calendar.

Put him on every day of the week.

Psalm 56.

Lord, thou art for me, you're for me.

Of course he's for you.

If you're saved tonight.

He invested his son's blood in you.

You're bought, paid for.

He said to these people, they're stiff necked.

You ever got a stiff neck sleeping on the wrong way or wrong pillow or whatever?

We can get stiff necked spiritually looking down too much.

Look around and look down so much that when you want to try to look up, it's kind of, kind of hurts our neck.

We're stiff necked.

Let me alone, Moses.

I'm angry.

I made up my mind.

I'll start it all over with you.

And Moses besought the Lord and he presented a case with God.

I mean, when you ask something, do you ever stop and think, well, did God say he would do this?

Did he make a promise about supplying our needs if we put him first?

Did he?

Well, just tell God hadn't forgotten.

But God wants you to quote his word back to him.

I had A man in my church for years.

I led him to Christ back in.

He was a colonel in the army.

I was in Columbus, Georgia.

I baptized him.

And his wife.

His wife.

He passed away a couple years ago.

His wife still comes victory.

His name was Powell Johnson.

I don't know if you knew Powell, but he was.

I can't describe how in your face.

Military guy he was.

He loved the Lord.

He cared.

But he just came across like, who was that famous general with the boots and the whip and the gun?

Yeah, that's how Powell came across, like Patton.

But here's what he do.

And when I came to Texas, he loved me.

I don't know why, but he left Georgia and came to Texas so I could still be his pastor.

And we put him in charge of the mission.

Our missionary ministry did a fantastic job.

But here's what.

Here's the thing he would do that just sometimes got on my nerves.

He'd get me.

He'd ask me something and I'd say, well, I don't know, this, that and the other.

And he'd look at me, he'd say, preacher, you said.

You told me you preached.

I'm just telling you back what you preached.

This is why you taught me, if you love God, you keep his commandments and you talk to people about Christ and you read the Bible every day.

He read the Bible through.

I lost count how many times that man read through the Bible.

I mean, unbelievable.

And he even had a Sunday school class to hold that class accountable, to read through the Bible together.

And every Sunday morning, they would talk about the last six days that they had read the Bible.

But he was always quoting my sermons.

I didn't think anybody remembered my sermons.

I don't remember.

My wife doesn't remember my kids.

I don't remember that one, dad.

Well, it was a good sermon.

I guess it was, but I don't remember it.

Well, Paul wasn't that way.

He took notes.

He remembered every sermon.

And that's the way he would approach.

If he wanted something or wanted me to do something, he'd say, now, preacher, you remember?

And he'd quote my sermon, the points and everything.

Okay, let's do it.

That's kind of what Moses did.

Moses said, now, God, you brought us out and you promised this and this and this and this and the other or not.

I think you all change your mind.

God said, yeah, I guess you're right.

Okay, I'm not minimizing God.

I'm not putting God down on A little level.

God's not our servant.

We're his servant, okay?

We don't command God.

We don't demand for God to make things happen the way we want it.

We get mad at God sometimes because the weather is not the way we wanted it, or there's.

There's uncountable things.

But he presented a case before God.

He said, lord, what about your name?

I've been telling people about you and how great you are and your name and your promises and, Lord, you know, I heard a preacher one time, I think it was Adrian Rogers.

He said, the prayer that reaches heaven is the prayer that begins in heaven.

What did he mean by that?

He said, you get ahold of something that God said.

Jesus is at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us.

And you say, lord, you promised.

That starts in heaven.

And the prayer that gets to heaven, you start up there with what God said, then you pray you and it goes back to heaven.

Does that make sense to you?

God changed his mind.

I've had preachers.

I don't know, I've kind of alluded to this several times, probably at one of the fellowship meetings.

And I've had preachers go, brother Wetherby, you hunting the wrong dog there.

Said, no, God doesn't change.

God doesn't change his mind.

I said, well, what are you gonna.

That's just one.

If we had time tonight, you go back and get your concordance and look under repentance and see how many times it said God repented.

There's a lot of them, and they didn't agree with me.

And that's okay.

I'm not a better preacher than they are.

And I'm certainly not a scholar in the Bible, But I read that Moses prayed God changed his mind.

So I'm gonna pray.

And maybe God will change.

He don't have to, but maybe God will change his mind.

So I'm gonna keep praying.

And I know you're gonna keep praying, too, but sometimes we need a little revival in our prayer life.

And say, God, can I talk to you?

And God says, I've been waiting all day.

And you say, God, I got something on my mind.

He says, I read your mind all the time.

I know exactly what it is.

What do you want?

What do you want?

And we begin to lay out our prayer to God.

Say, lord, I'm not being brash or smart aleck, but you said right here.

I just read it.

It says right there, God, that you're going to take care of your children.

Take no thought of what you shall eat or drink or what you shall put on.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

And all these things shall be added unto you.

God, you said that.

And I have a need.

I got more bills than I got money.

I got some problems going on in my life.

Lord, I need you to take care of this.

God says, okay, it's taken care of.

Don't worry about it anymore.

I don't know if I helped you tonight or not.

I wanted to preach from the book of Ruth tonight.

But a couple hours ago I began to read that again.

I go there a lot to Exodus.

And God said, I want you to share that with the people tonight.

So I hope it helped.

Let's stand with our heads bowed and eyes closed.

Could we have a little music and just stop for a moment?

And maybe you would like to come and just thank God for prayer, the gift of prayer.

What would you do if you couldn't pray?

Pray.

Maybe you would come and pray for someone tonight that's very dear to you.

Maybe you want to just pray of thanksgiving.

Just say, lord, Brother Donaldson didn't call on me a while ago.

But I have some things I just want to thank you for.

Or maybe you would come and say, lord, I just need freshen up my prayer life.

I need a revival in my prayer life.

I don't want to just go through the motions.

I don't want to just say the same thing over and over.

Maybe you would come and say, lord, I don't even want to ask you for anything in my prayer.

I just want to talk about how great you are.

Do your children know how to pray?

You have a teenager.

Does he believe in prayer?

Does she believe in prayer?

Really?

Do they really believe it?

Are they praying?

Teenagers?

We're going to sing Jesus, keep me near the cross after I pray.

Some have already come.

If God's touched your heart, you come.

Heavenly Father, give courage and draw us closer to you and closer to each other.

And Lord, keep teaching us more about prayer.

That it would become part of the way we think and the way we make decisions.

We pray without ceasing.

I pray this church will continue to be a praying church.

The devil hates praying churches.

He hates praying Christians.

Help us, Lord.

We pray in Jesus name.

Heads are bowed.

Let's sing just one verse.