In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of prayer and maintaining a connection with God. He shares his personal experience of waking up at 4 a.m. and feeling led by the Lord to deliver a message. The preacher highlights the need for believers to seek reality in God and not be deceived by worldly distractions. While he initially considers speaking on the theme of Israel, he feels compelled to share a burden of another kind. The sermon emphasizes that in the kingdom of God, nothing is minor.

Good morning, young believers. One day you'll be in this position and you'll be coming up to a platform with tremblings. Lest you think that this is some professional exercise that one can learn and master and turn on and off at will, however, I don't know how it looks from there up, but from here down, it's another story. It wouldn't be bad if the church, how's the sound? Am I coming out okay? Yeah. If the church learned to appreciate the preached word and to recognize what a phenomenon it is in itself as absolutely holy and utterly supernatural. We need to elevate our appreciation of the preached word as being the word of God and not of men. And the man who speaks needs to have the faith to believe that the word that he speaks is the word of God and not the word of man. The remarkable phenomenon is this, you dear saints, that God performs this through an earthen vessel. It's an astonishment. You know what it is? It's the genius of the mystery of incarnation, which we don't adequately understand or appreciate either. But that's what takes place when a true word is preached from the Holy Pulpit. Incarnation, God in the flesh. And the remarkable, he's humbling himself to allowing himself to be contained in a vessel and to be articulated and expressed through the limitation of that vessel, except for the grace that he imparts. And he's even willing to allow his voice to suffer a Brooklyn accent. So, because the issue of the preached word is the issue of the church, and the issue of the church is the issue of Israel, and the issue of Israel is the issue of the kingdom, and the issue of the kingdom is the issue of his glory. It all goes back to what proceeds from this place. Little wonder that Paul says, who is sufficient for these things? So, Lord, I acknowledge, certainly, I'm not sufficient, especially to bring a conclusion to these three days. Only you, who are the Alpha, are also the Omega. Only you, who gave us the beginning, is appropriate to give us the end. Because you gave that beginning in anticipation of the end. You knew the end from the beginning, which we didn't. That's why we're uncomfortable. That's why we feel the frailty of our humanity and uncertainty. Should I? Should I? Is this the text? Is this the theme? We don't want to miss it. Do you know why? It's once and for all. What do you mean, Art? You'll be back next year, won't you? Who's to say? If there'll be a next year for a 76-year-old crock, or the Lord will take me up, or direct elsewhere, who knows? It is altogether appropriate, you dear young saints, to understand that every true speaking is a last. This is the final time, and it's once and for all. It will not be given again. And of all of the remarkable things that I could speak, I'm so privileged in what God has given me over the years. What shall I speak? What is to be selected from that panoply of themes and insight and revelation, any one of which is calculated to bless you? But what do you need most? Shouldn't it be something on the explicit theme of Israel itself? One of the great classic messages, Ezekiel 37? Well, if it is, God should have quickened that, but he hasn't. So I'm under constraint just to share, to attempt to express burden of another kind. That seems to be a minor key. But as we know in the kingdom, nothing is minor. I lost an entire Russian audience in the same city where I bought this $40 suit. When I opened up with the subject of Paul's statement on widows and slaves, when they heard that that was my subject, boom, they never came back again to another meeting. They lived downstairs in the basement of the church in the dormitory and would not come up for any single meeting that followed because they were grossly disappointed that I began on a minor key. Paul's statement on widows and orphans. Read it sometime. It's a little pinhole next to the breadth of Paul's apostolic understanding. But even that pinhole emits the most powerful light. Pity that they didn't stay for it. You know what they wanted? American hotshotism. Here's a guy who's going to tell us how to do it. Big church mega. He's American. And were they ever disappointed? So, Lord, precious God, a pinhole from you is a door and a window to everlasting glory and understanding. We welcome a pinhole or just the finest intrusion of light if that's what you select. So come and again express your great heart in your esteem for this body and your understanding of its future. And the appropriateness of your wisdom and love. Speak, Lord, for your servants are hearing. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Okay. You know that the cross did not start at Calvary. It culminated at Calvary in its overt, physical and violent expression. But the cross is intrinsic to God. The cross sublimates and subsumes the wisdom of God, the way of God, the understanding of God, the nature of God, the cross is not a little fixture. It's God. And Jesus experienced the cross before he even came down to earth. How do you figure that? Because to be separated from the Father, to leave the province that he had occupied from his inception in the unspeakable privilege of intimate fellowship with the Father in heaven and to come down to this marred earth, this sewer, and to traffic in men and suffer their abuse and to be confined in a human body that has humiliating requirements of having to go to the bathroom, that experiences hunger and all that, to leave that heavenly dimension to come down to earth was already the cross and it was freely chosen as the cross itself was. It was not obligatory or it not be the cross. The cross is ever always the free givingness of God to men and ourselves in our own giving. So for some reason I have been occupied with Jesus in the garden since arriving in Singapore when he travailed and groaned and prayed at Gethsemane. Do you know what the word Gethsemane means? Hebrew. It means olive press. Do you know what an olive press is? It's not some little hand contraption. It's a great device with heavy stones, one upon the other, turning on a kind of a spindle with a great lever where one man on one side and one on the other move around and bring those two stones closer and closer till they finally touch and crush the olives that are pressed between so that the substance and the oil can be emitted. He chose an appropriate place, don't you think? Because his prayer and his intercessions and his agonizings were an exact statement of that press. He put himself into the press. I want to say true prayer is dying. I want to say true prayer and true intercession is suffering. I want to say that true prayer is the cross. True witness is the cross. True service is the cross. It's a suffering, it's sacrifice, it's extension. It's allowing yourself to be pressed out, which is happening before you this morning in my speaking, if you have eyes to see and to understand. So, interesting that he should agonize in the garden. I looked up the word agony or agonize. Do you go to the dictionary? Right next to your Bible, that's where it should be. Dictionary is one of the great gifts of God and Webster was a Christian. And it's surprising sometimes what you find in definition of a word that you think you already understand. None of us understands as we ought in anything. You know what agony means? Jesus agonized in prayer and sweated clots of blood that fell to the earth. The first bleeding of calvary, the first bleeding of atonement, the first shedding of blood was not extracted by man. It was extruded by God. There's a difference between extracted and extruded. Extracted is something inflicted in brutality, but extruded is something that comes from within out. By the constraint of your own agonizing and press before God, because you're about something earnest that requires a communication with God that is soon to be consummated at a cross at Calvary. The whole issue of evil is going to be met head on. The prince of death is going to be defeated through death by one who will voluntarily bear that death, not just the death of the mortality of his humanity, but death as anguish, death as suffering, death as torment, death as humiliation, death as the excruciating conflict with darkness and with evil in the garden. So interesting that the great redemptive drama begins in a garden with Adam and Eve and a serpent in the garden. Beautiful place, but that's where you have to be on guard. It's beauty that is seductive. And not the least things that Jesus had to wrestle against in finding communion with the Father. Have you tried that lately? It's no snap. Earnest prayer is no snap. Oh, I mean, we can mouth our little banalities and unctuous official prayers and the polite prayers. That's nothing. That requires nothing. That's not from your gut. That's just something that you can mouth and speak out of your own head. It transacts nothing. It does not contact God. It does not transact. It does not obtain. He doesn't hear it, I don't believe. Prayer is communion with God. And here I am, a believer for 41 years. You think that I know as I ought to know who God is? You think that I have, at least in my experience, a sufficient sense of God as God, as holy, as an object and subject of awe and reverence? Have you yet come, cats, to the place of adoration? And I'm making a public confession. You need to pray for me. No. In fact, my earliest irritation as a Jewish believer saved by a God whom I was not seeking is to come into the Pentecostal assembly in Oakland, California and hear these Gentiles sing about adoration. And instead of enjoying that, I was chafed, irritated, vexed by people taking a great word and trafficking in it and making it something light and other than what, in fact, it ought to be and is. Adoration. Let me be on record. Adoration is the ultimate posture of man toward God that issues out of the deepest recognition of the majesty of God and who he is in himself that elicits and evokes a rapturous emotion of deepest love and esteem that is called What's the word? It just went out of my head. Adoration. To adore, to adore God, that's going to take contact. But have you noticed that the heavens are as brass? Have you felt that your prayer could hardly go through the ceiling? Have you felt that there are layers interposing themselves between us on earth and him in heaven? That it's no easy thing? That it's going to require an agonizing to break through these remarkable layers of spiritual opposition out of darkness? And most of us cease prayer at the time when we ought to really be beginning. We've made it a little curtsy, a little initial thing and then go about our business. Jesus was not doing that. He never did that. The whole genius of Jesus and his ministry, his power and his authority was not some magical source that he brought with him from heaven. He lay aside his deity. He came stripped as a man and a slave and a servant and as a Hebrew and a son of Abraham and David. He chose an ill-chosen race. He chose a despised people in a little corner of the earth in Nowheresville. What a humiliation for the great God to come down to that. So anything that he accomplished which was great and mighty, raising the dead and healings and his remarkable statements was something that he received from heaven, from the Father in communion, in prayer, in relationship. Because he said the words that I speak are not my words. Remember that? Did you believe that? And the things that I do I have only seen from the Father. Nothing originates from me in and of myself or out of my humanity. It's totally from above. My whole posture as a son is to glorify the Father who has sent me. And if he doesn't give, I can't perform. If he doesn't inspire, I cannot speak. If he doesn't authorize, I cannot perform miracles. I'm helpless, hapless, and utterly dependent on him who sent me. So he was in prayer oft in the early morning hours while it was yet dark. He was up at the mount or he was in the garden seeking his Father, not just for instruction. What about today, Dad? What have you got on your agenda? But it's not recorded for us. It's too private. It's too precious. It's too holy for us to intrude and gawk and understand what he was actually praying. But we can surmise and intuit that it wasn't just the putting of petitions to the Father in order to fit him for the service of the day the way that we pray. It was communion. It was a son speaking with his father and waiting on his father and gaining afresh the sense of his father, which was now more difficult to maintain being in the earth. It was one thing to be in proximity with him in the heavenly realm, but now on earth in all of the tumult and controversy and opposition that he had to face with Israel in its apostate sinful condition to break through that weight upon his spirit and find contact with God in a pristine, pure, original, and holy way to be refreshed at the throne in the knowledge of God and then to face the world required agonizing, required a press, required a deep calling unto deep. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to set for us an example of what it means to be a son of God because he's calling many sons to glory. And if you'll not rise up and out and come forward from your present stale, predictable, and ordinary religious and obligatory prayer, you'll not ascend to sonship. Hey, where'd that come from, cats, from above? Where everything else has come from that I've been speaking so far. Believest thou this? Prayer is the issue. It's not a technique. It's not a methodology. It's not a religious obligation that we have to discharge and then go about our business. Prayer is the issue of our faith, of our relationship. Spurgeon said you can know a man and a minister by hearing him pray because what you hear publicly has had its origin in that which is private and unseen. He has a history, has a relationship of a devotional kind in the early morning hours before the light breaks. And when you hear him publicly, you're catching the echo and the substance and the authority that he has received in that communion. So this last time in Gethsemane, which was a favorite place of his, a beautiful garden. It's one of my favorite places in Israel. You've never been? Pray about it. I'm not calling you to be a tourist, but the highlight for me, the place where Jesus suffered, the house of the high priest, I forgot his name, Caiaphas, and you go down a stone spiraling place right down to the basement and you can see the places in the wall where the iron fastenings were where he was strapped so that he could be flagellated and whipped. It's an eerie, awesome place. It's holy. There's a hush from God. It's the place where in the courtyard Peter betrayed the Lord three times before the cock crowed. And my other favorite place is Gethsemane. Oh, they have built a remarkable Catholic church over it. That's the pity. Maybe it preserves something. I don't know. But you have to fight through the mosaics and the architecture because in the middle with an iron grill around it is a rock. And you know what kid cats did? Don't tell the authorities. I stepped over the grate and I went right onto the rock itself, face down like a dead man, and I gushed. This is the place where we have to take our young people when we consecrate them to the Lord for service, at that rock. Prostrate yourself on that rock. Gush to God on that rock. Exude something out from your inmost depths unto the Father at that rock. That's the place of consecration and sacrifice. And it's in the garden. So let me not miss the point. Do you know what the word agony means in the dictionary? To contend. I was so surprised that the word agon in Greek, the root, means to contend or to contest something. Are you in a contest? Or do you think that the issue is already all solved and the ball game is all over and it just requires now a last shout? Oh, you dear, naive saints. We're in a contest, a struggle, a contention against uttermost odds for the issue of what is going to prevail over this creation. Darkness or light. Which prince is going to prevail? What wisdom will go forth to mankind in this earth and the nations is the struggle to the end that there was in the beginning right to the end, the contention between darkness and light, the prince of darkness, the prince of light, and ultimate combat and contest, which is an agony. How dare we then be at our ease and be at our leisure and lean back as if it's all done and made and all we've got to do is learn a few phrases. There's a struggle, and it's a struggle for Singapore as to what wisdom is going to prevail here because the other guys seem to have all the marbles right now. And if you'll allow my impression as a New Yorker and living in Minnesota in the rustic far reaches and having traveled widely in the world, I would say Singapore is one of the uttermost cities of beauty to be found in the world. It's tranquil. There's a remarkable sense of order and beauty and cleanliness. It gleams with brand-new cars. I'm looking in vain for one dented, rusted old heap, and I can't find it. I don't have to look far in Minnesota or New York. They're everywhere. I myself own one, but try and find one in Singapore. No way. Everything is new. Everything is up to date. Everything has a luster. This is a smart, snapping little society here, and this is a garden. And though not the least things to be contested and contended against is the garden itself because it impedes communion with God, and it says in its silence and in its prosperity and lush quality of life that this is what's real. This is what really counts, what you see, what's visible, what men are striving for and owning and possessing and enjoying. This is life. This is reality. Oh, yeah? What about eternity? What about the glory of God? What about the kingdom of God? What about the things that Paul saw that were invisible and were the eternal weight of glory? Well, that's just a bunch of hokum. That's just religion. This that you see that is everywhere about you and for which men clamor and pant, this is reality. You need to fight against the garden. Not only do you need to struggle and contend against darkness to reach God in prayer, but you need to know that the very environment in which you live is seeking to snuff out your spirituality and have you succumb to a lie that what it represents constitutes reality and the things that men ought to seek and give their energy and life to obtain. I said to you, dear pastor, just a comment in passing, I said your function as a preacher is to introduce and to persuade your hearers about an alternative society. And if you succeed, and it's going to be a struggle because everything will oppose it, you will have turned your hearers into pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth. And who wants to be a stranger? Especially you young guys. You want to be accepted. You want to be popular. You want to be a Christian and be liked also and show that you're one of the boys. That because you're a Christian doesn't mean you're not fun anymore. Got the idea? Who wants to be a pilgrim and a stranger in the earth? It's a remarkable anomaly. Excuse my language, it ought to be on the screen. Anomaly. Contradiction. That I'm a stranger and a sojourner in the world and yet I am comfortable in any and every place to which God brings me. Not only am I getting by in those places, I feel like a giant amongst pygmies. I stride the earth as one who is joined with its creator and its soon coming king. I'm not intimidated by skyscrapers. I know they will crumble. Gibraltar will crumble. Some of the old songs are really great. And I've got to fight against it because they want to seduce my soul. So, you guys have a special problem in Singapore that we don't have to face in New York or Minnesota, but we have our own problems. Your problem is the beauty of your garden, the seductive power of your environment, the false wisdom that has been promulgated as being truth and reality. The thing for which you've been prepared in school is to fit yourself and to function in its economy and to obtain its rewards and to eclipse and make marginal your Christianity as if that's only a Sunday supplement, which for too many of you it is, because where were you last night and the night before? Okay. Jesus was groaning and agonizing, sweating drops of blood. I love that, that the first bleeding and the first drops that constitute our atonement were not extracted by men through violence, but freely and voluntarily given. What's the word that I used before? Extracted or extruded out from the agonizing of his deeps calling unto deep. It required and expressed itself in blood. And I wonder what it means in the New Testament when it says, have you resisted sin unto blood? Have you ever tasted blood? Not physically, but something comes up in your mouth through some kind of vexation or a remarkable challenge of a moral kind where you can taste it. I've seen a lady, I happen to be married to her, who was so confronted by issues of truth of a moral kind, I dare not make this confession public, that unable to face the requirement of it, having so long hidden that she hemorrhaged and bled for about a week internally. There's something about blood. Jesus sweating great drops of blood was not some kind of cosmetic, skin-deep thing. It came out from the gut. So as much as I have, what's the word, that lampooned you and pricked you and prodded you, I have to confess I'm jealous for what you have when I see you before the Lord at the end of a service, weeping. I think, is that Chinese, Lord? Is there something with these people that they have racially? Because I love what I'm seeing. There's a depth there. Their drops are falling to the floor. This is an earnest crying. This is not some superficial saccharine thing. This is deep. This is out of the heart. And here I am reproving them and reprimanding them and spoofing them for their shallowness. Keep it up. Let it deepen. So the issue of true prayer is the issue of true faith. It's the measure of it. Should it become weak, inept, vain, so equally will be our faith, our witness, our testimony. P.T. Forsyth, whom I'm commending to all the church, an English writer, saint, pastor, theologian at the turn of the century, who is hardly known and deserves to be widely known, he says, all forms and views of religion have their test in prayer. Lose the importunity of prayer. You know what it means to be importune? It's to not stop. It's not to pray once or twice and give up. Jesus prayed three times the same prayer, having to go back to his disciples to find them sleeping. He went back again to that rock and prostrated himself and cried out again, let this cup pass if it can. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. He prayed the same prayer three times and the father was not bored by the monotony and the repetition. It's a prayer that needed to be repeated in agony because he knew what he would face in drinking that cup. So to importune God is that widow woman or the man who had company and needed three loaves of bread and had to wake up his neighbor, or the judge who said, no, it's too late. He didn't stop. Jacob didn't stop. I will not let you go except you bless me. I don't care how long it takes, how long I must wrestle, how long I must agonize in physical contest with very God himself. I will not let you go except you bless me. I'm tired of being Jacob. I'm tired of being a schemer, wheeler, dealer, a supplant, a living by my wit, and it's catching up with me. I worked for seven years for a wife and I find myself in bed with the wrong woman and got to start all over again. I can't live by my wit. I need to come into the relationship that my fathers knew, Abraham and Isaac. You're the God of my fathers, but you're not yet my God. We've not yet touched. We've not yet been joined in spirit. I need something from you, and I'm wrestling to obtain it. If there's anything that could be said for Jacob, it's this. Oh, I love that spirit that contends, that will not cease at the statement of the former heavyweight champion, Ali. What's his name? Muhammad Ali. In his last heavyweight fight, title fight, I've got it written in the back of my watchman's knees, Love not the world. Why there? Because in the last chapter of that book, Nii says something like this. It's one thing to pray for evangelical work and for witness and the various other activities we have as Christians, but when it comes to contending against the powers, that kind of prayer will not suffice. There, something of the uttermost is required, or your conduct and activity is vain. That's what Jesus was combating in the garden, the powers, and they are our mortal enemy as well, disarmed but yet active, and their final defeat will come through us, and the final release for Asia and China, Singapore, will come when they are dealt with from prevailing in the air over these cities and countries, uncontested and uncontended against, because the only agency that God has given that could both recognize them as evil and contend against them in the realm of spirit and triumph is the church. But what a church. It's a church that agonizes. It sweats blood. It will not let him go except he bless us. God forbid that prayer should be reduced to formula, to method, because how long after that will worship equally be reduced, and how long after that does the faith itself just become consensus and acquiescence to certain doctrinal truths? How long after that do we become totally apostate and actually find ourselves opposing God and killing men like me and claim that you're doing God a service? It doesn't happen in one fell swoop overnight. It's a process of neglect, of erosion, of allowing the most holy and apostolic church to become a commonplace, a burp, a peep, a kind of a cheap reflex action prayer and choruses. And when that happened in Germany, Nazism came in with a bang. When the land of Luther had reduced its faith to a kind of mechanical formula of middle-class piety and lost its virility and power and connection with God, in that spiritual void came the powers of evil to completely take over the most civilized, civil, philosophical, and ethical culture of nation in the world and make it an engine for the devastation of civilization and the elimination of the Jewish race. You need to read your history aright and guard your faith and keep it and grow in it and deepen in it and know what prayer means in vital contending against darkness and against the very God in itself. And to pray not only singly, solely and individually, but corporately in a circle and with others face-to-face in intense wrestling against the powers of darkness and evil which Jesus stripped but did not eliminate. He left them around for you to finish them off in the realm of spirit. Is it time to conclude? Stay around for round two. It will be a little different but it will be related. So let me just finish with P.T. Forsythe. Are you going to go find his books? You can find little booklets. One is called The Soul of Prayer. I have it with me in my briefcase. Treat yourself to a copy of The Soul of Prayer by P.T. Forsythe. Hold it up, Simon. See, it's come out in this inexpensive edition. It's not going to be easy to read. You'll have to study it. You'll have to be strained and stretched in understanding the sublime mind and heart and depth of this saint whom I'm now quoting. All forms and views of religion have their test in prayer. Lose the importunity of prayer. It's insistent, driving, Jacob quality, and it's reduced to soliloquy. What's that, Art? That's talking to yourself. Thinking that you're talking to God. You're only talking to yourself and justifying yourself. God forbid. It loses the real conflict of will. You lose the habit of wrestling and the hope of prevailing with God and make it mere walking with God and friendly talk. Precious as that is, you tend to lose the reality of prayer at last. And if I can add my little cat's-ass punctuation, not only do you lose the reality of prayer. You ready for this? You lose reality. Dum-da-dum-dum. And then you come to believe that Singapore is real, that the garden is what it's all about because you've lost reality and you're open, therefore, to the seduction which is so compelling. You need to contend for the faith once and for all, given the saints, which is more than just a body of doctrines to believe. It's a way. It's a mode. It's a reality that is reality. Though it's eternal and invisible, it will one day prevail in the earth because of such a church. And when it's time for us to move from this earthly abode and into the heavenly, it will be no sweat. It will be a minor transition because we are already living in the heavenly reality here. Contend for it. Believe for it. Find it. Maintain it. Because if we're not real, what are we? If we're not real, what are we as the church? A culture? An entertainment? A Sunday diversion? The world is dying, you saints, for reality, don't you know? That's why men are drugging themselves and shooting needles and everything that they can do to find some kind of a thing that supposedly gives them a sense of being and of reality. And, of course, it's a delusion. They'll not find it. Their condition will worsen. Reality is God. Reality is heaven. Reality are the things that are invisible, unseen, and eternal. Reality is the moral truth of God and righteousness. Don't lose reality. Find it. Maintain it. The loss of reality begins with the loss of prayer. In principle, you make it mere conversation instead of the soul's great action. If you can write one sentence like that, you can retire. You make prayer mere conversation instead of the soul's great action. Are you jealous over your soul? Your inward being? The truth of yourself as a distinct personality that God has created and shaped and formed for calling and destiny? Are you jealous over your soul? Or are you a non-entity? You're one of many. You're in the faceless masses, even as Christians. To be jealous for your soul is to be able to express the soul's great actions, which is prayer, which is service, which is true witness, which is extending yourself for the Jew in the hour of their greatest extremity, when no one else will have a thing to do with them because they'll have no beauty that any should desire them, and when they'll be knocked down and out and rolling in their own blood, looking like a beat-up Christ at the cross and being scorned and expelled, and you are there. God has brought you there or brought them to you, and you stretch forth your hand to lift them up, to wipe their brow, to take the blood out from their eyes and wipe their face and give them water and hug them and embrace them in love. It's nothing less to them than the revelation of God. That's how I got saved, you dear saints, former Marxist. I got saved because I saw God in Gentiles. I saw the light to lighten the Gentiles as being also the glory of the people Israel. I didn't know that we had such a glory until I saw the light of that glory that lightens the Gentiles. Do you understand? There's nothing more powerful for Jewish consideration than the light of their God and his glory in a Gentile face where we least expect to find it, especially the face that is looking down on us with compassion and mercy and wanting to pick us up and clean us up and feed us and comfort us and tell us why it is that we're suffering what we are but that your God will vindicate you and he'll restore you to Zion. In order for you to do that, you know what doing that is? It's expressing the cross because for you to bend down and extend yourself, you might get detected and caught because there will be spies by the government and other agencies looking for those who befriend Jews and see to that they go to the concentration camps with them and the Jew knows that and when he sees you extending yourself to express mercy and love when all the way else they're hated, what they're seeing is God because your action and conduct is in the spirit of the cross. It's giving for another without any thought of the consequence for yourself which will likely mean peril and suffering, imprisonment or death. That's the cross and they'll see it through you and as I said last night, to see the cross is to see God for nothing more profoundly reveals him than that cross and if your prayers fail and become minimal and be turned only to a little conventional faith to assent to the correct doctrines if you lose the power of the cross and of the soul how shall you be to my people what you ought which is the whole reason for your coming into the kingdom because he'll be glorified by their restoration and he'll be the king who will come to rule over them and all nations through them. It all starts with prayer. You know when it started for me this morning? 4 a.m. not 3.59 or 4.01 I went to bed from the service last night I thought I would read a little study maybe the Lord wants to quicken something for today I tried, my eyes closed in the first I put it down I shut the light I was out without knowing what today's message would be could you go to sleep like that? and 4 a.m. my eyes opened I quickly looked at the clock, exactly 4 and from 4 o'clock on it has been nothing but the Lord in prayer, in prostration in communion with another brother and actually taking the body and the blood the bread and the wine to be infused afresh with the life and the vitality of God to serve you today in that power and to find the inspiration and mind of the Lord that he wants to express and then to speak of believing that this is his will huh? this is the faith saints I'm just a layman thank you Lord, precious God oh holy one the privilege of prayer save it from mere religiosity mere obligation to some deity who's up there whom we hardly know and don't know as we ought and think that we can pacify him with a little passal of words of a little unctuous formula and then go about our business, we've done our duty Lord, we don't know you as we ought we don't worship you as we ought we don't adore you as we ought we're not praying to you as we ought as the God who deserves not just to hear our petitions but to hear our communion that we'd love to be in your presence and wait upon you and give you the day and confess afresh that without you we can do nothing that we're nothing but weakness and frailty and dust, my God whose frames you know and how do we dare stand before your people in one of the most cherished churches and bodies and fellowships on the face of the earth and speak to them appropriately on a final day what wisdom what human determination can ever lead us to select a word that is right but to pray to believe and to have something formed and grow in our hearts and thought about Gethsemane the olive press the drops of blood the first bleeding was not compelled, it was freely given it was voluntary, it was extruded through the excruciating prayer that would not let the father go that knew that there was a cup that had to be quaffed while his disciples slept who were soon to betray him my God my God, I bless this church these young people, Lord put something in their souls infuse something, the sense of yourself that cannot be satisfied with a little cheapy prayer that are willing to wait until they learn that there's a difference between their prayers and the prayers that God himself will give to pray to pray God's prayers is such an exquisite treat and most of us have never known it we've just muttered our own little formula we've not waited long enough we've not believed deeply enough for the prayers of the God which is true prayer so Lord help us, precious God for the statement of our prayer is the statement of our faith and the statement of our faith is the statement of the church come my God bring us to that desired place that you demonstrated in your own life and suffering which was the cross from the beginning even before you ascended it and we thank you and give you praise for the privilege of being joined to such a God as you are hear our prayer even now Lord, even where we sit that where we tell you we're not satisfied with ourselves as we are in you we're not satisfied with the measure that we have that we want to be like Jacob of old and we'll not let you go except that you bless us and your strange blessing is to touch us in the socket of our thighs and to cripple us and make us lame that hereafter we'll walk with a limp we'll be conspicuous, we'll be a crippled people but to be weakened is to be strengthened by the Most High and we're willing my God for that strange blessing that leaves us lame because it's the lame who take the prey so we bless you Lord come and converse with your children right in their seats, they're talking to you right now, hear them my God, their precious young hearts who have hardly been able to follow this strange Jewish man but their spirits have been stirred they know that this is reality he's talking about something deep that I need to know and to appropriate meet them Lord, the time is short, the hours are urgent, the stakes are great, there's not a luxury for them to take their time to grow up and come to maturity, something is being required early and now sainthood sonship authority, stature weight in God, true prayer true service, true worship truth for Jesus sake, whose name we pray