This sermon emphasizes the power of fervent prayer and calling upon God in faith, sharing powerful testimonies of God's miraculous interventions in response to prayer. It encourages believers to take hold of God's promises, to pray with desperation and faith, and to expect God to do the impossible in their lives and the lives of others. The speaker highlights the importance of genuine prayer, not as a religious cliché, but as a lifeline to God and a means to experience His glory and power.

So good to be here, brothers and sisters. I was thinking a while ago when we were breaking bread, I felt like I was in Acts chapter 2, and probably the closest I've ever felt like that. I've never honestly been a part of a home meeting like this, and it's been such a blessing. We've been blessed ever since we got off the plane, really and truly. It's just been a tremendous blessing to be here and to fellowship with brothers and sisters and brothers Sam and Serena. They've treated us way better than we deserve for sure. But we're so grateful for you all. I thought tonight was just going to be a prayer meeting, so we're just going to trust the Holy Spirit to lead us in what He wants to say. Let's just bow our heads and pray again and call upon the Lord. Heavenly Father, we are here because of You. We are here, Lord God, to honor You, to exalt You, to hear from You, Lord. Lord, I confess that I can do absolutely nothing in and of myself. We do not put any confidence in the flesh or in what any man can do, Lord. And I'm so persuaded that I can do nothing apart from You, Jesus. So we call upon You, and we thank You for the other truth that through You, we can do all things. And we thank You, Father, that You have chosen to use the weak things of this world. You've chosen to let Your strength be perfected in our weakness. And so, Father, my desire is just that we would see You tonight, Lord Jesus, and that our ears would be open to hear Your voice and to receive Your promises and our hearts would be stirred, Lord God, that we would lay hold of Your Word and we would believe You and we would obey You and we would receive, Lord, what You want to say to us tonight. Would You just speak, O God. Speak to my heart. Speak to each and every one of our hearts. And let Your name be glorified here tonight in this house and in each one of our lives. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Let's turn to Jeremiah chapter 33. This was a verse that God put on my heart just a couple days ago when we got here. And Jeremiah chapter 33. I want to remind you, brothers and sisters, tonight that the call to pray is not a cliché. Does everybody know what a cliché is? A cliché is something that you just say over and over again, and sometimes from overuse or just saying it without any heart. Saying it but not believing it. You begin to say things, and you can even begin to quote Scripture, but you don't really believe what you're saying. It just becomes an empty cliché. And there's a little phrase we all say oftentimes. We'll say, let's pray. We're faced with a problem. We're faced with a situation. We say, let's pray. Now, that little phrase can be what ushers in the power of God and unleashes the power and presence of God and invites the Lord God to manifest His presence in our midst. Or, it can just become an empty religious cliché that means nothing. I want you to see tonight, when we're opening this book, The Holy Word of God, sometimes we need to be reminded this is the Word of God. We're about to read the words of the One who created the universe. Who created that ocean that I got to see for the first time the other day. The Almighty God. El Shaddai. The One who is beyond compare. These are His words. These are His commands. These are His promises. And we need to lay hold of them that way and take seriously what God says. Now, in Jeremiah 33, we'll read the first three verses. Moreover, the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah a second time, while he was still shut up in the court of the prison, saying, Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it, the Lord is His name. And this is what God says. Call to Me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. Call to Me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. Now, Jeremiah the prophet is in prison. It says here for the second time. He was thrown into prison for preaching the Word of God. Most people don't want to hear from a prophet. Most people don't want to hear Thus saith the Lord. A Word that comes from God that makes them uncomfortable, that convicts them. And that's the reason he was thrown into prison. They didn't want to hear what he had to say. He was prophesying judgment. It was a critical hour. Nobody wanted to hear it. And they throw him in prison. But Jeremiah was in prison. It was a critical hour. He needed a Word from God. Anytime we are in a desperate situation, we're facing a critical hour, we don't know what to do, maybe we can't understand what's going on, can't make sense of something that we're facing, whether it be a trial, a test, a temptation, whatever it may be, we need a Word from the Lord. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God. Jeremiah needed a Word from the Lord. And a Word from the Lord he received. This was it. God says to the prophet, call to Me. Call on Me. Pray. And I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. Now, is that just a verse we memorize and we quote? But we don't lay it to heart? It just becomes a cliche? It has for many people. Many brethren. For many brethren, 2 Chronicles 7.14 has been quoted so many times that it's just used as a cliche. If My people which are called by My name shall humble themselves and pray. We quote it fast. We're not listening. God is making a promise here. God is making a conditional promise here. This is a call to pray. It's a command from God. And God forbid that we make any of His commands just an empty religious cliche. His command is call to Me. Pray. And then we have the promise. I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. Oh, if we would hear that from God. What will happen when God's people pray? And pray in faith? And pray laying hold of the promises of God? You know what will happen? God will answer. He will show us great and mighty things which we do not know. This little phrase, call to Me, in the Hebrew, literally means to cry out. I love the way we have been led to pray and the elders here have led us to pray when we come together to cry out to God. It's important. A lot of times our praying can just be mental prayers. We're just praying to ourselves in our hearts. I suppose there might be a time for that, just quietly in our hearts. But there's also a time when God would have us to call out loud, to cry out to God. The fact is a lot of times we have to be placed in a desperate situation before we will do this. Because most of us oftentimes are too dignified to cry out, to call out humbly and in desperation to God. And I hope it shouldn't take those desperate situations for us to humble ourselves and cry out to God like this, to call out loud. But this is exactly what He's calling us to do. There is something about crying out loud with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with every fiber of your being. Cry out to God in prayer. I'm convinced there are victories in Christ that we will never really enter into apart from crying out to God. I know that's been true in my own life. That there's been things that I've faced in my own life and there was not a breakthrough until I cried out loud to God. I mean, with all that is within you, crying out in prayer to God. So it's a command from God. It's a call to cry out. And then we have not only the command, but the promise. God says, I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. And I felt in my heart just a while ago to share with you maybe some testimonies because it's good for us to give glory to God for what He's done. And when we hear what He's done, it can stir our faith to encourage us and exhort us that hey, God has worked this way in the past. He will work this way again if we will believe Him. So one that comes to mind. Several years ago, I was pastoring a church and it seemed like we were at a place where nothing much was happening. You know, you preach the Word of God, you pray, but it just seemed like we weren't seeing God glorified. God really moving in our midst. And I remember the Spirit of God just putting on my heart that I was grieved because God was not being exalted and glorified for who He is. And so I'm praying, Lord, do something that can only be explained that You did it. Do something to bring glory to Your name. Well, there were two men in this town that everybody talked about. And I overheard one pastor say, a deacon actually saying to this pastor, Leon Alts will never get saved. That's what he said. Another one said to me later on, you are wasting your time witnessing to that man, Leon Alts. He was basically known as the hardest man in town. He was a big mountain of a man. And very belligerent, very arrogant. He and his brother both. And he and his brother hated each other. They had gotten in a fight four years previously to be being there. They hadn't spoken to one another in four years. One time his brother approached me. He got right in my face and started just mocking the church and saying things to try to provoke. And he looked at me and he said, do you realize what a man my size can do to a man your size? That's the kind of guy he was. Leon looked at me one time and began to just tell me about all these hypocrites and just trying to provoke. Called me a coward. This is the kind of man he was. Well, in prayer, the Lord reminded me of promises. Promises like, call to Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. And I remembered his word where he says, God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Do we really believe that? That God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from His way and live? Do we believe that? And so I remember praying and asking God to save this man. And everybody would know that it was God, that only God could do it. And that testimony would bring Him glory and it would spread throughout the town. And I remember the Lord giving us a boldness and I remember announcing one time, I said to the church, I said, when God saves Leon Alts and He will save him, then revival will begin in this town. And we began to pray. And I encouraged the saints to put a little sticky note on the inside of their Bible and to write down at least five or six names of lost sinners that they wanted to see God save. And every one of us, I think, had at the top of the list, Leon Alts. And we began to pray. And it didn't happen overnight, but we kept praying and we kept believing and we kept laying hold of God. We kept crying out to God and interceding for this man. And it was on New Year's Day. I had gone up to my office. I'd walk in there to get something. No one was there because it was a holiday. And I turned around and there's this mountain of a man standing in the doorway, trembling. This was the big, proud Leon Alts. And he's trembling in the doorway. And I looked at him and I almost couldn't believe my eyes. And I said, Leon? He's shaking and trembling. He says, I need help. Never seen this side of him before. A broken man. I said, what's going on? I said, sit down. He said, I'm not sure that I didn't die last night. He had been having heart trouble. In fact, he was scheduled to go into the hospital in just a few days to have heart surgery. He said, I'm not sure I didn't die last night. He said, I turned over on my side. Everything went black. And he was convinced he was dying. He was convinced he was going to go straight to hell. He called out to the Lord at that moment and he said, God, if You will keep me alive till morning to get to that preacher, which he didn't have to get to the preacher, but this was his mindset, to get to that preacher, I'll give my heart to You and I'll serve You for the rest of my life. He shared that with me. I said, Leon, get on your knees. We got on our knees. And I'd shared the Gospel with him already. I said, I'm not going to lead you in a prayer. You cry out to Jesus. And that man cried out for Jesus Christ to save him. And he was gloriously saved. And how do I know he was gloriously saved? He got up off of his knees after a long time of prayer. And I said, Leon, two things. I said, number one, everybody in this town knows who you are. Are you willing to publicly confess Christ that Jesus Christ is Lord and He is now your Savior and what He's done? Are you willing to tell people that out loud? He said, I am. I said, secondly, and before I could say it, he said, I have to go reconcile with my brother. This was huge. Two proud brothers. Nobody could get together. One would walk into the cafe if another one was there. The other one would get up and walk out. They hated each other with a passion. I said, will you do that? He said, I don't have a choice now. I said, will you do that? He said, yes. So he gets up, and he drives straight to his brother's house. Knocks on the door. His brother has company. He almost backed out because his brother had company. And he wanted to do it more in private, but he couldn't. The Lord had called him to do this. He was going to obey. He knocked on the door. His brother's wife came to the door. She called me later and told me the story. She came to the door and couldn't believe her eyes. Leon is outside her door. She panicked. She didn't know what he was going to do. He said, Lona, it's okay. He said, I want to talk to Richard. And Richard comes to the door, bowed up. He said, Richard, Jesus Christ saved my soul. He said, it's real. And he said, I want to tell you I'm sorry, and I want to ask you to forgive me. And those brothers embraced each other. His wife called me weeping. She'd never seen anything like it. Couldn't hardly believe it. God did this. We called upon Him, and He showed us great and mighty things which we couldn't know. Leon's scheduled now to go two or three days later for his heart surgery. Before he does, it was on a Sunday. He goes to one of the local churches in town and walks in during the middle of the service. He stops the pastor and simply asks him if he can testify. The pastor stops. Everybody stands in awe. He stands up and he tells everybody about what Jesus Christ had just done. He leaves that church and goes to another. Three or four churches there in town. He stood and he confessed Christ. This man that others had no hope for of ever being saved. A couple of days later, we go in for his surgery. I sit down next to his wife. His wife shows me the medical records. She shows me a picture. It was actually not his heart. It was the arteries around his heart that were clogged. She's telling me what all they have to do is they take him back to prep him for the surgery. The nurse came back and she said, he's ready. If anybody wants to talk to him before he goes into surgery, you're welcome to go back now, but only two at a time. Leon's wife, who is not a Christian, grabs my arm and says, I think we need to go back. So I went back with her. On our way back, I said, Dorothy, I don't understand everything about healing, but somehow I feel in my heart that God wants to heal your husband completely, and I want to ask you if it's okay to pray over him. She said, sure. So we go back, lay hands upon him, and call upon the Lord. He had said later that he felt that fire went through his entire body. The doctor goes in to do the procedure and can find nothing wrong. Every artery that was clogged was completely cleared. He later says to his wife, we went in, but we did nothing. We could find nothing wrong that was on the echocardiogram, the papers. And he says, I don't understand it. And she, an unbeliever, testifies and says, God healed my husband. This was a miracle. His testimony began to spread throughout the town. And what did it do? It brought God glory. It brought God honor and glory and praise. And I'm telling you, brothers and sisters, the Lord wants us to call upon Him with things today that can only be explained by Him doing it. He wants us to come to Him in faith. He wants us to cry out to Him in faith, believing God. And we could give so many stories. When our son Luke was 12 years old, he was diagnosed with cancer. And it was a blow. When we heard that news from the doctor, it just took the air out of us. And some of you have been in those kind of trials. But when you hear that word, your son has cancer, you're at a place of desperation. And I remember at that time shutting myself in a closed car and crying out to God with all my heart, saying, God, I only know of one of two things You could be saying. You're either saying that You're going to take my son home to be with You, or You're going to heal him for Your glory. And I said to the Lord, just honestly, I said, I will not get through either one of them unless I have a word from You, unless I have a promise from You, unless You give me grace for either one. And the Lord spoke so clearly to us. He immediately spoke to my heart. And He said, this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. And we laid hold of that promise. We laid hold of God's Word. And it didn't happen overnight. He still went through a bone marrow transplant. They brought Him to the very brink of death. They told us that's what they would do before they gave Him my daughter's bone marrow. She donated her marrow. But there were so many times when it looked like it was over, when it looked like it was gone, and again, the Lord would remind us, call upon Me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. And over and over again, the Lord would remind us of His Word and remind us of His promises. And it wasn't just like we went through the book trying to find something to stand. It was something to where you're praying in desperation and the Spirit of God brings to your mind and your heart a promise. And when He does that, we've got to lay hold of His Word. Stand upon His Word. And that's what we did. And there was one time when my wife just woke up out of a dead sleep. And she said, Brian, what's Psalm 41? What's Psalm 41? And I was just waking up. I said, I don't know. I don't remember. Go read it. And she opens it up. And Psalm 41, it's the Lord talking about raising Him up off of His sickbed, sustaining Him on His bed of illness. It was such a clear word, a promise from God. So she laid hold of that. I laid hold of what God said to me. And we prayed and we cried out to God. And we could share so much, but I'll just share this, that there came a time when He was dying. And the head doctor came down and he said, you all need to go ahead and call your family in. And we knew what that meant. And one lung was completely collapsed. The other one was halfway gone. And I remember my daughter and I just falling on our knees and just crying out to God, Lord, You've given us a promise. Lord, You're faithful. You're a covenant-keeping God. And we cried out to God. And from that moment, little by little, the Lord began to just touch Luke and heal him and strengthen him. And it wasn't just very long after that that shaking, He sits up with me helping Him. He puts on His jeans for the first time in I don't know how long. And He steps out of His bed and He begins to walk. And God restored Luke. God answered our cry. Our God is a God who does the impossible. And He wants to do what only He can do. And He wants to do it in our midst. And He wants to do it in our day. God wants to do this. This is what brings Him glory. He's not wanting us to just live dead religious lives. Blurting out empty clichés. Quoting Scriptures we don't really believe. You know, treating prayer as it's just some religious duty. Prayer is our greatest privilege, brothers and sisters. It's like our lifeline to God. We need to look at prayer as the very breath in our lungs. You know, the very life in our bones. This is what connects us to God. Gives us fellowship with our Heavenly Father. And it's so exciting. When you really take this to heart and you hear our sovereign God who is all-powerful and all-knowing and who loves us with an everlasting love, when we hear Him say to us, call to Me. Call to Me and I will answer you. Show you great and mighty things which you do not know. When we listen to Him and take hold of those promises. Some of us, I'm sure, are facing things in our own lives that there is no other answer for. I mean, there is no plan B. If God doesn't come through and if God doesn't move, then there's no hope outside of that. And I want to tell you, our God, there's no such thing as hopelessness with God. He's a God of all power and grace and glory. And I just feel that burning in my heart that the Lord wants to move mightily in our day. He wants to save the lost. He wants to save sinners for whom everybody else gave up on. He said there's no hope for that one. I remember one time, we were laying hold of Scriptures like this. This was at a different place. And praying. And I'll never forget this. It was on a morning. I forget which day it was, but it was early in the morning. And I'd walked down into the building there into the basement of the church. And I was praying. And I wasn't there 15, 20 minutes praying. And the Spirit of the Lord just prompted me to go back upstairs. I didn't know why. I went back upstairs and I walked out the door. And here's this woman getting out of her car, bent over. She looked like death. She looked just in total despair. I said to her, Ma'am, are you okay? No, she says. What had happened in the meantime was she had called my sister-in-law who was at that time she was in the church office and working in the office. The phone rang. This woman was going to commit suicide. And she said she laid on her bed. She had the gun. And there was a phone book right next to the bed. And she called out and she said, God, if you're real, help me. And she said she reached over and she opened the phone book and it opened to the yellow pages. And this church that I was passing at the time, the phone number was right there. And she called the number. And my sister-in-law told her to come up immediately. And so she's coming up while I'm coming up out of the stairs. Now what I didn't know, this woman whose name was Jimmy McDaniels was a practicing witch. She was involved in the occult. And at this point had come to such a place of darkness she was going to commit suicide. I talked to her for a while, preached the Gospel to her. God came upon her, convicted her of her sin. She called out to the Lord. And she was saved. And I shared with her in the book of Acts, I said, Jimmy, we read in the book of Acts where in Ephesus you remember when these sinners were coming to Christ and they were repenting, they were bringing all of their books and all the things that were an abomination to God and they were burning them. I said, Jimmy, you've told me what you're involved in. I don't need to hear any more. We don't need to glorify the evil. But I said, are you serious about repenting? Are you serious about following Jesus? She said, I am. I said, are you willing to clean out your house and everything that is in your house that you've been using for evil, that we throw it away, that we burn it? She said, yes. I called some of the sisters at the church, this old sister in her 80s, Lena Alexander, who was a prayer warrior. I said, Sister, will you go with me to this house? This is a woman. I told her this story. She said, yes. So we went to the house. Every window in the house was covered with black plastic. There was a wooden altar in one room. Knives. Unspeakable evil was taking place in this house. And we went through that house. And Jimmy, we filled up four big black, I think it was four, big black trash bags full of books and all kinds of evil things and took them out of the house and we hauled them out in the country and burned them. But this woman, who from man's perspective would have said, she's gone too far. It's over. The Lord heard our cries. We didn't even know who we were praying for. But God, You said, call upon You and You would answer us and You would show us great and mighty things that we don't know. And here God moves. And He saves this woman and we burned all of the paraphernalia. She's praising God, weeping. We're all praising God. Just rejoicing in the Lord. That woman got a job at the local grocery store. She hadn't worked in years. And I would walk in that grocery store more than once. She would not know I was there. She would be three or four aisles down stalking shelves and you would hear her singing praises such as we sang earlier. Jesus, Lamb of God. And she's stalking shelves, praising the Lord. Everybody almost that would come by, she would tell them about Jesus. She was full of the joy of the Lord. And she was at the point of suicide total darkness and death. We moved from there sometime later. And the last I heard from her, she had called me. She said, Brother Brian, guess where I'm at? I said, where? She said, I moved to Denver, Colorado. I've gotten married. She said, I married a godly man. I said, praise the Lord, Jimmy. Guess what I'm doing? I said, what are you doing? She said, we go out on such and such a day, my husband and I, and we buy all the McDonald's Happy Meals that we can afford. And we go down the streets and we give them to the homeless and we tell them about Jesus. And here's a woman who was a practicing witch that God saved for His glory. He's a great God, brothers and sisters. He's a great and mighty God. And I want to encourage you, in our day, when you can be so taken up with discouragement or things going on around you that you see darkness over and over again. You run into hard cases. Perhaps even like we ran into today. This lady that seemed, in a sense, she was broken. Some brokenness, but she was in no way broken to the point of coming to Christ. Kept resisting the Gospel. But cases like that, you can talk and talk and talk, and it seems like you're getting nowhere. God can come instantly and break someone's heart like that and save them and bring them from death to life. He is able. We're calling upon the One who stood outside a grave and said to a man who'd been dead four days, Lazarus, come forth! And he got up and he came out in grave clothes. And that's revival. When God begins to move in such a way that can only be explained by God. I think it was Adrian Rogers that said, we have no right to be believed so long as we can be explained. God wants us to live and abide in Him in such a way that the unbelieving world looks at us and the only answer they have is their God must be God. Their God must be God. I just am so desirous that Jesus Christ would be glorified in our day, that He would be exalted, that He would be lifted up. I encourage you, brothers and sisters, perhaps just in practical ways, perhaps you want to take a little piece of paper. If you're not already interceding in prayer for somebody, for a lost sinner, take that sticker and put it in your Bible and let it be a reminder. You pray for these souls every day or whatever the needs may be. But to get something that only God can do. Get a God-sized problem. I was thinking not long ago some of those stickers I had kept and some of it was years later. One of them was a girl who had become a prostitute and a meth addict. And God saved that girl. And the last revival meetings that I was preaching at a few months ago, God was using that girl to bring other lost sinners to the evangelism meetings. Incredible! Nobody would have thought it back when we were praying for her. She looked like a lost cause. Crack addict. Meth addict. Prostitute. And God saves her and cleans her up. And now she's bringing them in every night. I was sharing with her from Haggai where he said, go bring in the wood so that my house may be built. I said to her, Devon, that wood is a soul. You go after them. Bring them to Christ. And she was. One day I was saying, Devon, the Lord is using you in this. She said, Brother Brian, I'm just bringing in the wood. One girl came in and she testified. She actually came to Christ one night and then she testified later and she said, I came because I couldn't stand to see Devon crying anymore. She would come in these dope houses and she'd just start crying and telling everybody they need Jesus and begging them to come to Jesus. And if they wouldn't come to Jesus, she said, will you please come to the meeting tonight? Many of them wouldn't. Some of them would. This girl came because she said, I couldn't stand to see her cry anymore. And the Lord saved that girl. So, call upon Me, God says. I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know. Father, we thank You so much for Your holy Word. We thank You for the reminder, Lord, of Your Word. You said the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elijah was just an ordinary man, just like us. But he prayed. He prayed. And it didn't rain. And he prayed again and it rained. Lord, it's amazing what You will do if Your people will simply take hold of Your promise. If My people will, then I will, You say. Lord, I'm asking You to stir our hearts tonight. I'm asking You, Lord God, to put upon our hearts the burden of Your heart. You said the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. Would You show us, Lord, those who fear You, would You show us maybe some glimpse of what You want to do that we may begin to call upon You to do that which You want to do, Lord? Some of us perhaps have sons and daughters who are outside of Christ, who are lost. Oh God, I pray You would stir us up with faith to lay hold of promises and to pray for them until You bring them into Your kingdom. Lord, we see that we desperately need revival today. We desperately need a spiritual awakening. And You're waiting for us. We know You want to send it more than we want to. We want to receive it. But You're waiting for us, Lord, to meet the conditions, to surrender all, to become living sacrifices, to call upon You in prayer and to believe You and take You at Your Word. Lord, we pray for this woman today. Her name was Margaret. We pray, Lord God, that the truth that she heard today will pierce and penetrate her heart even up into the night tonight. We pray, Father, that she would not even be able to sleep. That You would awaken her in the night and cause her to hear and see over and over again, Lord. Open her blind eyes, Lord. Break the hardness of her heart. Reveal Yourself to her, Lord Jesus. And save her soul, we pray. We ask You to save her. We ask You to bring her to the meetings. She knows where the meetings will be Saturday night. And we ask You to save her and bring her that she may testify. Just do something that will bring You glory, oh God. We're not interested in exalting man. We're not interested in talking about man. We're interested in talking about You, Jesus. In exalting You, Jesus. In glorifying You, Lord. And seeing You move mightily in our day. Oh God, pour out upon us a spirit of grace and prayer, supplication, Lord. That we may lay hold of You with fervent prayer and trusting You, God. Standing upon Your promises is my prayer. Thank You for this. And thank You for my precious brothers and sisters here tonight. Thank You for this precious time. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.