In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of trusting in God and seeking His will in our prayers. He uses the example of Little Douglas MacArthur and the miraculous rescue of soldiers in the Philippines to illustrate that God's intervention cannot be explained by chance or probability. The speaker also highlights the need for believers to have a strong prayer life, which is based on the Word of God. He encourages listeners to prioritize the work of the Lord and trust God for their future needs, rather than relying on worldly security measures. The sermon emphasizes the power of faith and reliance on God in all aspects of life.

To Psalm 61 for just a verse or two, I'd like to speak tonight on keys to prevailing prayer. And we have an illustration of effective prayer in Psalm 61, the first verses. Psalm 61, verse one, hear my cry, O God, attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee. When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I. Thou hast been a shelter for me and a strong tower from the enemy. I will abide in thy tabernacle forever. I will trust in the covert of thy wings, Selah. Keys to prevailing prayer. The longer I live, the more I believe that the work of God is done more by prayer than in any other way. And God wants us to have effective prayer lives. It's very easy for some of us as Christians to feel, oh well, you pray and you pray and you pray and nothing happens. And it's possible that some get discouraged in their prayer lives. That isn't the way God wants it. God wants our prayer lives to crackle with the supernatural. God wants us to be seeing answers to prayer regularly. He wants us to see miracles taking place, marvelous converging of circumstances that could never take place according to the laws of chance or probability. Is that the kind of a prayer life I have? When did you last see a definite, miraculous answer to prayer? Let's think tonight about some keys to prevailing prayer. Remembering as someone has said that God is more interested in our worship and communion than he is in our service, the heavenly bridegroom is wooing a bride, not hiring a servant. The first key to prevailing prayer, of course, is the person must be a believer. He must be a believer. That is, a person really can't come into the presence of God and claim the promises of God in prayer unless he's in right relationship with the Lord. That doesn't mean that God never answers the prayers of unbelievers. He most certainly does. Not too many years ago, there was a young man spaced out on drugs, living a rather sordid life, reduced to poverty. Actually, he was living in a cave in Palm Springs. And he rather came to the end of himself. And one day he sat in the cave, and he said, Oh, God, if there is a God, reveal yourself to me, or I'm going to take my life. Within 10 minutes, a young fellow stuck his head in the mouth of the cave, saw the cave dweller in there, and said, Hi, mind if I speak to you about Jesus? He did. And the cave dweller trusted, and is in active Christian service today. God does answer the prayers of unbelievers. And if there is a person here tonight unconverted, and you mean business with God, I challenge you to pray that prayer. Oh, God, if there is a God, reveal yourself to me. He will. Augustine was right when he said the man who seeks God has already found him. It's just that easy. But then secondly, the person who's going to have a life of effectual prayer must be abiding in Christ. He must be walking in fellowship with the Lord Jesus. He must be in communion with an ungrieved Holy Spirit. And that means, of course, all sin must be confessed and put away as soon as he is conscious of it in his life. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, shall be done unto you. The thing to do is to be so clear, so near to the heart of Christ that we can sense his heartbeat, and our prayers will be answered. But if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. A third key to effectual prayer is this. The man must pray in faith. He must pray in faith. James, chapter 1, verses 6 through 8. It's a familiar portion, but let's read them. James, chapter 1, verses 6 through 8. Well, verse 5. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally, and outbraideth not, as shall be given him. Let him ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. When we pray, we must believe that God is able and that he is willing. I'm sure many of you heard the story of the Sutherlands hiding in the forest in the Philippines years ago when the Japanese had invaded. They used to have their family prayer there in their forest, and they noticed that the little boy used to pray something. They couldn't get the words, but every night he would be praying something, and they couldn't hear what he was saying. And one night the father said, what is it that you're praying by yourself? You know what he was praying? He was praying that God would send a submarine to rescue them. That's rather remote, isn't it? And when he revealed that, his father, Sandy Sutherland, was conscious of the fact that at that very time, there was a verse of scripture going through his mind, and this was it. Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. Strange coincidence, wasn't it? Strange converging of circumstances. The boy is praying for a submarine, and the father is meditating on the footsteps of God in the great sea. How do you think they were rescued? General Douglas MacArthur sent a submarine, reached them, and took them out of the Philippines. You know, it's hard to explain something like that by the laws of chance or probability, isn't it? You can only stand back and worship in the door and say, it is the Lord. We must come to God and say, faith that he will fulfill his promise. He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Fourth, of course, our prayers must be according to the will of God. 1 John chapter 5, verses 14 and 15. And what that really means is our prayers must be Bible-based, because the general outline of the will of God is given to us in this wonderful book. And the more our prayers are in line with the word of God, the more effectual, the more prevailing they are going to be. So they must be according to the of God. Let's turn to 1 John chapter 5. Just read those two verses in passing. 1 John chapter 5, verses 14 and 15. And this is the confidence that we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us. If we know that he heareth whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him. A fifth key that I find helpful in this whole discussion is this. Our prayers must be sincere. Our prayers must be sincere. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 22. This means I mustn't come to God and ask him to do something that I can do myself. That's not sincerity. That's a form of hypocrisy. If there's some need in Christian work and I can meet it, I ought to meet it, not ask God to meet it. And I shouldn't ask God to do something without being willing that he should use me to do it. Parents shouldn't ask him to send someone else's young people to the mission field. They're not willing that their own children should go. That's not sincerity. Absolutely not sincere. We must be sincere. We have a God who reads our hearts. Our lives are an open book before him. And he knows it when we're coming to him in blood earnestness. He told the disciples to pray the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth laborers into the harvest field, the very next verses he called them. They prayed, they were willing, they got the divine cap on the shoulder. A sixth key to effectual prayer is this. We must persevere in prayer. We must keep on asking, seeking, knocking as long as the burden lasts. Sometimes we pray once, the burden is lifted, we don't have to pray again. All the time we pray 30, 40, sometimes 50 years before the answer comes. But the one key to prevailing prayer that I'd like to emphasize most tonight is this. The best prayer comes from a strong inward necessity. And that's why I read those verses in the psalm. The psalmist was desperate. He was in a tight spot. He was really cast upon the Lord and he prayed and that prayer winged its way to the gates of heaven and brought forth the answer. The best prayer comes from a strong inward necessity. And I'd like to suggest to our hearts tonight that the reason that many of us have dull, listless prayer lives is that we're too well-headed. We really don't have to pray for things that much. We live in a security-conscious society. And we have cushions and crutches and props and pillows and we're braced against almost every conceivable form of loss. We're rich and increased with goods and in need of nothing. And our prayer lives suffer as a result of it. The man who sees God work in mighty supernatural ways is the man who's really cast upon the Lord. You never get to know the Lord as well as when you're in the wilderness. I may have told this story to some of you before, but it bears repeating because it illustrates this. Some years ago, a young fellow who had been overseas serving the Lord came to my little place there in Illinois. He came to discuss a problem that had arisen overseas and spent quite a bit of time with me. And before he left, I just thought I'd do a little probing. And I said to him, Greg, what makes a fellow like you click anyway? What makes you tick? I said, here you are. You've had a good education in this country and you could have the world eating out of your hand and you throw your life away. You go overseas and bury yourself with a bunch of nobodies over there. I said, what's it all about anyway? I was just probing to see what he'd say. And he said, Mr. McDonald, I see that it's very hard to live a life of faith in the United States. You have to put yourself in a position where you have to trust God, where if God fails you, you're sunk. And when you do that, you'll see God work in your life. And when you touch other lives, something will happen for God. Well, I found out what I wanted to know. So I said to him, Greg, you're going to a city here in the Midwest and there's an elder in an assembly in that city who should know what you've told me today about this problem. So I'm going to give you his name and address and ask you to look him up and tell him. So Greg left me. And a couple of weeks later, I got a letter from Los Angeles. It was from Greg. He said, Dear Mr. McDonald, I went to that city in the Midwest. He said, I was only there a few hours. I had appointments. I had meetings. The Lord knows I was yielded to in the subject. I didn't get to see that elder. But he said, the Lord knows I was willing. I wanted to, but it just wasn't possible. Greg was out in California, had two weeks of meetings in Los Angeles. At the end of that time, he boarded a Greyhound bus to come back to the East Coast to go back overseas. When he got on the bus in Los Angeles, it was just a few passengers. They drove on to Riverside, California, bus stop there, and some more passengers started getting on. The bus started filling up. It filled up, filled up, it filled up till there was only one seat. And that was the seat next to Greg Livingston. And he bowed his head and he said, Lord Jesus, lead on some young person that I can witness to for you. They watched the door and a middle-aged man got on. The man came and sat down next to him. He said, Lord, young or old, I have my duty to do for you. So he turned to this man next to him and he said, he began to speak to him about the Lord Jesus. And the man said to him, well, that's a strange thing. He said that you should talk to me about the Lord Jesus. He said, I happen to be a born-again Christian. And Greg said, you are? He said, my name is Greg Livingston. And the man said, my name is? And he gave the name of the elder from that Midwestern assembly. See how that ever happened. What kind of luck brought that about? Well, I'll tell you, this man and his wife have a family. They have a daughter married in Arizona. They took a drive-away car from Chicago to visit their daughter in Arizona. And the drive-away car had to be delivered to Riverside, California. So he dropped his wife off with the family in Arizona, drove the drive-away car to Riverside, California, delivered it, got on the Greyhound bus to go back to Arizona and sat next to Greg Livingston. And really it's wonderful when you think of all the days in the year, all the Greyhound buses in the United States, all the seats on the bus, all the hours in the day, the different schedules. Wasn't it quite remarkable that God should bring two men together on a bus like that? I met that elder three months later and he said, Bill, in all my life, he said nothing has spoken to me as loudly as that, in my Christian life, that God is so interested in us that he would bring us together on a bus like that. And he said, you know what a wonderful time we had from Riverside to Arizona. But remember what Greg said when I met him that day. He said, Mr. McDonald, I see it's very hard to live a life of faith in the United States. You have to put yourself in a position where you have to trust God, where if God fails you, you're sunk. If you do that, there'll be a power in your life. And when you touch other lives, something will happen for God. You say, practically, how would I do that? How would I know this power in my life? I'd like to make a suggestion. God calls us to walk by faith and not by sight. If you see, you can't trust. God wants us to walk by faith. How would I do it? Well, here's a suggestion. Work hard for the supply of your current needs and the needs of your family. Put everything above that in the work of the Lord and trust God for the future. I feel a few nervous breakdowns coming on, don't you? That's the way to do it. You see, we've been so conditioned in the world in which we live. We turn on the radio and we listen to the air and it says, the hopes, the dreams, the better life you've waited for, they're yours today at Citizen Savings. And this has infiltrated our minds. And we say, well, it's only common sense to provide for your future. You see that? And we rob ourselves of a great blessing. Work hard for the supply of your current needs and the needs of your family. Put everything above that in the work of the Lord and trust God for the future. And your prayer life will snap, crackle, and pop. You like it? Let's put it in. Some may have come to the meeting tonight and they may be saying, does it really pay to pray? I mean, I hear McDonald up there on the platform holding it. But does it really pay to pray? I'd like to answer the question by just sharing a few incidents with you. And then you make up your mind at the end of the meeting whether it pays to pray. Two years back, I was going to take a trip around the world with three young fellows. It was a ministry trip. We were going to go with the gospel and the ministry of the word of God. And we had planned our trip. We had bought the tickets through Pan-American, round-the-world tickets. At Easter time, I went up to Calgary, Alberta, and I was speaking at a conference there in the Jubilee Auditorium. And between meetings one day, a brother came to me. He said, Brother McDonald, could you come back next year for the conference? And I said, I'm terribly sorry. I'm going overseas. I won't even be in the country next year. He said to me, you're going to Australia. I said, no, I'm not going to Australia. He said, you must go. There's a man that's never met me before and telling me where to go. He said to me, you must go to Australia. I said, I'm sorry. I said, we're not going to Australia. And he became more adamant and more demonstrative. And I said, look, we bought our Pan-American tickets, and it's on a mileage basis, and they're not booked for Australia. He said to me, if I came to you tomorrow with an envelope, would it make any difference? I said, look, I'm not asking for anything. Australia isn't in our plans. He said, I understand. If I came to you tomorrow with an envelope, I said, all I can say is it would make me pray about it. That's all. I had no leading to go to Australia. The next day after the breaking of bread, he and his wife came and put an envelope in my hand. I put it in my pocket. And that night when I got back to the house where I was staying and opened it, it was the additional fare for a trip to Australia from probably Hong Kong to Australia and then back to the Philippines, something like that. Was that guidance to go to Australia? It wasn't guidance for me. I wanted to know from God that he wanted me to go. I don't like to get on those planes if I don't know that I'm in the will of God. On the Monday after the conference, I spent most of the getting back to Chicago. I had to fly to Winnipeg, down to Minneapolis, to Chicago, changing flights. I didn't get my mail. Tuesday morning, I went down to my mailbox and there was a card in it from a man I had met once in my life. I don't even remember who he was. He just came into my life and went out of my life. I just met him once. I must have told him I was going on a round-the-world trip, period. I got a card in my mail the next day and it said, Dear Brother MacDonald, on this separate cover, I'm sending you a book on prayer by F.J. Hugo, missionary to Mexico. He said, If you've already read it, perhaps you'd like to give it to some brother in Australia. Just one of those seemingly random remarks. If you've already read it, perhaps you'd like to give it to some brother in Australia. I took it from the Lord that he wanted us to go to Australia, and we went. This brother had a special reason for wanting me to go, and apparently it was the will of God. So we go overseas, and these three fellows are really on fire for the Lord, the three that are traveling with me. One day we come to Paris. We have to change railroad station. We miss our train, so they dump all of our baggage in a big pile there, and they get out their guitar and start singing to the glory of God. When you sing, with your guitar, in any of these places, you start drawing young people. That's just what they wanted. They started witnessing to the young people. After we'd been there a couple of hours waiting for our train, a young American fellow came along, and he said, Could I leave my baggage here, while I go and buy my ticket? I tell him, Bill McCarter said to him, Sure, where do you come from? He said, Chicago. Oh, he said, That man over there comes from Chicago, meaning me. So he introduced me. He said, This is Mr. McDonald, Terry Foley. I said, Where do you live, Terry? He told me, and I said, Oh, you know a gospel chapel in the corner of Foster and Nagel in Chicago? He said, Yeah, I live two blocks from it. I said, That's what I thought. So I witnessed to him for a while, and then he said, I think I'd better go and buy my ticket. It was getting kind of warm, and I said to him, Before you go, Terry, I'd like to say something to you. I said, Nothing happens in life by chance, and it was no chance that you and I met here in this station. He said to me, You think you're going to save me in a Paris railroad station? I said, Terry, I couldn't save a mosquito, let alone you, but I think God is speaking to you, and I think you ought to listen. Terry goes and buys his ticket, comes back and gets his luggage, and he drops out of our lives, but he doesn't drop out of our prayer lives. He goes on the prayer list, and he's made the subject of prayer. I'll never see him again. A few years later, I'd been in Ireland, and I had to come back to Chicago very briefly on business, very briefly. I was only in Chicago one Sunday, and I went to the Norwood Chapel, corner of Foster and Nagle. I went to the breaking of bread, and as I was getting up after the breaking of bread and walking to the back of the chapel, a young fellow, Danny Erickson, came to me. He said, Mr. McDonald, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine. He works with me at Bill Gothard's place. He said, This is Terry Foley. I rang a bell, but I couldn't place that name. So I was stalling for time, and I said, Where do you live, Terry? And he told me, but the family had moved in the meantime, so that didn't help me any at all. And then finally the dawn came. Terry Foley. I said to him, Terry, did I ever witness to you, did I ever speak to you about Jesus in a parish railroad station? And he went like that. He recoiled physically. He said, Yes, you did. What had happened? Well, Terry left us, and he went down into Germany, hitchhiking a ride to Vienna. A Volkswagen came along, two fellows and a girl, young life people. They took him into the Volkswagen and drove him all the way to Vienna. They didn't force the gospel down his throat, but they told him about young life, told him about the camps they have there in Colorado in the summer. He got the address of the girl. He came back to the United States, and that summer he decided he'd call the girl. Actually she went out with him. I'm not recommending this, I'm just stating the fact. What I mean is he was unsaved, and she was a believer. But anyway, she didn't cram the gospel down his throat, but she told him about the camp out in Colorado again. That summer he had some free time, and quite apart from her he went out to the camp in Colorado. Nobody particularly pressed the gospel on him, but the last day he was standing alone in the swimming pool. Another fellow came in, shared Christ with him, and Terry Foley was saved in the swimming pool at the young life camp. Went on to Wheaton College, graduated from Wheaton, and as far as I know today is living for the Lord. Does it pay to pray? These people you think they're going to pass out of your lives forever, but they don't. We left there, and we were going down to Italy at one time. We left Geneva. Switzerland was driving down. We had an address of some friends there, had no way of knowing how to reach them. It was dark when we got to Reggio Emilia, and we prayed, Lord, we're so tired, you know, long arduous day, and how would we ever, very few streetlights in Reggio Emilia, how would we ever find this house in the darkness of night? Ray Lynch said, let's pray. We prayed. He said, I'll go across to the tavern there, across the street. He went across the tavern, and he had the address. He said to them, where is this? They said to him, where's your car? And he looked out the window and pointed. They said, you're right in front of the house. So I suppose you could content yourself to think that it just happened that way, but it's a lot easier for me to believe the Lord arranged it. And so we're down there in Rome, Italy, and we go to visit Steve Woods. We did have a short time with him, and we're visiting Steve, and he says, you're going to Czechoslovakia tomorrow, and that's right. We're going behind the curtain tomorrow. He said, do you have any special prayer requests? He said, yes, as a matter of fact. We only have one contact in Czechoslovakia, and we want more. Can we pray that God will raise up other contacts? The only contact we had was a man named Dr. Jan Zeeman. So we prayed, and we parted with Steve Woods. The next day we went to the assembly there. After the meeting, I was being driven through Italian traffic by a young Italian, and that is a saint-producing experience. It's wild. And all of a sudden we're driving through, and this fellow is driving, and all of a sudden he begins to flag the car beside him over to the curb. And I said to myself, what did the poor man do? And so when I recovered my composure, he said to me, this is a missionary I want you to meet. And so we jumped out of the car, there was a missionary, and there was a couple with him. And we met the missionary, and then he introduced us to the couple, but they couldn't speak English. They were a couple from Czechoslovakia. They spoke German, but they couldn't speak English. And so without faltering German and mostly hand signals, they said to us, you're going to Czechoslovakia? Yes, we're going to Czechoslovakia. Do you have any contact there? Yes, Dr. Jan Zeeman. And she said, Dr. Zeeman is dead. Dr. Zeeman had died of a heart attack, so we didn't have any contact. But before we ended, she reached in her purse and brought out their card, their address, and she said, when you come to Czechoslovakia, you come to our house. The day before we had prayed for contact, not knowing that the only contact we had was dead, and God provided in the meantime. But when we were there, we did go to, when we were in Czechoslovakia, we did go to Bruno to visit Mrs. Zeeman, and we expressed our Christian sympathy to her in the recent loss of her husband. And she said, I want to tell you something. She said, when my husband died, she said, I was alone in the house. My daughter was off at a camp. She was counseling at a camp in the mountains. And she said, there was no telephone. I had no way of reaching her. So she said, I fell to my knees. My husband's dead body was there in the house, and I fell to my knees and said, Lord, open up a way for me to get word to my daughter that her father's gone. Very difficult. Very difficult. In the morning, Mrs. Zeeman's front door bell rang. And she went to the door. It was an American woman, a child evangelist and fellowship worker. She said, Mrs. Zeeman, I've come to Czechoslovakia to, I hear that you have some children's camps, and we're making a study of children's camps throughout the world. And she said, I would like to visit the camp. She said, can you tell me anything about it? Can you tell me how to get there? She had a car. And of course, Mrs. Zeeman realized that God had sent his angel. So she told her that her husband had died the night before and that the daughter was at this camp and she wanted the daughter to come home. And when she went to the camp, would she please tell the daughter to come home? So she gave her directions and the woman started off. And after she got approximately close to the camp, she got garbled in her instructions. She couldn't find it. She stopped the car. She saw some people and she asked them, how would she ever get to this camp? And they said, you come with us. You park the car and you come with us. And it was interesting. Instead of taking a road, they traveled across fields and they came to a wooded section. And they're walking through a wooded section and they find a young lady there with some children. They're out on a nature hike. Who do you think it was? It was the Zeeman daughter and she wasn't at the camp. They had left that morning on a nature hike and this woman found her in the woods. What a wonderful God we have. In answer to the prayers of that dear widow in Brno, Czechoslovakia, he guides a child evangelism fellowship worker to the very spot where the daughter is. Effectual, prevailing prayer. Wonderful thing. I went on, we went on there and along the way we stop off in Bangkok, Thailand. And there's a young fellow there serving the Lord named Billy Bray. Not the famous Billy Bray, but perhaps a descendant of his. Billy Bray is there. To make, put bread and butter on the table, he sends articles into Time Magazine and Newsweek and all the rest. Well anyway, he went into a hotel one night for supper and he left his briefcase there and all his personal papers and his checkbook was in it. Now when Billy Bray, whenever he signed his name, he always signed it Billy Bray, Phil 121, for me to live as Christ and to die as gain. Bill Bray, Phil 121. And when he went into a bank one day, the teller said to him, why do you put Phil 121 after your name? He said that's my life motto, for me to live as Christ and to die as gain. And he witnessed to the teller. Well he left his attache case there in this hotel after supper. He forgot it and when he went back it was gone. The waiter had stolen it and the waiter forged a check out of Billy's checkbook and took it down to the bank to cash it. Which teller do you think he went to? Billy was praying in the meantime, you know, that the Lord would get his attache case back. The teller looked at it, writing looked good, signature looked good, but something was missing, Phil 121. God used that and prayer to save Billy Bray over a thousand dollars. Does it really pay to pray? I'll say it pays. It pays. Just one more illustration, we went on to Kathmandu and there we heard how dear brother, so they piled him into a taxi and threw his suitcase in the back and he wears a shoulder bag too with his papers and they threw that in the trunk of the taxi and off they go to the airport. And everything is done in a rush and George rushes out and grabs his suitcase and into the airport and onto the plane he's off to England. He forgot the shoulder bag. It's still in the trunk of the cab. Goodbye forever. No, not goodbye forever. The fellow praying on the plane going to England, he's praying that God will recover that bag from because it has important papers. The next day, one of the fellows Ron Penny starts, he's going to go down to India. So he gets on a bus in Kathmandu and he's going to go down to India. The bus travels a few kilometers and it breaks down. They get out and they try to fix it with a few hairpins. We start off again and it breaks down again. They get out and try to fix it with a few rubber bands, go on, coat hanger, it breaks down again. Ron said, I'm never going to get to India this way and he wasn't far wrong. So he crossed the street and took a bus going back into Kathmandu. He had to fly to India. He took a bus going back into Kathmandu. When he got to the outskirts of Kathmandu, he got out of the bus and grabbed a cab, opened the trunk of the cab to put his bag in. What do you think was there? It shouldn't have been. Out were those drivers and when you think of all the cabs there are in Kathmandu and all the drivers, not a Christian one in the bunch, the bag was there and he answered a prayer. I'll tell you, it's wonderful, isn't it? Somebody has said, faith lifts you to heights that makes reason do thee. That's true and you know that's the kind of a prayer like God wants us to have. I just hope that as we've gone over these little simple illustrations tonight that it'll just make all of us want to go and get on our knees and learn God in a new way, an effectual prevailing prayer. Brother Frank's going to lead us in a closing hymn and then we'll pray. Jesus loves to live. He also suggests that we know particular to rise above flesh and blood. Help us to lay aside every weight and the sin of unbelief that so easily besets us. Help us to shed all the impediments, all the so-called securities that take our reliance off thee, and may our lives be perpetual crises of dependence upon yourself. Lord, we want to have lives that are radioactive and we pray that it might be so in the Savior's worthy name. Amen.