When God Answers Prayer

We're going to be coming to the Lord's table in just a little bit, but I want to first have you turn to James, chapter 5. We're going to look at how we can have assurance that God answers prayer. I'm sure all of you have some needs in your life that only God can deal with, and you have to look to Him to answer those, to meet those needs, and answer those prayers, and that's what I want to look at this morning as we're going to the book of James. In James chapter 5, beginning in the middle of verse 16, let me read these few verses. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months, and he prayed again in the sky, poured rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

My brethren, if any among you stray from the truth, and one terms him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the air of his way will save his soul from death, and will cover a multitude of sins. We face a lot of challenges as individuals and as a local church, as we look to the future and the things that we believe that God's calling us to do, we have some big obstacles that we have to get through. We are want to build a building, and we don't have the resources to do that. Somebody was talking this week, they heard a preacher say it was congregation. The good news is that we have all the money we need to build this building, and the bad news is it's still in your bank accounts. Well, I'm not sure that's exactly biblical, but we do need God to do something supernatural for us in this next year to come.

We have all kinds of things that are much bigger than that. We have people that we love and care for that need Christ or desperately. Some of us need God to do certain things in our lives, so we know that only He can do. How can we see God answer our prayer? How do we know that He will answer prayer? We want to look today at this passage in which James tells us specifically the conditions under which God answers prayer. He gets us a very simple formula, and it's not really a formula. It's about how God is and how God works in the lives of His people. According to our text today, there's a way to pray so that God hears answers and acts on our behalf. And notice this in verse 16, the effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.

First of all, let me tell you that means a righteous person. This isn't only nails who can have their prayers answered. It means the effective prayer of a righteous person can accomplish much. The word accomplished is a very powerful word. I want you to pay attention to what He, or understand what He is saying. The root of the word means to be strong, powerful, robust, to be capable to do and accomplish something, to overcome opposition. Some of us have things that we need God to do, but we know there is so we want to do. We want to accomplish for the Kingdom of God, but there are obstacles in the way. Maybe the obstacles are our own inadequacies, our own inability, our lack of knowledge, our lack of skill.

And yet what prayer does is it accomplishes much. That is God moves in such a way that we are able to do what we cannot do on our own because of God's working. This passage is saying that the effective prayer of a righteous man is continually accomplishing much. It's not just that it happens once in a while, but this is the manner in which we live as the people of God. We are people of prayer. One of the basic characteristics of the Christian, the believer is that he prays and God answers prayer. So if we were to translate this very literally, it is referring to the fact that God is continually exerting His power through our prayers in a very forceful way and overcome in the opposition that we face in order to do the work of God and fulfill the purpose of God.

Some of us, we have a brother in South Africa who is there as a missionary that we support, Mark Christopher, and just this past month, he said something come up. One of the supporting churches, because of financial difficulties they are facing, had to drop his support and his support was from this one church with $1,000 a month. Now you can imagine if you were on the other side of the world doing the work of the gospel and you suddenly discovered that your income was cut by $1,000 a month, you might face some great difficulties. And God is the one who has to move into this situation and accomplish what Mark and his wife need him to accomplish. And so as he prays, that's what he's expecting to happen, that God is going to accomplish much.

Notice how this word is used in 1 Peter chapter 4 in reference to your ministry as believers. The Apostle Peter says, who ever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength which God supplies. In other words, all ministry, without exception, when you minister for Jesus Christ, when you exercise the gift that the Spirit has given you in fulfilling the ministry that Christ has called you to, what he wants you to do is to serve by the strength, the power to accomplish what God wants to accomplish that God gives to you. In other words, he doesn't want you to just to see what you can do in your own strength, but he wants you to begin to live in such a way that you can experience God accomplishing through you what you cannot accomplish in and of yourself.

That's the point. And I want to ask you, is this the kind of prayer that we pray? Does this describe our prayer light? Do we see God accomplishing things that we know could not be accomplished unless God were to move in and to act and accomplish what he's called us to? This kind of prayer that James is describing here, he says is characterized by three things. There are three elements to it, three characteristics of the kind of prayer that is powerful, that accomplishes things, that in which God can display His mighty power in accomplishing what He's called us to accomplish. And those things are this. First of all, it is a prayer that releases the power of Almighty God. And I say that based upon this phrase here, it is the effective prayer of a righteous person that accomplishes much.

The effective prayer, the word effective, the Greek word intergal, from which we get our word, energy is a very powerful word. It's a word that Jews continually throughout the New Testament to speak of God's effective power. There are half a dozen words using the New Testament to describe the power of God. And all of them, practically, are words that come over in the English language, for example, the Greek word, dune a mist from which we get our word, dynamite, is a word for power that describes the power of God. But this particular word, intergal, emphasizes the fact that it's an effectual power. And there was God as imposing. It's not just that He's a muscle builder and He poses and we look at Him, we are in awe of His great potential in power, but He actually does something.

He actually accomplishes things. He actually produces divine effects in our life. And so He says this prayer, this kind of prayer that accomplishes much is prayer in which God is displaying His effectual power. He's actually accomplishing things. And when He says in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are given a spiritual gift in verse four by the Spirit, and verse five, Christ gives us a ministry to fulfill, to use that gift fulfilling. And then He says in verse six that the Father produces a variety of effects. That's our honor. That God wants to produce results in your life spiritually, in your ministry. So that's why He's giving you a gift. That's why this set is assigned to a ministry. So the Father can produce divine effects in your life.

So that your life lived here and now is going to have the kind of effects that are going to last for eternity. The Apostle Paul told the Thessalonikans when he wrote to them that when he stood before Christ, that they would be His crown of rejoicing. In other words, He would have God would have accomplished something through Him that was going to last for all eternity. There's a lot of things you are involved in and I'm involved in. There are going to have no lasting effects whatsoever. In fact, we can do things in the church that will have no lasting effects beyond this life and sometimes not beyond this month. But we can be involved in things that are going to last for eternity. We can be involved in things that are going to affect the lives of people and we stand before Christ.

We're going to have people there that will be our crown of rejoicing. The God can use us as instruments to see people come to faith in Jesus Christ, to see God produced effects, God produced results rather than just the best we can do. We can see God act. That's a lot better plan, isn't it? Then simply doing the best we can. If we can live in such a way and relate to God in such a way that we can come to Him in prayer and see Him produce divine effects in our life, it will motivate us to pray. These powerful results that God produces, He says, bring glory to Him. God wants to be glorified in your life. Some Christians live as though the main goal in life is to avoid failure. You know, they do everything they can do to keep from getting put into a position where they're going to look bad or feel bad or fall on their face or fail to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish.

What God wants us to do is have enough confidence in Him that when He calls us to do something, we can trust Him to produce divine effects, powerful results that will be down to His glory and will last for all eternity. We were to translate this whole sentence very literally, it would go like this, the prayer of a righteous man, being continually infused with effectual power is always accomplishing much. Now I think this is an incredibly important principle because it is the design and purpose of the sovereign God who were told in Ephesians, for example, that's not the only place, but in the first chapter of the Ephesians, we were told that God works everything according to His purpose, His plan, His decree.

He has planned to accomplish great things. God says that Jesus was crucified, He was like a lamb when John Simon in the book of Revelation. He said he was as a lamb slain before the foundation of the world. What that meant was that when Christ came into this world and went to the cross and was crucified, it was according to God's plan and His purpose. He was working on His plan and purpose. And some people when they hear that, when they discover that in scripture, that God actually has a plan and a purpose and everything in our lives are part of that plan and purpose and He works things out according to that plan, they think they confuse this with fatalism as though it doesn't matter what you do, God's going to do what He's going to do.

That's not the picture at all. But God tells us that He's going to accomplish His purpose and it is according to His will that He accomplishes purpose through the prayers of His people. In other words, God moves into your life, He burdens your heart, He moves you to pray, and in response to that, in the power of the Spirit, you pray and God answers your prayers, and that's the accomplishes purpose. I had a student asking me at this school of theology last week in a class and teaching through the doctrine of materialism, the doctrine of salvation. And we've been talking about election, God in salvation and he came into me and he said, my wife and I were talking about this the other day and she said if this is true, then we shouldn't pray for that God would save certain people because maybe it's not His will, maybe they're not left, maybe they're not chosen, so we shouldn't pray.

And he said that she was talking to me about my own dad. Maybe it wasn't really the right thing to pray for him to be saved. And I said, well, that's what the Bible calls moronic. That's foolish because God's told us that it is His will, His desire that all men be saved. And we're told to pray according to His desire. And so we pray for people. My mother prayed for my father, His salvation for 20 years, and God answered a prayer. And as I talk with this, I'm Manning somebody who actually God's answered my prayer. I prayed for my dad for 10 years and he came to faith in Christ about six months ago, but I was just wondering if I was right to pray for him. Well, absolutely because that's how God accomplishes His purposes through the prayers of His people.

Are you burdened for someone? Pray. Pray for them and expect that God will use your prayers to accomplish His glorious purposes. Just think of that. When you stand before heaven and you see certain people there that you prayed for, that you sought God to save. You went before the Lord and you took their name before him every day. You made a pact with God. I won't let a day go by without bringing this name before you, that you would save them, deliver them from their sin. And you get to heaven and there they are before the famous seed of Jesus Christ. And they're going to be a glorious day. You can say, I prayed for him. I prayed for him and God answered my prayer. That's the kind of God He is.

He moves you to pray. He answers your prayer and then he rewards you for praying. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. The implications of this, I think, are this. First of all, the power of this kind of praying is the force of Almighty God who is sponsoring and responding to our request. You see, that's what's neat about prayer. I've read these studies too and you've heard all these studies of recent days about how prayer works. You see this on the news. The latest sociological studies prove that prayer actually works and you read the study and it says it's been discovered that if people pray, it doesn't matter if there's a God or not. But if six people pray, some of them will get well.

Isn't that amazing? That is not the biblical teaching of prayer. The reason that prayers get answered is because there is a God who hears his people pray and he responds to our prayers. He sponsors the prayers. He puts the desire in your heart. You respond to that. You respond in faith with that desire and you call upon God and then God answers your prayer. The person, the problem, or the circumstance, and I think you could fidget about everything in your life that you were praying for in one of those categories, a person, a problem or circumstance that is the target of our request becomes the target of God's effectual power. You've got, I know most of you have people in your life that you desperately want to see them come to faith in Jesus Christ and yet you know they're so stubborn and they're so, they're in such a condition that it seems absolutely humanly possible that they could ever bow the knee to Jesus Christ and put faith in Him.

But what this passage tells us is that God will display his mighty power even changing the hearts of people. He saved you, didn't he? And you were hardhearted and stubborn and he saved you. He saves people like us. And so we're called to pray. The righteous man's prayer becomes the channel through which God's almighty energy is released on the problem, the purpose, person of the circumstance. See, in other words, we pray if we want God to be glorified. If all we want to do is to show how much we can accomplish, then we don't pray. It would be, it would be a very easy thing to make people feel guilty when you talk about prayer because most of us have pretty pathetic prayer lives, don't we? Do I hear a name in?

There's more truthful people in this room. It's pretty pathetic, isn't it? How little will we pray? I mean, some people the only time they ever speak to God is over a meal because there are people there and they feel pressure to pray. If they didn't pray, they wouldn't look Christian. Some people, some Christians, I know this because people tell me this, never seek God in a serious way in prayer. And yet this is one of his basic commands to us to pray always without ceasing. Jesus has actually given us a pattern of prayer to follow. It's an important part of the Christian life. We're called to pray. And God wants to display his mighty power not through what you can do on your own, your best intentions.

He wants to use you as a conduit through which he exerts his mighty power in prayer. So a prayer that gets answered is prayer that releases the power of Almighty God. It's not magic, it's not a technique, it's not a formula, it's the kind of prayer that gets to God that touches the living God in a way that he releases his power. Secondly, it is prayer that comes from the heart. He says here, when the word that he uses for prayer, there's about a dozen words in the Bible that describe prayer many different ways. This word is very, is one of the less used words in the New Testament, deacist. And the emphasis of this word when it's used, you know it's used for a purpose. And this word means a deeply felt need.

What James is talking about here is when we commune with, when we come to God and we communicate to him from our heart, when we cry out to him from our heart about something that we feel a deep need for, he says, it will produce results. John Knox, if you were knowing about the life of John Knox, the Scotsman, who was so overwhelmed with the spiritual depravity of Scotland in his day, when priests didn't even own a Bible. There were priests in Scotland in the Catholic Church who didn't even know what the New Testament was. One of the public statements during the Reformation that began to penetrate Scotland, one of the priests that I think God, I've never read the Bible. They were in such spiritual darkness that John Knox began to pray, begin to seek God and he said to God and he communicated to the whole nation, give me Scotland or I die.

See what he's expressing there is a, is a deacist. It is a felt need. It's something that he desires so much that he can't stop praying for. It's something that every time he comes to God, he brings this before the living God. This is the kind of prayer that James is talking about, a cry of the heart, a response to a deep work of the Holy Spirit. In Romans chapter 8 verse 26, it says, we don't know how to pray as we ought to pray and the spirit intercedes with groanings that are too deep for words. You know the groaning of the spirit as it affects us, it will cause us to call out to God, to pray, to have these needs that we see that our eyes are open to because of the work of the spirit and we go to God about it.

We plead with God. The sad things that I ever do is to preach a funeral for an unregionary, unsafe person. A few years ago, I preached a funeral here in town and it was a young girl, 16 years old. In the midst of her wild rebellious life, she was killed in a motorcycle accident. She lived the life of debauchery and rebellion and all of her friends were there. What do you say if you know all like that? And all I could do was preach the gospel. That's enough though, isn't it? And I remember after I finished speaking, they had an urn with her ashes in it up at the front of the church and these kids, as they began to weep and wail and somewhere laying in the aisle of the church and crying and weeping because of the sense of loss this person was gone. 16-year-old girl ushered into eternity with no hope, no hope.

I'd say at times like that, when I talked with her parents, their deep desire that God would have worked in her life. They had a deep desire, but they had not prayed for her by their own confession. It's amazing to me how we can be like this, but there are things in our life, there are people in our life that have such deep and massive needs and yet we never go to the Father. They're not a felt need. And then God brings us into these circumstances when all of a sudden we feel the need and we begin to cry out to God. We begin to learn how to besiege God, to beg God because we feel the need. That's the kind of prayer that James is speaking about. Do you say the presence of God and in the Word of God long enough to feel deeply the significant needs that are in your life and in your family?

Luke chapter 9 verse 38, a man from the crowd shouted out to Jesus, teacher, I beg you, this is the word that James is using, I beg you to look at my son for he was my only son and a spirit seizes him and he suddenly screams and it throws him into a convulsion with forming at the mouth and only with difficulty does it leave him, marling him as it leaves him. Can you imagine your little boy having this kind of condition? He says, I beg your disciples to cast it out and they could not. This is the word that James is using for prayer. It needs to besiege God, the beg God. Is there anything in your life that's so big and needs so great, a spiritual needs so great that you can besiege the living God to meet that need.

It's not how wrong, it's not how repetitious, it's not what language you use. I know some people think the most important thing for them is if they can get some prayer language that's not English, that somehow they could pray more effectively. That's not what the Bible teaches. It's not how repetitious how long what language but the attitude of my heart. It's me experiencing the weight of this need and I take it to the Father and call out to him. There must be a hungry, a first thing, a craving desire to see God act on our behalf. And all of us have gone through those things where we see things that they really are and we are shaken and we are waking up and we realize what the real needs and allies and the life of our family and friends and church really is and we begin to call out to God.

We must exercise our freedom of speech. It says in Hebrews chapter 4, therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. The word with confidence means with freedom of speech. What that means is that I can tell God what I'm really feeling in the depth of my being, I can call out to him. And what about biggest powers? We don't feel anything that deeply. There's nothing that we want from God that we feel that we need from God that would cause us to go to him and besiege him and beg him to answer. Is it because we don't have needs? No. It's because of our perception. It's because of our perspective. We live in a time where we have so much abundance and we don't have a whole lot of felt needs other than psychological needs and you can take four or five drugs.

So I'll help you with that. If you're anxious, they have a drug for anxiety. If you're depressed, they have some drugs for anxiety. I mean for depression. And so people get to thinking, I don't really have anything that I desperately need from God until we begin to come to his word, have our eyes open to the truth, and since what the real needs of our life and the lives of our children, for example, really are. It's not just a graduate from college and have a good career. It's to come to love the living God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. And how do you produce that? Only God can produce that. And so we begin to besiege him and we beg him and we call out to him. The last implication I believe that this is that this intense kind of prayer is work and that's why we don't do it.

I say that because Paul says, in Colossians 2, for I want you to know how great a struggle I have on your behalf and for those who are lay at the sea and for all those who have not personally seen my face. It's time for praying for them. And the word that he uses here are gone from which we get our word agony. He says, I agonize in prayer. I struggle to the point of exhaustion in prayer. You would play like that. God of a burden you with needs that it wades you down so heavy that you couldn't stop praying until you were exhausted. What if our desires are contrary to God? That's one of the problems, isn't it? We don't pray because we don't desire what God desires. And so we pray very little. Well, this is an opportunity to grow.

And let me show you what I mean. It says in Hebrews 5, chapter 5, regarding Jesus experiencing the Garden of Gethsemane. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears. He's talking about his experience in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night that he was arrested and he was about to go to the cross and he was thinking of what it was going to be like to become sin for us and to be cast off by the Father, to be forsaken by the Father. And it says he prayed with loud crying and tears so the one able to save him from death. And he was heard because of his piety. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from the things which he suffered. That is an incredible reality that the God of the universe, the second person of the Trinity, the creator and sustainer of all things learned something in his humanity.

He learned obedience to the things that he suffered. So when my desires don't match up with God, it's an opportunity for me to grow as I seek His face. That's what I need to pray about. If you don't have anything else to pray about, then I would suggest that you pray about your prayer life. And you begin to tell God that you have a huge need in your life because you're so shallow spiritually, you feel no compulsion to bring your needs before him. He said in Luke chapter 22, Luke quotes him as he prays in the Garden, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me yet not mine will, not my desire, but yours be done. In other words, his desire was changed to be the desire of the Father. Or in Psalm 37, the Psalmist says, the light yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

If you don't delight yourself in the Lord, he won't give you the desires of your heart. You know why? Why do you think that's true? You can respond to this. Why do you think that's true? What's going to change when you delight yourself in the Lord? Your desires are going to change, aren't they? And you're going to be desiring the things that God desires. And then he will give you the desires of your heart. Philippians 2.13, for it is God who is at work in you both the desire and to work for His good pleasure. God will begin to produce the kind of desires you want to have for your children, for your spouse, for your life, for your coworkers, for your friends and neighbors. You'll begin to desire the right things for them.

And then you can call on God. So what are you begging God for? What is in your life right now that you could say, like John Knox, give me, or I die? I've got some things like that. And I've broken my commitment to God more than once. When I told him, I will never let a day pass without asking you for this. Do you have anything like that in your life that you want God to do? So this prayer is prayer that releases the palm of Almighty God. It's prayer that comes from the heart. And then finally, it is prayer that's prayed by a righteous person. What does that mean? Well, a righteous man, this expression, using two ways in Scripture. First, it's use of a person who's righteous because of his position.

He stands righteous before God because he's clothed in the righteousness of Christ. When a person comes to faith in Jesus, what the Bible says happens is, it's as though you're given a garment, the garment of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And God puts that upon you and you stand before God as perfectly and absolutely righteous. You couldn't get any more righteous in the eyes of God than that. That's what justification is. The biblical or justification means that the judge looks at you and he declares you to be absolutely righteous. He accepts you as righteous. He treats you as righteous. That's called positional righteousness. Every Christian is the same. The most mature, the most immature.

Every person who has rested their faith in Jesus Christ is absolutely totally righteous. There are none that's more righteous than others in their standing before God. It doesn't matter if you know just a teeny-weeny bed about the gospel, but you have put faith in Christ and you have been born again. You are as righteous as the most mature Christian on the face of the earth in your standing before God. And that's what Seventh Corinthians 5 says, that we might be the righteousness of God in Him, clothed in Him. But there's another way this term is used. It is a person who is righteous in their practice. Suppression who lives righteously, they live an obedience to God. That is, they live the kind of life where their hearts continually being purified.

And they are in fellowship with God and they practice righteousness. They will ban them. They live a life of obedience. Not perfect obedience. They stumble and fall and have to confess their sin. But they live a life of righteousness. They live a life of obedience. They are committed to live in obedience to God. This is the kind of man that James is speaking about. This is the emphasis of his book for us to live righteously before God. And so when he says the prayer of a righteous man, and he gives us an example in the person of Elijah, he's talking about the person who lives in obedience to God. Why is that so important? Which prayer is God going to answer? The desire of an enemy or the desire of a son?

Well, obviously. In Psalm 66, 18, David, a believer who knew he was righteous in the eyes of God, said, if I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear. Because when I pray with wickedness in my heart, my requests are going to be the requests of an enemy. John 157, Jesus said, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, his words abiding and you mean you're looting an obedience to his words. They have power over your life. Somebody says, hey, let's go do this. And you say, I can't. Why? Because I would disciple of Jesus Christ. And I've got obey Christ. Even if it means I'm not popular in your eyes. Even if it means I'm rejected by people, I've got obey Christ. He's my master and Lord.

And Jesus said, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish in that condition and it will be done for you. Those are, that's a pretty powerful promise, isn't it? If you abide in him and his words are abiding in you, if you're walking an obedience to him, you're seeking his will and his glory and his purpose and his righteousness and his kingdom. He says, ask whatever you wish. Do you do all yourself in the world? He'll give you the desires of your heart because you'll produce desires in you that he wants to answer and he wants to fulfill. There's an example for us to follow here in this text. It's Elijah. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Now that's good news, isn't it?

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Now if your person is easily depressed, Elijah was like you. He got so depressed one time, he was down under a boom tree and he sat there and he said, okay, I've had enough. Just kill me. You ever done that? You've asked God just to take your life because you're just sick and tired of the whole thing. People aren't cooperating with you and you're just too holy for this age and you want out of here. That's how Elijah was. Now that maybe you have maybe you're a person who's easily overcome with cowardice and spiritual things. Maybe you want to be a witness, but every time you start to get close, you start stuttering and you just can't bring yourself to be bold.

Elijah could be like that. Jezebel said to him after his greatest act of victory over the prophets of Bale, Jezebel sins him, a message and says, I am going to kill you. I'm going to do away with you and Elijah runs south. He gets out of the country because he's so afraid of this woman. Elijah lived in a time very significant in Israel in the northern kingdom. He was a prophet of God. His mother named him Elijah because God told her to and Elijah means Yahweh is my God. Now I have special significance because the kings of Israel during his life, Henry and then Ahab were both ungodly idolaters. There were kings over Israel that they weren't worshipers of the God of Israel. They worship idols along with the God of Israel.

In fact, Ahab, who reigned, who was the son of Ahmah, reigned much longer than his father, and he was a politician and he was a smart politician. What he did was he married a powerful woman. You see, that's one of the keys to being successful in politics. Mary a powerful woman. So he married a powerful woman named Jezebel. She was a kingly descent and she was an idolater. She was a worshiper of Baal. That is the worshiper of minigods, minigodels. And what she heard goal was to bring in a whole new program in Israel. She had a program that she put forth and it was a program to convert the nation of Israel to worshippers of Baal. And you remember the great challenge of Elijah's life when he met the 450 prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel and he challenged them to a test to see who was the true and living God.

And so he told them to set up an altar and they set up an altar and they put their sacrifice on. He says, now without fire, cause the sacrifice to burn. Call out to your God. And so they begin to cause their God. And Elijah begins to confront them after a while, after a few hours. And they're calling on their God and he says, well, maybe your God's are on vacation. Maybe you should yell a lot of them. Maybe they can't hear you the too far away. Or maybe in the restroom you should yell and scream. And so they yelled and screamed and they cut themselves and they did everything they could think of to get their God to their God to manifest their power. But their God's never did do a thing. And then Elijah puts his, does his altar out of stone to represent the tribes of Israel.

And he puts a sacrifice on it and then he begins to pour water. He puts a trench around it and begins to pour water and more water and more water and more water. He trenches it. He trenches the water. He trenches the sacrifice and it's full of water everywhere. And then he begins to call upon the living God. And the God of Israel caused fire to come out of heaven and consume that sacrifice just like that. Here's this great victory. The Elijah has victorious. But then as soon as this woman hears of it and he and now he that, but he killed all the cloppets of veil, priest of veil, would gets back to Jezebel and Jezebel tells him, sends him a note and says, you've had it. I'm going to get you and he runs.

So he's a man with a nature like ours. God uses him in glorious ways and then he acts like a coward. Can you relate to that? Sometimes you're up. Sometimes you're down. Sometimes you're just victorious as I'll get out. And other times you feel like a total failure in the Christian life. Well, Elijah is the guy you can relate to. He has great strengths and also great weaknesses. But notice how James uses him. He says, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that we're not praying. You know why he did that? Because when they have came to the throne and began to influence the nation to abandon their God, it's so burdened his heart because he loved the God of Israel that he began to pray and he began to seek God and he began to, as you read the word, as you read the law, he saw in the law that God promised.

If this nation ever turns away from me and turns to false idols, I will bring up on them judgment. I will withhold rain from them. And so Elijah says, that's the Word of God. I can pray the Word of God. And so he begins to pray, the Word of God. He begins to pray. God, you said, if we turned to idols that you would withhold the early and late reign, you would withhold rain from us and we would have drought in order for you to show your mighty power over your people. And so he begins to pray and he asks, God, stop the reign. And God stopped the reign. Notice, James says it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months. Amazing thing is that Elijah actually goes into the king's court and announces that it's going to happen.

He prayed and God gave him the assurance, I'm going to answer your prayer. And so Elijah goes right into Ahab's court and says, the God of Israel says it is not going to rain until I say it's going to rain and it did. And God just went upon that nation. And then James goes on, then he prayed again in the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit. He says, here's an example. Here's a man who prayed this kind of prayer, a righteous man who with an effectual prayer that produced much. God bought judgment and the nation's heart was turned. The desire of the son of a son is seen in 1st King 17 when he praised that God would stop the reign. But there was another time that Elijah prayed a little later in 1st King's 19 under the broom tree and he said, I've had enough more.

Take my life. Well, let me live any longer. If anything is, God answered the first prayer in 1st King 17, but he didn't answer the prayer in 1st King's 19. That's why sometimes the answer is your prayers and sometimes he doesn't because sometimes you pray as a son and your heart's burdened for the will of God and the purpose of God. You want to see God's will done. Other times you pray like an enemy. You pray that God would exalt you and give you what you want. As James said in chapter 1, we have not because you have not because you asked not when you asked. You asked him this in order to squand it on your own desires. But if you had the desires of God and you prayed to God for him to do the very thing he wants to do, he says he'll answer your prayer. 1st Peter chapter 312, I love this.

I mean, get this picture. For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and the idea is he's looking everywhere. The eyes are looking all over the earth. His eyes are running through and fro. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears are tinged to their prayers. It's almost like God is stretching his ear out, listening to the prayers of those who are right with him. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. See God wants to answer prayer. You know if the problem in this world is it's not that God's not answering the prayers of righteous people. It's that we aren't praying. We aren't deceiting him. Isn't that the truth? Isn't it true that our biggest problem in this church in regards to prayers we don't pray?

That's basically it. And he says the prayer of the righteous man will avail much. Let us draw near with a sincere heart. In full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. It is Hebrews chapter 10 and in this context a lot of Hebrews is saying work since Jesus has died for sinners like you. You can come continually and you can have your heart cleaned so that you are clean enough to come into the presence of God. You can have your dirty heart cleansed. Not just clean but cleansed. In other words we can be continually having the kind of relationship with God that we can know that he hears our prayers because our delight is in the Lord.

That's what he's calling us to. How should we pray if we want to see supernatural results as individuals and as a local church? First of all pray and keeping with God's will. I have a want from the word of God to pray for unsafe people because first Timothy tells me that God desires all men to be saved. And so I can pray for all kinds of men. I can pray for those that are close to me that are without Christ. I can pray for those that I come in contact with and I get to know and I see they need Christ. I can pray for them and I can pray with confidence. And I've discovered if God burdens me with this desire, if he puts this desire deep within me, I have this great assurance he's going to answer our prayer.

Secondly we're to pray with a sense of urgency. Pray from the heart. Pray with a sense of urgency. The does have moved you then don't expect it to move God. Have you ever had those kind of things where you promised God, oh I really want this so bad. I want you to do this so bad and I'm going to pray for this. I'm going to continue to seek your face as Jesus said. You keep on, you just keep knocking and keep seeking. And three days later you totally forgot. It's just out of mind. It's not even a desire anymore. It doesn't move you then don't expect it to move God. And then he says, pray with an obedient heart. Play with an obedient heart, a cleansed heart. God is free to work in and through an obedient child.

John 15, 7, Jesus says, if you abide in me, my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done. Isn't that a wonderful promise? If you abide in him and his words abide in you. If you're living a life of obedience, if you're living a life as a disciple or responsive, responsive to the living Christ, then you can expect he's going to burden your heart and as you pray he's going to delight in answering your prayer. Jesus told his disciples that the Father delighted in giving his kingdom to his children. I want to tell you something. I believe this with all my heart. God wants to answer your prayers more than you want them answered. That's why we don't pray. It's because we don't want our prayers answered as much as God wants to answer the prayers of his people.

Don't ever think that the reason that you're not saying prayers answered is because God is unwilling to answer the prayers of his people. Don't ever think that. Wake up. Listen to what Jesus said. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desire to your heart. That's his promise. That's great. Our Father, we are grateful for a throne of grace. We're thankful for this open door that Jesus has made for us this way into the very presence of God where we can come and you said that we can speak with boldness with freedom of speech. We can actually share our hearts and be honest and open and transparent about what our desires are. We pray, O Father, that you would teach us to walk with you and to allow the words of Christ to abide within us so that we would have the desires that you long to answer.

I pray that you'd give us a heart to pray for our unsafe families, family members and our friends and neighbors and that you'd give us a heart to pray for effectual and fruitful ministry for the advance of the gospel to see you do mighty things in this world. I pray, Father, you'd help us to come to a place where we are a part of the means by which you accomplish your great purposes. Not only here in Brentwood and East Contra Costa County but throughout the world, we pray that you'd help us to become partners through prayer and the great work of God in Jesus' name. Amen.