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FAST Missions

Daniel Vis

Power in Prayer

Father in heaven, and so I'm praying, Lord, that as we talk about prayer, that somehow Your Holy Spirit would break through to each of our hearts and just impress upon us again more deeply how indispensable prayer is.

May they be Your words I pray in Jesus' name.

I don't think we really talk about it enough.

Or we talk about it, but I think sometimes it's just not real enough for us.

And so we need to set aside special times of prayer like this week, this upcoming week that we're doing, where we can encourage each other just to redouble our efforts in prayer.

We just need to remind each other this is important.

God is a prayer hearing and a prayer answering God.

There is no limit to His love or His power or His ability to answer our prayers.

We can't always explain how prayer works, but I know that when we pray, things just seem to happen.

Sometimes slow, sometimes they happen quicker than we think.

But the answers come if we would just persevere in prayer.

Many of you have seen God work in your life.

And when we pray for something like revival, which we've been praying about for more than a year now, or for the launch of some ministry like what we're doing with our care groups or our new training team we started this morning, or all the other things we've got planned.

We've got a whole calendar planned for the whole year.

When we're praying for these things, we can be even more sure that God is going to work because we know that revival is the greatest and most urgent of all our needs.

We can pray for that, and we know God's going to send it.

And we can be sure that the formation of small companies that was shown to Ellen White by 1 who cannot err.

So when we pray for that, that God will give us success, we can be 100% confident God is going to answer those prayers.

This is the confidence that we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His will, we know that He hears us.

And if we know that He hears us, we know that we have the petition that we desire of Him.

But you know, prayer is a perplexing topic too.

How does prayer and free will work together?

Especially when we pray for someone else.

How do we pray for someone whose life maybe is not right with God?

Who's bringing their own problems on their own selves?

We do bring problems on ourselves sometimes.

How do we pray when we don't really know what God's will is?

How can we pray in faith that God is going to do something if we're not sure that's His will.

How does prayer fit in with the great controversy which basically, or at least to some extent, says that God allows sin to play itself out so we can see how horrible sin is?

I mean, if we just prayed and God took away all these consequences of sin.

How does that really fit into the whole great controversy issue?

I don't really have answers to all these questions.

And then there's practical questions too.

We don't have time to go into all these this morning.

How can we discern if something really is God's will or not?

Why did God choose this method of communication anyway?

It seems so kind of like one-sided, like we're just talking and just going up.

Or is it not supposed to be one-way communication?

But here's the biggest question, the 1 I do want to talk about today.

It doesn't make sense that we pray as little as we do.

We're told the angels are baffled by the fact we don't pray as much as we do.

And we continue on living defeated, powerless lives.

First thing I just want to point out is the Bible has a lot to say about prayer.

You type in the word prayer, pray, praying, something like that, you'll find over 500 references to prayer in the Bible.

It was certainly an important part of the life of Jesus.

Despite His crowded, busy life, His ministry, He spent extensive time in prayer.

Many early mornings just pleading with God in the quiet before the dawn even rose.

Same thing with the apostles in the early church.

We constantly see them praying and fasting, and praying and fasting, and praying and fasting.

I still remember the first time I flew into Seoul, Korea.

And as I came into the city, I noticed there were these little red neon crosses all over the city.

Everywhere you looked, you'd just see these little red neon crosses.

So I asked the person I was driving with, I said, what are all these little red crosses around here?

He says, well, in Korea, we have little prayer meetings all over the city, everywhere.

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Power in Prayer

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