Join us for our 10 Days of Prayer where you hear powerful testimonies and answered prayers from the Granite Bay Pastors.

<p>Join us for our 10 Days of Prayer where you hear powerful testimonies and answered prayers from the Granite Bay Pastors.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Granite Bay SDA Church

10 Days of Prayer

Aron Crews

The Animal Game

Shawn Brummund

The Power of the Holy Spirit

Jean Ross

God Will Take Care of You

Jeff Walper

Jesus is So Good to Me

Luccas Rodor

The High Ways of God

Carlos Muñoz

Exceedingly Abundant

This was recorded at the Granite Bay Hilltop SDA Church, located in Granite Bay, California.

Hope you are blessed by the message and that it draws you closer to God.

I'd like to start my testimony here tonight.

I was asked, pastor, as the other pastors were asked, what is 1 of the more outstanding answered prayers that you have and that you can share during our 10 weeks of prayer?

And so I'd like to just open up by looking at 1 of my favorite passages.

It says this, Now it came to pass as he was praying, that is Jesus, in a certain place and when he ceased, that 1 of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.

And so he said to them, when you pray, say, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us day by day our daily bread and forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.' And he said to them, which of you shall have a friend and go to him at midnight and say to him, friend, let me 3 loaves for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey and I have nothing to set before him.

And he will answer from within and say, do not trouble me, the door is now shut, my children are in bed with me, I cannot rise and give to you.

I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is a friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs.

In verse 9 Jesus goes on and says, So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you, and seek and you will knock and it will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives and he who seeks finds and to him who knocks it will be opened.

If a son asks for bread from any father among you will he give him a stone?

Or if he asks for a fish will he give him a serpent instead of a fish?

Or if he asks for an egg will he offer him a scorpion?

If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, How much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?

And so I have to confess, as I was asked to share what is a powerful answer to prayer in your life.

As we look at this passage, we find that Jesus starts by instructing them with a model prayer, the Lord's Prayer, with those key ingredients that are found there.

He goes on and then he says the importance, he teaches us the importance of persistence in our prayers.

Continue to knock, continue to seek, continue to look for those answers as you continue to bring your supplications, your requests before God.

But he's still not finished because then he makes the most important point in his follow-up.

And that most important point is in addition to what he instructs in the Lord's prayer.

And that's the 1 that we don't want to miss out on.

For then he goes out of his way and he says, listen, I have an additional powerful point and ingredient that is intended to be part of your personal prayer life.

And so the most important prayer that God has answered in my life is the prayer that I lift up before Him every morning.

Lord, please baptize me with the Holy Spirit.

Help me to be able to walk with you in a very real way.

Fill my heart that I may be able to know that you are with me." John chapter 3 and verse 3, Jesus tells us that unless you are born again you cannot see the kingdom of God.

And then 2 verses later we find there that he's still not finished.

He says unless 1 is born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

And so Jesus is telling us we need the Holy Spirit for spiritual sight and he tells us we need the Holy Spirit for salvation, don't we?

It's the most important answered prayer that God gave me that first summer when I was turning 21.

I came from a secular, non-religious experience in those first 21 years of my life.

And that summer, when I had my 21st birthday, I began to respond to the Holy Spirit that I never even knew about.

I did not know He was real, but I knew that God was working in my heart in a very real way and He had called me into an experience with Him.

As I responded, as I started attending the church, as I started to pray for the first time in my life, God helped me to become born again.

The fruits of the Spirit poured into my life in a very real way.

And at the same time, that same summer, God brought Denise into my life.

And so the 2 most important lifetime relationships of my life I found during that summer when I turned 21.

And so as you can imagine, that was no small year for me.

Well for the next 4 years, Denise and I, as she was also a very sincere believer, raised in the Lutheran church and traditions and so on, but also was searching for more than what her church was offering her.

And so as we began to search together, we began to wander, as I say, wandering through the desert.

And that desert was modern Christianity and more than not, unfortunately, most of those churches did not fulfill the needs that we were looking for.

And the greatest need that we had was Bible truth.

And so fast forwarding 4 years to the end of that wandering through the desert, it was the fall of 1992.

And in the fall of 1992, Denise and I had just moved back from Toronto.

We were both born and raised in Canada, as many of you know, and if you don't, now you do.

And we had lived in Toronto for 3 years for Denise's education.

She graduated from 1 of the major universities there, and now that she is graduating, we wanted to move back to the west, where our home province of British Columbia and Kelowna, BC was located.

We started living with Denise's parents as they were assisting us in getting established and trying to find those career jobs that we were looking for in the West.

And while all that was happening in the fall of 1992, Denise and I, as we had been over the last 4 years, we were reading the Bible because the Bible was our final authority as far as we were concerned in regards to the Christian religion and religious truth.

And so as we were reading, we came to Revelation 1 3.

And as we came to Revelation 1 3, it says, blessed is he who reads or those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it for the time is near." And so when we looked at that, the implication was very clear.

There is a blessing to those who keep the things that are in it.

Well God would not give us a book which we could not understand and then promise us a blessing if we keep the things that we can't understand.

And so we thought, we're going to claim that by faith.

We're going to read the book of Revelation.

And even though it's 1 of the most difficult Bible books to be able to understand, we're going to read it by faith and claim the promise that God will give us a blessing.

And friends, this is another answered prayer that made a lifetime worth of difference in our lives.

Because as we came to that conclusion, as we came to that movement of faith and began to read the prophecies of Revelation.

I confess when we started to go through it we were more confused than we were finding clarity.

It's a very difficult book, especially if you were more biblical illiterate like I was.

We were reading about the different multi-headed beasts that were coming out of the seas and such.

And Denise is very sensitive to kind of more gruesome or more exaggerated kind of monster imagery and so on.

And so she was literally having nightmares because we were reading it before we went to sleep.

And we had no idea of the symbolism and the application of that symbolism to literal realities as of course as we do now.

But God always honors our acts of faith and especially when it comes to asking for the Holy Spirit, which we had already started to experience in a real way, and wanting to know Bible truth.

God always honors those 2 requests, always.

And he was not falling short in this case as well.

And so we're about halfway through as I said, and then all of a sudden in the mail a handbill comes in.

Amazing Facts Evangelist, Leo Screven, coming to town, he's going to explain Revelation for you.

Well, we never even saw the hand bill before our mother-in-law had saw it first, or my mother-in-law and Denise's mom.

And so she already had been studying with the Seventh-day Adventists off and on for the last couple of years.

We had no idea who the Seventh-day Adventist Church was.

And so she came to us and she goes, you guys have been reading Revelation, haven't you?

And I know that you're struggling with it.

You need to go to this seminar and they will explain the things that you're looking at in Revelation." And so we said, well, okay.

If you've already been exposed and you know that's the truth then we'll go, I said.

But as soon as they start to leave the Bible, if they're not in the Bible the whole time, then we're going to leave.

Denise's dad wasn't so much interested in going.

He was a little bit more stuck on the religious heritage of the Lutheran heritage that he had, good German dad and father-in-law.

And so he wasn't quite as interested in going, and so the 3 of us showed up and we sat in the front row.

As we came to the end of that first meeting, there was 2 things that really amazed me.

Number 1 was the fact that 1 man could say that many words in an hour.

For those of you who have ever been exposed to Leo Screven in years past know exactly what I'm talking about.

He was known as the machine gun preacher.

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Series

10 Days of Prayer

The Power of the Holy Spirit

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Transformed

Only by His Spirit

1h 17m

Mindful of God

36m

A Wonderful Promise

51m

Alpha, Omega, Meet It!

Alpha, Omega, Meet It! Part 3

1h 22m

Personal Encounters with Jesus

4. The Secret Christian: Nicodemus

50m

Gold, White Clothes, Eye Salve Needed Now

1h 1m

A Brand New Spark

44m

The Nativity

02 The Nativity

42m

Testimony of Becoming a Missionary

54m

Our Greatest Need: The Holy Spirit

58m

The Parables

The Grand Banquet

46m

Sound Doctrine