Today we're talking about the Power of Prayer and let's just go to the Lord in prayer right now. Our most kind heavenly Father, thank you so much for Your love and Your goodness to us. Lord, I thank You for the privilege of prayer. And, Lord, I thank you for the privilege of being here today to worship. I'm asking for an outpouring of Your Holy Spirit here today, Lord, that you would fill each one of us with a burning desire to get to know You better and to walk closer to You. In Jesus' name, Amen.
You know, prayer is a privilege, isn't it. Every time we can go to the Lord in prayer, it's quite a privilege. But the power of prayer is always God's isn't it. I think we get in trouble sometimes when we try to do the work of the Holy Spirit. I know there are many times in my life that I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, but I was not really listening. I really wasn't letting God into my prayers. I was praying just hoping my prayers would be answered. I wasn't praying with faith that my prayers would be answered. I wasn't praying with power. You know, there's a difference. There's a difference when we are praying and we're really pleading with the Lord. God knows our hearts, doesn't He. He knows when we go to Him in prayer. He knows when we are praying just remotely. Have you ever prayed remotely? You're tired at the end of the day and it's 'Oh, dear heavenly Father, Be with Mom, be with Dad. Bless you kids,' you know. You know, go through the whole routine. 'Be with grandpa and grandma and all. Forgive me my sins, Amen.'
God knows when you're praying. God knows when you're really talking to Him. God knows when you're really communicating with Him. And it makes a huge difference in your walk with Jesus in your prayer life. You show me someone that is praying continuously and I'll show you someone who is walking with Jesus.
I was speaking a couple weeks ago for a women's retreat in North Carolina and I was speaking on the power of prayer. A lady raised her hand midway in the seminar and she goes," You know what? I read your book and it sounds like you pray about everything. How many times a day do you pray?" I said, "All day long." She was like, 'You pray all day long?' "Sure, I do."
You know, if I'm going down the road 'You know, I can't find this address. Where am I supposed to go?' You know what? He'll always show me. I'll be saying, 'Lord, You know, I don't know what to fix for dinner tonight. I would really like to do something really special for my husband tonight. I don't have a clue what he has a taste for. Lord, what can I do? What should I fix for supper?' You know, God cares about the little things.
'Lord, I really want to witness for You today. Would You use me in a special way, Lord? Can You put somebody in my path today that I can be a witness to.' You know, He always does. He will never fail you.
I just want you to turn in your Bibles, if you would. In our scripture reading this morning it was in Mark, but I want you to turn to Matthew 7:7. It says, "Ask, and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, he door will be opened.
Now, turn over to Mark. One more time I want to read our scripture reading today: Mark 11:24. "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." I hope you have brought those yellow high-lighters. This is where you're gong to remember to go back to it any time your faith needs a little strength. Go back and read, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received," the key word is believe, " and it will be yours." And if you stand praying and you hold anything against anyone, forgive him so that our Father in heaven may forgive you the thing.
And that's the key word there, too, if we're harboring anything in our hearts against anybody else, can God use us in a special way? Are we going to have that close communication with Him that we want, that close walk with Jesus? We do need to forgive whatever. We need to judge each other less and love each other more, don't we. We need to forgive anyone that has done a wrong for us. And it might a "continually forgiving."
I find that if you let those little hard feelings , you know, pile up. Maybe you've had somebody that comes and they have an encounter with you at church. Maybe it's somebody that did just have a bad day and they've not been thinking and they say something and they just said something to you and they went right on and they're just so busy they didn't realize what they said. You know what? You need to forgive them right then. Just say, "Lord, ask them. Forgive me, Forgive them. Help me to have forgiveness in my heart for them." He'll do it. And you know what? You won't have those harboring bad feelings, will you. It's praying continuously. It's talking to Jesus all day long.
Now, there's one more text I want you to go to. And that's in John 14:14. "You may ask me for anything in My name, and I will do it." Now say that again: "You may ask Me for anything in My name and I will do it." I have kids that write to me all the time and I have a little boy that wrote to me, I get two or three hundred letters a week on average, and the little boy wrote to me and said, "Miss Brenda, I don't believe what you said about God, asking God and he'll answer your prayers because I asked Him for a motorbike and I didn't get one." Do you know, was that in His name? We forget, sometimes when we are praying, it's about the 'Gimme's.' "Gimme this and gimme that." You know. It's not really the most important reason for prayer. It's to get to know Jesus, isn't it? To get to know our heavenly Father.
Now, it's easy for me to get up here and say that, but I want to share with you this morning that, you know, our walk with Jesus grows daily. We ask you every single day to surrender at the cross. Our walk with Him grows daily. Sometimes our faith gets weak. Sometimes, you know, we are not praying, with power.
Last fall I got a call from Danny Shelton, 3ABN President, and he wanted to take Kuzma and I to go down, it was right after the hurricane Katrina happened and wanted us to go down there and write a book. He'd just gone down there with a group from 3ABN and he had heard so many incredible survival stories; answers to prayer. He said, "You've got to get down there to write this. There's too many stories down here that need to be captured right now that need to be in a book." I was already on a trip, I had my plane ticket, I was scheduled for a 3ABN rally and I already had my ticket, so, I said, "Well, I've already got these tickets. You're not going to get your money back. Do you still want me to go?" "Yes, go. Forget Idaho and get down here."
So Kay Kuzma and I drove the nine hours from Knoxville all the way down to Bass Memorial Academy and two hours after we got there, Kay got a call from her daughter that her husband and fallen and they thought he had broken his hip, and she had two hours and she had to turn around and go back. I was going to drive her back and she said, "No, Brenda, somebody's got to get these stories." I had brought a tape recorder so I could interview all those, you know, people and get everything on tape. I wanted to document everything. And so we had prayer, and our pastor drove her the nine hours back, and now I was by myself.
Now when you talk about this... It looked like I was in a war zone. You know, the closer we got to the gulf, I'm telling you, I had never seen anything like it in my whole life. I've been to devastated areas, I've been to Russia several times. I've seen poverty. I've been to the Dominican Republic and seen horrible poverty there. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw down there. I mean when you talk about people that have lost everything, they had lost everything. And you know, I just prayed that God would use me in a special way. I said, "Lord, I don't know why I'm by myself. ... Now, I'm not, Lord. I'm with You." You walk daily. Pray continuously because the devil likes to put those in there.
I'm glad that our walk with Jesus is not about feelings. You know that even if you're feeling bad, isn't it? Because, you know, the devil likes to do that, doesn't he. He can cause hard feelings, too. So, it isn't about that. I can tell you I was nervous. My feelings were that I was nervous. And I was... And so, you know, I said, "Jesus, I'm just going to hold your hand. I don't know where to go. I want You to get me the best stories You can give me. The best stories in the book, Lord. I want you to give them to me. I'll go anywhere You want me to go. I prayed and I prayed. I pleaded with God to use me. I pleaded that He would give me understanding and empathy for these victims down here. "Lord, let me see this through their eyes." I prayed that the first night I got there.
Now, I'm going to tell you a little something about myself and I can see I have about ten minutes. I'm sure glad they gave me a second service to talk to. You're not going to hear the same thing twice, I tell you. I need to finish up in the next half. (We have two services to accommodate our nine hundred members in a sanctuary that holds only four hundred fifty persons.)
I'm going to just share a little something about myself. I'm what you may call a 'high- maintenance lady.' I mean, it takes me two hours to get ready in the morning. It takes me so long to primp and fix my hair, and so that next morning I'm not representing 3ABN and I'm thinking I want to look professional and I was there in my nice designer black dress pants and I had on a blue silk blouse and I got up two hours early to fix my hair and spray every hair in place. And get my make-up on. Now I'm coming out there the day. I've got all my equipment with me, my tape recorder. I've taken typing paper to write people's names on, so I could do mug shot pictures so I'd know who each was, so I'd have a way to identify each person I interviewed. And so I was ready, I thought, for the day.
I went down and I met with Dave Kent there, who was in charge of ACT. He was heading up a disaster relief center there. He said that I could drive with him, and spend the day with him in Waveland. We would group... "Don't take your car. Ride with me. I'll make sure you get the stories. I'll put you with the group that gets stories. We have groups that go out to all these houses. Most of these people don't have cars, so they couldn't get to the disasters. We would load up with supplies, go out to where the people are and get the stories. And I'm praying the whole way.
I get out there and I ride the two-hour drive from the Bass Memorial Academy, and I'm there all looking the professional. I get out there and I'm teamed up with an academy. There were different colleges and academies that were helping to bring the students there to help with the victims and help with the disaster relief. And I got teamed up with this one academy. In the back we had a big trailer filled with supplies that was all loaded up and ready. The guy said, "I've got another nurse that can go with you. You're a nurse so pack some medical supplies. You might as well be out giving out pet massage and fixing up people while you're getting the interviews." I said, "Sure." I was ready for that. And so they had a photographer student from Southern Adventist University that was there and her name was Sonia and she said she'd come along with me to take pictures. So, there was the three of us women and they put us on this group with these academy students. And there was a president, a lady president and her husband was the principal, a man and wife team. And so we took off.
And Andria had been there already for ten days. I had gotten there ten days after she came. She had already been there. She came the day after the hurricane. And so, we didn't know where to go. Our instructions were to go wherever God leads us. I love those instructions, don't you? So I just. We decided to go where Andria suggested.
We went to this really hard-hit area where the water had just covered the homes completely. And so we pulled up this one street and, I don't know how many here have been Ingathering. I don't know if they do that any more. When I was little I always loved to get my Service Vanguard. I was out there Ingathering. You know how they go down the street to every other house and another team takes the ones in between. And you cover the street that way. Anyhow, Andrea and Sonia and I got out and went to the first house. The students went to the next house. And everyone piled out. I left my water in the van and we went and everything was very contaminated and you couldn't touch anything.
We were told just to go into the house and make sure to wear a mask because all the mold was so toxic. And so we went in and it was horrible. It was devastating. The lady poured out her heart to us. They had spent time in their attic and they had to escape through their attic and the roof. They just spent the entire storm on top of the roof. It was horrible. She was crying and I reached over and it was hot: 104 degrees out. It was burning hot. Everything was covered with this mud by flood everywhere. Everything was toxic everywhere. I just put my arms around her and I said, can I pray with you. And we got in a little circle and we prayed. And that lady just cried and cried. After we finished praying she just, tears coming down her face and she said, " I can't believe you even touched me. I'm so stinky and filthy. I haven't had a shower since the hurricane hit." No water. And she did, she was pretty stinky. And I didn't care. I knew she needed love.
We got through a lot. I heard the van motor take off. I didn't think nothing of it. When we got through we said good bye. And we're now walking down the street, Where's the van? It's gone. We looked all around and we looked down the street and it wasn't there. So, now what do we do? "Well, they, like Ingathering, finished this street so they must have gone to the next street." So, we walked all the way down that street and went down, now his was a bad area before the hurricane, so it wasn't a good place to be. So, we went down and we looked and we looked and we looked, For four hours we looked for that van. It was nowhere to be seen. Four hours! I'm praying the entire time. I'm asking God, I'm pleading with Him, "Jesus, please help us find this van!" I said. You know what? We're so hot and we had to go to the bathroom and there was no place to go. We were so thirsty. Our water was on the van. We had our cell-phones, but guess what, no cell-phone coverage, couldn't call anybody. And we were stuck.
And we got to the bottom we went back to where the house was where we first started was and we are on our way top that area, and we heard these dogs barking and a man all of a sudden says, "Hey!! What are you three girls doing out there?" From the back of a shed where there used to be a house, he came crawling out from under there with his big old shotgun. And he said, "What are you three girls doing out here?" We were scared to death. So we told him what we were doing, and he said, "You guys gotta get outa here! We've got pit bulls in there. I hear them. We've been calling the neighborhood guys to shoot 'em and can't get 'em. So you guys had better get outa here. Besides that we've got prisoners around here raping women. I know you're not going to hear about it in the news, but it's happening. There's a lot of prisoners out here. We've already had four women and they don't have any security around here. People have houses, but they can't sleep in the houses, they camp out by the house with no security. You've got to get outa here." Well, we walked a little faster I'll tell you, and we prayed a little more. And we're praying and praying. Are we praying with power? Are we praying with faith? We're scared to death. No, we weren't trusting. And we were just praying and praying.
We got to the first house were we had been and still no van. We looked at each other and we called out to somebody because there stand now in the corner that was passing out sandwiches. We were starving after four hours, 104 degree heat, all that time I had getting ready in the morning, I was just like I got out of a shower. All that hair spray had just glued to my face. I looked like a cyclone had hit me. I was dripping sweat everywhere. It was horrible. And we were so hot, so miserable, no place to sit down, and this guy said, "You gotta get outa here. It's not safe." We said, "No, no. our ride will pick us up." After waiting another hour this guy started flagging cars down and asked, "Can you give these girls a ride back to the disaster area?" I looked down and I was so relieved to see a lady there. We all climbed in. I tell you those seats felt so good, and so did the air-conditioner in the car. You just can't imagine how that felt.
We drove the seven miles back to the disaster relief and I was thinking, 'What are we going to do? What happened to that van? And we drive up, and there's the van. "Oh, " I said, Jesus, thank you that they're okay. I'm sure they got so worried about us. They came back there with a search party. So I walked over and asked, "Have you seen those academy students?" "Oh, yes, They're over at the lunch tent having lunch. So I went over there and I said, "Excuse me, (this part is not in the book). Can I see you for a minute?" Her husband stepped aside and I said, "Were you going to come back and get us?" I've got to give her this: she was honest. She said, "No." "Were you just going to leave us there? Three women out there?" She said, "Yeah, you knew your way back." I said, "You are going to sit here and enjoy your nice cool lunch in the tent with the fans blowing on you while we women are out there hunting around in 104 degree heat?"
"Well, if I did something wrong, I'm sorry."
I don't know about you, but I didn't feel that was a real apology. I knew the Lord and better shut my mouth. So I said, "Lord, please forgive me. Don't let another word come out of my mouth." So I said to her, "It's okay." and I walked away, and I wasn't even hungry now.
I ran out, and who do I run into but Dave Camper, head of ACTS. I just spilled that story right out. I let all that sorrow and woe out to him. It just came piling out and he looked and heard all my story. And you know what he said? Three words to me: "Isn't God Good!" What?? Hadn't he heard one word I said?? Didn't he hear I had been lost, I had been sweaty, I had been scared. I couldn't even go to the bathroom. I was stuck. We were abandoned. We had no security. He cold see I had processed all that in a microsecond. He continued very quickly, "Isn't God good! Brenda, God's hand must really be on this place. Think about it. God put you in a position to really feel what these people are feeling. You had no security, neither did these people. You had no water, neither did these people. You had no place to sit down or get off of this toxic dirt, neither did they." He went down the list. You had no way to keep cool, neither did they." He went down every list and then he said, "Isn't God good?"
Let me tell you what. All that righteous indignation spilled right out of me. I tell you what, I had tears flow down my cheeks. That's the idea, isn't God Good.
Did God answer my prayers? Yes! You know, that if we pray to Jesus is everything going to be right in our lives? Sometimes God has to lead us through the trials to draw closer to Him. Can tell you that I have no ill feelings. They never apologized, but that's okay. Because, you know, I forgave them. I know God used that experience when He helped me write this book. Those stories that He led me to He did it for a reason. Every single street I went down. You think I was in power now, you think I'm praying with power now? The whole trip I was down there, every street I went on, I was like, "Lord, where do you want me to go? Should I go down this street?" "No." "Well, what about this one?" I went from every single time. You know, when you are praying with power, and you really let God use you, He does. I have some of the most incredible stories that are in that book, that God wants in that book. It's amazing to me. One story after another.
One man was breathing through pipe under water, completely buried. One girl was swept out of her house and couldn't swim. She survived for twelve hours in the woods, fighting water moccasins with a bull frog on her head. I mean, incredible stories. I talked with a man last night and had prayer with him on the phone. He sent his wife and son away so that they would be safe away from the hurricane, and he was going to join them. On their way out of town, headed toward Nashville, they were killed in a head-on collision. When he came back from the hurricane he has lost everything. All he has is the slab. Then after he lost everything, someone robbed him, hit him in the head, and left him for dead. He was unconscious and had to be airlifted out. He told me last night, crying on the phone, and want to know if I would pray with him again. He had gotten a bill for $11,000, they're going to make him pay. He doesn't have any money and he is still paying money for... He has no insurance and he still has to pay his mortgage on a home that is no longer there.
You talk about discouraged. These are people that have lost everything, but I told them about how much Jesus loves them. We claim promises, and god works for him. Last night on the phone I cried, but I cried buckets all week long there, because I know Jesus had me down there for a reason, not just to collect the stories for that book, but to share Jesus with them, and to give them the hope of salvation, and give them the hope of Jesus. Like one man told me, all of his house was piled up in front of him; every belonging he had. He looked at me and he said, "It's just stuff." He had lost his wife.
You know, Jesus is coming soon. We want to be close to Him. I've heard people say, "I'm a good person. I've never done anything wrong. I keep the law, I don't even go over the speed limit." You know what they say? "I'm going to go to heaven. I'm a good person." Let me tell you right now, being a good person isn't going to get you to heaven. Having all the church offices that you want to hold in this church isn't going to get you to heaven. You are not going to go to heaven if you do not know Jesus. If you're not praying and having that close communication with Him on a day by day, minute by minute basis, if you're not praying with Jesus all day long, you do not know Jesus as your personal Savior, you're not going to be there. I'm asking you today to make Jesus your best friend. I'm asking you today to pray with power, because when you do, God surely will answer your prayers.
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last updated 13/03/06 by Bob Beckett.