We can't think of a more creative title than that, but I was noticing the acrostic, praying as we should, that's P A W S pause. So, this is our first pause night. But What we're doing tonight is, we're going to be devoting virtually all of the time to prayer, and we've already been praying in the songs that we have been singing, and asking the Lord to speak to us, asking him to teach us tonight. In addition to other things, we will be asking the Lord to teach us to, to pray.
Listen to what one of my favorite commentators, says, D. Edmund Hebert. He says the devil cares but little about how many activities we engage in or how many organizations the church has developed, so long as he can keep believers from intensive prayer. Without prayer, all the machinery is useless for lack of power.
You think about it, all the stuff that we do, even if we nailed everything and did it perfectly, which we don't, if God doesn't show up, And he doesn't do what only he can do, then everything we're doing is a total waste of time. God delights when His people come to Him and recognize Him as the source of all good and come to Him in prayer individually and as a corporate body and ask Him in prayer to do what only he can do. We observe in James chapter 5, verse 16. James tells us that the prayer, literally in the Greek text, the prayer of a righteous man, when it is put into operation, accomplishes much.
Prayer accomplishes much when it is put into operation. And obviously it's the God of prayer who accomplishes much, but he is offering this tool called prayer to us. But what is prayer? There's a lot of ways to answer that tonight....
