Sunday, November 29, 2015

November 29, 2015

As we move from Thanksgiving into Christmas Season it is a perfect time to call the church to prayer. And before I do I want to review several important insights about prayer. Two have been presented and in this post I will share the third.

First, We Must Be Armored for Prayer – Ephesians 6:10-20

Second, We Are Assisted in Prayer – Romans 8:26-35

Today, We Can Be Assured In Prayer

“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him”  I John 5:13-15

·        You can be confident the One Who answered the prayer for your greatest need according to His will will also answer all your prayers according to His pleasure!

·        Consistent with our theme for this series – our courage and confident for the future is based on what God has done in the past and promises to do in the future when His people pray!

A small congregation in the foothills of the Great Smokies built a new sanctuary on a piece of land willed to them by a church member. Ten days before the new church was to open, the County Building Inspector informed the pastor their parking lot was inadequate for the size of the building and until the church doubled the size of the parking lot, they would not be able to move into the new sanctuary.

Unfortunately, the church with the undersized parking lot used every inch of land right up against the mountain that bordered their property. In order to add the required parking spots they would literally have to move a mountain!

Undaunted, the pastor announced the next Sunday morning there would be a prayer meeting held Monday evening for all the members who had “mountain-moving faith”. The sole agenda for that meeting would be to ask God to somehow remove the mountain from their back yard and while He was at it, provide enough money to have it paved and striped in time for their dedication service scheduled on the following Sunday.

The next evening 24 of the 300 church members showed up and used their mountain-moving faith to call upon God in behalf of their desperate need. For three hours they earnestly prayed and at 10:00 the pastor pronounced the final “amen”. He dismissed the faithful few with this assurance, “We will dedicate our new sanctuary as scheduled next Sunday! God has never let us down and He will be faithful to us once again!”

Tuesday morning the pastor was in his office bright and early. His study was interrupted by a loud knock on his door. When he called, “Come in”, a rough looking man wearing a hard hat walked into his office. Removing his helmet the man introduced himself, “Excuse me, Reverend. I’m a construction foreman from Acme Construction Company over in the next county. We’re building a huge new shopping mall over there and we need a whole lot of fill dirt. Would you be willing to sell us a chunk of your mountain? We’ll pay you a fair price for all the dirt we remove, we will level and pave all the exposed area free of charge and stripe it for you if you will agree to let us begin today. We can’t proceed on the project until we get the dirt in and allow it to settle properly.  

So, the little church with a big faith dedicated their new and larger sanctuary as previously scheduled! And there were far more members with “mountain-moving faith” than there had been the Sunday before!

When you understand you must be armored for prayer, when you know you are assisted in prayer and you assured in your prayer you, too, can have mountain-moving faith!