What is true prayer? Dr. Joel Beeke examines prayer as a means of worship and explains what it means to truly pray - to "prayerfully pray" - and how to lay hold of yourself to pray properly, and to lay hold of God in your praying.

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Joel Beekie with the following message entitled, Prayer Has Worship. Worship. Turn with me please to Isaiah 64, Isaiah chapter 64. And I want to read just verses six through eight, six through eight, and then we'll turn to James chapter five. "'But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away.

And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee, for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us because of our iniquities. But now, O Lord, thou art our Father. We are the clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hands and then James chapter 5 verses 16 through 18 James 5 16 through 18 confess your faults one to another and pray one for another that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.

And he prayed again, And the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we bow before thee this morning and thank thee so much for thy word and thy truth and the gift of prayer, we pray that we might truly worship thee in our prayer, that we might pray in our prayers, that we may learn to take hold of thee and to take hold of ourselves and to be prayer warriors in the kingdom of God. Oh God, help us, teach us to pray. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well prayer is the heart of worship. Jeremiah Burrows, the Puritan observed that prayer is such a part of worship as sometimes in scripture it's put for the whole worship of God, such as the phrase, calling upon the name of the Lord. Prayer is our great response to God's salvation. If we fail to pray, we fail to worship.

You see, we only glorify God when we put ourselves in a position of dependency upon Him and call upon Him by faith to save us from evil and provide for us good as God alone can do. We can only worship God through prayerful surrender as sinners saved by grace. And so real prayer fulfills again that definition of worship I gave you yesterday, I'd say it again, to worship God is to bow down before his majestic glory and in spirit and in truth to bring him in and through Jesus Christ according to the Scriptures the honor and praise that belongs exclusively to him. So prayer honors the Lord above all, prayer approaches God through Jesus Christ, prayer makes our requests according to God's will as the Scriptures reveal it, and prayer is in spirit and truth. Prayer is worship, and prayer must come therefore from the innermost desires of our heart." We must truly pray in our prayers.

Now I think you know together with me that many of our prayers are prayerless. We say the words but we don't have the heart to truly pray at that moment. It's interesting that in James 5, 17, when it says Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that the marginal notes of the King James Version say, or prayed in his prayers, in accord with the Greek. Elijah prayed in his prayers. In other words, his prayers were more than a formal exercise.

He poured himself into his praying. The Bible commentator Alexander Russ says that that idiom communicates intensity. A man may pray with his lips and yet not pray with an intense desire of soul. So to prayer, to prayerfully worship is to do prayerful praying. And you see, that doesn't happen automatically.

Just going to a conference or listening to a preacher or reading a book won't flip a switch inside of you and make you a praying machine. True prayer, true prayer is coming from the heart. Now that's the difference, you see, between us and the giants of church history that dwarf us. I had the privilege of studying at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, in my doctorate for Reformation and post-Reformation history. And when I studied there, what really amazed me was when I read hundreds of our forefathers, they really weren't saying things much differently than what we're saying them today.

Maybe a little better, but why was there times of revival in their day and why do we live in a day of small things? I grappled with that question extensively until I finally realized that the secret was that our forefathers were men of prayer, real prayer. Prayer wasn't an appendix to their lives. Prayer was their life. Martin Luther, of course, is well-known for his prayers.

One day he said to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, Philip, I've got so much to do tomorrow, I need to pray an extra hour. Yeah, what do we do in our prayer life, or when we're very busy on a certain day, our prayer life goes in like an accordion. Luther's went out like an accordion. And the difference is, because prayer was his life, he needed to pray over everything he was about to do. And for us, prayer is kind of an afterthought far too often.

Or take the example of John Welsh. John Welsh was a son-in-law of John Knox. His wife said after he died that he averaged about seven hours a day in prayer. I mean, don't even think about trying it. You just feel guilt-ridden and miserable.

But she said, this man, my husband, never slept through a single night without getting up in the middle of the night, taking his robe in the northern Scotland cold area and going off into a side cold room to cry out to God. And she said, I would often follow Him. I wouldn't dare go into the room. It was too sacred. I'd stand outside the room and I'd say, John, honey, don't you think it's time to come back to bed.

You're going to catch cold, my dear." And I'd hear his voice coming back through the closed door. Oh, my dear, I have 3, 000 souls to care for. That was the size of his congregation. And I don't know how it is with many of them. You see, he was praying for them one by one in the middle of the night.

These men were prayer warriors. And there are many, many people today that are prayer warriors in many different cultures. American culture is very poor at prayer. You go to Korea, 5.30 every morning, 365 days a week, a year rather, the Koreans are praying. Once a month they pray through the night, first Friday of every month.

Churches go to a retreat. They pray till about three or four in the morning, take their sleeping bags with them, sleep on the church pew, get back up at 5.30 and go back to their normal routine of praying at 5.30. It's amazing. Now, I'm not here to just riddle you with guilt over your lack of prayer life. That's very easy to do, of course.

We're probably more susceptible to that in prayer than anything else. I'm not even here to tell you, you need to pray long, long periods of time. I will say this to you, that a five-minute relationship with God every day doesn't cut it. You wouldn't say to me, would you, I've got a wonderful relationship with my wife if I talk to her five minutes a day. You just can't do it in five minutes.

My mother had a wonderful prayer life. She prayed a couple hours every day. We knew as children that she was always there on her knees for us, remembering every one of us. We'd get up in the morning, go to have breakfast, and we'd tiptoe past the living room and kind of furtively glance in and seeing her in the semi-shadows on her knees. We'd have breakfast, we'd get dressed, we'd come back down, she'd still be on her knees.

My dad was still alive. One day I called down from Grand Rapids, Michigan down to Kalamazoo. My parents live 50 miles away. Said, I've got a free night, I'm going to come down. He said, oh, that's great.

Is mom there? Well, no, she's praying right now. This is 6.30 in the evening. It's okay, I'll be down in an hour. I get down there, just my dad greets me.

He says, where's mom? Well, she's still praying. I wish I had that kind of prayer life. But you see, it's not so much how long you pray as a sincerity of your prayer. I'll get to that in a moment.

But what I want to stress with you today is that when you read Isaiah 64 and James 5 and you see God complaining of Israel that they don't lay hold of him in prayer. And you read James 5 of Elijah laying hold of God and praying in his prayer. There's something we're missing today. The old Scottish divines, 17th, 18th century, used to say it this way, pray on until you lay hold of God and have his ear in heaven. And too often, we give up before we start.

I have a friend in Scotland right now, he's just a great prayer warrior, and he tells me this. He says, usually I pray for 20, 30 minutes at a stretch and I haven't really got into praying yet. And often I am so disappointed with myself, I get up from my knees, I walk away and I say, no you fool, go back and pray until you lay hold of God. I go back and pray until I lay hold of God. When I lay hold of God, the tears begin to flow and my heart feels united with Him.

I'm embarrassed that I was so quickly off my knees. Prayerless praying, that's a problem. It's perhaps the biggest problem of the Christian Church today. We don't know how to pray worshipfully. So the solution, well what's the solution?

The solution is prayerful praying, praying worshipfully, taking hold. Taking hold of what? Taking hold of yourself and taking hold of God. So what I want to do in this talk is I want to give you six ways to take hold of yourself and four ways to take hold of God. The Spirit alone can give these things, of course, but I want to get at the heart of this.

Prayerful worship is taking hold. Hold of yourself and taking hold of God. So let's look at taking hold of yourself, first of all. Number one, remember the value of prayer. If you're going to pray worshipfully, you've got to remember how valuable prayer is.

William Carey labored as a missionary in India for eight years before baptizing the first convert from Hinduism to Christ. And yet in all those years, he learned to live for the glory of God alone. He wrote, I feel that it is good to commit my soul, my body, my all into the hands of God. For then the world appears little, the promises appear great, and God in all sufficient portion." You see, God's delay became marrow for Kerry's soul. Puritan Thomas Brooks put it this way, you must distinguish between God's delays and God's denials.

The Puritan William Bridge went even deeper saying, a praying man can never be very miserable, whatever his condition be, for he has the ear of God the spirit within to indict a Friend in heaven to present and God himself to receive his desires Truly it is a mercy to pray even though I never received the mercy prayed for Do you understand what a gift it is just to pray? When I was nine years old, my dad sat me down on his bed one day and said, son, I want to, I wish I could write this on your heart with an iron pen, and he did because I still remember it now, half a century later. Don't ever forget this. The difference between a believer and an unbeliever is that a believer has a place to go. It's a gift to pray, even though you don't get an answer.

You know, you men know what it's like, because we're kind of rational, and our wives are more emotive than we are. Often if you're a wise husband, you know that your wife just wants you to listen to her. She doesn't really want an answer, many times. She just wants to pour out her heart. And we're so wired rationally that we want to give answers.

Oh, this is the way you should do. This is the way you should handle this. This is what you should think. Barbara Weiser off just sitting down beside her, putting her arm around and say, honey, what's troubling you? And she pours out her heart and you just listen.

And you don't give solutions, at least not right away. And often your wife will say to you at the end of that, thanks for being such a good listener. You were so helpful and You say, well, how'd that help? I didn't say anything. But just that she has the freedom to go to you and knowing that you understand means so much.

Just having the freedom to go to God, it pours out your heart, is already worship, prayerful worship. And knowing that God understands, knowing that he was tempted, that Jesus was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin, is absolutely astonishing. Sin is absolutely astonishing. To have the freedom to pray is worth more than all the money in the world. And to lay up prayers for other people in heaven's courts is the most important thing you can do for them.

Matthew Henry said, it is better for parents to lay up a treasury of prayers than a treasury of gold and silver for their children. Hezekiah laid up a treasury of prayers for his son, Manasseh. 15 years after Hezekiah died, his son was converted in a prison. My mother died last year. My parents were always relatively poor.

It's really easy when your parents are poor and they die and they've got no money to leave you. You don't have to argue about who's going to get what. It went very smoothly. There wasn't much there. But there was a lot there.

There was a lot there. I believe that my parents' grandchildren, many of them are being converted. I believe that many of them are being converted as a fruit, as an answer to my father's and my mother's prayers now while they're gone. Oh, the gift of prayer. Have you ever gone down on your knees and you got up and nothing changed outwardly but everything changed inwardly?

And you were reconciled to it, whatever was bothering you. And you found peace that passes understanding and love and sweetness and beauty in communing with God, though there was no answer. Remember the value of prayer. But if unanswered prayer is sweet, take hold of yourself by remembering how sweet answered prayer is. Bishop Joseph Hall said, good prayers never come weeping home.

I'm sure I either receive the answer for what I was asking or I'll receive an answer what I should have been asking for in the first place, which is even better. You see, prayer is so valuable Because God does answer it in due time, but the sweetness of communion is in itself an answer. So, pray on. Refuse to leave the Lord alone. Keep before you the encouraging words of Thomas Watson, the angel fetched Peter out of prison, but twas prayer that fetched the angel.

Remember the value of prayer. Prayer is so valuable that even an ungodly queen, Queen Mary, said of John Knox that she feared his prayers more than the armies of 10, 000 men. Prayerful praying worships God for himself just as he is. Even if there were no heaven, no hell, the greatest joy of a believer in this life is communion with God through prayer. Number two, take hold of yourself by maintaining the priority of prayer.

Apart from God, you can do nothing. You need to pray. Puritan John Bunyan wrote, you can do more than pray after you pray, but you can't do more than pray until you prayed. You see, we need to pray and we need to act. It's like rowing a boat.

You've got two oars. You've got to first dip in the oar of prayer and then dip in the oar of action. And you'll go forward. If you only pray, you might as well join a monastery, and you'll go in circles all your life. If you only do action and you don't pray, it's like growing with one or you go in circles.

You've had days like that. You're just hairy. You'd go from one thing to the next, and you're not accomplishing anything because you forget to pray. Bunyan goes on to say, "'Pray often, for a prayer is a shield to the soul, "'a sacrifice to God, and a scourge for Satan.'" So you value prayer as the most important thing you do every day. What's the most important thing I do every day?

Praying to God in secret, praying to God with my family, and praying to God with my teacher's aid, and my faculty, and my staff. You know, I have a teacher's assistant in the last couple of years of my life, which is just wonderful, a godly man. It's a great blessing. Most seminary presidents have had them for years and years, and I finally got one. But this man is a special man.

He's a prayer warrior. Every day I go into his office and we both pray together, maybe 15 minutes, sometimes 20. I usually pray about five, he usually prays about 10 to 15. You know, I've been praying with him for two years this way and I've never heard him say the same expression twice. It's phenomenal.

I just love to be in the presence, just hear it, of this God-fearing prayer. And to me, it's the most important part of my day, these prayer times. So I pray when I get up, I pray with my family, I go over and our staff gets together and we pray at 9.30. Then I go upstairs and pray with my teacher's assistant. Then I'm ready to work.

Sometimes I pray with them in the afternoon, have a break between the prayer times. That's good too. But salt your day like that as best you can with prayer, stated times of prayer, said our forefathers, but also spontaneous prayers. The old Dutch expression was, hat off praying. Praying while you're driving, praying while you're working, just little petitions that dart up to God.

Help me with this Lord. Let me glorify thee here Lord. Refocus me Lord. Value the priority of prayer. Priority of prayer in good times, priority of prayer in challenging times.

You see, it's easy to pray when you're like a sailboat gliding forward in a favouring wind, but you must Also pray when you're like an icebreaker, smashing your way through an Arctic sea, one foot at a time. No matter what, keep your prayer your priority. So that prayer becomes a way of breathing. Prayer is your spiritual thermometer. It's your natural mode of operandi.

That's the way to pray. So you're driving down the highway with your family, and you pass by an accident. There's an ambulance there. It should be spontaneous for you. Children, we're going to pray for that family.

You keep driving. You pray with your eyes open. You lift up that family to God's throne. You teach your children prayerful worship, prayerful spontaneous worship, because prayer is the natural air, the natural spiritual air you breathe. Take hold of yourself by maintaining the priority of prayer.

Third, take hold of yourself by maintaining the priority of prayer. Third, take hold of yourself by speaking with sincerity in your prayer. Psalm 62 says, trust in him in all times you people, pour out your heart before Him. God is a refuge for us. Don't just mouth your words, pour out your heart before Him.

Psalm 86, verse 11 says, unite my heart to fear thy name. That's the most important thing. Puritan Thomas Brooks put it this way, God looks not at the elegance of your prayers to see how long they are, or at the arithmetic of your prayers to see how many they are, nor yet at the music of your prayers, nor yet at the sweetness of your voice, or at the logic of your prayers, but he looks at the sincerity of your prayers, how hearty they are." Then he goes on to say, God does not want a divided heart in our prayers. He hates a feigned heart as the Scriptures stress. And he concludes, The true mother, he's thinking of the case of Solomon, the true mother would not have her child divided.

As God loves a broken and a contrite heart, so he hates a divided heart. He's looking for sincerity in your prayers. Pour out your heart. Take hold of yourself. Pour out your heart in sincerity before God.

Number four, prayerful worship means taking hold of yourself by cultivating a continual habit of prayer, a continual spirit of prayer. Pray without ceasing, says 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 17. And that refers of course more to the spirit and the habit and the condition of prayer rather than the physical act of prayer. There was once a ministerial fellowship. John Newton was there and his friends and they discussed this text.

What does it mean to pray without ceasing? They got together once a month and discussed a question. They took notes. Those notes later got published in a book that's now out of print, that Banner of Truth Trust reprinted about 20 years ago. It's a fascinating book.

And there's a discussion about what this means. And what happened was one minister said, well, I think it means this. Another said, I think it means that. And they debated, what can it mean to pray without ceasing? And they weren't satisfied with their answer.

So one minister turned to the young lady who was waiting on them and bringing them refreshments and said, well, maybe you know, maybe you know what it means to pray without ceasing. She's a very God-fearing girl and she said, oh sirs, she said, it's really not much of a problem to understand that text, it's just kind of a way of life for me, you know, when I get up this morning and I dress myself, I pray, Lord, clothe me in thy white robe of righteousness today. And when I came down and dusted the furniture, before you came, I prayed, Lord, take away all the filth on my heart. And when I set this bread and drink before you, I prayed, Lord Jesus, be thou my bread and my water of life. You know, I just kind of prayed my way through the day like that, she said.

That's it, you see. Praying without ceasing. It becomes a way of life. You're in contact with God. And I think you know what that means if you're a true Christian, especially when you're living very close to God.

There's such a difference. You see, when you're backsliding, you don't have that communion with God during the day, do you? Well, you still go through the motion of regular stated times of prayers, but you don't have those sighs and cries going up to God that pouring out of your heart spontaneously. But when you're close to God, you can't miss him and you speak to him many, many times a day. Joseph Aline was a very great Puritan, very prayerful man, who grieved that he often heard blacksmiths at work at 5 a.m.

In the morning before he was at prayer. He said this to his wife, I am never quiet until I am in my old way of communion with God again. I'm like the needle in the compass that is restless until it be turned to the pole. And so when I'm out of that old way of communion with God, I'm apt to be unsettled and quickly set off my hinges like a bird out of my nest." You understand what he's saying? You know how good it feels to get home when you've been on vacation for a while?

Take your family on a car vacation somewhere and I'll tell you if you're speeding at any time you're speeding on the way home aren't you? Because you're excited to get home. No place like home, you say. Well, that's how a believer feels with prayer. The Lord is my dwelling place in all generations.

The Lord is my home. I don't feel at home. I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel good inside until I'm back at that old way of communing with God. When I'm missing it, I feel like a bird out of my nest.

One thing to remember here, if you really want to take hold of yourself, is that whenever you feel the least impulse to pray, pray. I learned this lesson powerfully about 20 years ago. I was sitting at my desk working on a sermon. I had this powerful impulse to pray, which isn't unusual when you're preparing a sermon, at least I hope it wouldn't be. And while I was having an impulse to pray, I also had three or four thoughts in my mind I wanted to get down because they were coming fast.

It was kind of a moment of inspiration. And so I wanted to type them out. I thought well, I just pushed off that impulse. I got those thoughts down all right, then I went down to my knees to pray and the impulse was gone. And I learned a lesson.

That no matter what thoughts I was going to put down, this impulse to pray was more important. Give it priority at all times. Take hold of yourself. Take hold of yourself and cultivate a continual spirit of prayer. Number five, pray intercedingly.

Take hold of yourself to work towards organization in prayer when it comes to praying for others. Now that sounds like a contradiction to what I just said, pray spontaneously. But when it comes to intercessory prayer, we fail miserably today because We say often to people, I'm going to pray for you and then we don't. And we prove to ourselves to be liars. Every single day, I get about 100 emails a day on an average from people somewhere around the world, and many of them are prayer requests.

Will you pray for me? I can't possibly remember everyone the way I should, everyone that asks to be remembered. So what I do habitually when I get such a request is I stop and I pray right there. Then I write the person back, I just prayed for you. I don't promise I'm gonna pray for you all the time because I just can't.

But I remember them right there. So I do pray for them. So however you work that out, you see, you've got different people with different needs and different priorities in your life, but to pray intercedingly is a biblical command. And It shows when we have a lot of intercessory prayer that we're not selfish. I had a dear friend who passed away last December.

It was very tragic in my mind. He was a prayer warrior. I think one of the best preachers in South Africa. I just love being in his presence and just a great man of God. He got up every morning, 5.30, prayed for one hour to 6.30.

Half of that hour was Nothing but intercession. He had three charts in his little book. He showed me a footstool where he prayed. I asked him actually. On that little footstool, you can see where he laid his arms every morning.

Because actually in the wood, there was indentations from his arms. There was his little book. He showed me his book. He said, you see how I divided up people I pray for every day, people I pray for every week, people I pray for every month. I look here, he said, here's your name.

There was my name, my wife's name, my son Calvin, my daughter Esther, my daughter Lydia. He said, I've got you all five listed individually because I pray for each of you Every morning. Wow, every morning. Do you realize how many times it was a comfort to me? Just thinking times of trouble and trial.

My friend Martin is praying for me in South Africa this morning. I have a little trouble with one of the kids. My friend Martin prayed for that child this morning. What a comfort. Pray interestingly.

Organize it. John Newton said, my best friends in the world are those friends who are lisping my worthless name in the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth every day. Be a best friend of other people. You know, I had a couple occasions to meet the former president, George W. Bush.

And whatever you think of Bush, Bush is a praying man. And When I would meet him, the last time I met him, just to be with him a moment, I shook his hand and I said, President Bush, I'm praying for you. He instantly got tears in his eyes. And he said, I'm the most frequently prayed for president in American history. So I'm a grateful man.

I had a friend who was in his presence at a prayer time where Bush came. And it was at the beginning of the Iraq war when it wasn't going well the first couple of days. And one of those... It was a group of ministers and one of the ministers asked Bush this question. You walked into this room and you looked cheerful.

You looked upheld. How can you be cheerful when the war isn't going well? And Bush got tears in his eyes and he looked back at that group of ministers, 20, 25 ministers. And he said, I'm held up on the prayers of God's people. You see, pray your way through your church.

When you get your church bulletin, lift up those people during the week. Pray through your church directory. I get together with my colleague, my fellow pastor, and what we do once a month, I wish we did it every day, we pray through a whole page in our church directory. We know the people well. We pray for each child, each parent, one by one.

So in a period of some months, no one is forgotten in ministerial prayer. But you can do that individually. Pray, interestingly, take hold of yourself to remember those you need to remember. Pray for missionaries, pray for God's servants, pray for the church, pray for the government. Number six, keep biblical balance in prayer.

Take hold of yourself. By showing balance, You know, that's one beautiful thing about speaking at conferences in a variety of different, dozens of different countries. I've had the experience in my life of hearing so many people in so many different cultures pray. There's so much to learn from so many different cultures. In Northern Ireland, you ought to hear those Northern Ireland men pray.

The first five minutes of their prayer are just extolling God, just full of adoration. We too often just say, Lord, and we just go right into our petitions, not them. They know how to pray from the heart to adore God. I learned that from them. Then you move over to Wales.

Oh man can those people pray for revival. You never hear anything like it. So gifted they'd storm the mercy seat that God would descend and rend the heavens and come down and visit his vine. So learn from others how to pray. I like to tell people just make sure you're following the Acts formula adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, And that formula gives a good sense of balance.

And then within that, you see, there's all kinds of variety. But make sure you spend time just adoring God. Make sure you spend time just confessing your sins. Make sure you spend a period of time just thanking him. And then, of course, don't forget your supplications, which we never do, because we're prone to put all our focus there.

But prayer is so much more than that. Prayer is a whole way of communion. So take hold of yourself in these six ways. Pray worshipfully, but also by the grace of the Holy Spirit, take hold of God in prayer. How do you do that?

Well, first of all, you plead God's promises in prayer. You plead God's promises in Jesus Christ in prayer. You see in His sovereignty, God has bound Himself by the promises He has made to us. Augustine said his mother prayed long for His conversion, pleading God's promises. She urged upon thee as thine own handwriting." Augustine writes, "...for God in His covenant mercy chose to become a debtor by thy promises." Show God his own handwriting.

He's tender of his own word. Some months ago I had an elderly friend who was cleaning house and he brought me a spiritual letter from my father that had been written about 60 years ago when my father was first converted in the early 1950s. I thought you might like to have this, he said. Like to. The whole letter was spiritual from beginning to end.

He was obviously in his time of first love with the Lord Jesus. I said, I would love to have this letter. It was so personal. It was my dad's handwriting. Well, how do you think your father in heaven feels when you show him his own handwriting and then you say, Lord, do as thou has said?

The Puritans made a great deal of this, praying God's promises back to him, turning his promises inside out and suing the Lord at Heaven's courts as they called it, to fulfill his own word. Puritan John Trapp put it this way, promises must be prayed over. God loves to be burdened with and to be importuned upon, that is urgently pressed, in his own words, to be sued upon his own bond. Prayer is of putting God's promises into suit. And it is no arrogance nor presumption to burden God, as it were, with his own promises.

William Grenall, prayer is nothing but the promise reversed. Their God's word formed into an argument and retorted by faith back upon God again. Furnish thyself with arguments from the promises to enforce thy prayers and make them prevail with God. The mightier Any is in the Word, the more mighty he will be in prayer." Take hold of God. That leads me to my second thought.

Take hold of God by reading your Bible for prayer. Knowing your Bible. Memorizing the Scriptures. What a good habit it is to take one text a day and memorize it. Get to know the Word of God.

So when you pray, your mind moves in a Scriptural direction. And you can take hold of him by taking hold of his word. You know, when I get a bit discouraged, I have behind me in my study about 12 books of the prayers of the saints of ages past, prayers of Charles Spurgeon, prayers of Edward Bickersteth. Wonderful books. I pull those books out and I just read them and I'm always amazed when I read them that their prayers are really almost nothing but one scripture after another laced together in unique ways.

They're praying the word, they're taking hold of God by praying the word to God. Jesus said, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you will and it shall be done to you. And then thirdly, we don't only take hold of God by pleading his promises in prayer and reading the Bible for prayer, but by looking to the glorious Trinity in prayer. Looking to the glorious Trinity in prayer. You see, so much of our prayerlessness is due to our thoughtlessness towards God.

We get into an immediate need or crisis and we cry out to God. But God dwells in our prayers most when our minds most dwell on God. We need to pray to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And so when we bow our head and we go to pray, we ought to think about whose presence we're coming into rather than rushing into prayer. Ephesians 2 18 tells us how the three persons of the Trinity operate in our prayers.

It says this, for through him that is Christ Jesus, we both have access by one spirit unto the Father. Did you ever think of it this way? Every true prayer is a triune operation. Prayer is like a golden chain that runs from the Father, decreed by Him from eternity past, through the Son, who has earned the right for us to truly pray by the Spirit who groans within us groanings that are unutterable and then sends that prayer back up to the Son who salts it with a meritorious cleansing salt of his own sufferings, and he presents it back acceptable and pure to his heavenly Father. So in taking hold of God in prayer, we recognize the God centrality of every true prayer from the Father, merited by the Son, through the Spirit, back through the Son, up to the Father.

Actually John Owen has a whole book on communion with each person of the divine Trinity. It's called Communion with God. It's a classic. What Owen basically says is this, when it comes to prayer, normally you pray to God. And by God you mean particularly the Father, but also the whole Trinity.

But there can be special seasons when you appeal to one person of the Trinity because that person's economic work in the Trinity particularly corresponds to the particular need you're feeling at that time. And sometimes you might appeal to two of them rather than the three. For example, prayer itself. Prayer is given by Jesus. He's the praying high priest.

So you might pray to him for the gift of prayer. But you might also pray to the Holy Spirit because he groans it out within you. So Owen has a whole list of times, I think it's seven or eight times, areas where you might pray directly to the Son, and then another half a dozen areas where you might pray directly to the Holy Spirit because it corresponds primarily with that one person's work in your soul at that particular period. So look to the glorious Trinity. Take hold of the glorious Trinity in your prayers.

Finally, fourthly, take hold of God by believing that God answers prayer. Our problem today is that we believe so little in prayer, we get surprised when God answers prayer. That's to our shame. But It's always been that way. It was that way even with the New Testament church.

You know, they were praying for Peter to be released from prison. And then when the angel set Peter free and Peter came to the room and knocked on the door, the girl who answered the door was so excited she could hardly believe it. She forgot to open the door and she went back and told the others Peter was there and they couldn't believe it. But they'd just been praying for it. So they had the problem too.

Perhaps you heard the story of the church that was really suffering because a guy came along and bought a building right next door and turned it into a tavern and it became a refuge place. There was garbage every Sunday morning on the church parking lot. It was just a miserable, miserable restaurant right next door to the church. And the pastor advised the people that we need to pray that God will intervene in this situation. They remembered it from the pulpit, They remembered their private prayers.

They stormed the mercy seat that God would give relief. And God did intervene. God sent a tornado to that town. And the tornado wiped out the tavern, completely left the church untouched. The tornado completely demolished the tavern.

Gone. So the tavern owner took the church to court. And he told the judge, these people are guilty of destroying my tavern because they were praying against my tavern. And the people said, we didn't do anything. We're innocent.

And the judge said, this is the strangest case I've ever heard in my life. He said unbelievers believing in prayer and believers not believing in prayer. You see this is our problem. We pray but we don't realize how important that prayer is. I was once rebuked by one of my own parishioners.

I prayed with her in a hospital room, and I then shook her hand. I said, I wish I could do more for you. And she rebuked me. She said, Pastor, I must rebuke you. You just did something more important for me than any physician in this hospital could do for me.

You prayed for me." Believe in prayer by taking hold of God in prayer and believing. He will answer. If your children ask you for a fish, will you give them a stone? How much more your heavenly Father will give you his Holy Spirit when you ask him? Alright, let me conclude now.

Prayerful worship, if I was taking hold of God, taking hold of yourself, and crying out to God, and bowing down, bowing down before his majestic glory, and in spirit and in truth, bringing him in and through Jesus Christ according to the Scriptures, the honor and praise that belong exclusively to him. As I close, let me say this. I don't want you to leave this talk saying it's hopeless for me. John Welsh prayed seven hours. His mother prayed two hours.

I just can't do it. That's not the point. The point I want you to leave with is this, take hold of yourself and take hold of God. Pray for five minutes, in larger prayers perhaps, as time goes on. But pray earnestly, pray sincerely, believe in prayer.

Don't expect too little of prayer, but also don't expect too much of yourself. But pray for a growing relationship with God and pray for intimacy in your prayer. John Calvin said, true prayer is climbing into the lap of my Father and whispering my needs in His ear." It's an intimate picture. Don't rest until you too can say, by the grace of God, I pray in my prayers. Don't rest with prayerless praying.

Storm the mercy seat. Take the kingdom of heaven by violence. For the violent take it by force. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we thank you so much for the gift of prayer.

We thank you for thyself, that thou art a prayer giving and prayer hearing and prayer answering God, how Beautiful thou art. And we ask of thee, O Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to take hold of ourselves, to take hold of thee, and to worship thee in both, and to bring thee the honor and the glory that exclusively belongs to Thee. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen.

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