"The Missing Ingredient for Perfect Prayer" James 5:17-18 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning, James 5, verses 16, I'm sorry, 17 and 18.

James 5:16

I'll be the only two verses we look at this morning.

The Lord willing, we'll finish the book of James next week.

Let me read our passage for us.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.

Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.

One of my favorite biographies is by Paul Johnson, no relation, called Winston Churchill.

It's a actually it's just called Churchill.

He made the title short.

What makes this book so powerful is that it is 150 pages long.

It's a short book, a short biography of Winston Churchill.

If you know anything about his life, you know that that is quite a feat to wedge all that into 150 pages.

In contrast, the longest biography ever written about anyone in the world, also written about Winston Churchill.

24 volumes by Randolph Churchill and Matthew Gilbert, 24 volumes, three million words.

Now you see why I like Paul Johnson's biography, right?

You know, this morning, when we look at the life of Elijah here, we get a two-word biography.

There's a lot more that could be said about Elijah, but James shoehorns his life down to two words.

There they are at the middle of verse 17.

Elijah.

He prayed.

He prayed.

Can you think of a better summary for someone's life than he prayed?

Can you think of a better thing to have as your epitaph?

And here lies so-and-so.

She prayed.

And that's how James remembers Elijah.

Now, prayer is obviously important and significant in the Bible.

The first prayer in the Bible is James chapter 4, or Genesis chapter 4, verse 26.

James 4 · chapter mention Genesis 4:26

There, Adam and Eve have been thrown out of the garden.

People begin to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And outside of the garden, they had no longer face-to-face communication with God.

And so Moses writes in Genesis 4.26, it was there that people begin to call upon the Lord.

And from that place forward, all the way to the last verse of the Bible, the Bible has prayer.

It is focused on prayer.

I mean, the theme of the Bible is people separated from God and Jesus Christ coming to bridge that gap.

But there's a lot of other stuff going on.

And chief among these is how God communicates to us what kind of relationship creature has with creator, what kind of relationship we as humans can have with the God who made us.

This relationship is two directions.

God speaks to us and gives us his word.

So God speaks to us through the Bible.

He speaks to us through the prophets in the Old Testament, chiefly through his Son.

And then He gives us ongoing revelation through His Word.

We communicate back to God.

We respond to God through prayer.

That's our means of bending the ear of the one who holds the world.

And this is what brings James to the person of Elijah.

James is focused on prayer, as is the Bible.

James begins by saying that you'll have trials come into your life and you should seek the will of the Lord in them.

You understand that the trial is from the hand of God, and God is doing something to sanctify you.

He's doing something to purify you.

He's doing something to strengthen and refine your faith and give you steadfastness in your trial.

But you don't know what exactly it is.

And so you should call upon the name of the Lord.

Seek wisdom.

If you lack wisdom to know what God is doing in your trial, ask.

Don't ask with a double mind, like looking for your own gain and for God's gain, because then you'll get neither.

Instead, seek his face.

That's how James begins.

And so it's fitting now at the end of the book.

There's only a few verses left.

James is closing by taking us back to the priority of prayer.

Jesus, after the Sermon on the Mount, which should strike you as the best sermon ever preached, Jesus was the best preacher ever preached.

The disciples, after listening to that, did not gather around Jesus and say, Lord, teach us how to preach.

Instead, they gathered around Jesus and said, Lord, teach us how to pray.

And James remembers that lesson.

You have to get a little bit of extra biblical background here to fill out the importance of these two verses here at the end of James.

Prayer was a significant part of James's life.

He was known as a prayer warrior for his own church.

The church historian Eusebius testified that after he died, people discovered that his knees were hard like a camel's knees because of his constant devotion to his people through prayer.

Notice the New James said that he was always found kneeling, always found calling out for the forgiveness of his people.

James is the oldest book in the New Testament, the first book in the New Testament written, perhaps around the same time as Matthew.

And yet James is laying the foundation for the church.

He gives you the concept of elders here leading the church.

He gives you the concept of praying and corporate worship here together, and he ends with the priority of prayer.

He wants that to be evident in the life of the church.

And that's why he chooses Elijah as our example.

Now, Elijah is a significant figure in the Bible.

He starts in 1 Kings chapter 17.

1 Kings 17 · chapter mention

He went through 1 Kings a few years ago, but if you remember 1 Kings and 2 Kings, you would expect them to be a series of kings, and that's how 1 Kings begins.

You get a list of six kings, each one worse than the one before.

And this is after Solomon dies, the kingdom is split between Rehobam and Jeroboam, Jeroboam down in Israel, and he is awful.

And the second king Israel gets is worse than the first.

And the third king Israel gets is worse than the second.

And the fourth king they get is worse than the third.

And the fifth king they get is worse than the fourth.

And the sixth king they get is worse than the aggregate.

Take all the evil of all those first five kings, and Ahab exceeds them all.

And so what does the narrator in 1 Kings do when Ahab is on the throne?

He stops talking about kings.

Let's be done with a list of kings, a silly, inconsequential list of kings.

Interstage left Elijah.

He bursts onto the scene.

You don't know anything about his life.

You don't know anything about his family.

You don't know who his parents are.

You know he was a Tishabite.

We don't even know where that is.

He walks onto the scene and he becomes the focus for the rest of the book of 1 Kings.

It becomes the story of Elijah.

And what does the narrator introduce to you as important about Elijah?

It says, here comes a man, Elijah, who is a man who could stand before Yahweh.

That's 1 Kings 17, verse 1.

1 Kings 17:1

He could stand before Yahweh.

Elijah could stand before God.

Clearly, at this point, he's known as a man of prayer, that he has the ability to go before God.

How?

Through prayer.

Through prayer.

Elijah, of course, had a beleaguered life.

He was opposed by the world.

He was hunted by the government.

He declared there would be a drought.

There would be no rain until he prayed for it.

And so the king Ahab sends his army after Elijah.

Ahab never learns this lesson.

He always thinks he can negotiate with God through taking his prophets captive.

Do you remember later on in Ahab's life how he died?

When the prophet Micaiah said, You're going to go to battle and you'll lose.

And so Ahab said, put the prophet in jail.

Prophet, tell God that if I don't come back alive, you're never getting out of jail.

Like you can negotiate with God that way.

God, I have your prophet.

You better give me what I want.

You can picture Micaiah going, oh great.

Ahab never learns.

So Elijah said there won't be any rain.

And so Ahab summons his army to go track down Elijah and capture him, puts a bounty on his head.

Elijah wasn't a threat to the government.

He wasn't going to do a coup.

He didn't have a sword.

He didn't have an army.

And nevertheless, the army went after him to catch him.

He didn't pose a military threat to Israel, but he did pose a threat to them because he had the ear of the Lord.

Now Elijah was all over the place emotionally.

He had his highs and he had his lows.

He had his triumphs and he was much of his life he was beleaguered.

He goes out into the wilderness.

He's fed by ravens because he has no food.

The creek brings him water.

And as the creek dries up because of the drought, he is forced to wander around.

He has to leave Israel.

He finds a widow.

She has a little bit of bread, a tiny bit of oil, a little bit of flour, and Elijah asks for food.

And she says, I just have this one bite, and I was going to feed it to my son, and then we were going to die.

And Elijah says, Okay, that'll do.

I'll take that.

You remember, of course, he does take her food and eat it, and then prays for her oil and prays for her flour, and the Lord multiplies it and sustains the three of them the widow, Elijah, and the widow's son.

That's how Elijah is ministered to, with that friendship and that fellowship.

And then the son dies.

And Elijah prays, and she and this is the son resurrects.

And then Elijah goes toe-to-toe with the prophets of Baal, faces down three hundred false prophets with the courage of a lion.

He puts the 300 prophets to death, and then he prays for rain, and the rain comes, and he just stared down 300 prophets, and then the queen comes to Elijah and opposes him and he runs.

He goes all the way back to Egypt.

Remember, he goes back to Mount Sinai and says, God, I quit.

Destroy the Israelites.

I'm done with them.

They're hopeless.

There's no hope for them.

Be done with them, God, and then you and me, let's start a new nation.

We'll start over.

I'll be the second Moses.

Let's start from scratch.

And God remember covers Elijah, puts him in the cave, and there's the earthquake, and God's not in the earthquake.

There's the whirlwind and God's not in the whirlwind, and then there's the still small voice, and that's how the Lord communicates to Elijah and sends him back and tells him, Go find Jehu, go find Elisha, and go back to Israel.

And so he does.

He summons Elisha, and the two of them will be inseparable the rest of Elijah's life.

He has a final friendship to take him across the finish line.

He goes and finds Jehu and turns him loose on the kings.

Jehu slaughters them all.

And Elijah was called up to heaven.

He couldn't even die in Israel.

Remember, he had to cross the Jordan River.

Israel wasn't even worth having Elijah die there.

He had to go back.

And Elisha went with him, and the whirlwind came, and the chariots came and ubered him up to heaven.

And the lesson from this that James draws out is that Elijah was a man of prayer.

And that's going to be your outline this morning.

Elijah's recipe for powerful prayer.

I like the phrase Elijah's recipe because he's chiefly known for supernaturally being able to combine the flour and the oil for bread that gave him his life.

But you understand that prayer was more important to him than the bread.

Prayer was his oxygen.

So let's look at his recipe for powerful prayer.

First from James, pray with passion.

Step one, pray with passion.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, the scripture says.

That phrase, the nature like ours, is a single word, homeopathos.

You would expect the word to be homeous, which would mean like substance.

That's a concept we think of in our mind.

We think of the Trinity, the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

They're homocious.

They share one substance, one essence, one being.

In other words, they're all three God.

They share the nature of God.

You would expect that to be the word here, that we share a nature with Elijah.

He had a nature like us, but instead James uses a different word, homeo pathos.

Homeo being one, pathos being emotion.

Think of the pathos in the Greek mind, compassion, love, jealousy, anger.

This is Elijah's life.

Beleaguered and beaten down by the world, hunted by the king, abandoned in the woods, comforted first by Obadiah, who didn't barely trust him, and then comforted by the, of course, the widow and her son, and then the resurrected son, and then Jehu and Elisha for the rest of his life.

He had friends.

He was comforted in his beleaguered state.

And perhaps that's what makes James think of him here.

That Elijah was beleaguered by the world and then relied upon the widow for her oil to live.

And James had just told us that if you're beleaguered by this world, go to the elders for prayer, and their prayer will be like anointing you with oil.

Perhaps that's where James' mind goes.

And so he's here focused on the passions of Elijah.

That he had the same kind of emotions that we have.

In other words, the strength of Elijah's prayer is not in Elijah himself, but it's in the Lord, because Elijah prayed from strength and he prayed from weakness.

He did everything in his life with passion, highs, and lows.

And his power was never in him.

His power was always with his devotion to the Lord.

He prayed with fervency.

He prayed, verse 17 says, with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently with it.

When you meet him, as I said, he stands before God, his arms outstretched to heaven.

He prayed like it was the power of his arms that held the rain back.

He commanded the heavens, and the heavens obeyed.

Now, obviously, God is the one who's sovereign.

God is the one who's in control of Elijah's life.

God is the one who's in control of the rain.

He's in control of the weather.

He's in control of the kings.

And Elijah prayed as a participant in God's plan, not as an observer.

He didn't pray as a spectator watching what God was doing in Israel.

He prayed as the means God was using.

He prayed because he understood God is sovereign, God is in control, and so he had better use me.

Sometimes I've heard people ask, if God is sovereign, why pray?

I'm sure you've heard that question.

Maybe you've thought it.

If God is in control, if God is sovereign, why should you pray?

And that question, honestly, it frustrates me a little bit.

Because just turn it around and you see what a frustrating question it is.

If God is not sovereign, why would you pray?

If God's not in control of the worlds, then why would you pray to him?

Do you remember the prophets that Elijah face down on Mount Carmel, who are, you know, they're trying to get the fire to their God to send fire, Baal to send fire, and Baal, of course, wasn't listening because Baal doesn't exist.

And the prophets are prancing around and they're lancing themselves and they're crying out to Baal, and Elijah's mocking them and saying, hey, maybe you should call out louder.

Maybe Baal went on vacation.

Did he forward his calls?

You should look into that.

Listen, if God's not sovereign, why pray?

If he's not in control of this world, why don't you find out who is and pray to that person?

The more you understand this meticulous sovereignty of God, the more you understand the importance of prayer.

God has his secret decree, his perfect will.

He has meticulous control over the universe.

All things happen in accordance to his secret will.

And our prayer is asking God to do things.

We are the means God uses to bring about his will.

God could hold back the reign without Elijah, of course, but he chooses to use the means of Elijah to demonstrate the importance of prayer, the passion of prayer, the necessity of prayer, that God is glorified through prayer.

Listen, what fueled Elijah's passion, what fueled his fervency to use James's word, is his theology.

It is the fact he knew that God is in control.

If God doesn't hold the worlds, then you're dialing the wrong number.

You bring your prayers to the God who is in control.

And this, when you view prayer this way, it takes you from being a spectator to a participant.

You go from watching in the stands what God is doing in the world, you go from being a seasoned ticket holder to being on the field.

When you understand that God is at work, it's like Mordecai and Esther.

Esther says, I can't go before the king.

He could cut off my head.

And Mordecai says, God's going to do what God's going to do.

So you better act, Esther.

Because God's going to do his plan.

And if you remain silent, then you lose all part of this.

But if you act, you could be the means God uses to accomplish his will.

That's why we pray.

We want to be used by the world in opposition to the world.

Listen, Elijah prayed with world-opposing courage.

He prayed that it wouldn't rain.

Who does that?

Israel is worshiping the rain god, so there's a sense of irony involved in this.

He was opposing the world.

He was standing up to the king.

He was standing up to the nation.

He was standing up to the weather with the confidence that God was going to act.

Prayer is not a petition to God, it's a disposition of knowing that God rules the world.

I'm a big fan of programmatic approaches to prayer.

You know, Acts, adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, supplication, moving through the outline.

When I pray for an hour, I have a little wheel that I follow through, and it, you know, I break my prayer time up into five-minute blocks and I pray through that way.

I've preached a whole message on that.

It's on our church's website.

If you want to hear more about that, I don't want to go through that whole plan now.

So I appreciate a programmatic approach to prayer.

But sometimes I wonder if a programmatic approach doesn't rob our prayers of passion.

I remember Mike Tyson, heavyweight champion, being interviewed.

The champion of the world, and his opponent rattles off his plan.

You know, this whole plan, his whole strategy for how to fight Tyson.

And the reporter asks, Mike Tyson, what's your response to that?

And I'm sure many of you remember what he said.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

And I wonder that about our prayer.

You know, we've got a good approach to prayer.

We've got our outline, A C T S.

We've got our little wheel, and something punches you in the mouth.

The world hits you in the face.

Then you scrap the outline.

Now you pray like your life depends on it.

Now you pray with passion and fervency.

You pray like you know the Lord.

You should be encouraged that Elijah's prayer did not come from a position of strength and confidence.

If you know Elijah's life, you know that.

Elijah's prayer came from a position of weakness and desperation, a desperate dependence upon the Lord.

It was Leonard Ravenhill who said, God doesn't hear prayer, he hears desperate prayer.

This is Elijah's prayer, 1 Kings 18, 42, after the fire fell from heaven and the prophets of Baal were slaughtered.

Do you remember what Elijah did?

He walked around the side of the hill.

It was his turn to pray now.

He didn't prance around like the prophets of Baal.

He walks around the side of the mountain.

1 Kings 18, verse 42 says he sits down, puts his head on his knees.

1 Kings 18:42

No shouting.

No nothing.

A passionate and desperate plea to the Lord.

That's what James says.

In verse 18, he prayed again in heaven, gave rain.

So first, pray with passion.

Second, pray with precision.

Pray with precision.

Elijah's prayer was surgical, it was strategic.

He knew exactly what he was asking for, and he asked for that.

It was at work in the world, it made a profound impact in the world.

He was not praying superficially.

Notice even the phrase again, 1 Kings 17, verse 1, as Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain all these years except by my word.

1 Kings 17:1

No dew nor rain.

He knew exactly what he was asking for.

He prayed with faith, not with a double mind.

Again, the contrast from James chapter 1.

James 1 · chapter mention

You're going through a trial.

You are supposed to seek the Lord's will in it.

You know the Lord is stripping away your confidence.

You know the Lord is sanctifying you through your trial.

You don't know exactly what else he's doing.

You don't know exactly how he's sanctifying you.

So James says, hey, ask him.

Ask him in faith, and he'll answer you in faith.

If you're really looking for help in your trial with the wisdom of God, ask him and he will reveal it.

But don't ask as a double-minded man.

Don't ask as the person who says, Lord, help me through this trial, but also take it away from me.

And, you know, going both ways, like I want what's good for you, and I want what's good for me, I want it both ways, because James says you won't get either of those.

Elijah prayed with world opposing courage and heaven moving specificity.

He prayed to move the weather.

He knew exactly what he wanted in the world.

Notice that Elijah, as I said earlier, was not an observer, he was at work.

In the world.

John Stott.

You know John Stott, the famous theologian.

He was on vacation once and he visited a small rural church in England where he wasn't recognized.

He wrote in his book on prayer, describing the pastoral prayer at that church.

So the pastor got up and prayed that their other pastor who was on vacation would have a good vacation.

And John Stott himself on vacation writes, I mean, I guess there's something wrong with that.

I wanted a good vacation too, so hey.

And the pastoral prayer went on, and the man prayed that an expecting mother would have a safe delivery, and then that a woman who is sick wouldn't be sick anymore.

And so concluded the pastoral prayer.

And Stott said he sat there and realized what was wrong.

This is a village church, he writes, that believed in a village God.

God was no bigger than their own immediate needs.

God was no bigger than their vacation.

God was no bigger than their health.

He was exactly that size.

That's not how Elijah prayed.

And I you know what I mean.

I know you've been in prayer groups where the prayers is for, you know, your sister's neighbor and her foot.

You know those kind of prayers.

There's nothing wrong with praying for your sister's neighbor's foot.

But if your prayer life consists at that level, then it is superficial.

If your prayer life consists of the externals, it's a village prayer to a village God.

Rather pray that God would use you to impact the world.

Rather pray that God would use your trials to sanctify you.

Rather pray for the things you're battling in your life.

Rather pray for your own weaknesses, for God to make you strong, for God to teach you humility through them.

Rather pray for your missionaries.

Rather pray for the gospel to go forward in the world.

Pray for God to use you to help people, for God to use you to help your neighbors.

I mean, it's not even a joke anymore.

Every now and then we'll get we'll seriously get a prayer request that says, pray for my, you know, Muslims moved into my neighborhood.

Pray that the missionary would come reach them.

Is that a joke?

Pray that you would be bold.

Pray the Lord would use you.

Pray specifically.

I know there's the generic prayer, Lord, save the whole world.

Amen.

No, pray you specifically, that God would use you to reach people, that God would use you to be sanctified, that God would use the trial in your life to cause you to grow.

Pray with precision.

That's how Elijah prayed.

What have I told you?

That God was like a genie.

And He will give you three impossible things.

You can choose.

You get three wishes.

And God will grant them to you.

So now think carefully.

I mean, you got three, so be precise here.

So-and-so has a sickness.

Would you pray for her healing?

Or would you pray for the Lord's will to be done in her life?

Would you pray for her to be spiritually strong and her faith to be more secure?

So what's better for her?

You only have three.

I mean, I suppose you could pray for both, but you only have three.

Now, of course, God is not like that genie in this particular way.

He doesn't cap your requests at three.

You get an infinite number of requests.

You should still choose carefully.

Pray strategically for God to be at work in your life.

Number three.

Pray with passion, pray with precision.

Number three, pray with purpose.

Pray with purpose.

Now, I titled this message, The Missing Ingredient to Perfect Prayer.

And these first two, you know, there's prayers in the Bible that lack passion.

There's prayers in the Bible that lack precision.

There's prayers in the Bible that are answered in different ways than they were asked, of course.

There's all manner of prayer.

But this third one, this third point here, to pray with purpose.

Every single answered prayer request in the Bible, every single answered prayer in world history has this one factor in common.

Every time God answers a prayer, it's because it is in correspondence to his will.

Every prayer God answers, it's because it's his will to do so.

It is God's plan to do this.

And that's why you pray.

You want your prayers answered.

You pray in accordance with his will, not your own.

And this is what stands out about Elijah's prayer more than anything else.

And we talked about this when we went through 1 Kings 17.

More than anything else, what stands out about Elijah as a man of prayer is that he prayed to his own harm.

He prayed counterintuitive prayers.

You're going through a famine, pray for food.

You're going through a drought, pray for rain.

But none of the people worship the rain God.

So Elijah is praying that the Lord would hold back the rain while the water that he is needing for life is dwindling.

Do you understand how he's praying for his own harm?

Do you understand that the army that is searching for him, there's a bounty on his head, and if he would just change the prayer round, drop the no from his prayer, then he'd be the most popular person in Israel.

He's praying against himself.

He's praying against the world, of course, but also against himself.

He's praying according to God's will, not his own.

And this is why prayer really is spiritual suicide.

Prayerlessness is spiritual suicide.

If you lack prayer, it's harming your own spirit.

And this is what I mean by this.

Sometimes a person who's prayerless views their life, their little circle of influence around them, as what they're in charge of.

So I'm good at this.

I got my food, I got my job, I got my family, I got this covered, so I don't need to pray for this because I got this.

And you're doing what you think is best in your world.

When do you pray, by the way?

That when does that kind of person pray?

When somebody else's little sphere of sovereignty bumps into you.

When you have conflict or problems because of somebody else, then you pray that God would deal with that person's circle.

Because mine's just fine.

That guy keeps bunking into me, Lord.

So fix that guy, please.

Amen.

But understand, when you're acting like this, that you're you've you don't need to pray for things that you've got, you're in charge of.

I got this, God.

This is spiritual suicide because you are always acting in your own best interest.

You're always doing what you think is best for you.

And I mean this in a nice way, but you are the worst person to judge what's best for you.

You're an awful judge about what is best for you.

You really are.

Because of sin and because of the fall, you don't see yourself clearly.

It's like the goldfish who says, This tank is the perfect tank for me.

What does that goldfish know?

He hasn't been to other tanks, he has no idea what he's talking about.

I suppose the tank is better than dying on the ground, I guess, but come on.

You're not a good judge about what is good for you.

And so you are in a constant war in your prayer to bring your submission under the authority of the will of God.

Because he knows what is best for you.

You're standing on the shore.

You like the sunset, you like the breeze, you like the view.

You don't know what's underneath you.

You don't know if you're standing on a rock, or you don't know if you're standing on the sand, but you love the view.

And so God sends trials, he sends waves that beat and batter the shore.

They beat and batter the sand that you're on, and they start to bring the sand out to sea, and they start to pull away the foundation under your feet.

And over time it will be revealed to you if you are standing on rock or if you are standing on sand.

And there will be scary moments in that revelation too.

And the wind and the waves, they keep beating and they keep pulling what you think you're standing on out to sea.

Do you pray for the waves to stop?

Do you pray for the waves to go away and return your sunset, which you liked very much?

If you pray that way, you're praying to your own harm.

You understand?

Instead, you pray that your will, your heart would be submissive to God's.

God, do your will in my life.

Pull the sand away if that is what I need.

Pull the foundation away if that's what I need.

Expose whether or not I'm on the rock or not.

God, I need to know if I'm rooted in you.

Who prays that way?

Elijah did.

He prayed that this world would be stripped from him and he would be left with the knowledge of God.

He prayed with a world-confronting courage, a heaven-moving specificity, and he prayed against his own perceived best interest.

He knew what the Lord wanted for him was what was best.

Even when it was against his health, even when it was seen to be against his life, that's the face that he sought.

This is why I remember this phrase: surrendered hearts lead to strengthened hands.

When your heart is surrendered before the Lord, your prayers become more powerful.

When you say, God, I don't want my kingdom to advance, I don't want my will to be done, I want your kingdom to advance, I want your will to be done.

Then you're submitting your life to God.

That is not natural to pray that way.

Our normal instinct is to say, Lord, my will be done.

My kingdom come.

Make heaven like I want my life here on earth.

Elijah prayed with the self-denying power, surrenders his heart to the Lord.

And so his hands were strengthened in his prayer.

My favorite example from church history of this kind of prayer is from the life of David Brainerd.

Many of you are familiar with David Brainerd, I'm sure.

Jonathan Edwards was pastoring his church in Northampton when he was fired and sent out to live among the Indians.

This is how he met David Brainerd.

David Brainerd had been expelled from Yale.

He was a theological student at Yale, and then he stood up in chapel and said that there was a chair that was on stage that had more evidence of God's saving grace than the dean of the school at Yale.

And so he found himself expelled.

Thrown out of seminary meant he couldn't be a pastor for an English language church, and so he was sent as a missionary to the Indians.

That's where he lived his life, riding his horse from Indian village to Indian village, praying for the people as he rode.

He spent so much time on his horse and in prayer that it he got sick, eventually got tuberculosis from this.

Indians found him in the woods one day, passed out on his horse, bleeding.

They took him to Jonathan Edwards' house because he was living with the Indians then as well.

Jonathan Edwards brought him in and had his family, Jerusalem, his daughter, try to nurse him back to health.

But he wouldn't give up praying.

And he wanted to look at the Indian villages when he prayed too.

One morning he was missing from his house.

Jerusha goes looking for him and finds him outside in a snowbank.

I mean, there's feet of snow.

This is modern-day Stockbridge, Massachusetts, feet of snow out there, and she brings him back inside.

He'd been out there for hours praying for this village in the snow.

She then from her house saw out there in the snow, and Jerusha thought she saw something supernatural.

She wrote later that she thought she saw roses growing up from the ground, growing up through the snow from where David Brainerd had been praying.

So she went back out there to investigate and saw that it was his own blood that he had coughed up while he was out there in the snow, freezing to death and praying.

Jerusalem, this made her love David Brainerd.

We don't know if they got married or not.

She cared for him for the rest of his short life.

She then died of tuberculosis also.

The image is etched in my mind of a man so addicted to prayer that he would go out in the snow to pray for these people, even if it cost him his life, which it did.

And it makes you ask yourself, what do you give up for prayer?

What do you say no to so you can pray?

Anything?

How do you deny yourself so you can go before the face of the Lord?

This is Jesus in the garden, isn't it?

The Garden of Gethsemane praying that this cup would pass from him.

I'm glad he prayed that.

He's the holiest person who ever lived.

If Jesus would have been excited about receiving our sin on him, that would give you grounds to question his holiness, wouldn't it?

What kind of holy person wants sin?

And so he prays that the cup would pass from him.

He prays in his weakness there.

Jesus has two wills, his human will and his divine will, and his human will, as holy as it is, wants nothing to do with sin.

And so he goes to war on himself and he submits his human will to his divine will.

And he says, Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done, and he goes to the cross to bear our sins.

You don't have two wills.

You only have your human will.

But you need to follow the example of the Lord and beat your will into submission and submit it to the will of God so that you pray according to his will.

Lord, we're thankful that you did not let even your holy desires to avoid sin keep you from the cross.

And we're thankful that you have given us an example like Elijah.

Lord, if you were our only example of how to pray, we would make excuses.

We we are not sinless, we are not two-natured beings.

We could excuse your prayer that way.

But Elijah confronts us.

We have a nature like his.

We have weaknesses like him.

We have physical needs for food and shelter and friends like him.

We see how he was deprived of all of those things.

And yet he drew his strengths from prayer.

Help us be like Elijah.

Help us be men and women who are known for standing in the presence of the Lord.

We pray that you would work in our hearts this week to accomplish that in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at IBCVA.com.

Here is a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibcva.com.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

We're located in Northern Virginia, and for more information about when and where we worship, check out our church website.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week.

You speak to Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.