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Okay. So this year, '20 the year of 2025, I said this towards the beginning of the calendar year, that our the spiritual focus of our life in community, the life of the church here, the Conduit Ministries, is to be seeking the lord's face through prayer and through Sabbath. To seek the lord's face means that we seek intimacy with the lord. We seek an actual experience with him, an actual relationship with him. You know, that's different seeking the face of the lord or seeking intimacy of relationship with god is different than seeking knowledge about god.

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Often what gets substituted for experience with the lord or intimacy with the lord is simply knowledge about the Lord. We can become very knowledgeable about Christianity. We can become very knowledgeable even about the scripture. We can become very knowledgeable about faith in general. We can be very knowledgeable about a thing and not actually know a thing here in our heart.

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I shared with you last week that I, like, I am like, I really love World War two history or that era of history. And, can talk about all the main historical people and the policies and what happened in the countries and the attributes of war as it happened. Right? So I know a lot about World War two, but I don't know a lot about World War two like the guy who was on the beach of Normandy knows about World War two. There's a difference in experience when it come when when knowing something is different when you experience it intimately and when you just know about it.

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And what we wanna do here at Conduit this year and past that, right, even past that, is we want to move into a season of not just knowing about the Lord, but about experiencing intimacy and closeness and relationship with God through a life of prayer. On the other side of that is Sabbath. Right? Prayer and Sabbath. And

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Sabbath is is a is something that we actively pursue in order to make space for God's

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presence in our lives. Sabbath is a countercultural practice

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of making space so that

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the Lord can show up, bring healing, bring restoration, speak into our lives. We we we we turn the dial down on the white noise of culture and life in our soul so that we have internal capacity to actually hear from the Lord and experience intimacy with him. And so if we are going to walk into intimate relationship with God, we need to ensure that we're making room for him to show up in our lives in significant ways. And both the individual and communal practice of Sabbath is just the thing that does that.

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It says to the lord, hey, lord. We are we are pausing all of

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the rest of the things of our lives in order for in order to make space and to communicate that not just our mind is aligned with the desire to know you, but our schedules are aligned. Our families are aligned. Our priorities are aligned. Our resources are aligned. Our time is aligned.

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Lord, we want you here in our lives. Come and meet with us.

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K? So this will be and since that is

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the spiritual theme for the year, we decided we're gonna preach two kind of, like, big series for prayer and Sabbath at the beginning of the year as kind of like a a bolus, so to speak, of of biblical wisdom on those things, the beginning of the year. And then, we will be continuing to pursue both a culture of prayer and a culture of Sabbath in our church throughout this next year. So this is the last message on the initial series of prayer. And if you've missed them and you wanna go back, they're all on our YouTube channel. You can all go and and check them out there.

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But prayer will remain kind of the heartbeat of what we do even as we go into Sabbath, the Sabbath series next week. We have been talking about prayer as not just some random spiritual practice that you have a duty to undertake as a follower of Jesus or as someone who believes in God. But we've been talking about prayer as an invitation from God to enter into intimacy with him. Prayer is the kind of the context of an invitation from the Lord to say, hey, I want you to know me, and I want to know you. Come and speak with me in prayer, Develop this intimacy with me in prayer, and, let's grow in our relationship together.

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Tyler, stay in, pastor and writer. We have a

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book in the back there. There's some bookshelves in the back next

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to Ben. Hey, Ben. Can you raise your hand? See Ben back there? Those white bookshelves there?

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There's all kinds of books on those, shelves right there. It's, may maybe one of the better kept secrets, of this room. I know it's pretty anticlimactic, but, is that, books that pastor Luke and I read and really recommend around the topics that we're talking about on Sundays, we put on that shelf. You can purchase one. If you don't have the money, but you really feel like you need you wanna read one, you can grab one and just take it and read it.

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That's fine. But a book back there on prayer written by a pastor named Tyler Staton, one of the quotes in there says this about prayer. It says, prayer is about presence before it is about anything else. Prayer doesn't begin with the outcome.

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Prayer is the free choice to be with the father and to prefer his company.

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Prayer is the free choice to enter into an invitation to enter into intimacy in the presence of and the company of the father. This is what prayer is about. It doesn't start with, I need a desired outcome. And so because I need a desired outcome, I'm gonna jump into the life of prayer. Although we believe prayer produces things, we talked a little bit about that.

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But prayer always starts with the invitation from the Lord to say, hey. Come and meet with the person that produces the outcome first. It's not about the outcome. It's about the one that you meet in the midst of pursuing the outcome. It is him.

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It is himself. He is the prize of our prayer life. Relationship with him is the goal of our time in prayer. You know, I've I've found, you know, just about twenty years of pastoring people and their faith with Jesus and their relationship with Jesus. I've found as many reasons, as many reasons that people struggle with prayer as there probably are people in this room right now.

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And, it's it's it's almost a universal it's almost a two universal truths is that when you ask in a room like this, hey, raise your hand if you think prayer is important. K. Some of you think it's important, most most of you don't. So it's okay. We're gonna we're, I believe by faith that you're gonna believe it's important by the end of the sermon.

Cameron: 08:29

Right? Prayer is important. Everyone raises their hands. Right? And then you ask a similar or parallel question, and that parallel question is, how many of you feel like you are just hitting it on all eight cylinders with prayer?

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Yeah. Like, some of us like, I'm getting there. I'm growing. Right? But I have this internal sense that there is still something missing, still growth to be had from my life in prayer.

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So universal kind of truth in our hearts is that prayer is extraordinarily important, and I'm not good enough at it. Super, super important, man, I need some help. I need more of it in my life. I don't know how to get there. And there are a number of reasons, some personal to each of us, and then some that are kind of generalized reasons that we we usually struggle in prayer.

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Now we don't have time obviously to talk about all of those, but among all of the other reasons, I think a primary reason that I've recognized over time that we struggle with prayer is that in general,

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we do not know who we are.

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And in not knowing who we are, it becomes impossible to know who we are in relationship with the father that we pray to. So if we don't have if we don't have a if we don't have a right understanding

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of who we are in relationship to the heavenly father, then prayer can get twisted around all kinds of different fear, all kinds of different insecurity,

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all kinds of different, like, lack of confidence. But we struggle with prayer because we don't know who we are. And in not knowing who we are, we don't know who we are to God and why he would want us to pray.

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Now for those of you who have given over control

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of, control and lordship of your life to Jesus. For those of you who have trusted Jesus by faith for the forgiveness of your sins and have trusted Jesus to reconcile you to God, I'm here

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to tell you this morning that you no longer purely just belong to yourself. You belong to the Lord. You are not your own.

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You are his. And I don't mean that in type in in this sort of, like, authoritarian, maniacal, jealous, possessive type of way that you like that you are his.

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I mean it more in the way that I would say, these are my kids. Meaning, I understand that they're not that, like, that they have a will and that they are their own people. Right? And I don't possess them. Right?

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But as

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a figure of speech, we understand, right, what that means. We are gods, not in some jealous possession type of way, but more in, like, a loving, adoptive father type of way. And this is exactly how the scripture communicates our relationship with the father when we have expressed faith in Jesus Christ. That we are no longer aliens or strangers in this world. We are no longer foreigners.

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We are no longer orphans, but we have been adopted now as sons and daughters. We are not alone. We have a father in heaven who is eager to hear our voice, who is eager to build relationship, who is eager to increase the capacity of our lives to love. Paul says, for instance, in his letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians one verse five, he says, in love, he, god, predestined us to be adopted as his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and his will. That out of an act of love through Jesus Christ, God has adopted us as sons and daughters and is actively working to conform us to the image and likeness of Jesus Christ himself.

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Even more poignantly, he says in his letter to the Romans, Paul says in Romans chapter eight verses fifteen and sixteen, he says this. He says, for you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received a spirit of sonship. And by that spirit, he says, we can cry, Abba, father.

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The spirit himself testifies to our spirit that we are God's children. Now there's a

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d there's some details here even in this verse that would be easy to miss, but I I wanna take a few minutes to point them out. Understand that Paul, the apostle Paul who's writing Romans here, is writing

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as a deeply committed Jewish man. Okay? And as a Jewish man, and in Jewish culture, there was there was a healthy and holy fear of misusing the name of God. And so they would use a the the the term that they would use was the the what they called God was Yahweh. That was his name, which was a term of holiness and glory and separateness, but it was not a term of intimacy.

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It was a term of, like, we are so humble. God is so holy.

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The name Yahweh as an impersonal name was the name that we could say without the glory of God coming pounding down on us. Right? Where we weren't afraid that we were gonna misuse it. And so no Jewish person in their right mind would ever use any other name for God other than Yahweh for fear of misusing or dishonoring his name, blaspheming his name. So when Paul comes out and he says in Romans chapter eight verses fifteen and sixteen, he's like he's like, look.

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By faith in Jesus Christ, you are given the spirit of God, the spirit of sonship. You are now no longer some distant Jewish person, some distant gentile person, but you have been brought so close to the

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Lord in sonship as a child that now you have the level of intimacy where you can look at God and be like, Abba, father, daddy.

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Like, all the walls of religiosity, all the walls, all the all the all the the the trappings of holiness in life that have kept us, like, stiff arm length away from the Lord is, like, through the spirit of adoption and sonship in your life through faith in Jesus Christ, all of those have been torn down, and now you walk into the presence of God literally as your father to whom you have ultimate intimacy with. You can call him daddy, Abba. Right? And so Paul here is trying to make a case for all those who would come to faith in Jesus Christ to say, like, you don't even do you even realize the closeness of relationship that god desires with you? That god that god yearns for with you, that god himself is seeking for you.

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You see, what the difficulty here is with prayer is that we can lay out these biblical the a biblical truth like this.

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That, hey. Look. You're not far away from God. You're not a stranger to God. And faith by by faith in Jesus Christ, you're not a stranger to God.

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You are his child. You are his daughter. You are his son. That's a biblical truth. Right?

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And we can lay that. I can show that to you here. But but until a biblical truth becomes a heart reality, nothing changes. Right? Until we take what is proclaimed over our lives in the

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word and we allow the holy spirit of god to implant that on our hearts as now a heart reality, we will continue to approach prayer in kind of like this. I'm a stranger to God, I'm an orphan, I'm all alone, so I can't ask with boldness, I can't be persistent, I can't come with my pain, I can't come with my doubt, I can't ask for whatever I want because god is somehow mad at me, he's separate from me, he doesn't know me, I don't know him, he doesn't like me 99 of the time, and I'm just here a poor beggar coming to the lord in prayer.

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And what all of scripture is being like, listen, get the biblical truth into your heart as a reality because this is

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what will transform your life in prayer, knowing who you are. You are a you are his his daughter. You are his son. God doesn't just tolerate you. God is not annoyed at you.

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God is not sick of hearing your voice. God is not tired or weary of carrying your burdens.

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God enjoys you.

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God delights in you. God delights over you. You are his child,

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and he loves you.

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Pastor Tyler Staton said this. This this quote has rocked me for, like,

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the last three weeks since I first read it. He said

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the great scandal and most important work of prayer is simply to let ourselves be loved by God. And when we see prayer as an invitation to intimacy, walking into relationship with God in humility, allowing him to love us, it begins to transform a biblical truth into a heart reality. Because when we let God love us, we begin to see ourselves as he sees us.

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Worth love. Worthy of love. Worthy of delight.

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As one to enjoy.

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So I don't know about you. I don't

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know if you've been growing in prayer these last five weeks or so. If you've been developing a deeper level of intimacy with god than you have before I have, I am growing.

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I want you to know that, like, I am certainly not finished. Like, that

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the lord is changing and transforming me day in and day out as I submit to him.

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But if this has been

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the case or not been the case, my encouragement to you this morning, keep on praying. Keep on praying. Keep on pursuing. Keep on seeking because there is more and so much more of God that he wants you to know. Now as we've been talking about prayer the last few weeks, I've had this sense in my heart, and I've talked a little bit about it.

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I've had this sense in my heart of how, as a church conduit, will move forward, not just hoping that you each take your own little piece of the prayer pie and and go back and hope that it, like, revolutionizes your individual lives. I want that, of course. I I hope for that. I pray for that for you. But but to come to a come to a different type of mindset, a different type of understanding that as that that we exist together, not just as individual people, but as a community.

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If it that's a theological statement. It's to believe in the words of scripture like first Corinthians chapter 12, right, that Jesus is the head of this body of which we take places as many parts come together to do the work of building the kingdom in the place that we live. So I've been kind of asking the lord and like just wondering alright well what how does the building of a prayer culture in our hearts affect how we see our lives as a church going forward and what we do in response to what God is doing in our hearts about prayer. I think this is an important question to ask. Now last week, I know that, we had a a call to pray and fast together on a specific day, and so this was an invitation without judgment to anyone who wanted to participate.

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And I don't know if you participated, what your experience was in that, but there is a there is a togetherness and a unity that we must that we must agree upon as followers of Jesus Christ, one family united by one spirit to move forward with. So how will a culture of prayer affect conduit in general? I want to talk about that. Well, it will certainly, I hope, the growth of prayer and the growth of intimacy with God in our lives will certainly grow our own capacity

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to love god with our whole hearts. And loving god with our whole hearts is a pretty important thing. In fact, Jesus said it's the most important thing. Right? The teacher of the law came

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to him and said, hey, Jesus, sum up all of the law and the commandments. What's the most important what's the most important thing? If you were to sum it all up, he said, well, the most important thing is to love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

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Oh, okay. That's

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pretty clear. And so as we grow in our life in prayer, it is certainly our hope that we grow in our capacity to love god with our whole heart. It's something that we want to do. It's something that we pursue as followers of Jesus but here's a coreality to that it's the other half of what Jesus said there about the greatest commandment is that we will not just grow in our capacity to love God but that we will also grow in our capacity to love others. Right?

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Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's what Jesus said. And so when we love God with our whole hearts, it allows us to love others with a pure heart.

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We cannot love others in purity of heart without kind of, like, selfish motives if we don't first grow in our capacity to love god with our whole heart. See, loving others, so that our relationship with them is better for us

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is a way in which we love people without a pure heart. Like, I'm gonna love this person because the reason I'm gonna love them is because being around them right now in the state that they're in is really uncomfortable. I don't like who they are. And so I'm gonna love them into a position of their lives that makes it more comfortable for them to be around me. And when we love people for our own outcomes, we cannot possibly love them with the purity of heart that god calls us to.

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We love them for the picture of who we hope they will be someday rather than for the person God has made them in that moment. And so in our in our in our growing capacity to love God with our whole heart, we also grow in our capacity to love others with a pure heart. Now this has, of course, some personal, like, manifestations, building a prayer culture in

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the church. It affects us personally and individually. But I I will tell

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you, I have felt in my spirit that this birthing of a prayer culture here at Conduit has a lot more to do with the way that we, as a church, are in relationship to the region that we live in. Like, physically geographical region that we live in. Jamestown, Chautauqua County, Warren County, Pennsylvania, the greater area of that we that arch that represents who we have here in our church. I've felt in my spirit that God wants to kind of shake loose some of the comfortable, practices and trappings of evangelical Christian life and to remove obstacles to the pouring out of his spirit, not just on individuals or homes or on, or churches, but on the region.

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And I do believe that it is the prayers

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of the church, his sons and daughters, those who have access to the father through faith in Jesus Christ.

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I do believe that it is those prayers that chip away at the obstacles of darkness and evil in the world.

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The prayers of the church, the prayers of those who have access to the father by faith

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are the are the very things that bring down strongholds in regions, in cities, in churches, and in homes. And so if we do not get a vision for our for for our participation in God's desire to affect the whole region, we will abdicate the position of prayer that he has and the

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and the invitation to pray that he has given to us. And we will continue to see the same level of hopelessness, the same level of brokenness, the same level of despair, the same level of darkness that we have always seen, but have never had an answer for.

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Theologian Karl Barth said this, to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world. Now I wanna be clear when I say these next few comments.

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I love our church, man. I mean, I might be

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biased because I work here.

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I might be biased, but I we're gonna tell you, I think this is an awesome church, and I think this is an awesome place to make a spiritual home, and I love the things that, we're doing as a spiritual community. I love the programs we have. I love the ministries that we have. I think that they're God honoring, and they're done in purity of heart. And so I

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just want you to hear me say that first before I say all of this next stuff. K?

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Another thing I think that the birthing of a prayer culture will do here at Conduit is bring us back to the sober reminder that outside of the manifest presence of god in our community here, in our body, we are powerless to affect any amount of change in our community or region. Without the manifest presence of god here in the body of Conduit Ministries, we are powerless to affect any amount of change in our community or our

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region. Listen. Without God's manifest presence, there will

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be no transformation of hearts or lives. Without God, there will be no healing in marriages. Without God, there will be no freedom from addiction. Without God, there will be no peace in your mind or your heart. Without God, there will be no purpose for your work.

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Without God, there will be no eternal purpose for your possessions. Without God, we might as well just swing wildly at the air in a pretend sort of fight thinking that we're doing something we're not. We are we desperately need to pray for the manifest presence of God in our midst because we desperately need God. We desperately need to pray because we desperately need God. If we do not desperately pray for the presence of God to be manifest in our midst as a church, we are showing an over reliance on our own gifts, our own abilities, our own strategies, our own our own flesh and we will

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fail. There's another quote from pastor Staton's book. He says, Jesus teaches us to include the phrase, give us in our prayers daily. We as we ask, he weans

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us off of our addiction to independence, our insistence on living under the illusion that what we most deeply desire, we can feed ourselves all on our own. Our requests are not the spoiled whining of a child or the shaking cup of a beggar. Daily bread. Prayers are a daily reminder that we are not in charge and we are not in control. And I want you to hear me say, we are not in charge

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of the church, and we are not in control.

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Jesus was as as clear about this as he has been about anything else. It is he who will build his church.

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Jesus builds his church. He calls his followers to live in accordance

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with the core values of the kingdom, which he came to preach about and speak about more than any other thing. The kingdom of God is like. The kingdom of God is like. The kingdom of God is like. And when we live according to the principles

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of the kingdom, he is faithful to build the church. We get it switched. What can we do to build the church? How can

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we build this thing? How can we grow this thing? What program can we add? What ministry can we add? What strategy do we employ?

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What thing do we do? All good things. Love them in favor of them. Right? But there is a primary thing which is for us to understand our ultimate and total reliance on God in prayer.

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Lord, if you don't come, if you're not here with us, if you're not in this at the very center, Lord, we are doomed. This is the best it's gonna get. We talked about this all these realities a few weeks ago. Human effort insufficient to produce transformation in our hearts and in our region, so God must show up. And the things we consistently see in this area of life that we live, this area of the state that we live, Faithlessness, hopelessness, despair, darkness.

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I mean, for goodness sakes, we saw the sun for five minutes this morning, and we were

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all like, let's go. Right?

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It's like it did something internally to us. Because for so many months out

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of the year, we walk in both this actual dimness and darkness, but internally, there's this looming sense of just go to Facebook for more than

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five minutes and you I hate this place. Jamestown's the worst. I can't wait to move and get get out of this place. There's no jobs. There's no no nothing fun to do.

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I don't like anyone that lives here anymore. I can't wait to move somewhere warmer. Everyone is everyone is depressed here. Everyone is anxious. Everyone is addicted.

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Everyone has mental illness. And I and we just sit there and as the, like and as people who live according to the principles of God's kingdom, I'm like, yeah, but the gospel. But God. Yeah. Great.

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This is the perfect environment to show that the power of the gospel changes everything. Don't take me to the place that's already perfect. I wanna live three feet from the gates of hell so that we can proclaim for all the time that the gospel of Jesus Christ changes lives. And it will if we give ourselves to it in prayer. But listen, we must come to the realization that there is no amount of strategizing that can get us over, like, the looming spiritual sense of, like, we can't break through this invisible barrier or obstacle of whatever it is here.

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And the disciples experienced this themselves. In Mark chapter nine, Jesus the the the disciples were brought,

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were brought a demon possessed boy. Mark chapter nine starting at verse 14. And the boy was brought

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to them and, like, major case of demon possession. And would would regularly throw the boy into convulsions, try to kill him by throwing him into a fire, throw him into the water, and, and the father brought the boy to the disciples, and the disciples tried to heal him and they couldn't. And so then the father went to Jesus. Jesus is like, what's going on here? What's the issue?

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And and he's like, my son has been demon possessed for his whole life. There's been something wrong with him for his whole life. I brought him

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to your disciples. They couldn't they couldn't fix him. And Jesus is like, this is a faith issue. This is a faith issue. Right?

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And then maybe maybe we pick up the the story here, like, verse 21. Mark chapter nine. Jesus asked the boy's father, how long has he been like this? From childhood, he answered. It is often thrown him into the fire or water to kill him.

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But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us. If you can, Jesus says.

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Everything is possible for him who believes. Immediately, the boy's father says what I would say in a moment like that. I do believe, but help me with my unbelief because I got a lot of it.

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When Jesus saw that a crowd was running to the scene, he rebuked the evil spirit. You deaf and mute spirit, he said. I command you come out of him and never enter him again. The spirit shrieked, convulsed him violently, and came out. The boy looked so much

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like a corpse that many said he's dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lit how many times have people been like, James Jamestown? He's dead.

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But Jesus takes him by the hand and says, get up. Listed him to his feet, and he

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stood up. And after Jesus had

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gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, why couldn't we drive it out?

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It's like us saying, hey, heavenly father, like, man, we're we're working like our fingers to the bone over here

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in Jamestown. We're doing our best. Like, we're getting we're getting after it, and and we're, like, we're serving the poor, and we're being merciful, and we're preaching the gospel, and we're disciple people discipling people to faith, and we're baptizing them in your name. And it just seems like, lord, like, we're just not, like, we're just not moving the needle at all. What like, Jesus, what what what are we what are we gonna do?

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How do we do this? And then Jesus answers the disciples, why couldn't we drive it out? He says, this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. Now the interesting thing here is that this was not just some parable that Jesus was telling.

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He wasn't trying to communicate some spiritual point that's like hidden in the message of the it's an actual story and an actual thing that Jesus said and an actual thing that Jesus meant. Right? But there are some spiritual lessons that can be weaned from this story that we would do well to apply to our own circumstances as people in this community. There are spiritual realities that we are going to bump into that our natural gifting, our natural intellect, our clever strategizing, our great programs will not equip us to handle. Will not.

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See, there is a way of living and moving and programming and strategizing that is so that that is so a part

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of our fleshly work that eventually it just leaves us feeling exhausted, exasperated, and holding on to the paltry amount of fruit that our own efforts have produced. There's spiritual dynamics at play, brothers and sisters, in our world. There are spiritual dynamics at play. And if we fight in those spiritual dynamics with only a sense of fleshly resolve and work, all of our attempts will be weakened by our own lack of faith. These kinds of things, Jesus says, come out only by prayer and fasting.

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I think that we are at a critical crossroads of life in in this culture that we live in, in particular, our context here in Jamestown and the Chautauqua County region, where we must rightly see that some striving of the church to just, I gotta get people to believe. I just gotta make them a little bit more moral than they were yesterday. We gotta make churches attractive and palatable as possible. We gotta make it easier for people to follow Jesus and be here is the same type of effort that the disciples were able to offer in mark nine and left the boy still possessed and infirmed without any hope. Instead, I think that we must come back to a recognition that this moment of time of life and culture demands a more intense and intentional action and response from those who follow Jesus from the church.

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Recognizing that whatever is in culture here in Jamestown will come out only by prayer and fasting. And so we must give ourselves to the work of prayer and fasting for our region if we ever ever ever want to be able to go on Facebook and say, hey. Isn't Jamestown an awesome place to live? You see what the Lord has done here? You see the hope that has been brought?

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You see the things that have been built? You see the things that have been made new? You see the marriages that have been restored? You see the people that have been made whole? You see the people that have been set free?

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You see the families that have been revived? Do you see it all?

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This kind only comes out through prayer and fasting.

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And we would give ourselves to that, to be harbingers of a greater hope, a greater story, a more glorious gospel.

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The Lord will the Lord will show up.

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Second Chronicles chapter 16 verse nine says

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that the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.

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It's like the Lord is looking whose hearts fully committed to me, whose hearts are fully committed to me. Point, like and then it's his eyes stop. His eyes range throughout the earth looking for the person, looking for the people whose hearts are fully committed to him. And when he finds it, it's like, there. I will pour out my strength on that place.

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I will pour out my strength on that person. Heart's fully committed. Here comes my strength. Will the Lord's eyes rest upon us, church? Will the Lord's eyes rest on us?

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Man, I got three quarters of a sermon left to preach, and I

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feel like we're just gonna stop there. I'm not even joking.

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Will the Lord's eyes rest on us?

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Will you will you give your heart fully to him?

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And will you will you pursue, but will you seek the face of the Lord by giving yourself to the work of prayer? By saying by saying, lord, I I come to you as a son. I come to you as a daughter in boldness, in persistence, in a spirit of intercession, knowing, Lord, that you have called me to stand in the gap between what is and what can be through you.

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The Lord is looking for people who will be that. The Lord is looking for people who will do that. The Lord is looking for people who

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will say, oh, this kind this kind only comes out through prayer and fasting. Sign me up.

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Here I am, believing

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believing God for a greater vision of the place that we live.

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Believing God by faith that when he instructs his disciples to pray and he says, our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as

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it is in heaven, that we believe that prayer to actually be

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true and about us. That, lord, yeah, I will pray, heavenly father, that the reality of the kingdom of heaven would become the reality of the city of Jamestown.

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And you know what I know about heaven? Is that there is no despair there. And there is no darkness there. And there is no anxiety there. And there is no addiction there.

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And there is no sickness there. There's no hopelessness there. There's no brokenness

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there. So, will you join me?

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Will you join us

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to pray in faith that Jesus actually meant what he said when he told his disciples to pray, that the kingdom of heaven would come

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to the kingdom of earth? I do believe. I'm asking the lord to help me

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with my unbelief. Right? But I do believe. I will give my life to it.

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I will I will give my career to it. I will give my calling to it. I will give my resources to it. I will give my family to it. I will give my time to it.

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I will give my energy to it. Who else will?

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Thank you. Let's do that. Let's do it together. Let's do it together. Let's continue to continue to pray church.

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Continue to pray. I was gonna I

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was gonna preach, like, another half a sermon, I don't know, on Luke 18, which was, like, it's the parable of the persistent widow where, like,

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out of out of all of the parables in the gospels, this one is like, hey. I'm gonna tell you what this is about before I say it. Here it is. Right? It's like he's not I'm not I'm not leading this up into, interpretation.

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This is just like I just want you to know straight off. Here's the lesson. Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.

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And then he went and told the parable. Right? Let's always pray and never give up because the Lord that we serve hears our prayers and delights over them. Let's pray.

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Heavenly father. You have called us and invited us into intimacy with you. Lord, the context of that intimacy is the place of prayer. Lord, we know that we can find you in your word.

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We know that we find you in the body, in community. Lord, we know that we find you in worship. Lord, but, father, I pray that you would build in us here at Conduit a culture of prayer that has faith to say to that mountain, be uprooted and moved into the sea, and it will be so.

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Lord, save us from small faith.

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Lord, save us from a weakened vision of what can be, could be, should be, or will be in Jamestown at Chautauqua County. Give us a vision, Lord, of give us

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a vision of give us your vision for this place, Lord, that we might pray in faith that the kingdom of heaven would come crashing down to the area of Jamestown, and that nothing would remain the same, that everything would be changed. Lord, we are a people whose hearts are fully committed to you. And, Lord, we are asking that your eyes would stop on us, Lord, and that you would fill us with your strength. Strength to believe. Strength to have faith.

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Strength to say we will work as hard as we possibly can, but we will trust and rely only in the spirit of God. We will not trust in chariots or horses. We will trust only in the Lord our God. Father, write that truth upon our hearts this morning by faith. We give ourselves to you in Jesus' name.

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Amen.

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Lord,

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make us a dwelling place. Yeah. Lord, we're making room for you to move, making room for you to speak with clean hands and pure hearts, lord. We declare you are so much more worthy than a song. Come and make us your dwelling place that we

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might be for the glory of god. In Jesus' name, amen. Kinda, you are loved.

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Have a great week. We will see you next week at 10:30.