I'd open up your Bible's book of Psalms, the Psalms, number 18, in verse six, Psalm 18, verse six. Title of the message tonight is The Prayer of Distress, The Prayer of Distress. Our prayers often come in times of distress. And you know, this is a good thing. Being distressed not only adds a sense of urgency to our prayers, but as I hope to bring out to you tonight, it is good for our spiritual health. Psalm 18.6, before we read that, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer. Our kind and most gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Lord, for the blessed privilege it has been to be in this place to worship you in spirit and in truth. Lord, I just pray your blessing upon this message, upon the reading of your word, the verses that we shall look at. I just pray for your Holy Spirit to teach us from these things. Oh, Lord, teach us about prayer. and reinforce in us how very important prayer is, true prayer, how important it is. Lord, I just pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen. All right, Psalm 18, verse six. The psalmist says, in my distress, I called upon the Lord and cried unto my God. He heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears. Those should be very reassuring words to the believer, to know that we can go to God in our distress, that we can cry out to God in prayer, and that he will hear us. Our prayers will come before him. They will make their way into his ears. And as we've said many times, one very important, factor in that is that the Lord Jesus Christ is our mediator. He is our intercessor. He goes between us and the Father and he takes those prayers and he makes certain that they reach the Father's ears. And that's such a blessing for us. And we shouldn't ever lose sight of that rich blessing. But to be in distress and to call upon the name of the Lord, can be a good thing. Now, the distress may not be so good. Whatever it is that is distressing us may be of a great threat to us in some way. But to be able to call unto the Lord is a good thing. And it's in those times that we can learn much about God and about his love for us, his care for us, and about how it is we should interact with God from our point of view. Too many people, I think, treat prayer as a kind of a way of taking their wish list before God. And maybe looking to God is that genie-in-a-bottle kind of approach, you know, that, you know, if you say the right things in the right way, then God's bound to answer your prayer the way you want Him to. Well, that's not what prayer is. Indeed, we take our requests before God. We make them known to God, okay? But we must understand that prayer is not about us going to God to change his mind about something. It is so that we go before God so that he might change our minds to be with his, to match his. Not that we don't ask God to change circumstances. We should, and we should make those requests. But we need to understand what true prayer really is all about. And that's the intention of the sermon tonight, is to talk about true prayer. I wanna make a couple of points here tonight. One, the very activity of true prayer rehearses in us our unworthiness. Our unworthiness. You know, by rights, you and I do not deserve for God to listen to our prayers. Not by our own merits. The very fact that he does is by the merits of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, okay? And we don't deserve answers to our prayers like some people seem to think that they do. God doesn't really owe us anything, does he? He doesn't. But he does say in his word that he hears our prayers. Just as the psalmist points out to us, he hears those prayers and he responds to our prayers. And he is very loving and merciful, very kind, but also very wise in the way that he responds to our prayers. The very activity of going to God in true prayer helps us to rehearse that unworthiness. I want you to turn now, and we could turn many places in the scriptures, and some maybe should be the best place to go at this point, but there is one Psalm that I do want you to look at right now, and that's Psalm 39. Let's turn there, Psalm 39, verses 12 and 13 in that Psalm. We, again, this very activity of true prayer should teach us our unworthiness before God. We're unworthy to receive his goodness and his grace. The psalmist here says in verse 12, hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry. Hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me that I may recover strength before I go hence and be no more. So note this person, the psalmist here, their feelings here. I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner. There is no presumption here by this person upon God and that God owes them anything. This person recognizes that they are just strangers on this earth, sojourners here, just as their fathers were. And note also that one of the requests here is that I may recover strength before I go hence and be no more. There is a recognition here by the psalmist here that they are lacking in something. Well, you know, we need to appreciate, or we need to look more for our own unworthiness before God, because that teaches us, that helps us to fight against pride that can crop up in us, in each one of us. When we think, when we get to thinking that God owes us something, you know, God, I've been going to church every Sunday for so, so long you ought to give me this, you know, for that. When we get to thinking along those lines, then I don't think we're truly praying, not as we should be. And we need to realize just who we are and just where we're at. We learn our unworthiness. as God has us to ask for his favors instead of just pouring them out upon us. Now, there's no doubt that God blesses us and gives to us things we never ask for, and he is very, very, very good to us, much better than we deserve. But we should also understand there are times when he wants us to come to him and ask him for something, because in that, he is teaching us to be dependent upon him. to rely upon him, to trust him in our time of need. And so, therefore, maybe he withholds something from us, or maybe he permits something to come up in our lives from which we realize that we're lacking and we don't have whatever it is we might need, and we must turn to the Lord to find that thing. We should take each day one day at a time with a sure knowledge of just how poor we are and just how much we need God. Again, when we begin to feel like we've got things under control, when we feel like we have whatever resources we need to get us through life, our dependence on God will waver. It will fall off, and we will lose something there. And so God permits certain things to happen to us that cause us to be reminded that we don't have everything we need, that we need God. And folks, we need to understand, we need God for everything. Everything. I've heard people talk about how they've pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. That's an old saying you don't hear much anymore. But basically meaning they made their own way in life. Well, you know, where did the health that that person has to do whatever it is they do, where did that come from? Where did the skill that they have to do whatever it is they do that they've made their way by, where did that come from? And if we need any further reminder, let me say this, or ask this, where does our next breath of air come from? The Lord. The Lord. He can take that away just as quickly as anything. If we have it, it's because of the Lord. And all good things come to us from the Lord. And we need to remember that. And we need to take stock of that and understand that. But using that phrase, take stock, let me go on and say this. True prayer will teach us how to take inventory of our needs. while exposing our poverty, our inability to meet those needs. We ought to take account of that. Some people don't like to, and this is pride in a person, they don't like to remind themselves that they're in need of something. They don't want to be dependent on anybody, even God. Well, that's not a good attitude for a Christian to have. We need to understand we are very dependent upon God, and we should often take inventory to remind ourselves of what it is we depend upon God for. So prayer then becomes our request for the riches of God, while at the same time, it is our confession of personal inadequacy. We make a request before God because we need something and we know God can fill it and we know that he must because we don't have it, right? And so there's both an humbling of self involved here as well as a worship, an exaltation of God. to whom we turn to and to whom we trust and we depend upon and we can count on. And that's a good thing for the Christian, I think, to experience daily, a reminder of that very thing. The second point I will make, I want you to turn now to Philippians chapter four, by the way, in the New Testament, Philippians chapter four, where we'll look at verses six and seven, probably a pretty well-known passage for you. Should be. And we've said the activity of true prayer rehearses our unworthiness. The second point I want to make tonight is the activity of prayer develops our spiritual health. Our spiritual health. You know, we give a lot of attention in America today to our physical health. There's much made of that, okay? There is much money spent on that very thing, right? There's medicine or a drug for anything now, almost, it seems, and we probably, Honestly, probably we take too many drugs, too much medicine for things. And certainly there is a whole multi-billion dollar industry built upon that very thing. But we do spend a lot of time, there are a lot of people, some spend more time on this than others, of course. I obviously am not one, but a lot of people spend a lot of time working out, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. but working out and trying to improve their physical health, and that's good. But we need to give, as believers, we need to give as much, if not more, attention to our spiritual health. And so, let's look here at Philippians chapter four, verses six and seven. He says here, be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. Now, that's true prayer. Prayer that involves supplication before God, that's what prayer is, with thanksgiving. You know why it's important to pray with thanksgiving, by the way? That again goes back to what I was just saying. It shows the acknowledgement on our part that we are trusting in God to provide that which we cannot provide for ourselves, okay? And so we demonstrate thanksgiving to God. We ought to be so very thankful to God. We're coming up on one of my favorite holidays. In fact, I think might rightly be the top Christian holiday, and that's Thanksgiving. But we should be thankful year round, right? We'll spend a lot of time that week leading up to that, maybe even thinking about what we're thankful for. And we have so much to be thankful for. But we should be doing that year round. But Thanksgiving is very important. But let your requests be made known unto God and the peace of God, verse seven, which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and mine is through Christ Jesus. Now, I want you to make a connection. We oftentimes separate these two verses, and we talk about prayer and thanksgiving in verse six, and then we go on and we talk about peace with God in verse seven, but I want you to understand that these two things are linked together. True prayer will produce peace in your heart toward God. Even when we may start out, we might be angry at God about something when we start out praying. But the end result of our prayer ought to be peace with God. We may be frustrated with God. We may be confused. Our minds may be in an uproar over something that's going on and we just don't understand it. But if we spend time in true prayer with God, we can come away with peace in our hearts. We might not have the understanding yet, if ever. We might not have all the answers to what it is that we're troubled by, but we can always have peace. And true prayer produces peace in our hearts. And we shouldn't overlook that or undervalue that. That's of great importance to us and certainly to our spiritual health. You see, we are the healthiest spiritually when we are at peace with God. When we come to that point where we pray and we empty ourselves of what we want and we're filled with what God wants, then we realize that we're poor in self while being rich in Jesus. And this is precisely the place that God wishes us to be because it's at this place that he often unleashes his power in us as his children. So I want you to hear that again. When we realize that we're poor in ourselves, we empty ourself of what we want. How often, let me interrupt my thought here and say this and ask this, how often do we go to God with our want list? God, I want you to do this, this, and this. We have things figured out. Go back to this morning's message a little bit. We can be quite presumptuous sometimes with God. thinking that we know better, God, you need to give me this, you need to give it to me in this order, and you need to give it to me by this time, you know? And we think that, and that's not good. We need to empty ourselves of those thoughts. Not of making the request. But in our attitude, in the condition of our heart, the motivation in our hearts for asking God for these things. So we need to empty us of ourselves and be filled with what God wants for us. Open to the fact that he may have a different answer for our request than the one we're looking for, okay? and I've gotta be prepared to empty myself of what I want, and be prepared to fill that with what God wants. God may want you to suffer a little while longer, and we need to be prepared to receive that, and we can do that and be at peace with God. Now, that's not something the world's gonna understand. That's not something that a lot of people aren't gonna understand. But the believer does when they spend time in true prayer with the Lord. It's always a good thing to come away from a prayer session with God thinking, you know what God, you do have it under control. You do know what you're doing. And we need that reminder from time to time. else pride hovers up and will take over our lives. We need to root out that pride. One way we do that is by learning to empty ourself before God and be filled with what it is that he wants. I believe this morning, I believe his brother Larry and his devotional mentioned something he saw about David when David faced Goliath about not being concerned that he only had a sling with five stones, something along those lines, because the giant he faced was too big to miss. I think I got that right. I hadn't heard that particular thing before. I was struck by that. And I got to thinking about that in relation to what we're talking about here. And we need to remember how David approached that giant. David went into that encounter with his eyes on God and not on the giant. If he had looked at the giant, it wouldn't have taken very long for him to be convinced of how, you know, he wasn't gonna be able to do the job. He'd be back up on the hill with the rest of the Israelites, cowering in fear like they had been doing, because that's all they could see is the giant. They weren't looking to God. But David went into that thing with his eyes on God. I'm gonna tell you something, you don't do that without spending time in prayer with God. Much time in prayer with God. So David wasn't going, he didn't walk down that mountain in his own strength. He wasn't going down there thinking, I can do this. He was going down there thinking, God will do this. God will take care of this giant. And he believed, he had faith. He was, I would say, very spiritually healthy. But a child, but a young man, a teenager probably, going down that mountainside, he was very spiritually healthy. He wasn't depending on himself, but on this God. You know, just as the athlete trains and builds strength and builds up skills through daily exercise, so must the Christian gain strength and build up skills through daily prayer. True prayer works this in us. And it does it in a couple of ways. One, by backstopping, if you will, human weakness with divine strength. We remind ourselves of how weak we are as humans, but we know that God's strength is behind us. I'm gonna tell you something. You cannot serve God without his strength. You're not strong enough, you're not able enough. You're not skilled enough. We need God's strength behind us. True prayer works that out in us. True prayer also will help to transform our human folly into divine wisdom. Our biggest problem sometimes is We get to relying on our own thinking too much. We figure things out. We know how they need to turn out. And we get to relying on that. And we need to understand much of our thinking is but folly, foolishness. And why? Well, it's easy to see when you compare yourself up against God. Do you know everything like God knows everything? Have you seen everything like God has seen everything? Do you know every circumstance in every person's life like God knows those circumstances in every person's life? So we need to True prayer helps us to weed out our own folly and replace that with that wisdom that comes from God. Isn't that the message of Romans chapter 12? Turn there. Romans chapter 12 in verses one and two. Romans 12, one and two. We've been here certainly in Romans 12 a lot lately. Romans 12, verses one and two. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. You see, God is working on our minds and he's changing them. And it's best for us to yield to that and not fight God on this and not insist on our own way and insist on our own thinking. but be transformed so that we look at things the way God looks at things. We see things the way he sees things. And then we will be able to prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. You're not gonna be able to do that before your mind is transformed, before it is renewed. Because then all you're gonna see is what you can do. But when our minds are transformed, when they're renewed, we begin to see what God can do and what God can do through us. I agree with Spurgeon on this when he says, we have no idea what prayer can do. And I think it's sad that that's so true. We have no idea because we don't spend the quality time in true prayer like we should. Maybe we're afraid of what we're gonna see, I don't know. All I know is when we see examples of people in the Bible who have obviously spent time in true prayer with God and their minds have been transformed and renewed, God did amazing things through them. I dare say we live in a time when it would be good if God's people spent some quality time in true prayer so that God might do amazing things through us. You never know. You never know how God might use you to open someone's eyes to the gospel and to what Jesus has done for them. I don't know if any of you pay attention to like pop culture and everything, but big thing that's been going around the last few weeks is that a rap singer by the name of Kanye West has made a profession of faith. And his life's been changed. He's going into prisons and ministering to people there and telling them the gospel. I've never been a Kanye West fan. I'm not a fan of that kind of music. And some of the things that he's done in the past are terrible. They're outright sinful. but he's not above God's grace or beyond God's grace. You never know what God might do and what God now might use him to accomplish for his purpose. That's how awesome God is. Folks, we can do amazing things for the Lord when we are surrendered to the Lord. and that happens through true prayer. I wanna close with a couple of passages of scripture. Colossians chapter four, Colossians four, verses two, three, and four there. Colossians chapter four, verses two, three, and four. Continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving. With all praying also for us that God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds, that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak. What's Paul asking the Colossians to do? To pray, to pray and to remember Paul and those who served with Paul, worked alongside Paul, remember them in their prayers, that God would use them to speak the gospel. where it needed to be spoken. We ought to pray for one and each other that very same prayer, that God would use us to speak the gospel wherever he desires it to be spoken. And then the last passage is Hebrews chapter four, verse 16. And you'll know this when it says, let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace. that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Only reason we can approach that throne of grace boldly is because we go in the name, in the righteousness of Jesus our Savior. but we can go and we must go before that throne boldly so that we might obtain mercy. And folks, we need mercy every day. And so that we might find grace to help in time of need. That time of need might be something along material lines, physical lines, health issues, financial issues, it could be a lot of things. But it should also be for spiritual things, spiritual power, spiritual strength, spiritual health, all these things we've been talking about tonight so that we might be used of the Lord to accomplish his purpose. God's not bound to use us to accomplish his purpose. He can do that as he wishes. But for some reason he's chosen to work out his will and work out his purpose in many ways through his people. And we should submit ourselves to him for that purpose. You can only do that if you're spiritually healthy. and at peace with God. And the only way to get there is through prayer. And quite frankly, the only way we do that kind of true prayer is when we're in or under distress. So therefore, distress is a good thing for us because it works out in us spiritual things. that draw us closer to God and put us in a place of service for God. Praise the Lord that he is patient with us and that he works these things in us. Let's bow our heads and we'll have a word of prayer and be dismissed for tonight.