Last Wednesday evening, I drew your attention to a text here in Ezra chapter 8. There in verse 22, for the sake of time, I'm not going to read the whole passage again. concerns the journey of Ezra and those with him. As they went up with a letter from Artaxerxes, the king, back to Jerusalem, carrying the gold and the silver for the house of God and the reestablishment of the worship of the Lord in his own house. And obviously they were going to be an easy target for bandits along the way. And the king offered them to have soldiers with them, to guard them on their journey. And just to show you the difference, Nehemiah would accept that. There's no difficulty. There's nothing wrong with it. But Ezra had already made a very powerful claim. And so therefore, having made that claim, he felt he had to stand over it. And faith was stirred to trust God, so they proclaimed a fast. at the river Ahava to afflict themselves and to seek the Lord. And the Lord heard them and brought them safely to their destination intact. But what he had spoken to the king, his claim was this. Verse 22, right there in the middle of the verse. The hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek Him. The hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek Him. Last Wednesday evening, I said, if you remember, that quite simply the doctrine of this text is that those who seek God will have the Lord's hand upon them. Those who seek God will have the Lord's hand upon them. Now last Wednesday night, I drew attention to the focal word, the vital word in the text, is the word seek. This is true of those who seek God. And so, though I thought it would only take a minute or two to open up the text, this is what we spent our time on last Wednesday evening considering what it is to seek God. I'm not going over that ground again tonight. But let us remember that that is the condition. This is not a carte blanche. This is not some promise that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can come and lay hold of. This is a promise that is restricted to those who are genuinely seeking the Lord. But where there is a seeking people, there is a promise from God that His hand will be upon them. Now, when you think of this text, therefore, and what it teaches, the hand of the Lord is upon all them for good that seek Him. First and foremost, you will see that there is a direct connection between our praying and the demonstration of God's power. God's hand in Scripture is always the figure of speech to declare and describe the working of His power. So, when it says His hands upon those who seek Him, it's saying there's a direct connection between our praying and the demonstration of God's power. In other words, prayer brings God into the situation. Prayer is the way of seeing God go to work on behalf of the people who are doing the praying and in answer to their prayer. Now, I have to tell you right away that it's easy to say that, but it raises a very deep and mysterious point. I can't answer it. I can't solve the problem. If it is a problem, to me it's no problem. You see, I don't worry about mystery. I don't worry when God is beyond my explanation. I'm actually quite happy when God is beyond my explanation. If I can ever explain God, then I'll bow in front of the mirror and start worshiping me. God is beyond comprehension. One of the most fundamental points in Christian theology is called the incomprehensibility of God. He is incomprehensible. He is knowable. You may know Him, Our knowledge is partial. We do not comprehensively know Him. Only God knows Himself. Only infinity can comprehend infinity. Only omniscience can comprehend omniscience. So we cannot comprehend God. There's a mystery here. I'm happy with it, but it does cause some people a lot of problem. God somehow The God who has all things under his power. The God who works all things according to the good pleasure of his own will. The God whose counsel comes down to the smallest details of life. Jesus said, even the very hairs of your head are all numbers. He says, even a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without your Heavenly Father. That is, without the absolute sovereignty of God. It extends to every detail of life and existence in His whole created universe. The whole of what we call the future is subject to that comprehensive decree of God. So the question arises, how then can my praying have any effect? How, if God is sovereign in all these things, how can my praying have any effect on any outcome? How is it that God's power and its demonstration is in any way conditioned upon my praying? And I have to tell you, I can pose the question, any idiot can do that. I cannot give you an answer. Only God has the answer to that. I can give you a logical and a theological reply. There's very often a huge difference between a reply and an answer. If you want to know the difference, just listen to any of the puppet masters who are running for presidential nomination. You ask a question, they haven't a notion in the world about giving you an answer. They make a reply. I had to laugh. I don't watch these debates. I get angry watching those debates. They're not debates. I'd rather watch paint drying a wall, to be quite honest. But I don't know. I must have had a brainstorm or flipped away from something important, like an English soccer match or something. I don't know what it was. Maybe I was looking for news, and this was part of the news. Probably it was that. And they asked Mrs. Clinton the question, looking back over the campaign so far, what one thing have you done or said that you think you would say, I wish I could take that back? And it was amazing. I'd love to be the question master. I'd love to say, hey, Mrs., just stop there for a minute. When I want that answer, I'll ask that question. But here's what I've asked you. And she went on and on and on, and the next thing, she spent the next three or four minutes blasting the Republicans because of the quality of their debate. Not a word about anything she had said or done that might want retraction. That was her reply. Certainly wasn't an answer. So I can give you a reply to this. How does it work out? Always remember Bert Cook, when we were young fellas and we would get taken up with these big questions. Bert Cook would always thump into us what is confessional theology, Westminster confession of faith theology, that the God who ordained the end also ordained the means. In other words, he didn't just ordain the end and you jump from here to here. He ordained everything in between. And in that ordination, there is the seeking of God's face in prayer. So while I cannot give you an answer, I can tell you that it is within the sovereign decree of God, and it is according to the working of the absolute wisdom of God, that He demonstrates His power to and through a praying people. And that's it. You can believe in the sovereignty of God from now until the cows come home. You will see nothing of God's moving, no matter how much you believe in God's sovereignty, unless you actually seek His face in prayer, lay hold of the promises, and get God's intervention. He is the one who has tied them both together. That's not just something that's true as a proposition of theology. That's true in biblical and post-biblical history. You go to the book of Acts. You open the first chapter of Acts. What do you find? You find the disciples on their knees. Because they have had a promise from God, Jesus gave them a promise. And the promise of the Lord Jesus was, wait for the promise of the Father which you have received of Me. He had told them, the end of Luke tells us this, that you are to go back to Jerusalem, you are to tarry in Jerusalem, you are to wait before God until you are endued with power from on high. So what did they do? They went back. And they didn't just wait by saying, well now, we have a promise from God. We're going to see revival here. Pentecost is going to come. Let's sit with our feet up. And as that idiot of a Presbyterian said, get out your cigar, get out your mug of beer, crack open your Bible and see what God's going to do. That's not what they said. They got on their knees and they started praying. And for 10 days they prayed and they sought God. And the day of Pentecost fully came, and God made bare His hand to a people who were seeking Him. You travel on in the book of Acts. The power of God is now flowing. So what do they do? Just go with the flow. Well, in a way they did. But how did they go with the flow? They kept praying at every step. They prayed, and they prayed with such power that physically even the very house in which they were meeting was shaken. You look in the book of Acts, and you see a very definite conjunction between praying and power. If you want something even more mysterious, you take the sister book to the book of Acts, the book of Luke, because written by the same man and addressed to the same man. Acts being a continuation of what Luke commences. Go back to the book of Luke and there is a theme running through that book and I'm deliberately not turning to it because we'd never get on any further if I did tonight. But there's a theme running through the book of Luke. Here it is. The Lord Jesus Christ in the place of prayer and the demonstration of God's power through Him. He is God. He is the Almighty Incarnate. But yet the deeds that He did, He did not do merely by virtue of His divine nature. He did as the God-man, furnished with all gifts and graces by the Holy Spirit, filled with the Spirit, anointed by the Spirit, enabled by the Spirit. And even in the ministry of Christ, God ties together these two things, seeking God and God. making bare his hand with power. Hosea speaks of the hiding of God's power. Various ways in which you could take that. I'm going to just use it as the phrase stands. The hiding of God's power. I think you could say, to a large extent, in the Western world, that's what you have today. I do not think that it's coincidental that the hiding of God's power goes right along with a loss of prayer. and a loss of seeking God. These two things go together. A direct connection between our praying and God making clear with divine demonstration His power. The second truth that comes clearly out of the text, the hand of our God is upon all them for good that seek Him. is that God grants his special protection to those who seek him. This is actually the contextual message. These people were in danger. They were taking a long and arduous and lonely and exposed trek. They became very vulnerable. They were carrying a lot of wealth. Obviously, such a thing was not done in a corner. It was impossible for this to be a secret. It was bound to be noised abroad. Ezra and this paltry company of unarmed people are setting out and they have wealth with them. You could just see every bandit on the road salivating. This is going to be an easy touch. That's why the king offered soldiers. because he realized this was dangerous. But Ezra says, the hand of our God is upon them for good that seek him. We are seeking him for a right way for us and for our little ones and for all our substance. We're seeking him. We're earnest about seeking him. And therefore, his protection will be upon us. Now, that protection is particularly A protection against anything that would stop us doing the work of God. Or anything that would rob us of the riches of God's house. Those are the two things that God was protecting with Ezra and his people. They were going to do a work for God. Anything that would stop them from doing God's work. If they're seeking Him, He will defeat that thing. He will hold it back. and He will bring them through. That's the promise. There is protection for us. Now let's lift this off the page of Scripture and into our hearts. This is real life. We're not here to spin fine theories. This is real life. Have we started out on an important work for God? Look at every obstacle. Look at everything that would come as a bandit, as it were, to take us out of the way, to distract or to redirect or to weaken or whatever, to stop us getting where we ought to get in the work of God. It is not God's will that we start a course without finishing it. Let's understand that. It is not the will of God that we start on a spiritual course. without finishing it. It is not God's will for a church to start down a line of serving God and give up. It is not the will of God for me as a Christian to start serving Him and give up. It's not God's will at all. There's nothing of that in scripture. When John Mark gave up, Paul was angry with him to such an extent he wouldn't entertain even taking him at a later date. Now he came to soften up later on. John Mark learned his lesson and became a mighty man of God. So there's a message of grace, there's restoration, there's hope. For those who have given up, there is a way back and a way forward. But nonetheless, it's not God's will that we start out and then just say, ah, forget about that. It's too hard. It costs too much. It's too much commitment. God's here to protect us. We'll seek Him. He'll protect us from that. Now, you need protection from it. But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you, oh, I'm sitting up here in Mount Everest and all you poor pygmies down there. It's a pity of you. I'm glad I'm not where you are, that I would never feel like giving up. Many a time, the desire of my heart would be, Lord, let somebody else do the work. Well, that's real spiritual, isn't it? That's real worthy of God. If Jesus Christ had taken that attitude, we'd all have been in hell. So, it's not really worthy of the Lord. But nonetheless, there are forces at work. I don't need to go down the list of what they are. They can be anything, from any direction, to stop you doing the work of God. Or to rob you of the riches of God's house. They were carrying the riches, the treasures of God's house. And there were forces that were out to rob them of it. Now I don't want to spiritualize unnecessarily. I don't think I have to. There are riches associated with God's house. The riches of grace. The riches of fellowship. The riches in this place of prayer. The riches of a soul winning ministry. The riches of an expanding ministry and God doing His will and His work among His people. These are real treasures among God's people. And it is the devil's attempt always to rob us of those things. We're going to hold on to the treasure. We've got to get through to God in prayer. The final thing I'll say very quickly is that when God's people seek Him, He grants His seeking people His special provision. This is a whole message all on its own, so I'll sum it up very, very quickly. There are three things. that God grants by way of provision. Back in chapter 7, verse 23, of the words of King Artaxerxes, as he sends Ezra forth, whatsoever is commanded by the God of heaven, let it be diligently done for the house of the God of heaven. God grants the means. When God sends you forth to do His work, He gives you the means to do it. God never sends anybody forth to war at His own charges. God never sends you forth to do a work for Him without making available to you the means to do that work. And I think that there is a greater King than Artaxerxes. He says it's commanded by the God of heaven. And he's certainly right. So there's a greater King than Artaxerxes who says, let everything that's needed for the house of God Let it be done. Let it be made available. Now that opens up the storehouse, not of an earthly king, but of a king of glory. Whatever is needed for the house of God, let it be provided. What do we need to serve Him? What is it we need for the house and the work of God in this place? Then God has promised if we seek Him, He will provide the means. Chapter 8, verse 25 through 27, you'll see that He provides the money. I don't want to get particularly into financial things, but the work of God, while it's a spiritual work, needs money. All our fledgling churches out there need money. Many a time I've told the Lord, if You'd give me a few million dollars, I could certainly do a lot with them. And then I realize I'm talking like a fool. because probably nothing would corrupt the work more quickly than if they got things too easy. But nonetheless, I think there's somewhere in between that I'd certainly like us all to be. But what we need, the Lord's going to provide. He will provide it. And then chapter 8, verse 17, He'll provide the ministers. There's a beautiful text there. Ezra looked around him and he saw, look who's with me and look who's not with me. The sons of Levi, the Levites were not there. These necessary servants for the house of God. Sometimes it's mistakenly said that the priests were not there. There were priests there. Ezra himself was a priest of the lineage of the high priest. There were priests there. But the work of God didn't go forward simply by the work of the priests. Vital to the work of the temple was the labor of the Levites. And they didn't turn up. I want to tell you, there is a responsibility that devolves upon you. You can't say, well, I'm not called to be the preacher. So what? You're called to be a servant. This is not a one-man or two-man or three-man ministry. Yes, the work of the preacher is different from yours. And it's a vital work. But it's not the only part of this work. And I just want to ask you tonight, In this church, how many of the Levites are checking in, absent for service. So, as we sent out an SOS, and this is our prayer, bring us ministers for the house of our God. Bring us servants for the house of our God. It's true, however you look at the idea of ministers, servants. We do need ministers for the pulpits. We do need ministers to go plant churches. We do need ministers to go out and carry the work of God to new places, new people. But with them, equally important and in some places, you have to say more important. We need the Levites. In other words, this is not a papist church. In Popery, the hierarchy is the church in the truest sense of the word. We're not papists, we're Protestants. This is the church, not just the ministry, but the membership. You are ministers of Christ. And you're either going to mark yourself present or absent for service. The prayer of a seeking people is send us ministers. God answered that prayer. He names the people that he sent. They were called Nethenim. Not going into the history of the Nethenim, but basically they signify people who are God's gift. They're God's gift. We pray for Buffalo. We pray for here. We pray for the churches. We need God's power. We need God's protection. And we need God's provision. We need Him to give us, provide us all the means. We need Him to provide all the money. We need Him to provide all the ministers, both preachers and people. that are absolutely essential to the work of God. This is our need. Here's God's promise. The hand of our God is upon them for good. Let's seek Him.