Well, our Bible conference speaker this morning is Dr. Tom Constable, and I had Dr. Constable for a couple of classes at Dallas Seminary. I can't believe it. Twenty years ago this past December, just a month ago, I graduated from Dallas Seminary, and they have slowed down, but I still have dreams that they're going to reread my papers and revoke that degree. I wake up in a cold sweat thinking, oh my goodness, what if they read that again? But anyway, no, I went to Dallas Seminary in the late 80s, early 90s, and a couple of things I remember about Dr. Constable, and he would not know this except that he's going to hear it now, and one is his comb humility with a bunch of snot-nosed seminary students that thought they knew it all. And I just love the way he handled the questions that were more like the student was trying to teach the professor than the other way around. And then there was one chapel at Dallas Seminary and I'd just be honest with you, it wasn't the best time of my life spiritually. Lori and I were struggling in our marriage and I went to chapel one day and we had communion and it touched me then and it touches me now. His voice broke as he was talking about the bread and he was talking about the cup and I realized that this isn't just an forgive me, an egghead theologian. This is a man who has been changed deeply by what Jesus did for him in his life. And that just, it never meant more to me, and it still means something to me to realize that those men that were teaching me were godly men, not just men who'd studied a lot. And I just loved that about him. We now have a different connection with him because he's the founding, one of the founding elders at the church where Laurie's brother is the pastor in Plano, Texas. And so I've seen him a couple of times in the years since. And I think you'll really enjoy listening. Take your notes out. I noticed they put a booklet together. Take some notes today and let's welcome Dr. Constable. Thank you so much, Dan. We will get to those papers eventually. It's a joy to be with you today because I always enjoy coming to the Bay Area, for one thing. The summer after Mary and I got married, we lived on the peninsula for a short time and grew to appreciate this part of the country firsthand. And since then, I've had a number of opportunities to return And as Stan mentioned, we have some connections with this church as well, not only as our pastor, Laurie's brother, and Stan, a former student, but the daughter of our worship pastor, or the wife of our worship pastor, is the daughter of the Thingveils in this church, Ken and Ellen. And we greatly appreciate Sarah Rober, and the contribution that she makes to our ministry in our church, our worship ministry. And also, I understand that the daughter of Dick and Carolyn Sharman also attends this church. And they were part of our congregation for a number of years as well. So I've been looking forward to coming. Mary is with me. She's sitting next to Valerie Anderson here. really have been anticipating our time with you. Prayer has been a special object of interest for me and a subject of study for me since I was in college. I grew up in a Christian home and my parents prayed, but as I grew older and became more thoughtful about my faith, I began to wonder about prayer And as I read the scriptures, I began to read things that seemed to be contradictory. And I couldn't put it all together and didn't understand some things about prayer. And so I decided to make a special study of that and pursued it and found out that the scriptures are amazingly consistent on this subject as well as on every other subject. The subject of prayer has remained a perennial subject of study and interest for me, and I delight to share some of the insights that God has given me in the time that we are together. I hope you'll be able to attend some of the other sessions. They are designed to help us in our walk with the Lord as well as in our understanding of what prayer is all about. But we need to start out with the troubling question, why don't we pray more? If I were to ask everybody in this room to raise their hand, if you feel you pray enough, probably few hands would go up. All of us feel that prayer gets away from us. We don't pray as much as we should. We don't pray as well as we should, we often feel. We forget to pray. We say sometimes, well, I was too busy. Other things just crowded it out. Or perhaps we quit too soon when we were praying. Something came up and we were interrupted. We didn't get back to it. And those are the reasons we sometimes give, but I would suggest to you that the real reason is that we don't feel a need to pray more. We feel a need to eat a meal because our stomachs get empty and they remind us that we need food. But we don't have that kind of a physical response to our need to get in touch with God. and communicate with him, and therefore it gets past us. And I have been embarrassed sometimes to come to the end of a period of time, perhaps a day, and realize how little I have talked to God. Well, why is this? Well, I think if we realized how desperately we need God's help, we would pray more and we would pray better. Our lives would be more powerful spiritually because we would be in closer touch with our Lord, but we're comfortable. Our stomachs are full, we're living in a peaceful atmosphere, and the world is constantly telling us that we can get along perfectly well without God. And that has an influence on us. And so we don't pray like we should. We think we can get along without it. A very serious mistake. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian dissident and poet, once wrote in an essay that was published in Time magazine of the spiritual impotence that comes from living a life of peace. He said, people are unwilling to risk their comforts when they live in peaceful conditions. And often I think that is true. We become spiritually impotent because everything is rocking along fairly well. And if you have lived the Christian life for any length of time, You have discovered that you can do things in terms of serving the Lord, and the more you do it, the easier it is to do it without realizing that we are dependent upon the Lord for any success that comes out of what we do. Well, how can we change? Well, I think in some cases, it's a matter of unbelief. You remember when Jesus criticized the disciples, he often criticized them for their unbelief. What did he mean? Well, he had told them things, but they just didn't believe it. And it didn't affect the way they lived. And I think many of us are in that boat. He has told us clearly in his word that we are absolutely dependent upon him. We're dependent on him for our salvation. We have no hope of life with him beyond the grave unless we trust in the provision of salvation that he has made by sending his son who gave his life as a sacrifice for us. And probably most of you this morning here have realized your dependence upon God for your eternal salvation. And that's good, because that's reality. We have no hope of heaven if it is not through God's grace, his provision of salvation. And perhaps you're here this morning, and you're concerned about that. You do not have the assurance that when you die, go to be with God. And I would invite you right now to place your confidence and trust in Jesus Christ as the one who did for you what you cannot do for yourself, and that is he satisfied God's righteous demands against people, sinners. And if you will put your confidence in Him that what He did on the cross of Calvary, He has said that you have eternal life when you do that. Most of us have believed that. And that is why we gather together and rejoice and sing the songs that we've been singing because we appreciate the salvation that He has provided for us. We have come to depend on Him for our salvation. but we also need to depend on him for daily victory over the temptations that we have to live with and that come to us like waves as we go through life. The Apostle Paul struggled with that. He writes about it in Romans chapter seven, where he said that he had a desire to do what is right, but he found that he didn't do it. He knew what was right, but there was something within him that made him rebellious. And all of us can identify with that, can't we? We are dependent upon the Lord for the strength to overcome those temptations, to live in victory each day. to continue to live by the faith with which we began the Christian life, day by day, trusting in Him. And if you've been a Christian for some time, you've undoubtedly heard that preached and taught many times. And often, when we run into problems and situations that we know we can't handle, we really pray about those things. And that's good. We should. Because he is our only source of victory. But we're dependent on him for everything. Turn in your Bibles, if you have one, this morning to John chapter 15, verse 5. John 15, 5. Jesus is speaking to his disciples in the upper room before he went to the cross. He's preparing them for life without him. And he's telling them that he is like a vine and that they are like branches. And in verse five he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit. For without me, you can do what? Nothing. Nothing. Without me, you can do nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. However you want to put it. In the context of this passage, of course, he's talking about bearing fruit. But if you think about it, this is literally true of everything. that we experience in life. You will not take another breath unless God enables you to do that. You are that dependent upon him. Your heart will not beat one more time. You will not take a step out of this room unless God gives you the ability to do that. Do we believe it? Well, yes, to some extent we do. But perhaps we don't believe it to the extent that we should. If we really believe that, wouldn't we pray more about what we face, about what we do? I'm not suggesting we pray that our hearts will continue to beat. No, that might not be bad. But about everything that we do. As we go to the grocery store, as we drive our vehicles around, as we have opportunity to talk to other people, if we are to be the instruments of God in the world that he wants us to be, we have to recognize that without him and his enabling grace and guidance, what we do will be nothing, ineffective. It's interesting that Jesus didn't say to his disciples, unless you have a supportive spouse, you can do nothing. Unless you are a member of a good church, you can do nothing. Unless you've been a Christian for at least five years, you can do nothing. Unless you've memorized at least a thousand Bible verses, you can do nothing. All of those things are good, But that's not where the power lies in the Christian life. The power lies with God, and we tap into it as we acknowledge our dependence upon him so that he can work through us, and then he gets the glory from us and from those who observe. I've been in ministry a long time, and I've noticed that the longer I am serving the Lord, all of us are in ministry, of course, as Christians, but I've been doing this a long time, and I've noticed that the longer I do it, the easier it is to do it without praying about something. I've done it before, usually. I can do it again, I think. But that's not true. Unless God blesses and works, what I do is going to be ineffective. It doesn't depend on experience. It depends on God. Well, not only does God tell us that we are absolutely dependent on him and his word, but he shows us this in the lives of people in scripture that he has recorded. When God's servants recognized their dependence upon him, they were transformed. They became different people. When they lived a life of conscious dependence upon God, This happened. You remember Job? Job was the most righteous man on the planet, evidently, in his day. And he was wealthy, he was prosperous, he was respected in his community, he was loved by his large family. But then one day, Satan asked permission from the Lord to try Job's faith. And God gave him that permission and so Satan stepped in and he removed all of Job's supporting structures from his life. He lost his family, he lost his possessions, he lost his health, all in one day. And he went out to live at the landfill. It's the only place that he could live. And it was there that his, quote, friends came to encourage him. And with friends like that, who needs enemies? But their intentions were good. They were just not very capable counselors. They had the wrong solution to Job's sufferings. They thought that he was a great sinner. That wasn't the reason he was suffering. It was because God wanted to use his life to demonstrate to others how a person would trust him in spite of difficulty. And so through all the trials that we read about in those 40 chapters of the book of Job, we read that Job was being tested. He cried out to God in his agony. He kept praying to God, but God didn't do anything. He didn't show up. He didn't intervene. He didn't stop the pain for a long time. And then one day, God did show up. And interestingly, he didn't answer Job's questions, but he simply gave Job a greater appreciation of himself, of God. He revealed his sovereignty in controlling the creation, the animal world. He impressed him with God's sovereignty, his authority over his creation, his creative ability. And Job said, I have heard about you with the hearing of my ears. I heard a lot about you, God, and I believed in you, but now my eye sees you. It's as though I see you for the first time. And he said, I abhor myself in dust and ashes. What did he mean? Well, he meant that he realized how dependent he was on God and that God was there and God loved him. and that he could trust God. And as the book ends, Job never gets the answers to all these questions that bother us so much as we go through suffering. But he's content because he realizes that he is in a dependent relationship with a creator God who is in control of everything, who is all wise, all powerful, and he can trust him. Job became a different man after he went through that, after he learned his dependence upon God. Moses was another Old Testament character who learned the same thing. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us some things about Moses that the Old Testament doesn't tell us. Josephus wrote that Moses was an outstanding young man in his youth, 20s, 30s, that he was actually a military commander who led the Egyptians in victory over their enemy, the Ethiopians. Bible doesn't mention that. He was, of course, the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, He grew up with many advantages, physically, financially, socially. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And he thought he was a pretty competent individual. He had good reason to think so. He'd been very effective. And so when two Hebrews got in a fight, Or excuse me, when two Egyptians got in a fight, Moses said, well, I can handle this. And he stepped in. And he got involved in the fight and ended up killing one of the Egyptians. This was observed, as you will remember, and brought to Pharaoh's notice. And the wanted posters got posted up everywhere that Moses was the man to be brought to justice. He had to flee to the backside of the Midianite Desert for 40 years. And there, this young man, who thought that he had everything under control, learned that he had very little under control. He was a shepherd, taking care of a bunch of dirty sheep rather than leading an army. D.L. Moody said that Moses spent the first 40 years of his life thinking that he was somebody. He spent the second 40 years of his life learning that he was a nobody. And the third 40 years of his life seeing what God can do with somebody who has learned that he's a nobody. That's a pretty good description of Moses' life and career. It was on the backside of that desert where Moses came face to face with his own limitations and acknowledged his dependence upon God that his life was changed. When he came upon that burning bush and God said, I want you to go back to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of Egypt and into the promised land, Moses said, I can't do that. I'm not your man, God. I can't do that." And God had to argue with Moses to get him to go back into Egypt to do this. Moses had learned only too well of his own inability, but he hadn't learned well enough God's ability. And that's what the plagues in Egypt were designed to do for Moses, to teach him that the power in his life, Moses' life, was not Moses, but it was God. And it became effective as Moses recognized his own dependence upon God and trusted him and obeyed him as he went out and did what God led him to do. Well, there are many other characters like that. In the Bible, Isaiah is another one. He saw a vision of God in his celestial throne and it absolutely paralyzed him. He fell on his face as though he were dead because he realized that God was the absolutely holy being, absolutely perfect in every respect. And he said, I am an unclean man. I dwell among a people of unclean lips. Daniel had a similar experience after seeing his visions of the future and how God would control history from then on. The text says that he was sick for days. It knocked all the stuffing out of him. And the Apostle John in the book of Revelation says he fell at his feet as one dead when he saw the Lamb on the throne at the Father's right hand. When people get a vision of God as He is, that He is really in control of everything, He is sovereign, it changes them. When they realize that He is absolutely perfect in every way, absolutely pure, we realize that we are not. and it makes us feel dependent upon God in a realistic way because we really are dependent on Him. Our culture is trying to convince all of us that we don't need God, that all we need to do is try a little harder or buy this self-help book and put these principles into operation. We can get along perfectly well without God. And if we buy into that, we are buying into unreality. Because the Scripture says, without me, you can do nothing. Nothing. Do we believe it? Well, not only does Scripture teach us this, but our experience teaches us the same thing. How much spiritual impact does your life have on other people? I was challenged reading the biography of a young man in his 20s. He died in his 20s. He was a missionary on the East Coast during the colonial period of American history. His name was David Brainerd. Perhaps you've heard of him. He was a man of unusual spiritual power. His life affected people amazingly. The work that he accomplished simply by prayer was almost unbelievable. His biographer, A.J. Gordon, wrote, in the depths of those New England forests alone, unable to speak the language of the Indians, he was a missionary to the Indians, he spent whole days in prayer. Well, I guess you would if you couldn't communicate with the people that you were trying to help. He knew he could not reach those savages. He did not understand their language. If he wanted to speak at all, he had to find someone who could vaguely interpret his thought. Therefore, he knew that anything he should do must be absolutely dependent on the power of God. So he spent whole days in prayer. simply that the power of God might come upon him so unmistakably that these people should not be able to stand before him. And what happened? Gordon wrote, once he preached and the interpreter was so intoxicated he could hardly stand up, yet scores of people were converted through that sermon. It was the tremendous power of God working through him. Now, when I first read that, I thought to myself, well, that would be great, but frankly, spending whole days in prayer is very difficult for me. I've never done it. Maybe if I did, I would have that kind of influence on other people. I was interested to read this comment by Martin Luther, He was a pretty busy man. I'm sure he didn't think that he had a lot of time to just spend in prayer. But he said, I have so much to do that I cannot get on without three hours a day of praying. I thought to myself, that's an entirely different view of prayer than I have. I think most of us tend to fit prayer into the nicks and crannies of of our lives, and when we have a few extra minutes, we spend some time in prayer. I'm not sure when Luther did his praying. Maybe it was three hours nonstop. I think probably it was three hours worked into the day. Paul spoke about praying without ceasing. And I think this is much more realistic, that as we go through the day, our minds constantly go back to the Lord. In computer life, there is a default position that things revert to automatically. Wouldn't it be great if as Christians, the default position of our minds was to go to God Well, we can train ourselves to do that partially. When we get into our car, the first thing we can do without turning the key is to pray that God would give us safety and guidance. As we go to bed at night, first thing we do is to pray about it. We can train ourselves to do that. And perhaps we should do more of it. Robert Lewis was George Washington's private secretary. And during the first part of the presidency, he said that he accidentally witnessed Washington's private devotions, both morning and evening. There's some question about whether George Washington was a genuine Christian, but he certainly was a God-fearing man and one who believed that he was dependent upon God for wisdom and help. being the president of a new nation, I suppose, helps one feel that. Mr. Lewis saw him, Washington, in a kneeling posture with an open Bible before him, and he said he believed this was his daily practice. His custom was to go to his library in the morning for his devotions every day. Stonewall Jackson was a man of prayer. According to E. M. Bounds in his book Purpose in Prayer, Jackson said, I have so fixed the habit of prayer in my mind that I never raise a glass of water to my lips without asking God's blessing. He trained himself to do that. I never seal a letter without putting a word of prayer under the seal. I never take a letter from the post without a brief sending of my thoughts heavenward. Never change my classes at the lecture room without a minute's petition for the cadets who go out and for those who come in." Could you do that? Could you train yourself to remind yourself of your dependence upon God? Well, I think all of us could do more of that than we do. And that would certainly help our prayer lives. putting into practical effect our belief that we are totally dependent upon him. I began to learn this when I was in college. I went to Wheaton College, and I met with a group of students there in the Chicago area before lunch once a week to pray for missions. We were all interested in missions. And we would get together in the basement of Blanchard Hall there and pray for missionaries. And we'd get letters from missionaries and share them with our friends, and then we'd go to lunch together. Well, one day we got a letter from one of the missionaries, and he said, I'd like you to think about coming down to Mexico City and helping me during the Christmas break. And we thought, well, that'd be a great way to spend Christmas. And so we started to pray about it. We didn't have any way to get there, didn't have any money, didn't have any transportation. Most of the group didn't know any Spanish. So there were a lot of barriers to overcome, but we prayed about them, and one by one, God began to answer those prayers. We learned that we could get all the literature that we wanted free from the Moody literature mission. Somebody provided a van for us to go in and the missionary sent us phrases in Spanish to learn. And so when it rolled around, time rolled around to go down, we were ready. And I remember getting in that van in the snow And we were packed in that van like cordwood with all this literature. And I think it's about 3,000 miles from Chicago to Mexico City, and we drove it nonstop. It was an unforgettable trip. And then when we got to Mexico City, we met the missionary, and he said, we've got to go farther south to Oaxaca, where I live. where we're going to do this literature distribution. So we got back in the van and we went farther south. And then he said, OK, I want to divide you up into twos and send you two by two throughout this whole city. And I want you to distribute this Christian literature. Some of it was free. Some of it was for sale. But with all of it, there was an invitation to a Bible correspondence course. And so we started to go door to door. And most of us thought, hey, we're probably not going to be very effective at this because who's going to buy Christian literature from gringo teenagers in a Catholic country? But it was amazing. The people were so gracious and friendly. They took our literature. They even gave us money for some of it. They accepted these invitations to a Bible correspondence course. And when we got back to Chicago after the whole trip was over, the missionary sent us a letter. And he said, you would never believe how many invitations have been returned for correspondence courses. And we began to put two and two together. God really does answer prayer. He really does work when it seems that it is impossible for him to work. One of the members of that team was a fellow named George Verwer. That's a familiar name to a few of you because George Verwer is the founder and head of one of the largest mission organizations in the world today, called Operation Mobilization. He used that experience and said, I'm going to build my life on these principles. Sometimes we would spend a whole night in prayer getting ready to go on that trip, pleading with God to give us what we needed. And he did. And the great work that God has done through O.M. since then is a testimony to the fact that he honors the prayers of those who recognize that they are absolutely dependent upon him. Not only the word of God, Not only our experience, but the challenges that we face prove our total dependence upon God. The world needs a supernatural revival. I've been told that there were more wars around the world in the 20th century than there have been throughout all the preceding centuries of history. We're well aware of the rebellions that have taken place in Egypt and the Middle East and elsewhere. The nuclear arms potential is greater in the world today than it has ever been, despite disarmament. Billy Graham said that World leaders used to call him frequently to ask him if the world was coming to an end. The point is that it doesn't take an expert in Bible prophecy to know that the world is headed for something dramatic and big. In view of that, the coming of the Lord appears to be very soon. We don't know how much more time we have. We may be the last generation before Jesus Christ calls his church home and the judgments of the Great Tribulation begin. Secular historians. are saying that could be the case. That could be the case. Mary and I had the privilege of living in Great Britain for a year while I was on sabbatical. And during that time, we made a trip to Wales just to see the sights. One of the things I wanted to see in Wales was the slate mines that Wales is famous for. because I'd heard that during the Welsh Revival, which took place about 110 years ago in Wales, there were so many people getting saved and so many working class people getting saved, miners, that they would come out of the mines singing these great hymns of the faith that some of us still sing. Guide me, O thou great Jehovah was written by a Welshman at that time. and other great hymns like that. I wanted to see those minds. And we did. And as I stood there looking at that hole in the ground, I thought to myself, just think of all the people here who came out of those mines singing those hymns. Wouldn't that be great if that happened in America? The account of the Welsh Revival that I read said that the Holy Spirit was working so dramatically among people that as Christians walked down the sidewalks and passed unbelievers, unbelievers would drop to their knees and cry out to God to have mercy on them. That's almost unbelievable, isn't it? Wouldn't that be great if that happened again here? We certainly need it. I hope you're praying for revival in America. Pastors of the elders got together before this service and one of them prayed for a revival. I was so encouraged by that. That's what we need. But we have to recognize that only God can do it. It's not something that can be generated or programmed. It's a working of God that comes about when people recognize their dependence upon him. The Welsh Revival began when a small group of Christians committed themselves to pray about the abominable conditions that existed in Wales at that time. The world needs that now. We need to pray for whole countries. We can't hope to be much help to others without God's power. His word says so. Our experience teaches us that. And the challenges that we face help us to recognize that as well. We desperately need God's help. Independence from God is very dangerous. Prayer is a discipline of dependence, a discipline of dependence. It's a way in which we ask God to help us as we humble ourselves before him. May God teach us how desperately We need him because only then will we pray as we must. Our Father, we thank you for the great privilege of prayer. We thank you that we never have to wait in line to talk to you. We never have to make an appointment. that when we pray, our prayers are never delegated to angels, but that you hear each one of them and that you respond in your own wisdom to each thing that we request. Thank you for giving us the privilege of being your dependent children. Help us never to outgrow the feeling of dependence that still exists between us and you because you are who you are and because of who we are as well. In Jesus name, amen. This message has been brought to you by the Santa Rosa Bible Church. Our purpose is to lift up the Lord. by living out the word, loving one another, and leading others to Christ. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.srbible.org or come visit us in person at 4575 Badger Road, Santa Rosa, California 95409. You can also give us a call at 707-538-2385.