Well, I'd like to read just three verses to you. One is from Isaiah 64, verse 7. There is none—this is God complaining about Israel—there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee. For thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us because of our iniquities. And then James 5, 17 and 18, Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it rained out on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit. Well, I'd like to speak to you about both of these verses, actually, in these few minutes. under the theme of taking hold of God and of yourself, ourselves, in prayer. And actually, the Bible commands us to do both. And there are certain ways in which we, by the grace of the Holy Spirit working in us, can take hold of ourselves in prayer. And there are other ways in which we can take hold of God. And I'm going to give you six quick ways you can take hold of yourself and four quick ways you can take hold of God. One way of taking hold of yourself is to remember the value of prayer. Remember the value of prayer. William Bridge said, It is a mercy to pray, even though I never received the mercy prayed for. Just having an open throne of communion with God is invaluable. When I was nine years old, my dad took me into his bedroom one time, sat me down on the bed and said, do you know what the difference is between a believer and an unbeliever? And I said, no, dad, because I never got the right answers to all his spiritual questions. And he said, A believer always has a place to go. He always has an open throne. And he then took some money out of his wallet, laid it on the bed. He said, no matter how much money I put on this bed, the value of prayer is higher than anything in this world. This is the most valuable gift you have in this world, that you have an open throne of grace to go to God at any time. Prayer is incredibly valuable, even if it's not answered, just to have the ear of God. Bishop Joseph Hall said, good prayers never come weeping back. I either receive what I asked for or I receive what I should have asked for in the first place, which is exceedingly abundantly above all that I could ask or think. So remember the value of prayer. And then secondly, take hold of yourself in prayer by remembering the priority of prayer. I had a very God-fearing mother who was just known for her prayer life. She prayed a couple hours every day. And when she turned 80, I said, mom, if you had to live your life all over again, what would you do differently? And she said, oh dear, I'd pray more. I go, oh, pray more. I mean, it's amazing. You see, the more grace you have of something, the more grace you have of a particular grace, the more you realize how little you have of that grace. And those people who grieve that they don't pray more earnestly and more fervently, usually are the people who are really in prayer. and because they have priority on prayer. Three days after I was ordained into the ministry, 43 years ago now, the first minister visited me. He was a man about 80 years old. I was 25. And I asked him, what could you teach me for ministry, for lifelong ministry? He said, I've only got one advice for you. He said, if you follow this, you're going to be okay throughout your whole ministry. I said, well, what's that? He goes, make sure that you never undertake anything, anything, without first bending your knee and asking God for wisdom and blessing and benediction. No matter how often you've done that class and you're doing it again and again, always, always show your dependency on God and go to him first. Thirdly, remember. Sincerity in prayer is the most important thing. It's really not the length of our prayers that is most important. It's not the arithmetic of our prayers, as Thomas Brooks put it, that's most important. But it's our sincerity in prayer. Brooks says the true mother, thinking of the Solomon example, would not have the child divided. So God loves a broken and a contrite heart, but he hates a divided heart. Sincerity is the key issue. Being honest with God, being open with God, being vulnerable to God. Take hold of yourself by remembering who you're coming to and come sincerely in prayer with your mind, your soul, your whole being. And fourthly, take hold of yourself by remembering what the old Puritans called the habit of prayer, that it must be habitus, they would say in Latin. It must be a holy habit, a regular routine every day, as well as spontaneous. Both are true. And so that's really what we mean by what Jesus meant by pray without ceasing. It doesn't mean you're praying 24 seven. It means that there's this holy habit. It's a daily flow. It's an attitude. Prayer is the thermometer of your spiritual life. And when you're living close to God, isn't that true? These little prayers, like Nehemiah's little prayers all throughout his book, go up spontaneously to God. Lord, remember me for good. Lord, help me now. That attitude of prayer, that habitus of prayer that the Holy Spirit puts within you, That is critical. Take hold of the habit of prayer. And then five, remember to take hold of yourself by being organized in prayer. And I'm thinking here particularly of intercessory prayer. Too often we have no organization of intercessory prayer. So we say to people, I'll pray for you, and we don't. I had a friend in South Africa. I wish I could say I do this myself. But he had a prayer book. And he had the names of all the people he'd pray for every day, then those he'd pray for every week, and those he'd pray for every month. And he was a very dear man of God. And he showed me that he prayed for me, my wife, our three children, each one of them, every single day at 5 o'clock in the morning. He was organized in his prayer. He's a prayer warrior. So yes, prayer must be very spontaneous, but when it comes to intercessory prayer, it's helpful to have a list. It is helpful to go through them one by one. We ministers in our church, we have a habit of every month we get together and we pray through another full page of about 15 families in our church, and every child. So we pray in a period of a year and a half, we pray for every single individual, all 750 people in our church together as ministers. Well, that's become just a joy to do not only, but a valuable, valuable exercise. And then sixthly, remember to take hold of yourself by valuing balance in prayer, balance in prayer. I know no better way than putting this than the very familiar way, which you know very well, of the Acts formula. You begin your prayer with adoration, adoring God, telling him how wonderful, how great he is. Then see for confession, confessing your sins, laying prostrate before him as a guilty, needy, poor sinner who has no strength in yourself, but you live out of his righteousness. And then Thanksgiving. Who am I? What is my house that thou hast brought us hitherto? And then supplications. So the acts formula, that balance, that's how we taught our children to pray. That's how we must pray ourselves. And one prayer will differ from another, of course. But we take hold of ourselves by not forgetting any of those four ingredients in prayer. Now, how do you take hold of God in prayer? Well, again, it's by the grace of the Holy Spirit. So you don't only remember the value and the priority and the sincerity and the habit and the organization and the balance of prayer, but you take hold of God by taking the promises of God and bringing them to him in prayer. An old elder in our church was going through his apartment when he was downsizing. He found a letter from my father, my God-fearing father, written one year after my dad was converted. And my dad was telling him in the letter about his spiritual exercises. I started reading the letter. I was fascinated. And the man said, would you like to keep it? I said, keep it? I said, this is my dad's handwriting. Of course, I'd like to keep it. Well, God, said Thomas Watson, loves to see his own handwriting coming back to him. from his people. So right behind me, actually you can see the books behind me on my shelf. I've got about 12 books there of prayers from our forefathers, Spurgeon's prayers, Bickerstet's prayers. Sometimes when I'm a bit down, I pull out one of those books. I just read through some of these great prayers and it stirs me up. But one thing I noticed about all 12 books is most of the prayers are simply the Bible. The Bible being interwoven back to God in prayer, telling God what he said, pleading his own word, saying, Lord, do what thou hast said. And the more we know the Bible, the better off we'll be in pleading those promises. We take hold of God when we take hold of the promises of God. And then secondly, We must remember not only God's promises in prayer, but we take hold of God when we remember the Bible itself for prayer, when we're bibline, when we're soaked and marinated in the scriptures. A beautiful thing to do, for example, is to take the Psalms and just open them up. Start with Psalm 1 and take every single verse, read it, and then turn that verse into a prayer. Read it, turn that verse into a prayer. Read it, turn that verse into a prayer. It's a powerful way to pray. Pray your way through the Psalms. Thirdly, we take hold of God in prayer when we remember that the entire Trinity is involved in prayer. Ephesians 2.18 puts it this way, for through Christ Jesus, we have access by one spirit unto the Father. You see the Trinitarian framework there of prayer? Through Christ Jesus, we have access by one spirit unto the Father. I like to think of prayer as a golden chain. What do I mean by that? Well, it's decreed if you can follow my hand here, is decreed by the Father in the top of the circle. And it's then merited by the Son. And then it's worked in our soul by the Holy Spirit. groanings that cannot be uttered. And then, by the Spirit, that prayer is then brought through Christ, and He salts it with the salt of His own sufferings, sanctifying it with His merits, and then presents it back to the Father, acceptable in the Father's sight. So it's a whole cycle, coming from the Father's decree, through the Son's merits, by the Spirit's groanings, back through the Son's intercessions, to the heart of the Father. And when we grasp, as John Owen put it, the distinctive communion with each person of the Trinity, and we see the Trinitarian involvement in every true prayer, as Owen spent 400 pages explaining what he meant by that in communion with God, we will have a deeper level of communion with God when we focus at times on the role of each person of the Trinity in our needy prayers. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. You see that's the text that John Owen actually expounded for 400 pages in stressing distinctive communion in prayer with each person of the Trinity. And then fourthly, finally, when we take hold of God, when we remember to truly believe in God, that he's the prayer-giving, prayer-hearing, prayer-answering God. O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come, says Psalm 65, verse 2. I love that expression, O thou that hearest prayer. This is who God is. And we've got to believe that. We've got to believe that. So I want to close this meditation with just a quick example here. There was a man who once set up a tavern next door to a church. And there were wild parties in that tavern, late night parties, also on Saturday night, sinful indulgence. And in the morning, there was often garbage or refuse all over the church parking lot. There was vomit on the church parking lot on Sunday morning from people who were too drunk to contain themselves. And it got so bad that the pastor said to his people, we're going to have to pray that the Lord will somehow intervene in this situation. And so they prayed publicly that God would resolve this problem. and or tornado maybe you've heard this story or tornado actually came to that town and completely wiped out the tavern and the tavern was no more and the church was left untouched and the tavern owner who was an atheist took the church to court claiming his loss was due to the congregation's prayers and The church members said, we didn't do anything. We claim innocence. We didn't touch the building. We did nothing. Well, the judge marveled. He said, this is the first case in my life where unbelievers believed in prayer and believers didn't believe in prayer. You see, the whole point of it was that they prayed and God took care of it. God answered their prayer. And if you know your own heart, if your heart is corrupt as mine, isn't that what happens to us so often? You pray for something, and God does it, and you're terribly surprised. Why are you so surprised? He's a prayer giving. He's a prayer hearing. He's a prayer answering God. Don't you believe it? And you see, our prayers are more fervent. They're more real when we take hold of God. as the prayer giving, prayer hearing, prayer answering God. And we truly believe in this connection. So all communication with God is a two-way street, really, isn't it? God comes to us through his word, and we go back to God through prayer. So when we open the Bible, we believe that word. But when we open our lips in prayer, we ought to believe that our God receives that prayer. And he will hear it, not for our sake, of course, but for Jesus' sake. Now, one practical conclusion and I'm done. When I studied at Westminster Seminary for my PhD, I read a lot of prayers and a lot of sermons by the Reformers and the Puritans. And I grappled, I grappled with this question when I read their sermons, especially. Their sermons really aren't that much different than conservative reform preacher's sermons today. So what made their lives so much more vibrant? And I came to the conclusion, I can't absolutely prove it to you, but I came to the conclusion that they had a much closer life in prayer with God than we generally speaking do. They were wrestlers with God. They were Habakkuk's in the secret place. And, you know, Martin Luther, for example, prayed three hours a day. Well, that doesn't mean that we all should go out and pray three hours a day. Don't forget he was a monk. He was used to praying long periods of time. But we need to use what our forefathers had, not to make us feel guilty and helpless, but to stir up hope and to stir up a realization of the value of prayer so that we don't just pray to fill up time or when we have a little bit of time, but prayer has got to be something in which we lay hold of God and we lay hold of ourselves and we view it as the most important part of our day.