I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His spirit

in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your heart and through faith.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the

Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

I am so thankful to have all of you with us today at all of our life churches and I hope

that some of you will join me in giving praise to our God that we're celebrating over 2,000

people being baptized today, made new by the grace of Jesus Christ, truly overwhelming to

every single one of you. I thank God for you. Amy and I were praying for you today. Your sins

are washed away. You are new raised by the power of Jesus to serve Him faithfully and we can

never take this for granted that we get to be a part of the community seeing so many people find

new life in Christ. For those of you that are new with us today, we're actually starting a brand new

four-part message series and what we do is we'll take a book of a Bible or maybe a chapter or a

theme or a character and for a few weeks we'll talk about that week after week and we're starting a

four-part message series on the word pray. We're going to talk about how do we learn to pray with

power, with passion in a way that we would grow in our intimacy with God. Now I need all of you to

help me out all of our churches. How many of you would say I absolutely believe in the power of

prayer and yet I probably don't pray as much as I should. Would you be honest today at all of our

churches? I'm seeing tons and tons and tons of hands going up which is really interesting to me.

Why is it that we know that we have a good God who answers the prayers of his children and yet so

many of us don't pray as we know we should. I think there are probably several reasons why. Some

people honestly don't really know how to pray. We lack confidence in knowing that you know are we

doing it right. Some people, some of you may actually get bored while you're praying. I hate to

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