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excel still more. Good morning. Welcome back. Thanks for being here. If it's all right with you,

I just want to jump right in today. I would love to share some things with you about prayer. I've been preaching for 25 years or so, and I've admitted before that in the first five, 10 plus years, I didn't preach or teach very often on the topic of prayer. And there were a couple of reasons for that. One prayer outside of the worship service is a very

personal thing that people do, and I didn't feel comfortable going in and regulating or trying to

influence that. But even more than that, I honestly just felt like I was the only person in the

room who struggled with it. I figured that prayer came easy and the power and expectations of prayer and the life that you lived when you came out of it. I figured that prayer came easy and the power and expectations of prayer and the life that you

lived when you came out of it, that all of the Christians around me were just absolutely on fire in

that process, and I was the only one who was not. And so it was a point of shame for me and something

that I felt like I just needed to work on privately until I caught up with everyone else.

Well, somewhere along that stream of preaching, I began asking members and having them

write down numbers on a card anonymously, one to ten, the strength of your prayer life,

or talking to high school students.

And what I discovered is there are a lot of people who continue to battle

doubt and fear, and maybe I'm not doing it right, or why aren't there any results and maybe

beginning to question either yourself or God, and that that can persist throughout our lives.

We need to talk about prayer. I put it in the

title so that you can know to expect this, but I want to wrap this up in the last several minutes

talking about Ephesians 618, praying in the spirit. We will circle around to some thoughts

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