The thing that I want to accomplish this morning by the help of God's spirit and His word is to stir you up to pray more earnestly.

For me as your pastor, for Glen Ogrin as he comes, and for the whole ministry here at Bethlehem Baptist Church as we strive with the strength that God supplies to enlarge and to purify the body of Christ in this place.

Unless the Lord builds the House, those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watch over the city, those who watch it stay awake in vain.

Which means that we can work our heads off and have meeting after meeting

after meeting and go through all the motions of worship.

And if God isn't in it it's nothing. And there are a few things

that are more fearful to me than the specter of a local church going on the momentum of tradition and habit when the power has been severed, like people sitting in a train, enjoying the scenery,

but coasting to a stop in the desert because the locomotive has been unhitched and has disappeared over the horizon.

Ernest and heartfelt prayer is the means by which we get coupled up with that locomotive of God's power, isn't it?

And didn't Jesus say, I am the vine, you are the branches, he who abides in me, stays

hooked up to the locomotive, and I and him, he it is that will bear much fruit. But all how easily

a church can deceive itself that even when it's not praying earnestly, nevertheless all of its

activity is something. And Jesus says without me you can do nothing. is nothing and how grateful I am that Bethlehem is not

severed from her power the locomotive is hitched in, the sap is flowing, and I have a great hope today that you

will be stirred up to pursue this even more and great reason to believe that it will not be said of us what

Paul said to one of the groups at Kallassie. They are not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through

its joints and ligaments grows with a growth that is from God. If we don't hold to the head, no life. And prayer is the holding to the head, isn't it? So I want to urge you and stir you up that there be a

spreading flame of prayer at Bethlehem Baptist Church this week and in the whole year to come.

And not only private prayer alone in your closet like Jesus said at home, but also public and corporate prayer.

And I hope that one of the main things I can do today is give you a compelling reason

why we must pray that way to.

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