get started. Really looking forward to what the Lord has for us tonight. After having had some time to really seek the Lord in prayer, I sense that the Holy Spirit was leading me to do a topical teaching before we get to the book of Ezra. We just finished in our trek through the Bible,

starting in Genesis, book by book, and chapter by chapter and verse by verse. We completed Second

Chronicles, and the next book is the book of Ezra, a great book, really looking forward to that. But as you can see on the

screen, we're going to be in Psalm 6 tonight. I want to encourage you to turn there. And

I've titled tonight's topical teaching, The Power of Prayer. And by way of an introduction, I think it would be good if I took a little bit of time

and provided you with the back story of sorts that kind of led up to this teaching and perhaps more importantly the direction that I sense that

the Lord is leading us as a church and I hope to be able to share that with you later on tonight.

But before we jump in, if you would join with me, let's pray and we'll ask God's blessing on our time together tonight.

Loving Heavenly Father, we're so grateful to you for all that you're doing in our lives and in the life of this church.

Lord, you have blessed us exceedingly, abundantly above and beyond anything that we could have

ever thought or imagined. Lord, you're so good,

and we love you so much. Lord, we want to commit our time to you tonight, the time that we're

going to have together in your word as we look at just prayer and the simplicity

of it, the power of it, the nature of it. And so Lord, would you bless us as we do? Would

you minister to us in the time that we have together tonight in your word

we pray. In Jesus' name, amen. Over the last several months, the Lord has been ministering

to me concerning the power of simply praying.

And especially praying and even fasting and praying.

And when medically you're able and there are many different kinds of fasting, but fasting is very powerful.

I think of when the disciples tried to cast a demon out of a boy and were unsuccessful, and the father of that boy took him to Jesus and said, I don't

know what your disciples think they're trying to do here, but they're not able to do this.

This is a very loose paraphrase of the account obviously, but Jesus responded by telling

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