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 backstory 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 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 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, you know,

to do this.

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

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