(The Sermon on the Mount and Prayer - Session 1) - Part 4

And I turned to Brother Denny today and I said to him, you know Brother Denny, I have discovered that there is nothing that has created in my heart such a deep hunger and a thirst for God's Word as when I spend time in the Word of God. That's why when you study Psalm 119, you will be absolutely amazed by what the Scriptures is saying about the Scriptures. And one of the things that happens to us because the Spirit of God, my brother and sister, have nothing else to work upon than the infallibleness of the Scriptures.

And so when the seed of God's Word become part of my life, the Spirit of God would come to us and the Spirit of God would come to fertilize the seed. And so one of the greatest things that you and I as a Christian can do in our relationships with God is to have this unexplainable hunger and thirst for God and for His Word. And to allow this to become part of our lives and to see God building up Christian character and to bring into our lives a sense of brokenness and a sense of purity and a sense of unction and a sense of transparency as the Word of God becomes part of our relationships with Him.

You say, what about the Gospel of Matthew? 1051 wonderful verses that we discover in these 28 glorious chapters. I said to brother Denny today as we were driving some time ago in Washington state, I was asked to spend time with a group of leaders and what we did those days is that we went to the material of the Apostle John and we discovered those 879 verses in the Gospel of John and set them aside and took the 404 verses out of the book of Revelation and we put them aside in the 105th and 1 John and the 13th and 14th and 2nd and 3rd John and brought them all together and I discovered 37 prayer passages in the writings of the Apostle John. And I discovered that in those 37 prayer passages that they divide themselves up into 10 aspects of what prayer was about from the Apostle John in his understanding of the life of Christ and the intimacy with Christ as it relates to prayer.

You see, this is our problem, you know. We know so much about the Word of God, but brother and sister, the Word of God knows so little about us. And so this needs to become part of our lives so that we will not just become hearers of God's Word, that we would become doers of the Word of God.

In some of these sessions, I want to take you to those 248 possible prayer passages that is coming unto us in the New Testament. And they divide themselves up into 12 aspects of New Testament prayer. And as that becomes part of our lives, God brings us to the place that we pray not because we feel like it, but we pray in our submissiveness to the Word of God.

And as we pray in our submissiveness to the Word of God, the Spirit of God would come and we pray with the Spirit and we pray with the understanding. And the Spirit of God feeds our understanding as He relates us to the will of God in prayer. And as we pray with our understanding, we pray in the realm of the Spirit and we climb underneath the burden of God in prayer.

And God help us to dissect the burden of God in prayer because we cannot process the fullness of God's burden in prayer. And we pray according to the will of God. Well, you say, Brother Gerard, what about the Gospel of Matthew? It's quite significant when you and I would study the Gospel of Matthew that you will discover that it seems to us that the Lord Jesus spent most of His time in Matthew's Gospel and what we would refer to as the regions of Galilee.

Because in the fourth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, you will discover that the Lord Jesus, or rather that Matthew said, after these things, Jesus departed into Galilee.