Why pray? Daniel 9

Daniel chapter 9 and the first 23 verses. In the first year of Darius, son of Xerxes, Amid by descent, who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom, in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the scriptures according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last 70 years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting and in sackcloth and ashes.

I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed, O Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled. We have turned away from your commands and laws.

We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. Lord, you are righteous, but this day we are covered with shame, the men of Judah and people of Jerusalem and all Israel, both near and far in all the countries where you have scattered us because of our unfaithfulness to you. O Lord, we and our kings our princes and our fathers are covered with shame because we have sinned against you.

The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him. We have not obeyed the Lord our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants, the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you.

Therefore the curses and sworn judgments written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out on us because we have sinned against you. You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us great disaster. Under the whole heaven nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem.

Just as it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. The Lord did not hesitate to bring the disaster upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in everything he does, yet we have not obeyed him. Now O Lord our God, who brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day, we have sinned, we have done wrong.

O Lord, in keeping with all your righteous acts, turn away your anger and your wrath from Jerusalem, your city, your holy hill. Our sins and the iniquities of our fathers have made Jerusalem and your people an object of scorn to all those around us. Now our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant.

For your sake, O Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary. Give ear, O God, and hear, open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy.

O Lord, listen. O Lord, forgive. O Lord, hear and act.

For your sake, O my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your name. While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and making my request to the Lord my God for his holy hill, while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed me and said to me, Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding.

As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the message and understand the vision. May God bless that reading from his word.

Verse 20, let's read together up to and including verse 23. This is Daniel 9. While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and making my request to the Lord my God for his holy hill, while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. He instructed me and said to me, Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding.

As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the message and understand the vision. If I had been invited, which I wasn't, and I don't suppose the thought ever crossed the minds of the organizers, to have addressed, in part at any rate, the grand conference that was held in Manila just a few months ago when evangelical leaders around the world came together.

If I had been asked to make any declaration at all, this is what I would have pleaded for. I would have said that as we enter into the next decade, let's ensure that around the world the emphasis is on making it a decade of prayer, a decade of prayer. And really, that's the agenda that I want to write for us here at Worthing Tabernacle.

It's an agenda I want to write for my own life, and I will confess that my prayer life is not what it should be. How is yours? It's a prayer life that I would like for the whole of our church and the whole of the body of Christ over which I have any influence at all. I want us to write on our agenda the priority of prayer, the priority of prayer.

We were having a day together as elders last Thursday, and though I am grateful to the men who serve alongside me for their insights, for their evaluations of our church at the point that it's at, and for all the plans and the exciting comments that they had to make, one thing still nonetheless remains bottom line, and it is this – that however good our church management may be, whatever our schemes are, however many departments we have in our church, however much we might encourage one another in the whole area of giving and all the ancillary ministries, unless, my brothers and sisters, we are sincere and committed to a ministry of intercession and renewal, then it seems to me that all our planning is really just a matter of words. So I want to talk to you today, setting the agenda for our church, at least for next year, if not for the whole of the decade, I want to talk to you about prayer, and I do so under the simple heading, Why Pray? Why Pray? And here's my seed text which will set the agenda for what I want to say in this whole area of prayer. For my text says, as soon – verse twenty-three, Daniel nine – as soon as you began to pray, an answer was given, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed.

Why did he pray? Because Daniel believed that God answers prayer. How did he know? Well, because God answered the prayer that he offered. What type of person was he? He was a man who was highly esteemed.

And my final application will be under the heading, Why are we so slow to pray? But first of all, let's go back to starters. Why did Daniel pray? Well, he prayed because he believed that God could hear. It seems to me that in this particular passage there are three stimuli that encourage Daniel to engage in prayer.

And the first was the reading of God's Word. Look at the ninth chapter right at the beginning, will you? In the first year, the verse two, in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures according to the Word of God given to Jeremiah the prophet. Here is this man.

He's a Hebrew, but he's living away from home. He's very much like Jeremiah, very much like Joseph in many respects. He spends a larger part of his life away from the country whose nationality he actually wore.

And he took with him his Bible when he was in Babylon. And he used to study his Bible day by day. And it seems to me that those who read a lot, pray a lot, and those who read little, pray little.

There is a stimulus that the Word of God brings into the hearts of the man who's reading it that compels him to engage in the holy ministry of intercession. Now one of the things I asked while I was away, and I believe it was done, was that there should be an exhibition in our foyer indicating the availability of Bible reading notes to encourage people here at the tab to be into the Word of God day by day and week by week. In fact, my greatest challenge is this, for you to get a copy of the NIV version of the Scriptures, or any other version for that matter, which is set up in calendar fashion, so that you this next year, perhaps many of you, may be the majority in this church, the first year of your life that you have ever read through the Bible from Genesis through to Revelation.

I challenge you to do that, because one of the things that will help you in this holy ministry of intercession is coming before the Lord in Scripture, reading what he has to say and being stimulated to prayer as a result. Why did Daniel pray? Three reasons. Because of the Scriptures, because of society, and because of himself.

As for the Scriptures, well, the Scriptures will tell you a great deal not only about yourself, they'll tell you a great deal about the society in which you live. So, the second reason why Daniel starts to pray is that when he reads Scripture, he discovers that the society in which he lives amongst Jewish exiles and amongst Babylonians is a long way removed from the society that God actually wants in his world in Daniel's day. Now, it seems to me that exactly the same obtains for ourselves.

Our world is in a very confused situation, and yet Daniel believes as he reads Scripture that actually the hand of God is upon the world and he can still bring about his purposes as men like Daniel commit themselves to a ministry of prayer. He's stimulated to pray by Scripture. He's stimulated to pray by the society in which he finds himself, because as you read his prayer, what do you discover? Well, he mourns for the fact that people, that God is who he is and what people have done.

He mourns for God being who he is and what people have done. Will you look at the fourth and fifth verses of this prayer for a moment? Oh Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands. That's who God is, but this is what the people are.

We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled and have turned away. Daniel, I say, is prompted to prayer by social conditions as he sees who God is and what his people have become.

Moreover, as he recognizes what God has done and what the people have ignored. Look at verse 15, will you? Now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and who made for yourself a name that endures to this day, we have sinned, we have done wrong, O Lord. Now, when Daniel reads the Scriptures, he appreciates that the society of his day falls foul on what God expected of them, and this causes him to engage in prayer.

There's another reason why he prays, it seems to me, and that is he prays because of what is at risk and what needs to be preserved. What is at risk and what needs to be preserved. Drop your eye down, will you, to the 18th verse or thereabouts, and you discover Daniel saying, we do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy.

That's the end of verse 19. O Lord, listen. O Lord, forgive.

O Lord, hear and act for your sake, O my God. Do not delay because your city and your people bear your name. Did you get the point? He prays because of what is at risk and what people have ignored.

He prays because of what needed to be preserved. What needs to be preserved? Well, the glory of God. What is at risk? The future of the people.

Daniel has not in mind Babylon, Daniel has in mind Jerusalem, Daniel has in mind the whole purposes of the Lord. And so scripture prompts him to pray, and society in his day prompts him to pray, and also when he looks into his own life, his own self-life, that causes him to pray. And I find that to be a very interesting thing because, you see, as with Joseph, you find nothing in Daniel that actually would cause the likes of you and me to criticize him.

There's no sin that he, that the book says that he did. Obviously his righteousness is relative, it's not the righteousness that God expects, but as far as men concerns, he stands at Everest height like Joseph. And yet when he sees the problems of his nation, when he realizes that the purposes of God seem as though they're going to be thwarted because of the infidelity of the Jewish people, he identifies himself with their sin.

And when you read that holy prayer of intercession, Daniel is saying all the time in terms of the plural pronoun, Lord, this is what we have done wrong. Verse six, we have not listened to your servants. You get it again in verse eight, O Lord, we and our kings, our princes and our fathers, are covered with shame because we have sinned against you.

So to answer the question, why did he pray? He prayed because he believes God hears. God hears when men bring to him the great desires that are upon their heart, having looked at society and discovered society to be far less than what a holy man would want it to be, than what God would want it to be. Now here, if you like, is a challenge to Daniel, and it's a challenge to you and me.

Do we really believe that praying will affect the course of history? Do we really believe that praying will affect the course of history? You see, if you're convinced that prayer is, to quote one great Puritan, prayer is the nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence. If you believe that prayer does change national and international situations, then you will be like Daniel, very constrained to bring the condition that confronts our society today before the Lord. Does prayer change things? Now I don't often quote from the Daily Telegraph, but here just to tip my cap to some of you who think that I'm only on one track as far as my political reading is concerned, here is a Daily Telegraph editorial around Christmas.

Entitled, Tidings of Comfort and Joy. Congratulations to the Telegraph for such an editorial. Tidings of Comfort and Joy, 1989.

Not since the birth of Christ has there been such sensational good news to rejoice the hearts of mankind as there has been this Christmas. Christ is born again. For once it is possible to make the claim without a charge of blasphemy, for that is indeed what is happening right across the vast expanse of communism's godless empire.

It is almost too good to be true, a veritable miracle. Not only have the communist tyrants failed to extirpate Christianity in spite of their worst efforts at repression, but it is Christianity that ends up as the first force capable of overthrowing them. It happened first in Poland, then the editor goes on.

The notion that communism might be brought low, not by armies and fleets, not by the almighty dollar or the CIA and so on, but by a god long since pronounced dead, never entered their heads. But it has come to pass. And this Christmas all over the world, wise men will be less inclined to mock and more inclined to worship as happened at the first Christmas.

In other words, here's one of our leading papers making this conclusion, that the situation in Eastern Europe has been affected by the prayers of loyal, consistent Christian people in Romania and elsewhere. Now this is a challenge, you see, that Daniel brings to you. Because Daniel does believe that when he's on his knees he will change the political scenario in his day.

He's stimulated to prayer by the scriptures, by his own self-evaluation that spiritually he's a pauper, and we think he's overplayed that in terms of self-critique. He's also stimulated to prayer because of the whole theatre of politics in his day. And he believes that God somehow, as a response to his intercessions, can change the situation and return the Jews back to Palestine and bring about the advent of the Messiah and so forth, reference of which is made symbolically at the end of the ninth chapter.

Now here is the rub. Do you believe that? Or is this just a sort of old-fashioned Hebrew equivalent to a Yorkshire tyke who can't really think, who really is just imprisoned in religious bigotry? Now if you come to that conclusion, what you're in effect saying is that the Bible has no authority at all. And what incidentally you're in effect saying is that prayer is an illusion in terms of being reckoned as a force to change situations today.

But you see, Daniel has, because he's a historical figure, stands out as a great illustration to us as a man who not only believes in the force and the power of prayer, but sees his own prayers affect political situations in his day. The Jews eventually do return to Palestine. The Messiah that God refers to at the end of the ninth chapter does come into the world.

An end is put to sacrificial offerings, as is indicated in the twenty-seventh verse. The Lord Jesus does come in the middle of this remarkable seven-day prophetical period. He does set up a means whereby men and women shall be redeemed.

He does instigate a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, the eternal kingdom of our God founded by our Lord Jesus Christ. You see what I mean? Daniel does believe that when he prays, situations in the future are affected. Now here is a very interesting further illustration of this.

Daniel has been praying, and he's been praying with great passion for a transformation in the fortunes of his people. And in the twelfth verse of the next chapter, you discover this remarkable, mysterious reference to the angelic messenger of the Lord coming before Daniel, whose prayers once more have been acknowledged in heaven. Do not be afraid, Daniel.

Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them. But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, because I was detained there with the king of Persia.

Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future, for the vision concerns a time yet to come. What does all that boil down to? That the events in the future were being changed by the prayerful interest that Daniel had in the well-being of his own people. Now Daniel was probably one of the most intelligent men in the whole of the ancient world.

He believed in the power of prayer. He's stimulated by the Scripture, by his own need, his self. He's also stimulated by the situation in society.

If he was, how much more should we be? If communism is beginning to crumble, as seems to be the case, and incidentally I'm not a capitalist, if communism is beginning to crumble as a result of the prayers of faithful people in the East, how much more should we as Christian people today be coming together to pray for the dissolution of the power of Islam? Do you have a concern that men and women in the Islamic countries might yet respond to the Gospel of Jesus? Do you believe that in that very, very dangerous situation in the Middle East, far more dangerous, in my opinion, than ever Moscow or Peking have presented as dangerous to the Western world, have you a belief that God can somehow resolve the issue between the Arab and the Jew? How much are you prepared to pray during the next decade for this particular point in our world where there is so much difficulty being generated which will ultimately affect the whole of our world unless God in remarkable fashion steps in? Why did Daniel pray? Firstly, he prayed because he believed that God would hear. Secondly, how did he know? Well, he knew because God had answered and does answer. He doesn't always answer as dramatically, let's say this to be quite honest, he doesn't always answer as dramatically as he did with Daniel.

As soon as you began to pray, an answer was given. I believe that God always gives an answer, but the answer isn't always apparent. But if you do know and if you have the belief at the bottom of your heart that when you pray God does respond, then that's going to stimulate you to even greater intercession, isn't it? Not always as dramatically as I say as this, but nonetheless a belief that God does answer will enable you to be more faithful in prayer.

You see, there's nothing that I want for our church more than what Rodney Kingston, one of my closest friends here in Worthing, calls in a book that he's entitled that I want you all to buy, Restoring Your Walk with God. You see, it may be that you once had a prayer ministry like that of Daniel, but the years have gone by and no longer are you in close intimacy with the Lord. Some of us, we look back over the past decade and we wish the Lord would turn the clock back because we've missed so many opportunities for advancing His kingdom.

In many areas we compromised upon what we should have been. And what I want this morning is not to set before you the picture of Daniel as an impossible goal for you to realize. What I want you to appreciate is this, that however much you were successful or however much you failed in the last decade, because you believe in the imminence of God, that God is able to work today.

You can restore your own spiritual life and become a warrior in prayer affecting not only the destiny of people in Worthing, but our whole world as you are prepared to take time out and spend it before the Lord. So Rodney identifies those points that work towards a spiritual spiral downwards and then shows us in his final practical last chapter how to retrieve and come back to the position that once we held, restoring your walk with God. That's available for you to get at the end of our service here.

Daniel believed that as he stood before the Lord on behalf of the people, so God would respond to what he had to say. That's what intercessions all about. Intercession is standing in other people's shoes and representing them before God.

Intercession demands that you mean business with the Lord. It's not something that you engage in in a slovenly fashion. Look again at the second verse of chapter nine.

In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting and in sackcloth and ashes. Daniel believes that the time has come for God to act in history and to return the Jews to their own land and to bring about ultimately the scenario whereby the Messiah shall be brought into the world.

And he so means business that he's prepared to forfeit some of the legitimate things that might have occupied his time, might have been the target of his money in order to give himself opportunity in prayer to bring the nation, to bring the world before God. You get exactly the same thing, don't you, in the second verse of the tenth chapter, the next chapter. I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks.

I ate no choice food, no meat or wine touched my lips and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over. He went without his aftershave for three weeks. I jest but the point is there, he's meaning business with the Lord.

There's a lovely expression which I've referred to before, it comes from a book by Ravenhill, Leonard Ravenhill, born in North Derbyshire, spent most of his years in the States. And Ravenhill says in a book on revival that God has what he calls an aristocracy of the spirit. Do you remember me mentioning that term on several occasions here before? Now, Daniel is one of the aristocrats.

You're not born into that aristocracy. But membership is open. Are you listening to me? You can become, this is what I'm saying, in the name of God, you can become in our day what Daniel was in his day.

I do believe that. But you see, you've got to mean business. A.W. tells us, God wants to be wanted.

You see, God puts us all equal at the starting line in the race for spiritual maturity. There's no one here who can say, well because I didn't have the sort of background that Tony Sargent or Tim Saunders or any of our elders had, therefore in some way I'm disadvantaged. You're not.

Because in the kingdom of God, God gives us all an equal start. And there is a potential for all of us to discover and to exploit. He has so many ways of working out his purposes, and the successors in the Christian ministry are not those who occupy the pulpits, by and large.

The successors are those who mean business with the Lord, who dare to be a Daniel. Who believe that when they pray, things change. I learn from great people and from insignificant people.

I use the latter in the relative sense, insignificant as far as this world is concerned. My old secretary, Dorothy Fairst, she continues to teach me. Some of you don't know her.

Just a little lady, 80 plus, frail as can be. You think if you sneeze she'd fall over. But my goodness, she's got a powerful prayer ministry.

And she's got a beautiful personality. She has a laugh that's pure honey. She has a sense of humor that's as mischievous as that of a seven-year-old child.

When I was taking communion to her on Christmas day, which was the highlight of my Christmas day, do you know what she said as we were breaking, after we completed breaking bread and wine? She said, when you were abroad, on one occasion, she said, I woke up in the middle of the night, I don't know what it was. She said, but God just filled my heart with a sense of you and your need. Now, I can't prove this.

This is me talking, not Dorothy. I can't prove this. But I did have this rather remarkable experience in Shanghai, when I don't know where to go, and I don't speak Chinese, and a little boy comes to me, couldn't be more than seven years of age, and in perfect Chinese, in perfect English, asks me where I need to go and can he lead me.

Now, I can't prove that that followed from the prayer of Dorothy. But bear in mind the time factor, and she's awake at two o'clock at night, and I'm 12 hours on, as far as my day is concerned in China. There is more than just the possibility that the two things could be linked.

You see, I use that as an illustration because I want you to be bold and daring in prayer, to believe that God does change things, change situations, that God can use you to affect the lives of David and Irene Hansen out in Pakistan, as you respond to the fact that God has brought them peculiarly into your mind at that moment. Why did he come? Why did that thought come? Well, because the Holy Spirit works through our intellects. Sometimes these fleeting thoughts that we get, they're not just the product of a wild imagination, they're the product of the Spirit of God working within our minds, focusing in on things that we need to bring before Him.

Some of us have got such a hooey idea as to the supernatural that we think it's all so mysterious, it's all so beyond us, when actually sometimes the supernatural is a very easy thing to understand. God can use you supernaturally to disclose to you the circumstances of someone who lives abroad, so that you can take them upon your heart, bring them before the Lord, and help them out of a situation in which they need the divine strengthening of God. That's what I believe that prayer is all about.

That's what I believe, basically, the gifts of the Spirit are all about. This is what I think that Daniel had, and this is what I believe that you and I can have. See, to me, to live supernaturally is to live ordinarily as a Christian, because in one sense God is supernaturally ordinary and ordinary supernatural, and that's part of what His legacy is for you and for me.

You say, I don't understand that. Well, my friend, I can't really help you anymore, because here I give you the back cloth of Daniel, you see. I mean, he acts in a way that seems to be absolutely absurd, and yet he is, as I say, one of the wisest, most intelligent men.

And he believes that when he prays, situations change. Now, God doesn't change, therefore that principle that Daniel apprehended years ago, it works today. And that's a miracle of prayer, it does work today, doesn't it? Oh, for goodness sake, doesn't it? You see, pardon my frustration there, but when I was preaching in Korea, I asked people that, and they were up on their seats, and they were saying, yes, he does work today, and yes, the combined prayers of Christian people can break the power of Islam, can change situations, can transform societies.

My good brother and sister, I plead with you in the name of the Lord to believe that, and to act on that principle, because unless this, in some way, unless this convinces you from the depths of your being, you and I will never be of the intercessory caliber that Daniel was, or that Dorothy Fares is, to bring it right up to date, and to include all of us in the possibilities of being prayer warriors, because you know Dorothy, as some of you do, whereas you cannot, of course, know Daniel. The Christian demands that you and I mean business before the Lord, and St. Spurgeon says, God has no dumb children. Now, what he means by that is that when God brings you into His kingdom, He gives you words, that's what Hosea says, take with your words to the Lord.

He has no dumb children. You say, well, I make a mess of prayer. Well, listen to Richard Sibbes, and I'm deliberately bringing out the Calvinistic names of yesteryear, so that you don't think I've got some particular axe to grind as to various streams in evangelicalism today.

Sibbes says, God can pick sense out of confused prayer. So, the fact that you don't have the eloquence of maybe one of our elders, the fact that perhaps you don't have the education that some people seem to have, and you feel so dwarfed by it, that doesn't really matter. God can pick sense out of the most confused prayer, and sometimes it's the most confused prayer that gets through to the Lord than the articulate prayer that flows from the lips of a man or a woman who feel particularly strung before the Lord in and of themselves, whereas the stammering prayer comes from the heart of the person who feels absolutely inadequate.

Oh, thou that hearest prayer, says the psalmist, it was his conviction, it's Daniel's conviction, it must be your conviction. When I stood in front of Abraham Lincoln's statue in Washington some years ago, having taken time off to go and look at this particular site in that remarkable city from a conference that I was attending on biblical inerrancy, I recall and still recall Abraham Lincoln's great words, and he uttered many, many profound words, but none more profound than this, I have many times been driven to my knees by the utter conviction that I have nowhere else to go. That's why we should be engaging in prayer, my friends, here at the TAM.

Now, what type of people can engage in prayer very quickly? Well, people who are beloved of God. You say, well, that's an accolade that Daniel was given and it's no way appropriate to me, esteemed of God, and is it right to wish to be esteemed of God? It is right. We talk about self-esteem and esteeming one another.

What about the Richter scale measurement that applies to you on God's scale of esteem? Abraham was a friend of God. Lazarus is reckoned to be the one whom Jesus loved. Our Lord says it is not dishonorable to want in his kingdom to earn his accolade, well done, you good and faithful servant.

Again, let me strip from you the notion that Daniel and Joseph and all the greats of the Old Testament in some way are special. They're not. Well, they're special in the sense that they were successful, but there is the society door wide open for you and me to enter into the category.

The Apostle Paul says of you and me, speaking of the generosity of God, he who spared, not his own son, but freely gave him for us, how will he not freely give us all things? If that doesn't mean that you're not esteemed and beloved of God, then I don't know, you know, what language God could use to impress that upon you. You can be as used in the holy art of intercession as Daniel was, because you're beloved. Don't have a low self-esteem, my friend.

God thinks you are special. God looks down and sees Dorothy Fez as special as Wang Ming Tao. God looks down and sees the most anonymous person in this congregation as being as important as our church administrator or anyone else on our staff.

Now, I'm not saying this because it's nice, I'm saying it's because it's true. Don't call common what God calls special. Daniel's prayers are responded to because Daniel is highly esteemed before God.

Why does God esteem Daniel? Well, he's a man of integrity. He's a man who lives in Babylon, but Babylon doesn't live in him, as Joseph lived in Egypt, and Egypt didn't live in Joseph. In other words, he's a man who, although he's in the world, is apart from the world.

He's a man who does not live his life by the standards of Babylon, as Joseph didn't live his life by the standards of Egypt, as you are not to live your life by the standards of England. We are people set apart for the Lord, and he entrusts us with a holy ministry. And the most important aspect of that ministry is that you and I, together, are regular before God on our knees, individually and corporately.

And my friend, I tell you again that we can have all the Elders' Meetings in the world and all the church conferences, and I can bring to you the professors from church growth in full of Pasadena. And not one thing will change us individually, our town as a whole, our world in total, unless you and I are engaged in the ministry of prayer. That's what Daniel says.

That's what Daniel teaches us in the power of the Holy Spirit. Why are we so slow to pray? Because we underrate its importance. Because we don't want the risk of an answer.

Did you hear that? It says, Jonathan Edwards, another Puritan, many pray with their lips for what their hearts do not desire. You know why Dennis Clark didn't want to sing the hymn, O Holy Ghost, revival comes from thee, because the first verse says, Search me, O Lord. Who wants to be searched by the Lord? That's a painful process, isn't it? But these are the prerequisites to power, power in evangelism, power in the intercession, Lord search me, get my life right, so that when somebody comes to our town, like an Afghan refugee, or when your neighbor is in need, or when we put in notes and news that we have things that we are requiring people to help us in in the advance of the ministry, you don't leave it to somebody else.

If you can't be practical about your Christianity, then pack your bags, because really, the evangelical church, in terms of the straight proclamation of the gospel of Jesus, is not the place where you should be. And if you think that's a hard comment, then let me tell you, friend, the most exciting thing in God's world is to try to bring about His purposes, as you offer your life humbly and unreservedly before Him. And you can take your news you'd like to use, Daniel and Joseph and Dorothy Faires and the rest.

It says, A.W. Pink, most Christians expect little from God, ask little, and therefore receive little, and are content with little. We lack sometimes a spirit of boldness. It was Hugh Hill, and I say this in closing, it was Hugh Hill who said to me that he came across a product for a battery for a car engine the other day, and it was advertised like this, sealed for life, do not top up.

And I sometimes think that that's the agenda of a lot of Christians, we're safe, we're sealed, don't top us up. Well I want to tell you that God is in the topping up business. And the reason why He's in the topping up business was well explained by D.L. Moody when he said, I leak.

The spiritual agenda for this church, and if I had my say for the body of Christ this decade, certainly this year, is that we be more committed to the holy ministry of intercession. I want you at prayer meetings. I'd rather you be at prayer meetings than you come on a Sunday morning actually.

I'd rather have you at both. I don't want to labor for those of you who I know have problems in terms of health, but it seems to me that that's only a very small minority. Here's the agenda.

I can do no more than have delivered my heart to you. You can take God's Word, you can accept it or reject it, but I'll tell you something, you can't change it. Let's pray.

Father, we just as a congregation want to spend a moment before your throne. So often we have paid lip service. We've said that we believe that prayer is a very important duty, and yet we don't pray enough.

We've said that we believe in prayer meetings, and yet we're glad to have them just written down on the church's program without necessarily us being in attendance at all. And some of us have an avalanche of reasons to excuse ourselves, but we know full well that in the main they're empty and invalid. Help us, Lord, to pay more attention to come to your prayer meetings than going to the golf course or watching Coronation Street or what have you.

Help us to see in the Word this morning, not the lash of the Egyptian taskmaster, but the pleadings of the plaintiff shepherd of the sheep who asks for the intercession of his flock. Lord, we don't understand why prayer is so important to you, but your Word declares that it is. Lord, shut this tabernacle down.

If we can't be a prayerful people, if we can't be a holy people, if we can't be a consistent people, well blood is out from your book. Blood is out from this town, but our only credibility here opposite the town hall is that we can show a different way of life. Lord, we believe that the thing that controls the tiller of this church is those hands upon it that have been lifted to the Lord in prayer.

May many more hands be upon that tiller. May the direction over the next 10 years be a good one. We pray that you will do exceedingly abundantly with all that we could ever ask or think.

Help us to love one another, to pray with one another, and to glorify our God. Help us, Lord, because your Scriptures tell us that this is what we ought to do, because within ourselves we know that this is what we ought to do, and because the needs of society are such that it compels us to do this. Hear us for Jesus' sake.

Amen. Let's stand and sing the Lord's Prayer, shall we? Let's sing this sincerely before the Lord.