In this compelling episode, we delve into the deep waters of temptation and evil as discussed in the Bible. Discover the dichotomy between being drawn to sin and being put to the test, as well as the two faces of evil: hurtful and malicious. We explore the intricacies of God’s intentions for freedom and how this principle allows both good and bad things to occur—a vital aspect often overlooked in understanding the divine will.
Good afternoon, folks. It’s good to see you and good to see all of you who will be seeing us on DVD or listening to us on your car radio or wherever you have to be. I guess we could say welcome to the scattered Church of God or the Church of God scattered or the Church of God of the Diaspora because we certainly seem to have one. A big hello to the Classic family in Western Australia, and to Keir Graham, who the last time I heard from him was in Zurich, Switzerland. I assume he’s still there. And if you’re not, Keir, you need to get in touch. So we greet you in the right place. But good to see everyone here again. In the Lord’s Prayer, there is this line, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Now, if you’ve ever wondered why we have to ask that, you’re not the first person who ever wondered it. For one thing, James wrote in his first chapter of his epistle, Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempts He any man. And then there’s Jesus in Matthew who said, Your Father knows what things you have need of before you ask Him. So… Why is it that we have to pray, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil? We can start with one simple truth. The word tempt is used in two entirely different ways in the Bible, understood by context. One is to be drawn towards sin. We all have a lot of experience with that. Second is to be put to the test. We probably have experience with that. We may not have realized that’s what it was at the time. But it means that in the sense that God did tempt Abraham to find out, you know, go sacrifice your son in the place that I shall tell you to go. God does do the latter. That is, he does put us to the test, but he does not do the former. He does not tempt us or draw us towards sin. Now, so far, this is really quite simple when you understand that. We can proceed to the second simple truth. The word evil is used in two different ways in the Bible. One, it means hurtful or bad. Second, it means malicious. And that is the kind of bad that people do on purpose who are evil people. Generally, in the Bible, where you see the word evil, it’s the first of those that’s intended. In the Old Testament, it’s the Hebrew word ra, which basically means bad. That simple. And we sometimes, the translators in particular, get bored with putting the same word in all the time, so they pick different synonyms for it. But since God knows what we need before we even get around to asking, why do we have to ask? Now, one of the most profound lessons that I have ever learned in the Bible, and it is the answer to the most common argument the atheists make against God in the Bible, The term that’s used for it, theological, is theodicy. I’ve mentioned it before. It’s the question of how can a good God, how do you account for evil in the world, in a world created by a good God who is altogether good? The answer is fairly simple. God intends that man be free. It’s really, in many ways, the primary value, the primary command of God, man will be free. The problem is, if you’re not free to do hurtful things, you’re not free. It’s simple. It’s not a complicated idea. You’re just simply not free unless you can do bad things. We walk in a world full of free beings, just as free as we are. And that means that in the natural course of events, you’re going to encounter temptation in both senses. And you will suffer evil in both senses of the word. It’s just a part of life. Now when we pray, we are asking for an exception to the natural course of events. Do you follow me? Let me say it again so you’ll understand. When you pray, you are asking for an exception to the natural course of events. And you may be asking for an abridgment of someone else’s freedom. You’re going out to apply for a job along with a dozen other people. Nowadays it could be a hundred other people. And you pray before you go that God will grant to you this job. Now, you may or may not be the best person qualified for it. The best person qualified doesn’t always get the job. It may depend on the impression you make on that particular day to the interviewer. But you pray before you go. And what you’re asking is that God will give you the job as opposed to a whole host of other people some of whom are justified for it than you are. So you’re asking for an abridgment of someone else’s freedom, the freedom of the person doing the interviewing to decide who he wants to hire. Prayer asks for a change in the natural course of things, maybe even an abridgment of someone else’s freedom, maybe even a variation from the plan of God, or even for a suspension of a natural law. I don’t know how you jumped off the top of the Empire State Building and you’re passing by the 34th floor. If you start praying at that point, I really don’t know if God’s going to suspend the natural law for you at that point. I kind of doubt it. You’ve heard the story about the fellow who jumped off the Empire State Building, passed the 34th floor and said, so far, so good. Now, this is where… The words, not my will, but your will be done, come into play. As Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. This was a part of that prayer. Now, it is not unlikely that even when we have said the words in prayer, Father, Please grant me this. Nevertheless, your will, not my will, be done. It’s not unlikely that having said the words, you won’t rest in them. You won’t find peace. You won’t be able to go away and think, I’ve said I want it. God knows I’d like for it. He knows I’ve asked for it. And I’m also submitted to His will. I can face the day now in confidence. I wish it always worked that way. It doesn’t always work that way. Now, the amazing thing in all this is that the Lord’s Prayer gives us permission to make any kind of request we wish to make with that qualification that God’s will be done. And I submit to your will, and not as I will, but as you will. And we can ask for a suspension of national law if you want to. If you have the faith, theoretically, you can move a tree from here to there. You can take a mountain and cast it into the sea. But most of us would say to ourselves… Why in the world should I ask that? And if I did ask it, why should God give it to me? And because of our respect for the way things are, we probably would never get around to asking something like that. And I think sometimes when we get a prayer request from somebody who’s suffering from terminal cancer, we will say, Lord, heal Sister Bertha, you know, of her cancer, and go our way, which is a noble prayer. It’s certainly an acceptable thing. But in reality… It doesn’t say an awful lot. What exactly is it that you want God to suspend to heal Sister Bertha of her cancer? What is it exactly that you want Him to do? And how can you be certain that this is not His time for her to pass? Now, one thing you can ask for is that God would ease her way. You can’t ask for a relief from pain. You can ask that she find exactly the right doctor to help her through the situation that she’s in. There are a lot of things you can ask for with a lot of confidence that God would actually hear that prayer and would fulfill it for you. I think sometimes we paint with too broad a brush, and if the Spirit or God were able to speak, or was willing to speak, I should say, to us in our prayer closet, He’d say, what exactly do you have in mind? What exactly do you want me to do? How exactly do you want this thing to manifest itself? Now, God gives us permission to make this kind of request with the qualification your will be done. And it may be important in ways that we haven’t ever even thought about. Consider what happened on 9-11, September the 11th, 2001. What was it? It was 3,000 plus people who died on that day in those twin towers there. I remember standing there. I know exactly where I was standing when I saw the first one fall. I had started upstairs and turned around, and I couldn’t move from where I was, from what I was actually seeing before my eyes. And I watched as that first building began to fall, and my heart was in my shoes because they had been saying that on a given day there might be 35,000 people in those two buildings, a small city. And I could visualize easily the loss of 20,000, 30,000 lives in those buildings if they both fell. And we were profoundly blessed, I think, in a way that we only lost 3,000 some. I don’t know that you’d feel that way if it was one of your loved ones who died in the building, but as a country, we could speak that way. The thing that we, I think, often do not give adequate consideration to is there exists in the world a category of men called men and women. called the wicked in the Bible. And I hadn’t made that distinction as clearly as I had until I did the first of the books, really until I did the radio programs, not radio programs, the recordings of the Psalms with reflections on the Psalms. I believe that was where it first really dawned on me that there is a category of people who are irredeemable, really. They are what he calls the wicked. And you folks here are not in that category. You may have felt wicked at times in your life. What you mean is, I’m a sinner. I have sinned. I really knew better. I’m sorry I did it. You know, this is the way we go through our lives. We are sorry for our sins. Wicked people are not. They may or may not recognize what they’re doing as a sin. Generally speaking, they don’t think of it that way. What they think of is that what they want to do, what they want to have, where they want to go, is where they want, is what they want, and what they want is all that’s important. It’s one of the things you find with wicked people. And these people are evil in the malicious sense. Now, I know I’m covering some similar ground to what I’ve covered before. The problem is when you’ve given, as I probably have in my lifetime, 2,000 sermons, and 800 radio programs, it’s pretty hard not to repeat yourself. And I know it, but sometimes I feel like the young preacher who gave his sermon on repentance for the third week in a row. And someone said, you know, it was a great sermon. I loved your sermon. But this is the third time you’ve given that sermon almost word for word. He said, what are you doing that for? He said, you haven’t repented yet. So we all understand that sometimes I need, I feel the need. to go through and tell you it again. Now, the people we’re talking about are evil in a malicious sense. They’re not just bad boys. They are, with both hands, greedily wicked. If we were a nation that regularly prayed, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And if we prayed it from the heart, There are a thousand ways God could have prevented what happened on 9-11. A thousand ways it could have been stopped. Any one of the 11 guys could have been stopped somewhere, what he was doing, he could have been questioned, he could have, if necessary, been waterboarded and told them what was up, and they would have known what to do about the thing. There are many, many ways that God could have done it, and we would not even know that he had done it. But we are not really a nation anymore that prays quite this way. In James 4, verse 1, From whence come wars and fightings among you? Don’t they come from this of your lusts at war and your members? You lust and you don’t have. You kill and desire to have and cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you have not because you ask not. You ask and receive not because you ask amiss that you may consume it upon your lust. Now we all understand that. That’s an old scripture. You probably knew it before I even got through reading it. You have not because you ask not. You ask and receive not because you’re asking amiss for selfish reasons. Understand that. Now, we have no way of knowing how many people survived on 9-11 because of the prayers of other people. You know, how many kids, when their dad went off to work that day at breakfast time, along with everybody in the family, prayed that their dad would come home safe that night, that he’d be able to take them to the zoo Sunday or whatever else? And who knows what God heard those prayers? That some guy, I know one fellow, or was it a woman, who missed a ferry. And because she missed the ferry boat to get across to Manhattan, she was not where she would have been if she had been on time. That may have been an answer to her prayer or someone else’s prayer. We have no way of knowing what that happened. But did the event happen? Because we, as a nation, were not in prayer. I don’t know. This I do know. Psalm 12, verse 8. The wicked walk on every side when the vilest men are exalted. When it gets to the place to where vile people rise up, are exalted, hold high office, or are entertainment, or are sports leaders, or whatever… then when that happens, wicked people walk on every side. People see, at least they think they see, that certain kinds of conduct pay. We’re seeing really a fascinating example of this playing out on the national scene right now. Now, I thought it might be interesting to think about the context of this saying. It’s the 12th Psalm, and we’ll just take a look at it in context. He starts off by saying, “‘Help, Lord, for the godly man is disappearing.'” For the faithful have vanished from among the children of men. You ever feel that way? It gets to where you feel that way. They speak vanity, everyone with his neighbor, with flattering lips and a double heart do they. Good grief. I mean, how long has it been since we had a really good, solid, straight talker in the leadership of this country? Really. I remember… Patrick Daniel Moynihan, senator, Democrat, New York. Wasn’t he in New York? I think he was, yeah. I always looked forward to him when he came on Meet the Press on Sunday morning because they would ask him a straight question. He would give a straight answer. He oftentimes left. I don’t know if it was Tim Russert at that time or if Tim Russert came later. But anyway, he would leave his interviewer floundering from time to time because the interviewer would ask him a question, and he would say, yes. And then stop. Or they would ask you to say no. And the interviewer was now left to kind of work out of him what it was that he was looking for him to say. But the fact is that Patrick Moynihan would just tell you what was happening. He wrote a book. I forget the title of his book sometime back where he talked about the terrible pattern that’s developed. And at that time he was talking about black people in this country who’s… The illegitimate birth rate at that time, I think, had reached over 30% for blacks when he wrote his book. And he was very concerned about the direction it was going. He said, I forget his terminology, but it was very pointed, to say the least. Now we have come to a place to where over 40% of all kids being born are now being born without a dad in the home. And birth rates up, that’s the good news. The bad news is there’s no dad in 40% of the homes. And I have no idea. The last I had heard among the black population, the percentage was well over 60%. And I don’t know where it is today. Is it 70? I had not heard that. This is one of the greatest tragedies. And Ann Coulter has a lot to say about fatherless children in her latest book, Guilty. And, you know, I read Ann Coulter a lot for a good laugh. That book is not funny. It is not funny at all. Because she recounts, I mean, just line by line by line by line, the terrible cost that is being paid by children who are coming into this world with no dad and no home. Everybody just goes merrily on their way, say, oh, it’s no big deal. And it always haunts me when one young lady I know who had decided to divorce her husband, had a new boy and a baby, and the mother-in-law says, well, what about the child? Her answer was, oh, he’ll be all right. He probably will. He may be because of other factors. But the truth of the matter is, he will pay a price for not having a father in the home. Clear as crystal. But she didn’t care. It didn’t make very much difference to her. He said, they speak vanity every one with his neighbor with flattering lips and a double heart. If you ever want to see an example of it, just watch the political speeches and interviews coming from the nation’s capital day in, day out, day in, day out. I have never heard so much two-faced double talk in all my born days as I am hearing right now. He said, The Lord will cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaks proud things, who have said, With our tongue we will prevail. Our lips are our own. Who is Lord over us? For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, says the Lord. I will set him in safety from him that puffs at him. Do you realize what he just said? The reason why he is going to deal with this is because of the sighing of the needy. It’s because people are crying out to him because these things are happening. The words of the Lord are pure words like silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times. You will keep those words, O Lord. You will preserve them from this generation forever. The wicked walk on every side, he says, when the vilest men are exalted. And that is happening in our country right now on every turn. Now, do we have the right to pray about this? Well, yeah, not only the right, we have a responsibility to pray about this. It is something that dawned on me, as I said, when I was writing the Psalms chat books. Consider this prayer. Psalm 7, verse 9. Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the just, for the righteous God tries the reins and the hearts. Now, mind you, What he is asking for here is an exception to the natural course of events. I’ll repeat that. I want us to understand because this is a key to understanding the Lord’s Prayer. He is asking for an exception to the way things normally work on this occasion. Okay? In the natural course and in the short term, the wicked went out. Is that true? In the natural course of events, the wicked went out. Because the righteous, they don’t even in the first place, they are slow in attributing evil to evil where evil is due. In the second place, they are slow to judge. Third place, they are slow to act against it. And sooner or later, because the wicked will do it now and doesn’t care who gets hurt, the righteous is liable to find himself dead in the natural course of events. What happened on 9-11 was the way things worked. If there was an exception to it in there, we don’t know about it. I do think there are a number of people who do know about it because of the fact that their bacon was saved. Now, he goes on to say, My defense is of God who saves the upright in heart. God judges the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day. But without prayer, God may let the natural course of events play out. He may be mad at the wicked, But because God is committed to freedom, He may allow the natural course of events to play if we don’t fight it in prayer, and maybe also in public for that matter. Psalms 9. The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made. Verse 15. In the net which they hid is their own foot taken. The Lord is known by His judgment which He executes. The wicked is snared in the work of His own hands. Now, this may come to pass. I mean, it will come to pass, not may. The wicked will be snared by the judgment of His own hand, but you and I may be dead and gone by the time it happens. What you pray for is that it will happen now, hastening what will eventually take place. So in the normal course of events, the wicked will win this battle, he will win this battle, and then finally when it comes all the way down to the end of it, he will fall on his face. What you are asking for when you pray that God will judge the wicked is that he will do it now rather than later. Don’t let the natural course of events play out. People will get hurt in that situation. The wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God. For the needy will not always be forgotten. The expectation of the poor is not going to perish forever. Arise, O Lord, let not man prevail. Let the heathen be judged in your sight. Put them in fear, O Lord, that the nations may know themselves to be but men. Now there’s a prayer a person should be able to put some muscle into that. Arise, O Lord, let not man prevail. Let the heathen be judged. Put them in fear that the nations may know themselves to be but men. How would you pray about that? Well, I don’t know. If I were an Israeli, I would be praying that God would keep Ahmadinejad awake all night long. I would be praying that all those Ayatollahs over there who are plotting the destruction of my country would be put into fear. They would be scared to death. They would become afraid of their own shadow. And that God Himself would put them in fear. There are men out there who think they cut a wide swath. Boy, they think they are the thing. I pray that God will show them what they are really worth. Just so they will understand this. They think they hung the moon. I pray God will show them that they did not. Sort of like he told Job that. He says, when I created the earth, when I made the waters and put the boundary of the sea, where were you standing? I didn’t see you there. Well, sometimes people need to learn that. Psalm 10. This psalm starts off with a description of the way things seem to be in the course of natural events as they occur. Why do you stand way off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Now, do you know the answer to this question? It’s pretty simple. He stands afar off to grant man the freedom that is a part of his plan. For if a man is not willing to serve God voluntarily because he appreciates who God is, because he recognizes the power of God, because he fears before God, if a man is not willing to do it for those reasons, what’s it worth? Nothing. He wants man to worship him freely. The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor. Let them be taken in the devices they have imagined. For the wicked boasts of his heart’s desire and blesses the covetous whom the Lord hates. Well, you know, we’ve got a real classic example of this going on around us right now. As we have government, we have people who are basically taking money away, really out of the mouths of the poor. with the pretense of helping the poor. It’s really incredible when you look at this and see what is taking place. And I’m not going to sit in judgment of this or that political philosophy. That’s not what I’m here for. What I’m here for is to say, and this is another thing you need to understand in the Psalms, David in his most violent prayers about the wicked doesn’t name names. The reason for that is simple. One is he doesn’t know the heart of everybody concerned. And secondly, there are an awful lot of wicked people who are out there whom he does not know and who are causing a lot of grief to a lot of people. So he wants to be sure he can include them. Start naming names, you’re going to miss somebody who does not need to be missed. So anyway, arise, O Lord, let not man prevail. Let the heathen be judged in your sight. Put them in fear. I’ve already passed over that part. Now, verse 4. The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God. God is not in his thoughts. His ways are always grievous. Your judgments are way above out of his sight. He doesn’t even think about your judgments. As for his enemies, he puffs at them. He said in his heart, I will not be moved. I will never be in adversity. It’s so tempting. It is so tempting. You know, you feel sometimes when you see somebody who is so full of himself, so puffed up in his own vanity, you just sometimes, do you ever wish you could just put a pin in it? Just put a pin in it and sort of deflate the thing? Well, don’t imagine for a moment that God isn’t sitting there and probably some angel, this angel or that angel says to him, are you ready we go take him down? I mean, this guy is asking for it. You want me to go do it? Can I do it now? Can I do it now, please? And, of course, God’s willing to allow the natural course of events to take place in the interest of giving man freedom. He will act when he must. He will act when he is asked, if it fits. You don’t ask, you don’t get. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud. Under his tongue is mischief and vanity. He sits in the lurking places of the villages. In secret places he murders the innocent. His eyes are privily set against the poor. I don’t know any murderers. but then I cannot see what’s going on in their mind. I don’t know, but they are there. We know that for a fact. I’m afraid so many times I get through watching Greta Van Sesteren’s show on Fox News every evening. There was a period of time where it seemed like it was the murder of the day that they were dealing with. young women, vulnerable women, Natalie Holloway, and now it’s little children being kidnapped and carried out of their homes in the dark of night, little children being murdered allegedly by their own mother. And, of course, there have been situations over the past several years where we know children were murdered by their mother. And you watch that sort of thing and you try to say, what’s going on here? And how in the world can a normal human being do this? Well, they are left free to do it. Now, it’s very hard to get your mind around the reality of some of these psalms. I’m afraid that we are naive. We really are. And I’m grateful that we have the liberty and have the situation where we can afford to be naive. But if you really are thinking on God’s wavelength, There are plenty of opportunities and things you see in the news that can attract your attention, call for your prayers, and your prayers can be for the purpose of changing the natural course of events in one way or another. We drift along sometimes in that natural course of events, not taking responsibility for calling down God’s wrath on the wicked. We really are supposed to do that, you know. This is the kind of prayer we’re supposed to make. When we see wickedness in high places, we are supposed to go to God and say, don’t let that happen. Cut it off. Do whatever you need to do. And He will. Maybe. If we care enough. If it fits His will. If it follows the plan. He will actually interrupt the natural course of events for you. You do understand that probably the… The most dramatic illustrations of this are in Jesus’ own ministry where he comes to a man who was born blind. In the natural course of events, that man will die blind. Jesus suspended the laws of nature. He set aside in many ways all the consequences of whoever it was or whatever it was that made him be born blind. The man who’s in a synagogue with a withered arm all clutched up. I’ve seen a couple of those in my lifetime. Whom he told, you stretch your arm out. And he stretched it out and it became whole just like the other one. He actually had to change nature to do that. Had to change the course of events, change the laws, suspend the laws to do whatever needed to be done so that this person could be healed. He had the power to do that. He still does. And he is still willing to do so. But I increasingly, as I read through the Psalms, and I’m involved in the fourth, I think, writing the fourth of the book of Time with God that I’m making, I am increasingly just compelled to understand that we are supposed to pray for and against people in high places because of the things that are going on. that we may be able to change some things. And I’ll tell you what, if the natural course of events plays out like it appears to be doing, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people die in the next few years. I’m not going to say five or ten. I’m not sure how long some of these things will take. But my impression is that they’re coming sooner rather than later, and that possibly between now and, in fact, almost certainly between now and, I’m confused now that I’m in the 2000s, in 2020, shall we say. numbers probably in excess of a million people will die in terrorist activities or in overt warfare. Maybe far more than that, because if Iran, who do not seem to care about their own lives, if the Iranian leadership, who believe that they must bring about chaos in the world so that the Mahdi will come, if they attack Israel, hit Tel Aviv, they’ll destroy half of the population of Israel right there. And because these people, this is something that I don’t know if you’ve thought about this, but to them it is important that they kill people in a terrible way. Now, think back to 9-11. A lot of us were very concerned. I remember I was at one time about refineries and about the tunnel coming back from the feast through going through Mobile. And yet something inside of me told me there’s no reason to worry about that. That’s not where they’re going. They are not going for strategic sites. They are going for terror. Never lose track of that. So they won’t aim at Israel’s military complex. They will aim at population centers. I speculated on a recent radio program that if they know better than their guidance systems are likely to be, they may aim at Tel Aviv and hit Gaza. Some prophecies in the Bible suggest that Gaza will be desolated. I don’t think that that’s necessarily what it’s about. But sometimes… There’s a great irony in the way prophecies do play out in the Bible. The language that you read in the Psalms is archaic, but the events are as current as the drudge report. I mean, you get up there and make your way down those little lines that they have with the news that’s being played out, the events are just there. God said, in his heart, he says, God is forgotten. He hides his face. He’ll never see it. Sometimes it looks that way, that God’s not going to see it. Maybe because we don’t ask for it to be otherwise. I know we’re just a handful of people. How can what we say make a difference? Well, we’ll talk about it later. Arise, O Lord, lift up your hand, forget not the humble. Why does the wicked condemn God? He has said in his heart… You will not require it, but you have seen it. You behold mischief in spite to require it with your hand. The poor commits himself to you. You are the helper of the fatherless. Break the arm of the wicked and equal evil man. Seek out his wickedness until you find none. Now notice, no names. He did not name names. You may not even have the right evildoer in mind. But God knows. God knows who those termites are. who might be hiding here and there in the structures of power, who may be one of the real reasons why things are going the way they are, and they never make the news. Chances are, the worst of them are never in the news. Well, here’s an interesting thing. Now, parse these verses carefully. The Lord is king forever and ever. The heathen are perished out of his land. Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble. You will prepare their heart, you will cause your ear to hear, to judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may know more oppressed. The judging of the fatherless and the oppressed and of the man of the earth comes about because God has heard the cry of the humble. It’s inescapable, right there. Because he’s heard that cry. We make one very fundamental mistake, I think, due to an unwillingness to recognize the wicked for who they are. You don’t have to name names. In most cases, you don’t even know who they are. But you do have to recognize and condemn wickedness when you see it. And God will sort it out. He and the angels can tell what’s going on in the darkest corners of wherever there is. The darkness is broad daylight to him. Psalm 37 is really a fascinating psalm. I won’t take the time to go through it. I recommend it to your reading because of the way in which it develops the theme further of the wicked and our responsibility and the importance that we pray about this. I want to bring you back to some fundamentals. One, God is good. Two, God gave man freedom. Three, freedom implies the freedom to do bad things as well as good. Four, in the normal course of events, bad things are going to happen, and they’re going to happen to good people just like bad. Fifth, for reasons that may be too high for us, God allows us to weigh in with prayer and thus change the course of history. That’s a pretty big responsibility. And you may not think you can do it alone. James 5, a familiar scripture to many of us because of all the years of ministers coming to pray for the sick. James 5, verse 13. Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up. And if he’s committed sins, they’ll be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another. Pray for one another that you may be healed. Then he says this, the effectual, fervent prayer. of a righteous man, and that’s man without making a distinction on gender, the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Just how much? Well, he goes on to explain, Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain and it didn’t rain on the earth by the space of three and a half years. He prayed again and the heavens gave rain and the earth brought forth her fruit. How many prayed this? One. One man. How long were those fervent prayers? Now, fervency is not a matter of the voice. It’s not a matter of the lungs. It’s a matter of the heart. How long were those prayers? 1 Kings 17, verse 1. Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said to Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel lives before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word. Period. End of quotation. And Elijah disappeared, and Ahab didn’t see him again for three and a half years. Hardly anybody did. A widow that kept him alive was the only one that saw him. That’s a short statement, prayer. I mean, and he said he prayed, and it didn’t rain, so I’d have to conclude that God looks upon it as a prayer. And Elijah was a man of few words. He never used two words when one would do. That’s just the way he was. Then it came to pass, 1 Kings 18. when all we got through the three and a half years and the time has come to bring about a denouement in all of this. It came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, Elijah the prophet came near and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, that I have done all these things at your word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that you are the Lord God and that you have turned their heart back again. And the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice and the wood and the stones and the dust and licked up the water in the trench around the altar. And everybody fell on their faces and said, Jehovah, he is God. Jehovah, he is God. They had gotten over very quickly the worship of Baal and the adoration of Baal. It didn’t last that long. But nevertheless, in that moment of time, it happened. So Elijah, a man of like passions, just like we are, prayed and it didn’t rain for three and a half years. Prayed again, and the rain came. And a whole group of people did turn to God, at least for the moment. Now it seems an awful lot to ask God to turn our people’s lives again, their hearts back to God again, because we have come so far down a wrong road in this country. But it may be God’s will to give us all another chance, but only if we ask for it.
