The Most Important Conversation (Aug. 2 2026)

Good morning!   My name is Ken, and I’m one of the pastors here, and I want to welcome again everyone who’s joined us today in person and online.    And if you’re new here with us today, we are so glad you could join us, and I want to let you know a couple of things:  1) I’m not the person you’ll regularly see speaking, our lead pastor is out of town on a well earned vacation, and I’m usually playing guitar or something at the back of the stage, and 2) we don’t normally have a giant sheet hanging from the ceiling over here, but we are undergoing some construction issues and we ask you to bear with us for just this week.   

I love to talk about prayer, and about 5-7 years ago I skimmed through something called biblegateway, essentially google for the Bible, and wrote down a bunch of the references to key figures in the Bible praying, and how they prayed, and I condensed that down to about 3 minutes, and I wanted to share some of that with you this morning:    

Hannah prayed for God to give her a child

David prayed for deliverance, forgiveness, and salvation.

Solomon prayed for the dedication of the temple

Elijah prayed against the prophets of Baal.  (1 Kings 18:36)

Elisha prayed for his servant to see that those fighting for them were more than those fighting against them.

Hezekiah prayed “we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

Ezra prayed for forgiveness of the people of Israel

Nehemiah prayed and fasted for days to rebuild Jerusalem's wall, and prayed at every stage of the rebuilding. (Neh 1:4-11)

Job prayed for his friends 

The Psalms are prayers set to music. Prayers of joy, of praise, of anger, bitterness, hope, repentance, sadness. Prayers for deliverance, protection, compassion, forgiveness, strength, healing. Prayers that focus only on God’s goodness, and prayers written from moments of deepest despair.

Daniel never changed his prayer routine, even when his prayers carried the death sentence.

Jonah prayed from the depths of the sea and was restored to dry land

Jesus rose very early while it was still dark, went to desolate places, and prayed. (Mark 1:35)

He prayed on a mountain all night until daylight, before choosing the 12 disciples He would use to change the world. (Luke 6:12)

He taught about praying in faith (Mark 11:24), and praying with forgiveness (Mark 11:25), and modeled a lifestyle of constant prayer to his disciples (Luke 9:18 and others)

He railed against the hypocritical prayers of the Pharisees (Mark 12:40)

He took Peter, James, and John to the mountain with him to pray on the day of his transfiguration (Luke 9:28-29)

He told the 72 to pray earnestly for God to send laborers to the harvest (Luke 10:2)

He taught His disciples about spiritual forces of darkness that could only be defeated by prayer (Mark 1:29)

Jesus told us to pray for those who hate us (Matt 5:44), to pray sincerely and not hypocritically (Matt 6:6), to pray in secret and not for the recognition of people. (Matt 6:6).

He dismissed the crowds to prioritize his solitary prayer with the Father. (Matt 14:22 

He prayed blessings over little children (Matt 19:13).

In righteous premeditated fury He cleared the temple of the greedy, saying “my house will be called a house of prayer.” (Matt 21:12)

He said to always pray and never give up (Luke 18:1). He told of the humble tax collector whose prayer was heard, while the Pharisee’s was rejected (Luke 18:13-14)

He told His disciples to pray they would not enter temptation (Luke 22:46)

In agony in Gethsemane, he prayed even more earnestly, with sweat like drops of blood falling to the ground. He rose from prayer and told his disciples to pray that they would not fall into temptation (Luke 22:44-46)

He prayed–three times–for the Father to spare Him crucifixion, but chose instead to do the Father’s will, and die in agony on a cross that should have been ours. (Matt 26:41,42,44)

These are just some of the references to prayer in the Bible, and all of this begs one enormous question. Why don’t we prioritize prayer?

Jesus said “my house will be called a house of prayer.”  At that point He was talking about a building, the physical temple in Jerusalem.   But today, the temple is you.  I Cor 3:16 says “16 Do you not know that you[a] are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you.   Human believers in Jesus are the temple of the Holy Spirit, He lives in us.   So if you are the temple, if you in a sense are God’s house, is your house a house of prayer?

And if you’re sitting here today or watching online, you very likely already pray.   But a whole lot of us still feel unsettled in our prayer lives, like prayer is something we definitely support, we think it’s a good idea, we tell people all the time online and in text messages that we’re praying for them, but we still have a vague sense of prayer-guilt; this idea that our prayer life isn’t what it could be or what it’s supposed to be.  

God clearly thinks prayer is important.  And honestly, that alone should be enough to revolutionize our prayer lives.   

But why does God think prayer is so important?

Prayer Is Important Because We Are Important:

God sees us as valuable.   He values our relationship with Him.    Through faith in Christ we are called dearly loved children, beloved.  To this day I don’t feel like I can totally comprehend that, but it’s true.      

I never get tired of looking up at the night sky.     

Have you ever had a time where you were surprised by how many stars you could see?   My family was driving back from Ocracoke Island to Nags Head in the Outer Banks a few years ago and we stopped at Hatteras Lighthouse; the big lighthouse, to try and get some pictures of it at night.   And I remember getting out of the car, and I just completely lost track of the lighthouse and said “Joan, look at the stars.”   And it was just amazing.   There’s almost no light pollution there and it was a clear, moonless night, and the stars went on and on forever.  I don’t remember much about what the lighthouse looked like, but I remember the stars.  It felt like 10 times as many stars as we can usually see here.     

And the stars we can see with just our eyes on nights like that are only the absolute closest ones.   We can only actually see about 5-10 thousand of them across the entire night sky.   With a good set of binoculars that number goes up to about 200,000, and with a decent home telescope it goes up to about 5 million.  

(Sky and Telescope; 9.096 Stars in the Sky–is that all?)

That sounds like a lot, but that’s just the very beginning.   

Our sun is just one star, and it’s not a particularly big one.   But you could fit well over a million earths inside just our sun, which is just one star in our galaxy.      And there are at least 100 Billion stars in just our galaxy.  And the latest estimate is there are about 2 trillion entire galaxies.   And that number goes up every year as our understanding gets better.  

The God that made and sustains all of that created you, cares for you, and actually wants to spend time with you.   That’s a staggering thought.  It should be enough to make us drop everything and fall on our faces in worship and surrender.       

And on the other side of that, the God that made all of that wants to spend time with you, and we’re saying I’ll get to it but I’m really busy today.  I’m watching this reel; I’m almost done watching this show.   I’ll do that tomorrow.

Which one is more important; which one is more beneficial?

Prayer is Eternal

(Show cell of a Ray)

Does anyone remember what this is?  You might remember this from grade school geometry.  It’s called a ray.   It’s a fixed point in space with a line extending infinitely out in one direction.   

Your life here on earth is that little tiny dot at the beginning.   The line that extends out for infinity is your life in eternity.   Does it make more sense to live for our time in the dot, or our time in the line?   

I heard someone say that two things are eternal:  Time with God, and time with People.   When you spend time with God, it lasts past the end of your natural life and into eternity.  

Prayer is God Involving Us in His Plan:

Some people use work to avoid prayer.   Some people use prayer to avoid work.   But the Biblical model is both of them intertwined in exactly the right balance.  .   The apostles and the other early believers in the book of Acts did both.    They prayed in ways that would put all of us to shame; they prayed for 10 days at a time once, they prayed all night.   But after they sought God’s power and boldness they went out in the streets sharing the message of Jesus, and caring for people, often at huge risk to their own lives.    

One of my favorite Bible characters is a guy named Nehemiah in the Old Testament.  He’s one of my favorite examples of leadership, ever. He was brave, wise, organized, and inspiring.   He unified a disunited people, risked his own life for the greater good, was an incredible planner and administrator, and confronted sin when necessary.   But he didn’t do anything without praying first.   He fasted and prayed for days before he planned and started on his main mission to rebuild Jerusalem’s wall.   

One pattern that you see throughout Scripture, and right up to today, is that God routinely moves people to pray for the things He is already planning to do anyway.   We have agency and freedom and our own minds and requests, but somehow God fits our prayer lives into the bigger picture of the ongoing story He is always writing throughout history.   We can operate with a sense of destiny because God is allowing us to be part of His plan.     

Prayer Sustains Us:

In John 15:4 Jesus says

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.”(John 15:4)

Abide. That’s a word we don’t use much today but it communicates an entire way of life in just those two syllables.

I cut this branch off a tree in my back yard.   That was about two weeks ago.   From a distance it still looks kind of green and sort of like a branch, but what will it look like in another month?

Jesus says abide in me, remain in me, dwell in me, stay in a daily relationship with me, and if you do that everything in your spiritual walk will flow from that. We can’t do the good works God has set aside for us to do apart from a relationship with Christ. In the very next verse, Jesus says “apart from me you can do nothing.” Everything that we do to serve other people should flow out of a daily journey with God through prayer and time in the Bible.  Prayer is not the only way that we abide, but it’s a huge part of it.  

You can tell the difference between when you are doing things on your own strength, and when you are doing them through God’s power. It’s the difference between trying to push a string up a hill, and sitting on a sailboat with a breeze at your back. But too many times we don’t even slow down enough to ask if we are operating in God’s power or our own. We just keep doing what we’ve always done because it’s easier that way, and it gives us a sense of control.

Hard work is essential in the Christian life, but there’s a difference between being just busy and being effective.   Jesus was focused. He always operated with a sense of purpose and destiny. The days He spent caring for the crowds were long and I’m sure they were utterly exhausting even for Him, but He would send people away in order to have private time alone with the Father, or invest in His disciples.   If Jesus needed time alone with the Father, how much more do we?

How are we doing with this today? Are we operating in God’s strength or our own?

God Wants Us To Pray For Each Other:  

When you’re really in trouble, who do you ask to pray for you?   You might have dozens of people to choose from but when it’s really important I bet you have 2-3 specific people that you think of and ask first.   Why? What’s different about them?   Because you have some sort of sense that when they pray, God answers.    Why is that?    I’m not sure that I know, but I think it has something to do with time, intensity, and heart before God. 

Col 4:12 says “Epaphras (EP-us-fras), who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.” It talks about “Struggling” in prayer.  Other translations of the same verse use the phrases “wrestling in prayer”, “laboring fervently in prayer,” “combating” in prayer.   If you wonder why you have so much trouble with your prayer life sometimes, it’s partially because real prayer isn’t easy.   

In one sense we are all absolutely on equal footing before God, but in another sense, I think God seems to respond more to a 5 minute prayer than a 5 second prayer.  It says you value time with God enough that it costs you something.  

There was a wonderful woman named Olivia who was one of our deacons here.  The world wouldn’t have seen her as someone that was particularly influential at all, but she was a rock star in the Kingdom of God.   Olivia never got tired of praying.    I would text Olivia prayer requests all the time.   I think I was just one of about 20-30 people who did that.     She was someone you knew would really genuinely pray for you, and you had the sense that God would actually listen and act when she did.  She would send back texts that said “calling out your name before God.”   That’s more of a commitment than hitting the prayer emoji button on your phone, and moving on to the next thing.  

No prayer request was too small, and no prayer request was too dumb.   I sent her lots of both.  She never made you feel like you were wasting her time with something trivial or something you shouldn’t be bothering God with.     

She passed away several years ago from cancer, and I went to visit her in a local nursing home  just a few days before she died.  She could barely talk by that time, and I had real trouble understanding most of what she said.    But I mentioned how much I appreciated her prayer life, and that she must have gotten tired at times from getting so many endless prayer requests from so many people.   And she said “Never!   Never!”   They were the only words I clearly understood from her that day, but on her literal deathbed this woman affirmed that she would never, ever quit praying, and would never think it was a burden.  That’ll stick with me for the rest of my life.

I want to be that kind of person.   I want you to be that kind of person. 

And some of you might be thinking, “that’s nice and all, but I’ve kind of tried this before and it’s never really worked out.  I wouldn’t tell people this, but I’m kind of scared to pray out loud, I feel like my prayers aren’t good enough, I see those prayer people and some of them are kind of strange, I try to pray some each day but there’s just too much going on, and I can’t stay consistent with it.  And honestly, I’m not really sure God wants to hear from me anyway”.  If you’ve ever felt any of those things, I just want to tell you:

Whatever the next step is in your prayer life, you can do this.  There are always a million barriers in our way when we set out to take the next step, but you can do this.   Because God can help you.  

If you’ve ever thought or felt any of those things I just mentioned, let me tell you something that changed the whole direction of my life since I was a brand new believer in my 20s.  

God doesn’t hear us because we’re awesome, He hears us because He’s awesome.  God doesn’t hear us because we’re great, he hears us because of the sacrifice of His Son.   

Hebrews 10:19-22 says “since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Heb 10:19-22)

If you’re new to the faith or still investigating all of this, there’s a lot of imagery there that might seem a little foreign to you.   But the gist of the verse is that Jesus has torn down the barriers that separate us from God, He’s destroyed them, and God now allows us to draw near, not because of the great things we’ve done, but because of what He’s done.  

This changes everything.  Through faith in Christ we can run, not walk, into God's presence and ask Him for amazing things in His will.

He’s not against You, He’s for you.   If you feel like you don’t know where to start, He’s there to help.  You can tell Him everything and anything; He already knows it.    

He tells us to pray.  He doesn’t ask us to do anything He isn’t willing to help us with

So what do we do with all of this?  Real quick, here are just a few things that have helped me with my prayer life over the years:  

 Pray Honestly:

You can be totally honest with God.

When I was a new believer I felt like, it’s not ok for me to tell God that I feel angry at him, or I doubt Him, or whatever negative emotion I was dealing with, and I would try to hide those from God.   And a friend of mine who helped lead me to Christ said something that was really obvious but it hadn’t occurred to me.   “He knows what you’re thinking anyway.”

He totally already knows what you’re thinking and feeling anyway.   Why not talk to Him about it?   Better than that, it’s ok to be that honest with Him.

Skim through the book of Psalms in the Old Testament sometime.  The Psalms are the literal songbook of the Bible; these are the words to songs that people sang in worship services centuries ago.   There are 150 of them; it’s the longest book by chapter count in the whole Bible.  There are people who have studied the Psalms and broken them down into several main categories (Lament/Praise/Royal/Thanksgiving/Wisdom).  And the biggest category, which is about a third of the Psalms, is what they called Lament; sometimes they’re called the Complaining Psalms.   They ask God questions like where are you?   Why aren’t you helping?   Why is my life so difficult when the bad people have it so easy?   They express the full range of human emotions fearlessly, and usually cycle back to God’s faithfulness and grace, but not always.   Sometimes they leave the questions unresolved.  And they were singing these in church!

God’s not threatened by our questions; He included them, in the Bible.  On purpose.   

I love that we have a God that lets us honestly say how we’re feeling.    

The devil wants everything in your life to slowly push you away from God, so subtly that you don’t even notice it.  But you don’t have to let him. Let everything in your life–good or bad, failures or successes–point you back toward God.

If you sin, don’t try to hide it from God, say “God I’ve sinned.  Please forgive me and help me out of this cycle.”   

If you feel ashamed, take your shame to God

If you feel guilt, take your guilt to God.    

If you don’t even feel like following God some days, say “God I don’t even feel like following you today, but please help me to do that anyway.”  

If you’re an atheist, say “God I’m not even sure you’re out there,but if you are please let me know.” 

(I used to be an atheist, by the way, briefly, when I was a teenager.)

If you’re angry at God for something you think He could have fixed, or didn’t prevent, tell Him.

Pray Specifically:  

General prayers get general answers.   Specific prayers get specific answers.   

Let’s say I’m praying for you.   I can either pray something like “God, bless ‘em.”

Or I can pray for you like Paul the apostle did when he prayed for the churches he oversaw. 

(Col 1:9-12)   9 . . . we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11 being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; 12 giving thanks[d] to the Father, who has qualified you[e] to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. (Col 1:9-12) 

By the way, if you’re ever not sure how to pray for someone or something, pray the prayers in the Bible.   They’re everywhere, and they’re way better than anything I would come up with on my own.   If you want to know more about this find me or email me after the message and I’ll make sure you get a list of some of them.  

Keep Track of God’s Goodness:

If you go through the prayers in the Bible you’ll see that prayer and thankfulness are linked together over and over and over.   They are everywhere in the Bible, and here’s just one of them:

“do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6)   

And I’m honestly not good at being thankful unless I’m very intentional about it.  Years ago I overheard someone at a Christian camp say they wrote down “3 victories a day;” three things a day they could thank God for.   I thought that was a great idea, so I used my Notes app on my iPhone to write down 3 things a day I could thank God for.   And eventually it dwindled down to maybe one thing a day, and later on it was just when I noticed things I could be thankful for, and sometimes I totally forgot about it for months at a time and then restarted it when I thought about it again.   But I’ve kept at it in some form for about 10-15 years now, and it’s now dozens of pages long.  I call it a thankfulness log.   And on difficult days when it feels like God’s not at work or I think everything’s falling apart, I go back and read through it.   And I see years and years of God’s faithfulness, protection, mercy, kindness, and grace, that I had completely forgotten about.     God is faithful, but we are forgetful.  We need to intentionally remind ourselves of His goodness.   

Try the ACTS method:

God made all of us different, we have different strengths and weaknesses, some of us are introverts, some are extroverts,  so what helps me connect with God might not help you, and that’s ok.  But if you keep at it you will eventually figure out what works best for you.   There are countless different things people use to help them focus on prayer; this is just one:   ACTS is just an acronym:   This is just one thing that has helped me at times to focus in my prayer times.    

Adoration

Psalm 95:1-6

Confession

Thanksgiving

Supplication

Requests on behalf of yourself or others

5)   Never Give Up

Luke 18:1 says “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart”

One translation renders this verse:  “Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up.”  

Pray persistently.   

George Mueller story.  (from george mueller.org, and below is a google search about him)

Orphanage and Philanthropic Work

  Lived in the 1800s:  

Established five large orphan houses at a place called Ashley Down in Bristol, housing over 2,000 children at a time.

Cared for a total of 10,024 orphans during his lifetime.

Refused to ask people for financial help or go into debt, choosing instead to pray directly to God for all monetary and material needs

So George has been dead for over a century, but he does have his own website..  And it shares his story of praying for five people he knew, daily, for over 50 years.  

In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day, I continued to pray for them, and six years passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remained unconverted.

Thirty-six years later he wrote that the other two, sons of one of Mueller’s friends, were still not converted. He wrote, “But I hope in God, I pray on, and look for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.” 

In 1897, fifty-two years after he began to pray daily, without interruption, for these two men, they were finally converted—but after he died! Mueller understood what Luke meant when he introduced a parable Jesus told about prayer, saying, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1).

I prayed every day for my dad for years.  He was an amazing, wonderful father, but he was not a believer and was a devout agnostic, and strongly opposed to the Christian faith at times.   I prayed for his salvation daily even though it seemed completely hopeless that it would ever be answered.   I prayed that prayer without any sense that God would ever answer it, but I kept praying, basically every day, for maybe 20 years.     He became a believer two weeks before he died.  I got to lead him to Christ at Winchester Medical Center.   

We always notice the prayers that seem to go unanswered, and I don’t have an easy explanation for those, but I know God is more faithful than our memories of His faithfulness.

Never Give Up.  Never stop praying.   That person or thing you’ve been praying for forever and nothing seems to be happening, don’t give up.  

So in closing, let me ask the question again: 

Is your house a house of prayer?    What’s the next step in your prayer life? 

I talked to one guy from the Friday morning Better Men group (which is restarting on September 11) who went from not praying much at all, to praying and journaling every day.   He said “this is the best part of my day now”

You can do this.   You can do this.   You don’t have to qualify, you just need to have a willing heart and show up and ask Him to help.

George Mueller, the guy we just talked about, wasn’t always an amazing missionary who helped orphans. Earlier in his life he lied, stole, drank heavily, manipulated, and spent time in jail.   Whatever you think you may have done in the past that disqualifies you, it’s not true.   God can use you.  You can come back.     

Some of you might want something to start or jumpstart your prayer life.   Here’s something that was a huge help for me as a brand new believer.  I read a book called The Fight by a guy named John White.   The author mentioned a card he had signed earlier in life that said simply   “With God’s help I resolve to spend 20 minutes a day alone with God.”  The book gave me the opportunity to do the same thing.  

I signed it and did my best to keep my commitment.    At times I’ve been very consistent with it and at other times I’ve been inconsistent and sporadic.   But I’m still convinced that decision to spend daily time with God is a huge reason I’m the person I am today.  

And we’re giving each of you the opportunity today to do the same thing.  In the seatbacks in front of you,  there’s a card with the same commitment that I signed off on when I was 18.   If you feel up to it, you can sign it today and take it home with you.  Put it someplace you’ll see it often.   And start tomorrow.   If 20 minutes seems too much for where you are now, you can change the number.  

I’m going to ask you all to bow your heads and close your eyes now, and I’m asking our elders and deacons to come forward now to the crosses, and we’re going to take just a few minutes during this last song to meet with God.   

You can pray in your seats, but if any of you have a prayer request for yourself or someone you know, and you just need someone else to pray with you about it, you can come forward and pray with one of our elders or deacons.     If you’re praying for physical healing, you can come forward and have someone pray for you.   If you’re ready to give your life to Christ for the very first time, and you want someone to pray for you, you can do that.   

And for some of you, your next step today might be giving your life to Christ for the very first time.  

I did this in a car at Shepherd College when I was 18 years old.   

I spent 8 months of my freshmen year of college fighting against God’s pull in my life, but one day I woke up and realized “I want to do this; I want to be a Christian; I want to follow God with my whole life.”   If you’re ready to do that today, you can.  You can pray to do that in your seats but we’d love to hear back from you about it from that blue card, or you can come forward and pray with one of our elders and deacons. 

As we continue to pray, anyone that wants to can come forward now, as the worship team sings this final song.