Ask What Ye Will

Introduction:

If you could ask for anything in the world what might it be?

Millions or billions of dollars?

A new house? Car? Boat? Clothes?

Jesus told the disciples in John 15:7 “7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”

This is both information, condition, and promise

There is the information that God answers prayer

I’m so glad God answers prayer

He’s answered many prayers of mine.

Just yesterday Gloria called and told me to pray that God would help - she was going to have to have an IV put in and it was the fifth one and they had apparently been painful and problematic.

I simply prayed on the phone with her - a little while later she called and told me that the nurse came and did it so quick she didn’t even feel it. I call that an answer to prayer.

It may seem little and insignificant to some - but it is a powerful reminder to me that if God can answer a prayer like that - I can take greater prayer risks, I can ask confidently for larger things.

Condition -Prayer is answered typically because we are connected to the prayer answering Source - “If ye abide in me and My words abide in you...”

We must maintain connection to Him if our prayers are going to be effectual and be answered.

Going back to what happens when God answers prayers for us we can take boldness and confidence. That is what Paul says in Eph. 3:12 “12 In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.”

John 15:7 “7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”

This “asking” has to be in accordance and harmony with God’s principles and Kingdom. It has to be within God’s will.

But the boldness, access, confidence by faith allows us to “ask what ye will”

THE PRAYER MEETING THAT SHOOK A NATION -- The Results of Joseph Lanphier's Prayer

Joseph Lanphier knelt alone. He prayed for days alone in an upper room of the Old North Dutch Church in Fulton Street, New York City, praying for a revival. Each day he would broadcast an invitation for others to meet with him, but because none came he was not to be deterred in his purpose of praying a revival upon the nation. This was an ambitious request, and an adventure that would task the faith of even the greatest. Yet he prayed on.

Out of his soul came this request, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"

Finally one man joined him, and

the next day there were six lifting their voices in unison for the long-delayed revival of holy fervency.

Then the number jumped to twenty,

again to a hundred, all beseeching the Lord for flood tides of glory to sweep the land. And soon the meetinghouse would not hold the vast groups of suppliants. These prayer meetings took hold of the imagination of the city, and from all ranks of life people came to pray. A second and third room in the same building were filled; the entrances were choked with persons, and hundreds, so a report declares, went away from this "one man" prayer meeting disappointed because they could not get in.

The meeting overflowed to the John Street Methodist Church, and the lecture room was filled. Old Button's Theater in Chambers Street was thrown open to the midday prayers, and this was overcrowded. From New York the prayer meeting leaped to Philadelphia, where the celebrated Jayne's Hall prayer meeting was started, and this hall was filled to overflowing.

Oh, how those groups sang straight from the heart. Lanphier, the city missionary in that church where the meetings started, taught them to sing old gospel hymns, and soon on the streets, down at the wharfs, these hymns rang out. Prayer meetings started on board the ships at dock, and aboard one of them two hundred seafaring men were converted.

The meetings leaped again, and we find the church of Henry Ward Beecher thronged until Beecher himself had to attend and preach, and at the end of every sermon people were invited to come forward and accept Christ. The famous Theodore Cuyler, a noted preacher, and author of more than five thousand religious articles, took a hand in the work, and ten thousand converts accepted Christ in less than six months under his spiritual ministry.

Over in Philadelphia more than three thousand people a day crowded the Jayne's Hall over a period of several months. They lifted that song, "Stand Up for Jesus," until it became the battle cry of the city.

Back in New York it was estimated that six thousand people attended the twenty daily prayer meetings. Boston, cold intellectual center that it has always been, caught fire, and in the staid old churches hoary with age, prayer meetings ran into revivals and thousands flocked to these new centers of spiritual light.

Over to Pittsburgh, and into Cleveland, and on to Chicago, and even to Omaha, these prayer meetings spread until a traveler said that in coming from Omaha there was one continuous prayer meeting for two thousand miles. One man from a lumber camp attended a meeting in Philadelphia, and when he reamed to the camp all alone he started the fire blazing, and several thousand were converted.

The prayer meeting became more than a season of praying; happy seekers after God were found everywhere.

Newspapers devoted full pages, front columns, and large headlines to the delineating of the story of these prayer meetings.

Telegraph companies sent at certain hours of the day telegrams of salvation and prayerful messages free of charge.

The awakening outran the churches. In St. Louis churches filled, and these prayer meetings burst out as natural conflagrations in the homes and business houses. God seemed to have broken in upon the souls of the people everywhere.

Most business houses at the noon hour closed up that the owners and clerks, as well as the customers, might attend the prayer meetings. In_ Chicago, in one church, more than two thousand would meet each noonday for prayer. One author, writing a few years after these scenes, said that reports came in from all the western states, as far as Washington, that the prayer meetings flamed out into revivals and the Holy Spirit swept thousands into the kingdom.

Finney preached up in New England during that winter, and powerful revivals followed his ministry. Elder Jacob Knapp joined in with the host of triumphant evangels. Over on the prairies of Kansas these concerts of prayer awakened many young men to the kingdom.

One writer refers to this spiritual outburst of evangelism as being essentially a deep, rational movement, based upon prayer rather than preaching, that restored the spiritual balance of thousands of American people. In an editorial the New York Times said, "It is most impressive to think that over this great land tens and fifties of thousands of men and women are putting to themselves at this time, in a simple, serious way, the greatest question that can ever come before the human mind."

The results seem impossible in terms of the humble beginning of the movement, a lonely praying man. It is estimated that one hundred thousand conversions occurred within the space of the first four months of these prayer meetings, and that during the first year which followed the beginning of the work more than four hundred thousand had been brought to Jesus, Before this great revival ended more than a million souls had been won.

It was in Chicago that a young man was selling shoes, and when the noonday prayer times arrived he took his customers with him to the meetings. Dwight L. Moody. wrote home to his mother about these wonderful prayer seasons. He said, "I go to meeting every night. Oh, how I enjoy it! It seems as if God were here himself. O Mother, pray for me! Pray that this work may go on until every knee is bowed." Out of these prayer meetings and through the far-reaching influence of these revivals, the work of the famous soul winner, Moody, was born.

This alone -- the setting of the pace which Moody was to follow in his revivals -- was worth all the effort that the lone missionary in the slums of lower New York City had put into the arousing of the consciences of the city to pray, pray, until the entire land was awakened.

The next year we find the effects of this prayer meeting breathing forth in England, and the soul-inflaming revival of Wales was in full force.

The availing power of prayer meetings turned the tide of millions back to God. The lone wailing voice of Lanphier heard in that upper room, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" broke into the corridors of Wall Street, rang out to the dens of pleasure, until it was magnified a thousandfold, and as the sound of mighty thunder, the rolling of tremendous volumes of water, it quickened the conscience of millions.

PRAYER MEETINGS THAT MADE HISTORY

By Basil Miller

Author of "God's Great Soul Winners"

The Warner Press

Anderson, Indiana

Copyright 1938

By Gospel Trumpet Company

Printed In United States Of America

HDM3382