How to Study Your Bible: Part 5 Session with Nathan Pearl from the Big Texas Shindig

 Transcription

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Nathan Pearl:  This will be a topical—we talked about the two studies, a passage or topical—this will be a topical study of prayer, the way that it is taught in the Word of God.

What I did was, I took my concordance, and I typed in the word "prayer" and put an asterisk after it, and that tells my computer concordance to look up every time the word "prayer," "prayed," "prayest," any suffix that's attached to "prayer," any grouping of that word is going to be looked up. I found that—you probably can't see it right here—it's found 545 times in 511 verses, the word "prayer" in some use is in the Bible.

Remember, there are 91,000 books on Amazon that you can read on the subject. The word appears 500 times in total. You can understand, it's a lot faster, it's a lot simpler and easier, and a lot more accurate to study it in the Word of God than it is to read books on it. Do you see that? You can do it for yourself. It's not difficult to do.

I looked it up, and the first thing I see is that it says right here, the first time it's used, in Genesis 12:13, "Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister." That's from a guy talking to his wife. "I pray thee, between me and thee, between my . . ." Okay, that's from another man talking to another man. "I pray thee, from . . . " Okay, so right away you see the Old Testament is going to be full of one man praying to another man, saying, "I pray thee."

When I studied it myself I looked in the Old and New Testament, but for the sake of time here, I went back, typed in my "prayer*," and clicked on "New Testament," and come to the first time that it's used in the New Testament. When I type in "New Testament," it tells me right here it's 174 matches in 165 verses. The first verse, right there in Matthew, it says, "Jesus says, 'But I say unto you, love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.'"

What I'll do, and this is where I use my word processor, is I'll go ahead and type in this passage is about Jesus teaching on prayer. Do you see that? It's not theological, what I've done. It's not difficult, and it could be anything that I want. It doesn't have to have this. This is just how I frame it for me, so that I'll understand it. So I take my word processor, and I type down, "Jesus teaching on prayer." [jokingly] I promise I'm not going to sell a word processor or a laptop.

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Nathan:  " . . . prayer," and put this passage under it. Then I go to the next one, and I see right here, I see 6:5, 6:4, 6:3, 6:6, 6:7. You see all these verses on prayer right after each other. I click on one of these, pull up all the verses, and then look at the passage where Jesus is teaching on prayer. Then I select that whole passage, and I stick it up there.

Once again, it's not amazing. It's not difficult. It's not even that time-consuming. I have a big passage of Jesus teaching on prayer. This isn't what somebody wrote about prayer. This is what Jesus taught on prayer. Now I need to understand the divisions, that this is prior to the New Covenant, prior to the blood being spilt, but this is Jesus teaching on prayer.

Then it says, "Pray ye therefore, to the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers unto His harvest." That's my next verse. So, I put a new thing, "Commanded to pray." Now this one's really interesting to me, the times in the Bible that we are commanded to pray. If you'll study this, it changes your prayer meetings. It changes the way that you meet together, or the way you pray in your personal life. Did you know that God commands you to pray for certain things? Do you do it?

I listen to Christian radio periodically, when I'm driving down the road, and they have a thing where you can call in prayer requests. I hear, "Aunt Margie's got cancer." "Uncle Biff got a broken ankle." "I lost my job, and I need a new job." And so on, and so on, and so on. They have these prayer circles for that. I think, "How sad." How sad. Here you have the chance to come before the Almighty God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Man who makes all things and by all things consist. Here you have this chance to come before the Throne of God and you look around, and you see a field of people that are dying and going to hell. You're going to work with people that are going to hell. And you're worried about a broken ankle?

Really? I mean, if we can get together and agree on one thing and pray for it, you're worried about a broken ankle, or your job? It's not like that's in there. That's going to be in my prayer at my house, for our family, for blessings and health and things like that. But in a public setting, I've never heard anybody come up and call up and say, "Guys, I just went to Houston, and I just looked out there, and there were a sea of lost people. I would like to bring up the city of Houston and ask you guys to pray for it." Because nobody studies this.

If you read this, you see what Christ is talking about, right here. He says, "Pray to the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers." See how instructive it is? I haven't done anything difficult here. I've not done anything that any one of you can't do. If you can read, this is easily attainable, easy to do.

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