How to Study Your Bible: Part 6 Session with Nathan Pearl from the Big Texas Shindig

Transcription

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Nathan Pearl:  I go through, and I put down each of the verses. I went through the whole 165 verses, and I put down headers for each one. These are the headers I broke down. I have teaching on prayer; and then commanded to pray for things; and then people that were talking about prayer. I put a bunch of them under that. I put down ones where Jesus was praying. I like to know the way my savior prays. When He prays, I want to listen to it and listen to it. I mentioned last night my boy wanting to walk like I do. You dads know what it's like. Your sons want to emulate you, want to be like you. Well, I've got a heavenly Father that loves me and that died for me. I want to pray like He does.

When I have examples, I want to hear about it and then I want to pray it that way. And then the efficacy of prayer, incidental prayer, answered prayer. Prayer meetings—I thought this was interesting. When I got ready to begin a prayer meeting… this is an interesting passage teaching on prayer meetings. You can probably find 91,000 books on prayer meetings, if that's what you want to do. Or you can see what the Bible says about it.

Praise prayer: did you know that the Bible is full of people praying praise to God? When you pray, your prayer ought to be full of praise to God. Not because I say so, not because a book says so, but because you read the Bible, you looked up prayer, and you find a lot of places where people are praising God with prayer.

Anointing prayer. What should it look like if you send a missionary out of your church? How should a missionary be sent out? How should someone be sent out to give the Gospel to somebody else? How do you anoint someone? Do you use tradition, or have you looked it up? Right here it will tell you. The word of God will explain how to pray and anoint someone.

Another one is the apostles' Ministry of Prayer. That is a very interesting look at the way the Apostles prayed for the church. And then prayer for the apostles. How do you pray for your missionaries?

Okay. This isn't very focused, but I have the ones under teaching on prayer. Jesus prayed, where He says, "I say to you, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." Now I know that I can pray for someone that despitefully uses me and persecutes me. If someone's persecuting me, I'm going to pray for them that God will change their heart.

And then Jesus said, "When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, for they love to pray standing in the synagogue and on the corners of the street, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. Let thou, when thou prayest, enter into a closet, and when thou has shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father, which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

So when we pray, we're not to pray out exposed, not out praying to everyone. You say, "Well, this isn't very profound. What am I even doing here? I could read that." That's right. You could read that. You could do the study. And so I want to know, why don't we? Why doesn't the church do this? Why don't the men and women of God avail themselves of the tools that we have, and study the word of God, and see what He says about prayer?

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