The mentality I have of my Father is that He’s going to be quick to wanting to deliver me.  My heavenly Father knows what things I have need of.  “His ears are open to the cry of the righteous,” the Scripture says.  The Father that I know is a Father who wants to lavish upon His children His kingdom and all that pertains to it, and at the same time we see these admonitions over and over again.  We need to seek His face.  We need to come before His presence.  It’s not God who needs to be reminded of His promises, it’s us.  The fact that we can quote them back to God doesn’t mean that we believe them.  The fact that you’ve memorized it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it.

So, we get to go through different times of trials to prove what’s in our hearts.  He says in this eighteenth chapter that we come, and we cry unto Him day and night.  God will avenge His own elect, though, the Greek there is talking about and/or/also, which would imply “and yet He is longsuffering.”  “I tell you that he will avenge them”, say it with me, “speedily.  Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”  So, we see that admonition, day and night coming into His presence, reminding ourselves though God does bring justice and vengeance upon the unjust, His righteous He avenges, say it, “speedily,” praise God.  We want to encourage ourselves in that.

A couple of points we want to look at that are very important in encouraging us in our prayer lives, knowing that God is going to bring about that purpose.  We saw the mandate to ask, to seek, to knock; amen?  A continuance of coming and believing from every aspect because those that ask, say it, “shall receive,” praise God.  Amen?  To those that knock, it’s going to be opened.  We spent a little bit of time on seeking Him.  When you seek Him with all of your heart, you will find Him.  When you pray with all of your heart, when you’re invested in your prayer life, we’ll get there in just a moment, when you begin to pray and drops of sweat and blood are falling from your brow in the agony and the warfare for lost souls, for the healing and deliverance of people’s minds.

Let me encourage you.  We talk about the great falling away.  We need to be interceding for one another and ourselves to protect our minds.  Satan brings in those accusations.  He blinds the eyes, the minds, of individuals that they cannot believe or receive the glorious gospel of Jesus; amen?  It’s a warfare for the minds.  Don’t entertain one evil thought about God, about your brothers; amen?  Put on the helmet of salvation, the one thing that we do that guards our minds more than anything else, that helmet of salvation.  When we are truly saved, we are so thankful for what God has done for us, that that thanksgiving, that recognition that we are the chief of sinners, and God sought us and bought us, is what gives us the ability to be longsuffering with one another; amen?  When people’s souls become precious to us and not our hurt feelings or our own ideologies or methodologies but the genuine saved mind, sozo, “whole”, to where we see one another as the finished work of God and can rejoice in that; amen?  It’s an act of faith.  It’s a great gift of God.  I have enough trouble seeing myself in the finished work.  What a great miracle redemption is.  What a great miracle regeneration is.  What a great gift of the new creaturehood that we have, and so we need to keep saying that about each other and rejoicing in that miracle in each and every one of our lives, and give no place to the devil.