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"Here as in Heaven."
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Welcome to Garden Church podcast. We are a community in Southern California dedicated to raising resilient disciples of Jesus Christ.
Jonny Hughes:Terry Waite was an Anglican church official, not a name I expect anyone or most people in the room to know, but here he is on the screen. And he was an adviser to a previous archbishop of Canterbury, a man called Robert Runcie. Now in that capacity, mister Waite, who is still living actually, he successfully negotiated for the release of British hostages in Iran in the early 1980s, 1981, and in Libya in 1985. Now in 1987, while he was negotiating for the release of American hostages in Beirut, he was taken by the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah. And he was taken prisoner, and he was held hostage in Lebanon, in and around Lebanon for five years.
Jonny Hughes:During that time, he occupied a dark cell in a series of places. They moved him around quite a lot, certainly initially in his stay. And in his autobiography entitled Taken on Trust, he wrote this. I was chained to a wall by my hands and feet. I was beaten on the soles of my feet with cable and denied all my human rights and contact with my family and given no access to the world.
Jonny Hughes:For four years, I was kept in solitary confinement, and I had no companionship at all. I was always blindfolded or had to wear a blindfold when someone else came into the room. I never saw another human being. Never had any exercise in that whole period. He actually he would walk around his cell and count off the time that elapsed in the day because he had no watch by how much exercise he'd done.
Jonny Hughes:Had to get what exercise I could while chained to the wall. I had five minutes a day to go to the bathroom, and for the rest of the time, I had to use a bottle. What was most difficult was that I had no contact with my family for five years. They didn't know whether or not I was dead for about four years until the news got to them from another hostage. Now when Terry Waite, who was something of a hero to me, was released, he was flown to an air base air force base in England.
Jonny Hughes:Here we have a picture of him arriving. He said, I stumbled just after this moment through a glass doorway and stared. My son who was a teenager when I when I was captured had now grown up so much that I didn't recognize him. Jillian, my youngest daughter ran to me, leapt into my arms and we both wept together. Then my whole family moved forward.
Jonny Hughes:We wept as we embraced each other. That's when I knew I was home. You are currently in a series on prayer, house of prayer. We are closing this morning's series on prayer before Darren takes you into a journey through the acts of the apostles. And such a series is important because so many of us spend so much of our life, present company included, confused about prayer.
Jonny Hughes:We're likely to consider it to be some kind of spiritual test that we have to pass or we feel that we fail some spiritual standard. So many of us feel probably primarily ashamed about the quality of our prayer lives. Perhaps we treat prayer as a burdensome obligation, a standard to achieve that we just cannot achieve. Maybe we say, I know I ought to pray, but it's an obligation and I'm busy. Have so many other things to do.
Jonny Hughes:Or worst of all, among our misconceptions about prayer, we might think of prayer as a badge of holiness, a badge of pride. If we're doing it well, pat on the back. If not, it's a source of shame. And prayer therefore becomes a way that we prove to God or other people that we're really serious about God. But what if prayer is coming home from a far country, moving from a place of captivity and returning to our family, to our father?
Jonny Hughes:Maybe prayer is the recognition that we've been traveling in a far country or like Terry Waite, we've been held captive in a distant country, a country perhaps of bondage, country of addiction, of remorse, of anger, maybe a country of fear and anxiety, of lust, of other people's conditional loves. And in prayer, we respond to that father's invitation to come home. Prayer then is hearing the father's invitation, son or daughter, stop keeping yourself away from me. Stop living in that distant country. Come home.
Jonny Hughes:Come home to my forgiveness, to my affirmation, to my acceptance, to my unconditional love. This is the beginning of prayer as Jesus teaches his disciples, our father. This is what Amy showed us last week, that the Lord's prayer opens up with an address to the father who is in heaven and that coming home is how all prayer ought to begin. Not in earning a way back home, but in recognizing that the way has already been earned on our behalf. And this means that the core of all prayer is simplicity, directness and honesty.
Jonny Hughes:There is no need or room for religion in honest prayer. Prayer begins with coming home. Coming home to God, but also as we do, coming home to ourselves, to who we truly are. As Brennan Manning says, not who we wish we were because we're never gonna be as we ought to be, but who we really are. We can only pray as we honestly are right now.
Jonny Hughes:This is something of my story. I don't have time to share the whole kit and caboodle, and it would bore you to hear the whole thing. But I grew up in the church and had a kind of Anglican heritage. My father's an ordained vicar in the Church of England for his sins, which is what I now am for my sins. And my father has an identical twin, Uncle John, he's an ordained vicar as well.
Jonny Hughes:He has three sons, two of whom are ordained. We often say that if we had a cat, that cat would probably also be ordained. Thankfully, we don't. And and my experience was was of I experienced the holy spirit at a really young age and had a real faith. I I committed such as, you know, you do as a child.
Jonny Hughes:I committed my life to Christ at a young age. And I journeyed with him through my teenage years, but I got stuck a bit in my later teens. I think I I lost I lost a vision for what my life was supposed to be. I think I'd allowed a lot of anger, frustration to accrue in my life. I didn't know really what to do with it.
Jonny Hughes:And I pushed and projected a lot of it onto God as young people can do. And I lost where I was going and I got really lost actually in my late teens, early twenties. And it was in my early to mid twenties that I encountered a community of faith, a place of healing in which I was able to experience grace, not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And it felt like coming home. For as many people as say, the church is a stumbling block to them.
Jonny Hughes:I understand that that's true for many reasons for many of us. And that was in some ways true. I can honestly say that were it not for the church, I wouldn't be here. You know, without the church of Jesus, I'd be wandering in the wilderness. But I encountered a community of forgiveness and acceptance and faith and it completely changed my life.
Jonny Hughes:Prayer is about coming home. That's my story. But prayer doesn't end with coming home. Prayer doesn't end there. The very next line of the Lord's prayer, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, takes us beyond merely coming home to a vocation, a role, a mission in the world.
Jonny Hughes:We learn that this father is located in heaven. That means though the one we're praying to is part of, in fact upholding all that we see and all that we know. He is also beyond all that we see and know. We might say he transcends it, he surpasses it. He is beyond it.
Jonny Hughes:The phrase in heaven balances this intimacy of fatherhood of God with an affirmation of God's sovereignty and his majesty. And this is hugely important if we're gonna catch a biblical vision of prayer or just even if we're gonna have a healthy prayer life. It is important that we see God as a generous and gracious father, otherwise he'll remain unapproachable. But if that's all he is, then we might never actually pray the kinds of prayers that move mountains. In other words, we need to know both the imminence, the here and nowness of God, and the transcendence, the big and otherness of God.
Jonny Hughes:We need to know the friendship and the fear. Speaking about this tension, by the way, the the the Christian faith is not about balance. It is about a series of tensions. And all of you know that if you wanna keep attention, you have to pull equally hard at the same time in both directions. Friendship and fear.
Jonny Hughes:You don't resolve that by finding balance. You keep pulling as hard as you can in both directions. Pete Greg speaking about this tension, the friendship and the fear says this, there's an exquisite symmetry in the way that Jesus counterpoints the emphasis of his first four words, our father in heaven, with that of the next four, hallowed be your name. As the biblical scholar William Barclay says, this is somebody quoting another person. Probably very lazy, but let me carry on.
Jonny Hughes:This saves the idea of the father and of God from all sentimentality. In other words, this is what keeps a vision of prayer from Father Christmas. And it sets down in unmistakable terms the oh, listen to this. The inescapable easy to say. The the inescapable obligation of reverence.
Jonny Hughes:Get that tattooed on your arm. Today, I wanna explore this tension, this symmetry by taking a look at the phrase, hallowed be your name, and to see what it might teach us about prayer. So let's look at this, the phrase, hallowed be your name. That's interesting because hallowed is not a word that really is used much in contemporary culture. In The UK, and I think this is probably unique to us because I I did a little poll at the 09:00 and nobody put their hands up.
Jonny Hughes:But I don't think hallowed is a word that you guys use at all. We sometimes in The UK will use it to describe a particular sports ground. I know I have at least a couple of Brits in the audience here. We might say that Lord's Cricket Ground, you don't even know what cricket is. We might say it's hallowed turf, hallowed ground.
Jonny Hughes:We'd say it's set apart for a particular purpose. You might say you probably don't use this language. You might say the White House is a hallowed ground. Particular things happen there for particular purposes. By the way, not MMA.
Jonny Hughes:Well, maybe MMA. Anyway, it it's set apart for particular purposes, but that that language doesn't tend to get used so much. But the word hallowed is comes from a Greek word hagiatso, which means something like purified, separated, sanctified, regarded as holy. So this phrase, hallowed be your name, simply means may your name be recognized as holy. And so by introducing this in the second line of the prayer, what Jesus is saying, this by the way is the first of this series of requests that we are supposed to bring to God.
Jonny Hughes:We as Christians are supposed to be praying to God that God would sanctify God's name. He wants us to come to him on bended knee, on outstretched arms and say, God, would you make your name holy? Would you set apart your name? This is to be the content, at least part of the content of Christian prayer. What is God's name?
Jonny Hughes:And why does it matter? Well, God's name is significant theme, a through line throughout the whole of the scriptural narrative. It is a term that we find particularly present through the old testament. God's name really speaks of his reputation. It speaks about God himself as he is perceived and honored by people.
Jonny Hughes:His name is often referred to as holy because holy is a primary characteristic other separate, different, distinct. I I like the word weird. Like the weirdness of God, the otherness of God. Weird, I think, captures that distinctness. God is other.
Jonny Hughes:His holiness is a primary characteristic, which means all of his other characteristics are holy. It means God is love, but he's not love as you and I understand love. His love is holy. His love is not like our love. God is kind.
Jonny Hughes:But if you look at Christian if you look at human kindness and try to kind of extrapolate, you won't get to his kindness because his kindness is holy. And as Karl Barth said, a twentieth century theologian, you can't speak about God by speaking about man in a loud voice. In other words, God isn't just what we are and more, he's holy. His name is holy. And so he ought to be recognized as such.
Jonny Hughes:And we recognize him as holy when we honor his name. Think of Exodus three, Moses encounters God at the burning bush, this kinda shrub in the wilderness, not a rare sight, a shrub in the wilderness burning up. But this shrub doesn't burn up. It burns, but it doesn't burn up. And this purpose the purpose of this strange encounter between Moses and God seems to be twofold.
Jonny Hughes:Firstly, to get Moses attention, to redirect his life, to grab hold of him. But secondly, to reveal for God to reveal God's own identity to Moses so that Moses can fulfill the commission to set God's people free. Why? So that they may worship God in the wilderness. In other words, the honor will be given to God's name.
Jonny Hughes:And so that by doing so, other nations will hear the story that there is a God who liberates his own people, and they too will honor God's name. The story is about the freedom of God's people, but the biggest story is that it is about the worship of God's name. God wants his reputation to spread for the sake of the freedom of his people, not because he is needy, but because he is worthy. God is the only being in the universe. In fact, he's not a being within the universe.
Jonny Hughes:He's beyond the universe. He upholds the universe, but God is the only being who who you cannot outvalue. The only thing you can do as a human with God is undervalue God. You can never outworth him. That is why in heaven right now, all of the angels are still saying holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, because they haven't got to the end of the holies.
Jonny Hughes:Come on. There's more. There's always more. And if you think it will be boring to carry on saying that in heaven, you haven't yet grasped the worth of God. None of us has, so you're not alone.
Jonny Hughes:Significantly. God's name speaks of his identity and his reputation. Somehow the Bible is telling a story which says that the name of God, the reputation of God has been damaged. How? Here's how.
Jonny Hughes:Because God has chosen to invest his reputation in his people, in humankind. He makes us in his image and his likeness. You and I and all people were uniquely called to bear his name. That's what it means to be human, to be Adam, to be mankind, to be male or female is to bear the image of God, to carry the image of God. This comes I've just been reading a book that I found in somebody else's house, which I may well take with me and replace, but here's here's the book refers to this moment in the early scripture of Adam and Eve naming or Adam, in fact, in this story naming the animals.
Jonny Hughes:That is a unique commission and vocation that only God can do. What this book says is that when when Islam when the Muslims take that story, they redact, they remove the moment in which Adam names the animal. It's too offensive in Islam to do that because the the Muslims recognize that doing that is to share in God's own vocation. We need not be on we need not be embarrassed about the fact that God is calling us to do that. We've gotta recognize that our failure to do just that has damaged God's reputation.
Jonny Hughes:And this is the case for all humans. We continue to fall short in this vocation, and the results of this seem to be apparent, don't they? Look at the world. Isn't it self evidently so that we have not born his name? Whether through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault, We have fallen short of this great standard that God this great vocation that God gives his people to bear his name.
Jonny Hughes:See it in the world events, see it in the events of your life, see it in the events around you, see it in the environmental crises that we'd rather own more stuff than value rainforests. See it in our language. And maybe this doesn't happen so much in in this area. I don't know what your culture is exactly like, but every time I'm around somebody in where where I live and I hear them use the name of Jesus as a curse word. I like wince.
Jonny Hughes:Not because I'm righteous or holier than thou, but because that name is precious. That name is to be used for worship and worship alone for reverence and veneration alone, not as a curse word. But what about the subtle ways we use language, the way that we use the big and mighty god words, word like awesome, to describe things like a burrito. I love that burrito. It was awesome.
Jonny Hughes:Really? Awesome? We all do it. We dilute the potency of language and we flatten out our value system. God's awesome and the burrito's awesome.
Jonny Hughes:How's that work? That's crazy. I'm aware of it after church on a Sunday. Because after church on a Sunday, usually, Amy and I have well, I certainly always, I have made no plans for lunch. We have five children and they are screaming.
Jonny Hughes:How many of you have pastors, kids you know that most of church is waiting for your children to your parents to leave and they are screaming for food. And we say, well, have we made a plan? No. Okay. Well, let's go to Asda.
Jonny Hughes:Now Asda's our version of Vons or Ralph's or Trader Joe's or similar. And I arrive in Asda if we've avoided the temptation of the golden arches, which by God's grace, we have at least 50% of the time. And we arrive in Asda and the isles are packed. And I think back to a time in my childhood when supermarkets weren't able to open on a Sunday because there was a legacy of honoring God's name. And I think to myself, and honestly, it grieves me.
Jonny Hughes:I walk around grieving and I think what would it take for these people to be in a church worshiping Jesus on a Sunday? And the lament I feel is that that feels impossible, feels somehow out of reach. What about the church? When you look at the church, what do you see? When I look at the church, I see God's beauty displayed and I see our humanity displayed.
Jonny Hughes:And one of the ways I see that in my own heart is in my the the the the paucity, the poverty of my expectations for God. When you come to church, what do you expect? Do you expect that God could do anything? That he might come in a whirlwind and break open the roof and grab us out and grab us by the scruff of the neck and reorder everything? Or do you think you'll sing a few songs and hear a something said and go on?
Jonny Hughes:Speaking of this, Annie Dillard, one of your own authors said this, does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or as I suspect, there's no one believe a word of it. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats, of which I think there are probably only one or two in the room, and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares.
Jonny Hughes:They should lash us to our pews. That's the fear of God, but how many of us carry that fear? I recognize very little of it in my heart. Those of us who are called to bear the name with honor and to pray for God's reputation to be valued are often so hardhearted, so halfhearted. How long and how are you long to be part of a church where God's presence can be pleased to dwell and which God's name is made known, fitting the greatness of his reputation.
Jonny Hughes:That's a house of prayer. But I look at my life and I look at sixteen years and more of pastoral ministry in one way or another. And my confession is that I've spent most of my time seeking to get God to honor my name instead of asking him to honor his name. And because of all this, God's reputation is dishonored in our culture. It is in a place of shame and dishonor so much of the time.
Jonny Hughes:There is indifference, antipathy, and even at times aggression, hostility. And this is why God has acted in Christ to bear his own name on the earth. Comes to us in Jesus Christ as both the one called to bear the name and as the name himself, Yeshua. He is both image and image bearer. He perfectly bears the image of God.
Jonny Hughes:And in his death and resurrection, he pays the price for all those of us who have failed to hallow his name. He shows us a new way to be human and he empowers us through the spirit to live lives together in which as part of God's new society on the earth, the church. We can show the world who he is and what he's like. He gives us through the gospel a new beginning. So the question that remains is simply to ask in response to what God has done to carry God's own name into the earth in Jesus.
Jonny Hughes:What can we do? How can we join in with that? I am Anglican still, and so three points coming your way. What can we do in response to him? Firstly, obey.
Jonny Hughes:We can obey. Easy said than done, right? Simple but difficult. Well, here you go. Earlier on this year, I was putting one of my children to bed.
Jonny Hughes:I promised them I would not say which one, one of the five. And Amy was preaching on Sunday night church, so I left at home. Clearly granny wasn't available. And this particular child was doing what happens, parents here know, grandparents know that putting your bed putting your children to bed is just the beginning of a negotiation. What should take five minutes takes, at times, hours.
Jonny Hughes:This child wanted to start off in our bed and then be moved to their bed later on in the evening, perhaps when they were already asleep. I disagreed. I didn't want to carry them up the stairs when they were asleep and heavier than I could carry, and so we began that negotiation. In the end, my child said, dad, I think Jesus would let me sleep in your bed. I was I was completely defeated for about thirty seconds and then in a moment, a flash of inspiration, I said this, Jesus would want you to do what your father had asked.
Jonny Hughes:Praise god. Praise god. Now you've got no idea how good I felt in that moment, but it is true. We honor the name of Jesus by doing what the father wants. And I simply wanna say this to you this morning.
Jonny Hughes:If there is an area of your life where you know you're not living in agreement with the father's will, this morning, not for your sake alone, but for the sake of the name of God, in this place, I just I invite you to come to Jesus in repentance. Secondly, watch. We obey. We secondly, we watch. I I I think that hallowing his name is actually about beginning to discern the interior movements of the holy spirit in our soul as we look out at the world.
Jonny Hughes:So I spoke about Asda. You know, there's been years that I've experienced that kind of thing. Particularly for me, it happens when I look at the church and I've become overwhelmed with grief and I've allowed that grief to overwhelm me when I look at the state of the church and I've got lost in it. More recently, I've recognized that is actually a call to prayer. We've gotta we've gotta watch for where the holy spirit's moving within us.
Jonny Hughes:Some of us who are more sensitive to the state of the world and perhaps have got more of an intercessory gifting prominent in us, we will be in danger of become overwhelmed by these kind of emotions. But actually, we gotta watch and see where God's name is being dishonored because that's where God is calling us into prayer. Might be specific place. I heard a great story recently about pastor Agu, a Rukwu from Jesus House Church in London, wonderful man of faith and a leader in our nation in The UK, my nation. He and his wife were driving on the way past on way to or from church, and they saw effectively a strip club.
Jonny Hughes:It grieved them, and so they started to curse it. Now I didn't even know you could do that, but, you know, I take my lead from pastor at Haggett. And within weeks, that thing had shut down. That's that's the kingdom coming. That's somebody taking up a a desire to see God's name hallowed by withdrawing a blessing from a place that should not be there.
Jonny Hughes:Where is it that God is calling us to watch and see? Not to tolerate evil, but to pray for his name to be hallowed. But we can also watch and see where he is working and join him with that. And as if it were add kerosene or gasoline to the fire of his presence, heard a great story of this recently because God is moving in The UK in a new way, being called the quiet revival. It's beautiful.
Jonny Hughes:We're seeing generations come to faith. Gen Z, as you would Gen Zed for us, Gen Z for you. We're seeing numbers of people attending church quadruple from 4% to 16%, an increase of 87% biblical sales, particularly driven by new readers. I saw Louis Gigolo speak this week about a 22% increase in Bible sales in this year alone in this your country. Driven time first time buyers, but behind this are individual stories.
Jonny Hughes:And I heard this story, a dear friend Chris shared with me just a few weeks ago. He was gonna get a haircut from his 30 year old barber because he was about to come to The US and needed, I don't know, had business deals to do or whatever else he needed to impress, he was going to get a haircut. And so he went to his 30 year old barber. And this guy had been cutting his and his boys hair in the place that they'd moved to about a year before. And last year, this guy went missing.
Jonny Hughes:And the police put out messages saying that they were concerned for his safety because they knew that he was planning on ending his life after a significant battle with mental health issues over a long period. So Sophie, Chris's wife, and he began praying that God would keep him safe and that one day he'd know God's love. Now he was found by a friend and slowly he began to get back to work. And in April, Chris rescheduled this this appointment for 8AM on a Friday morning. And he sat down in the chair, first appointment of the day, and asked this guy how he was.
Jonny Hughes:And he told Chris that he thought he had found God through dreams and bible verses that Christian soccer players were putting on Instagram, but that he didn't know who he could talk to about it. My friend Chris said, you can talk to me as I'm a Christian. And in that moment, his barber fell to his knees in the barber shop and began to sob. Why? The night before, he said he had asked God to send him someone the next day to help him make sense of what he was experiencing.
Jonny Hughes:Chris told him that we that he and his wife had been praying for him when he went missing and he said that made sense of the force he felt stopping him going through with ending his life. They took him to church and he's been on a journey of discipleship which ended with him being baptized a couple of months ago and now he's bringing other people to church who have asked why he looks so happy. He's weaned himself of drugs and he's digging into church life. We watch for signs of the kingdom and we pray, God do it more. You know, God, think he's saying at the moment, I'm gonna do my own PR.
Jonny Hughes:I've seen your efforts, they're not that good. I'm gonna show you what it's like when I move. And your job, he's saying to us as the church, your job is to watch and pray it in, to pray that the embers of this stirring in our nations might become a wild fire. Finally, we pray. Not surprising that the final emphasis in a series and a sermon on prayer would be this, pray.
Jonny Hughes:But in teaching us the Lord's prayer, Jesus clearly expects us to pray for God's reputation on the earth to be restored. When we see signs of the kingdom, we're to pray, to pray, as I said, that these embers become flames. And it seems that there is a mode of prayer available to us, which goes beyond something I'm very fond of, the contemplative contemplative aspect, and moves more into what we might call contending or travailing prayer, more of a warfare posture. And I do believe this is the time for the church in the West to rediscover some And of these modes of prayer. Modes of prayer that others who've been awake to the battle that we are already in.
Jonny Hughes:I Perhaps who haven't been blinded by comfort in the ways that we have, ways that they are already cognizant of and aware of. Contending prayer, travailing prayer. We are to pray that we are enabled by God to bear his name and to carry his reputation well. Listen to these words by the prophet Jeremiah. Your reputation is at stake.
Jonny Hughes:Don't quit on us. Don't walk out and abandon your glorious temple. Remember your covenant. Don't break faith with us. Your reputation, says Jeremiah, is at stake.
Jonny Hughes:Your name is being dishonored. Don't abandon us. Return to your people, God. Let your presence again rest on your house. Teach us how to obey your name.
Jonny Hughes:We don't know how. And we're actually not gonna bother pretending any longer than we do with our religious schemes and our attempts to impress you and to perform for you. God, we simply say, we're lost without you. We have nothing to give that could impress you. All we have is our broken lives, and we give them to you asking that you could make something of them.
Jonny Hughes:God, please could you write straight with these crooked lines. We have nothing to give which didn't first come from your hands. Please, God, move in us. Your reputation is at stake. Restore your name in our nation where your name is regularly blasphemed, whether, the coffee shops or the corridors of power.
Jonny Hughes:How do we do that? How do we pray in that way? Well, I I tell you what, this form, this mode of prayer will not be polite and it sure as heaven won't be passive. It will be at times violent. The kingdom of heaven comes violently and violent people take hold of it.
Jonny Hughes:Here's a story from the Hebridean revival, which I've got some slides on the screen. I don't even know if they're the right one. So I do apologize to the team if I sent you the wrong quote, but here we go. Around midnight. This is a revival in the last century that began actually with a couple of praying, older praying women.
Jonny Hughes:And the beginning of their prayer, their contending prayer, it actually began as they looked at young people around them and they recognized that young people weren't coming to church anymore because they were going to dances. So I don't know what the contemporary example of that would be. An evangelist, Duncan Campbell, was invited to come to The Hebrides. And they weren't actually seeing a lot happen, so they just resorted. So often we do this, don't we?
Jonny Hughes:They resorted to prayer. And around midnight, Duncan turned to the local blacksmith. He said, John, John Smith, the blacksmith. John, I feel the time has come for you to pray with his cap in his hand. John rose to pray.
Jonny Hughes:And in the middle of his prayer, he paused, raised his right hand to heaven and said, oh God, you made a promise to pour water upon him that is thirsty and floods upon the dry ground. And Lord, it is not happening. He paused again and then continued. Lord, I don't know how the others here stand in your presence. I don't know how the ministers stand, but Lord, I know if I know anything about my heart, I stand before thee as an empty vessel, thirsting for thee and for a manifestation of thy power.
Jonny Hughes:He halted again, and after a moment of tense silence cried, oh God, your honor is at stake and I now challenge you to fulfill your covenant engagement and do what you have promised to do. Many who were present witnessed that at that moment the house shook, dishes rattled in the sideboard as wave after wave of divine power swept through the building. A minister standing beside Duncan Campbell turned and said, mister Campbell, an earth tremor. Duncan's mind, however, was in the fourth chapter of Acts where the early Christians were gathered in prayer and we read when they had prayed, the place the place was shaken where they were assembled together and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. Would you stand with me?
Intro/Outro:Thank you for listening. For more information, please visit us online at garden.church.