Application. What is you prayer life like, build those prayer muscles, choose to grow in the quality and time spent with God in prayer. If you start going to the gym the muscles ache and its a challenge to keep going but if you persist, you'll see the benefits, the same applies to your prayer life. Tyrone shared with us from Amos abut God confronting the nations about their sins and you could almost hear Israel delighting in God's convictions about the other nations, but then it all cam full circle, Amos prophesied against Judah and Israel, the silence must have been deafening, are you sad and broken about the condition of your own heart or are you looking at the spec in your own eye, when there's a plank in your own. Are you broken about the condition of our country, put aside the politics and the race baiting, are we concerned that the walls of respect, unity, the family unit, the murders and the rampant adultery. Are we broken about the condition of our world. Are you praying specifically at with God's purposes in mind. As it says in James 4, Nehemiah asked with God's purposes in mind are your prayes the same?
4 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
4 You adulterous people,[a] don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us[b]? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
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7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.