Honesty In Prayer

Honesty In Prayer

by Rosalind Rinker

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I want to thank those of you who were praying for me last night while I was speaking, before I spoke. Strange thing, I don’t have any messages prepared, you know, that I just give out. I just have a message in my life and in my heart.

And every audience is different. Some of you have heard me before. Every time it comes out, it’s different. I may even be using some of the same material, but it’s all different. And it depends on what you want.

Now, your prayer meeting should be like this, too. It depends on what you need in your heart and where you are and how ready you are as to what the Holy Spirit will give you. And most of us, when we start learning something, have a little pattern that we learn from, don’t we? Some of you girls, when you first learned to cook, you had to have a recipe, didn’t you? Then you wondered what was the matter and you found out you left the baking powder out. However, today we’ve got the cake mixes. We don’t have to do that. Everything is made easy for us. But after a while, you find out you’re a natural born cook. I found out I was. Well, I can make a better meal just going to the refrigerator and seeing what’s there. And putting it all together and mind that it stimulates my creativity.

Some of you are like that, too, aren’t you? And the way you sit down and plan everything out and buy it and put this together, it doesn’t turn out… well, it turns out all right, but it’s more fun when you do it the other way. Of course, you have to have something in the refrigerator.

But even then, when you have very little in, and you know God’s Spirit’s like this, He takes what you’ve got even though it isn’t very much, when His Spirit gets into it. In every prayer meeting, when it first starts, it’s a group of people who have their hearts reaching and longing, hoping that the miracle will take place today. What miracle? Jesus in the midst.

When He’s there and we touch Him and He touches us, through His Spirit, through each other, through our words, through His Word, a miracle takes place. Now, this little outline that I gave you. And I’m sorry that I don’t have thousands of these cards there so you can all take home as many as you want to. But if you don’t get one, you write your name and address on an envelope, put a stamp on it, and give it to me and I’ll send you some.

But this little outline is just the beginning. It’s like a recipe. It’s just something to get started with. You’ll find after you get started that it’ll all just weave itself in around. And there really isn’t any method. In fact, if you’ve got a method, you know what will happen when the Holy Spirit gets there? Hmm?

Yeah. He just breaks it all to pieces, doesn’t He? But we get started by thinking of the Lord with us. Do you remember those? Let’s go over those, shall we? All right. The first one? Jesus is here. Thank You, Lord. Help me, Lord. Help my brother. Now, all right, you say without my help. First? Jesus is here. Thank God. Now, anything you’ve ever learned about prayer, it’s here. Intercession’s there, isn’t it? The fourth point. What about… And petition, too. What about confession? Yes. Help me, Lord. What about thanksgiving? And adoration and praise and worship. It all comes in those first two parts, doesn’t it? So I call those first two parts, starting with His presence.

The Lord is here. And thank You, Lord. We start with His presence, not with ourselves. Then, after we worship Him and love Him and know how much He loves us, then we get to ourselves. Because if we start with ourselves first, well, your idea of what you need and what you want may not be the same as what the Lord has for you. He may have something where He wants to talk to you. You have to start where He leads you. After your heart’s opened up to Him, He’ll tell you where to start. You know, I’ve heard people praying, “Oh, Lord, come down into our midst this morning.” You know, so much of our prayer language has no faith in it, and it’s all upside down. Well, He’s already here. Thank You, Lord, that You are here in our midst. If you’ll say that a few times, He’ll be there.

The Chinese pastor and his wife in Chicago are friends of mine. I knew that Chinese pastor’s wife when she was a little girl, 13 years old, in China. They’ve had me out speaking, and I spoke to their young people and talked to them to pray. And I taught them about Jesus being right here. He’s in the room here. And I said, and they had their eyes closed so they can see Him better. And I said, “What would you do if Jesus was standing right here with His arms out saying, ‘I love you. Come here.’ What would you do?” And I said, “Don’t tell me. You just do it, will you? Do it in your mind.”

The control of a Christian’s mind is possible in the presence of Jesus Christ. And when are you ever away from Him? When you let your mind go away from Him. He never goes away from you. One girl said to me, “Well, you know, my mother told me never to do anything, nor go anyplace, nor say anything, that I wouldn’t say when Jesus was there.” “Oh,” I said, “did she?” I said, “Well, where do you think you can go where Jesus isn’t?” “Oh,” she said, “my boyfriend wanted a beer.”

You don’t know where your children are all the time, do you? I said, “Oh, I see.” I said, “So when you drive up to the tavern, are you going to say to your boyfriend, ‘You get out of the car. I’ll be out in a minute.’ And then you say, ‘Lord Jesus, will You stay here in this car, please, until we come back? Because I’ll need You when we come back.’”

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Is He anywhere you’re not? Can you go anyplace where He isn’t? Can you? Is He in a tavern? Come on. Sure He is. Is He in the automobile? Hmm? Sure He is. Does He go off and leave you? Who goes off and does the leaving? All right.

Afterwards, a little Chinese girl came up to me. She was the pastor’s wife’s daughter. She played the piano. “Oh,” she said, “Roz, thank you for that. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this.” I said, “Well, why?” “Well,” she said, “you know, when you told us to think about what we’d do if Jesus was standing there saying, ‘Come here, I love you.’” She said, “You know what I’ve done? I’d have just gone up and let Him put His arms around me.”

And I said, “Well, did you?” She said, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.” And I appreciate the little woman who came to me after my first talk here and said, “You know, all this, up to this time, I said, ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus. Oh, God loves me.’ But,” she said, “tonight, I can say, I know I can say it in the first person. He’s saying to me, ‘I love you. Come here.’” There’s a difference in when you say, “God loves me,” and when you hear Him saying, “I love you.” Now, I learned this from Frank Laubach. Have you ever let God speak to you through your lips? Have you?

He says that when, now I’ll tell you how to try it, because I tried it and it worked. Take a hymn where, can you think of a hymn now where, in the words, either the Father or the Lord Jesus are speaking to you, right through that hymn? Name one to me. What? No, you’re praying there. You’re saying, “Lord, speak to me that I may speak.” Where is the Lord speaking to you directly in the hymn? You’re speaking that one too, “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.” You’re speaking to Him. Give me a hymn where He speaks to us.

You’re still with us a prayer. “Oh, Master, let me walk with Thee.” What? That’s the Bible verse. I want a hymn. “Oh, Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight.” Who’s speaking? I am to the Lord Jesus. “Come closer, my child, to Me.” Is that a hymn? You know that one? “Come closer, my child, to Me.” Name another one that you know. That’s right.

Yes, but you’re saying what He said. “Are you able?” said the Master. That’s, what is that? That’s a prayer you’re asking. Well, we haven’t got any hymn books there. Hmm? “Work, for the night is coming.” That, we could be telling each other that, couldn’t we?

Yes? Stand up and say it. Read it. All right, thank you. The first line was His. The rest of it was telling what He was saying, wasn’t it? Now, this is a very good devotional exercise for you. We think we’re praying to Jesus, and we think we’re being honest, and we think we’re being personal, and we aren’t at all.

Tradition in religion is so hard to break. Now, I wonder how many of you have read this little blue sheet that was given to you when you registered. Have any of you put any marks on it? I put some marks on it, I put some circles on it, I’ve written some things, keywords out on the edge. You know why? That’s the way I learned. I’m studying, I studied Spanish in college with somebody who’s here, she came and told me about it afterwards, but I’m studying it all over again now. And our professor told us that a person has to hear a word, he figures, 35 times before they can use it. Now, how many times do you think you have to hear something, a new, a simple way, a new way of praying before you can actually practice it?

You hear it, you read it, and then what do you do? Same thing. You need to go back and pray the same way exactly. We’re like this. And, you know, religious principles are not held intellectually. You may think they are, but they’re not. They’re held emotionally. Do you know why? When somebody believes differently than you do, what happens? Oh, excuse me. When somebody believes differently than a neighbor of yours or a friend of yours, what sort of reactions, and they begin to talk about how they believe differently, how do those people react?

They get a little bit upset, don’t they? One of them, they start to argue a little bit, don’t they? One of them goes by and she can’t see that point at all. A person’s perfectly blind. It’s perfectly plain in the Scriptures, what it says. You know why she’s emotionally upset? Because our religious truth is emotionally held. And if what I’d say to you about prayer upsets you, that’s good.

You’ll never make any spiritual progress until you are upset. That’s right. When I was in Kansas, Dr. Frank Laubach, a group of us were talking between meetings, a little group of us, maybe eight or ten of us, sitting together. As I said, I stayed pretty close to them. I wanted all the droppings and all the crumbs. And somebody said to me, “Roz, where do you get the power you have when you speak?” One lady who knew me five years ago said, “Roz, what’s happened to you since I knew you?” Well, she said to me, she said, “Do you attribute this to the baptism?” Well, I said, “Not entirely.” I said, “I think that there are a great many things that have contributed to this. I don’t think there’s any one thing that contributes to it, because I’ll tell you something, I don’t care if you got the baptism and spoke in tongues for three days and three nights.

“Let me live with you a week. That doesn’t make anybody perfect in love.” You know what makes somebody perfect in love? Sitting at the feet of Jesus. Some of you folks have found this out. Some of you still have to find it out. You’re seeking for other things beside a place at His feet. Or, go ahead, it won’t hurt you. All these things, they don’t hurt you, they’re good for you. They help humble you. Every spiritual experience you have, every experience of the Holy Spirit you have humbles you. It’s good for you. But in the end, you know where the Holy Spirit will lead you? Where Mary sat, the feet of Jesus. Mary has chosen the better part. Well, anyhow, we were sitting talking there, and I said, “No, I don’t think any one place. I said, I don’t, I said, I know it isn’t because I’m so holy.

“Because I say, I have to be honest too before the Lord and confess my faults and my sins before Him.” And then Dr. Frank spoke up. He said, wrote it down, a little piece of paper even. I thought, and I got it out and wrote it immediately. I thought, I’m not going to trust this to my memory on this. I want his words on here. And he said, “I believe we are made or forged into full bloom, mature sons of God through suffering. This is the only way.” Some people suffer physically. Some people suffer mentally. Some people suffer emotionally. There are all kinds of ways to suffer.

But until human love has failed you utterly, God cannot pour into you the fullness of His love and show you the richness, the deepness, the fullness of His love. I’ve held about a dozen all-men’s meetings. And the first one I ever held was at the request of a group of Christian Reformed men in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Now, if you know anything about the Reformed church, you know they don’t go for women preachers at all.

And after the, at the close of that, a man came up to me and he said, “What do you do,” he said, “if love has gone to ashes?” I knew he was talking about human love. And I knew he was referring to his wife, but I didn’t say so and he didn’t say so. I respected his personal dignity. And I said, well, you know, C.S. Lewis, a great English one who wrote these wonderful books who died recently, he wrote a book called Four Loves, says that until human love falls into ashes, the living sprout comes up out of a dry ground, which is the Lord Jesus. We’ll never know. His love. Then we can recreate our human love and our human love will be reborn again. And he said, wherever there are ashes of human love, they can be rekindled through Jesus Christ and His love. Do you believe this? If you don’t believe it, it’ll never happen.

Do you believe it? Be in His presence. Why do I say Jesus is here? Now, one of the things that God taught me, He taught me, as I’ve been going around holding workshops on prayer, is one day He said to me, “You know, if your mother had never let you get into the kitchen to cook, you never would know how to cook.” I said, “I guess that’s right.” He said, “I don’t want you talking about prayer all the time. I want you to let people pray.”

And do you know, I began to, wherever I went to a prayer meeting, I began to time it. Do you know, I found out that people sing a long time, they give a talk on prayer, and a prayer meeting, then they have requests, then the leader repeats all the requests, so everybody gets them, and how long do you think they pray? Did you ever time a prayer meeting?

Now, that’s kind of sneaky, I know, of me to do that, and I’m just likely to do it if I get into yours, so don’t ask me. But do you know, we never get anywhere unless we’re willing to fix where we are?

And so many prayer meetings pray such a short, short time. And that prayer meeting, it’s so general. And first, who are they talking to? Face to face with the Lord Jesus, this is the work of the leader, to somehow have a devotional exercise to get people face to face with Him.

I’ve got lots of them. Some of them, I’ll get them into a book. I even take young people when I’m talking with them up in a jet ride and they get up there too. I did it with adults and one man said, “I didn’t come down until I got to Seattle. I was up there and the Lord was talking to me all that time.” I said, “What did you go to Seattle for?” “Oh,” he said, “I had to ask somebody’s forgiveness.”

We’re not tapping the power of our creative minds when it comes to prayer and being in the presence of the Lord Jesus. Not at all. We’re thinking about each other and how our prayer sounds to somebody else or whether we’re afraid or whether they can say it better than we can. Aren’t we? We’re repeating so much. Our problem is we don’t pray in the Spirit and we don’t get answers and we don’t get healings, physical and spiritual healings, because we’re not in His presence.

Why, humanly speaking, we don’t do this to each other. You get somebody on the telephone before you make a request, don’t you? You sit down and write them a letter or you see them face to face. You don’t just talk into the air when they’re not there and then blame them because they didn’t do it.

Be face to face with Him. Bring your mind to Him. Talk positively to Him. He’s there. Don’t say, “Well, I don’t feel Him.” You don’t have to feel Him. I know He’s there. I stopped living unfairly. I don’t know about you.

Do you live by the way you feel? You’re going to be sick all the time. You’re going to be talking about it all the time. The more you talk, the worse you’re going to be. So we get into His presence. And then we give Him thanks. That’s the next one. We thank Him. Now usually, I do this sometimes in a great group. I’ve even done it in a group. It’s hard in a group like this because you can’t hear each other. And we’ve got to hear each other in order to do it. Sometimes I’ve even said, “Well, will the whole front half of this congregation turn and face that direction?” Right in your seats.

I don’t know where I get these ideas. I say, “Lord, give them to me.” And He does. Sometimes we just sit this way and I want to say, “Let’s have thank yous. No amen, please. Let’s have an open-end prayer so we can keep adding.” And if you get your thank you out of the way, and you don’t have to think it up. It’ll come to you. This is the Spirit. Say it. Don’t keep holding it there. As long as you hold it, you can’t listen to what anybody else is saying and rejoice in what they’re thinking. You’re thinking about yours and wanting to get it out. Get it out. Then you’ll have another one and another one and another one. I was in a big Presbyterian church in Detroit.

And it wasn’t a big room like this. It was one of their smaller chapels, but it held about 200 people. It was jammed. And right at the… while I was talking, a man and a woman came in back there and the usher brought them clear down to the front seat because there wasn’t any place else to see. He was a big man. And I think a very successful man too because he had a huge diamond on his finger. And he held it where I could see it too when he was sitting there.

And I just loved both of them. And she was a little woman kind of quiet, you know, and you could tell that he ran everything. And, but he sat there. He had his hand on the back of the seat. And when I got to the end of the thank yous and people were giving thank yous, I heard them and I watched them and I listened to them and I thanked God. And I saw some people get free. One thank you won’t do it. Two won’t do it either. By the time you’ve given five or six, not all at once, let somebody else have it in between. You’ll get some freedom. And how do you do that? We pray by subjects. Somebody says, “Thank You, Lord, for my father and mother.” Oh, you say, yes, I thank Him for mine, but you don’t open your mouth. Shame on you.

The Spirit gave you thankfulness and you held it back. When somebody says, “Thank You, Lord, for my parents,” there should be half a dozen of you say, “Yes, Lord, thank You for mine. And mine, mine too.” Is this prayer? Yes. This is heart prayer. This is not the kind of prayer the minister prays from the pulpit on Sunday morning. But this is not the way you’re supposed to pray when you’re in a prayer group. That’s for the minister on Sunday mornings. We are supposed to pray from our heart. If somebody prays a little prayer, and that’s why I say, let your prayers be short first. After a while, when you get in the Spirit and learn this, and you get accustomed to each other, you’ll have longer prayers. And you’ll get into deeper depths, into depth prayers, but we start on the surface where we can bring everybody in. And that’s why, I like to keep the same people together for a while because they get accustomed to one another. And if you have too many people together, nobody’s going to be honest. I’ll get to that a little later. You have to break them up. And listen, there are plenty of people in your group that can lead a prayer group just as well as you can, even if you’re on the council ring.

Now, I hope you still love me. Because I love you. But I’m interested in all those people in your group that they get free. And some of them are going to get free and learn that in the little group of four, if you divide them and they’re standing together, she can lead it. She can say, “Jesus is here.” And all of a sudden, He’s there. She never said it before. And that’s better than you as a leader saying it to her. We only learn through participation.

Your people are going to grow spiritually in your group, here and at home, in the measure that you as a leader give them time to pray. You watch the time. Well, anyhow, this man down here, I watched him. He began to get nervous and I knew he wanted to pray. And, you know, I saw his hand on the back of the seat, you know, just going like this, you know, around his wife. And I said, “Huh, he’s getting ready to pray. Thank You, Lord. This is the greatest thing that could happen to him.” And somehow or other, I knew the awareness of love when you’re in Jesus’ presence. First, He empties you and you learn to be honest. It’s painful. And I let people pray for you. Then you help. Then you’ve got an awareness about other people, see. But you’ll never get this awareness until it happens to you.

I prayed for him and I loved him. And I knew Jesus was loving him down there. And then this hand with the ring on began to fumble and fumble and fumble. Finally, he put it in his pocket. I said, “All right, Lord, do You help him?” And you know, finally he got to us. There was a little lull and he came right out with his big voice there. He said, “Thank You, Lord.” He said, “For, thank You, Lord, for this little life of mine.”

You know it’s the first time he ever said anything in public. And I think it was the first time she had ever heard him pray aloud. You know why I think so? Because while the prayer went on back here, she fumbled a little bit with the catch on her purse, pulled out a handkerchief. And by that time, the tears were already dropping.

And he reached over with the hand behind her and patted her. That was the most beautiful thing I saw that day. This is what God’s given me. A desire to help people pray who don’t know how to pray.

And I believe, and I’ve asked Him that all those of you who do know how to pray, He’ll begin to give you the same hunger and desire. Because there are people all around you who want to get close to Jesus. But they won’t come your way. They won’t come the church’s way. They won’t come Billy Graham’s way. They’ve turned that down. They’re hungry, but, what do they want? They need love. They need you. That’s what they want. Just think. If you learn to give thanks, you get hearts open. That’s all you need to do at first. Just give thanks.

I was in a Mennonite church in Berne, Indiana. This was a women’s meeting. And it was down in the basement. And there they sat. These were with their little caps on. Such beautiful faces. Such quiet faces. I thought, dear God, do they have the problems the rest of us people have? They don’t have all the problems with jewelry and clothes and don’t look like it. And men, and you know, all these things. It looks like everything’s real quiet around here. But I went ahead and gave them my talk. And the Lord talked to me through them. And I gave them a little exercise in the presence of Jesus. Created a mental exercise. And He was there. And then I said, “Let’s say thank you. Let’s have thank yous.” And at first, I just let them have it held or scaled or any way they want. Just to get their mouths open. But I said, after a while, if the Spirit comes, you’ll find that the thank yous will go into subjects. That’s what’ll happen. People will add to it and add to it and add to it. And men like men especially like this kind of praying. Because there’s no repetition in it. We’re praying for the same thing all at once. And not everybody praying for it all the way through and repeating it and thinking of different ways to pray so it’ll sound good.

Because it’s already been said. So in this thank you with these men and women, when we got to thanking, it came first here and here and here. And I can usually tell whether I’m in a liberal church or a conservative church if I don’t know when I go in. By the way, they say thank you. Do you know how I can tell? If it’s a very conservative, fundamentalist church, you know what they thank God for?

They say, “Thank You, Lord. We thank You, Lord, our Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And somebody else said, “Thank You for the inspired Word of God. And we thank You for the plan of salvation. And we thank You that we can be converted and redeemed and be washed in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now listen, I believe in all these things. I grew up an old-fashioned Methodist in an altar ale. But you know what I found out about that finally? You can be just as dishonest there as any place else. And when everybody’s praying together at the altar, you don’t have to tell what’s the matter with you.

You’ve been there. You know what I mean. That’s where it comes into this honesty business. I keep getting ahead of myself. Well, I can’t help it. I just have to go where the thing goes. See, it’s all kind of together. Anyhow, I’d already told the women here, these Mennonites, about the honesty. You know, we must be honest when we pray. So they started with thank yous. And you know, I found out they weren’t very fundamental in that church. You know why? They never thanked God for any of these things. You know what they started on? People. “Thank You, Lord, for my children. Thank You for my good Christian husband.” And every time, they thank God for people. And I found out, too, that the people who are not, who find it difficult to pray will always start with people, too. And I’ll say, thank Him for the thing that’s most valuable in your life. And the people who are not, don’t know how to pray very well, are never, I call it, never broken the sound barrier. You just can’t, you just never heard yourself praying. You don’t want them either. You don’t want anybody else to either. And it’s as painful as breaking a sound barrier. And when you start, you just think the world’s going to fall to pieces and all the windows in the house are going to break, you know, and all that, and you wish there was a hole down there that you could fall into.

Do you know that’s how people feel? Some of you have prayed for years. And really, prayer is a kind of evangelism, of love, and of awareness, and of sensitivity, and of being where people are. And they start with giving thanks in Jesus. These women started, and they began to pray and thank God for their people. Then they came to the pastor. They got to the church. And they got to the pastor, and they got to the Bible after a while. And then it went back again to themselves. And do you know, the first thing they were doing was thanking God. Somebody said, “Thank You, Lord, that You took my husband the last week to be with Yourself.” And she started to cry.

You know what those women did? They went right into point four. Help my sister. Oh, they said, “Thank You, Lord, for her.” They named her. “Thank You, Lord, for Ruth. Thank You that You gave her that good husband.” Somebody else said, “Thank You that he’s safe with You.” And somebody else said, “Thank You that You’re with her there in the house. And thank You, Lord, that now You’re leading her on a new path of pain. Thank You, Lord, that You can use this to help not only comfort her, but help her comfort others.” And a dozen people here and here and here. She wasn’t alone in her sorrow. How many of us have felt so alone? Wouldn’t you have loved to have been in a group like that who prayed for you? Wouldn’t that have helped you and comforted you? Why do we withhold this from each other? Oh, we say, “Well, nobody ever told me before.”

The Holy Spirit has tried to get through to all of you. But you know, we’re all bound by religious tradition. We can’t get through. Those women then began to pray about their difficulties and the painful things, thanking God for them with tears. And then the women around them who knew them picked it up and prayed for them. It was beautiful. After, well, they started to pray and I’d already, I usually, I can get away with an hour real easy. I don’t know where it goes. And so when they prayed, I watched. And after 15 minutes, I thought, well, maybe I ought to close this because I’ve, we’ve been here long enough now. They had the opening exercises and I talked and we prayed for 15 minutes and as I thought this, the message got through to me and I heard His voice saying to me, “Who are you to close this?” I said, “Forgive me, Lord. You’ve got hold of this meeting. I’ll let You have it.” Do you know how long those women prayed? One whole hour. Nothing but thank you for painful things and tears all over the place. But there was order. Because the Holy Spirit was there. And there was release and there was freedom and there was love. My love flowed around that place.

It was beautiful. I’ve seen, I saw this happen with a group of the high schoolers, 200 of them from the First Methodist Church in the building. And you know how long those kids prayed? After the first 10 minutes, I sat down. They prayed for two solid hours.

Honest, too. The fellow that started it was their leader. He got up and made a confession to all the people, all the kids there. He said, “This is what honesty is. Help me, Lord.” Now sometimes we need one person to talk to. And the Lord will show you who that one person is. Sometimes you can say it in a prayer group if it isn’t too big. Sometimes you can, you and your husband need to have a good session. Sometimes, but sometimes you can say it in the whole group. This group had been praying together. Their pastor, George Anderson, got converted two years ago. That’s right, another pastor.

And he brought a lot… He’d been teaching the kids a little bit about conversational prayer and so they were all ready for me. I didn’t have to get their confidence or, you know, teach them anything. They’d already tried this. He got up and he said, “I’m sorry.” He said that, for my attitude toward one group of people here. He said, “Will you folks forgive me? I should have been more loving to you.” The ringleader got right up and said, “Forgive us, George. We were wrong.” So I got up and I said, “You know, George is really… That was a wonderful prayer.” He didn’t pray it in prayer language, but that was the third basic step. That was an admission and a confession from his heart. And it brought another one. I said, and when I talk to kids, sometimes I use four-letter words. Your parents wouldn’t like it. But some of these people out here might be offended if I said it. But I used a four-letter word. I said, “It took.” And then I used a four-letter word. You know what I said? What?

Well, I won’t say it. It starts with G. For George to get up here and say what he said. I said, “Is there anybody else that’s got something to say?” And you know, I always ask questions when I talk, you know. And do you know a boy walked up?

I walked right up there. I knew him. His name is Randy. He’s president of the whole group last year. He said, “I’ve got something to say. My girlfriend is a Lutheran. You all know her. I sent her to Roz’s meeting Friday night. And when she said thank you, she got converted. That’s what I wanted her to do. But do you know, I’ve been with her all day today and I haven’t let her tell me about it.

“She hasn’t tried either because she knew I didn’t want to hear it. And I’ll tell you why I didn’t want to hear it. When I saw her face and got near to her, I knew I wasn’t converted. I’ve just been giving mental assent to all this. I haven’t really let Jesus come into my heart. Would you pray for me, please?” And he walked back.

Can you imagine how much the Lord Jesus must have loved Randy at that moment? I said, “Let’s pray.” And I prayed for him. I said, “Who else wants to pray for Randy?” Two or three did. And then a boy right over here said, “Well, if Randy’s not converted, I’m not either. Pray for me.”

We did. You know, you prayed, the kids began to pray. Different ones said the same thing and began to pray and then they prayed for themselves. “Lord, I’ve said that I wanted You to come into my heart, but I never really meant it. Would You forgive me?” Then they began to pray about how they treated their parents and how they treated each other. And then a girl back there said, “Lord, forgive me for my stinking attitude toward a certain boy here. When I saw him get out of the car, I said, ‘There’s the most conceited, stuck up.’” And she went on with a whole string of adjectives, “boy I ever met in my life.” And through it, about four people down, right in the front seat sitting next to me, I heard a boy say, “That’s me.”

And as soon as she finished praying, he prayed. He said, “Lord, forgive me. I didn’t mean to be like this.” Now, this boy was at Wheaton College this year. And listen, if he got on TV, he’d be a star. He’s the funniest thing I ever heard in my life. He makes up little poems about animals that the grown-ups don’t understand at all.

He’ll say, “Fuzzy Wuzzy little owl with two great big eyes.” You know, and all those motions they make, you know, I don’t know, I can’t do it like he does. And he’ll, that’s all, that’s the only line he’s got. But all the rest is movement. See, “Fuzzy Wuzzy little owl with two great big eyes.” And then he’ll say it different ways and then he’ll stand there a minute and then he’ll go, “Psst.”

Well, some of you didn’t get the joke, did you? This was the boy and because he was such a comic and such a boring thing, this girl thought he was… And he said, “Lord, forgive me, I don’t mean to be like that. I’m sorry. Help me with my attitude and help me to show the love of Jesus. I don’t want to be like that.” And the kids all over that place prayed for him by name. “Thank You, Lord, for Bob. We love him. Thank You that You gave him to us. We need him.” And they all comforted him one after another with their prayers. Wonderful. Then a little girl next to me started praying. She was sort of a plump little girl. Really, she was kind of fat, with a little red sweater on. And her hair was kind of straight and she wasn’t very pretty.

And she talked to me before. And, she liked that boy. But he liked somebody else. So I knew what she was praying about and she was sitting there beside me. And you know, those kids not only prayed once, some of them prayed five, six, seven times. And she did. One of her prayers, her first prayers and the tears began dropping down and I began reaching for some Kleenex to pass over to her. She said, “Lord Jesus, forgive me, but I always want something that I can’t have.”

I knew what she was talking about. And He knew. There’s a way you can pray. But do you know, after she prayed a few times, you should have seen her face. The tears. Why? It’s just beautiful. And then she was sitting straight up. And then I heard her say, “Lord Jesus, I didn’t know it was possible to love You. I didn’t know You loved me this much.” She got her freedom. She gives thanks. And a boy sitting over here in the front seat, he prayed about seven times too. He’s the one that started off, “Randy’s not a Christian, I’m not either.” By the time he prayed the seventh time, he couldn’t even sit in his seat. He was so relaxed. He was, he had the back of his head here, on the neck of his head here, on the seat. See? And he was stretched right out like a board. With only his neck and his heels on the floor. And he was looking straight up, and that boy’s face was just like Jesus. He was looking straight up at Jesus.

Those kids prayed for two hours. And they prayed for themselves and for each other, and they asked each other’s forgiveness. And do you know, after it was all over, I said, “Lord, how are we going to end this meeting?” And I thought, well, somebody ought to sing, just like Charles does down here. And you know, somebody did, somebody started a chorus, and then they took it up and they sang. Pretty soon, they were up on their feet, singing. And you know, pretty soon, they were, everybody was hugging everybody. And this is Christian love.

I’ve seen this happen when the Spirit takes over. Have you, Charles? Yeah. Yeah, it happened last year. I was in one place where this happened. There was a little girl who was partially blind. We found somebody in the group that was a beauty operator. We got her next to this little blind girl to give her a hairdo. Her whole morale changed. And we got her into prayer meetings. And she happened to be in a meeting where the Spirit of God was let loose and everybody got free and praised God and prayed for one another and loved one another and they went around hugging each other. And that little girl, you should have seen her. Afterwards, she came to me. She said, “Do you know, this is the first time in my life anybody ever put their arms around me.” And then I had some tears.

There are people like that here. There are people here who have never had anyone pray for them by name. There are people here who don’t dare pray out of their hearts and say that they’re lonely. That was a wonderful talk that we had, where is he, yesterday, I’m bombing us. Everybody is alone. I don’t care how many years you’ve been married, you’re still alone. And you’re not. Yeah, it is right. Yeah, I can see you down there. And you folks who think that when you get married, it’s going to end everything. Ha-ha.

Married or single, you’ve got to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn to love Him. And then you can love one another. And this is the only fulfillment in all of life. Is that right? Well, say it. Amen.

All right, Mr. Ten, it’s time for me to stop. Thank you, Alice. There’s one more story that came to me I would like to tell. This is on honesty, too. But I was down to the Texas camp. That’s where I met to Glen Ellyn. I don’t know what she’s doing up here in the Ohio camp. You’d think one camp would be enough for a person, wouldn’t you? But anyhow, I was down to the Texas camp and it’s a big Methodist camp. And they’ve got air conditioning down there in some of the places if you want it. Anyhow, this hotel had too much. I really didn’t like it too much, but then it had it. And I was quite a ways from the meeting place. And a woman drove up in a big old Oldsmobile by herself. And she was in the room in the hotel, too. And as I came out, she said, “Would you like a ride down to the…” And I said, “Yes.” “Well,” she says, “I’ll wait for you every time and take you.” Well, I said, “You might have to wait a while.” “Oh,” she said, “I’d be happy to do that.” And I was glad because I needed a ride. Well, the second time we drove up to the hotel, I thought, well, we might as well have one of these little informal prayers right now and get started because, listen, if you can love people, you can pray with them.

Don’t say you’ll love people if you can’t pray with them. Praying for them is a different thing. Think that one over. And you’re not going to be free to love them until you’ve been honest a little bit and said, “Lord, I need some help. I thought I love people, but I don’t.” And have people pray for you by name. And I hope that happens in your groups. Don’t give these nice-sounding prayers about the world until you… this little group loves itself and loves each other. Then you can pray for the world. So as we sat there in the car, I said to Hazel, I said, “Just a minute, before we get out, let’s just talk to the Lord a minute.” And I reached over and took her hand. And I said, “Thank You, Lord Jesus, for Hazel and for bringing her here safely on that long trip. She’s away from the other side of Texas.”

And that’s two things. Thank You for Hazel and thank You for a safe trip. And I had one more thing to ask. I said, “Whatever her need is while she’s here, give it to her.” And I just sat there with Noah, amen. Pretty soon she said, “Well, I don’t have any special need that I know of.” I don’t have any special need that I know of.

And I said, “Well, that’s fine.” I just sat there. Pretty soon she said, “But you know,” she said, “I’ve lived I’ve been told this, that man 33 years and I still don’t understand him.” But she didn’t have any special needs, you know.

And then she began to talk. She began to tell me about herself and about him. And about the child they adopted who’s grown now and married. And how difficult it is now that the child is grown and out of the house for her husband and her to make a new life again when they’re just the two of them. Because they’re so far apart. And he’s… Oh, I don’t know how high you can go on the Masons, but he’s up there, way at the top. And they’ve traveled all over the United States, you know, all these Masonic deals because he’s one of the big guys up there. She goes with him. But she says, “I don’t understand him and I don’t know him.” And she says, “I don’t know where I’ve been all these years or what’s happened to us.” And I said, “Well, it looks like you ought to pray for that man, doesn’t it?” She said, “Yes, I guess I should.” So behind the wheel she settled herself. I saw her, you know, got real settled. And she prayed. I listened to what she said.

If you love people, you listen to what they pray. You know why? So you can pray where they are. And not go thousands of miles away and pray for the President and for Africa and Vietnam when you’ve got somebody right here whose heart’s breaking. They don’t always say it in so many words. But if you’ve got any ears to hear, if you’ve got any love set loose in your heart, you’ll hear. If you haven’t, you’ll just pass it right by and God will have to send somebody else.

Let Him use whatever suffering He’s given you. Let Him use whatever loneliness He’s given you so that you can get free now. Accept it. Anyhow, I let her pray and I listened. And when she got through, I said to her, “What’s your husband’s name?”

She said, “Charles.” I said, “Why don’t you pray for him again now and pray for him by name?” And she started out, let’s see, I’ve forgotten his middle name. And anyhow, it doesn’t matter what his last name. Anyhow, she said, “Well, Lord,” she says, “there’s Charles.” And she went Charles and she named him a second name and a third name. Just like that tone of voice. “Well, Lord, there’s Charles.” La. She named him. And then she stopped and she laughed out loud. She said, “You know, I’ve never called him by his whole name in my life.”

Now, you know when your mother calls you by your whole name, what she means, don’t you? Yeah, that’s right. I knew too. That woman was getting it. When she started to pray for him by name, she got honest. You should have heard her pray. For him and for herself and for her resentment and her hatred and the lull that grew up. She just prayed and prayed and the tears came and I prayed for her and she prayed for him. And listen, she was free.

And then when she got free, I laughed and I said, “Hazel, do you know what you prayed for the first time?” She said, “What did I pray for?” I said, “You forgive me, Hazel, for saying this. But,” I said, “you led in prayer.” And I said, “You prayed a good Baptist prayer.”

I understand you. They’re still laughing about that Baptist prayer. Because my friends just come from where they are. And do you know what happened? Finally, Hazel said to me after two or three days, she heard me talk. She said, “Roz, if you want to tell the people about me,” she says, “you can.”

And it wasn’t as large a camp as this. And I told it. And you know what happened? Everybody took Hazel in. She was sort of a reserved woman. But everybody loved her and took her in. And she had the time of her life at that camp. Because she let me tell it. Now, sometimes you have to tell on yourself. Sometimes you do it when you pray. Sometimes you do it afterwards. But I really believe this is part of our freedom. To learn to pray. Anyhow, I got the rest of that story from my friend who’s here. And she said that if Hazel went home, and I don’t know all the details of it, but in the end, Charles learned to pray too. And he dropped a traditional prayer. He dropped all of the Shakespearean thees and thous. And he dropped all of the traditional kind of prayer. And he prayed from his heart. And he prayed for himself in the presence of other people. And he thanked God. And he prayed a simple prayer, from his heart.

You want somebody that you know to be close to Jesus, you be close to Him first. And help some other people get close to Him. Whoever it is you’re trying to reach for Him, they will know what’s happened to you. There will be a new awareness and a new love and a new sensitivity in your heart. But you can’t… You know, I’ve heard people pray, “Lord, I want to be crucified with You.” Or, “Lord, give me the baptism.” They think that this is going to give them all that power. And separate them from self. You know what’s going to separate you from self and give you… And let the Holy Spirit really… If you have love, be honest. I was teaching some women to pray in a parlor. Never prayed before. One of them says, “Thank You, Lord, for our husbands.” And the other one repeated it. “Thank You, Lord, for our husbands.” So I said, “All right, girl, since I’m your teacher, give me your ears a minute.” I said, “Was that the first time you prayed?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, you did just fine.” I encouraged her a little bit, see. And I said, “Yes, my first time, too. So we did just fine. It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

And they said, “No.” And they felt better. But now I said, “Look, were you praying for your own husbands or for our husbands?” “Oh,” she said, “I was praying for mine.” She said, “I was, too.” “Well,” I said, “really? You were praying a dishonest prayer.” I said, “Excuse me for using such strong language. But sometimes we need strong language. Or we don’t break patterns. Because when you pray, and when do you use I and my and me, and when do you use we? You only use we when you can include everybody in the room. Now, that makes good sense, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the way you talk? You don’t say we’re going out to dinner when you’re not taking half of them out, do you?

“Say I when you mean yourself. That’s when you…” I said, “Besides, you left me out of that. You couldn’t include me in that.” And I said, “I feel hurt.” And I laughed, you know. I said, “Now, let’s start over, shall we?” “Oh, yes.” I said, “Let’s do it again.” And these two started again. And you should have heard of it the second time, those two. One of them said, “Lord.” She said, “I love that man. And I’ve never ever prayed for him. Will You bless him? Teach me how to pray for him.” She marched her prayer. And the other one said, and you know that thing went right around the room, and everybody who had a husband prayed for him? And then they prayed for each other, and they prayed for their children. And all the tears, and the Spirit was there immediately. There comes a time when method is ended, and the Spirit comes. But we need sometimes a little method to get started. How are you going to fix those potatoes?

All right, get the frying pan out and make raw fried potatoes. But it might turn out different than you thought before you get through. You might put something else in, you know. So mind a few onions or peas. You might see them sitting there. You don’t know what you’re going to do.

Well, I am going to stop. I hope you have a good time praying, but I hope you shed some tears, and I hope you laugh sometimes. And I hope you use each other’s names, and I hope you love each other and get free. And don’t say this is Roz Rinker’s method because it isn’t. All I’ve done is put four little simple steps down there, and they get all mixed up when you start praying. There’s no order to it at all, except the Lord’s here. Isn’t that right? And we want to love one another. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for teaching us this morning a few things. We know they’re right when we listen, but it’s so hard to do them. We’re so tied up. Will You, in each prayer group today, will You bless the leader, show her and the others too, let Your guidance come to all of them, whether they should stay together with that many people, or whether they should break up into twos or threes or fours or fives or halves or what they should do and for how long and what they should do together and let them learn how the Spirit leads.

And will You help them after they do get into what they’re going to do that if it isn’t going right to say, maybe the Spirit’s got something else to say, help us to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit and be taught and help us to put our pride aside and learn how to be honest. And may there be some spiritual healings and some physical healings in our midst, because love is there. And bless all of the creative art periods, and help us to get some freedom in that time. Help us to get our bodies free, and our minds free, and our hands free, and our mouths free, and our hearts free.

For he whom the Son sets free shall be free indeed. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for each one who’s here. For Your love for each one of us. And for all that You’re getting ready to do for us, for all You’ve done for us this morning.

In Your name, and for Your sake, we pray. Amen.