So read and think and pray and plan and then pray this year as you never have before. Pick a prayer meeting and make it a priority. Pick a private place and make it as sacredly sure as your favorite meal. Now to make the Word of God the support and power of this exhortation, I want us to look this morning at our text, Jude 20-21, But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit , keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. Thomas Manton, the Puritan, has twenty-three pages of commentary on these two verses.
Every phrase is worthy of a sermon.
But I would like to make only one observation from these verses this morning, and then return to them next week. Today s observation is that prayer is a means of God s grace designed to keep us from falling into disbelief, and to bring us safely to eternal life. If the term means of grace is not part of your spiritual vocabulary, I would like to add it this morning, because I don t know of a better way of describing how God s decisive work relates to our dependent work. Consider the context of this word about prayer in verse 20. There it says that we are to pray in the Holy Spirit.