Our prayers, to be answered, have to be according to the will of God. They have to be prayers, as we shared this morning, that really are originating in the heart of God, in the promises of God--for them to really become effectual in our lives. So we need to know what God's doing, what God is saying in His Word. We need to be able to step back and ask ourselves what the motivation of our praying is. Is that motivation to affect our will, to get God on our timetable, to push through our agenda? We are talking about the need, then, to rest and to determine the will of God. This is the confidence, John said, that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. If we know that He hears us whatsoever we ask, then we know that we have the petitions that we've desired of Him. Our petitions, of course, as we looked at the full revelation of that, are things that are based upon knowing the will of God. An interesting quote here, and I think it was--no, it wasn't Jonathan Edwards, it was John Wesley, which makes it a little better. In this quote, it's a powerful quote, I remember the first time I ever read this. As I'm looking at this, just a flashback as a young man twenty years old. Reading this, I remember my heart being touched and saying, "Father, I want to be one of those men." Here I am forty some years later and tragically, I'm not. It's a very sobering thing to look at a life that could have been used for so much more for the glory of God. But we have time left, don't we? John Wesley wrote these words. Hopefully some young man here will hear it and do what I wasn't able to. He says these words:

Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shape the gates of hell and set the kingdom of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer...