Where Do All Our Prayers Go?
00:00:00.000 | "When we pray, where do our prayers go to?" This was a question answered by John
00:00:09.920 | Piper in his 2006 sermon titled "Prayer and the Victory of God." Here's what he
00:00:16.180 | said. Final text on this to illustrate the connection between prayer and the
00:00:22.740 | victory of God is Revelation 8, 4 and 5. This is amazing. I love this image. Try to
00:00:29.820 | get it. An angel, another angel came and stood at the altar. So now picture God.
00:00:36.580 | No, you can't picture God, but here it is. An altar and God and a throne. Another
00:00:42.700 | angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer and he was given much
00:00:49.460 | incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints. Get this. Millions of saints.
00:00:58.060 | This is a picture of heaven at the end. At the end, not back then, the end. So
00:01:03.620 | millions and billions and billions of prayers stored in heaven, never forgotten,
00:01:13.700 | not one "Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come" will ever be forgotten. With all the
00:01:21.300 | prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne and the smoke of
00:01:26.020 | the incense of the prayers, the incense of the prayers of the saints rose before
00:01:31.980 | God from the hand of the angel. Now we usually stop there and we think, "Oh yeah,
00:01:37.700 | I've heard that the prayers of the saints are like incense and they smell
00:01:40.660 | really good to God and that's true and that's magnificent." You want to make God
00:01:44.160 | happy? Pray. You want to create a good smell in the kitchen of heaven? Pray. But
00:01:49.940 | this text isn't going there. It's going to victory. Verse 5, "The angel took the
00:01:58.260 | censer and filled it with fire from the altar where these millions of prayers
00:02:06.100 | are burning. Filled it and threw it on the earth with peals of thunder and
00:02:14.780 | rumblings and flashes of lightning and an earthquake." You wonder, "Where did all
00:02:20.860 | these signs come from at the end?" They came from your prayers. "Hallowed be thy
00:02:27.580 | name on the earth, O God. Let your kingdom come, O God. Let it come. Bring it in, O
00:02:37.300 | God. Let your will be done on this planet the way the angels do it in heaven. Hasten
00:02:43.620 | the day of our God." That's what gets thrown on the earth in fire. The victory
00:02:52.140 | of God is coming and it's coming by the prayers of God's people. Amen. This clip
00:03:01.180 | was taken from John Piper's 2006 sermon titled "Prayer and the Victory of God," and
00:03:06.300 | he was talking about Revelation chapter 8 verses 4 and 5. This clip was suggested
00:03:12.420 | to us by podcast listener Justin Bushnell from Indianapolis, Indiana. Thank
00:03:16.460 | you, Justin, for suggesting this to us. And we now have 18 episodes on prayer in
00:03:21.340 | the APJ Archive. You can find them. Go to the landing page at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn
00:03:26.260 | and type out the word "prayer" into the search bar and you
00:03:31.860 | will find all of those 18 episodes listed out right before your eyes. Well,
00:03:36.580 | a question has come in about whether souls can be scared into heaven. In other
00:03:41.520 | words, what is the right and what is the wrong emotional dynamics that can happen
00:03:45.740 | in personal conversion? John Piper is going to sit down with us tomorrow and
00:03:49.800 | sort of untangle the entailments of this question. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks
00:03:53.940 | for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. We'll see you tomorrow.
00:03:58.260 | [BLANK_AUDIO]