A scared prayer works. Let's talk about it on this edition of Kiwai. That was Steve Brown, and this is Kiwai, a no-nonsense approach to God's work. If you have the Bible, get it, and let's see how it applies to real life. Steve? Thank you, Mike. If you have your Bible open it there, as we're talking about Satan, I spend a lot of time giving you some biblical information about Satan is pretty scary unless you know the truth. So I'm talking about some of the things you need to remember in dealing with that side of the problem of pain and suffering. We talked about learn to use the truth, study the Bible, learn to know what the Bible says about Satan that he's the father of lies, learn to call him that. Learn to recognize his lies, learn to resist him, and that's the second thing that we learn from the truth, the Bible. Learn to resist Satan for speeder 59, and James 4.7, let me give you another way in dealing with this. Make prayer your hidden resource. God's hand is not shortened that he cannot save you, that's Isaiah 59.1. Because of Christ's death for you on the cross, you have been afforded to high and holy privilege of walking into the control room of the universe. Because of Christ, you can, the book of Hebrew says boldly approach the throne of God. Boldly, I love that word, Tim, who is producing the program today, and I were talking, and I'd used the word debauch, and he said, I say that word, what exactly does it mean? I said, just what it sounds like. The botiary sounds like something really bad, I mean really, really bad, and bold, sounds like bold. And you're able to go into the throne room of the universe with boldness, the book of Hebrew says, because of what Christ has done for you. John Bunyan was right, this is what he said, pray often, for prayer is a shield for the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge of Satan. Martin Luther once said that, we ought to be careful in our dealing with the devil because he had been around a long time. He had a vast amount of experience, that's true, and that scares me. At least it does, until I remember I had a personal relationship with a one who has been around far longer than the devil, and who has far more experience than he does. I don't want to go pious on you, but I want you to know, and I wrote a book about it, I really am a man of prayer, not wonderful theological prayer, but a man of prayer. I get a breather early in the morning, and coffee in Jesus, caffeine, and Jesus get me up in the morning, and when I wake up and think, oh man, I like to go back to sleep, and I don't use an alarm clock, I think of him, and coffee, and I get up, and so I'm a man of prayer. One of the things that I've learned in this wonderful experiment of my life of coming into the throne room of the universe is that there's great supernatural power there. There really is, and so make that your resource, and dealing with the kind of stuff that's bad when it comes from a supernatural source, which you say is on the mouth that you can do. Learn to submit everything. The other part of James' instruction for our feelings, and you remember I quoted it. It was James 4.7, therefore submit to God, resist the devil, devil, and he will flee from you. Submission to God. There comes a time when you sense Satan or demonic involvement in your broken rope, when you've done everything you can do in your dealings with Satan and your pain, continuous, what do you do then? You just say, all I can do is all I can do, and all I can do is all I can do, and so I give it to God, knowing that he's in control of the situation, that Satan is being used by God for God's purposes in your life. Submission to God is hard. I know that, but when you've done everything else, there's simply nothing left to do. Now listen to me. Don't worry. You can trust him. He hasn't made any mistake so far, how I suspect he won't make a mistake when you trust his plan in your life and your pain. And gave me the text of an order written by CJ Olshin, like the Commander in Chief of the Middle East forces during the Second World War, listen to this. There exists a real danger that our friend, Rommel, is becoming a king or magician or boogie man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a Superman, although he is undoubtedly very energetic and able. And if he were a Superman, it would still be highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers. I wish you to dispel by all possible means the idea that Rommel represents something more than the ordinary. The more important thing now is to see that we do not always talk of him when we mean the enemy in Libya we must refer to the Germans. The Axis powers are the enemy and not always the harping. Please ensure that this order is put into immediate effect and impressive on all your commanders from the psychological point of view it is a matter of highest importance. Now let me suggest that this kind of order about Satan ought to be issued to every Christian. Satan has incredible public relations, he's boring from everything to dry cows to cancer. But he isn't as powerful as his public releases would suggest only God has that kind of power, the power that Satan claims, try to remember that it helps. Now I want to start, that's everything that I've got by way of teaching, maybe a little bit more. Let me, I'm going to deal with some questions that people ask about pain and suffering. We've got thousands of questions here at key life and as we teach on this particular subject some of the best ways to deal with that is with questions. Some questions believe that the essence of the Christian faith is to accept what God is ordained and have and leave the questions for later. Now I suspect there may be something to that. The problem is however that very few of us can simply accept pain and not ask why. In the Wall Street Journal article a number of years ago, Kerry Doan relayed the myth of Paley, the goddess of volcanic eruptions in the way. According to the story, the goddess cursed everyone who took volcanic rocks from the island to souvenirs. There's nothing to the myth, but you can prove it by some of the people who have sent their rocks back. That's why you receive money, apologies, and rocks from people who felt they had been cursed because they had taken souvenirs from one of the volcanoes, one man even blamed a bleak love life on the fact that he had taken a piece of lava. He wrote, relay my sincere regrets to the goddess, undoubtedly being a goddess in an all she knows who I am. It would be nice if we could all attribute our broken ropes, our pain and our suffering to something as simple as our having stolen a few rocks. Wouldn't make sense, but at least we wouldn't be perplexed with a lot of questions. We would have a simple answer to our problems. We'd just give back the rocks. Unfortunately, can we talk? Our pain and our suffering often doesn't lend itself to easy questions and answers. In fact, one of the most terrible things about broken ropes is that perplexed, he involved, questions are inseparable from broken ropes. Are you familiar with John the Baptist? He was one of the great men of the Bible, ordained of God to be the forerunner of Messiah, Jesus. He baptized Jesus. I mean, this is one of the men. He baptized Jesus, pointed to him as the one about whom the prophets had spoken. If you'd known John the Baptist, you probably would not have liked him. And even if you liked him, you probably wouldn't have introduced him to your friends. He was dressed in camels, air clothes, he ate bugs, locusts and honey. Somebody sent me a letter one time and said, locust was a kind of fruit, not a bug. So what he ate were nuts and honey, fruit and honey. And his language, I mean, he's about his earthy, you think I offend people? You should have met John the Baptist. He would not have been acceptable in most of our homes, certainly not in our churches. His message from God shook the foundation of the religious and governmental establishment. He offended almost everybody except the common people. And they flocked to him to hear his message. John's problems began when he offended Herod. You remember, the offense couldn't be ignored. Herod was after all the king. Herod had John arrested in order to teach John a lesson. But one night, the daughter of Herod's wife performed a strip show at a party that Herod gave. Herod was sourced for those of you plastered. Well, he was inebriated, he was drunk. And in that drunken stupor, he promised his stepdaughter anything she wished. You know what she did? And it scared Herod to death because he really thought John was a godly man. She requested the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And the next morning, Herod honored the girl's witch and wish, after all, it would not be fitting for a king not to fulfill his public promises. Now, I'm not going to take time. Well, maybe I will. I don't have time today, but maybe I'll do this on Monday. But in the 11th chapter of Matthew, you have a really interesting thing going on. John the Baptist, this is godly man who had stood against the powers of his day. I mean, he was ordained of God. He believed it all. He called people to revenge. You have John the Baptist asking questions, going through a moment of doubt. I hear these super spiritual people saying, when they're going to, I never ask why. I always ask why not. And then I want to go, well, you're a fruitcake. Of course you ask why. When it really hurts bad, you ask why? Well, we're going to spend most of next week finding an answer to that question one. But for today, remember, it's okay to ask. 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