This morning we are going to continue our discussion about the nature and purpose of prayer. We have built this discussion on the belief that prayer is not just how we communicate with God it is how God communicates with Himself. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father interceding for us and the Holy Spirit dwells within us interceding on our behalf according to the will of God. Two-thirds of the Godhead are in constant prayer to the Father for us, God is prayerful, He did not create prayer for us He invited us to join Him in prayer. This is why Jesus could teach us in Matthew 6 that the Father is in the secret place, because God is prayerful and so when we pray we are joining God where He is and in what He is doing we are not awakening or calling God to join us where we are or in what we are doing. Prayer is God’s invitation for us to join in the divine conversation, to literally pull ourselves up to the table and not just talk to God but to have God speak to us, to have Him share His heart, his love, His character and even His will with us. Prayer is when we walk with God the way Adam and Eve did before sin in the Garden of Eden, it is where intimacy with God is experienced by the consistency of His character. In prayer we also discover that God is not just for you or for me but He is for us. God is a God of unity, He is united to Himself and He created us to be united to Him and to each other. Prayer is where God’s intimacy toward us builds His community in and through us. God doesn’t just love you and God doesn’t just love me, God loves us. Hear me out before you shut me off; yes, God loves you but His love for us as individuals is because of His love for us as mankind. Peter told us that God wills that none would perish, Paul wrote to Timothy that God desires all men to be saved, John told us that Jesus was sent because “God so loved the world”; God is not walking through the garden of earth looking for a few flowers to pick, He is a farmer that longs for every seed to come to harvest. God plays no favorites, He loves us all and He is most glorified and most satisfied when our response to His love for us is to love Him by loving each other. Jesus prayed in John 17 that we would be one with each other the way that He and the Father are one. If Jesus is always interceding to the Father, then their oneness is largely built upon prayer. This means that our oneness, our unity must also be built upon prayer, but like the Father and the Son this cannot be simply prayer for each other it must be prayer with each other. We cannot possibly live together in unity if we are not first devoted to praying together in intimacy. Community is built when prayer is chosen. Last week we saw clearly that the first church chose prayer and they chose each other. When they were told to wait they prayed, when they were persecuted they prayed, when they were prosperous they prayed, when they were sure of what their next step was and when they had no idea what to do next they chose prayer and they chose each other and in that environment God poured out His Spirit and He added to their number every single day. To put this in language we use regularly, when we pray together God is glorified and men are redeemed. This morning we are going to test praying together by looking at how should we pray together in the midst of an election and how we can stand for righteousness when it seems we have been given no righteous option to choose from. I don’t want to talk about how or even if we should vote and I’m not going to mention any of our candidates because what I believe matters more than ever before in our country is not our government but the hearts of God’s people. Who will we be, where will we stand and what will we do if everything that we thought would happen and even everything we believed should happen actually gets turned upside down?