This post mostly gives insight into the role of the prayer leader as he/she helps to bring consistency to the prayer meeting. Although the things that I say are in no way just for the prayer leader alone, all can learn valuable life lessons about prayer meetings in the reading, or shall I say rantings of this horrid writer.
So you are the person that put this prayer meeting together huh, well then here are some things to help you in the leadership on the meeting itself. Take it or leave it. You, as a leader of the prayer meeting that is going on in whatever arena you are in, have the right to dictate the direction the prayer meeting goes in. ‘WHAT?!’ It’s true, you can ask people to pray about certain topics in order to bring structure to the meeting. It is great to ask the intercessors what they are going to be praying about before they grab the proverbial microphone, but you by all means have the right to say, ‘I think that we should focus on _____________(fill in the blank) instead.’ This should in no way hinder the prayer meeting or make it awkward for that person to pray, if you do it with some tact they agree to do what you ask with no hesitation.
Now your whole prayer meeting does not have to have one focus, it can have multiple focuses (focusi, focusee, yeah focuses), you can take the first section and pray for your college, and then you take the next section of time to pray for your city, and then the next part to pray for Israel and so on. This establishes a consistency that is not found when Billy prays for one thing then Jean prays for something completely different right after him, and then Beau decided that he is going to pray for another topic after Jean, this confuses me to even type it yet alone to be in a prayer meeting where it is going on.
Just like in life, if you take the time to organize your prayers together, the meeting runs more efficiently and smoothly. I promise you will not ‘quench the spirit’ if you ask someone to pray on a different topic because it will bring consistency to the meeting as a whole. You being the leader have the liberty to ask someone what they are about to pray for before they ‘step up to the mic and let it rip’. You have the liberty to ask them to wait on that subject matter for the time being because the meeting is not going in that direction. It is OK! Just make sure you do it in a manner that does not belittle or make them not want to pray ever again! That would be bad. Don’t be, what I call a ‘Tactless Wonder’.
‘…indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.’ 1 John 1.3-4
I was in a prayer meeting the other week, to open the prayer meeting a worship song was sung to help to bring the room together in agreement. It was a song that had a great melody and had nice words and was preformed well. But something was bugging me about the song that stuck with me throughout the whole prayer meeting and after. I realized that the thing that was bugging me was the lack of content in the song. I don’t want to mention the song but I will say that it is a popular song on Christian radio done by a very prominent artist. What was the content that was lacking? Christ. No where in the song was He mentioned the idea of Christ was there but not ever was His name lifted up and praised. The thing that sets us apart from anything else is this Man and for me to be singing a song in a prayer meeting that does not even mention Him seems to me to be a waste of my breath. The centrality of Christ is one of the things that is being questioned across the globe, but He is the foundation to all that we are. Upon Him the church is built. Without His bloodshed we are nothing. With His bloodshed we are everything.
It is for this reason that we need to strive to make all of the songs in our prayer meetings Christ centered. I was hindered that entire prayer meeting because my spirit was bugged by this. He did so much for us, all I want to do is praise His name and sing about Him. My opinion is that we don’t fully connect with the cross of Christ and the work that He did on it for us. If we would take the time to experience the cross in our personal prayer times we would start to get a grasp of the pain that He went through in order to make a way for us to be with Him forever. So how can we apply this to our prayer meetings? Take the time to really look at the songs that are going to be sung. Think to yourself ‘What am I going to be singing about during this prayer meeting?’ ‘ Are these just nice songs or do they proclaim Christ and the workings of His hands?’ The Lord loves it when we sing songs to Him about Him. It is what we were created for anyway, we might as well do it so the rocks don’t cry louder than us.
Paul makes it very clear to the reader that there is only one way to have access to the throne of God in boldness and confidence, that is through the workings the man Christ Jesus. It is through Him that we as christians have access to the ear of the Creator, it is only through Him that we are able to approach the burning, radiant beauty of the Father. When we as believers understand the power behind the Son of God taking on the burdens of the whole world in order that we might has access to the Father we can be free to ask our God to provide for us our children.
Recently I had to go to court due to my heavy foot while driving, one of the things that I noticed in the whole situation is how the judge would only listen to the cases that were the most important. If a speeding ticket needed to be taken care of he was not the man who wanted to hear about, in fact there was an entirely different person to take care of those. This is by no means the way that our God works, He hears all of the petitions of His children and will answer them all. He might not do it in the time frame that we desire but He will answer all who make petition before His throne through the name of His Son.
A central message of the New testament is that there is no possibility of prayer, or even of entry into the full presence of God except in and through and by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus states that very clearly Himself in John 14:6 when He speaks saying ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes to the Father but by me.’. Paul writes to Timothy in the same manner ‘There is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.’ 1 Timothy 2:5. Therefore we have access to the throne of the Most High through the work of His Son and we are to walk with confidence and boldness when bringing our prayer before Him. His Son paid the ultimate price and died for all of humanity in order that we would gain entrance into the Holy of Holies. This is the only way to gain entrance, if there were some other way to make petitions to the Lord then there would have been no reason for the Son to even set foot on the earth, but a way of entrance had to be paved, it was a necessity.
Therefore let us enter into the place of prayer knowing that we have the full backing of Christ as we enter the most Holy place. It is through Him (Jesus) that we can enter and can ask of our Father, King, Judge, anything and He will hear us and move with delight to grant the request of His children.
The Challenge of any prayer time, whether it be your personal quite time or a corporate expression, is the issue of distraction. How many times have you been in your quite time and find yourself all over the place in your prayers and in your mind? On more than a few occasions I can recall me sitting down to pray for my family and find myself lost in the thoughts of what my day was going to look like. Where I was going to go, who I was going to see, what I needed to get done to have a productive day. All of those things are great things to think about but not when you are supposed to be communing with the Lord. That time is you and Him, not you, Him and the rest of your day. Or how many times do you find yourself in a prayer meeting and the focus of the prayer meeting keeps switching from the lost to the schools in the area or back to the lost and then onto Grandma Jeans spleen surgery recovery? This is far from a little distracting in a prayer meeting. So how do you bring order and definition to a prayer meeting?
One of the things that I have found helpful is to decide on a focus ahead of time with your compadres and stick to it. Whether you are going to be praying for the salvation of the lost, or revival to break out in your church or city, or praying for the College/High School in your area. Take 10 to 15 minuets on each but have everyone pray for the same subject in the time frame. If you have three friends all four of you pray for revival, then move on and pray for salvation and so on. When you maintain a focus it helps to allow new comers and visitors to engage with you in your times of prayer. Couple that with praying through the scriptures and you have a win win situation. Take for example the apostles in the upper room, Acts 1:14 tells us that they were ‘all with one mind devoting themselves to prayer’. In other words the apostles had a prayer focus with which to govern their prayer meetings. The Bible does not tell us what they were praying for but we can see that when they were all in ‘one mind’ the Holy Spirit showed up. So if that is not an example of power breaking out in a focused meeting then I don’t know what to tell you.
So what is the challenge? The challenge to you is this, spend some time with your compadres of prayer choosing a specific topic to pray for and pray for it, all of you together. If you focus your prayers the Lord will show up in your prayer meetings.
Like previously stated I have been to quite a few prayer meetings in my day. What I have come to find as a helpful tool when praying is my Bible. WHAT!? Who would have thought that the Bible could be a tool to be utilized in prayer? Well I have come to find that there a quite a few powerful prayers that have been passed down through the centuries to us and they remain tried, tested, and true. Let me back up. I don’t know how many times that I have found myself fumbling over my words when praying. Or trying to come up with the right words to pray, and if I found the right combination of the words my saying them would somehow start the next great revival. One of the ways to combat these thoughts is simply through praying and applying the scriptures to your prayer life. A good place to start is with some of the prayers of the apostles in the New Testament. A plus is you can rest assured that you cannot go wrong praying the scriptures. They are God inspired! A good place to start is Ephesians 1:15-19, read the passage over and then start to break it down praying small phrases over yourself, your city, or nation. God give me a sprit of wisdom and revelation so that I might understand your heart in this matter. Open my eyes to new revelations from your Word today. It is as simple as that. Just start to break each few lines down and apply them to your life, or whatever burden you have on your heart. You can find a breakdown of some good prayers to pray right on the resources site of ihop.org, under apostolic prayers. Doing this consistently will change your prayer life and take you to a whole new place in your times of corporate prayer or even your own personal prayer times. In a corporate time it will help to provide a specific prayer focus for your meeting as well as being some great guidelines for the person who is new to the idea of prayer. Like I said previously you can’t go wrong praying the scriptures.
Growing up in the church I would always see the prayer groups that were going on and nothing about them excited me or interested me in anyway. They were all the same, three to six chairs set in a circle in a room that was not being used by the church at that time. Most of the rooms were smattered with brooms, vacuums and various other cleaning supplies, for the most part, there were those few occasions where specific rooms were set aside to pray in but for the most part this is what the norm was for a prayer group. It did not help that the age range of the group was somewhere between 65 and 80. Each of these women would take the time to go around in the circle to pray for the various things that were impacting them that week. I am in no way invalidating these prayers, I am simply setting the scene of what prayer meetings were when I was growing up in the church. Those elderly women were/are bold proclaimers of the Word and I am extremely grateful for the many years that they spent laboring for the promises of the Lord. I am simply saying that this did not excite me in the slightest. With that we come across the question of the ages, what makes for a good prayer meeting?
My answer is not a defining answer by any means. There are about a bazillion ways to have a prayer meeting, one way is by adding music to it. I figure if it was good enough for King David that it must be good enough for me. David employed thousands of full time musicians and singers to minister before the Lord night and day in the temple, all of them employed by David, Chronicles gives us a look into what the numbers were.
I say all of this to say that ever since I have incorporated times of worship in my prayer life I have seen an increase in sustainability, in other words I have been able to pray for longer times. I have found my times of prayer more enjoyable. So the challenge to you is to start off your prayer time with a little worship and keep the music going while you make petition before the King of the earth for this next week. If you play an instrument start with an easy song that you know and just sing, then continue playing the song and just offer your prayer up while you play. This will make your prayer time fly by and before you realize what is going on you are having fun while praying.
This weeks post is mostly a testimony of what the Lord has done in my life through my time of sitting at the feet of Him and singing His words back to Him. This has been a long and sometimes trying journey in pursuit of the Man from Nazareth and I have found that one of the things that always sustains is singing the Words of Life back to Him.
One of the main questions that I receive more than any other is ‘What is the importance of singing the Scriptures?’ my response is always one of ‘Why not sing the words of God Himself?’ One of the things that I am striving after is being a man rooted and grounded in the Word so that I may speak boldly and clearly about my Master. One of the easiest ways to do this that I have found is through sing the scriptures. Being a musician I have always found it easy to memorize lyrics to songs but always hard to remember scripture verses. I can remember almost all of the lyrics to the top 40 hits from 10 years ago, you test me on the top forty hits of today and I will fail but 10 years ago, I could win a million bucks. Still the thought of combining the Word with song never hit me until I walked into four double wide trailers being joined to each other to form one building, the International House of Prayer in 2001. It was in this small trailer that the foundations of my life were laid. I have seen a major increase in word retention through singing the scriptures, I would encourage all who are longing to have a word based life to sing the words of God. He only has the words of life and through those words you are changed.
So what is the tangible difference? Well I would have to say that the tangible difference is displayed through the workings of my life. I have seen a major difference in my attitude and character through the years of having the word infiltrate my life in all that I do. The take away point is this, you don’t need a prayer room to make this work. You can do it in your car, you can do it while doing dishes, you can do it where ever you want! Pick a verse for that day and sing it! It is as easy as that. Just like you commit to talking the dogs for a walk everyday, commit to picking a verse a day and singing it. I have found that the Psalms lend themselves perfectly for this exercise. Work your way through the Psalms and go from there, the options are limitless! You can do it through the whole Bible! Do it for a week and then reflect on it at the end of the week, you will a major change in character from the start of the week to end of the week.
So here is the challenge: Spend the next week picking some verses to sing, shut off the radio in your car, and spend the time that you drive singing those scriptures, then post a comment telling all about your experience in doing it. I promise that after doing it for a week you will be hooked! Just do it – Nike!
I am putting Ephesians 3 on hold for the remainder of the month but I did not want to leave Part 2 until October. So here is a rare post at the end of the week. Hope you all enjoy.
God has reasons why He does things the way He does, we might not understand the reasons for why He does things the way He does. All we have to do is stand in agreement with Him in all matters knowing that he is a righteous judge who will uphold those who put their faith in Him and bring down the wicked who come against Him. The other thing that we have to take into account is that this plan has been in the mind of God since the outset of time. It was always in His mind to do all that has been done and will be done. This plan, Paul writes, ‘was from the beginning of the world’ – or better, the ‘beginning of the ages’ – ‘has been hid in God’. God has made this plan something that you have to search out to understand it. This is just a little glimpse into the playful ness of God. Christ came and shown some light onto the full potential of the plan but up until that point all was hidden within the heart of the Father. God has had all the workings of this earth in His control from the beginning He has never had to change His plans based on some political leaders actions, there is no improvisation in the plans of God all was in His thoughts. In a time when the world seems to be spiraling downward at an incredible pace we must hold to the fact that this is the plan of the Lord, and has always been the plan of the Lord. No matter how bad it gets we have a hope though, our hope is found in the man Christ Jesus. He, from the outset of time, is the Man who will restore the earth back to the days of the garden. Those days were seen as perfect in the eyes of God and Christ is coming again to reconcile all things together again, both heaven and earth will be brought under subjection of Him and be made whole again. Apart from Christ this world has no hope. Rules and examples of how to act and what to do are far from enough to save this dying world. That is ultimately why the humanist movement of the day will fail. The idea that we can do it on our own without the help of God is false. We need the Lords help in all we do, as I stated before, without Christ this world has no hope. When God has a plan in His mind there is nothing that can sway Him from seeing it to it’s end. The end of this plan that is being worked out right culminates in the second coming of Christ and through His coming the reconciliation of all things to God which means a new heavens and a new earth. God is always functioning in His role of Creator, He is always creating, and He longs for His children to see His ultimate creation, His holy mountain. This is the Hope for a Christian the eternal fellowship with God and man again just as it was meant to be.
If we do not understand the fact that Salvation was a gift bestowed on us and given freely to us instead of something that we have to work to retain then we have lost sight of the true meaning of salvation. Paul truly understood that and lived it. Two times Paul states that grace was given to Him through the work of the One, Jesus Christ. Paul goes on to state that it was only through the powerful work of this Man that he could go from the most persecuting, blaspheming hater of Christ into one of His foremost preachers and apostles. Nothing apart from an encounter with the Man Christ Jesus could produce such a response. This is the only thing that can take any man from thinking the ways of Christ are foolishness and turning those same things into the things that he glories in. It is the same effectual working that Paul encountered that makes it possible for any man to know the unsearchable riches of Christ. It is a rebirth, a regeneration. It is not something that we decide to do, yes we make the decision to live for Christ and to go after Him with all our hearts, but it is the working of the cross that changes us into something that we never could have been without it, it is done to us. Paul would have never been a christian if it were not for the working of this ‘effectual power’ but through it he was given the gifts to write with power and to speak with power and the power to teach with conviction. This power that was given to Paul is the same power that has been given to each and everyone of us who have named the name of Christ and have been changed. There is a major difference between speaking the words of Christ and preaching the words of Christ. A man can get up and speak very eloquently about Jesus but if there has not been the energetic working of power through Christ then his words fall flat. If that same man has had an encounter and has been changed and speaks the same message the Holy Spirit breathes on it and conviction falls on the audience of listeners and lives are impacted. Still everyone has there place in the workings of God an for some the gift of preaching is given and to others writing. Still these gifts are given freely by God to those who have been transformed through a power encounter of His Son. It is this power that energizes men to strive after more of God and to long to see all come to know the Man Christ Jesus the same way as them. So I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is this, are we just talking about Christ or are we preaching Him? Have we been changed through the working of the Cross and if we have why are we not living like it? Mediocrity is running rampant throughout the Church of America, the idea of ‘I said the prayer and now I am set.’ is being preached from pulpit alongside the idea of ‘What can I get out of salvation?’ This is not the way a Christian should be living out their lives, Christ said to be perfect as He is perfect. So why should I strive for anything less than perfection in my walk with Him. Mediocrity has no place in the life of a Christian. There is NO grey area.
