Prayer meeting at the Sanctuary every Friday from 7pm – 9pm
Prayer is the one part of our relationship with God that we can’t fake. We can read the Bible for merely scholarly pursuit or sing a song because we like the words, the band, the style of music or the beat.
But in prayer there is no script. It is about pouring out what is going on in our hearts and minds together as brothers and sisters. Prayer is so misunderstood that we lose out on the very essence of our experience of God. Prayer is about God and I. A relationship. God and I listen and talk to each other, we interplay and have a rapport. And we enjoy each other.
Prayer has been wrongly made into just asking God for things and then asking for it more and more. And then somehow, God decides to answer prayer. This is not prayer.
The Bible points out that in John 3:8 that The Holy Spirit is like the wind: The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
For this reason, a true prayer meeting is lead by The Holy Spirit. And because of that it is unpredictable, invigorating and excitingly fresh.
So on each Friday night, we don’t know what is going to happen or what direction to take so we wait for God to direct it. The Bible is the kinder wood to start the fire and the Bible is also hearty logs that catch the fire. We depend on God’s Bible to partner with praying in conjunction with two important gifts to give to our God: worship and confession.
The health of a church and the individual Christian is the prayer meeting. Jesus stated that God’s church will be a house of prayer primarily, not a house of sermons or other crucial aspects of the church. (Matthew 21:13)
The only way to learn how to pray and what to pray….is to pray. We learn as we do it and we change as we keep praying. The prayer meeting will overflow in our personal prayer life and our prayer life stimulates a prayer meeting.
And praying in a group helps pierce our wildly independent stubborn nature because we open our lives up to each other. People open up what is going on in their hearts and it edifies and encourages us as we help carry each other’s burden-thereby fulfilling the law (Galatians 6:2)
Prayer unites us with God and with each other. This is what pleases our God.
How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!
-Psalm 133:1