While it is true that a
very large place is given in the Bible to individual and
personal prayer, it is also true that a very great value
is put upon corporate prayer. Indeed, a value is given to
corporate prayer which cannot be known in individual
prayer. In the New Testament the prayer-meeting has a
very vital place in relation to the people and the work
of God. It can be rightly said that the prayer-gathering
is the index and register of the church’s life. Show
us your prayer-gathering and let us hear how the
believers pray, and we will tell you what kind of church
that is.
But what is
church-prayer? In other words,
What
Should The Prayer-Meeting Be?
It may seem
a truism to say that it should be
(1)
The Church AT PRAYER.
That is, the church as
an entity, a corporate entity. Such a gathering together
should be the solid expression of the organic oneness and
spiritual unity of the local company of believers. The
mere congregating of a number of individuals without an
organic integration, and with so many personal interests
to express or have expressed, may have values and would
be better than nothing at all, but it would not be the
solid and effectual prayer of the church as an entity.
There is a history
behind the prayer of the church, as such. It is the
history of a work of the Cross in which each member has
been brought on to the ground of identification with
Christ in death, burial, and resurrection, and by that
common history has identical life and fellowship. Such a
church has gone through something in experience
and that something has become subjective.
If two people have gone
through a similar experience which has deeply affected
their inward life, they have a mutuality of
understanding, and they can speak with one voice. So it
was in the prayer-life of the New Testament churches.
They shared and expressed locally what was fundamentally
true of the Church universal. It was a crucified and
resurrected Church, having been baptized into the
sufferings and victory of its Head. That victory should
be inherited by the local church, and be manifested in
the effective working and issues of its corporate prayer.
There, in the gatherings
— or coming together — for prayer, the very
nature and vocation of the Church universal should be in
expression. Its nature is that of a spiritual organism
because it has been born "not of man, nor of the
will of the flesh, but of God", "born of the
Spirit". Its vocation is to express the greatness,
the rights, and the authority of Christ. Prayer is
essentially vocational, and this is pre-eminently so in
corporate prayer.
Vital relatedness, both
of the persons and of the prayer, is indispensable to
effectual prayer. How easy it is for someone to come in
with something quite discordant or irrelevant, and so
swing the prayer away from its strength of purpose and
positiveness.
While many particular
matters may occupy the foreground of required prayer,
there should always be a looking beyond the thing itself
to how it really relates to and touches those three
factors just mentioned — the greatness, the rights,
and the authority of Christ. We must have an adequate
case in our prayer, and that is the Lord’s glory.
(2)
Corporate Prayer Must BE AUTHORITATIVE
The church at prayer
must be on the ground of absolute authority. It must not
be in doubt, uncertainty, or weakness, but in assurance
and confidence. There must be the ground of authoritative
appeal to God. There must be the ground of authority over
the evil forces at work in any given situation. The
church must have the assured right in its position and in
its intercession.
That right and authority
is respectively the infinite virtue and efficacy of the
Blood of Christ and its testimony, and the Name of Christ
as above every other name.
The church — at all
times, but — especially when at prayer must be
consistent with all that the Blood of Christ means as a
testimony against sin, condemnation, and death. These
things mean a closed door to Heaven and God. The Blood of
Christ has for ever been the ground, and the only ground,
of "the new and living way" to the Throne of
Grace. The Name of Christ is the very synonym for supreme
authority. But even so, it is not just a title,
but the embodiment of a nature wholly satisfying to God;
of a work perfectly accomplished; and of a position fully
accorded Him. These are the elements of authority, and
the ground of authoritative prayer. On this ground the
church has a right to pray and expect. It can do more
than ask upward; it can challenge outward — "in
the Name."
(3)
Corporate Prayer Should BE EXECUTIVE
When we use the word
‘executive’ we mean decisive. If you were a
member of an executive body in any business concern, you
would be a person marked by certain features, that is, if
the concern with which you were connected was of a really
vital character.
(a) You would be
recognized as a person with a real business mind. That
concern would give a seriousness to your demeanor and
attitude. It would rule out diffusiveness and
irrelevance, and knit you together with your colleagues
as one with an integrating objective.
(b) You would be a
person who would be marked by a will for decisions.
Wasting of time; indecision; tentativeness; carelessness;
and all such things would greatly disturb and trouble
you. Your soul would be saying, ‘Don’t let us
be always and only talking about things; waiting for
something to happen, and hoping that it will, some day.
Let us be executive, and have issues settled, and
conclusions reached. Let there be an element of
decisiveness and conclusiveness about our transactions.
Let us reach for and be set upon a verdict.’ Surely,
such features are traceable in the prayers in the Bible,
with Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Nehemiah, etc., and in the
New Testament Church and churches!
Our praying in meetings
is all too tentative and indecisive. We do not really go
out for a verdict. We stop before we have the assurance
that we are through on that issue. There is such a
thing as taking as well as asking. We ought to go away,
not wondering, to say nothing of forgetting, but rather
expecting and looking for Heaven’s answer. That
answer ought to be already in our hearts. If what we have
said is true of any Executive worthy of the name, who has
a serious Concern to serve, should it be less or
otherwise with the church which has the greatest of all
interests to serve, responsibilities to carry, and Name
to honour? We should not go to the place and time of
prayer just because it is ‘prayer-meeting
night’; or to do our duty to our ‘church’,
or for conscience sake; certainly not to give certain
others the occasion to pray while we listen and —
more or less — agree. We are the church. We are
in the greatest of all business! We should go
thus-minded and with ‘purpose of heart’
determined to co-operate and — so help us God —
to have outstanding, urgent issues settled for ‘the
sake of the Name’. On arriving our instant action
should be to take the right ground and ask fervently that
all should be taken into the hands of the Holy Spirit.
One word remains for this present.
(4)
Corporate Prayer Must BE COMBATIVE
It is impressive that in
that part of the greatest Church letter in the New
Testament where its militant character is emphasized and
its armor portrayed, the Apostle gives such a definite
place to prayer (Eph. 6).
There is nothing which
draws out the "wiles" of the evil powers so
much as corporate prayer. Everything is done to smother,
blanket, confuse, divert, pre-occupy, disturb, distract,
annoy, hinder, weary, waste time, and many other things,
all with the object to see that there is no real impact
of Christ’s authority upon their kingdom.
If we realize this we
shall ‘gird up the loins of our minds’, we
shall ‘stand and withstand’. Being alive to
what is involved and what is happening, we can be no more
passive than a soldier could be if he saw his
country’s interests and his comrades’ lives
involved in his attitude and action.
There is a real
combativeness in corporate prayer, and we shall not get
anywhere if our fighting spirit — not in the flesh,
but in the Holy Spirit — has been let go or taken
from us.
T. Austin-Sparks