40 It’s Time to Get Back to Prayer!

 

Copyright © 2019 Michael A. Brown

      Prayer has always been the powerhouse and the boiler-room of the church.  It has always been the battery that charges the church with the life of God.  Prayer is the spark that generates the fire and movement of the Spirit of God.  It forges our way into the presence, power and peace of God.  Powerful and free prayer, expressed in worship, praise and intercession, is what animates and enlivens church meetings.

      Prayer is the weapon that our spiritual enemy is most afraid of, and the one thing that he will always try to prevent believers from engaging in.  He knows, he has suffered from its powerful effects often enough!  Hearts that are burdened to pray are hearts that overcome him and see God work.  Prayer is what moves heaven into action and overcomes hell.  Powerful and faith-filled praying disempowers the enemy and frees people from his grip.

      The early believers knew all this.  That’s why they made much of prayer.  They prayed often and regularly, and God was with them.  That’s why he could move so powerfully through them.  But a church that has lost its power in prayer through neglect is a church that has become cold.  It is a church that slumbers and sleeps.  It has lost the fire of God.  It has lost both its discernment and its cutting-edge.  It no longer knows the presence and active power of God in its midst.  It has become more engaged with administration, its timetable, and its program activities than with the spiritual exercise of prayer.  It is more doctrinaire than it is spiritual.  So it is easily distracted by agenda, project and busyness, and is just as easily defeated by Satan.  It no longer overcomes hell.   In fact, it begins to tolerate ‘small sins’ instead of dealing with these and repenting of them, and so it is soon overcome itself by hell.  It is a church that has drifted away from God and his purposes, and if this state of affairs continues unabated, it is a church that will ultimately be closed down.

      The time has come to clear the old ashes out of the hearth, to prepare the sacrifice of wood for the new fire that God will bring.  It is time to shake ourselves out of our sleepiness and to wake up, to cast off our chains and to rise up once more.  When a believer backslides and grows cold, for whatever reason, it is always their prayer and devotional life that is neglected first.  So we need to come back to God in humility and repentance, to cast everything else aside, and to draw close and seek his face daily once more.  It is time to be revived, and to walk once again in the freshness of the presence and power of God.  God wants a powerful church, a church that lives consistently close to him, a church that he can form into trained soldiers that he can use in spiritual battle, rather than remaining like comfortable and sleepy civilians.

      We need to get back to God’s way of prayer.  That is where the power is.  We need to stoke the fire of prayer in our soul, so that our desires are stripped of their carnality and we delight once again in God’s presence, desiring him above all other things.  We need to give ourselves to prayer as a matter of first priority, as being more important than anything else we do.  We need to set aside time during the day to pray, and, if we are willing, to pray also during the night as God leads us.  The future of both our own personal spiritual life and that of our church depends on the renewal of our prayer life.

      Read slowly through the list below and make an honest assessment of how many of these things are true of yourself and/or your own church:

·         Do you feel like your spiritual life is not getting anywhere?

·         Have the services in your church simply become like a meaningless routine that always seems to be the same?

·         Do you no longer feel the tangible presence of God with you?

·         Have you lost your inward fire for the things of God?  Is your heart cold?

·         Do you no longer pray as you once used to?

·         Is there no longer any joy and freshness in your worship?

·         Do you have no desire to spend time reading the word of God?

·         Are you easily overcome by temptation in your heart and mind?

·         Do only a few people turn up for corporate prayer times in your church?

·         Are you more easily drawn to spending your free time browsing on social media than in seeking God?

·         Are you ashamed of talking about Jesus to other people?

      If you recognise the poverty of your own spiritual state or of your church in the answers you gave to these questions, and if you want to do something about this, then I want to ask you several further questions:

·         Have you yet recognised that you cannot go on as you are?

·         Does your heart long to get back to a close walk with God?

·         Do you want to be revived and refreshed in your spiritual life once again?

·         Do you believe that prayer is the means of renewing your spiritual life?

·         Are you prepared to put everything aside in order to create a time and place where you can quietly and freely seek the face of God?

·         Are you ready to confess your failure and your coldness, and to repent from all sin in your life?

·         Are you prepared to commit yourself to seeking the face of God in prayer (for a shorter or longer time) every day?

      If your answers to these questions are ‘yes,’ then I want to encourage you to take the steps you know you need to take, and to begin to seek the face of God in prayer once more.  It does not have to be for a long time, it simply needs to be real and sincere.  Your time with God will become longer as your desire to pray grows within you.  As you begin to seek him in prayer and commit yourself to doing this regularly, you will find that his presence draws near to you (Jas. 4:8).  Your spiritual life will be revived and will become fresh and powerful, and you will know the blessing of God once more in your soul.

Then take the step of joining your prayers with those of other like-minded believers in your church.  Meet up with them and spend time praying together.  Hot embers placed together cause a fire to flare up.  Streams that run together form a wider river and a more powerful current.  God can revive your church with renewed spiritual life as believers who pray commit themselves to praying together regularly.  Powerful and regular praying by a group of believers can bring breakthrough and can overcome barriers that have previously seemed to prevent God from working.