Pray. Together. Often.

In last week’s post, I said this: “if we want to know God’s will for the church as a body, we need to pray as a community…together…often. If we want to know what God wants, we need to get past our awkwardness about prayer and come together and converse with Him, expecting that He will answer. When He answers, the more of us that are there to hear him together, the more we’ll be on the same page together.”

As I check out the scriptures and actually come to a deeper understanding about prayer, I’m realizing a few important things…

Prayer is awkward – This idea of getting together to speak to an unseen God, listen for His voice, and meditate on His ways, just doesn’t make that much sense from a logical, scientific, humanistic viewpoint. And that is just the point. Prayer seems to be God’s way of drawing ourselves out of our dependence on our own strength, understanding, and comfort and into the precarious position of trusting in Him. If you are at all human, that just doesn’t feel natural. The result is, that in order to get together and seriously pray, we have to get past what feels natural and just do what is asked of us. That takes humility. Humility leads to faith. Faith leads to expectation. Expectation leads to openness. Openness leads to the reality of God. The reality of God leads to a conversation with Him, which leads to the point of our existence. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we have grit our teeth and walk through our awkwardness about gathering to seriously pray. It’s something that we just need to do.

We are a swarm – While God knows and loves us each as individuals, He also sees us as a group. He relates to us and reacts to us as a connected community that shares an identity. Nowhere is the idea of “team” more clear and important than in communities of Jesus-followers. If we want God to speak to us and lead us as a group, we need to approach him as a group, be willing to lose our individuality for a time, and be open to being part of a choir instead of a solo act. I really think that this approach opens some mysteries about how Jesus’ Body is meant to operate. Check out the Bible. This idea is everywhere.

Prayer is a signal to God – when we pray together, it says something important to God. As more and more people join together to pray seriously, we send Him a stronger and stronger message that His Body is ready for something or that something is becoming real to us. In the scriptures there is a guy named Joel who, in the middle of national disaster, calls all the people back to God – not just spiritually, but physically. Here’s what he says:

“Blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly. Gather the people, consecrate the assembly; bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her chamber. Let the priests, who minister before the LORD, weep between the temple porch and the altar.” (Joel 2:15-17)

Joel was leaving no one out. He was saying that even newlyweds on their honeymoon (!!) should join old men and children and priests to gather and pray seriously to the Lord. That would send a message! The idea is that such a gathering would give a signal to God that His people believe in Him and that they are all ready for Him to act. That idea is as alive today as it was then, and the spiritual devastation around us is as good a motivation as the people in Joel’s time had.

Do we want to send a serious signal to God about our readiness to live out His mission? If we really are serious about partnering with God in work that seriously matters to Him and to our world, we need to seriously pray. Together. Often.

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