Let me see again how many of you were not with us on the first occasion. Oh yes, thank you.
Well then, for those who were, we shall be covering some new ground, I hope, today; but we will go over a little of the old. I will not say exactly what I said before, but it bears repetition anyway. This whole matter of corporate prayer is probably the most vital matter in the life of the church.
So shall we just bow together in prayer and ask the Lord for real help?
O Father, we do pray together that Thou wilt, Lord, really meet with us in this workshop on prayer. Father, we do not have to tell Thee how important it is.
And Lord, we know that Thy desire is that we should learn to pray. And so, Father, we therefore ask Thee that Thou wilt graciously grant to us revelation and wisdom by Thy Spirit; that, Lord, somehow we may be delivered from bad habits, things that have somehow or other been taken on by us that destroy the effectiveness of prayer.
And at the same time, Lord, may we be taught how to pray. Father, only Thou canst do this; for else, in this little time this afternoon—yet Thou canst use it, Lord—write indelibly on our hearts lessons that will be put into practice in the days that lie ahead.
We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Now, can you hear me at the back? If you can, try to fill up these seats, do please, because we do not want to have to strain our voices the whole time. Thank you.
Now, we have been dealing not with private prayer or personal prayer, but with corporate prayer. The reason is that, generally speaking, although we have real problems with personal prayer—wandering thoughts, finding time, being disciplined, and all the many other things that go with it—most believers do know how to pray personally.
It is when we come to corporate prayer that we find the tragedy. In this matter of corporate prayer, there are very few companies of believers who know how to pray together.
Now, I have often said—and I believe with all my heart that it is true—that it is in the prayer meeting that you can take the temperature of the church in a moment. You can tell just where a company is by its prayer time.
You can tell whether they are all individuals, unrelated; whether they are able to read the mind of the Lord; whether they are sensitive to the Spirit; whether they know how to flow together; whether it is simply a question of holding forth before one another, or whether it really is a matter of being under the government of the Head by the Spirit.
It is in this matter of corporate prayer that the real life of the church is to be gained. There is really nothing to wonder about, because you will always find that where a company of believers knows how to pray—and how to pray together, how to take hold of the Lord in prayer, how to execute the will of God in the secret place of prayer—there will always be spiritual progress in that company. There will be a fulfilment of the purpose of God.
It is really what we were saying this morning in action. Of course, what I was saying this morning covers far more than just prayer, but prayer is a very vital part of the Lord sending forth the rod of His strength out of Zion, and our Lord ruling in the midst of His enemies.
It is in the place of prayer that we discover the mind of the Lord, and it is in the place of prayer that we execute the will of God before it has an actual physical, if you like, outward manifestation.
Now, there are one or two matters I would like to say straight away. If you turn to 1 Timothy 2:1, the apostle Paul says, by the Spirit:
I exhort therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men;
for kings, and all that are in high place;
that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and gravity.
I will not read any more, but if you want to, you can read right through to verse 8:
I desire therefore that the men pray in every place, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and disputing.
My point is that you have four kinds of prayer here: supplication, prayer, intercession, and thanksgiving.
Supplication is really a beseeching of the Lord. It is a Greek word used of earnest appeal, and it has within it the thought of supplicating a king—appealing to a king. The thought in it is that we are inquiring of Him. We are appealing to Him as to what to do and whether He will not do something about it.
Now, this is very important, because it is a missing link in prayer. People pray without inquiring of the Lord. Do you understand what I am trying to say?
For instance, we have a matter of someone who is ill. Instead of asking the Lord, “Now, what is Thy will about this person?” we take it for granted either that they are not going to be healed, and therefore we ask for grace for them; or we take it for granted that they are going to be healed on the basis of certain Scriptures and say, “Lord, Thou must heal them according to Thy Word.”
We do not inquire of the Lord.
Sometimes we have a situation facing the church. We do not know what to do about it, but we simply go into prayer and flounder about all over the place. It becomes a matter of giving opinions. Different people, instead of speaking vertically to the Lord, put across horizontally what they feel about a given situation.
We are informing one another what we think is the answer to the situation. We are preaching at one another, trying to influence one another. Again, we do not inquire of the Lord.
There are normally as many opinions as there are people—many different views, all varying shades. But if only we could get it into our heads that the first and foremost thing in corporate prayer is to inquire of the Lord, then it seems as if everyone is able to put aside their own opinion and view and really be open to the Lord to reveal what is His mind.
Now, I think I probably told you before: people sometimes say, “Are you a charismatic?” I always say, “What do you mean? Do you mean a pneumatist?”
In 1 Corinthians 12:1, “Now concerning spiritual gifts,” the word is pneumatikos. I would have thought that really a charismatic should be called a pneumatist. That is nearer to the point.
But a charismatic is someone who is alive to God.
For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The character of the true charismatic is that he or she not only expects to speak to God, but expects to hear God.
In other words, when you get a company who are not just always telling the Lord what to do, or always asking the Lord to do something, but actually expect Him to speak back to them, then prayer becomes two-way.
We expect to find the mind of the Lord in the prayer meeting. We expect to hear what the Lord wants us to do. We expect to be directed in the way that we ought to pray. The prayer meeting is transformed from one-way traffic into something that is two-way.
It becomes very thrilling, because God is directing us. Sometimes, in our hearts, we just have a sense: this is what He wants. Someone starts to pray along that line, and all of us witness to it. There is an amen all over, and we are right on the ball from then on.
We do not want long prayers; we want short prayers. What the Holy Spirit wants to use is your mouth for a few minutes—less than that, sometimes. But it is in the mouth of two or three witnesses that a thing is established.
Why is this matter of supplication so important? Because again and again there are tragedies amongst the people of God because we do not inquire of the Lord. Instead, we simply do what we think is either the biblical answer, or we try to put through our conception of the truth.
I may have used this illustration before with some of you. Some time ago, we had a phone call, and the elders were asked, “Do you think you could see this poor sister who is staying with me?” This was a sister in the company. The lady said, “She does not live here. She comes from Scotland, and she is in very great need.”
We said, “Well, all right. Would you like to bring her along?” This older sister brought her along.
Well, to cut a long story short, this sister began to tell us how she had been serving the Lord. She was a dear young sister, about twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. She said, “You know, I serve the Lord in the slums of Glasgow.”
Now, the slums of Glasgow are about as bad as anything you can find on earth. She said, “In order to get near the people, I have actually started to live, for the last three years, in the slums themselves, in a dreadful flat right in the middle of it all.”
She had been able to bring others to the Lord and so on. But she said, “In the last two years, I have lost everything. I have lost my joy, the joy of my salvation. I cannot read the Bible. I do read it, but I get nothing out of it. When I pray, I feel so heavy. I do not feel it means anything at all. I go along to the meetings, and I just feel dead the whole way through.”
She said, “Do you think that I am somehow or other possessed?”
Well, we brothers asked her a number of questions. She said, “I cannot put my finger on anything that I know I have disobeyed the Lord in, or that I have backslidden in.” So we said, “Well then, let us pray.”
She was quite sure it was a spirit. We got down to pray, and as we began to pray, we began to inquire of the Lord.
We were going to ask, “Lord, what is the root? There is a root in our sister’s circumstances, all right. What is the root? Once we know the root, we shall know what to do.”
We had been praying for a little while when, all of a sudden, something came to me about her glasses—how she was wearing glasses. They were a coloured kind of glass; not sunglasses, I do not think, but they had a sort of bluish colour.
So I suddenly stopped the prayer and said, “Sister, do you mind my asking you, why do you wear those glasses? I should think they would make anyone depressed.”
You see, she said she had been suffering from terrible depression for two years.
She said, “Well, in actual fact, I went to the optician, and he told me that these would help me greatly.” So I said, “Well, I wonder whether you should take them off. If they are not, in fact, helping you, perhaps they are depressing you.”
“Well, if the Lord wants me to, I will.”
So I said, “Well, go on asking the Lord.” So we went on praying.
After a while, we came to the place where we were going to pray with her. We were just about to pray that the enemy’s influence on this sister’s life would be broken in the name of the Lord. But another brother said, “Just wait. Before we do so, I feel that there is something in your house. Maybe it is to do with water.”
She looked at him, as I did, as if he was mad. “No.”
So then we prayed for the sister. We cut off the enemy in the name of the Lord. We declared that she was a redeemed child of God; that she was a member of the body of Christ; that she had been serving the Lord; that she had gone into these circumstances through the will of God. Therefore, we lifted her up to the Lord.
She felt tremendously encouraged. Off she went. The next day, we had a phone call to say that she felt so much happier and so much better.
But she remembered what the brother had said.
When she got back to Glasgow, within a few days her depression returned. Then, in the middle of the night, she remembered what the brother had said.
Now, she was a laboratory technician, so she took a little sample of the water to be analysed. To their horror, they found that the water had a very high lead content. The pipes were very old.
She had been there for two and a half years, and she was being slowly poisoned. The result was that she had had a permanent depression for a year or more.
Naturally, she had thought it was spiritual. It affected everything: her reading, her living, her witnessing—everything.
Now, do you see the need of inquiry? Suppose we had simply said, “It is a spirit. Out, out, in the name of the Lord!” She would have felt so much better and said, “Oh, thank You, Lord, I have been delivered.” She would have gone back to Glasgow, and within a few days it would have returned.
Then she might have come back and said, “Oh, brother, the thing is back again. Will you throw it out?” Or she might have gone to another deliverance minister and said, “Please do something for me. It is back again.” I wonder whether she could even have come to suicide, thinking that somehow no one would go to the root, when in fact it was the enemy using a physical thing.
Only inquiry of the Lord can lead us to the root. That is why to say that every illness is the same, or every case of mental disturbance is the same, is so foolish. Only the Spirit of God knows exactly what is at the root. He is able to give us that word of knowledge, that word of wisdom, that understanding in a situation.
We should always be careful in this matter of inquiry that it is not merely one person’s word, but one person’s word confirmed by others. Do you understand?
Now, I use that only as an illustration. I do not think this is something we should do only with sickness or spiritual depression. This covers everything.
When we have a problem, sometimes a heaviness in our meetings, we should inquire of the Lord: “Why have we got this dullness, this heaviness, in this meeting? Why, with all our desire to serve the Lord, are we not seeing anybody saved?”
Sometimes we need to ask the Lord. Sometimes it is not to do with us, not to do with the way we are doing things, not even to do with the people who come to the meetings. It is the fact that the enemy has taken up a position and said, “This will go no further.”
When we inquire of the Lord and the Lord says, “The enemy is blockading you; the enemy is laying siege around you,” we know what to do, do we not? I hope we do.
Can the enemy blockade the Lord Jesus? He is unblockadable. You cannot lay siege to the Lord Jesus. He is at the right hand of the Father, and anything He wants to do in Richmond can be done and will be done.
We end up praising the Lord: “It is going to be done.” Just like the men, when they looked down from the walls the next day, the enemy had gone, because the Lord always lays an ambush.
That is the importance of inquiry.
Then we have the word prayer, which is the usual word for prayer in Scripture: petition. That is very important. Our Lord says, “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” We have to ask, and I do not think that needs much explanation.
Then we have the word intercession, which is the deepest dimension of prayer. Intercession is far more than words. Intercession requires your body. Intercession requires your spirit, soul, and body. It requires your whole being.
It is not just a matter of coming to a meeting and uttering a few words, saying, “Oh Lord, please save so-and-so,” and thinking, “Now that is intercession.” Intercession is travail in your spirit. It is conceived by the Holy Spirit within you. It is a burden inside, an anguish inside, an agony inside—unutterable.
When you do pray, the audible part is such a fragment of the real birth, something locked up inside. That is intercession, and that, unfortunately, is one of the rarest things amongst the people of God today.
Oh, that is something we all need, and desperately need: to know real intercession. But then we have to be of a certain spiritual maturity. Let us not be afraid of that matter. We can all start on this road by saying, “Lord, we want to be intercessors. Lead us in that way that will give us a spiritual capacity by which Thou wilt be able to make us intercessors.”
Then we have the word thanksgiving, which is the giving of thanks. It covers the whole realm, not just thanking the Lord for what He has given us, what He has done, and answers to prayer.
Some people think of thanksgiving only as giving thanks for answers to prayer, but that is the smallest thing of all.
Thanksgiving includes thanking the Lord for what He is. It includes worship. It includes praise. It is a vital element in corporate prayer: to worship the Lord not only for what He has done and the answers He has given to prayer, but for what He is—to forget ourselves and praise the Lord.
Now, some people say, “I cannot praise the Lord because I feel bad. I feel somehow or other that I am jaded today, or jaundiced.” Then the devil comes and says, “Now, do not you praise the Lord. You are a hypocrite. There are enough of them in the church already without you.”
So we say, “Oh yes, yes, I must be real. I must be real.”
What was I saying now? Yes, that is right. The devil comes and says, “No, you must be real. You must be real. No good you praising the Lord today. You got out of the wrong side of the bed. You ate something late last night; it has not agreed with you. You are feeling really bad, so do not praise the Lord.”
It is amazing. You can have a whole company—forty, fifty, sometimes a hundred people—and without knowing it from one another, every one of them has got the same complaint.
So when we come to praise the Lord, everyone’s mouth is shut, because the devil has gone through them all saying, “Do not you praise the Lord. There are enough hypocrites here without you. You do not want to be unreal, do you? You only praise more when you feel good.”
This is a tragedy, because whether I feel good or bad, the Lord still reigns. Whether I feel good or bad, the kingdom of God is still in existence. Whether I feel good or bad, His truth endures forever. There are a thousand and one things that remain the same just because I got out of the wrong side of bed. Heaven has not abdicated.
But we are so self-centred that we feel somehow or other that unless we feel good, we cannot praise the Lord. Let us begin to find a whole number of things for which we can praise the Lord that have nothing to do with us.
I can open my mouth and feel awful and say, “Oh Lord, thank You, You are on the throne. Thank You, Lord, You are reigning. Thank You, Lord, Thy truth endureth for ever.”
There are a thousand and one things we can praise the Lord for. When you start to learn the secret of real worship, the devil will stop making you feel so bad.
It is a very simple thing with the enemy: your praise means more to the Lord when you feel bad than when you feel good, and he knows it. So he is not going to help the Lord in this matter.
Now, I would like to say a few other things on this matter of the purpose of prayer. What is the purpose of corporate prayer?
The purpose of corporate prayer is that, together as the people of God, we should lay hold of the Lord.
Together as the people of God, we should come into the presence of God and see that the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Our Lord taught us to pray these words:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
This does not mean in the millennium or in eternity to come. It means now: “Thy kingdom come where we are. Let the throne of God come into this situation. Let the throne of God reign in this locality. Let the throne of God touch the difficulties and problems we are facing. Let Thy will be done here, now, as it is in heaven, so on earth.”
It seems to me that this is very, very important. It covers all matters: large or small, corporate, personal, universal, local. We are on very sure ground when we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” and when we pray that the will of God be done, as it is in heaven, so on earth.
Of course, I am speaking generally. To discover what the will of God is in detail is part of the work of a local church. It is to know what the will of God is, and then to do it—not just beat around the bush, but get on with it and see that it is done.
Corporate prayer is the headship of Christ in its practical outworking. In other words, it is the authority of the risen, ascended, glorified Christ being exercised by the body. Now, that is wonderful, is it not?
The purpose of corporate prayer must govern its scope. A time of corporate prayer is not merely a time when everyone must take part.
Here is an idea we have: “Well, we have got a time of corporate prayer. Everybody ought to take part.”
The point of corporate prayer is that everybody can take part, but not everybody must take part. It is a question of the government of the Holy Spirit.
I do not just come and say, “Now, I am here and I am going to take part.” I come into this time and say, “Lord, here I am. I am available. I am open.”
Every one of us should be like that when we come to a time of corporate prayer: “Now, Lord, here I am. I am ready to be led by Thee. I want to be used by Thee.”
Sometimes the Lord may prompt one person to pray three or four times—not at great length—and may not use you on that occasion. But, as far as we are concerned, that person’s mouth is my mouth. Do you understand? When they are praying, they are praying for me. Am I not part of the body? Are they not speaking for the body?
That is why we need to use we and our in prayer. Our Lord taught us to pray:
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
It is amazing how this whole thought of corporate prayer seems to disappear. You hear everybody saying, “Lord, I thank You so much for what You are. Oh Lord, I want to ask You to do this and this and this. I feel shut out. I feel alone.”
Well, that is why I am here. Do you not? I mean, if you have any feelings!
Of course, there may be something which I personally feel and others may not share. Then we use “I.”
I have sometimes heard people say, “Oh Lord, we are all so dead. We are all out of touch.” Then you feel very uncomfortable. I trust it is not self-righteousness when you listen to it, but you say, “The fact is, I do not feel it.”
If he said, “Lord, I feel so dead. Meet me, Lord, in this time of prayer, please,” that would be a cry from the heart, and all of us could pray, “Amen.”
But when we are being asked to pray for certain matters that are real burdens, when you pray, you are leading us in prayer. Do not feel that you are being arrogant or presumptuous.
You can say, “Lord, we now ask You about Indonesia. We come to You with this whole need in this part of the world. Lord, do something there. We pray for Thy people in Indonesia.”
You are praying for us. When you say “we,” that is quite right. You are leading us in prayer.
If you look at every example of corporate prayer in the Bible, you will find it is all “we” and “our.” This is very important.
Everyone can take part, but the aim governing the whole time is to get things settled and done in union with the Head. It is not simply a free-for-all in which everyone has to take part, ought to take part, and will feel better after they have done so.
Our Lord has a design for this time of corporate prayer, and we need to be in union with Him by the Spirit and flow with Him. Like the conductor: the moment he points his baton in our direction, we take part; and when he has moved on, we shut up.
You see, some people, once they have opened their mouths because of nerves, cannot shut them. Finally they have got there and opened their mouths, so they are praying for Indonesia. Then they say, “Now I am here, I might as well pray for everything. I am going to work through this whole shopping list.”
You know the kind of thing: the prayer that begins in life and ends in death. By the time the person has finished, most of us are saying, “Oh Lord, help him to shut up.”
That is not really prayer.
To emphasise this matter again: the absolutely vital matter, the strategic necessity, in corporate prayer is for all of us to recognise and experience the headship of Christ by the Spirit.
The youngest one amongst us can learn to do that. Corporate prayer is the best place to learn how to recognise the headship of Christ by the Spirit. It stands you in good stead later, because in other meetings you begin to distinguish what is good and what is not good, to reject what is not of the Lord, and to accept what is of the Lord.
The prayer burden has to come from the throne of God by the Spirit. Therefore, it is the Holy Spirit who must be the practical Leader and Enabler in the time.
What about the character of corporate prayer? We covered this in the first session. If you turn to Matthew 18:19-20:
Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father who is in heaven.
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
The character of corporate prayer is togetherness in the Lord. It is as simple as that. Private prayer is prayer alone; corporate prayer is prayer together.
The key to corporate prayer is that, whereas in private prayer we take one matter after another as the Lord leads us, in corporate prayer we take one matter after another—but corporately.
Instead of twenty people each taking five things apiece.
This is the tragedy of the prayer meeting. Normally, you have one person over here praying for four things; one person over there praying for five; another praying for seven; one person here, thank God, praying for one; one person over there praying for eight. We do not know where we are.
Would it not have been better for us all to have gone to our bedrooms, got on our knees, and prayed? Of course it would. It is just a sheer waste of time, because we are all sitting together listening to people pray just as if no one else is present.
That is not corporate prayer.
Corporate prayer is that we are symphonised, or harmonised, by the Spirit of God. Did you hear that?
There is an idea about this matter of being agreed. You have often heard it, no doubt. People have said, “Is there anyone here who agrees with me on this matter?” Someone puts their hand up. “Ah, good. Now we can get the plan.”
Now, I do not say that it is false every time, but so often the idea is this: if three or four people agree to agree on a certain matter, they can twist the arm of God and get Him to do what He basically does not want to do.
For instance, I can get a Rolls-Royce out of God tonight by saying, “Is there anyone here who will agree with me—will agree to agree with me—that I should have a Rolls-Royce?” Two or three people put their hands up, and I say, “Well, I will let you use it.”
So you say, “Right, thank you. Now we will agree to agree. So now we go to God.”
The point is, God does not want to give me a Rolls-Royce, but now we can twist His arm. “No, we are agreed. We four, we five, have agreed that Lawrence should have a Rolls-Royce. You cannot deny us, because Your Word says, ‘If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything’—anything.”
No, the point is that I will not get my Rolls-Royce, and we shall all be very disappointed with the Word of God. But this is because we have not understood the Word of God.
People take the words, “If you ask anything in My name, that will I give you.” But He said:
Abide in Me, and ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
Abiding in Him is the key. If I am in Him, I sense in my spirit whether I can ask for this or not.
There are things I cannot ask for. There are things I can ask for. As I abide in the Lord, I know what I can ask and what I cannot ask.
Now, in this matter of being agreed, the key is the second verse—verse 20. Did you notice it?
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
The second sentence qualifies the first. Agreement comes from the risen Christ in the midst, and that is known by the Spirit of God.
It is because the Lord is in our midst. We have gathered into His name. We are His body. We are in union with Him, flowing together. Because He is in the midst by His Spirit, He is able to agree us.
He is able to symphonise us. This word is the Greek word from which we get our word symphony. He can symphonise us; He can harmonise us; He can cause us to be together.
What happens when we pray? Someone begins to pray about a matter, and we feel, “Yes, that is right.” Someone else takes it up: “Amen.” Someone else takes it up: “Amen.” Then someone else prays for another matter, and immediately in your heart you know that it is right.
It is as if there are certain points of life. Have you ever had that experience? Oh, well, I am glad I am talking to people with some experience. Otherwise people just look at you and think, “Well, what is he talking about?”
Could you describe colour to someone who has never seen it? But when you have had the experience, it is so marvellous, because it is evidence that we are in the truth.
It is the most gracious evidence of the reality of spiritual things: someone can be praying for something very necessary, very legitimate, very real, and yet you do not have this anointing. Then suddenly someone prays, and you feel as if you could burst. It is as if a burning comes into you. You feel a stirring in your heart.
As you are walking with the Lord, you ought to know that in prayer times. That is the Holy Spirit witnessing with your spirit that the other matter is right on the ball. Then you must open your mouth.
You may say, “But Brother So-and-so has prayed for it. Surely that is all that is required.” Oh no. The Word says, “In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established.”
It is not that we are wringing out of the Lord what He does not want to do. It is that we are getting done what the Lord wants to do.
Do you understand that about corporate prayer? We are not getting the Lord into a corner and twisting His arm, getting Him to save people He does not want to save, build up the church when He does not want to build it, or bless His own when He does not want to bless them.
This is the idea we have: if we can agree, we can get the Lord into a corner and make Him do what He does not want to do. Basically, the Lord is very lazy. He does not want to build His church. He does not want to bless Richmond, Virginia. He does not want to do this and that in the United States. He is slow to act, and we have to energise Him.
We have somehow to importune Him in such a way that He will have to do it. Now, I know our Lord told the story of the importunate widow, but the point of that story was not that the Father is like that wicked judge. Can you really believe the Father was like that?
He told the story because men ought always to persevere in prayer and not to faint. Some people think that once you pray for a matter, that is it: done.
The first time Israel went over the River Jordan, they only had to put their feet in, and the waters piled up at the city of Adam. They went over immediately. But they would have made a great mistake if they had done what so many of us do today: once we have a method that works, we work it to death.
Then they come to Jericho: one pop, down come the walls. So they come to the next town, and the walls do not come down. The people do not cooperate very well!
But on that occasion, it was the Lord who said, “Set the soles of your feet,” but this time, once a day for six days, and on the seventh day seven times.
That is why it is so dangerous to make any method a be-all and end-all.
The principle is the soles of your feet: you must possess. Sometimes you do it instantly and it is done; other times it takes seven days; and some of you know it takes seven years. To get Jerusalem, it took four hundred.
So, my dear friends, we have got to persevere. But the wonderful thing is this: if you and I can learn that corporate prayer is not getting the Lord to do what He does not want to do, corporate prayer is getting done what the Lord does want to do.
In other words, once we know that the Lord wants to do this and this and this in Richmond, Virginia, we are on sure ground. Now we can get to the Lord and say, “God, be with us in this matter. We want to see this done.”
Some of you will say to me straight away, “I do not know; I really do not follow you in this matter.” Let me give you one example: Daniel 9.
In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by the books the number of the years whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, for the accomplishing of the desolations of Jerusalem, even seventy years.
And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.
And I prayed unto the Lord my God, and made confession.
Now, what on earth is Daniel doing? He has found out that God had said, some time before, through the prophet Jeremiah, that there would be seventy years of captivity.
It must have been the Spirit of the Lord who revealed to Daniel that those seventy years were about to be accomplished, because even Bible scholars have had great problems with this. In actual fact, they were only fifty years in captivity, and some modernist Bible scholars say, “Well, of course, you must not look upon the Word of God as inerrant. When God says seventy years, He probably means—well, sometimes He does not mean seventy.”
But when God said seventy years, He meant seventy years, because the captivity began with the captivity of King Jehoiachin. Only the Spirit of God could have revealed that to Daniel, because otherwise he would have been twenty years out.
When Daniel started praying, he was already ninety years old. Lift up your heads, you white-haired ones: ninety years! He began his tremendous ministry of prayer and brought them back to Jerusalem.
But you must ask the question straight away: why on earth was Daniel praying for something which God said was going to happen anyway? We do not pray for what we know. If we know that the Lord Jesus is coming back, we do not pray that He will come back. We know He is coming back.
If we know that God is going to send revival to Richmond, we do not pray for revival in Richmond. We say, “Praise the Lord.”
In other words, when we find out what the will of God is, we stop praying and start praising. We say, “That is faith.”
Whereas Daniel got hold of a secret: once he discovered what the will of God was, he knew it had to be prayed into being.
If you look very carefully at the book of Daniel, you will know it is divided exactly in half: the first six chapters are history; the last six chapters are visions.
Now, the interesting thing is that if you compare Daniel 6 with Daniel 9, you find it is the same year and the same reign of King Darius. What do we discover in Daniel 6? That is the chapter where Daniel was put into the lion’s den.
The powers of darkness became so frightened of Daniel’s ministry that they got men to go to the king and say, “O king, you are so marvellous. There has never been an empire like yours in the whole of history. You know the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. We have written out here a law which we think would be very good.”
“You know all that hot air that people are always breathing out to the idols all round this place. We have said in this edict that no one is to pray to any god but you, Your Majesty.”
The old king said, “Sounds rather good to me.”
Hell knew that it had Daniel in its hands, because Daniel was the beloved one of the king. The king had no idea what he had signed. But those evil men went and hid somewhere below that window, listening for Daniel.
The shutters opened, and suddenly Daniel started to pray towards Jerusalem, just on time. Those men ran back to the king and said, “O king, live for ever. Thy servant Daniel, whom thou honourest so greatly, is praying to the living God.”
The king knew that Daniel’s fate was sealed. Then the confusion, if I may so speak, moved from earth to heaven. There must have been such a battle in heaven—angels putting down their wings, saying, “What are You going to do? What is going to happen?”
And the Lord said, “Shall I bring down fire upon the lions?” Then the Lord said, “Never. There is only one person in the whole earth who understands My purpose and who is in prayer that it shall be fulfilled. Let all the others come home by lions, but not Daniel. Give him faith.”
“Let faith be created in his heart so that he can go into that lion’s den and their mouths be shut.” Daniel went into the lion’s den, and you know the story. The lions were just like big cats.
Someone said he probably used one as a pillow and had the most marvellous night’s sleep. But the king did not, as you know from the story.
D. L. Moody once said that Daniel probably took out his watch, looked at the time for prayer, and went on with his praying in the lion’s den.
The fact of the matter was that he came out of the lion’s den, and all the enemies of God went into the lion’s den. The lions’ mouths were not shut when they went in.
Then Daniel became even more powerful in that whole empire—one of the greatest empires that has ever existed in the history of the world, stretching from Europe to Asia, from Greece and Yugoslavia to India.
Was it not amazing to think that a Jew was in charge of the whole thing? Amazing. One of God’s children.
But this man was not just a mere statesman. He was an intercessor.
My point is this: he prayed into being that return to Jerusalem. He lived to see it; he outlived it by three years. We have no record that he himself went back. He probably felt his job was to stay at the head of government, seeing that they were protected. But the fact remains: he saw them back.
That teaches me a tremendous thing about prayer. Real prayer is to get the will of God fulfilled. It is not trying to get God to come round to our way of thinking, trying to get God to do what we want Him to do. It is to find out what the will of God is, and then to pray it into being.
Now, my dear friends, you realise straight away just how important that is. You must realise that you are going to be involved in warfare.
To go into most prayer meetings, you would think you were in a respectable tennis championship: a kind of net between us and the devil, the ball going over and coming back, and someone calling out. That is the way we normally pray—very respectable.
But the apostle Paul, in Ephesians 6, uses a word which is very vulgar. He uses the word wrestling.
This thing is not a polite sport. It is all sweat, arms being twisted up backs, legs nearly being twisted off, and eighteen stone being flung from side to side so that the whole thing moves.
Have you ever seen it? Perhaps you are too respectable to have ever seen such a thing. But if you have ever been to a wrestling match, you will have seen what happens when a man is flung against the ropes and hits the post, and the whole thing moves.
You do not call that a polite sport, do you? It is not a tennis championship, badminton, or croquet. Yet, to see some people touching the powers of darkness, you would think it was a croquet match.
I do not mean that we should talk to the enemy or start calling him names. All that kind of thing is to be avoided like the plague. What I am saying is this: in a wrestling match, there are times when the other side is on top of you, sitting on you—every bit of eighteen stone—with your arm twisted up your back and your leg pulled in another way. You cannot move.
What is ever wrong with us when we go into a prayer meeting and say, “Oh dear, it is so heavy. I do find it difficult in the prayer meeting. I much prefer the Bible study”?
Of course you prefer the Bible study, because you are getting spoon-fed.
In the prayer meeting, we should expect it to be heavy, because sometimes the enemy is sitting on us. But, thank God, you must have seen that there are times when the man underneath gets up and wins the match.
The apostle Paul says:
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities,
against the powers,
against the world-rulers of this darkness,
against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
In other words, we are involved in conflict, and no wonder. I do not think the devil worries too much when people pray, “Lord, bless my apple tree in the garden,” or, “Oh Lord, will You help Joanna at school?”
I am not saying that it is wrong to pray that kind of prayer. Those are family prayers, and they are quite right in their own context. But believe me, you will not—