I am very glad to be able to be once again back in this fellowship of God’s people. This is the first time I have ever been cold in Minnesota. I have been here for many, many years, and I remember the first time I came was in the spring, when everybody was in shorts. This is the first time I have actually felt cold in Minnesota. I think that is a first at 215.
I am also very glad to be here to speak on this subject of intercession and corporate prayer. When the brothers spoke to me in Longwood about it, I had an immediate witness in my spirit that I should set aside the other arrangements I had made and come, because I put an enormous value upon corporate prayer and intercession.
There is nothing else that is going to bring about the fulfilment of God’s purpose for North America than real intercession before Him. Therefore, the challenge is colossal.
As we go through these times, I will say more. I will give an introductory time this evening that will leave you a little self-conscious. That is why we will not have a time of prayer afterwards.
Tomorrow I will give a teaching to begin with, and then we will have prayer afterwards. Now, there is one thing I ask. I hope it does not frighten you today: everyone who comes must be prepared to be corrected. That is simple. If you are too proud to be corrected, you had better stay away.
Very often, we do things in prayer and do not believe that we do them. It is only when someone says, “Did you realise that you did this, or you said this?” that suddenly you wake up, and a whole new direction comes into your life.
So, when we have times of prayer, they are also to do with instruction and teaching. They will be real times of prayer, because I shall ask the brothers to think of those matters over which we really need to seek His face. But I will use them also for instruction, and the discipline is to be ready to be corrected.
I hope that is not too heavy for you all. Shall we take a few Scriptures?
First, one verse in Acts 2:42:
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers.
They continued steadfastly in prayers.
Acts 4 contains the first—and, in fact, the only—example of a prayer meeting in the New Testament. Acts 4:23-31:
And being let go, they came to their own company, and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said unto them.
And they, when they heard it, lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said,
O Lord, Thou that didst make the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is:
Who by the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David Thy servant, didst say,
Why did the Gentiles rage,
And the peoples imagine vain things?
The kings of the earth set themselves in array,
And the rulers were gathered together,
Against the Lord, and against His Anointed:
For of a truth in this city against Thy holy Servant Jesus, whom Thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together,
To do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel foreordained to come to pass.
And now, Lord, look upon their threatenings: and grant unto Thy servants to speak Thy word with all boldness,
While Thou stretchest forth Thy hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done through the name of Thy holy Servant Jesus.
And when they had prayed, the place was shaken wherein they were gathered together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spake the word of God with boldness.
In Revelation 8:3-5:
And another angel came and stood over the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should add it unto the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.
And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, went up before God out of the angel’s hand.
And the angel taketh the censer; and he filled it with the fire of the altar, and cast it upon the earth: and there followed thunders, and voices, and lightnings, and an earthquake.
Now, a few more Scriptures. Go back to the first Gospel, Matthew 6:5-15:
And when ye pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites: for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father Who is in secret, and thy Father Who seeth in secret shall recompense thee.
And in praying use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Be not therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.
After this manner therefore pray ye:
Our Father Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
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 the evil one.
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
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.
Finally, 1 Timothy 2:1-2:
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.
Beloved Lord, we want to thank You that we are gathered here this evening. We know You have already heard our prayer. We want very simply to ask for that anointing, grace, and power to be upon this whole time.
Revive us, renew us, quicken us, Lord. In some way, challenge us. Do not let this time be a sleepy time in any shape or form. But, Lord, will You break through every work of darkness and every opposition of the enemy, and reach our hearts? Do something in us.
Now we need Your anointing, both for the speaking and for the hearing. Therefore, now by faith, we stand in that anointing power which You have won for us through the finished work of our Lord Jesus. Let it be in double portion upon me and upon our hearing, Lord.
We pray that You will help us to hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Lord, we are at a historic point in history, both for North America and for the world. Help us, Lord. We want to pray that You will use these times not only to challenge us, but to bring us to a new place of commitment with You. We ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
Well, it is very interesting that when our Lord Jesus spoke about the last days and all the events of the last days, He said, “Watch and pray.” That in itself is very interesting.
In all the possibility of panic, fear, turmoil, change, and many other things that might come to us to destroy our peace of mind, He said, “Watch and pray.”
Watching leads to genuine prayer. Where there is no watching, very often our prayer becomes routine. It is no longer powerful, incisive, clear, or strong. We need to learn how to watch.
If you look in the Word of God again and again, it says that we are watchmen. Now, as you know, in my part of the world watchmen are normally retired gentlemen. They are already vegetating in retirement. Their hearing has slightly gone, their sight has slightly gone, and they are to a certain extent disabled. But they are asked to be watchmen, and they sit in a little hut on the property and watch.
Therefore, many believers have the idea—especially young people—that to be a watchman means you have to be old, flatulent, somewhat disabled, and certainly deaf. Then you can be a watchman.
But if you change the word watchman to security officer, it changes the whole attitude to this matter. A security officer has to be someone well trained, in fit condition, able to run a mile or two without puffing, able to hear well, able to see well, and possessing a number of other qualities. Suddenly, it takes on a whole new dimension.
The Lord says in Isaiah 62:6:
I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem; they shall never hold their peace day nor night.
This is a calling to us: this watchfulness, this alertness, this watching what the Lord is doing, what the Holy Spirit is touching, and what the enemy is doing and what his strategy is. All these things should lead to genuine prayer.
When that happens, a prayer meeting becomes, instead of dull and boring, alive with the power of God. It is not somewhere you can fall asleep. When people fall asleep in a prayer meeting, there is something quite wrong about the prayer meeting. A prayer meeting where the Lord is present is anything but dull and boring.
There are many other things that I would like to say, but I have to keep restraining myself. I do not have to tell you about the present world situation—the financial meltdown and the economic crisis. You hear about it day and night on your television here, as far as the States are concerned, but it is a worldwide phenomenon, especially, of course, in the United States.
I have said for some time that I believe the States have been sailing, like the Titanic, into a massive iceberg that is going to sink them. I still believe it. I believe your election was absolutely historic, and it means that something has happened now that the Lord will not reverse.
What is possible is an enormous awakening on the North American continent. But that requires a people who will not let the Lord go, but appeal to Him day and night, that He will somehow do something and save men and women out of this mess and turmoil.
In my estimation—and I will leave it to another time to talk about this—you have three huge new superpowers in the wings. America is in decline, and that means the only country that has been the guardian of minorities in the world—Christian minorities, Jewish minorities, and other minorities too—is now losing its power and influence.
The three new superpowers, not yet quite there but in the wings, are China, India, and Russia.
Two of those powers are pagan. They have never had, at any time, a biblical foundation. Therefore, their influence on the world, on society, and on the norms of society will be tremendous.
Russia did have a biblical foundation, but Marxism created a vacuum through its seventy years of rule, and Russia has not recovered from it yet. I think we are going to see much more from Russia. A country as vast as Russia, with all those natural resources—with gold, diamonds, gas, and oil—has to be a superpower.
This is the tragedy of what is happening in the United States. The church in general—I am not saying you, but I am saying in general—has not prayed as she should. She has gone in for wall-to-wall carpeting, ministers of youth, ministers of age, ministers of music, ministers of education, and I do not know what else. Basically, she has forgotten this word of the Lord: “Watch and pray.”
If, by the grace of God, there were all over the United States and North America a remnant of the faithful, ready to sacrifice themselves and ready to lay down their lives for His sake and for the sake of the peoples among whom they live, it is entirely possible that North America will become the scene of one of the greatest awakenings in the history of the world.
We are sitting on a powder keg. At any single moment, that powder keg could explode—whether it would be a war in the Middle East, a massive earthquake here in the States, or something else akin to it. Anything now could tip what is already a critical situation into something horrific.
Corporate prayer is a lost art. Most prayer meetings are anything but corporate. They are a collection of people doing their own thing, praying their own prayers, expressing their own burden, without any real corporate guidance from the Holy Spirit.
A corporate prayer meeting is the expression of the Head and the Body. It is the one evidence that the Body and the Head are livingly joined.
That is just what I want to say in introduction. Then I will take a few matters and try to explain them.
Is it not interesting that when the Apostle Paul comes to the end of one of the greatest letters the Holy Spirit ever enabled him to write—the Ephesian letter—he did not end with words like, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Let us have convocations and conferences for the deepening of spiritual life.”
He did not say, “Let us have times together where we shall have instruction,” all of which is good, by the way, in its place. He did not say, “Let us have times when we can experience the power of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or whatever.” He did not say, “Let us have times where we can be trained in evangelism.” All these things are absolutely fundamental.
What he did say was:
Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
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.
Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.
As he goes right the way through, he tells us to take the Word of God, which is the sword of the Spirit, and then he speaks about prayer: “with all prayer and supplication, praying at all seasons in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:18).
I will talk tomorrow evening about the Holy Spirit and prayer, but I am only touching on this now. What I am trying to say is this: what the Holy Spirit was saying through the Apostle Paul is this—if you do not learn to stand in what God has revealed to you for the fulfilment of God’s purpose in your day and generation, you will lose what you have.
There is nothing static in church history. Either you go forward into the fulfilment of God’s purpose, or you go back into crystallisation, denominationalism, institutionalism—you know, the normal story of church history.
Therefore, all this that I am saying is of tremendous importance.
First of all, I want to say something about the strategic nature of corporate prayer. There is nothing else that God has given to His people as strategic as corporate prayer.
If what I have just said about standing—putting on the whole armour of God, standing, withstanding, and having done all, standing—has sunk in, you will begin to understand what I am trying to say. It is strategic.
Standing is not going forward and not going back, but standing.
This means that you have something revealed: something about the purpose of God, something about the truth of God. There is something in which and upon which you can stand, and you refuse to be budged from that foundation. You stand. That is the way we win the battle: by standing.
It does not matter if the United States is filled with darkness and evil, and the flood is coming over the whole land with abortion, homosexual rights, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, and everything else that I reckon you are going to see in the full years that lie ahead. The fact remains: if we learn to stand, withstand, and stand, God can still fulfil His purpose, if only in a remnant.
There is a wonderful little phrase in the prophecy of Joel, quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost. It speaks about signs in sun, moon, and stars, and pillars of smoke on the earth; then it says:
And it shall be, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
A marvellous word. In other words, there is every possibility, in the midst of colossal judgment, in the midst of everything breaking up and darkness seeming to be on top, for men and women to awaken to the salvation of God. That is what we are here for.
The Lord said in the letter to the Hebrews that God would shake everything. It is not Satan who is doing the shaking; it is God who is doing the shaking. That is always a comfort to me. I know the Person who is doing the shaking.
We may all feel the shaking in jobs, insecurity, income, and everything else, but the fact remains: we know the One Who is doing the shaking. The Lord says, “It is I, I, I. I will shake everything that can be shaken, that that which cannot be shaken may remain.”
Then He says:
Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God.
That is, I think, a wonderful word from the Lord.
Do you and I realise the enormous power that God has placed in our hands? We are by nature, most of us, a bit stupid. The Lord did not call us sheep for nothing. Sheep are the dumbest of all creatures. Goats, on the other hand, are quite intelligent.
I noticed the shepherd I keep my eye on, on the island, just recently. He has taken the goats and the sheep apart. He is getting on in years—eighty-eight—and still climbs right to the top of the mountain with them. But he does it first with the sheep, comes back down with them and pens them, and then he takes the goats back.
Goats are incredible creatures: deceitful, cunning, intelligent, with wonderful eyes and beautiful hair. But, I mean, when it comes to it, sheep are so dumb. The Lord did not call us sheep for nothing. We are dumb.
Do you realise the enormous power God has placed in our hands, in spite of how dumb we are? God can do anything. There is nothing the Lord cannot do. He brought the whole universe that you and I can touch, see, and feel into being out of nothing. By a word, He brought light out of darkness.
There is nothing the Lord cannot do. Our brother mentioned a song; he did not like the melody, he said. But it sounded pretty good to me—not the melody, but the sentiment he quoted about going up and possessing the land.
Ten of those spies said, “We cannot do it. These cities are walled and fortified to heaven. There is no way we can take them.”
This, I think, is often what comes like a pall of death on the praying people: “I do not think we can do anything. The enemy is so strong, so insidious, so divisive, so clever at throwing us at one another’s throats, too full of accusation.”
The power God has placed in our hands is colossal. It is much greater than nuclear power.
When a company of God’s people can come under the headship of Christ by the Holy Spirit, that people can see things happen that they would never have imagined.
Nothing is impossible with the Lord. It is not just moving out in that small business. He can do incredible things, if only He can get a people who are alive to Him and moving together with Him.
It is enormous power that God has placed in our hands. One day, when we are in glory, and we sit down for a moment—take a break from that eternal, everlasting hallelujah chorus—it seems to me that the Lord will instruct us. We shall see how, behind every great move of God, every move forward in the history of the church, there have been people who prayed it through at enormous cost.
We only know of Martin Luther. We know of George Fox, Count Zinzendorf, John and Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield. We know those front-rankers, if you know what I mean. We thank God for them.
But one day we shall hear the real story. We shall discover that there was a whole great number of people whose names were unknown to us, who were led by the Spirit of God to pray things through. Through their prayer, God fulfilled His purpose in their day and generation.
This tremendous evil power can be dislodged. Satanic strongholds can be hurled down. The purpose of God in our day and generation can be fulfilled. We can see, in all our failing and weakness, the house of God built. It is all there.
There is nothing that the Lord cannot do. His purpose for a nation, and His purpose for the church within that nation, can be fulfilled.
When this is achieved in the secret place, in the unseen, before very long it is concretely expressed in the seen.
Let me give you another illustration. I remember years ago that another brother and I were caught in Israel during the Yom Kippur War. We should have left before it began, but we were caught on the very day we could have gone. Therefore, we had to stay. There were no flights south of Israel and no flights into it.
It is a long story, but I will shorten it by simply saying that, since we had nothing else to do, I was asked if I would lead the brothers and sisters who remained in Jerusalem. Let me say that nearly all the missionaries fled. They queued up and got tickets when the flights opened, and every single one of them went.
But there were a faithful number for the Name, and we met together in what we called the bunker in the Garden Tomb. It was actually a great cave that goes into what some believe to be Gordon’s Calvary, the Place of the Skull. We had amazing times of prayer there.
I remember that at one of those times Colonel Doby, who came from an old military family going back about seven generations, said in his own inimitable way, “I want you all to judge whether this is the Lord. Three times I have seen clouds coming down on the mountains of Moab and blocking them out. I do not normally have this kind of vision, and I wonder what it means.”
After a few moments of quietness and reflection, a Dutch brother said, “I believe the Lord is telling us to pray that the Jordanian government will be confused and will not enter this war.”
If Jordan had come into the Yom Kippur War, Israel would have been lost. The longest front that Israel had was the Jordanian front. We all felt this was the Lord, and we really began to pray. My word, did we pray.
We were just a small group—perhaps a dozen, eighteen people at the most. We were on our knees. We called upon the Lord: “Lord, have mercy upon us.” We prayed for King Hussein, that God would confuse him. We prayed for the Jordanian government and the Jordanian military, that God would confuse them. What we did not pray for was the Jordanian Air Force. This is interesting.
They never came into the war, and they were heavily criticised by all their Arab allies—in Egypt, Iraq, and everywhere—for not joining in. They said, “You are responsible. We could have beaten Israel if you had entered in.”
God heard our prayer.
Months later, I was in Britain, in my mother’s home, the old family home. I was doing something in my bedroom when I heard my mother call, “Come down quickly. King Hussein is on television. He is being interviewed.”
I hurtled down the stairs and got into the room where the television was. I was just there to hear these words. King Hussein was saying, “I do not know what went wrong, but we were suddenly confused. We had made the decision that we would go into the war, and then we became confused.”
He said, “The most extraordinary thing was that the Air Force told us they were not sure they had enough air cover to give our troops safety.”
We never saw that in those clouds that came down on the mountains of Moab, but actually what the Lord was trying to say to us was absolutely explicit.
Do you really believe that God can speak to a group of people and lead them in prayer? That prayer meeting was anything but dull and boring. I have never forgotten it.
I have never forgotten another time when dear Gladys Roberts and Kitty Morgan, who had been with Rees Howells all the way through the war years, came suddenly into the prayer time.
Gladys said, “I do not know about the rest of you, but I could not sleep all night, and neither could Kitty. This morning I got on my knees and said, ‘Lord, what is it?’ The Lord said to me, ‘My enemy is trying to bring in Armageddon before its time.’”
She found that Kitty had the same burden, so they got into a taxi and came into Jerusalem.
You will not believe this, but the brother in charge of the Garden Tomb had been brought up in the Dutch royal family. The Dutch ambassador to Israel came in that afternoon and asked to see him. In the course of their conversation, he said, “The Queen wants you to know that they have picked up information about ballistic missiles that have been brought into Alexandria. Russians are setting them up, and the plan, we understand, is to destroy Tel Aviv. Then they will say, ‘Now it is done. Now we must take over this.’”
Praise the Lord, we got to prayer. We prayed, “Lord, expose this thing. Things are being done in the secret; expose it.”
Then President Nixon called a number-two red alert. Do you remember? Immediately, the Russians put the ballistic missiles back onto the ships, dismantled the whole thing, and sailed back across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
That is how near we came to colossal destruction. We are near to it again, but that is another matter.
Now, do you understand the power of prayer?
You younger people may think, “No, I mean, I am only a young person.” That is stupid. Do you know what age I was when I first learned about prayer? I was fourteen.
I went to a little prayer meeting with all these old, grey- and white-headed people. All the young people said to me, “What are you doing, spending one evening a week with all those old bogies?” I said to them, “It is wonderful.”
You know what we were praying about? We were praying about Nepal. This little prayer meeting was a prayer meeting for Nepal.
At that time, Nepal was a closed kingdom. Any Nepali who became a Christian was executed. If they escaped, they had to come across into India. On the mountains near Darjeeling were two wonderful sisters, Dr. Lucy Steele and Dr. O’Hanlon. God had told them years before, “You will preach the Gospel in Nepal.”
Therefore, they believed the Lord had given them a calling, and they were on those mountains near Darjeeling, praying for Nepal, that God would open it. This little prayer meeting was to support them.
All the folks in it were old folks—when I say old, I mean over sixty, between sixty and eighty. I was fourteen, the only youngster among them.
They found it extraordinary that a boy like me came once a month to the Nepal prayer meeting. I have never forgotten the battle they had on one of those evenings, and how they believed God had said to them, “It has happened.”
Then we got a cable from Dr. O’Hanlon: “Tomorrow morning we are going over into Nepal. The kingdom of Nepal has opened to the Bible.”
The whole church of God in Nepal has come out of those prayer times.
That prayer meeting was tough. There were times when you would be tempted to give up, but they were anything but dull and boring. Of course, I crowed, as only a rather arrogant youngster could, to those other young people: “I was part of a prayer meeting that saw the whole of Nepal open to the Gospel.”
There is something tremendous in the power that God has placed in our hands. When people pray together, when people pray under the headship of the Lord Jesus, anything can happen. God has tremendous purposes.
Real intercession has to be run—listen—like a military operation. It requires discipline. It requires togetherness.
You cannot all just shoot your guns all over the place, which is what happens in most prayer meetings. We have one person shooting here, one person shooting there, one person shooting somewhere else. We fire in all directions and everywhere, make a great noise, but nothing ever happens.
When we learn how to be together, how to hear what the Lord is saying, and how to test it, then finally something can happen.
I learned this in Egypt, of all places. I was convalescing. I had never had particularly robust health, and I was convalescing from a kind of jaundice that had kept me on my back for three weeks.
These old missionaries said, “Why do you not come down and stay with us in Port Said?” All the other missionaries said to me, “You must be careful. You are such an upstart and a youngster.” I was eighteen at that time. They said, “You are likely to upset them. They are very spiritual and godly.”
So I went there with great fear, frightened that at the slightest word I might upset these two wonderful old sisters. Instead, I found the most remarkable couple of women in the Middle East.
At breakfast, we had a time of prayer. They would pray for people in Algiers, and then after a while they would pray for somebody else. I noticed things happening. The telephone would ring, and I would hear Auntie Catherine saying, “Yes, yes, I have got it down. Alex and I will pray. Do not worry; we will get down onto it.”
Then I would hear her say, “Alex.” I heard footsteps going down the corridor. I was supposed to be convalescing, so I was on my back. I am Jewish, so I am very curious. I wanted to know what was going on behind that closed door.
They spent a whole hour behind that closed door. Later, I would hear the telephone ring again and Auntie Alex saying, “Oh, we knew. We got the victory in this for such a time.”
Letters came from Dunbar in northern Egypt; others came from Baghdad. I could not believe it. I thought to myself, “These two old ladies are a kind of spiritual CIA. They have got the whole of the Middle East at their fingertips.”
They were supposed to retire, but instead of retiring they took a flat in Port Said and gave themselves to prayer.
Then came the wonderful day when Auntie Ella said to me, “Would you like to join us for prayer?” I put on my most English manner and said, “Oh, that would be very bad.” But I was dying to get into that place to see what happened.
I got into the prayer meeting, and I will never forget it. The two of them read a letter from Casablanca about a situation in the church there. One said to the other, “Do you understand fully?” The other said, “Yes.” Then they both turned to me and said, “Do you understand?” I said, “Well, not very well.” So they explained it a bit more.
Then one said to the other, “Have you got any word from the Lord concerning this, that we can stand on?” The other said, “Yes—Obadiah.”
I thought, “Oh, Obadiah! I am not sure I have even read Obadiah. What can Obadiah have to do with the situation in Casablanca?”
But they got on their knees, took that word from Obadiah, and stood on it. I had never seen such a thing. They got everything out of that verse of Scripture and stood on it. Before long, we heard the answer.
I am not saying that every time they prayed the answer was immediate. It was not so. But what I saw taught me something: the enormous power that is placed in the hands of God’s people.
It taught me that there was a spiritual world—a world that you cannot feel with these hands, hear with these ears, or see with these eyes—but it is as real as anything tangible.
No one will ever really get into genuine prayer who does not recognise that this world is essentially a spiritual world. We know that it is a natural world, but essentially it is a spiritual world. It is what you cannot see that determines everything.
You cannot see God, but He determines everything. The spiritual world is determining everything.
Of course, no one will ever come to a prayer meeting if they do not believe that this world is a spiritual world. But when you understand that, something begins to dawn. If it is a spiritual world, you have to use spiritual means to touch it.
Do you remember Elisha’s servant? Most of you know that story. Elisha had a servant who looked after him. Dear old Elisha went to bed, and evidently, when the servant was making breakfast, he looked out of the window of the kitchen, I suppose, and to his horror saw the Syrian army.
He went to another window, and there were more. Then he went to another window at the back of the place, and there were more. Suddenly, he realised, “We are surrounded by the Syrians, and they hate Elisha the prophet.”
So he went to Elisha and said, “We are surrounded. They have got us. They have laid siege to us in the night. It is just a matter of time.”
Elisha did something that many servants of the Lord do not do. We would have sat him down and given him a good Bible lecture on all kinds of things. But instead, Elisha prayed the shortest prayer in the Bible: “Lord, open his eyes.”
That is all he prayed: “Lord, open his eyes.”
In that moment, Elisha’s servant’s eyes were opened, and suddenly he saw the whole area filled with the armies of God. It made all the difference.
What made the difference? The Syrian army was still there. The situation was still that they were besieged. They were encircled by people who hated Elisha. But in that moment his eyes were opened, and he saw the invisible armies of God. His life was changed forever.
When God opens your eyes to see the spiritual world and to see that God has won, everything changes.
The Lord Jesus is seated at the right hand of God already, and He has won the battle. We are only in the mopping-up operations, if you understand. Satan cannot get at the Lord Jesus. He has won. So what does Satan do? He gets hold of us, because we are still here on earth.
But our job is to proclaim that simple fact: Jesus has won. Whenever you sing a hymn about Jesus being Lord, the whole place is lifted; the atmosphere is lifted. Have you noticed that? It is quite interesting.
We need eyes simply to see.
Maybe tomorrow I will talk about the four different kinds of prayer. We read them in 1 Timothy 2:1. They are all in the plural, by the way:
Why do we have these four different kinds of prayer? All prayer falls into one or another of these categories.
The simplest word is prayers. It just means pouring out. In Greek and Hebrew, it means simply to pour out what is in your heart. Sometimes what you are praying is hopeless, but the Lord said, “Ye have not, because ye ask not” (James 4:2). You can ask.
C. T. Studd once said, “Why ask the Lord for a native when you could ask Him for an elephant?” It is just pouring out what is in your heart. You do not know what the will of the Lord is, but you pour out your heart before the Lord. That is prayer.
Intercession is different. Intercession is not just a hit-and-miss affair. Intercession begins with a knowledge of the will of God.
When the Lord said to Moses, “Stand aside; I am going to destroy this nation,” Moses began to intercede. “You cannot do that, Lord. What will the nations say if You destroy them?”
It was the same with Abraham. Remember when the Lord said to Abraham, “I am going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah”? Abraham began his intercession.
Intercession begins with a knowledge of what God’s will is.
If you know that God is judging the United States, then your intercession can begin. The Word of God is quite clear to me that Israel will be saved. Then we can start to intercede on the basis that Israel will be saved.
We know that there will be those in the church who will make themselves ready. The Bride will make herself ready. We know it is in the Book. Now we can start to intercede: “May the Lord get hold of people all over the United States and all over the world who are ready and who will make themselves ready for the coming of the Lord.”
Now we have a problem. Why should we pray for something the Lord has already revealed that He will do? Is that not a good question? Why should we pray? Surely He is going to do it, and it is in the Book. We can just sit back and relax. Why should we bother our little heads?
Do you remember Daniel? It is all in Daniel 9. When he knew from the Word of God that seventy years were accomplished for the captivity of Jerusalem, he worked it out. The Lord revealed to him when those seventy years began.
When Daniel realised that, he began his intercession. He interceded as if the Lord was not going to do it. He said, “Lord, please do this. Do not defer. Do it, Lord.”
But why did he pray that for something that God had already said in His Book? He had said it through Jeremiah years before.
If Daniel had been a good charismatic, he would have called a few brothers and sisters together and said, “Let us have a ball. Praise the Lord, it is over. The seventy years are finished. We do not need all this nonsense about fasting and praying and throwing ashes on our heads. It is already revealed. Let us rest. Let us be joyful. Let us have a spiritual ball.”
Is that not interesting? Instead, he prayed as if God were not going to do it. Actually, he prayed because he understood God was going to do it. But in some extraordinary way, he realised that God would not do it without a Daniel.
Do you get that? He needed a Daniel. He needs you and me.
You might well ask, “Why?” I have asked this question a thousand times. God could fulfil His will much more easily without you and without me. We are real problems. Once we get in on the act, we can make a mess of it.
Why does He not just do it without us? But it is almost as if the Lord says, “No. I will not do it without you. You have to learn to stand with Me. I will pray; I will educate you; I will discipline you.”
The whole thing is to do with service in the ages to come. That is why I have always said that intercession is the highest of all callings. Higher than the prophet, higher than the apostle, is the calling to be an intercessor.
But as an intercessor, you have to discern what is the will of Christ. You have to discern when He has said to do it, and then you have to stand with Him for its fulfilment.
This word intercession is tremendous, because intercession is quite different from other things. That is why the word supplication is first, because supplication is inquiry.
The word means beseeching appeal, but I think the easiest way to understand supplication is inquiry. You inquire of the Lord.
Let me tell you a story. We had a girl who came all the way down from Glasgow, Scotland, to Richmond, England, because she was in a terrible condition.
She had been a wonderful Christian. She had gone to Bible school, been filled with the Holy Spirit, and started to work among the slums of Glasgow—one of the worst slums in the world, I might add. She even took a little room in a tenement building so that she could be right with the people.
But she lost all her joy. First, she found she could not read her Bible. Then she found that every time she went to a service, she fell asleep. The third thing was that prayer began to be destroyed. Then she said, “I have committed the unforgivable sin.” The enemy taunted her to commit suicide.
Can you believe it? A real believer, a wonderful child of God.
She had asked different people to lay hands on her and minister to her, but nothing worked. Then she thought, “I will go down to Richmond and speak with the Berkeley prayer group.”
Down she came, and we began to ask questions. In the course of it, I said to her, “Why do you wear those glasses? They are tinted.”
“Oh,” she said, “because of my headaches. It helps them.”
“Do you want me to throw them away?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I am just asking.”
We said to her, “Well, we will pray for you.” We began to pray. Then one of the elder brothers said, “The Lord is saying to me, ‘It is water. It is water. It is water.’”
I thought, “No, he is crazy. What in the world does he mean, ‘It is water’? What has that to do with this poor girl? She is a suicide case, and he is saying, ‘It is water.’”
We prayed for her, and she came right out of that terrible thing. She went back to Glasgow.
Within two weeks, she had got back into the same condition. Then into her head came the words, “It is water. It is water. It is water.” She thought, “I will take a little bottle of water to the public-health people and get them to test it.”
Within hours, they were looking for her. They said, “The water you were drinking has an enormous lead content. You must have had terrible headaches and been unable to concentrate.”
Do you know, the enemy could have caused her to commit suicide?
Amazing what God can do in prayer. That is supplication. If we had not inquired of the Lord—“What shall we do? We do not understand this situation. Our sister has been tempted to commit suicide. She loves You with all her heart. She believes in the Word. She has had a real experience of You. What are we to do, Lord?”—we would never have found the answer.
We thought it was demonic. I did. And it was. Demons were using the water. But it was that brother who suddenly said, “It is water,” and the Lord had said it was water.
Prayer is a tremendous thing when you begin to understand that it is a two-way business.
What is the principle of corporate prayer? Listen very carefully. The principle of corporate prayer is very simple:
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.
Is it not interesting that generally speaking, we divide this one statement into two and divorce the two parts of the same sentence? We say, “Praise the Lord, where two or three are gathered together in His name, there He is in the midst.”
But it is all to do with prayer.
“If two of you shall agree on anything that they shall ask, it shall be given them of My Father Who is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I.”
In other words, it is the Lord in the midst, by the Holy Spirit, Who harmonises us so that we are, as it were, of one mind.
You often hear people saying, “Will anyone agree with me on this matter?” Then someone puts a hand up and says, “Hallelujah. Now we can get the Lord to do this.”
What do we really mean? Do we mean that the Lord is unwilling to do it, but if two believers agree—which is a miracle anyway—then we can force the Lord into a corner, twist His arm behind His back, and say, “You have to do it because we two are one”?
In other words, we agree to agree. But that is not what the Scripture says.
The word is sumphoneo, from which we get the word symphony. When two of us are actually agreed—harmonised—we know the Holy Spirit is in this. Now we know we are on the right track.
In corporate prayer, it generally spreads through the whole number. We are harmonised together. You hear someone saying, “That is it, that is it,” and something leaps within you. This is the Lord in the midst. It is wonderful.
“Where two or three are gathered together in My name” does not mean that we add His name as a kind of magic formula. What does it mean? It means that we are His Body. We are members of His Body. The Name is the Head.
My head has a name, but my body says, “Yes, that is our name too.” So when two or three are gathered into His name, we are His Body. Now we are being harmonised from the Head by the Holy Spirit.
This is altogether different from agreeing to agree. This is something the Lord does. There is power in the whole time of prayer because we have been brought together.
There is a right type of prayer meeting and a wrong type of prayer meeting. The right type of prayer meeting is very simple. We start off all over the place, and certainly someone prays, and there is an anointing there. The moment that person prays, the whole time of prayer goes onto another level and into another dimension.
Now our job is to follow it through. Once we have got the anointing, follow it through. When we follow it through, something happens.
In a poor prayer meeting, someone prays here, but we cannot hear them because they are praying into their lap or into the back of the seat. They do not lift their heads up. We need to hear what someone is saying. How can we say “Amen” if we do not hear what someone is praying?
You need to straighten up and pray out. Do not shout, but speak clearly in good American English. Then we can all understand, and we can say, “Amen. Even so.”
A good prayer meeting is when the Holy Spirit is in charge. We move from one matter, and a whole number of people pray for it. Then there is another matter, and two people pray for it. Then we move onto another matter, where somehow or other a whole number of people pray for that matter.
At the end of it, we feel that we have gone somewhere. We feel the Lord has heard our prayer.
A bad prayer meeting is when someone starts by praying for Grandma’s gall bladder, and then we are off on a world tour.
Someone starts in America, then prays for a men’s day, an evangelistic campaign in New Orleans, then off to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to Ghana, from Ghana to Singapore, from Singapore to Japan, and finally back to the United States.
Then someone else starts to pray for somebody who is sick, then a situation in the assembly, then a third matter, a fourth matter, and a fifth matter. I call it a shopping-list prayer. Every matter mentioned gets put into one prayer. Now we do not know where we are, and I wonder whether the Lord says, “Where are they? What are they doing?”
Corporate prayer should be like your time alone with the Lord. You go from one matter to another as you are led by the Spirit.
We do not need Satan when we have got ourselves. That sounds terrible, but we really do not need Satan. Golda Meir used to say, “We do not need enemies when we have got some of our friends.” They do more damage to us than our enemies in the long run.
I have listed a few things that destroy a corporate prayer meeting.
Long prayer is one of the destroyers. Someone prays for five minutes. Have you noticed that every single prayer in the whole Book, from Genesis to Revelation, is no longer than two minutes?
Even our Lord’s Prayer is only half a minute:
Our Father Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Long prayer is one of the destroyers of a prayer meeting, especially if someone is mumbling and you really cannot hear them. How can you say “Amen” to it?
D. L. Moody was sitting in one prayer meeting while a gentleman was praying at great length and going all around the whole Bible. He said, “Well, while our brother is finishing his prayer, we will sing a closing hymn.”
That is enough to destroy anywhere. Long prayer is a problem.
Here is the second thing: great oratory. Some people have wonderful oratory and all the most high-sounding phrases. It is a real sermonette. I feel the Lord gets more sermons preached at Him in prayer meetings than in any other place.
People take a Scripture and go through point one, point two, point three—a little sermon. I always feel the Lord says, “There is My child. I wrote it.” He does not need to be lectured or told.
Even when you take the Word of God as a foundation, that is different. But when you are preaching at the Lord, it is a real destroyer of any prayer meeting. So watch it.
Vague prayer is another destroyer of corporate prayer. What I mean is this: “Lord, bless China.” I feel the Lord says, “What do you mean? Do you mean bless the Maoists? Xi Jinping? Whoever? What do you mean?”
If you pray vague and unspecific prayers, do not expect the Lord to answer. “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” You have to be specific.
World-tour prayer is another destroyer. You start here, go off there, then to another place, then another place, and finally pray for all the missionaries and servants of the Lord all over the world. A few of those world tours—one over here, one over there, one at the back—and we are finished.
We end up saying, “Where is the Lord in all this?” The prayer may have been good enough; it may have been a burden, a personal burden. But it is not corporate.
Shopping-list prayers are similar. That is listing every single thing the brothers have mentioned that needs prayer. We have to take matters one by one. To have five different people doing the same thing will kill any time of prayer. No wonder it is dull and boring.
Then there is a very real problem: horizontal prayer. Horizontal prayer is prayer for public consumption, not for divine attention.
What we are really doing in horizontal prayer is telling one another what we think. You know the kind of thing: “Lord, I want to pray for Mrs. Lee. You know her son is a drunk, has been in prison, and now is out of prison. She lives on such-and-such a street, on the third floor.”
What are you doing in that prayer? Are you really telling the Lord not to bless the wrong Mrs. Lee? Actually, you are telling everybody else about Mrs. Lee.
It would be much better simply to say, “I have a burden for Mrs. Lee. Her son is in trouble. Do you think you could all stand with me while we pray that the Lord will save her son?”
Horizontal prayer is destructive.
I remember on one occasion in Hendersonville, when we had a school of prayer. We started to pray, and there were a number of matters for prayer. One matter came up which was really interesting. They did not even know this brother, but as they prayed for his backsliding, they peeled it like an onion, one layer after another.
I thought, “This is amazing. Not a soul in this place knows this brother, and they are getting right to the heart of it.”
But there had been a matter right at the beginning concerning a lady named Jessie in Florida who was near death. We needed to pray for her. Suddenly, this old brother got up and said, “No, we cannot pray for this brother when our sister Jessie is lying near death’s door. We have to pray for her, that the Lord will heal her.”
He went on and on. That was it. Someone else got up and said, “Yes, Lord, You have to heal her. If You do not, You are a liar.” That sort of thing went through the whole prayer time. Then everyone began shooting at one another. It became a lecture on divine healing. Should Jessie be healed? Was the whole character of God involved in this matter?
After a time, I stopped the prayer time, which was destroyed, and I said, “Let us pray. Lord, bless this mess. All of us have got into an absolute mess.”
When we were having coffee before the next session of prayer, a telephone call came through from Florida. Our sister Jessie had passed into the presence of her Lord at six o’clock that morning.
I could not wait to get back to the prayer meeting. I said, “I know we are all supposed to be Protestants here, but we have been really good Catholics. We have been praying for a sister who has already been in the presence of the Lord for the last hour.”
That taught us one thing: the whole prayer time was destroyed by horizontal prayer. Everyone was praying their own concept of what was right or wrong concerning divine healing. Horizontal prayer is a destroyer.
Then there are mechanical noises. I am always sorry about mechanical noises. I remember one prayer time when I kept hearing someone groaning. At first, I thought the poor brother was in terrible need. I thought, “Does he need a doctor? Perhaps he is having some kind of pain.”
But he went on groaning, and the pastor said to me, “Do not worry; he has the ministry of groaning.”
Afterwards, I said to the pastor, “I am very interested.” He introduced me to the brother, who told me, “I understand those groanings which cannot be uttered.”
At a meeting in Washington some years ago, a sister came up to me and said, “I have been in a prayer clinic.”
I said, “I have led schools, but I have never had a clinic.”
She said, “It has been wonderful. I have been greatly helped, but I am on the second term now, and it is worrying me.”
“Why?”
“It is about groaning. It is the ministry of groaning. We are taught how to groan.”
I said, “Let me get this clear. Does the brother say, ‘Groan,’ and you go, ‘Ohhh’? And then he says, ‘No, no, no—oooh’?”
She said, “Yes, that is about it.”
I am not Jewish for nothing. I suddenly said to her, “Are you paying for these terms?”
“Fifty dollars.”
I could not believe it. Really, it was interesting how people can believe anything.
We must be careful of mechanical noises. It is wonderful to praise the Lord, to say “Hallelujah,” and to say the name of Jesus. But we must be careful that it does not become a kind of grunt, something mechanical. That is not the Lord.
Once in Sweden years ago, I was preaching the Gospel. The translator kept saying something that sounded like “Tack och lov”—“Thanks and praise”—after every sentence. I would say, “Some of you will spend an eternity lost,” and he would say, “Tack och lov.” Then I would say, “The devil is very strong,” and again, “Tack och lov.”
I could not live with it. It was mechanical, like a sausage machine. Once it started, it just went on. That is not spiritual, and it is not honouring to the Lord at all.
Mechanical noises—we have to be careful of them. On the other hand, do not be afraid. There are times when we can shout for the Lord.
Sentimentalism is another thing. Sometimes we think we should pray for something immediately because we think it is terrible that people are praying for something else. But you must follow the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit will have already touched a matter while you are praying for another. You understand what I mean.
These are things that destroy corporate prayer.
The most common problem is to use the pronoun I instead of we. The sign that we are corporate is when we start to pray with we.
Did you notice the Lord’s Prayer? In another Gospel, they came to the Lord and said, “Teach us to pray.” He said that we should pray like this:
Our Father Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
When it is corporate prayer, we use we. If you are going to tell the Lord how dead you are and how hopeless you are, there is a place for saying I. Instead of saying, “Oh Lord, we are all dead here. We are absolutely hopeless, dead as doornails,” why not just say, “I feel dead as a doornail today”? Then we can really say, “God, revive that person.”
But we is the normal thing. That is why we say “Amen.” If you say I, you shut me out. It is your prayer. When you say we, I can either say “Amen” or not. Amen means “even so.” It is my signature on that prayer.
Well now, this is a long session. You can understand what I said about being self-conscious. If we had a time of prayer now, where would we all be? It would be the sort of little place where we would really get down to it.
But let us really look to the Lord to help us, because I think these times about prayer are vital for the future of this assembly and for the future of the United States.
Do you really believe that God could take a group like yourselves and use you to substantially touch a nation? It has happened. People prayed for Korea, and it is amazing to me how many in Korea have found the Lord. People prayed for other parts of the world at different times. It is amazing how that prayer has been answered over the years.
May the Lord touch our spirits. Shall we pray?
Lord, none of us can say that we know how to pray as we ought. We are all learners. Will You take this time this evening, and over the years, the months, and the days ahead, teach us and train us?
We want, Lord, not to be artificial. We want to be real, genuine people who know something about prayer.
We are so thankful, Father, that You sent the Holy Spirit. We know that the Holy Spirit is here just to do this work: to bring us to a place where we hear what You say, and where we are in touch with You in such a way that something can be done in our lives, in the life of our fellowship, in the life of the nation, and in the life of this city.
Lord, hear us. We commit ourselves to You in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.