I would like you to turn with me to one or two Scriptures. First of all, in Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew 6.
Matthew 6:5-13
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.
Then, if you will turn to Matthew 18, verses 19 and 20:
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.
If you will turn to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians 6, verses 18 and 19:
Ephesians 6:18-20
With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints,
And on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,
For which I am an ambassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
Then, if you will turn to the little letter of Jude—just two verses, Jude 20 and 21:
Jude 20-21
But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit,
Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
Lastly, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Romans 8, from verse 26:
Romans 8:26-27
And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered;
And He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
Shall we just have a further word of prayer?
Beloved Lord, we are thankful that we are gathered here this evening in Your presence. We want to pray, as we come to the ministry of Your Word, that You will make it live to us. We ask You, Lord, make this a time when You, by Your Holy Spirit, touch our hearts.
We need to understand something more about corporate prayer. We know, Lord, that we are totally dependent upon You for that anointing, both for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing of it. And later, when we come together to pray, we need You, Lord.
We open our hearts to You, and by faith we stand into that anointing for the speaking of Your Word and for the hearing of it. Lord, in some way bring us to a new understanding of corporate prayer.
Take hold of this company, Lord, of saints, and somehow or other turn it into an instrument in Your hands, through which a nation can be touched, and through which other nations can also similarly be touched. We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I sought last night to open up this subject in a rather lengthy time of speaking, but I hope you got something out of it. Because we need to understand that prayer is strategic. It is not just coming together to offer up petitions, to let off steam.
I remember a dreadful occasion some years ago, speaking with a whole number of Baptist ministers. I was asked to speak to them, and afterwards there was a discussion. Two of the leading brethren—not in this state—said, “It’s good to have a prayer meeting because we should let the people let off steam.”
And I understood why there is so much deadness in many of the churches today. If the attitude to prayer is that it is a place where people can let off steam, it does not really matter what they pray or how they say it. It is just a psychological exercise, rather like in the old-fashioned mental homes, where they had screaming sessions to help everybody feel better.
You know, let the people sort of let off steam; let the things out of them—their little burdens and petitions and feelings—and they will all feel better for it. In other words, it is a psychological exercise.
Prayer is not a psychological exercise. It is a divine strategy.
I spoke last night about the mystery of intercession—particularly intercession. There is no mystery about prayer, because it is the pouring out of our hearts to God, and God can either say yes, or no, or wait. But when we come to intercession, it is a mystery. Why should we pray into being what God has already willed to happen? It is incredible.
If you and I do not face the essential mystery of intercession, we will never understand the true nature of intercession. In some extraordinary way, God demands fellowship. It is almost as if He will not act, although He has revealed what He will do and what His purpose is, until He has people who will stand with Him—whether it is an Abraham, or a Moses, or a Samuel, or a Daniel.
It matters not, as long as He has those who stand with Him. My only explanation for this is that we are being trained for something far more important than even what we are involved in down here. It has something to do with reigning with Christ in the ages to come.
The intercessor is someone whom the Lord calls into that kind of fellowship with Himself. Now, there can be such a thing as a company of intercessors, and I covet that for all of you: that by the ministry and working of the Holy Spirit, you might become a company of intercessors.
We also spoke last night about the principle of corporate prayer. What is the principle? Actually, the principle is very simply this: it is the Head and the Body in action.
The Head at the right hand of God, the Body here on the earth, joined in union together, acting in the name of the Head. This is exactly what the Lord Jesus taught us to pray:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
In other words, prayer is strategic. It is the bringing of the kingdom of God to bear on the world around us: the nation in which we are found, the city in which we are found, the locality in which we are found, and the situations we face personally, as families, in business, and in workaday life.
To be able to bring the kingdom of God into the situation—that is the strategic nature of prayer. More than that, it is the establishing of the will of God, as it is revealed and done in heaven, on earth.
We are the custodians of the will of God, of the purpose of God. That is why the Apostle Paul said that we are stewards of the mysteries. It is something given to us as the people of God, to be able really to stand with Him for the fulfilment of His purpose.
I cannot think of a time more historic, more significant, than the time in which we live. Could there be anything more dangerous, and at the same time, in many ways, more exciting than the days in which we are living?
We are on the threshold of the coming of the Messiah. Our job is not just to sit passively and sing together and fellowship together, much as that is wonderful. There is another side to it too: it is to see that the will of God is done amongst us as it is in heaven.
This principle of corporate prayer is found in the words that we have read together in Matthew 18. I had better read it, lest I misquote it.
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 key to this agreeing is the presence of the Lord in the midst. Only the Holy Spirit can make the presence of the Lord in the midst of His own a reality. But when the Lord makes His presence known by the Holy Spirit, we are harmonised.
This word in Greek, as I said last night, is symphōneō. We get the word “symphony” from it. We are symphonised; we are harmonised. We are, in some wonderful way, brought into a union.
It is not that we agree to agree. Rather, when we listen to someone praying, something leaps in our heart and we feel, “That is exactly what I feel.” It is harmonising. When that happens, we know that we have the answer to our prayer. The Lord is in the midst.
Now, this is what I mean by the Head and the Body in action. It is only the Holy Spirit Who can make this a living reality.
In the same Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, we have these wonderful words. This is how this glorious first Gospel ends:
Matthew 28:18-20
And Jesus came to them and spake unto them, saying, All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.
Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations.
And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.
You could translate that, “I am with you all the days, to the consummation of the age.” Now listen again: all authority and power is in the hands of the risen, glorified Messiah. Therefore, go. Preach the gospel. Make disciples of all nations. And the Lord is with us all the days, to the consummation of the age.
This is the context of corporate prayer. It is to recognise the authority that is in the hands of the risen Messiah. It is to recognise that it is not only authority in heaven; it is authority on this fallen earth.
There are principalities, there are powers, there are world-rulers of this darkness, there are hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places. It makes no difference. All authority and power is in the hands of the Lord Jesus.
And in prayer, we touch Him. We touch His throne. We bring to bear the kingdom of God upon these situations.
Now, I want to speak this evening about the Holy Spirit in prayer. The very first thing I want to say, as powerfully as the Holy Spirit will enable me, is that without the Holy Spirit, there is no such thing as corporate prayer.
It is a religious exercise. It is a coming together of a whole number of individuals who have different burdens and different petitions, and they all voice them. Indeed, it is a psychological exercise.
Without the Holy Spirit, there is no such thing as genuine corporate prayer. The Head, our Lord Jesus, is at the right hand of God. It is the Holy Spirit Who makes the headship of Jesus a living reality to the members of the Body. When that living reality of the headship of Jesus is made real to the members of the Body, something happens on earth.
You know the Moravian brothers and sisters, a couple of centuries ago, were all at each other’s throats. They were a very diverse group—Central Europeans, very often given to strongly held opinions. They just could not get on with one another. There was a lot of criticism and a lot of judgmental opinion shared around.
Then, on that famous occasion when all were present, the Holy Spirit fell on them. It was the birth of the Moravian Church. That church was to change Europe.
It is amazing to me even to consider what happened. They were so filled with love. Do you know, the church had no burden for the unsaved other than the people in their own communities—not beyond anything like that.
So tremendous was the love with which they were baptised on that occasion that some of them sold themselves as slaves to win the slaves. They came over to the Caribbean and set up a community on one of the islands.
Some of them contracted leprosy in order to reach lepers. I remember very well those three old, eighty-year-old Moravian sisters in the mountains of Samaria in Israel. They looked after a dozen lepers.
Some of them had no feet or hands; they were horribly disfigured. They had to be carried to the bathroom and fed by hand. Those amazing old ladies, cut off from their home community in East Germany, served the Lord. I could not believe it. Nobody knew about them. Nobody supported them. They are with the Lord now, but it was amazing to me.
When this happened among the Moravians, something else happened which is the key to this incredible baptism of love and sacrificial service: a prayer meeting began. It lasted one hundred years—twenty-four hours every day, for one hundred years.
Zinzendorf said, “When the prayer meeting ends, the Moravian Church ends,” which it did. Amazing, isn’t it?
So incredible is this work that the Holy Spirit has come to do. There is no such thing as corporate prayer without the Holy Spirit. I cannot underline it enough.
What does it mean in Ephesians 6 when the apostle says, “Praying in the Spirit at all seasons”? Now, I am told by some, especially those who are very charismatic—and I consider myself to be pretty charismatic as well—that this means speaking in tongues.
They say praying in the Spirit means that you are speaking in a tongue, worshipping the Lord, praying to the Lord, and you do not understand what you are saying. I have no problem with tongues. I have no problem in praying in a tongue. But this is praying in the Spirit.
Praying in the Spirit may include speaking in tongues, but it is far, far more than merely speaking in a tongue. Praying in the Spirit means that you are under the government of the Holy Spirit. You are inspired by the Holy Spirit. You are led by the Holy Spirit.
Your patience and endurance to continue in prayer are through the Holy Spirit, and the fulfilment of the prayer ministry is through the Holy Spirit. That is what it means to pray in the Spirit.
In other words, if I may put it this way, it is in the context of the Person of the Holy Spirit that real prayer can take place. Does that make sense?
That leads me to a third thing. In corporate prayer, the one absolute necessity is the recognition of the absolute authority and sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
The leading brothers must recognise the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. Every other person must recognise the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. It is important because His kingdom cannot come in any given situation unless we are under the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
The wonderful thing about the Body of Christ is that we balance one another; we temper one another. It is in fellowship that we are preserved from making mistakes. All problems in church fellowship come when one person believes that he or she has it all—has all the revelation, all the understanding—and everybody else is wrong.
The Body is incredible because it balances that. We do not like it. We do not like being sat upon by other brothers and sisters, or disciplined by other brothers and sisters.
I do not mean actually being sent into a corner with a hat on your head. What I mean is that the very fact of being bound to other brothers and sisters is in itself a discipline. It is much easier to do your own thing, think your own thoughts, and get on with it. But the Body is an amazing brake on us all.
It is through the members of the Body that we understand the leadership of the Holy Spirit. You must all have had this experience. Here we have a prayer meeting, and someone starts off. We sing a song, someone prays that the Lord will lead us, we sing another song, and then we start.
And it is boring. Someone prays, and you think, “What are they saying?” Then someone else says something else—at least we understand them—but it is just as boring. Then a third person prays, and in that moment the whole meeting is lifted into another dimension. That person has the anointing.
It is not always so. It does not stay on that one person at every single meeting. It simply means that, at that point, that person came under the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit and prayed the kind of prayer that the Holy Spirit wanted.
In that moment, all of us, whether we like it or not, witness something. You must have had this experience, when suddenly you feel—you cannot help it—you have to say, “Amen.” That was the Lord.
When we follow that, the time of corporate prayer becomes effective, powerful, life-changing. It touches situations. It turns the whole thing upside down and inside out.
I could give many illustrations of this, but because of time, we want to pray later. I have curbed myself. But I think of that wonderful word in Psalm 33:
Psalm 33:10
The Lord bringeth the counsel of the nations to nought;
He maketh the thoughts of the peoples to be of none effect.
What a wonderful word that is. But when we do not pray, it does not happen. When we stand with the Lord, as we have done in Jerusalem so many times over these so-called peace initiatives, we have seen every one of them rendered ineffective so far.
The whole turmoil and mess that America, Europe, and Britain are in is very largely due to the division of the promised land. That is another matter. But it is tremendous when you begin to understand how important this matter is to the Lord.
Until He gets a few people—insignificant in themselves, unworthy in themselves—until He gets that little group of people in the Messiah, in Christ, gathered in the name of Christ, with the Messiah by the Holy Spirit in the midst, the kingdom of God does not touch the counsel of the nations.
But the moment you get that little group, however insignificant in themselves, in the Messiah, suddenly they become all-powerful. Because in some wonderful way they are in the throne room of God—more important than the Oval Office, more important than 10 Downing Street, or the Élysée Palace in Paris, or any other place.
They can say what they will, and plan what they will, and have their strategies. But once you get a group of people united to the Head at the right hand of God by the Holy Spirit, the Lord brings the counsel of nations to nought and makes the strategies of the peoples ineffective.
I wish I could make it more clear. Let me put it another way: the Holy Spirit is the conductor of a symphony orchestra.
What would you think of a symphony orchestra that does its own thing? The cellos are reading the music and playing exactly as they think it ought to be played. The violins are all playing differently, according to their timing and their own idea of how the music should be interpreted. Everybody is doing their own thing.
Isn’t this very much like most of our prayer meetings? Everybody is basically doing their own thing.
The Holy Spirit is the conductor. In an orchestra, every member has two things: the music and the conductor. They have to keep their eye on the music and read it properly, and keep their eye on the conductor and follow him.
So, in a prayer meeting, this wonderful symphonising of the members of the Body together—symphonising so that they are one—is all to do with this matter. It is of tremendous importance that we should understand it. Then something can happen. Tremendous.
You know, I always used to say, can you imagine? In an orchestra, there is someone there with cymbals, and often they only strike them once in the whole symphony.
Supposing they struck them all the time. They say, “Well, I feel I should, and we should be known. I mean, the cymbals are cymbals. We shall let everybody know we are here.”
This would wreck the whole symphony. That is exactly what happens in prayer meetings when people have got a bee in their bonnet and cannot get rid of it. They have to belabour it and belabour it and belabour it and belabour it.
When the Holy Spirit is the conductor, He brings us all in at the right point, at the right time, and in some wonderful way we are harmonised together. He communicates the burden and the mind of the Head.
Corporate prayer is not a free-for-all. It is the priesthood of all believers in action, but it is not a free-for-all. It is under the leadership of the Head by the Holy Spirit.
Once we are strangers to the work of the Holy Spirit, all we can have basically is a religious exercise. But when we are not strangers to the work of the Holy Spirit, when we are prepared to put a learner’s “L” plate on our behinds—when we are learners—then there is a tremendous possibility of the Holy Spirit beginning to teach a whole company of people how to pray together.
Let me go further in this matter. Corporate prayer, as I have said, is not just a free-for-all for self-expression or personal petitions. It is something to do with the burden of the Head.
What is the burden that is in the heart of the Lord Jesus? Only the Holy Spirit knows. The Holy Spirit can take that burden out of the Lord Jesus and make it yours and mine.
Now, I would like to say something about the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Is it not interesting that everything in the old covenant was anointed? The king was anointed, the prophet was anointed, the priests were anointed, the Levites were anointed—everybody was anointed.
The tent of meeting was anointed. Every single piece of furniture in the tabernacle was anointed. Every piece of furniture in the temple was anointed. It is incredible to me that everything was anointed. What does this mean?
It means very simply that God will not use anything that is not anointed. Anointing simply means set aside for God. It is not for secular use. It is holy.
Is it not interesting that the very first thing the Lord Jesus taught us to pray in that pattern prayer was, “Hallowed be Thy name”? In Greek, as in Hebrew, it is the word: made holy, set apart, sanctified, is Your name.
In Jewish tradition, the sanctification of the name is tremendously important. When a person dies, they die with the unmentionable name of God upon their lips. That is, they say, “HaShem.” It is the sanctification of the name: the idea that somehow you are putting yourself in a special relationship with the Lord.
This matter of anointing is very important. I do not want to spend too much time on it, because otherwise it becomes a study in itself. But it is so important.
Do you remember Psalm 133? Have some of you ever wondered what in the world that psalm means? It says:
Psalm 133:2
It is like the precious oil upon the head,
That ran down upon the beard,
Even Aaron’s beard;
That came down upon the skirt of his garments.
Why the beard? It did not touch the flesh. The anointing cannot touch the flesh. Our problem often in prayer meetings is the flesh. It is not the Holy Spirit Who is in charge, but our feelings, our burdens, our ideas, and so on.
When it speaks about an anointing for the tent of meeting, I love this: everything within the tent of meeting is anointed, but the tent of meeting itself is anointed. That means for every church meeting there is an anointing.
If you discover—and may I put this very clearly—this is the job of the elders and the leaders. Their job is to distinguish what is the mind of the Lord for a meeting. They are guardians and watchmen, not dictators, but they are there to watch over the course of that time.
A prayer meeting even more so. A time around the Lord’s Table is obvious, and a time of Bible study is important as well. But in a prayer meeting, it is obvious. The anointing is there.
What does this mean? It means very simply that the Holy Spirit is here to lead. That is the anointing.
When we follow the anointing in a prayer meeting, we go from step to step and from stage to stage, and we have a wonderful sense of life. Everything to do with the anointing is fullness and life and grace. When we follow the anointing, it is life, and we know it.
I cannot believe it would be possible for you, in this company for which I have great respect, especially in the prayer ministry, not to know this. That is the reason I am here, by the way, because I never speak about prayer in this way unless a company has been praying for at least a year.
I refuse to come, because I know if I did, everybody would take what I say and make it a structure, and it would all be artificial. It is much better for you to have made all your mistakes. Now I am here to prune and cut out what is unfruitful, and help you to see how to stay under the anointing.
When a company of believers follows the anointing in a prayer meeting, you can go anywhere. Into the depths of God, you can know. Even though you may not be able to hold too much of the depths of God, nevertheless you can touch things that are tremendously significant in the purpose of God.
I cannot make this more plain: the anointing for corporate prayer is all-important.
If we follow it—now, let us be honest—very rarely do we start with the anointing. We start happily, and the Lord is very much with us. We are all children. You know how we love children when they make a mess of things. We forgive them.
Nobody beats children because they have made a mess of something. We think it is rather cute. The Lord is exactly the same in the prayer time. He loves those who are young in the Lord, who say the wrong thing at the wrong place in the prayer. It does not stop, for a moment, the anointing.
What does stop the anointing are those who are very old in the Lord, who put their foot in it again and again and again, and kill the whole prayer meeting. That grieves the Holy Spirit, and sometimes quenches the Holy Spirit.
The anointing is something tremendous. It is not as if the Lord is a hard, severe old Victorian father who loves to beat His children and put them into misery all the time, telling them how wrong and foolish they are.
Father is Father, and He is unbelievably sweet and kind with the young. Those who are older, the Lord will discipline far more severely.
So this matter of anointing is very, very important indeed. I hope I have been able to make it clear, because discerning the anointing, abiding under the anointing, and following the anointing will, in the end, lead to fulfilment.
What do we do with problem prayers? Here we are, following the anointing. It is a wonderful time—life, power—and then someone prays about their cat.
Tibby has got into a problem, and now Tibby becomes an impassioned prayer. What do we do? It is clear that the person is burdened. They are very fond of their cat, and they have now told us what they feel about poor Tibby and the need for the Lord to touch Tibby.
What we have to do is put up with it. The moment they say, “Amen”—you do not have to say “Amen,” but they say “Amen”—we take up the anointing.
We do not do it in a superior way, as if we are saying, “Lord…” We do not have to make it horribly plain that we are sitting on poor sister so-and-so and her little cat Tibby. We simply do not try with the flesh to take up the anointing. Wait for the moment.
But in your spirit say, “Lord, we want to follow the anointing.” Then you will find the prayer meeting is on course.
A good prayer meeting may have a number of hiccups—things like Tibby, and grandmothers outwitting the Lord, and some world-tour prayer, and then a shopping list here and there. But when the prayer meeting ends on course, it is a good prayer meeting.
One of the most wonderful things is that the folks have learned how, while still loving one another, they can together stay on course. Now you have learned something about overcoming, and this will stand you in very good stead.
That is why I always say that prayer and intercession are tremendously important, because you have to discern the mind of the Lord. That will help you in your business, in your workaday life, in your home life, and in the choices you have to make.
When you learn together to discern the will of the Lord—and the youngest one of them, it does not matter who you are—when you are together, you can witness in your spirit. You have a spirit, you know. In your spirit, you can witness to what the others are feeling.
Then you discover that you are able to read the mind of the Lord. This will help you tremendously in all kinds of situations, not necessarily to do with the church, but with your own personal life, family life, workaday life, and so on.
When we abide in the anointing, there is life and power and clarity and fulfilment. When we leave the anointing, or ignore the anointing, there is confusion, and we are all over the place.
Well now, I think I should bring all this to a close, because we want to have an hour of prayer. What about the gifts of the Holy Spirit? It is a big subject to suddenly bring up at the end.
What about the gifts of the Holy Spirit in corporate prayer? Is it not an odd thing that we have an idea that all prayer is one-way traffic? Somehow or other, we are doing all the talking and God is absolutely silent. Poor Lord. He just has to sit there and listen.
Because if He said something, we would all drop dead. We would be so shocked if the Lord answered back.
I always tell the story. Some of you have heard it before. When I lived in Richmond, England, in Halford House, there was a certain sister who lived about eighty or ninety miles away and used to phone from time to time.
The sister who looked after the house, when she was there, always managed to stop her from ever getting to me. But sometimes I was there in the evening, working on something or other. Of course, the phone would ring, and I would take it up.
Then she would explode: “Oh, bless the Lord! Praise the Lord! The Lord has endowed you with the spirit of wisdom and knowledge. I prayed that I might be able to talk with you. I have a problem.” With that, she would pour out this problem.
I never got a chance to say anything. At the end she would say, “Thank you, dear brother. Thank you so much for the counsel you have given to me in this time. I am so glad,” and she would put the phone down before I had a chance to say, “Sister, I think you are up the creek. You are miles away from anything.”
This happened two or three times. Then, after a while, I got a plan. I know it is very mean of me, but I am going to tell you what I did.
I would take the phone up, say, “Yes, sister. Oh, yes, yes,” and put the phone down and get on with my work. Then I would take it up and say, “Yes, yes,” and put the phone down. I would take it up and say, “Yes, yes,” and then she would go, “Oh, bless the Lord! Bless the Lord! He has given you wisdom.”
The way she dealt with me was the way many of us deal with the Lord. We pour out our problem to the Lord, and we thank the Lord: “You are full of wisdom and knowledge. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in You. You are wonderful. You lead Your people.” And we never give Him a chance to say anything.
Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice.” Every child of God has within them a spiritual receiver that can pick up the voice of God. It is not a human voice, but somehow or other you know it is the Lord.
I find it very sad that we spend so much time telling the Lord about all our problems, and then never, ever give the Lord a chance to say something.
Now, spiritual gifts are all to do with the speaking of the Lord. Sometimes it is a tongue and an interpretation; sometimes it is prophetic utterance. Sometimes, and very often, it is a Scripture. That is the safest way of all.
When somebody has a Scripture in the prayer time and reads it, they have been given it by the Holy Spirit. Then you discover that two other people, or one other person, have the same Scripture. I have seen it again and again.
I remember when we were in this nightclub that had been closed down by the police for immorality, and we took it as our second meeting place in Richmond, Surrey, England. We had a marvellous time there.
Then, in a prayer meeting, someone read the Scripture about the pillar of cloud and fire moving. Someone else said, “I had the same Scripture.” Then another person said, “Do you think the Lord is telling us we should be moving?”
I was horrified. We had only been there one year. We had painted the whole place up, had curtains made—they were interlined to keep the noise of the buses in the High Street out from the meeting—and we had wall-to-wall carpeting.
I thought, “The Lord does not do things like that. I know the Lord is not mean, but when He spends money like that and so on, He does not just say, ‘Move,’ and we leave the whole lot.”
However, after a few more prayer meetings, I myself became convinced that the Lord was saying, “The pillar of cloud and fire is on the move. Move.”
So we began to ask the Lord, “What do You mean, Lord?” At a famous prayer meeting, which I shall never forget, some dear sister had a Scripture about a house on the top of a hill, and all nations flowing to it. It was completely taken out of context.
I thought to myself, “Oh, how silly.” Then another brother had the same Scripture, and another brother had the same Scripture, and then everybody said, “This is it. We are to look for a house on Richmond Hill.”
We went everywhere looking for houses on Richmond Hill. I tell you, we had a wonderful time, but I must not take up time telling you. I remember Lord Hore-Belisha’s home. Oh, it was wonderful. His ballroom had all this marvellous panelling. I thought, “What a room to meet in.” He had a sunken Roman bath. I thought, “A place for baptism.”
But not a penny came. The same with another place that had its own entrance into Richmond Park—that beautiful royal park. We thought, “This is it, this is it.” Not a penny came until we came to Halford House.
Then I said at the time, “Halford House is not on the hill.” But this other brother, who was a businessman, said, “It is. It is only lower down the hill.” That was the house the Lord gave us for four hundred and fifty pounds. We were all kids. We did not even have—it was about eight hundred dollars today.
That is an amazing story. It is amazing when the Lord really speaks, and how He leads. That is the thing I think is so wonderful about this.
You must expect the Lord to speak. He will speak through Scripture, and it will always be confirmed by others. It will never be just one person. It will always be two or three.
In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established.
Expect the Lord to speak. We should expect Him to do so.
Well, that is it for the evening. Do not be afraid of a tongue when it is a real tongue. Do not be afraid of a prophetic utterance when it is a real one.
These things have not passed. Those who say they have do not know church history. All through church history, right up to the Reformation, there were times when these things reappeared.
They reappeared with the Huguenots, the Calvinist Huguenots. They appeared with the Waldensians. They appeared with the [unclear]. They even appeared in Martin Luther’s circle. They certainly appeared with George Fox and the early Quakers, and they appeared with John Wesley.
In his journal, Wesley said people fell down and babbled in some strange way. It has never actually gone. I do not know why Pentecostals always say that it began at Azusa Street in 1906. I cannot understand it.
It began far earlier. Mr. Sparks’s mother was an Irvingite. Edward Irving started something in 1819, and it spread through the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.
Mr. Sparks said to me, “When I was a boy, I used to listen in my mother’s drawing-room meeting to them all speaking in tongues and prophesying.” This was long before 1903 in the Welsh Revival and 1906 in the Azusa Street Revival.
These things have happened. However, we do not make a huge thing about this. The main thing is the Lord speaking to us.
So let me gather up everything and say this: what is the purpose of corporate prayer? Here it is:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
The whole purpose and goal of a time of corporate prayer is to see the kingdom of God touching various situations and problems; to see the will of God, as it is done in heaven, done on earth.
May the Lord help us.