Building Faith: Prayer

Prayer is one of the activities Christians were engaging in when they assembled. Prayer directed towards God is an admission that “God Is” and reflects our dependence upon him. The scriptures describe prayer as the “sacrifice of our lips”.

In public prayer the primary audience is God and the secondary audience is the assembled congregation.

Prayer is a teaching tool. There are several prayers recorded in the Bible and they are recorded there for a purpose… they teach us. We can also teach with prayer in our assemblies.

Public prayer can be thought provoking and can create an emotional response in the listeners. I’ve had two occasions when I have led a public prayer and have had people come up to me afterwards with something special to say.

One of those was in Houston. My dad was either sick or had just passed away… I don’t remember which and I was leading the closing prayer. I don’t really remember what I said but I do remember that I was trembling and Julie reached down and held my hand during that prayer. Afterwards a friend came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “That was a powerful prayer”.

To pray well in public we have to have an active prayer life in private. To have an active prayer life in private we need to have a broad understanding of who God is and we need to spend time thinking about God. We need to pray to God when things are troubling us and we need to pray when we’re happy or have been blessed with good things and for every emotion in between.

We need to also break away from the old traditional prayers we often hear in assemblies and pray with our own words and our own thoughts.

Here is a sampling of things we can pray for…

- We can pray for other people than just those in our congregation. Pray when tragedy or suffering happens in the community. For example, a school bus gets in a wreck and children are injured.

- Pray for things that seem impossible. Pray that Osama Ben Laden will hear the truth and become a believer.

- Ask God to tell a loved one that we’re thinking about them.

- Pray for the simple gift of healing… don’t tell God how to heal, “Lord touch them with your healing hand”.

- Confess in prayer whatever short comings you have in your life.

- Ask for blessings but confess that if you don’t receive them that God is still your God.

- Pray for God to take us all to heaven right now as a church family.

- Pray for things that are expressed well in songs… “O Lord our God, when we in awesome wonder, consider all… “

Public prayer is one of the essentials of congregational worship. God is listening and the congregation is listening. Prepare yourself by immersing yourself in the word and by spending much time in quiet personal prayer. When you stand before the congregation try as much as is possible to let it be just you and God and pray from your heart with your own words just as if you are sitting in your own back yard thinking about things and sharing them with God.