Episode 26: Prayer Meetings

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This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas? You see that one in Pechote, Mexico?

Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The Church as Christ's Monarchy and the Necessity of Local Membership

Welcome to the Ruled Church podcast, episode 26. On Ruled Church podcasts like 1 .0 or whatever, I think we only made like 30-something episodes. So it's pretty cool to be on episode 26 and still going strong, don't you think?

Yeah, and you know, I feel like this time around, you know, we've been able to have more consistency, and not just consistency of recording, but even more consistency of uploading because of, you know, multiple episodes and things.

So yeah.

And we record on Zoom now. The whole process is so much easier. So I'm your co-host, Alan Nelson, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Prairieville, Arkansas. And with me is the mustache man, Eddie Ragsdale, pastor of First Baptist Church in Marshall, Arkansas.

Why Churches Need Corporate Prayer

Today, we wanna talk about prayer meetings. If you want to shrink the number of people coming to a service, just tell them you're going to have a prayer meeting. And some people kind of dismiss it, you know, like, well, it's just prayer meeting tonight.

We'll stay home. Let's talk about the theology of prayer meeting first, and then we'll talk about the practicality of the prayer meeting second. So start us off. Theology of a church's prayer meeting.

You know, in the scripture, we see the church praying together. The first thing I think of when we think of the church praying together is right there in Acts, in Acts chapter four, when Peter and John are released from prison, and immediately the church comes together to pray and to beseech the sovereign Lord, acknowledging God's providence and seeking his blessing.

And so I think we see it from the very infancy of the church, even thinking before that, that the church was gathered in an upper room in a time of prayer, you know, when gathered together and when the Holy Spirit came.

So I just think that we see it from the very beginning of the church that God's people have always been a praying people. Going back into the Old Testament, we see that God's people have been a praying people.

The Psalms, so many of the Psalms are just the prayers of God's people set to that Hebrew poetic form. And so God's covenant people have always been a people who call upon the name of the Lord.

Yeah, so we're talking about right now, why pray? And here in a minute, we'll talk about how pray, how to pray in our corporate prayer meetings. So why should a church pray corporately together? Answer number one, we see it in the scriptures.

We see the people in the Old Testament, God's people praying together. We see God's people in the New Testament, which by the way, just to plug here, God's always and ever only had one people, believers.

And so we see believers in the Old Testament praying, corporately praying, special events praying, or times of blessing praying, or times of repentance praying, or times of joy praying. And then we see in the New Testament, the church gathering together to pray.

Jesus tells his disciples, not if you pray, but when you pray. And all of that, by the way, in the model prayer, if you think about it in Matthew chapter six, it's all in the plural. So it's not my father who is in heaven, it's our father who is in heaven.

And so the idea here is, I'm not saying that's the be all end all, but the idea here is, we're not just praying individually, we're also praying corporately. So number one, why have corporate prayer meetings?

It's modeled in the scripture. Now that's not all, right? What are some other reasons a church should be praying together? Well, I'm gonna start us off on this one and say, because God actually uses the prayers of his people to accomplish the decrees that he, or the decree that he has given before the foundation of the world.

So, you know, if God is sovereign, why pray? And the old adage is like, if he's not sovereign, why pray? We pray because he is sovereign. And because he is ordained actually in a mysterious and beautiful way to use the prayers of his people to accomplish his good purposes.

Anything to add or talk about with that?

God Uses the Prayers of His People to Accomplish His Purposes

Yeah, you know, just to take a kind of a lesson from the testimony of church history, so many of the revivals that we have seen in the history of the church, the genuine revivals, the times when God has, in a special way, seemed to bring large numbers of people into the kingdom, those periods of revival have almost without fail been preceded by times of earnest prayer.

You know, I was listening to, I believe it was Mack Tomlinson just the other day, just recounting the history of the Welsh Revival, and then the history of the First Great Awakening, and just pointing to the fact that those were times when God's people prayed, and then we seen God move.

I'm not saying that if you start doing a prayer meeting, you're promised, you know, a tenfold increase in your church through that because of a mighty revival over the next year. But, you know, Jesus does say in Luke chapter 11, when in Luke's gospel, he shares the model prayer, he does tell the disciples that everyone who asks receives.

And there he's not saying, you know, you ask for a Lamborghini and you're gonna get it. But what he is saying is, you know who doesn't receive? The person who never asks. So a church that never prays, they shouldn't expect to receive anything.

They're not asking for anything. The one who never knocks on the door, they shouldn't expect the door to ever open because they never knock on the door. And so we ought to expect as God's people that God wants us to pray.

As you said, sovereignly, he's ordained our prayers to bring about his purposes. And so we ought to be praying just because we even see it in the history of the Christian church. My sons and I right now, we're reading a book called Wonders of Grace, which is basically just a collection of testimonies of people that were saved under the ministry of C .H. Spurgeon.

And, you know, so many of those testimonies, almost all of them do recount sermons that they heard, but so many of them acknowledge the importance of the praying church in the conversion of the individuals being saved.

And so if we genuinely care about evangelism and the transformation of hearts and the edification and building up a local church, we've got to pray.

Amen.

So why do we pray? Because it's exemplified in the scriptures. It's commanded in the scriptures. God actually answers prayer. God actually accomplishes his purposes through the prayers of his people. And maybe only other thing I'd add about why we pray is God is worthy.

It is an exaltation of Christ and his gospel when we pray because it is acknowledging that God calls us to come boldly into the throne room, you know, in the name of Jesus, based on his righteousness, not our own, that we call upon the name of the Lord.

And so God is glorified in the prayers of his people. It humbles us, it guards us against pride. Anything else to add in that?

Well, and then maybe also, instead of us thinking of why we ought to pray in terms of, listen, you have to pray because of these reasons, rather we always need to remember it's a privilege.

Amen.

We have an audience before the God of the universe. And because of Christ, we have access to come before the throne of grace boldly. And so with that being the case, why would we not avail ourselves of it?

Honestly, it's not so much that we have to pray. It's that a person who loves Christ, that's what we wanna do. We wanna go to the Father in prayer. We wanna go to Christ in prayer. We wanna go to God in prayer.

And so it's the privilege of our life that we get to speak with God.

The Privilege of Prayer and More Time for It in Worship

So I'll make one comment before we get into the how-to of a prayer meeting. And this may lead us on a bit of a tangent, but with all that being said, I would encourage more prayer in our services. There's been too many services that may start with some sort of opening prayer.

Maybe you have a prayer at the offering and maybe one or two, maybe the pastor prays or something, but very little, you have an hour service and maybe two minutes total have been prayer. So something to consider there that if all this is true, and it is that in our normal regular gathering, there should be more time of prayer.

Any comment you have that, and then we can get into the how-to.

Yeah, I think I've read that Martin Lloyd Jones would sometimes pray for extended periods of time, maybe 40 minutes in a service. I've read that before, that just extended times of pastoral prayer in the church meeting.

And so you think about the power, how are people gonna learn to pray if they never hear us praying? I mean, yes, we could teach on prayer, we could preach on prayer, but prayer really is one of those things that you learn to do it by doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

And you learn to do it personally and individually by doing it corporately. And we might also add this, it's not just corporately in the local church, but hey, I'll say this to men, men, you need to be leading your families in prayer.

Amen.

You need to be leading your families in prayer. I mean, how many children grow up and they've never heard dad pray? And I'm not saying dad doesn't pray, I'm not saying that you're not spending time alone with the Lord in prayer, but they need to hear you pray.

Teaching Prayer by Example in the Home and Church

Yeah, that's a good transition because there's a question I wanna ask you is, what about, I've heard people over the years say, well, you know, Jesus says pray in secret. And so then you kind of have to deal with that a little bit, but one thing I would respond to that is like, and you kind of hit it already, but one of the ways that we learn to pray is hearing other people pray.

And when Jesus says that we should pray in secret, he is not canceling out corporate prayer. What he is attacking is pridefulness in prayer or showiness in prayer, or we can get on this here in a minute, but if you're having a prayer meeting, there may be time that, you know, you need to pray a little bit less and make sure you're allowing for others to have the opportunity to pray.

But Jesus' command to not pray in public is not prohibitive of the corporate prayer meeting. Would you have any thought, anything you wanna add to that one?

Yeah, and certainly I would wholeheartedly agree. And I would say what Jesus is telling us, if you're not praying in secret, then yes, don't pray. Then you should not be praying corporately, you individually, because your heart's not prepared.

You're not right before the Lord. And so, yeah, it should be the overflow of our private prayer life that leads to the corporate prayer meeting. And honestly, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, if you wanna shrink a meeting, call it a prayer meeting.

But maybe the reason why our prayer meetings are so anemic is because, honestly, our private lives of prayer are so anemic. And that probably is a genuine symptom in most local churches.

I think that's one thing. And then the other thing is, I think sometimes we stink at prayer meetings. And so that's what we wanna talk about now, because you're just like, well, okay, what do we do? Now, a lot of typical prayer meetings that I've seen in rural churches have been something akin to, you know, a hospital report.

You go and you have, you know, this person's situation, this person's situation. I've been in meetings before where someone's like, I've got two unspokens, you know, or somebody's talking about Aunt Sally's bunion or whatever, you know, and it's like, okay, so let's say we're gonna have a prayer meeting Wednesday night.

How do we do that effectively? And that's kind of what we wanna transition into now. We've talked about the why of prayer meeting. Now let's talk more about the how of prayer meeting. You wanna weigh in here?

How to Structure a Prayer Meeting Well

Yeah, one of the things I would say is we wanna be careful not to feel like you have to do the same thing every single time. Every prayer meeting needs to look exactly the same. That's one thing I would say.

It's okay to change it up. A second thing, and you and I, I believe we've talked about this before on the podcast, but just like praying the scriptures can be beneficial personally, praying the scriptures can be beneficial corporately.

So one thing that we've done in our prayer meetings here is sometimes what we'll do is we will work through a list of things that we're gonna pray for, and we will put passages of scripture with those.

And then what we'll do is we'll go through and each person will take maybe a topic that we're praying for and the scripture that we've set with that, and they will pray that passage of scripture in connection to that topic.

And that can be a really, really helpful way to think through your prayer. I think sometimes we almost elevate the idea of the spontaneous prayer to the point where we almost feel like, well, it wouldn't be a spiritual if we plan it, but you may have a much better prayer meeting if you'll plan it a little bit.

Yeah, so here's, I kind of go through an outline of what we did of our prayer meeting. We had a prayer meeting beginning of, the first Wednesday night of January, we had a prayer meeting, and I'll just kind of work through the outline.

Let me go through this outline and then you can respond. But the first thing we did is we read Acts 1, 1 through 14, because we're reading through the, the plan that we're reading through together as a church, that was part of it.

And so it was just a natural thing to read it and say, hey, the early church prayed. You know, this is as they're awaiting Pentecost. The next thing we did is, and again, I wanna emphasize, you said you don't do all these the same, and I think that's right.

And so next time we'll change it up. But next thing we did, we read from the Valley of Vision, and we read the prayer called Continual Repentance. And so the next thing we did is we had a time of silent prayer and basically of repentance.

And then it was, you know, so we, so I said, hey, we'll take a few minutes here. Just pray, you know, pray. And then if anyone wants to pray out loud during this time, you can, and then we did that. The next thing we did is we read Matthew 6, 9 through 13, the model prayer.

And I asked just one brother to pray, to pray, you know, and so we prayed through that. And then as a group, we were trying to memorize Psalm 96 this year, and so, which we're gonna do that. I mean, it's not gonna take all year, but we're starting off.

This is something new for our church to memorize scripture together. So we're gonna memorize Psalm 96. And so I said, let's pray through Psalm 96. And so the next thing we did is we prayed through Psalm 96, just line by line, which is kind of this brother prayed or this guy prayed or whatever, a couple of verses at a time, and then we got through that.

Then the next thing we did is we sang a song together. And then the next thing we did is we listed, okay, because here's the deal. Well, we started talking about things to pray for specifically. And so we broke that up.

So the first thing we prayed for was Pastor Christian and Pastor Felipe in Mexico, and we prayed for them. Then we prayed for our evangelism and outreach and those things. Then we prayed for the spiritual growth of our church and the current sermon series that we're doing.

And then we prayed because I don't wanna dismiss this because the way I talked earlier, you might be like, well, you're dismissive of physical requests, but then we prayed for physical requests and there's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, that's good. We should pray for the, there's nothing wrong with praying for so-and-so's bunion or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Like that's okay, but it's just when that's the substance and focal point of a prayer meeting, it's just not good.

And so one of the things we did is each one of these things that we prayed for, we broke up. So it was like, number one, we're praying for this. All right, anybody wanna pray for this? And we may have one guy or a couple of guys or more than that.

And then we're like, okay, now we're gonna pray for this. And, you know, kind of broke it up. And that kept our focus on that specific thing. And then it was okay and right to share the physical request.

Again, I don't wanna minimize praying for those things. We ought to pray for those things. But so often prayer meetings are inverted. You pray for all those things. You don't ever pray for the lost or you don't ever pray for your church's growth, all those things.

So all that together, that whole thing, now that wasn't like, you could tell from me reading, that wasn't like we just started praying and we never stopped praying. You know, we broke some things up. However, we started at probably like 6 .02 and we finished at 7 .10.

And that was so encouraging to me. And it never felt like, oh, this is boring or this is out, you know, and it was so encouraging. So you have any thoughts or comments or feedback and then you talk some.

Well, I was gonna say, it's amazing how similar that is to what we did. Because this last Sunday night, we had our first, I wouldn't call what we do on Wednesday nights a prayer meeting. Well, we are, the meeting that I would most associate with, I mean, we pray in every meeting, but the meeting of our church that I would call a prayer meeting is our Sunday night meeting.

And so we didn't meet January 1st on Sunday night. We did, we had the Lord's Day service that morning, but we didn't meet that night because of some other things that took place in our church on that day.

So we had our first Sunday night prayer meeting this last Sunday. And what I did was I went to Luke chapter 11 and where Jesus gives the model prayer in Luke and then follows it up with some teaching about persistence in prayer.

And I made a few comments about the narrative portion of that about Jesus comments on persistence of prayer and giving good gifts, giving the gift of the Holy Spirit to us as God's people. And then we went back and we walked through the model prayer and we basically prayed thinking about the year ahead and we prayed for, you know, that the Lord would bring his kingdom, him being the one who is reigning, his providential reign.

And of course, I was trying to be a good Baptist. So I tried to, you know, alliterate it a little bit, but his providential reign, we prayed for prosperity and evangelism, for God to grant, you know, boldness and success and evangelism this next year as we share the gospel in our community.

We prayed for the church to progress and edifying and building one another up and the fellowship and the friendship that God has for his people. We prayed for the promotion of missions, the gospel crossing cultural barriers and getting into new places.

We prayed for, as you said, we ought to be praying for physical needs. We prayed for, you know, personal provision. Jesus even says, give us this day our daily bread. He there is instructing us that we ought to pray about physical things, about the things that we need so that we can go about serving and honoring the Lord.

We prayed about our forgiveness of sins as Jesus instructs us in the model prayer. And then we ended up by praying for God to be glorified in all of these things. Now, what we did with those was, I would point out each thing, we would talk about it for just a minute, and then I would ask for a volunteer to pray.

And they would pray through that and we would move to the next one. And so, you know, we had, you know, six or seven different people praying as we're working through each one of these. And like you said, it was probably just a little over an hour meeting and it did not feel like, you know, we were stretching it out.

You know, it was just this natural outflowing, but it wasn't spontaneous. That's the thing I wanna remind people. I mean, I had these categories worked out ahead of time. If I just walked in there and said, hey, what do y 'all wanna pray about?

Then it would have been, this person's in the hospital, this person's got this going on, and we would have prayed for those few needs. This gave us some direction. Hey, we do wanna remind ourselves, we want people to be saved in 2023 through the preaching of the gospel.

We want the church to be built up and be stronger in the year 2023. And so we were really thinking in those terms because we had prepared to think that way.

Amen, and there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, praise God for those spontaneous prayer meetings that go on, you know, for an hour or so.

Yeah, it's not bad.

Yeah, but for me, for my experiences, the spontaneous prayer meetings are the ones that end up being a little bit shorter and sometimes lack of focus sometimes, you know. However, you know, we have other prayer meetings.

For example, we meet every Sunday morning at 8 .45, any of the men of the church that want to, it's usually about four of us and we pray. And we don't really have a, we usually just read scripture and pray, or sometimes I might read from the Valley of Vision and pray and that's fine, it's a little bit shorter meeting.

But I think a strong emphasis in this episode that we want to push is it's okay to have forethought and planning and preparation. Those are going to be some of the healthiest prayer meetings that you can have.

And hopefully you've learned in this episode some reasons to pray, but also really been encouraged on some ideas of how to pray. Only other thing I would add, and we didn't do this because we're so small.

The only other thing that I would add is we would, I think there is a option of breaking up sometimes. If you have a bigger group, you can break up in a smaller group. I think that you can pray specifically for, you know, one of the brothers mentioned to me, like giving the children's name in the church, you know, praying specifically say for their salvation, you know.

And so there's some other things you can do with breaking up into small groups. And, you know, I think all that can be helpful, but hopefully you've learned some helpful ideas to have a more fruitful prayer meeting.

Recommended Resources for Leading Corporate Prayer

One last thing before we close, I know you wanted to mention a book.

Yeah, this has been a really helpful book for our church, and it's called A Praying Church, The Neglected Blessing of Corporate Prayer. It's by Dennis Gunderson, and Dennis used to have a bookstore called Grace and Truth Books, but they are now in Conway.

Are they still Grace and Truth?

Yes.

Books, so it's now in Conway, Arkansas, Grace and Truth Books, but I'm sure you can find it online. A Praying Church, The Neglected Blessing of Corporate Prayer, Dennis Gunderson. And so I would really, especially for pastors, and I assume most of our listening audience is probably pastors, but especially for pastors, leaders in the church, that is a wonderful, very helpful book for thinking through how to lead effective prayer meetings.

Amen.

Well, I think this has been a good episode. I know I've enjoyed it. I've been encouraged and edified, and hopefully our listeners have as well, and hopefully you'll grow into be a more praying church.

That's what we wanna do. One of the encouraging things, after we did that prayer meeting, two brothers came up and said, we need to do this more. I was like, wow, I was so encouraged by that. And so I hope that pastors, and if you're not a pastor, you're just a church member, encourage your pastor maybe to listen to this episode or to think through or to buy the book and to encourage it.

One of the things about pastors, I can say this, is sometimes we are not, sometimes we wanna do things, but we're just afraid that it's just gonna be me and one other person and no one is gonna like it, and it's just gonna, but if you encourage your pastor, maybe that'll push him over the edge to lead out in these things that he should be doing anyway, but he could use the encouragement.

And I might just add, this is the kind of, I would say, I would rather us be faithful in prayer as a church, even if it's not well attended, than for us to say pragmatically, well, that's not working because people aren't coming.

Well, we're not praying to them anyway. And so the one who's most important is attending. The Lord is attending to the prayers of His people. And so, and then I think as our churches grow healthier, we will see stronger and better prayer meetings.

But if you have a small group in your church willing to meet and pray, don't despise those small things.

Amen, that's good, that's right. Amen, that's a good word to start there. And prayer is something you can cultivate a hunger for, but you can't create a hunger for. And so that's up to the Lord, and you just be faithful with where you're at and who wants to pray.

Don't neglect the ones that wanna pray because of all the people that may not wanna pray. They might be unregenerate, right? So your prayer meeting might start something there. So praise God. Well, we're so grateful.

This will launch, I think this is February. So we've made it all.

Oh, wow.

It's not like I don't know the date. I'm just saying today is January the 11th. And I can't remember when this is coming out. So we've made it to February, 2023, Eddie. How about that?

That's awesome. That's awesome. Praise the Lord.

Amen. Yeah.

I appreciate you, brother. Thank you guys for joining us on this week's episode of the Rural Church Podcast. Say goodbye, Eddie.

We'll see you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the toimos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?