CHURCH SLEEPS ON TURNING A BLIND EYE.
THE MISSING SPIRIT OF PRAYER
With the late 19th C. downgrade of church prayer meetings the clergy then (conveniently relegated it to privatized intercession to the home. The increased pastoral control and often made him the hero as sole prayer guru of the assembly, although he too, usually lacks the fire to do so orally before the congregation today.
What happened to the gathering of interceding saints’ weekly meet of the congregation? Their once powerful prevailing mediation for the lost, for the state and the nation has been silenced or at best muted for over a hundred and fifty years?
No wonder congregations die and disappear to leave only the ebullient stage performing pulpits to simulate what has been lost by their irreverent and flippant humour, or unashamed secular jokes; improvised music of the world, and a manufactured sense of excitement to keep the hype going. They are sadly deluded, nothing can replace the abandoned spirit of prayer by the priesthood of all believers wherein oral fervent and impassioned brethren, elders, and deacons participated as moved by the burdens granted by the High Intercessor sitting on the right hand of the Father ever interceding for His body.
Today a nation has floated from its bearings once anchored, for the most part, upon the Rock.
New England Theology built upon the humanistic 18th C Enlightenment that led famed evangelists into liberal philosophy of the FREEDOM OF THE WILL (1746), rewriting the principles of prayer, grace, and salvation by faith through grace as they rejected both the Reformation and evident biblical principles.
This downgrade of the weekly public church prayer meetings urged pastors to reassert control over the midweek meeting and re-elevated their eminence as Commanders-in-Chief to replace the very life-breath of an assembly.
The pulpit replaced the-power-house of fire with a disappearing small slot suffixed to the pastors’ study at the end of his oration.
A “smoking flax” is all that is left of the fire that shook the church and awakened the lost with a hunger to hear the Gospel it preached, soon brought by the Father to Christ Jesus, though ‘the hearing of faith’ (Galatians).
Modern controlling pulpits have in a hundred years silenced both the voice of the pews and quenched the spirit of prayer and now the nation and o/or Union pays the price.
That Spirit of Prayer leaves when there is “no room for HIM in the inn”. But relegated to the stable the doors are locked and soundproofed for fear of that holy fire that once burned in pulpits and pews. The key is hidden in a time capsule as an anachronism of the past.
