OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (Pt.3)
Since the Reformation, until the mid 19th C the weekly intercessory gathering of the saints was an essential meeting for the whole congregation. From time immemorial this was the secret of survival for the New Testament church at Jerusalem and Antioch when it was still a persecuted and vilified minority.
Today, with very few exceptions, free prayer participation of spoken intercession is a forgotten public meeting. It was once a staple part of the church programme. It has been abandoned as too archaic and old-fashioned in the modern 21st-century hustle, and bustle addicted to restless compulsive busyness.
The unions secured the right of the worker to 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, and 8 hours leisure. Today’s frenzy of movement, predicted by the ancient prophets, seems to allow time for busy social media, electronic interactive screen communication and entertainment for leisure, leaving little or no time for private devotion to God in the Scriptures and prayer. Much is often determined by their master, the smartphone allowing them any quietude. Heaven forbid that they dare silence or switch it off! Such action would be anathema to their so-called friends sending the latest interactive hearsay rumours.
Truthfully, on average the godfearing and the upright professors of moral rectitude and religion could not possibly stop still in prolonged silence without image, icon or decibel to preoccupy their minds. Why? Because they do not want to be discomforted facing their own naked soul unmasked of its pretence, and spurious profession of walking with the Intercessor: the Saviour.
Prayer, the clergy says, in this ‘modern-day’, can be automated and privatised by circulating lists of their people’s needs to the faithful for their petitions, in private prayer via prayer-chains. Whether by Bible Study hand-outs, email, smartphone, or social media, they are in reality, obfuscating as clergy and elders as they silently proclaim: “Why pray, when the church can SAY it some other way? Viz: said prayers, read prayers, and dead prayers?
When the human spirit prevails in an assembly the spirit of prayer is unwelcome. Preachers and leaders bypass it altogether and relegate public assembly prayer to individual home activity. When this happens hot coals cool; luke-warm embers become cold; broken reeds become more bowed; saints forget how to pray and when they try they are lost for words the vapour of smoking flax ascends. They with the household of faith need the old-time fire of free spontaneous vocal saints’ praying in the midst of the assembly. Without it they are separated from the Spirit’s dynamic of fire that God has deigned to ignite only when saints pour out their hearts aloud to Him. In a day of false-fire, it must be understood that prayer is in the language of the people, not the indulgence in eccentricity via popular hypnotic entrancing gibberish. The latter can be made unwelcome by precluding outsider participation.
The modern church focuses only on public praise in worship of song and overlooks the other. No one denies that God has chosen the ‘foolishness of preaching’ to save, keep, and revive, but only free public prayer generates the fire of the spirit of prayer in the heart of the newborn lamb. Down through the ages until the mid-19thC. our godly forefathers took this as incontrovertible. This was so in the New Testament church at Jerusalem and later at Antioch.
“And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.” (Acts 4:31)
“Gird yourselves, and you priests lament,: you ministers of the altar howl: come, lie all night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God…Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God, and cry unto the Lord.” (Joel 2:13-14)
Credits: King James Version-(Public Domain);
Article: John David
