What kind of prayer meetings does God desire? – Praying together, Part 1

Do you remember the Asbury outpouring that happened last year?   From February 8, 2023, all the way to February 24^th, 2023, that’s 17 days, there was a continuous, 24/7, worship and prayer event at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky.  Throughout history there have been numerous such extended prayer efforts. In fact, the International House of Prayer in Missouri has a 24/7/365 prayer room.  Every day is divided into two-hour segments, and each segment is led by a team with prayer and worship.  You can watch their livestream anytime here. 

Do we need to pray like that?

Our current blog series is about relationships in the church family.  Previously in the series, I wrote about the importance of meeting together. Those six posts start here.  In those posts, we looked at how the very first Christians met together to see if we could learn anything from them.  They spent three years with Jesus, so they would best know how he wanted them to meet together.  In today’s post, let’s review a bit of what we learned in the previous posts.  What did we see the first Christians doing when they met together? 

In Acts 1, verse 12, we read the story of what the followers of Jesus did right after Jesus ascended back to the Father in heaven, 

“Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”

The very first expression of the followers of Jesus is “they all joined together constantly in prayer.”  We don’t know precisely how they did this.  We know there were 120 of them, which you can see if you glance at verse 15.  But they had no church building, so did they have a space that 120 people could fit into at the same time?  Did they break into small groups? What about food?  Sleep?  Work?  Hygiene? 

We’re obviously not going to answer those questions because the text doesn’t give us answers.  But we don’t need to answer all those questions.  Instead let’s just observe what the text tells us the first Christians did.  The first Christians, the men and women who were Jesus’ followers, were committed to meeting together for prayer.

We believe that this very first prayer meeting of the church lasted somewhere in the vicinity of 10-14 days.  Think about that commitment to wait and pray together.  Jesus had told them to wait, and they were obedient.  I applaud their determination to wait and pray because 10-14 days seems to me like a really long time.  After a day or two, I would probably be thinking that Jesus was a fraud, and I just gave the past three years of my life to nothing. So the first Christians’ example of commitment to pray is instructive to us.  It can be done!

But please don’t hear me saying that God is calling us to have 10-14 day long prayer meetings.  We can choose to like the International House of Prayer.  Or a nonstop prayer meeting might break out spontaneously like the Asbury outpouring.  But as we will see in our posts over the next few days, the New Testament doesn’t instruct us to have nonstop prayer meetings.  In fact, the book of Acts never again mentions a nonstop prayer meeting.  So what else does Book of Acts describe? In the next post we’ll find out.