Prayer as an instinct – Praying Together, Part 3

I visited my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandkids in Pittsburgh recently.  Though my kids live in Lancaster, my granddaughter was born four hours away in Pittsburgh because she has a heart condition.  So I got to meet her for the first time in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit of UPMC Children’s Hospital.  She was hooked up to all sorts of machines and tubes and wires. 

But you know what was in her mouth?  A pacifier. One of those big aqua colored rubber circle pacifiers just like the one in the picture above.  My granddaughter was working that pacifier, just like every baby does.  Why?  Because babies have a natural instinct to perform a sucking motion.  It’s what keeps them alive, right?  Instinct activates a motion so that they can receive nourishment. 

I think we see another life-giving instinct in the early church. In Acts chapters 3 and 4, Peter and John had been preaching about Jesus, ministering in the city of Jerusalem, and the Jewish religious leaders who disagreed with Jesus threw Peter and John in jail. Peter and John were two of Jesus’ 12 Twelve disciples, and part of his inner circle of three, Peter, James and John. 

The next day the religious leaders release Peter and John, threatening them to stop preaching about Jesus.  What do Peter and John do?  Let’s find out in Acts 4, verse 23,

“On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.”

The natural reaction of the first Christians was a movement toward prayer.  Gather and pray.  Cry out to God together. 

It was like an instinct. 

Instinctual habit brings life.  Even though she had been on a feeding tube for three weeks since the day she was born, my granddaughter worked that pacifier like a champ. A few days later when my son fed her from a bottle for her first ever bottle, she downed it no problem. 

Instinctual habit brings life.  Prayer is no different.  Prayer can and should be an instinctual habit for Christians, because it brings life.  The earliest Christians demonstrate this instinctual habit. 

In this and our first two posts this week here and here, as we’ve noticed in the account of the first Christians in the book of Acts, there is not a single story about a person who prays to God by themselves.  All we see is the instinctual habit of praying together with others in the church.

That is not to say that the Bible never depicts people praying by themselves.  The Bible has loads of those stories, including many in the life of Jesus, who famously went off by himself to pray.  But he also often prays with his disciples and others, and thus he taught them not just the content of prayer, but also the practice of praying together.  When we observe Jesus and his first followers, their practice of prayer is both a commitment to praying alone and praying with others. They are so committed to praying together, it’s like an instinct, a natural first reaction that sustained them. 

How about you? Is prayer a life-giving instinct?

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash