Core values — Fervently Pray
By George O. Wood
Excerpts from General Superintendent George O. Wood’s book, Core Values, will be featured in The Council Today. The complete book is available from GPH.
Passionately proclaim, strategically invest, vigorously plant, skillfully resource—each of these elements is vital to the life and health of the Assemblies of God or of any church. But without a fifth core value, the first four will accomplish nothing. The church and the believer must fervently pray in order to accomplish anything for the Kingdom.
The Early Church father John Chrysostom expressed it most eloquently and succinctly: “God can refuse nothing to a praying church.”
We cannot suppose that God will do for us without prayer what He has promised to do for us only through prayer. Without prayer we cannot accomplish the work of the Lord. It has been said countless times, but it is true: The church moves forward on its knees. If we are to see God work in our day and in our Fellowship, we must be praying people.
JESUS IS OUR EXAMPLE IN PRAYER
The term has almost become trite thanks to today’s marketing machine: “What would Jesus do?” But I can assure you that whatever Jesus was doing during His earthly ministry, it was built on prayer. He regularly communed with His Father in order to accomplish His Father’s mission.
He showed us that prayer must color all of our life. He prayed for others: for children, for disciples to receive the Spirit, for the faith of disciples to fail not. We learn Jesus set aside time and place for prayer.
There is nothing half-baked about Jesus’ prayers. He prayed with passion and intensity.
“Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25).
JESUS TAUGHT ON PRAYER
As we learn of prayer from Jesus, we find He taught us to pray for our enemies, to pray privately rather than for show and to pray to the point. In other words, stay engaged in your prayer. Don’t go on automatic pilot. Jesus taught us to persist in prayer — to ask, seek and knock, with the result being the gift of the Spirit. He taught that we ought always to pray and not faint.
Jesus gave us worthy goals for our prayers. He told us to pray for workers in the harvest, that some things cannot be done except through prayer, to pray in unity with others, to pray honestly and with humility. He told us His house should be a house of prayer. Jesus instructed us to pray with faith. He told us to pray with forgiveness and personal integrity. We are to pray to avoid temptation. We are to pray in Jesus’ name.
JESUS WARNED AGAINST NEGLECTING PRAYER
In Mark 9, the disciples had experienced powerful ministry success already, but the demon-possessed boy proved too hard with them. What had happened?
Jesus came right to the point. The disciples were struggling with unbelief and powerlessness. Jesus identified the cause: “This kind can come out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). While some versions include fasting in the text, Jesus’ first focus was prayer. He directed the disciples’ attention to their prayerlessness and that their prayerlessness had resulted in powerlessness.
A church that does not fervently pray is not going to see God moving in its midst. That congregation may limp along doing a few things in its own power, but it isn’t going to accomplish much. If the AG is to effectively reach this world, then prayer must become the foundational characteristic of our Fellowship.
THE LIFE OF A CHURCH IN PRAYER
Early in my years as a pastor, a gentleman by the name of Armin Gesswein would periodically visit our church. He was an older gentleman who in the early days of Billy Graham’s ministry had been a prayer counselor to Billy Graham. Armin was a wonderful man of prayer.
“George,” he said to me, “I visit and minister in a lot of churches. One of the things I look at in church bulletins is whether there are any prayer meetings taking place.” I pondered that.
“I’m afraid to say,” he continued, “that in a lot of churches there are many events, but there’s little publication of when the church is meeting for prayer.”
When he was done talking to me, I immediately grabbed my bulletin from that day just to check, and I was only partially reassured. While we did have prayer meetings announced, there were not enough. I began to make prayer a greater priority for our church.
We need many more of our congregations to take prayer that seriously. It is too easy for us to rely on our own efforts and our own strength. Prayer drives us to our knees in dependence upon God, reminding us that human effort cannot accomplish His purposes.
PRAYER WILL MAXIMIZE THE CHURCH’S MINISTRY
Why does the church exist? To reach a spiritually dead world with the life-giving gospel. Prayer will keep us from forgetting our mission. Prayer will remind us of our dependence upon the Lord to carry out that mission. Powerlessness is a direct result
of prayerlessness.
Serving at our national office, I am even more convinced our national offices must set an example for our churches. We begin too many meetings with perfunctory prayer. Anyone who thinks it is a courtesy to God to open a meeting with prayer does not grasp just how vital God’s leading is in our business matters. We must passionately pray for His guidance.
For a Pentecostal organization that believes in and depends on the Holy Spirit to move, it is essential we be people of prayer.
PRAYER WILL EMPOWER THE BELIEVER IN GOD’S SERVICE
Whether or not we realize it, the mission of the local church and of every believer in the church is a matter of life and death. Even in the absence of persecution, there are people around us in desperate need of a saving gospel that can preserve them from eternal separation from God.
Prayer in the context of the church’s saving mission is not perfunctory. It is a necessity, and souls are at stake.
Are we truly ready to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission in this world? We can only do so by following His example and His teaching on prayer. Jesus himself passionately proclaimed the gospel, strategically invested in His disciples, vigorously planted the seeds of His church and skillfully resourced those who would bring that Church into reality. But He did all of it on the strength of fervent prayer.
We can do no less.