It is hard to imagine a church being very effective for the work of establishing, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” without giving primary attention to prayer. We pray for one another and the needs around us as a regular discipline during our Sunday morning services and weekly bible classes, but these prayer times are relatively brief as we want to leave time for worship and the message or study together. But we have also identified a need to meet once a week on Sunday’s before church at 10:40 with only the purpose of praying together for specific requests, seeking God’s will for the community, other churches, and ourselves, and sometimes just waiting before Him in reverent silence.

When we look at the scriptures, we see our principal example of prayer with Jesus spending as much time as he could with his father. Perhaps he was talking to God about the band of disciples he had gathered, or maybe just getting his working orders for the day before him. He said that he did nothing of himself, but only what the Father told him to do or say. That’s a pretty intimate model of prayer. If we are to be effective in this world, we should seek to do no less than what our savior modeled for us.

His prayers were not trivial and neither should our prayers be of little importance in establishing the Kingdom of God. When we gather together to pray, we try to pray not just for our personal and family needs, but in our weekly prayer times, we pray for other churches and special prayer request, our local officials and services, local and regional concerns, political leaders, those who do not know Christ, and we pray against the influences of evil and malicious spiritual powers.

We are so grateful that Jesus, the most effective prayer person in the history of the world, now, ever-living, is continually praying prayers of intercession on our behalf as our high priest forever. Praise His Glorious Name!