On October 3-4, churches around the world will be gathering for a Global Day of Prayer for Revival. In preparation for this event, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Jeffery Johnson, are encouraging Christians to highly value public prayer and to actively participate in it in their local church. And, in this podcast, they discuss nine practical rules for corporate prayer meetings. 

First, pray from the heart. Suppress self-consciousness and pray fervently and sincerely. Second, prepare to pray. Make a short list or mental outline ahead of time of your praises and petitions. Third, pray short, not long-winded prayers. Fourth, pray to God; don’t preach sermons to men. Fifth, pray Scripture. Sixth, pray with confidence in our Savior’s work and sovereignty, knowing that He lives to make intercession for us. Seventh, pray engagingly. Pray loud enough for others to hear. And, as others are praying, don’t daydream, but join in affirming their appeals, either through silent prayer or out loud with “Amens.” Eighth, pray the promises of God. And, ninth, pray in faith, knowing God delights in giving good gifts to His children. 

To learn more about the Global Day of Prayer for Revival and to join the effort, visit https://globalprayerforrevival.com/. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Jeffrey Johnson with us to talk about corporate prayer meetings. That's always a pleasure. Good to see you, Jeff. It's good to be back with you, Gus.

Yeah. I love being on your podcast. Thank you so much. You know, the corporate prayer meeting has kind of died in America. There's a lot more interesting things for Christians to do apparently.

At the same time, the way I understand it, probably around 90% of the prayers in the Book of Acts are corporate prayer. And so it's an important category for the church to gather, corporate prayer. Also, Jeff, you're encouraging a lot of your brothers to engage in a global prayer for revival, and a bunch of guys are really encouraging their friends to do the same thing. Maybe could you just tell us real quick about that? Yeah, we're trying to promote a global day of churches coming together, individuals coming together with their families, just to pray for something I think we all should agree upon that is one of the greatest needs of our time, and that's for God to work in a special way in reviving His church and quickening the dead.

We're living in a time that we need to see God work, and we're desperate for the Word of God to be attended with supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. So if we could just come together as churches individually on a single day, I think it'd just be a great encouragement for my own soul, I think for all of our souls. I think it's not just one church or one individual, but there's hundreds of people praying all around the world on the same topic, on the same need for Revival. Yeah, and we're gonna do this on the first Tuesday and Wednesday of October, and so, you know, go to globalprayerforrevival.com and you can get all the information. Sign up, sign up your church, encourage your church to gather.

But hey, we're here to talk about the corporate prayer meeting because that's what is going to happen, of course, in this Global Prayer for Revival. I want to quote you, Jeff, in something that you wrote on the Global Prayer for Revival website. I thought it was really helpful. A local congregation praying together is more effective than a single person praying. Imagine a whole church coming to your door asking for something, could you turn them down?

But what if churches around the world were collectively praying for a single thing? Churches in China, Africa, Latin American, all throughout America praying for a revival. The idea of a universal global prayer meeting was so encouraging that it moved me to action. And of course, the same thing happens when a whole church gathers together. A whole bunch of people are banging on God's door, and it's so helpful to think of it like that.

I really appreciate the way that you frame that. Yeah, when you look at the New Testament text where God calls His people to pray, God labors with us in Scriptures to convince us that He's not stingy and that He's not reluctant. He has a predisposition to answer the cries of his children graciously. So he already has a bent to give us kind answers to our prayers, and if we're not praying boldly, If we're not praying for big things that God loves, then we haven't really grasped the heart of those texts. Hey, I want to say something about the corporate prayer meeting.

I've been saying this for years, and I've said it on this podcast, I'm sure Jason can quote me, he'll finish my sentence. You know, when it comes to the prayer meeting, decide once that you're going to go, and just go every time the church gathers. Don't make a decision every Wednesday night. Make one decision. Don't ask, you know, midday Wednesday, well am I too tired or whatever.

Make one decision that you're going to be there and you're going to pray with your brothers and your sisters. There you go. So I've said it again. Okay, so hey, we're gonna give nine rules for the corporate prayer meeting. And the first is pray from the heart, forget everybody else, suppress self-consciousness, eloquence is meaningless, pray from the heart.

Well, I think James encourages us to pray fervently, and a fervent prayer can't be done without the heart engagement. How do you pray fervently if your mind is only engaged and your heart is disengaged? That's part of fervency. We mean it. We mean what we're praying.

We believe what we're praying. It's something sincerely felt within. I want to introduce a fantastic little resource. It's part of a larger work by John Newton, but this is it, Thoughts on Public Prayer by John Newton. He was a pastor hundreds of years ago, famously wrote Amazing Grace, composed Amazing Grace.

He could have written all of these things last week, meaning the same dynamics, the same problems in corporate prayer meetings are what pastors were wrestling with a couple hundred years ago. Let me just read the table of contents because it doesn't take long to do so. He covers these topics. One, length. Two, prayer or preaching?

Three, formality versus familiarity in prayer. Four, repetition. Five, extremes in voice and manner. So all people who have attended corporate prayer meetings instantly recognize kind of where he's headed with each one of those topics. But he's just very practical in it.

I mean, there is so much gold in this. If you want it, you can download a PDF or you can order some copies from it from chapellibrary.org. Our friends at Chapel Library are dear friends. Chapellibrary.org, you can order that. But it's just golden council on corporate prayer meetings.

Fantastic. We're gonna we're gonna steal from him a little bit here. What did he mean when he said extreme voices? Extremes in voice and manner. Well, let me give you a quote on this.

This is from a subsection from that larger section entitled, Tone. The tone of voice is likewise to be regarded. Some have a tone in prayer so very different from their usual way of speaking that their nearest of friends, if not accustomed to them, could hardly know them by their voice. Sometimes the tone is changed, perhaps more than once, so that if our eyes did not give us more certain information than our ears, we might think two or three persons had been speaking by turns. It is a pity when we approve what is spoken, we should be so easily disconcerted by an awkwardness of delivery.

Yet, so it often is, and probably so it will be in the present weak and imperfect state of human nature. It is more to be lamented than wondered at that sincere Christians are sometimes forced to confess. He is a good man, and his prayers as to their substance are spiritual and judicious, but there is something so displeasing in his manner that I am always uneasy when I hear him." I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself, but just praying in a way that I would never speak, almost unrecognizable because of change in tone of voice and inflection, is just not like me. So he latches onto something really valuable here, which is in a corporate prayer meeting, one of our jobs in our praying is not to be overly self-conscious, but also be aware that you have other people with infirmities and weaknesses in the room and we can do things in our prayer that make them hard to track with us and and pray with us in one accord. Well I think that's good because we think about this first rule that our directive we have about praying from the heart, that doesn't mean all of a sudden we start speaking in a way we don't normally speak in.

Like fervency, you've got to speed up your voice so fast to be fervent that it's hard to understand what you're saying. So I think that's a good warning as we think about using our heart, engaging our heart, and being fervent in our prayers. We don't want to be dry and robotic and boring, but let's also be careful of becoming a person people don't recognize. Yeah, yeah. Hey, let's do number two.

This is one that I haven't done much of. Pray what you prepare to pray. So prepare. Before you come, make a short list and say, I'm going to pray for so-and-so and for such-and-such. I haven't adequately done that in our—we have a prayer meeting every Wednesday night, We have one tonight.

And I haven't found myself preparing, but I think it would be good if we came, you know, if everybody came prepared to pray something. I'm sure you've had this happen where you come to a prayer meeting, whoever's supposed to open the prayer meeting opens the prayer meeting, so you have this first prayer, and then there's dead silence followed by dead silence followed by dead silence. Sometimes when that happens, I have a sense these are holy moments. It is good to quiet ourselves before the Lord. Sometimes I have the sense people just aren't ready and they're having a hard time warming to the task.

Of course, your sense of it isn't always right, but that's definitely true that if it's worth doing, it's worth spending a few minutes thinking through the things so that we're ready to go when the meeting starts. I do that in my personal prayers. I'll take a moment to go, what am I going to pray about? Think through a rough little outline, not that I have everything scripted out, but there's just a direction in my mind, even in my private prayers. I find that to be helpful to guide my prayers and to have some type of direction.

Where am I going and what am I doing? And I think the Lord's Prayer gives us a basic outline to follow. We have a guide, we have direction, and we need to spend some time on praising God and worshiping God and thanking God in a time of petition. And then we can think through our petitions. I love how Spurgeon has a sermon on thinking through argumentations to give to God, reasons like you're a lawyer, going, God, you must do this, and here's five reasons.

These reasons are biblical reasons. Not that God is not hesitant to answer, but that type of argumentation increases our own faith that God's going to hear us because the calls are good. The request is biblical. There are all these wonderful reasons why God needs to answer these things because it's according to His will and His glory as a state. And So yeah, I think thinking through that is going to make us better prayer warriors.

Amen. Okay, number three. Pray short. Long prayers constrain participation and other things. What are your thoughts on that?

Y'all might not agree with this, but I exhort our church all the time. Pray short, arrow prayers like Nehemiah, buy up all the time, make sure nobody dominates. That's sort of the idea. So here's John Newton on length. John Newton says this, the chief fault of some good prayers is that they are too long.

Not that I think we should pray by the clock and limit ourselves precisely to a certain number of minutes, but it is the better of the two that the hearers should wish that the prayer had been longer than spend half or a considerable part of the time in wishing it was over." And this goes back to, by the way, the whole thing is filled with humor. He was clearly a witty, funny man as he writes about these things. But it does go back to that point that we're praying with people that are going to have a hard time hanging with us through long prayers. When I first got saved and was in prayer meetings, we would be exhorted to do popcorn prayers. Did you ever encounter that terminology, like pop, pop, pop, pop, like quick?

And it wasn't to get people to pray less, it was to get people to break up their prayers into bite-size things that people could hang with you through. Well, one of the things I've encouraged our churches to pray short prayers, I even put a limit, a minute, pray 60 seconds. And this is the reason why. What happens in prayer meetings, typically, is you got five good seasoned men that love to pray, and they pray 10 minutes each, and every week it's the same 10 minutes of prayers. And then you got a lot of other people that are nervous or intimidated, and there's not enough break in the action for them to jump in.

And so like, okay, I say, if you prayed last week, maybe consider setting back this week, allowing those who haven't prayed to engage in it. And then when you pray shorter, it allows for more prayers. Rather than five, 10 minute prayers, what about 30 one minute prayers? So you get more action, if you would, more people engaged in the prayer meeting. And that's part of the encouragement of prayer meetings.

I mean, it is for the Lord to hear. But part of it is hearing the saints cry out to the Lord, hearing their heart is such a means of personal sanctification for the rest of the body. And there's a lot of people, if you're a newborn Christian, they have something to encourage the rest of the saints if they've just saved for one day. We want to hear them pray. We want the man who's been saved for 50 years to pray.

So I think encouraging smaller prayers or shorter prayers to help facilitates more of a corporate dynamic to the prayer meeting. Okay, next. Pray to God, not preach sermons to man. I love that one. Yeah, Because how many times have you heard someone preach a sermon in the prayers and you're thinking, is that aimed at me?

The answer is yes. Like, is he talking to me? Is this a prayer or is this a sermon? And I've thought long and hard about this because it's impossible to eliminate some of that aspect. Remember when Jesus says, I don't pray this for their sake, but I pray for those who are hearing me.

Even the Lord knew that there was an element that what he was saying is for the encouragement of those who are listening. So I think there's an element that that's that can't be denied that we're praying in a way for others to hear, but it's easy for us to forget the audience and whom we're aiming the prayer to. And I think the way that it's worded is spot on. There's a difference between a prayer and a sermon. And we kind of hard to know how to fine-tune that, but we know it when we hear it.

Right, yeah. Okay, number five, pray scripture. Yeah, The beauty of praying scripture is that you know you're praying the right thing. I'm sure you've been in the middle of a prayer at times, and you're thinking, should I even be praying this? Is this the right thing to be praying?

But we never do that when we plead the promises and pray scripture. Yeah, I think it's so important because one of the elements of prayer will get to it towards the end of this list is faith and there's nothing that generates faith more than what you said Jason was just knowing that this is in the revealed will of God. This is what he's told us to pray and we can have great confidence. I don't believe in name it and claim it. I'm believing in naming and claiming like I get to pick out what God does.

I believe in finding out what God says He's going to do and claiming it. Take the Word and stand on that Word, and those who trust the Lord shall not be disappointed. So I think praying the promises are huge and generating faith in ourselves. I mean faith in God. It's such a blessing when people pray the word of God in our church.

I really appreciate it. It's food for the soul. Okay, number six. Pray with confidence in Jesus Christ out of the overflow of the confidence you have in your Savior's work and in His sovereignty. Pray with confidence.

Yeah, I was just looking for it. I didn't find the reference, but our church is working systematically through Romans right now. In one of the early chapters of Romans, it says that he lives to intercede for us. One of Jesus' functions is to plead the cause of His people with His Father. He is at the right hand, always interceding for His people.

So that should give us such confidence in our prayers that He knows how to take our prayers and plead them to the Father. Often we don't feel qualified to pray. We're going to ask the living God for things that we feel we need. We're going to God with some big requests for arrival. That's huge.

Who are we? I think it's being reminded that we have access. Our access to the Father is through the name of Jesus and through him. We have confidence that we can enter into his throne room and he will hear us. He's given us his word.

He'll hear us and it's not based upon our own righteousness or how well we've done through the week that we can come to the Lord. I said in my sermon this last Sunday, it was radical people. Is that true? It's so radical that you can go to God right when you're in the middle of sinning. I mean, it's like, that seems so radical.

It's like, what we think, well, I got to clean up first. I got to quit sinning. I got to wait two weeks to purify myself. And after I've done enough good works, then he's going to be clean enough that he's going to let me in. No, You don't wait.

You come to God with your sins. Now, you can't continue in sin if you're coming into the throne room. That will be the pure way of forsaking sin. But you don't wait to clean yourself up. You go with full access.

It's just like a marvelous thing that this whole prayer thing that we're entering into can't be divorced from justification and the work of Christ and the gospel. This is the center of our prayers. So I think that's a huge thing to be reminded of. I have a dear friend who's preaching I love, and I've heard him quote a Puritan. I don't remember the Puritan, but he's quoted him several times on this topic—on how that is de-Christing Christ.

Christ means the anointed. God has set him apart to this work for His people, to plead the cause of His people. And when we're hesitant to bring these things to Jesus and through Jesus, God anointed Him for that purpose. It sort of un-Christs Him. And when you think of it in those terms, my mind recoils from that.

Who would want to un-Christ Jesus? And we should leave him as what his father has anointed him to do, which is to be at his right hand, pleading our cause. Wow, I was just preaching on this matter of Christ being anointed with the oil of gladness, and I said in my sermon, and he was anointed by his father, and then he turns around and anoints his children with the same oil of gladness, you know. So, okay next, number seven, pray engagingly. And what I mean by that is prayer actually engages the congregation in one another's lives and what their concerns, their hurts, their desires.

Pray to engage the whole body into the world that God has put you in. Yeah. Well, and also, not just engaging people as you pray, but there's an art of listening to prayers. And I remind our congregation, whoever is leading off in prayer, they're leading off as the whole congregation. And we're all collectively entering into that prayer.

So we're saying in our heart, amen, verbally or non verbally, we're saying, Lord, I agree with this petition. And so we can't daydream when someone else is praying. We're to be engaged into that prayer. And when everybody's listening to what's being prayed and agreeing with what's being prayed, that's when the whole congregation is collectively voicing the same concern to God. And that's where God's hearing the whole congregation, even though there's only one leader in that prayer.

It's really the whole church is praying every time someone's praying. Hey, you brought up amen, so let's talk about saying amen. Now in our church, I encourage our people to say amen loud Because for one thing, okay, this, it keeps everybody awake. Okay? Sorry.

No, it keeps everybody on it. It keeps everybody on it, on the prayer, like, oh yeah, you know, amen. The Bible teaches us to say amen to the prayers. And do you encourage that when anyone has just prayed? So there might be 10, 20 amens during the middle of the praying.

Someone gets done and everyone says amen. Is that what you mean? Well, usually it's at the end, but you'll hear little amens, you'll hear baby amens, and then you hear the big amen at the end. We were talking about Chapel Library. I know down at Mount Zion when they have a prayer meeting, when any individual person is done praying, the whole congregation says amen before the next person does.

Oh, that's what we do. Yeah, okay, gotcha. Yeah, that's exactly what we do. Yeah. I have to remind them every once in a while to crank it back up.

Everything turns to jungle. So pray engagingly, say amen. You know, prayer isn't just an individualistic thing. It's an engagement of the whole church. In our prayer meetings, I learn about things that, you know, a lot of people in the Church know about.

Suffering that's going on, tragedies that have happened. I hear it in the prayers. Nobody called me, but I hear it in the prayer meeting. So it's a way that we all get more engaged, you know, with one another's life problems and stuff. Okay, eight, pray loud.

Don't use your normal volume. Pray so people can hear. Raise your voice. Acts 4, 23 through 30. They raise their voices in prayer.

And even posture makes a difference there. Meaning if you're head down, then the sound is projecting into the floor. You really need to be head up so that people can hear you. Well, why does it matter? Well, if you just wanted to pray by yourself, you need not come to a meeting.

But you're really wanting to have your brothers and sisters in Christ join into your prayers with you, and they can't if they can only hear every third word or whatever. You know, I've told guys, hey, you know, they're sitting in the front row and they're facing the front and there are a hundred people behind them, you know, turn around, Throw your voice, you know, to the back of the room. Where the people are. Where the people are, like that. I think we should be sensitive where we're placed in the prayer meeting and turn our voices where people can hear us, but you've got to crank up your volume.

You can't pray in your normal prayer voice that you do in the morning all by yourself. Okay, nine, last one. Pray the promises of God. In the Christian bookstores when I first got saved, the promises books were everywhere. You know, just enumerating the promises of Scripture.

I haven't seen one in a while, but I should put my hands on one for that very purpose, honestly. We should know what God has promised us so we can plead those promises in prayer, because you know what the answer is going to be to those because He promised them. I got some of those books in my library right over there. Yeah, I think it's important. Just take them down off the shelf.

Take them to the prayer meeting. Yeah, along with these promises, you know, it's I don't quite know as much as theology. I've studied. I haven't quite figured out this relationship between the promises and faith over and over the Lord says in according to your faith. Let it be done to you.

Yet, if you don't believe, you should not expect to receive a huge doubt, it's unstable, but believe. And then Jesus said in one place, he says, when you pray, believe that you have received it and it shall be given to you. There's a real expectation that there's a promise. Now again, as I said earlier, it's not like we're free to create our own promises and then believe what we have declared to be God's word. No, find what God says he's going to do.

And I love the fact that he says if we being evil know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will he give us the Spirit if we ask. That's a promise. And everything we do in the Christian life is necessitating the gift of the Spirit. And so here we have a promise, if we lack wisdom, let us ask of God and God will give it to us generously without finding fault. I mean, Here's another promise.

And I think without faith, we don't pray. Without faith, we don't ask. It takes faith to even take these requests and bring them back to God and put them in remembrance. Look, God, you've told us, Let me remind you of what you've said in your word, and I'm desperately in need of wisdom. So please there God honor your word, honor your promise, because I and then like and then how do you pray it in that way without really fully expecting thought to give you some wisdom?

I fully believe He's going to help me out and give me wisdom, and He's going to give me the Spirit if I ask. So we're taking these promises and we're apprehending them and applying them to ourselves. I think this honors God. I think it honors the Lord to take him at his word and believe him, and he's honored by that, and he's pleased to be faithful to his word, faithful to himself. Amen.

So, Scott, you started by saying that prayer meetings have sort of fallen on hard times in churches. Lack of attendance has killed many a prayer meeting. People just don't want to come to them. So how, Scott and Jeff, how do you reverse that trend in a church? Oh my.

Two ways. Two ways, I think. Chastise them, but that doesn't work very well. It works for one Sunday. Or one week, you know.

Yeah, put the big guilt trip, twist the arm. Yeah, guilt them into it. That really works. I said it like this one time to our church. I was like, hey, I've got a real important job that I like digging a ditch that's going to be really hard for me to do alone.

If you love me as a congregation, would you come and help me? It's going to be hard work and it's going to be you're going to have to sacrifice, but if you have some form of love to me, I'm calling on you to come to the prayer meeting. You know like the next week. Okay. Okay that it worked you know, but then it kind of slowly dies out in the weeks after that.

So I think the best method of, in my perspective, the best method that has grown our prayer meeting and our prayer meeting has gone from right now we're about I would say it's 60 to 70% attendance to you know, what we have on Sunday morning. I telecaring is I want it to 100%. Right now we're averaging around 450 people on our Sunday morning. I want 450 people on our prayer meeting. That's what I want.

That's the objective. Right now we're at 200 at the prayer meetings. So I'm encouraged by that. But one of the things that's pushed us, I think, is having sweet prayer meetings. Like when God attends the prayer meeting and people are blessed by it, they talk about it.

And then the rest of like, what I missed out on that. And it's like, it's, it's not a peer pressure. You better come. It's the feeling I've missed out on a means of grace. I missed out on that and then there's a buzz of excitement of people talking about it.

The prayer meeting is really a wonderful thing. It's a very encouraging thing when the prayer meeting is done correctly and done with some of these things we talked about with fervency and with heartfelt, you know, is done with taking the promises of God, some prayer with expectations people leave encouraged. And so I think that's the best way is like, let's seek to improve our little prayer beatings and pray. And then the people will gravitate to them. To offer an answer to my own question, which that was really good, I think that's a great answer.

Another answer, though, is remove competition. There's so much competition in churches doing this, that, and the other. Are they profitable? Maybe. Should they be displacing prayer meetings?

Never. And if the prayer meeting becomes the third or fourth night out of the week that you're asking them to come out of their home to something, then they are going to be poorly attended, and I suspect that's what has killed so many prayer meetings. Okay, I'm gonna give each of you just one last shot of exhortation or encouragement on this matter of corporate prayer meetings. Jason, you first, and then Jeff, you can wrap it up. So I think as I think elders or pastors have a pivotal role to play, Jeff, sort of to the point that you were just making, to come ready, to pray earnestly, to be very engaged, to really bring it in the prayer meeting, to pray passionately for the things that need praying for.

There is a place to pray for the sick, surgeries that happened last week, surgeries that will happen next week, that's not wrong to pray for those things, but prayer can get gobbled up in that. And the compelling things to pray for are the things that God loves and the advancement of his kingdom. We need to come ready to bring it, to pray for those things really earnestly, and people will follow us if we do. Yeah, I tagged the prayer meeting with the overall health of the church. The prayer meeting is the stinching cord to heaven, and where's the power in our preaching?

Where is the growth and sanctification in the lives of our Saints? I mean, are we seeking to carry out the functions of the church without looking to God? Are we seeking to carry out the functions of the church without looking to God? Are we seeking to carry out the Christian life without coming to the Lord and asking for help? We can say, hey, I don't understand prayer.

We can make that claim. I don't understand how it works, but the scriptures made it clear. You have not because you don't ask. It's made it clear that to the degree that we're coming to the Lord and looking to the Lord in prayer should be the degree that we expect God to work in our lives. And there's a correlation to our prayer life and the function and the health of the church.

So I would say my house shall be called a house of prayer. And the prayer meeting is shouldn't be viewed in any churches. Well, that's something additional. I mean, you can have a barbecue that's additional. We don't do or do have a barbecue meal.

That's okay. But the prayer in my life shouldn't be considered, if God says it's a house of prayer, it shouldn't be considered something secondary. I'm with you, James. Nothing should be competing with this time. This is something we're calling together.

The Book of Acts is full of corporate prayer meetings. I think if we could instruct our church that this is part of worship, this is a part of what we do as a church, and then expect God's blessings to flow from it. I believe that whatever good our church is doing in our missionaries, training pastors, I think we can look to our prayer meeting as a vital part of why God's blessing our church. Fantastic. Okay, guys, thanks.

Great discussion. May the prayer meetings be revived, including our own, even more and more. Amen. Yeah. Okay.

Hey, And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I really hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com.