Here are three reasons it is good to be devoted to our weekly prayer meetings.
Every Wednesday night we deliver a short doctrinal or experiential message on prayer to the congregation. We want to teach our people about prayer. Most people struggle with their prayer life. We are here to help clarify how to pray and why to pray and to relieve the struggle as much as we can. So, come to prayer in order to be “devoted to the apostles' doctrine,” and be taught from the scriptures about prayer.
For example, at our last prayer meeting, I opened to Luke chapter 6 to explain the role of faith in the authority of God in prayer. I explained the story of the centurion who had a servant who was sick and dying. The centurion explained how he trusted the authority of the Lord in answer to his prayer. He was a man under authority, and he delighted to be under the good authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. He acknowledged that in order for a prayer to be answered, all the Lord needed to do was to, “say the word.”
If you are feeling disconnected from people in your local church, hearing prayers is a way to be connected with the people. In prayer, people say things they are convicted of in their own hearts. You will find that people pray the things that they are comfortable speaking in public. If you want to know the thinking and the feeling of the people in a local church, you will hear it in their prayers. You will hear doctrine that is upon their hearts. You will hear what is weighing on their hearts. You will hear of their concerns. We can actually get to know one another better by hearing the prayers of the saints. In a sense, we can become better friends. We appreciate what they have prayed, and we say amen to the prayers. In my own experience as a pastor, every time we get together and pray, I learn something about someone that I did not know before. I have a greater sense of how our people are thinking and experiencing when I go to prayer.
When you pray you realize that you are out of your depths. It is very common, that when we consider praying publicly we experience a spiritual struggle. This struggle takes place in the privacy of their hearts. We recognize that we are tempted to pray for the praise of man. We want to be profound. We want to be thought of as theological astute. This recognition is humbling. In fact, it is a good struggle because it is a sanctifying recognition which brings us face-to-face with our man-pleasing pride. It gives us an opportunity to cry out to God to simply be useful in His hands through our prayers.
There are many other benefits of corporate prayer. These are just three.