Liturgy of the Lips

High on the list of my 11,400 favourite Bible passages is an incident recorded in Acts chapter 4, when Peter and John return from a rather unpleasant confrontation with the Jewish religious authorities who have ordered them to stop preaching in the name of Jesus. As they gather with the brothers and sisters of the newborn church, the group immediately turns to prayer. Verses 29-31 record the last part of that prayer:

“And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” (ESV)

Doesn’t a prayer like that move you? Don’t you long to experience the presence and power of God by the infilling of his Holy Spirit so that whatever place of prayer in which you find yourself is shaken from the floorboards to the rafters? I certainly do.

The key, I believe, is in the nature of their prayer. This is ardent, fervent, travailing prayer that emanates from the depths of the soul and cries out to our only source of help and hope. It is a prayer that is stripped of all personal ego and self-serving attitudes, prayer which seeks only to have God enable and empower his servants for faithful witness. It is a prayer prayed by those who know with absolute certainty that refusing to speak the word of God is simply not an option. And it is a prayer that acknowledges the sovereignty of God and his authority to heal and to give signs and wonders to accompany and to authenticate his word.

How desperately we need to recapture that depth of prayer in our church today. How confident we have become in our intellects; how comfortable in our rites, our rituals and our liturgies. How hungry the people of God are for renewal, for signs and wonders to be the norm rather than the exception, for God to look upon us as he did those first followers and to breathe new life into the body of Christ by his refreshing Spirit. I believe that God hungers for the same things. He is just waiting to be asked.

I frequently re-visit the history of the Moravians, that small band of Christian refugees who, in the 1700’s, were granted sanctuary in a small village on the land of a wealthy German nobleman. The Moravians were humble pacifists but they were also mighty prayer warriors. They were rooted in the scriptures and they knew that if they were faithful and obedient, God would hear and answer their prayers. They prayed for renewal and the Spirit of God fell upon their community. They had a heart to start a twenty-four hour a day prayer vigil and it continued seven days a week for more than 100 years. During that time they prayed for the lost, those who had never encountered Jesus, and they sent out more than 300 missionaries to every corner of the earth, where the word of the Lord changed hearts and lives. No less a servant of God than John Wesley himself was heavily influenced by the faith of this God-fearing community of saints. And their mark on the history of the church was written with the alphabet of prayer in the language of faith. We can only wonder what miraculous blessings await us if we will recover the practice of heart-rending, continuous prayer.

Faith begins with prayer. Discipleship begins with prayer. Witness begins with prayer. Worship begins with prayer. Service begins with prayer. The passage from Acts 4 reminds us that the Spirit of God filled all those who gathered to pray and that they all continued to speak the word of God boldly. Neither prayer nor proclamation is the sole purview of the paid professional. The word needs to be in all our hearts and on all our lips, and prayer is not optional. Renewal, revival, healing, sign and wonder, are available to all when God’s people humbly open their hearts to heaven. So by all means, for the sake of Christ and the church for which he died – let us pray!

The Rev. Peter Norman, Incumbent, Battle River Parish, Saskatchewan