“We need to have old fashioned prayer meetings.”

            Since before I started pastoring, I heard many assert that we need to return to old fashioned “prayer meetings.” Many have the idea that we need to gang up on God, twist his arm, and get him to do something. Multitudes point to the “great revivals” of the past, which began with people agreeing to meet for prayer. The numbers grew at the meetings; and, as the numbers grew, the intensity of prayer grew, until “heaven was conquered. God answered prayer; and revival broke out!”

            I cannot imagine anyone in the New Testament or the Old, except the worshippers of Baal (1 Kings 18:26-30), engaging in the kind of “prayer meetings” I have seen in Baptist churches. In the New Testament, when men and women met for prayer, they met to worship God, praying, reading the Word, singing God’s praise, and breaking bread at the Lord’s Table. I read nowhere of the churches breaking up into small groups with everyone praying audibly, either at once or in succession.

            We have four prayer meetings every week, after the order of the New Testament. Three times every Sunday and once each Tuesday, we gather in this place to worship God our Savior. Those who want excitement, displays of emotionalism, and religious entertainment will have to find it elsewhere. In this place we meet together for God’s honor, the ingathering of his elect, and the comfort and edification of his saints. The means he has ordained for the accomplishment of these things is prayer, Gospel preaching, the reading of Holy Scripture, singing his praises, and the observance of the Gospel ordinances of believer’s baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

            With Habakkuk, we cry continually, “O Lord, revive thy work!” And we are fully assured that if the Lord God sends revival to his church, it will be by the blessing of his Spirit upon the use of the means he has ordained, not by religious tom-foolery.

Don Fortner

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