“The earnest (heartfelt, continued) prayer of a righteous man makes tremendous power available My wife and I went to pay our respects and farewell an old friend at a funeral service. We knew the couple were churchgoers and which denomination to which they belonged, yet I found the service to be quite a culture shock, as it was conducted in a tradition far removed from that to which we were accustomed. I could handle the responsive readings from the Word, even though they were displayed on an impersonal screen at the front (I prefer the feel of a Bible in my hand), but I was unable to put any feeling behind the written prayers. All through my life, in four different denominations (I was recognized as a minister of the gospel in three of them), public prayers were always straight from the heart and never read. Period. To us, reading written prayers never even made it to the ceiling! The only exception was the prayer the Lord taught his disciples, and some even disliked that in a public service. I’m told it is good to get out of your comfort zone, and I was certainly uncomfortable as I stood and listened to those around me saying the prayers and responding at the right moment when the minister read his bit. I once viewed on television a re-run of an interview with Pastor E.V. Hill of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, California. A powerful preacher of the gospel and an advocate of black rights, he was asked to give the invocation at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon as President in 1973. A week or two before, he received a call from the inauguration committee asking if they could have a copy of the prayer for the order of service. Pastor Hill replied, “But I haven’t prayed it yet!” God bless him! They eventually understood the tradition he was coming from and allowed the change in the usual proceedings for such an important event. I’m not saying a tradition other than my own is wrong, but I still cannot get my head around how a prayer read from a screen or prayer book can be an “earnest, heartfelt prayer.” We took our prayer examples from the book of Acts, such as “And when they had prayed, the place was shaken…” (4:31) and “Peter… knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up” (9:40), and see also Acts 16:25 and 28:8. I’m all for prayer that gets results!
Pray For The Suffering.
Everyone day we’ll stop
And pray for the sick
And suffering today
And we’ll light a candle
And pray for them every
Night that the Lord Jesus Christ
Heals them tonight Amen.
For ten years I had been praying from prayer books,of which most of them were about falling down demons and catching fire evil spirits.I finally got tired of it and sought the truth and found it out.I thank God for opening my eyes.
You are definitely spot on! “…use not vain repitition as the heathen do…” was the admonition of Jesus when he was responding to the request by the disciples to teach them to pray in Matthew. He also said “…pray in this manner…”; not to repeat mindlessly the form or elements of prayer as he laid them out. It is not the Lord’s Prayer as unschooled or untaught think. His prayer is in John 16 in the garden before he was taken by the soldiers. Pay attention, class, and use your thinking caps!