Praying Out Loud in Unity

Many people have gotten used to the idea that in a prayer meeting, one person should lead at a time and the rest should just listen and wait their turn to pray.  But a lot more prayer gets done when everyone prays at once! God can certainly hear more than one person pray at a time!  After all, He’s listening to millions of other people pray while He’s listening to the people at our prayer meeting!  God is the ultimate in multi-tasking!

Consider this: When we have times of spontaneous praise and worship, doesn’t God hear everyone at once when they pray their own prayers of praise and worship out loud?  Of course He does! So it should be no surprise that He could hear us all making petitions at once, too, and that it would be just as much “in order” for everyone to pray their own prayers along the same theme as it would if everyone were praying prayers of worship out loud at the same time.

We don’t see the model of “one talks while the others listen” in Acts! They all prayed at the same time, and they all prayed out loud!

Acts 4:24:
And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said…

(The next several verses say what they said.)

The Bible doesn’t say much about exactly how believers’ prayer meetings were run, but we have that one example of one where the believers prayed together out loud and no examples where one person prayed while the others stayed silent.

The common practice of having “unspoken prayer requests” is unbiblical.  The believers lifted up their voice to God.  They didn’t just “think prayers at God.”  Think about it a minute.  How can anyone possibly pray in agreement with you if you won’t say what you’re praying for? It’s impossible!  For there to be agreement, there must be vocal praying going on.  If you don’t open your mouth, no one else can tell whether you’re in unity or not, or even if your mind is in the room or not!

So you may wonder, if everyone prays at once, how do we avoid just having chaos instead of agreement? Won’t we have a mess where Georgette is praying for revival while Norm is praying for government leaders, while Betsy is praying for Zeke and Layla’s marriage?

No, that doesn’t have to be a problem. You can still have different people “take the lead” at different times about different subjects, and the other people can agree with that person, using their own words, out loud. If someone else is leading, the key is to pray in agreement with that person, not about something unrelated.

United prayer meetings don’t work when they’re just a bunch of people all having their private devotions in the same physical location. There’s no point in doing that.  If everyone’s going to just do his own thing anyway, we could all stay home and do our own thing. But as we saw in the previous lesson, greater power is available when Christians come together in unity.

What if you run out of words and don’t know what to say? If you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, you can pray in another language while the other person prays “with the understanding”.

I’ve seen plenty of daydreaming and staring out windows with minds in “Neutral” in prayer meetings over the years, and I’ll admit to having done some of it myself!  It’s important to discipline ourselves to “stay in the room with everyone else”! If you start thinking about how you’re going to pay your bills or how you’ll do a job the next day, you aren’t hooked up in unity anymore. It does take some effort to do this, and everyone slips from time to time. But if you catch yourself slipping, please come back! That’s one reason we have short prayer meetings; more will get done in a short time if everyone focuses than if we run on for half the night and people just go through the motions.

As a couple more examples of out-loud, united prayer, the ten lepers in Luke 17:11-19 lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  This was another out-loud, united prayer of agreement; they were all agreeing for the Lord to heal them all. We see that because they asked the Lord to have mercy on “us”. If they were all just praying for their own healings, they would have prayed, “Lord, have mercy on me.” The two blind men in Matthew 20:29-34 also prayed, “Have mercy on us” twice.

(Additional mini-lessons will be posted as we go through them on Prayer night.)

[On to Mini-Lesson 4: Fervency][Prayer Index][Bible Study Index][Home]