God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
If a church is to be what it ought to be for the purposes of God, we must train it in the holy art of prayer. Churches without prayer-meetings are grievously common. Even if there were only one such, it would be one to weep over. In many churches the prayer-meeting is only the skeleton of a gathering: the form is kept up, but the people do not come. There is no interest, no power, in connection with the meeting. Oh, my brothers, let it not be so with you! Do train the people to continually meet together for prayer. Rouse them to incessant supplication. There is a holy art in it. Study to show yourselves approved by the prayerfulness of your people. If you pray yourself, you will want them to pray with you; and when they begin to pray with you, and for you, and for the work of the Lord, they will want more prayer themselves, and the appetite will grow. Believe me, if a church does not pray, it is dead. Instead of putting united prayer last, put it first. Everything will hinge upon the power of prayer in the church.
Because we are in Christ, there are no longer any hostilities in us that will always exist between those in the world. Ephesians 2:14, “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall.” We don’t employ the trite, superficial and flawed tactics of the world. Many of them are now championed more than ever in our day. We understand that the blood of Christ has cleansed us from our sin and has adopted us into His family. Thus, we see others different from us as part of the family of God, forgiven as we have been forgiven. We accept each other because God has accepted all of us. Our unity is not what we look like, but rather who we are in Christ. “[Christ] Himself [made] the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity” (Eph. 2:15b-16).
