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Prayer & Worship - Jeremy Jennings

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God… (Acts 16:25a)

If you have ever wondered whether prayer and worship are powerful activities in the combined sense then look no further than the above scripture. Put mildly, Paul and Silas had had a bad day having been thrown into prison and put into stocks after being stripped and severely beaten – it was well up on the scale of such days. Humanly speaking, there is no explanation for their behaviour – they were the new boys in the cells and anyone with any sense would have wanted to keep their heads down at the time of day mentioned. But we are put on notice that something unusual was happening because the text tells us that “the other prisoners were listening to them” as they were praying and worshipping. The Prisons Department at HTB assures me that it is not normal for other prisoners to meekly listen to fellow inmates engaged in such activity at midnight (or at any other time of day for that matter)!

The next word we come to in the text is “Suddenly” and all heaven breaks loose culminating in the jailer and all his family becoming Christians and being baptised there and then. I guess we will never know what would have happened if Paul and Silas had not been praying and singing hymns to God and had just gone to sleep instead but the fact is they were, and the point is there is real power released when we pray and worship together.

I recently had the sense that it’s time to bathe our evangelism with prayer and worship. That is not to say that we don’t already engage in this process but I think it is to say that we need to go higher, longer and deeper in it. The sense I had was that God is saying that we need to keep looking up as well as looking out and, as we do that, the “Lord of the harvest” will provide his people with more power to bring the harvest in.

Jeremy Jennings
24 May 2007