Day 8 - Prayer Night

Last night we had a prayer night at cell group.

Basically, I just brought a white board, and we wrote up a big list of things that we should pray for, and then we spent time praying for them all. As a little guide, we broke it up into four different areas: the world, the church, us, and anything else.

We spent a lot of time praying for the situation in Burma. We all need to spend time praying for our brothers and sisters over there - they desperately need God's help and provision at the moment, and in the months to come as they try and rebuild everything that was wiped away. For many of the people there, they also lost next year's harvest, so I'm not sure where they're going to get living expenses from next year? Pray for this too.

And we also thought it important to pray for the Church of God as a whole. In general, we've found that people in our country would probably love Jesus if he were here. He'd fit in perfectly in our culture. And yet it seems that his church doesn't really fit in at all. People don't really like the church much. It certainly doesn't seem to have the same life-changing effect that Jesus himself had when he was on earth. This is sad. How could this be, if we're all trying to be like Jesus? We're obviously not quite getting it.

So we need serious prayer.

Actually, even just praying about this kind of made me think more seriously about how I am doing in this area. How much do I look like Jesus? I could definitely do better here. I think I could be a lot more reckless in how I live out my faith - less safe, less hiding in church work. I think my next prayer time should be spent thinking and praying about this.

There were quite a few other things we put up, and we prayed for them all. Actually, I thought it was going to be pretty weird and unnatural to spend a night in prayer, but the time flew by pretty quick.

I'm definitely going to have to lead prayer nights again in the future. God loves our prayer, and he's moved by it (which is powerful!).

Plus, you don't really have to organise much. And it gives our group leaders a night where they don't have to run it too. Everyone wins!

Hooray for Pray in May.