July 2003

Prayer AND Worship

I love Revelation, Chapter 5! It begins with a vision of God on his throne holding a scroll, then the awful truth dawns that there is no one who is worthy to open it and this causes John to weep uncontrollably until one of the elders explains that there is one who is able to do it – behold Jesus!

He is encircled by various heavenly beings that begin a crescendo of worship to the Lamb and ‘to him who sits on the throne’ and this reaches its climax when millions of angels and ‘every creature in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth and on the sea, and all that it is in them’ are involved. Wow!

There is a description of the heavenly beings surrounding Jesus during the passage where we are told: ‘Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.’ (Revelation 5:8) In some circles these are known as the ‘harps and bowls’ of heaven!

It is this combination that is the model that we try to aspire to in our prayer meetings, because, whilst each activity is powerful and valid in its own right there seems to be an added synergy when the two (prayer and worship) are combined.

I wish someone would invent an alternative title to ‘prayer meeting’ because what we are aiming for involves so much more than what the title portrays. It is - or should be - so exciting for the people of God to come together to pray and to worship - how could that be boring?.

It is also so very powerful. This is because as we seek to worship - with the aim of touching God’s heart - and to pray - seeking his will to be done on the earth, the experience is that there is a release of God’s power into all the activity to which he has called us in the life of the church, including its corporate life and evangelism.

As we seek the re-evangelisation of the nation and the transformation of our society, the need for the combination of anointed worship and prayer is ever present.

Jeremy Jennings

This article is an edited version of one first published in Focus, July 2003. Reproduced here with permission.