Good morning. Nice to see you all so bright-eyed, well-rested. I anticipate that some of you will be applying our talks by bowing your heads and praying through part of the lesson today. At least, I'm just going to assume that that's what you're doing. I'd like to begin. Let me ask you to turn to Acts chapter 4. While you're doing that I'd like to begin by just mentioning a couple of things. The first is to say again thank you for inviting me and the Olivetti clan to be with you this week. We've had a great week. We've enjoyed your ministry to us and have been very encouraged and it's just been a really wonderful blessing for us to get to be here, to reunite with old friends and make new ones. And so thank you for opening your hearts to us this week and encouraging us and ministering to us and our kids especially. The second thing I wanted to do before we kick off is to add on to an answer I gave yesterday during the question and answer time. There was a question asked about how people deal with it when they receive fame or some type of applause, some type of adulation for being spiritual. And I talked about pastors and elders who are up front and the fact that we need to be careful not, the pastors and elders, people who do what I'm doing right now need to be careful not to become prideful. And it was pointed out rightly afterward that that could be taken the wrong way by the rest of us. And it could be taken as an encouragement for you to not encourage your pastors lest they get a big head. And that's not the right idea. Your job is to encourage your pastors and your elders as often as you can think to do it. Let God deal with their big head. Let them struggle with the whole pride issue. Don't withhold compliments and encouragements from your pastor so that he stays humble. that just makes him discouraged. That's a different thing than being humble. So yes, please encourage your pastors. Please say thank you often and tell them what you're learning and why you appreciate them. So I just wanted to mention that because I thought it was a good comment that I received afterward. Okay, so we're going to read in the Word of God this morning from Acts chapter 4 beginning in verse 23. Let's pray before we read. Lord, as we Come together on this last day of camp. We thank you that you've been with us this week, that you're with us at all times, that you are available to us at all times. Lord, we have enjoyed your word and the fellowship we have around it this week. As we open it one more time, Lord, we pray that you might grant to us the fullness of your Holy Spirit, that what we read about here in Acts chapter four might be true of us and of our churches. We pray for it in Jesus' name, amen. Acts four, beginning in verse 23. When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit, why do the Gentiles rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed. For truly in this city, they were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness while you stretch out your hand to heal. And signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant, Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. and continue to speak the Word of God with boldness. This is the Word of God. There is a lie that many of us have grown up with and we've heard in many different ways from many different corners of our society, which is that religion is okay, even good, as long as you keep it private. It's fine for you to love Jesus. It's fine for you to go to church. It's fine for you to be a Christian. As long as you don't let that spill over into the public sphere. As long as you don't go evangelizing and proselytizing other people. As long as you don't ask and encourage your politicians to be religiously minded. We've heard this from so many different corners that we've begun to a large extent to believe it. And American Christians believe that their Christianity is something that they do in their homes, by themselves, maybe with their families, but we kind of keep it tucked away the rest of the time so that we don't offend anyone else. One of my fears is that we've bought this lie so much, the lie that religion should be kept private, that we've bought the lie so much that, in fact, we've begun to keep it private from each other. We've bought the lie so much that not only do we not talk about religion with our neighbors, not only do we not vote and speak religiously in the public sphere, But often when we're with each other, we keep our religion private because that's just between me and God. But as I began this week saying that the life of constant prayer is one that will happen in the context of a local church or won't happen at all, to begin that week, we will end the week the same way with the conviction, hopefully from Acts chapter four and elsewhere in the Bible, that religion is not only not public, not private, but it is as public as it possibly can be. I did an experiment when I was preparing these lessons, and I went to my books on prayer. And like many pastors, it's easy to collect books on prayer. Everybody loves to write books on prayer, probably loves to write them more than we like to read or actually pray. So I pulled down all the books on prayer I could find, and I looked for chapters or sections in the books on prayer that I have about praying together. I didn't find any. And I'm not saying nobody ever writes this way or it's not a focus, but I'm saying I have enough that it's a pretty representative sampling and we have a problem. And we have failed to consider, and this isn't just the last 20 years in American Christianity, this goes back to the whole Protestant Reformation, we failed to consider that the church is a house of prayer. This experiment with my books proves that we tend to see faith and the exercise of faith as primarily individualistic rather than primarily corporate. This is, of course, a very American thing to do. We love our declarations of independence. We don't like to be dependent and tied to other people, but it turns out we are part of a church. I also want to mention here that as I was preparing this, I did a search online for books about praying together, and there is a new book called, lo and behold, Praying Together. It's written by a lady named Megan Hill, and I would commend it highly to you. Much of what I have to say today was, I either received encouragement from that book, I'll even be quoting some from it. She's a pastor's wife, I think, in the URC Church or the PCA Church. It's short, it's easily read, and very, very encouraging. It's just called Praying Together by Megan Hill. And so that's where we want to go today, is to consider how we will, as churches grow, into being houses of prayer that Jesus wants us to be. We've said this week that our foundational goal is not just learning to pray without ceasing, but to grow into spiritual people. And we've defined that as being people who live in constant and conscious communion with God. Or if you like other definitions, people who are aware of and responding to the presence of God at all times. That's what we want to be and that will of course result in a life of praying without ceasing. But without that constant awareness, that growing awareness of God, we won't be praying that much at all. But our conviction then as we come to Acts chapter 4 is that this growth in spirituality and the subsequent growth in praying without ceasing does not happen alone. It does not happen just between you and God. It only happens when it is part of a church family, when it is part of the church of Jesus Christ. And I don't mean that broadly considered, the American church, although I mean your church. You have an individual church that you're a part of and that needs to be the context in which you develop your spirituality and in which you develop your life of praying without ceasing. We don't do this alone. Many of you wish we could. I won't pick on the introverts anymore, but many of you wish we could develop our life of prayer without ceasing. We could do it just by ourselves in our closet, but we can't. So that all brings us by way of introduction to Acts chapter four. And then I recognize as we come to Acts chapter four, that prayer is not the theme of this passage. If I was to preach this passage in an expository way, it wouldn't necessarily be on prayer, but we're going to take the example of the church and then run with it through the rest of scripture. to see it as a normative example for us. The context is that Peter and John have been arrested, brought before the council, warned, and released from prison. And they go to their church family and they tell them what had happened. And look with me at verse 23 then. When they were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they, that is the church, heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, The natural instinct of the church in receiving the news about what the Council of Jerusalem had said, their natural instinct, their reflex in hearing about the coming persecution was to pray. Nobody called a prayer meeting. Nobody said, maybe we should pray about this. It just happened. That's what happens like you kids know when you go to the doctor and they hit the front of your knee and you have the reflex, right? This is what should be happening in our church. We hear something the reflex should be to pray about it as they prayed. Of course, we see and we won't dwell on this because we talked about it earlier this week. They prayed not only their hearts, but they prayed the Word of God itself. And they came to God and as they reflected on the coming persecution, their minds and their prayers went back to Psalm 2. And they quoted Psalm 2 to God and said, God, what you have said is going to happen is happening. And your purposes are coming to pass. And they prayed the word of God and they trusted and they entreated God together. So the first point I want to make then is that from the beginning, the New Testament church was a praying entity. From the beginning, it was a praying entity. I just want to prove this to you so you don't have to take my word for it. If you have your Bible open still, just flip back to Acts chapter 1. And we'll just go through a couple chapters like this. Chapter 1, verse 14. All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus and his brothers. Chapter 1, verse 24. And they prayed and said, You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen. That's when they were choosing a new apostle. Chapter 2, verse 42. And they devoted themselves to the apostle teaching and the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. Verse 46. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with gladness and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. Chapter 3, verse 1. Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. Chapter six, we'll go ahead and go forward now a little bit. Chapter six, verse four, after they had received this report about the problems of widows not receiving food, but we will devote ourselves, the apostle says, my apostles say, to prayer and to the ministry of the word. I'll stop there because we don't have time to go through the whole book of Acts and show you each and every time the church prays. You can't go through a chapter in the book of Acts without seeing the church of Jesus Christ praying together. Whatever they're doing, whatever else they're doing, the church is praying. No matter what else they're doing, the church is praying. This isn't new to the Book of Acts. This is, of course, the history of God's people. Whenever God's people were being what they were supposed to be, all the way throughout the Old Testament, too, they were always praying, no matter what else they were doing. The people of God are a people of prayer, not a people who split up and go to their individual prayer closets or their homes or their beds and pray there by themselves, but they are people always who pray together. And it's our corporate prayer that should take precedence over our individual prayer. And we need to begin to change some of the ways that we think about the church and our life in the church. A lot of times we do view our individual relationship with God as the apex or the mountaintop of our spiritual experience. A lot of us, like me, who grew up blessed by the Navigators and other para-church ministries, we learned how to have our quiet time, we learned how to really dive into the word of God and it was valuable for us. But we took in sort of an inadvertent lesson, which is that my private time with God is the chief or the highest experience that I have with God. And then I go to church to sort of learn some new things or to be with other people. That is not how Scripture presents the life of faith. The life of faith says that, yes, you should pray individualistically. You should pray by yourself. You should pray on your bed. But the highest experience you have of your relationship with Jesus Christ is together in the presence of God. We were saved to be together in the presence of God. So what I want to do here then is to make a biblical case for praying together and then discuss with you some ideas about how we pray together. So two whys and some hows. Why do we pray together and then how do we pray together? The first why of why we pray together. We should pray together because of who we are. We should pray together because of who we are. Why do we pray? We pray because we have been brought into a relationship with the living God. And prayer is the natural way. Prayer is how we talk to God. We pray because we are in a relationship with God. We pray together because when we're in a relationship with God, we're always and necessarily in a relationship with other Christians. You can't be saved by being united to Jesus Christ and not be united to the church of Jesus Christ. We pray together because we are being saved together. We pray together because our relationship with God always makes a relationship with each other. Prayer is always relational. It's not only relating us to God, but us to Jesus Christ specifically and his church, his bride together. When we are saved, we are at the moment of our salvation joined to Jesus Christ. and therefore joined to His body, which is the church. In the New Testament, the church uses different pictures, or the Bible uses different pictures for the church. It uses the picture of a plant, or a body, or a building. What do all those things mean? What do they all have in common? Some of them are organic, some aren't, but all of them are things that are being brought together into one, things that are being unified into one thing. We are all citizens of the same nation. We are aiming for the same place. The New Testament knows nothing of a Christian who is born again but is outside the church of Jesus Christ. And many of you have had this experience. We've done this. We knock on doors and we try to meet people in our neighborhoods. And I remember one time knocking on a door and meeting a man and saying, you know, I'm so and so from the church and over here and we'd love to invite you to church. And do you have a church? No. I'm a Christian. Oh, great, I'm glad you're a Christian. Where do you go to church? Well, I don't go to church anymore. I had too many bad experiences, and I've been done with church for about 11 years. If that's true, if there's somebody who says, I'm a Christian, but I'm not joined to the church of Jesus Christ, one of two things is true about them. Either they're not a Christian at all, or they are a very, very sick and unhealthy Christian. One of those two things is gonna be true. And the Bible doesn't, as I already said, the Bible doesn't know anything about a Christian who is not part of the church of Jesus Christ. And we need to begin to view ourselves, I think, a little bit differently. We need to begin to view our life of faith not just as being wrapped up in Jesus Christ, but being wrapped up in the church of Jesus Christ. The church, as one author said, is the place of salvation. There's no other place to be saved in this world other than the church of Jesus Christ. And of course, we don't mean the building. of your church, but we mean the body of Jesus Church. Megan Hill, who I already referenced, said it this way, praying together is a glorious expression of our divine and human relationships, a precious privilege purchased for us by the blood of Christ and an essential activity of the common spirit in us. Another way we could say all this is to say that praying together acknowledges that in Christ, When we are in Christ, every two-person conversation is really a three-person conversation. Every time there are two Christians talking together, there's really three people there. I always like being in camps like this because you can just watch conversations kind of happen and social circles kind of get together. It's always wonderful to see when there's two people talking and a third person comes up, What normally happens in a group like that? Two people are talking, a third person comes up. The two people turn their body a little bit, don't they? And they find ways to include the third person in the conversation, even by just looking at them and welcoming them in, saying, here's what we're talking about. I wonder why we don't do that more with God. I wonder if we don't just remember that the fact that when I'm talking to you, God's with us. There's a third person involved in this conversation. Maybe we should turn and consider him and talk to him a little bit at the same time. Praying together acknowledges that in Christ, God is always with us in every two-person conversation. It's really a three-person conversation. We come to verses like 1 Thessalonians 5 or like Romans 12 where it says, be constant in prayer. And we tend to read them individualistically, forgetting that they were written to churches. They were written to us corporately. Be constant in prayer together. How often Paul asked for the church to pray for him. Not imagining that they would say, yes, yes, we'll pray for you, and then go to their homes and pray. When Paul asked the church to pray for him, he fully expected them to stop what they were doing and to pray. Not put it on the to-do list for later when I have my private time of prayer. And so one of our problems then in all this is forgetting who we are in Christ, and then likewise forgetting who you are in Christ. If I'm in Jesus, I have the availability of God to me at all times. I can talk to Him whenever I want to. But if I'm in Jesus and you're in Jesus, then you and I are joined together by something that will never be broken. If I'm in Jesus and you're in Jesus, then even if you and I don't ever see each other again after today, we share the most important thing about ourselves. And we're gonna spend eternity together. My life of faith requires other Christians for me to be healthy. So if one of our problems is forgetting who we are in Christ, another one of our problems is forgetting the power of prayer. So the first reason we pray together is because of who we are. The second reason we pray together is because of what it does. What does it do? It prays together. Well, first of all, it encourages and it loves. If we want to be people who encourage others and love them, then we should pray not only for them, we should pray with them. Isn't it deeply encouraging to hear somebody pray for you? I trust that it is. I grew up in a reformed church. I grew up with a pastor who was kind of one of the guys who stayed in his office all the time and didn't interact very often with other people. I remember one time when I was sick in junior high and I was put in the hospital with pneumonia for a week and I found out through somebody else that I had been prayed for by name from the pulpit. Do you know that was the first time I'd ever been prayed for by name from the pulpit? Well, that doesn't seem right. We ought to be praying for each other. And when I hear somebody pray for me, it encourages me. When elders pray for me, it encourages me. I hope you know that your elders are together on a regular basis praying for you by name. Corporate prayer, says Megan Hill again, paves the way for mutual love by both humbling us and affording us equal usefulness. You have the same access to God that I have. You have the same access to God through Jesus Christ that the greatest saint in the world has. You have the same access, which means that all of us as we come to God, we are together before him with equal usefulness before him. And what happens then when the church prays together? Look at verse 31 here. It says, when they prayed, the place in which they gathered together was shaken. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. They were encouraged by being given boldness as they prayed together. We were reflecting yesterday in our discussion that social media has changed the way we relate to each other in the area of prayer. How often we go online and we say, this thing is happening, would you please pray for me? And there's nothing really wrong with that, but it's nowhere near as good as finding your church family and asking somebody in your church family to pray for you. Prayer is not a magic thing. You don't get more answers to prayer when more people on social media pray for you. If you really want to be together in prayer, I would encourage you, before you get on social media, asking somebody to pray for you, to call your friend. And get together and pray, or pray over the phone. Call your pastor, call your elders, and ask them to pray for you. Romans 12, 15 says, Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Galatians 6, verse 2 says, Bear one another's burdens. How do we do these things if we aren't praying with each other? If we aren't praying with each other, are we really ever bearing one another's burdens? Really weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice. Not only does prayer encourage and love other people, prayer also teaches and disciples. We've also talked about this in our prayer group. Is it okay to learn something from somebody else's prayer? Is it okay to be taught? Of course it is. How did the disciples learn how to pray? They learned how to pray by listening to Jesus pray. Why do you pray the way that you pray? All of you have a style of prayer. You have the little words you say. You have the things that are unique to you. For most of us, we pray the way we pray because that's how mom and dad pray. Or that's how my pastor growing up prayed. We learned it from somebody else. That's how we do. That's who we are. When we pray together, it is always teaching and discipling each other. And that isn't just from the super high spiritual people always teaching the less spiritual people in the church. The reality is when I listen to somebody pray, I don't care who it is, I am being discipled by them. I am learning something from the youngest child in our church when they pray to the Lord in my presence. I'm always being taught, always being discipled when I get to see somebody else's faith in action. And so we teach each other, we disciple each other in prayer. It teaches not just how to pray, it teaches good theology. It teaches what faith is. It helps us get those reordered desires that we want. So praying together encourages and it loves, it teaches and disciples praying together gains the heart of God. God loves it when his people pray together. Now God loves it when you pray. We're not belittling personal and private prayer, but we know that God loves it when his people gather together and lift up their voices together with him in prayer. God loves it and it gains his heart. It moves God to action when his people pray together. And so we should pray together because of who we are and because of what it does. If I've made that case, then let's move on to how we pray together. And here we'll get into maybe some more uncomfortable specifics. It's always nicer to leave things theoretical, but I'd like to poke and fraud just a little bit as we close today. A few weeks ago, I remember driving by a local church. This is a church in West Lafayette with whom we have a really good relationship. It's a church called the Upper Room Christian Fellowship. It's Pentecostal. They love the Word of God. They preach it. We have a lot of good friends there. They let us borrow their building for some stuff. It's great. It's a good church. We have some disagreements, but it's a really good church. We're driving by Upper Room one day. And I saw, and I saw, um, I saw some people outside like having a work day and you could tell they all had breaks or something. And four of them were in a circle with their rates and they were praying. You know what I thought? That looks really weird. It just looked out of place. Like, what are they doing? They're supposed to be working, and they're praying. Not only that, but a few weeks before, I'd been talking to my friend Andy, who's the pastor of that church. Then we were, of course, just talking about, how's church going? What are you encouraged by? And I was related to the fact that the previous year, that our congregation responds to a letter that we received from somebody in our church that we set aside a day for prayer and fasting in advance of the national election. And so we set aside this day for prayer and fasting. We wrote a letter to the congregation. I even put it up online. Other churches joined us in this day of prayer and fasting. I was telling my friend, Andy, this was great. We were encouraged. We met in the morning. We met at lunchtime. And we met in the evening. And we had a service of prayer at night. And you know what he said? He said, yeah, we call that Monday. And he wasn't belittling us at all. He's a very humble guy. But I was really kind of proud of what we had done. We had a day of fasting and prayer. They have it every week. They have it every week. We could do a lot better than we do, is all I'm saying. And that's at least our church. I'm only guessing that maybe your churches could grow on this as well. So I'd like to consider with you four arenas in which we pray together and how we can do it a little bit better. The first arena, of course, in which we pray together is corporate worship. If you look at this passage, you'll see in verse 24, it says, when they heard it, they lifted their voices, plural, together to God and said, and then it records the prayer. Now, one of two things we have to assume happened. Either sheets were handed out with the printed prayer on it and everybody voiced the same prayer aloud at the same time, or one person prayed and God counted it and saw it and heard it as their voices corporately coming toward him. And that's what we believe. And of course, when it says they lifted their voices together, it doesn't mean they all shout at the same time and just miraculously happen to say the same prayer. It means that one person prayed and they all prayed together and God heard their voices together. This means that when we are in corporate worship together, one person can lead, but it counts before God as everybody praying. If you're like me and you grew up going to church, this could be something you never actually learned. You give me something you never really learned that now I'm just listening to the pastor pray. I'm sort of watching a show from the sidelines. But that's not what's happening in corporate worship. When your pastor, one of your elders pray in corporate worship, you are joining in that prayer and God doesn't just hear his voice, he hears your voice. And what you are to do then in that moment is to take the prayer that you hear, bring it into your ears, into your heart and turn your heart into an echo chamber. Prayer bounce around a little bit and then send it up with the pastor's prayer. And whether you say out loud, amen or not, you are creating an echo chamber in your heart. And God is hearing not just the one voice, but the voices of the congregation. We need to learn to pray together in worship. And a lot of you have already figured that out. I know I was way behind in this. But some of the rest of you could be with me, and you need to really learn that when my pastor's praying, when my elder is praying, I'm not on the sidelines for five minutes. I'm in the game. This is part of how I worship the Lord, by joining in the prayer that's being said in corporate worship. You might consider, and some people have already asked about this, and we'll throw it in here. You might consider that the posture we take before the Lord matters. The posture we take before the Lord matters. In the Bible, there's warrant for standing when you pray. There's warranting when you pray. There's warrant for laying face down when you pray. And there's one example, just one, of somebody sitting when you pray. So all of those different postures are warranted, but you might consider that those different postures do different things. Now, I'm not encouraging you to go ahead and stand up when everybody else is sitting down in your church, right? We're Reform Presbyterians. We don't have to stay in the box. But I am considering you just to consider whether it's in corporate worship, whether you elders want to consider this, there are times that it's worth standing before the Lord. as a sign of respect. There are times that it's worth kneeling and getting on your knees before the Lord as a sign of humility. There are times in our personal lives, I wouldn't do this in corporate worship necessarily, times to lay on your face before the Lord and the fear of the Lord and crying out to him for help. So whether it's corporate worship or any of the other arenas we'll consider in a moment, pressure can matter. And a lot of times, maybe 95, 98, 99% of our prayers we do sitting down. And I'm not against that. David prayed sitting down, it says in 1 Samuel. But he's the only one in the Bible that has said praise when he's sitting down. And if some of you can correct me on that, I'm happy to be corrected. That's the only one I've found. So it's okay to sit when you pray. It's more okay to kneel. It's more okay to stand. Our posture can really make a difference in how we engage with those who are praying around us. Our second arena of praying together are prayer meetings. Our prayer meetings. I can only assume, I have not taken a survey of your pastors. I don't want to get in too much trouble here. I can only assume that the experience of the churches in the Allegheny Presbyterian is similar to the experience of all the other churches I've ever known, which is that a good way to empty the church building is to call a prayer meeting. Oh, we just got really uncomfortable in here. A couple people started laughing and stopped. It's true. It's true. Typically, if we want to lessen the attendance at a certain event, we'll call it a prayer meeting. Why would I need to go to a prayer meeting? Well, because of everything we've just said. If we really believe the things we're talking about this week, especially wanting to be people of constant prayer, praying together, prayer meetings should be full. And whether your prayer meetings are official, or every week, or irregular, occasional, whether you have them on Sunday before worship, or they're part of your small groups, I'm not necessarily advocating that you have to have a weekly prayer meeting, but when your church is called together to pray, You should be there. You should be there. If you don't have a really, really good excuse when your church is called to pray before the Lord, you should be there. And you should want to be there. And if you're there and you don't want to be there, make that your first prayer request to the Lord, that your heart would get in it. And so we should pray together corporately. In our corporate worship, we should pray together. In prayer meetings, we should come and pray together whenever we can pray together. A third arena of praying together is our homes, is our families praying together. If you don't have a family, you can pray with your roommates. If you don't have roommates and you live by yourself, you ought to find a way to have somebody in your life that you can pray with on a daily, if not like maybe every other day basis. We should be people who are praying together in our homes. Husbands and wives should be praying together. Parents and children should be praying together. Parents, you took a vow when your kid was baptized to teach them how to pray and to pray with them and to pray for them. How are you doing with your vows? Terry Johnson said it this way, our children should grow up with the voices of their fathers pleading for their souls in prayer, ringing in their ears, leading to their salvation or else haunting them for the rest of their lives. Do your children hear you men? Pray for them. They hear your voice. Pray out loud with their name on your lips. There's no time to start like today. So pray together in your homes. Pray as you have family worship on a regular basis. Pray. Don't just let the kids pray. Men, pray for your families. You are the spiritual leader of your household. Teach them how to pray by praying. Teach them and pray with them. A fourth arena of prayer then would be something we could call prayer partners. So when I came to Laurelville several months ago, we came for the Iron Man retreat. And I don't know that all the churches here have Iron Man ministries per se, but the Iron Man ministry is not something you need to have in an official way in your church to have. All it means is that you have somebody set apart in your life who's going to pray with you on a regular basis. That you men have another man, that you ladies have another lady in your church family who are committed to meeting with you, to hold each other accountable for certain things, and to praying together. You should have a prayer partner that doesn't have to take 15 hours of your life every week. I remember several years ago, I was at a Banner of Truth conference and I was rooming with a pastor I did not know. And he was, I remember trying not to listen to a phone call he had, but I couldn't help it. We were in the room and he's talking to this lady in the church and just being a good pastor, talking to her through a problem. And at the end of that time on the phone, he said, well, let me pray for you. Do you know that was the first time I realized that you could pray with somebody on the phone? I was already a pastor. Don't tell anybody. You can pray with somebody on the phone. Did you know that? Oh, you did know that. I didn't know that for a while. We should have people that we are praying with on a regular basis. Prayer partners are not commanded by the scriptures, especially not like family prayer and corporate prayer are. It's not the 11th commandment to have an accountability partner. If you don't have it, you'll probably be OK. But why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you invest yourself in a particular friendship that's based on the desire to pray together? Jesus said in Matthew 19, as he was driving people out of his church, my house will be a house of prayer. So I just want to encourage you as we end this week to make commitments to praying together. Make commitments to praying in corporate worship, to prayer meetings, to praying in your homes, to praying with friends and prayer partners. I want to encourage you to be quick. A lot of times we are driven to prayer after we've had some super serious accident. We're in the hospital with somebody, and then we think, well, maybe we should pray. But why don't we end more of our conversations with prayer? I mean, we talk about some serious stuff sometimes, and then we say, well, I'll pray for you. When? Why not now? God's here. Let's pray. Let's pray to end this conversation. I preached this to our church several weeks ago and I was pressing home this point that we should see visibly people praying together in our church building on a more regular basis. We should see heads bowed. And we just don't very often. And so I said, we're going to start doing this. And if you don't start doing it, I am. And what it's going to take is for some of you, as we've already said this week, to step into the awkward space and to say, let's pray about that real quick. And here's a secret. Whenever you say, let's pray about that, nobody's going to say no. As long as you're willing to take the first step forward, they'll say, oh, OK. And so we should be praying together on a regular basis. Done with that sermon and one of our friends, she came up and was telling me about some problem in her life. I was just listening and say, well, let's pray. And she was startled. Oh, right here? All these people are around. Yes, right here. It's really okay if other Christians see you pray. I promise it's okay. Jesus said, my house will be a house of prayer. Whenever you have the opportunity to pray with other Christians, never pass it up. Never pass it up. We've said we're building a life of constant prayer on the basis of spirituality, which bleeds or forms us into being people who are aware of the presence of God and praying more often on our own. But none of this will take root if your church culture doesn't change. None of this will really last if you don't do it together. And this is why I think this conference, this could really work. That's why I'm excited about this. We all come to conferences and we latch onto an idea like, yeah, that's good. I'm going to go home and pray by myself. But now we're all in the same room and you've heard, you've all heard Jared say, if you don't do it together, you're not really going to do it very long at all. And you've got a choice to make whether you're going to be part of the change in your church's culture. Every church has its own family life, has its own culture. Why don't you be the one that's going to go and start praying with people more often? You be the one that makes that change and see how other people are encouraged and built up in the fear of the Lord. So that's where I want to end. I want to end where I began with the conviction that we should be people who pray without ceasing. But the only way to do that is to be a church that prays without ceasing. Let's pray. Lord, we are, again, convicted, but we're glad. We're glad to be convicted. It feels good. It feels good to be reminded, Lord, of the gift you've given us in each other. Lord, even this week we've experienced that gift. It is so good to be together. It's so wonderful to spend hours at leisure speaking with other people, hearing about their lives, making new friends in the Church of Jesus Christ. Lord, we have had a blessed week simply because we're together and we're joined to each other by being joined to Jesus Christ. Lord, many of us recognize, maybe all of us recognize, we need to add to that. We need to pray more together. And for whatever reason, Lord, maybe there's other reasons we haven't even mentioned yet, we're not great at this yet. So help us. We pray that this conference would just be the start of something great in our churches, would be the start of a change. Not a huge change, Lord, but a change where people are just praying together more, are just more reflexively coming to you in prayer after the end of an important conversation. Lord, help us to end our phone calls with prayer more often. Help us to pray even when we leave today. Lord, we could just pray as we say goodbye to people today. So help us, Lord. There is some awkwardness here. We recognize that. Help us to be people who believe this enough to be the first ones in all that awkward space. So Lord, again, we thank you that we can pray. We thank you that you're always with us, that you love to hear us pray. And we do ask God that you would stir us, that you would move us, and that your house would be a house of prayer. We pray for it in Jesus' name, amen.