Prayer: Part of our Identity

I was reading through Galatians 5 this last week and it dawned on me, prayer is a core part of the dna of our identity in Christ.  Galatians 5 is about the battle of the old sinful nature and the new reborn nature we have when we commit our lives to Christ.  God has given us some catalysts to walk in this new nature.

The three core catalyst I think of that help us live in this new nature is being in Gods word, spending time with Him in prayer, and  worshiping Him.  These catalyst of the new life promote our awareness of God.  These three illumine our minds to ways that are not our natural bent.  They also awaken our hearts to what is on Gods heart and they strengthen our resolve to pursue God.

With that in mind I realize even more how powerful corporate prayer is.  Chris Galanos, our lead pastor, says "closet prayer changes individuals while corporate prayer changes cities".  It dawned on me that if individual prayer is a catalyst that illumines our minds to Gods ways, awakens our hearts to what is on Gods heart and strengthens our resolve to follow Jesus, then corporate prayer illumines a communities mind to Gods ways, it awakens a communities heart to whats on Gods heart and strengthens a communities resolve to follow Jesus.  Prayer is catalytic to the community and the community becomes a movement.  They are a people on mission empowered by God.

There it is.  The reason so many people are coming to our prayer gatherings is that there is a movement of God that is empowered by coming into Gods presence each Monday night and realizing that this empowering by God is the key to the wondrous way God is moving at Experience Life.

Monday night we reached another threshold, as our attendance was around 475 people in the rink and that doesn't count children that we are teaching about prayer in classes.

We prayed portions of Galatians 5, especially about walking by the Spirit and not walking by our sinful nature.

We had the privilege of having Andy Hurst and some of his family join us.  Andy is the new pastor at St. Lukes Methodist church in town.  We spent time praying over Andy and his family.

We spent time praying for our lifehouse leaders and life transformation group leaders.  We had people who were ending something in their lives stand and we prayed for their transitions.  We had people stand who were beginning something and prayed for Gods favor in that beginning.

We ended the night praying for anyone who wanted to hear God in a clearer way, so basically we prayed for the whole crowd.  And then we had people available up front in our prayer teams to pray for any other needs at the end of prayer.
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Some things that worked well for us tonight:

• Many more people are coming up to our prayer teams at the end of the service.  I thinking it is becoming an accepted part of our prayer culture on Monday night.
  
• Using the Jesus Culture DVD "Where you go, I'll go" during our pre-prayer time seem to get people ready to worship and pray.
  
• Having three leaders come up and pray over people who were beginning, ending, and wanting to hear God more clearly worked well.  We had two mics and just passed them to those praying over the crowd.
  
• Having Band begin to play, but also having someone encourage people to prepare their hearts for God tonight before worship kicked off worked well.