Praying for Mission

 

The beginnings of the CRC church in Wollongong were soaked in prayer. As the pastoral team ministered to God, they sensed the need to call the congregation to all-night prayer gatherings. Beginning around 8 p.m. on Saturday nights, intercessors persevered until daybreak. In those times of prayer, praise and proclamation, the Spirit often spoke through prophecy indicating the needs of the city. On Sunday, people would be drawn to the services by the Holy Spirit, many times without fully comprehending why they were there. This church implemented the model of prayer depicted by Christ in the book of Luke.

Lukan mission emphasizes the importance of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and prayer. In the work of Jesus and the early church, a strong correlation between prayer and mission exists. Luke sees Jesus praying where other Gospel writers do not: the baptism of Jesus (3:21), the selection of the Twelve (6:12), Peter’s confession (9:18); the Transfiguration (9:28); before the teaching of the Lord’s prayer (11:1); and at the crucifixion (23:34, 46). Independently, Luke relates two special parables about prayer: the friend at midnight (11:5-8); and the unjust judge (18:1-8). He alone presents the story of the Pharisee and the Publican at prayer in the Temple (18:9-14), and states that Jesus exhorted his disciples to pray during his agony in Gethsemane (22:40).

Why does Luke include the prayer motif at key junctions in his story? It seems that for Luke it is the means whereby God directs his mission of salvation to lost humanity. Through prayer, God guides the mission of the church and apprehends the dynamic power of the Spirit for salvation history (Ac. 2:42; 4:31; 6:4; 13:3; 14:23). In other words, Luke conceives of prayer as an important means by which God guides the course of redemptive history and prayer serves as an important way in which the divine plan of salvation is made known.

Two paradigmatic passages on prayer and mission illustrate this point. First, at the baptism of Jesus in Luke 3, the narrator links prayer, the Holy Spirit and mission together as a pattern for all disciples of Jesus to follow. Further, the God-spoken sentence from heaven is a combination of two messianic texts. The first half from Psalm 2:7 is in the context of God commanding his resurrected Son to ask for the nations as his inheritance (see Ac. 13:33). The second part is a quote from Isaiah 42:1. The prophecy concerns the coming Messiah filled with the Spirit who “will bring forth justice to the nations.” Both sections of God’s exhortation to Jesus at his baptism come from messianic scripture that speak of his mission to the nations.

 

 

Second, in Acts 4 there is a parallel passage for the prayerful church in mission. After Peter and John’s release from the Council the church prays, and they also quote Psalm 2 in the prayer. This psalm, and other messianic texts, was in the forefront of the early church’s thinking. The nations were to be the possession of God’s Kingdom as well as Israel (Ps. 2:8-9). Christ was to ask, and the nations would be his inheritance.

So with that in mind, the disciples prayed that God would grant them the confidence to speak his Word, and that he would extend his hand to heal through the name of Jesus. “And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak the Word of God with boldness” (Ac. 4:31 NASB). And that is what happened as recorded in Acts 4:32-35.

Here again we see Luke combining prayer, the Holy Spirit and mission in a way that was to become a pattern for the church’s evangelism (see Lk. 10:21 and Ac. 13:1-4). May the contemporary church rise up and be bold, and ask God for the coronation inheritance of the Lord Jesus in the unfolding plan of salvation.

 

PR