My grandmother, however, had been saved many years
before in an old-fashioned Methodist Camp meeting, so she was
accustomed to hearing people pray out loud.
Later, when some Full Gospel people came to our town and
put up a tent, my grandmother went to their meetings. She told
me I should go, too.
I already had been saved and healed,
although I never had heard the name "Full Gospel" before.
I stopped by one night and stood outside the tent listening to
the message. The next week I went by and went inside the tent
for the whole service. After the minister had preached, he came
back through the crowd, shaking hands with people and asking if
they were Christians. Practically everyone he talked to went to
the altar.
He asked me if I were a Christian. I told him I was a
minister.
He told me to go to the altar and pray because it wouldn't hurt me. Then he went on.
We didn't do things that way in our church. For a moment, I
felt a bit insulted. I never had heard of prayer hurting anybody,
so I went down and prayed. But I was bothered because they did
all their praying out loud and I did mine quietly.
A church was built from this revival, and I went to the
services because they stimulated my faith. But when I would go
down to the altar to pray, I would move far away from the
others. One time I ventured to tell them God wasn't hard of
hearing. They replied He wasn't nervous, either!
As I got to thinking, I remembered that these people knew
about divine healing and my church didn't. And they were right
about divine healing. They might know some other things I
didn't know.
I decided to read through the Book of Acts and underline
with a red pencil, everywhere two or more prayed in a group.
I was
going to see how they did it back then.
As I read through Acts underlining these Scriptures, I
couldn't find a single place where there was a group and one
person was called on to lead in prayer. I also couldn't find
sentence prayers or anything like that. I found the Bible said they
lifted their voices. They all prayed at once, and they all prayed
out loud!
The next time I went to the Full Gospel services, I got right
in the middle of them when they prayed.
...To be continued
FFT: God is not hard of hearing, neither is he nervous!
ACTION POINT: Make up your mind to pray aright
INTERACTIVE SESSION: Do you believe in corporate prayer? (share your experience below)
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