When I visited Korea a few years ago, I met a pastor who was serving in Seoul. He told me that in his church, they pray for more than an hour during Sunday afternoon worship. As such prayer meetings are held on a weekday, I found it to be very interesting. In his opinion, people who usually come out to worship in the middle of the week are the ones who live to their faith to some extent, and all those who really need some prayers come out only on Sundays.
The pastor’s words gave me a challenge. At that time, I was preaching about the Levitic tabernacle, and upon realizing that a climax of an Old Testament worship is to burn an incense in front of the sanctuary where God was present – meaning a prayer – I made up my mind to put some time for prayer during our worship service, so that people can experience his presence.
We didn’t have enough prayer time in our worship service. In addition to the time allocated for a representative prayer, most of the prayers are done in a few minutes of vocal prayers and in a closing prayer. In order to give God a place to work, even if it means a reduced sermon time, I decided to have 10-15 minutes of prayer after the sermon during Sunday worship. The Wednesday worship service already had 40-50 minutes of individual prayer time after a sermon, but the Sunday Worship service, where most people come out, did not.
Therefore, upon making that decision, after a sermon at Sunday worship, I allocated some time for people to praise and pray. I began to pray earnestly for myself and for the whole church community to live by God’s words as preached that day. “Lord!” I started praying loudly. I hesitated at first in case those who don’t have faith might feel uncomfortable, but I went ahead as I wanted to have time to desperately pray, and this has become a time to experience the presence of God.
Recently, I decided to pray with greater faith, because I hoped there were more God’s glory during a worship service. The first prayer is, as what has usually been done, to repent of what has not been lived by God’s words and to make a decision to follow his words, and in the second prayer that follows, I beg for a new history of healing and filling with faith. Usually, the reason why people live sick and are obsessed with darkness is because they disobey God’s words. As such, it is natural that healing occurs when they repent and confess to obey God’s words. Therefore, when we pray, we want to experience physical, mental, and spiritual healing as well as God’s ability and wisdom to handle study, work, and ministry for a week.
In the Bible, there was always someone who believed and obeyed to God’s words, when God worked in an amazing way. God can work on his own, but he always had us as his partners; He is happy to work through our faith. I earnestly pray that every week when we worship, that healing and filling will occur: “Lord, I give you more room to work.“
