• ESPAÑOL: Potenciar nuestra oración a través del ‘acuerdo’ (Disponible el 11 de junio de 2024)

Over the last few months, I have sensed that the Holy Spirit is urging people to pray more. We need to pray more individually, but as part of this, I also believe that God wants believers to gather together to pray.

This can come through attendance at a church prayer meeting on Wednesday night, or like my wife and I did in late 2023, we joined a group meeting at a friend’s home on Monday night to pray.

Members arrive about an hour early to enjoy a meal together, then move into an hour plus of group prayer.

Group prayer is powerful because it is another way to supercharge our prayer.

Jesus said, “Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven,” (Matthew 18:19 ESV).

The Greek word for agree in this verse, sumphōneō, is the word from which we get symphony. It means to speak in unison and to harmonize together. It involves the idea of a contract and two people making a deal to work together on a project.

Like a symphony, it talks of different-sounding instruments joining together to make a powerful, glorious sound, that each on their own could not achieve.

But the key to the agreement is concentration.

In other words, a trumpet can’t be playing a bar from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the violins playing a line out of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

But that is often what can happen in group prayer.

I know this because this is exactly what I was doing in our Monday night sessions.

When someone else was praying, my mind had a tendency to wander.

Sometimes I would think of spiritual things, even what I wanted to pray next, but other times I would ponder the latest signing by our professional football team.

In other words, just because we are in the same room praying doesn’t mean we are agreeing in prayer.

I believe the Holy Spirit wants us to focus and concentrate on what that other person is praying. The Holy ‘Spirit wants our spirit, thoughts, and voices to align and agree. We have to be on the same page of the musical score and in this agreement there is power.

This is how the early church prayed. When the Jewish priests had started to threaten the early church members, they gathered together to pray, “they lifted up their voice  to  God  with one accord,   and  said,  Lord,  thou  art God, which hast made  heaven.. .” (Acts 4:24).

They prayed in ‘one accord’ which is the Greek word, homothumadon, and means simply ‘one voice.’ They were praying together as one person.

People were not checking the latest football score on their cell phones or wondering what groceries they needed to pick up at the store when others were praying.

Furthermore, we must understand that the result of this type of agreement prayer is not proportionate. When two people agree in prayer, it does not double the power, it is wildly higher.

Deuteronomy tells us that when God is with us, ‘one man can put a thousand to flight, but two men TEN THOUSAND.”

It doesn’t even make sense, that two could be that much more powerful than one.

But it does when we read what Jesus says next when there is agreement, “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20). When there is agreement, the very Presence of Jesus, His Power and Authority, will settle in our midst.

This is exactly what happened when the early church prayed in one accord, “when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 4:21 ESV).