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Prayer And Worship
By Arthur Katz
A prayer meeting is so much more than ‘reciting a prayer.’ It is existential participation in the drama and dynamic of the life of the fellowship. It must have, therefore, its beginnings in the most deadly silence, where nobody knows how to begin, and there is not a professional to do it for us—no overhead projector, no song service and no priming and prodding. It is only when the Spirit moves that the life of God flows, and we are obedient to be yielded to that Spirit.
We have been so schooled in the utilitarian world to look upon that as a waste: "Look at all the time going to waste. For what purpose is this waste?" We want to come into church by 10:00 a.m. and be out by 12:30 p.m. It is a beautiful day, and we want to be out on the golf course, but the body of Christ cannot be dealt with like that.
We had prayer meetings for ten years in the first Ben Israel community, and there were occasions when those meetings were agonizing and painful. We sat and looked at each other in a room face-to-face in silence. Everything was itching for something to be said. Nobody had a prayer, nobody had a word, nobody had a thought and we waited and we waited and we waited. Our ears are voluptuous. Sound and sight are sensual things. They are the senses, and our senses want to be gratified with something to hear, something to see, something to speak or something to do. Silence is death to the senses and asserts the primacy of the rule of God over our senses that want to have an independent existence from Him. Waiting is a form of dying, and we could have alleviated that because we were clever enough. We could have said something or broken into a chorus. It was a suffering until someone finally prayed something or said something, but the sessions that began in that kind of painful death frequently, if not invariably, ended in glory.
Authentic prayer and even authentic praise and worship are themselves a re-enactment of the Cross. That re-enactment is our willingness to forsake and put aside human confidence and dependence, and come trembling and dependent upon God, willing to experience the foolishness of weakness. Are we praying safely and timidly? Are our prayers conventional and respectable? Are they "our" prayers that we conceive in our own minds? Or are they His prayers? Have we ever let go of the one in order to obtain the other?
It is a fearful proposition to die to our own prayers. We will never know if there will be another, never know what form it will take or what its content will be. And even if we begin it, will we be able to end it? And how will it sound? Will it embarrass us? Will it confuse those who hear it? There are many forms of death. Martyrdom is the easiest if it comes as a final moment, but the truth of the Cross for the church is the daily dying. This is what terrifies us – failure, humiliation, and what men will think. We are afraid to take the risks of faith, lest we fail – because failure is death. Humiliation is death, but it is the way of life.
If this dynamic of life has apprehended us, our prayers would be of another kind altogether. They would terrify the powers of darkness; they would be prayers that even would astonish us. No more do we insist upon our own agenda and the correctness of our own prayers. We have not let go and let God be our source of prayer. It is a daily dying, and as often as we will, when we die to ourselves, and are willing for the risk of embarrassment and failure, then the life of God has its expression.
Every member should sense his or her vital significance and importance. We need, therefore, to prepare ourselves for the coming together of the saints. We do not go direct from the television set to the prayer meeting. It is a holy coming together for the Lord’s use of us, and we are expecting that. What begins in awkwardness and silence becomes unspeakably rich. Each one is obedient to express a word, or quote a Scripture, or sing a hymn, or to give a prophecy. It becomes such a statement of God’s very heart, that requires every part to be expressed, or we would not have the whole thing.
The quality of our corporate prayer and the authenticity of it cannot exceed the quality of our relationships and the authenticity of our life together. True prayer is relative to the quality and the truth of the corporate life together. Prayer is not the issue of virtuosity or skill. It is the statement of the truth of the corporate life. Are we in a place of union and identification with the Lord together, or are we disjointed and isolated individual entities, who have not a significant and authentic reality in relationship among ourselves? There is a Cross, which is to say, there is a horizontal member and there is a vertical member, and they both must be authentic. We delude ourselves to think that we can only have a vertical relationship to God and some kind of solo, ‘lost in God’ feeling, and still be forgetful of our neighbor. The safest way to measure our spirituality and relationship to God is not by our euphoric ‘lostness’ in the heavenlies, but with that flesh-and-blood thing right next to us.
Can we reprimand or rebuke one of the members of our fellowship for praying a private or personal prayer? There is a place for this kind of prayer, but not in a corporate setting. True corporate prayer is the issue of corporate life, and it is only this kind of prayer that does business with the principalities and the powers of the air over our communities and nations. That kind of prayer can only be, and must be, corporate.
The one thing that the powers of darkness are required to acknowledge is authenticity¾the thing that is real. I am an enemy, therefore, to what seems to be real in prayer and praise, but it puts the emphasis on musical ability, on instruments, on electronic technology, and on worship leaders. True praise is the spontaneous expression of the redemptive work of God in the life of the believers personally and corporately that finds expression involuntarily. That is authentic, and when the powers hear that, they are required to flee. Our worship will never exceed the quality of our relationships. We can turn up the amplifiers all we want and create an euphoric musical atmosphere – and yet be deceived. Worship is more than singing. The heart of worship is sacrifice, and there is nothing more sacrificial than the loss of our privacy and our individualism and the kinds of things that we experience if we give ourselves in earnest relationship one to another.
Community, as I have said before, is the intensification of all of life, and brings to the surface things that would otherwise have gone undetected because of that intensity. Life together compels recognition and dealing, which is to say, suffering, but it is out of that grit that the possibility is opened for reality and the glory and grace of God. Worship is the spontaneous overflow of joy and praise to God for the depth and the truth of His sanctifying work that had come through struggle and suffering together. The praise has got to be the unconscious, unpremeditated and unorchestrated spontaneous expression of a reality that has come corporately through suffering, by people who are long enough together and intensely enough together to obtain it.
Reference: True Fellowship, Arthur Katz - chapter 10
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