Praying with others

Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

So why is praying with others so important?

• Keeping you focused. Alone, the outside world has room to enter your thoughts and disrupt your praying.

• It’s not just about you. You’ll not just think your ‘me thoughts’ but look at prayer from someone else’s perspective. You’ll gain insight and empathy into other people’s situations. Someone else’s prayer may help you in your prayer too.

• Reducing your load and gaining comfort. Basically the reverse of above, you share your prayers, lightening your load and gain comfort from their and God’s understanding.

• Becoming one with others. Examples of this can be found in the Bible, particularly in Acts. Praying together was extremely important to the apostles from the 120 believers praying together on the day of Pentecost (Acts 1:13, 2:1) to Paul and Silas’ prayers resulting in the conversion of their jailer (Acts 16:25).

• Increasing your spiritual growth and connecting you with what God’s purpose is for you. And this is the confidence we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14-15).

• Praying together demonstrates your unity as a believer and proclaim Christ to the world. “’The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me’” (John 17:22-23).

How will you find ways to pray with others?