Is a National Day of Prayer really helpful?

The National Day of Prayer for this year has come and gone. It is time we investigated the whole concept a bit further.

I don’t have anything against such a “National Day…” Anytime God’s people get together to praise and thank, to confess and intercede, all the better. But the issue, which is addressed precious little these days, lies further on.

E. Stanley Jones, the late Methodist missionary to India, once said that “Where there is no effective prayer life, the heart of religion has ceased to beat and…becomes a dead body of forms and customs and dogmas.” And yet the vast majority of lay and clergy alike don’t practice a consistent and daily practice of prayer and thus fall as casualties before the admonition of James: “The prayers of a righteous man availeth much.” Righteousness is a matter of God’s grace and prayer is one of the chief means of that grace.

Jones continues: “If I were to put my finger on the greatest lack in American Christianity, I would unhesitantly point to the need for an effective prayer life among laity and ministers.” And then Kagawa is quoted. To second-generation Japanese Christians in America he said “Your greatest lack is that you do not know how to pray.” Christianity becomes anemic and feckless without personal prayer lives. (E. Stanley Jones, How to Pray)

And what has happened to the church prayer meeting? Once this nation was known for Wednesday night prayer gatherings where people labored in getting through to God. Now, if there is a prayer meeting at all, it is too often the most boring meeting of the week, little attended and the hour is crammed with singing, preaching and requests more than fervent prayer.

Pastor Jim Cymbala swears that Brooklyn Tabernacle went from “doomed” to dynamic after he sensed God speaking to him: “If you and your wife will lead my people to pray and call upon my name, you will never lack for something fresh to preach. I will supply all the money that’s needed, both for the church and for your family, and you will never have a building large enough to contain the crowds I will send in response.”

“Lead to pray.” In Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire Cymbala then quotes that great Charles Haddon Spurgeon:

The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.

All of this to ask: What use is a National Day of Prayer if no one has a prayer life, and local churches aren’t passionately interceding?

We need the following:

• Pastors who spend at least an hour a day in personal prayer thus leading by example in this most consequential church dynamic.
  
  
• Churches who reclaim a time for fervent intercession either during the Sunday service or at something like a Wednesday prayer meeting or both.
  
  
• We need pastors to begin beckoning their people to consistent and ardent prayer and fasting as a local church standard.
  
  
• We need seasons of prayer where pastors and laity alike are honing in on the life of holiness God desires for all of us.
  
  
• Then…we need to participate in the bigger vision of “National Days of Prayer.”
  

I just have this funny feeling that doing the last without the former won’t mean much to God. And that all of these together in abundant fashion across the nation will likely mean revival.