In the last couple of days, people have asked me the same question over and over: "so, how did 24/7 go?". It's a bit of a bizarre question in many ways - "well, we prayed a lot and tried not to leave too many people stuck inside or outside the prayer room at unearthly hours" (my apologies to those of you who did experience this...). I feel like they're expecting amazing testimonies of the answered prayers, of miracles happening left, right and centre and of God doing awesome things in an amazing quantity for the time in which we prayed. I may be doing them a grave injustice, they may not have been expecting this, but I do feel under pressure at these moments to try and draw on the best stories I've heard from the last few weeks and bring them to the fore as the result of our prayer efforts. But this seems to turn the whole thing on its head. Obviously we have been praying for the impossible and believing that God can do it, but it's not because we stay up all night that God might heal someone's foot, that's missing the point. Intercession and prayer is about more than that.
So often for me, prayer is about sacrifice and surrender. It's about bringing situations and feelings before God and accepting my inability to change them and asking for Him to do something. It's about growing in the depth of my empathy with the brokenness I see around me and growing in appreciating God's sympathy for that brokenness, for that mess. It's about identifying with God's anger towards sin and the evil in the world and yet still loving the people who are caught up and constrained to that. Prayer is about coming to know God in greater depth, in receiving His power to grow in understanding of how broad, long, high and deep His love is. It's about having revelation of the realities of God's word.
Now, that's not to say that God hasn't been at work in an amazing way over these last 3 weeks. One of the main problems is that I haven't heard all the testimonies! But those I have heard have been inspiring. Over 40 texts to text-a-toastie events where previously there would have been merely 20. Deep and serious conversations with people who previously avoided "God stuff". Stereotypical "lads" suddenly asking for prayer and revealing hidden hurts and issues and then asking for daily Bible texts with no obvious prompting. But doesn't God do stuff like this all the time? Isn't it just that we don't always hear about it?
I find that intimacy and intercession are so caught up that it's wrong to separate them. Jesus prayed to His Father in quiet secluded places all the time and also prayed in crowds for people to be healed. The disciples prayed together secretly for themselves, but also that they might proclaim God's word boldly that many might be saved. It seems that if we will humble ourselves and pray and seek God's face and turn from our wickedness, he will come and heal our land, but seeking His face in the quiet place speaks of great intimacy and personal transformation than a prayer movement shifting the nation, although it is in fact part of it.
So what is the point of all this praying? It is undoubtedly to ask that our nation might be changed, to ask that every single person in our university would hear the Gospel and that through hearing it, they might be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). But we must be careful not to live off of results. Not to get discouraged when we don't "see" anything or to think that it is obviously because of our efforts in prayer that more stuff is happening with the CU. We seek change and we have faith that it will come, but we must be content with the struggle and with seeking God in the quiet place, with finding our identity in our adoption as God's children rather than our effectiveness as missionaries. We go out from prayer, acting on God's word which inspired our prayers and seeking its fulfilment but we return to prayer to ground ourselves again in the knowledge of His sufficient love and grace.
So the point is this - more prayer. We may have finished this round of 24/7, but there are more to come. There are more journeys into the quiet place to be made, into the painful place of intercession, into greater revelation of God. And there are still a lot of people who need to hear about God's love and plan to heal and save the world. We need to pray more and to change our culture and unnatural situations around us and be changed ourselves from our own broken image into greater glory through prayer. Through conversing with our creator we will see Durham changed. My question is simply this - will we persevere?
A group of students in St John's college had just finished a week of 24/7 in the Epiphany term of 2010 calling on God for more prayer amongst the students - a greater passion and a house of prayer which they might use. When they finished, they felt that God was bringing this verse to mind.
"You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth." Isaiah 62:6-7
About a term later a house of prayer opened in Durham called Sanctuary 21. About a year and a half later, this verse became part of the motivation for 3 weeks of 24/7 amongst over 100 Christian students. Often it's bad to live off results for this reason alone - we may never see the results. But know this, they will reflect the Glory of God.
