Weekly Pursuit – Week 3 of January
Verse:
Matt. 6:9-10 “You then pray in this way: Our Father who is in the heavens, Your name be sanctified; Your kingdom come; Your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth.”
Excerpts:
For the organic building up of the Body of Christ, we need the divine life, and we also need prayer. We realize that we need another life, that we have been made by God as vessels as the means through which God can work. Still we need prayer. To pray means that we realize that by ourselves, with ourselves, and in ourselves, we are nothing. Therefore, we do not want to do anything by ourselves. Instead, we want to do everything in God, with God, and through God. There are two significances of prayer. First, when we pray, we pray ourselves into God. Second, when we pray, we pray God into us. We are not that much in God nor is God that much in us. Because we are distracted, we get outside of God. If we are going to do God’s work, we need to get into God. Furthermore, God is not that much in us. Therefore, we need to pray God into us. Then we can do the work in a way in which we are mingled with God. In other words, we are in God, and God is in us. We can arrive at this situation and condition by prayer. When we pray, we do not need to pray too much for affairs or for the work. We need to pray ourselves into God, and we need to pray God into us. This is the principle of prayer.
When we want to preach the gospel, we have to stop a while to pray. To pray means to stop ourselves from doing anything. If we can do something on our own, we do not need to stop and pray. We can just go ahead and do it ourselves. Many times we carry out the service in this way. We do it by ourselves. This is wrong. We have to stop ourselves…. The book of Acts shows us that whenever there was some activity, the apostles firstly prayed. They never initiated work without prayer. Whenever they wanted to do something, they stopped themselves by their prayer. Their prayer gave God a way to come into them, to fill them up, and to saturate their very being. Then the apostles began to work. That work was not something done by the apostles independent from God. Instead, the work done by the apostles was only done in full dependence on God. (The Practical and Organic Building Up of the Church, chap. 9)
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