January 20, 2021 (Wednesday)
We know much more about the content of Paul’s prayers than we do about the content of Peter’s prayers. Paul was the author of 13 books of the New Testament, and Peter wrote two. In addition to that, each of Peter’s books was rather brief. We do not know much about the subjects of his prayers, but we do know that he observed faithfully the hours of prayer observed by sincere Jews. They were to pray three times a day — morning, afternoon and evening. The prayers were about thanks to God, praising God, and asking God for things. We cannot help but believe that no man on earth could have delivered his great message at Pentecost without having spent time in prayer.
The Book of Acts in the Bible chronicles the activities of the new people of God that eventually became known as Christians. On several occasions, the book tells us that the disciples were observing an hour of prayer. Once when Peter was doing this, God gave him a vision of unclean animals and instructed him to use them for food. Peter rebelled at the thought but God told him, “Don’t call “unclean”what I have cleansed. It was God’s way of calling Peter to take the gospel to a gentile household.
If we consider Peter’s conversations with Jesus as prayer, then he spent just about every day in prayer. While we do not have as much documentation of Peter’s prayer life as we do of Paul’s, we can rest assured that he was definitely a man of prayer. His experiences urged him to believe in prayer, as when Jesus saved him from drowning, and when the angel was sent to him in prison, releasing him in response to the church’s prayers.
Why don’t you just read through the Book of Acts and discover afresh the importance of prayer in the early church. It may help you to see the relevance of prayer in today’s congregations.
This hymn expresses the need of God in a person’s life; it also implies that any holy endeavor, like the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, needs to depend upon God’s guidance and strength in its every undertaking. God will not bless the church that says, “I am rich and have need of nothing,” but He stands ready to pour out blessing upon blessing to those who say, “I need thee, oh, I need thee.”