A Call To The Remnant

Many many years ago my mother and father attended a Baptist church, and they would go to the prayer meeting. The minister was quite a strict man and gave firm instructions that no one was to pray for “personal,” issues. The prayers were to be on whatever the subject of the teaching had been prior to the prayers beginning. As someone who has”operated,” in the prayer ministry over the years, I understand where the minister was coming from. It can often be frustrating to hear someone pray for what an old friend of mine used to call “aunt Flo’s big toe.” Prayer meetings can devolve into praying for all the different body parts. A long list of peoples ailments. The whole world can be in flames and the church can be falling away, and yet, even if you are fortunate enough to have a prayer meeting, aunt Flo can play a prominent roll in it, or at least her big toe can.

One night at the prayer meeting, before I was saved, my mother “felt the calling,’ to stand and pray for the salvation of her son. It was so strong she could not resist. So, she stood to her feet, trembling, and very clearly breaking the rules, she prayed for something that was very personal to her. She felt what she called “the breakthrough.’ She knew something had happened in the realms of the Spirit. Very shortly after that I got saved, a man on the brink of suicide and ravaged by sin and the lashes of a a dark world.

I think it is great to have structure. I think it is great to have direction. I think it is great to have some kind of instruction. Yet in the end, all of that must be held very loosely or we shall certainly miss the mark. The tension between man’s order and God’s moving is a perilous one. It has to be revisited over and over again. Whether in a prayer meeting or a Sunday morning service, get it wrong and the preeminence of God is usurped. Outside of His preeminence there is only shades of grey at best, which is nothing more than darkness masquerading as something that it is not.