It is Monday the first day of the “Five Days of Prayer.” we have four of these a year, one right before Christmas, another right before Easter, a third in February for our foreign missions ministry, and this one for all of our ministries at JBC.

When each one is over I am exhausted from lack of sleep, but after a couple of days I can hardly wait until the next one. I experience such a powerful and real sense of the presence of God and it has a profound but difficult to describe affect on my inner person, on my faith level. I grow in my sensitivity to His prompting in my daily decision-making. I become more convicted over sins, smaller sins. I seem to get wiser in my dealings with people. I grow in my desire to give more money to the Lord and His work. And my desire to read and memorize His Word goes up. It isn’t a huge amount of growth and change but it is noticeable, and with four in a year, twenty days of sitting at Jesus feet I get excited about who I am becoming.

I almost always get in 40 hours of praying during each of the five days of prayer, but this time, because of other events that I need to go to, I will be fortunate to get in 30 hours. That makes me feel short-changed and cheated.

I truly believe that it is the corporate nature of the five days of prayer that makes it so special, so powerful. We have a good number of people who devote ten hours of prayer or more during the five days. They have become effectual, powerful prayers. They pray with conviction, with passion, and with very obvious faith. Sitting in the prayer room listening to them pray for hours is a spiritual treat that blesses my heart.

I wonder why there are so many Christians who don’t seem to get from the prayer room what I do. They rarely come and if they do they rarely pray out loud.