PEOPLE OF POWER - Power Of Prayer // One Church Podcast, 22nd September 2025

We are one church. We love God, love people, love

His mission, and love His church.

Welcome to the One Church podcast.

Over September, across all of the One Church sites, all of us

will have the opportunity to hear a message in a series that

we've called the People of Power.

There are two main purposes to this series.

One, to clearly restate some aspects of who we are as a

church, that we are people of power and that we want to be

that more as a house. And secondly, to practically

equip and to train people of power who know their God, are

strong and do exploits, as it says in the book of Daniel, to

be ready for what's here now and also for what is to come for the

move of God that we believe is coming.

So why train again? Because this is a bit of a

training sort of series. Well, we're remembering Jonathan

Conrath, who came back in May and did some missions with us.

You remember him. He met with us as well as

leaders. And on that morning when we had

some training as leaders, he gave us some powerful prophetic

statements. This is just a quote from one of

them. He said this is what he believed

God was saying to us as a church.

He said one church will see waves of salvation, waves of

conviction, waves of miracles, waves of prodigals, and you'll

have a heart to restore the fallen.

So call people to follow Christ, not just to be saved, but make

disciples. He said from one church, many

will go. This is going to be a sending

house again. These are accelerated days.

So train, train, train. And he said train people not

just a course, but even on a Sunday.

So this is what we're doing. Your willingness to equip and

train the whole body will determine what I do with you.

Or it can't be sustained. But if you do, the fire will be

carried and rivers of living water will flow out of you.

So if that doesn't get your heart going first thing in the

morning, then I don't know what will.

And in these key weeks, we've looked at the power of surrender

back on OC together a few weeks ago, where David encouraged us

to lay our lives down again. And we brought all the aspects

of one church to the table. Do you remember?

We had a table at the front and we were saying we want our

church to be an altar, not a stage.

We want to build an altar for you.

God lay everything down. We talked about the power of

giving. We had that inspirational

message from our finance team a couple of weeks ago, again,

really about the altar of our hearts and what that means for

our lives and our money. The power of miracles.

And that we are all encouraged to pray for miracles in our own

lives and also in the lives of people around us.

And we're also going to talk about the power of family, just

to restate some of our values as a church and how we can be part

of that. That's coming next week.

But this week we're talking about the power of prayer.

Yes, because none of that is going to happen without prayer.

So by the end of September, we should all be fully in there.

Yes, fully ready to go fully pilgrims on this journey

together. So the power of prayer.

Well, statistics would say that wherever you are in this room,

even if you're not yet a Jesus follower, you've probably prayed

quite likely very regularly and quite likely recently.

So what is prayer? Well, prayer is what we were

made for. It's connection with our

Creator, deliberate connection. For me, I was thinking prayer is

really my life. I, you know, because prayer is

such a big part of now who I am since I became a Christian.

And it's far more than just a quiet time, just a devotion

time, One church and prayer. We think about us as a church.

It's our breath. Our church is built on prayer.

I was thinking about how many prayers have been prayed in this

building, in the building we used to own over in high fields

in other places where we've met as church to pray, in small

groups to pray and so on. Thinking about how many prayers

have gone into the ground. And they're all like seeds.

Some of them have already borne fruit.

Some of them are yet to bear fruit, but they're all there

waiting for the rain to cause them to sprout and to grow.

Not one prayer that we've prayed has been wasted.

And all of them have been heard. And our church is the people who

are part of the church. Yes.

We're not the building. So we're all part of this.

We're all part of this. So I wonder today, are our lives

built on prayer? Do we really understand the

power of prayer? Because people say that prayer

has power, but actually that's not exactly true because it's

God who has power, isn't it? God has power, but through

prayer we access the power of God and that power is released

to work for us and through us on this earth to bring his purposes

to be to bring in his Kingdom. So if you want to see him break

into this city, into love for up the road into our county, do you

want that? Do you want to see him break

into the area around this site here?

Do you want to see him break into your neighbours lives?

Do you want to see him break into your work colleagues lives,

your friends, your family? Our nation is in desperate need

of God, Yes, and the world is in desperate need of God.

All the suffering and the pain that we see on our TV screens.

Well, the first thought of call is to pray.

The Bible is full of prayer. Jesus wove prayer through every

aspect of his life, but we're going to look at 1 main key

passage today and just pull out of it, use it as a bit of a

springboard to answer some questions that we might have

about prayer. So here we go, James letter,

chapter 5. Is anyone among you in trouble?

Let them pray. Is anyone happy?

Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you?

I'll let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and

anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.

And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.

The Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will

be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to

each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Elijah was a human being even as we are.

That's Elijah, the Old Testament prophet.

He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not

rain on the land for 3 1/2 years.

Again, he prayed and the heavens gave rain and the earth produced

its crops. So just a quick word about those

last couple of verses about Elijah.

We read of Elijah and 1 Kings 18 particularly where he prophesied

as a prophet to the nation of Israel who prophesied that there

would be a great drought and that happened.

And then he tells the king that it's going to rain.

And it says in that chapter, there's the sound of heavy rain.

Elijah climbed to the top of Mount Carmel, bent down to the

ground and put his face between his knees.

That's the posture of childbirth.

So he was like birthing something in the spirit.

He said, go and look towards the sea to his servant.

And his servant went and looked. There's nothing there.

He said seven times Elijah said go back.

And the 7th time the servant reported a cloud as small as a

man's hand is coming. He's rising from the sea.

And the sky grew black with clouds and the wind rose and a

heavy rainstorm came on. Now, interestingly, several

people over the life of one church across all the sites have

preached into those verses over the last few weeks.

And we just believe that we're seeing a cloud like a little

man's hand, people coming to Jesus.

There is a move happening in our nation, in the world.

But if we're to see more of what we're beginning to see, then we

need to know more of the practise of the power of prayer.

And we believe that the rains will come, that we will see a

mighty harvest. When the Holy Spirit was poured

out on the church about the days before, then the, the, the early

Christians were sort of soaked in prayer.

They were like soaked, if you like, ready for the fire to

come, just like you maybe soak your briquettes of on for your

BBQ with whatever you soak them with.

I don't know spirit or something for the for the fire to come,

for the fire to to take. Pete Gregg of 24/7 Prayer said

recently the hinge of history has always been the bended knee.

So how will we respond at this key moment in our history?

Revival always starts in prayer and it always gives birth to

prayer and through birth we are sent and we are mobilised.

We think of John Wesley. This isn't all just about

sitting in a room and just loving God and he loves us.

That is a very important, but it's also about being sent out

of that room. John Wesley, a man of God,

strangely warmed. It says in his, in his diary, he

said I had a night where I was strangely warmed.

He had another night where he says he laid on the floor under

the power of a God. This is when it was maybe not so

usual in the circles that he moved in, but he didn't stay on

the floor. He got up on his horse and he

rode thousands of miles all around the UK planting little

churches. You'll see Methodists because he

founded the Methodist movement, because they were called

Methodists because they had a method for helping people to be

discipled. Well, that's what we want to

have in the life of one church too.

And you'll see these little Methodist chapels because he

planted so many all around the country.

Prayer accesses God's power and we need to pray.

We need to pray now like never before.

If we're to ride this way, then it's all of us being ready, Yes.

So we're just going to have a wide-ranging look of prayer.

Look at prayer, the power of prayer from this passage, but

sort of quite loosely from this passage.

It's not exactly an exposition of it, but just to build this up

to have a bit of practical training on how we pray for each

other in the life of one church, just to equip us all.

So here we go. Some questions from this

passage. Then why pray?

First of all, why pray if you just look at the whole of the

passage, it, it says quite a lot to us.

It says we pray because we want to praise God.

It says, you know, is anybody happy then sing songs of praise

all creation praises God. You know that.

So when you walk out in creation.

We walked out with the grandchildren last Monday after

it had been so windy found a horse chestnut tree and they

were I'd never seen so many conquers just amazing abundance

of God's creation. We, they, they were wearing

their hoodies, the big hoodie things and they filled the

pockets and filled the hoods with, with conquers and they're

now in these big baskets in our lounge.

We cook with so many Creation praises God, but creation

praises God without having a choice.

We're the only ones in all of creation who can praise God

because we choose to praise God and we need to be sane to our

soul. Praise the Lord, Oh my soul like

it says in the Psalms. Praise the Lord, Oh my soul

because he is worthy. We pray because we want to thank

God. We've got to 1,000,000 reasons

to thank him today, small and large.

And what a way to live with an attitude of gratitude.

There's so many verses in the Bible about overflowing with

thankfulness, being full of thankfulness, praying with

thankfulness. We had a an afternoon a few

weeks ago with two lovely senior ladies, both in their late 80s,

early 90s. We had a little cream tea

together and the conversation flowed so easily because these

ladies are, although they're getting older, they are full of

vibrant faith. They're still thankful.

They're still outward focused. They're looking ahead towards

eternity, not with dread, but with excitement.

They are looking back on their lives with gratitude.

And it just was so easy to talk to them.

And what what about us aiming to be like that?

Having an attitude of gratitude in our life?

We pray because we need help. If you look through the Psalms,

our great book of prayers and songs in the Bible, in the

middle of our Bible, you'll see that quite a few of the Psalms

have basically one bottom line, and that is help.

You know, help me. If we need help, then let's look

up. Let's turn it into prayer.

We pray because we need forgiveness.

This is a constant need. Maturity means asking

forgiveness and allowing God to change us.

It's a process of being changed to me, more like Jesus.

One of the Find Your Voice preachers over the summer

preached a message about moving from give me saying to God, give

me this, give me this to change me, make me, make me different.

And that's a process. And it involves also asking

forgiveness. What about we pray because we

need God. We need him.

You know, if God withdrew his hand from our lives, we couldn't

even breathe. We wouldn't even be here, would

we? We would not, we would not

exist. We don't realise how much we

need God every moment we we pray because we know we need him.

We had a a minister new to leading a church in our city

came into our staff prayer a week ago and we said, how can we

pray for you? And one of the things he said

was well, I know I can't do this without God.

And we thought, well, what a great healthy place to be and

how many times do we need to say and how many times do we say,

well Lord, I need you, I need you.

You might want to say that right now.

I can't do this myself. We need miracles.

So we pray because we need miracles.

I think the last week we need a demonstration of the power of

God. We need a demonstration of

something that is not easily explained just in worldly terms.

We need those sudden breakthroughs and we need those

longer term miracles. We've been praying a lot in our

Friday Zoom prayer and in different contexts, praying for

Pete and Barbie Reynolds, who used to be part of All Nations

Church many years ago, who were held captive in Afghanistan.

I don't know if you saw the news this week, but this week they

were released and reunited with their family and it was like top

headline on the BBC News I think on Thursday.

Big and small miracles. I was thinking how many miracles

I've seen just walking around the golf course on the Thursday

morning, talking on the phone and praying on the phone with a

friend of mine. How many miracles we've seen of

healing of families in our families.

We've seen weddings. We've seen changes in

circumstances, lives lifted up, people giving guidance, help,

and all because of just 1/2 hour prayer on a Thursday morning

once a week. You know, we need everyday

bread, so we pray daily needs. Jesus said give us this day Our

Daily Bread. I wonder what you need today.

Well, just thank him. Just say Lord, you're my

shepherd. You say I have everything I

need. So I thank you for that.

So prayer is our breath. Prayer changes things and prayer

changes us as well. So that's why.

But what about when to pray? Well, again, there's clues here

in James 5. Is anyone in trouble?

Is anyone happy? Is anyone I'll the answer to all

that is then. Well, yes, and pray is has

anyone's sin, they'll be forgiven.

Do you need a miracle like Elijah prayed for?

Who? Pray for no rain, then rain.

So we pray basically when we're in trouble, when we're happy,

when we're sick, when we need forgiveness, when we need a

miracle. In other words, we pray at all

times because whether we realise it or not, at all times we need

God's intervention. Rejoice always, says 1

Thessalonians. Pray continually, give thanks in

all circumstances, for this is God's will for you.

If you're looking for God's will for your life, well, there's a

good start. Don't be anxious about anything,

but in every situation, by prayer and petition with

Thanksgiving, present your requests to God in every

situation, says Paul, we pray. I found this lovely quote from

Tom Wright in his book New Testament Prayer for Everyone.

Prayer isn't just one thing amongst many, it's like a secret

stream flowing along unseen, refreshing everything else we do

and making things happen in ways we can't understand and often

don't even expect, but which prove themselves real time and

time again. When Paul writes pray

continually all the time, he's not being prayer.

It's just something we do because all of us have lives,

don't we? So if you work in an office, you

can't just literally spend all your time just on your knees by

your computer because you'd pretty soon get the get the

sack, wouldn't you? Because, you know, you're not

actually doing your work. But is it possible to pray

continually? Well, I read the other day this

fact about our brain, so this is interesting.

The average person can speak about 150 words a minute, but

the average mind can understand about 350 words a minute.

So that's a 200 word per minute boredom factor just there.

Which means that you can certainly talk to God even while

you're talking to somebody else or doing something else at the

same time, sort of underlying an underlying river and current of

connection with God, which might not be words, but sometimes

would burst into words. So pray about everything.

Maintain a running conversation, develop A2 track mind if you

like. Pray continually, and what

happens then when we pray what we see here, we see that when we

pray, we get help, we get answers, we get joy, we get

healing, we get forgiveness, we get miracles, and His Kingdom

comes. And in this passage, all the

words, all the many words lead to a central sentence.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Powerful and effective. I think the new Living

Translation says it's powerful and produces wonderful results.

You might say, well, that's a righteous person.

If you're that way inclined, this is might be where your mind

goes. But I'm not righteous, so maybe

God doesn't hear my prayers or not as much as that person.

It's not to do with that because if we're in Christ, then we are

righteous. We may have been a Christian one

day and we have this immediate access into the presence of God.

And, and, and even if you are not yet a Christian, when you

call to God, he will answer you. He will answer you because he

always hears the cry he's looking out for and listening

out for our cry to him. So have faith, your prayers and

making a difference. Now, I could give you an example

because we're talking about miracles as well a little bit

today of a miracle from a long way away somewhere else.

But here's just a couple of quiet ones from the last few

weeks in the life of one church. I got a message from a lady

called Sarah who's part of Northside and she's been unable

to attend for quite a little while because she's had some

serious mobility issues really to do with her knee.

Now she's just had surgery a couple of months ago.

Before the surgery, all the consultant teams, this is her

own words. And the surgeon seen a growth

within the knee which they said was a benign tumour, which they

believed caused the sudden damage back in October, which

meant that she couldn't really walk properly.

They showed me two scans and said that they were going to do

surgery to remove the tumour and to tidy up all the other bits of

damage that were in there from over the years.

And she said she was struggling quite a lot, getting very tired,

getting a little bit low. And she said, but I was staying

at a friend's house in Leicester and we kept praying and laying

on hands and we knew one church were praying, we knew the

Stocking Farm small group that's from Northside, we're praying.

We knew friends, family and friends from Holy Trinity Church

and my sister's Home group in Paris were praying as well.

On the day of the surgery, the surgeon, who's quite well known

and a knee expert, visited me and explained he's going to do

everything he could to fix my knee.

But then when he visited me after the surgery, he said the

knee was badly damaged with scar tissue going back years, but

he'd not done the biopsy he planned to do because there was

no growth because the tumour had disappeared.

So praise God for his, this is her word, praise God for his

helping hand. And she's believing that as she

works on her physio and begins to go back to work, God's going

to continue to strengthen her. So we pray He will.

So it's not not a perfect miracle.

It's not all done yet. But that is a miracle, isn't it?

Two weeks ago, we'd all prayed for each other after the

meeting. And at the end I was just simply

chatting to a lady who was on the serving team and she was

telling me a need that she had for prayer, talking about her

job. She works in court.

She has a lot of very heavy cases on her caseload.

And particularly on a Tuesday, she was.

Like overwhelmed every Tuesday by the, the level of suffering

and hard things that she was hearing in the witness and the

testimonies of people. And so I, I just simply say,

well, let's pray now. We prayed and we agreed and we

spoke over her mind and so on. And she'd been trying to do

everything right. So she'd had praise music on in

the car. She'd gone home and deliberately

like had a shower, got changed and and tried to just get a

whole new mindset, put all those things behind her, but she

wasn't able to to shift some very horrible headaches she was

having as well on that day. And well, a week past Thursday,

I saw her and she came running up to me and she said it's

amazing that things, these things have really happened

since we prayed. She said that first Thursday I

went in, she said, for a start, I didn't get any headaches.

The atmosphere has changed and even other people in the room

said what's happened in this room because there's something

different. You know, even in situations

where we feel in the minority, even in your, maybe your work

situation, your college, the place where you are in the week

and you may feel in a minority and the forces around you may be

strong or feel strong. But Jesus is so powerful.

And when we access his power through prayer and especially

sometimes when we agree with somebody else, then prayer

changes the atmosphere and God will lift the heaviness.

So that's a promise for somebody here as well.

Then how to pray? OK, so firstly we pray in faith.

What does that mean? Well, I believe it means really

seeing God as he really is. Does anybody here get absolutely

blasted with emails and even texts from Specsavers?

So Specsavers in Beaumont Lees are absolutely relentless.

If you've once been and got any glasses from them, they, they

will send you reminders on a very regular basis that you're

basically your eyes are going to be in a terrible state unless

you go and have another eye test and buy another pair of

expensive glasses. They're keen really to get our

views corrected, aren't they? Our eyesight corrected.

And if we talk about coming to God in faith, I believe it's

talking about really seeing God through the right glasses or

seeing him through the right lens, Seeing him as he really

is, not in a distorted way, and not seeing prayer as a

technique, but as real communication with God as our

loving heavenly Father. Seeing God that he is good, that

he is for us, that he really wants the best for us, for

example, all those sort of things, that he's a good father.

And even in that short passage in James, there are hints to

what we read all through the Bible as to the many and varied

ways that we can pray. So let's just practise that

praying continually, praying all the time, and let's rebuild a

prayer altar in our own lives. I've got a friend who's from

Cameroon, and she always talks about a prayer altar, building a

prayer altar, the place on your sofa where there's a groove

because you've sat there so many times to call on God.

And it just feels like that special place or that little

walk that you do where you particularly connect with God.

Even the prayer tent here in this room is the sign.

It's a sign that we believe that we cannot do what we do without

the power of prayer. So fundamentally, prayer is just

to be with Jesus and for Jesus to be with us.

And we can pray alone. We can pray together.

We can play at special times of celebration or at all times.

We can pray at home when we're out and about in church.

We can pray aloud or quietly, even silently.

We can pray freely. We can write our prayers.

I love writing prayers down sometimes, quite often actually,

pray with music. We can pray with our voice.

We can pray with declaration. We can use the Bible.

We can speak in tongues. We can pray lying down, kneeling

down, sitting down, standing up while we're cooking, while we're

doing anything. We can pray for ourself and for

others, and we can pray out in our lives for those that we meet

as well. You know, I want to challenge

myself, and I've been sort of challenging myself through this

message to be a little bit more bold when I'm talking to someone

who's not yet a Christian Lord, just to say, oh, you've shared

with me you've got a bad knee. You know, I believe in the power

of prayer. Can I say a little prayer for

you now? And I believe as we do those

things more and more, we're going to see more miracles out

there in our everyday lives. I had a privilege of praying

with a lady in a cafe on my birthday, which was like a

little treat in Spain where she just began to open up, share a

bit of her life. And I just said before we left,

you know, can I just say a little prayer for you?

Because by then she knew what we believed.

She knew a bit more about me. So, you know, let's just

challenge ourselves to do that a bit more.

I want to say that prayer is a battle.

There are two kingdoms and if we're a part of Jesus Kingdom,

then by default we have an enemy Kingdom.

And one place that this war is played out is on the battlefield

of our mind. And we're going to talk a bit

more about that in a few weeks time in a two week teaching

series we're going to do called the Battle for Your mind.

This means that prayer can sometimes feel hard.

It means that sometimes we can hear a voice or quite often

maybe telling us not to bother, we're not good enough, or to

back off because we have a real enemy who doesn't want us to

pray. Because as the old saying says,

Satan trembles when he sees the weakest St upon his knees.

We don't have to be big and bold and have it all together, all

our ducks in a row as a Christian for God to hear us and

to answer our prayers. He can answer all of our

prayers. So that means also that prayer

is fighting. And it's often where we fight

the real battles is in that spiritual realm. 2 Corinthians

10 says the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this

world. On the contrary, they have

divine power to demolish strongholds.

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up

against the knowledge of God. And we take captive every

thought to make it obedient to Christ.

So we don't fight spiritual battles with worldly methods.

We fight with weapons that are spiritual.

So what this means is that it doesn't matter who you are or

where you are because you could be an old lady in a, a, a

sheltered housing complex and in your room, you can impact the

world through your prayers. You can be a family around a tea

table. And yeah, it can be a bit of a

battle to get your kids to, you know, let's pray together.

And, and often you'll find somebody will begin to like

misbehave at that moment or something happens as a

distraction comes. But if we persevere and we say

we're just going to have a little family time of prayer

every day, you wait and see what happens.

It also means if you're a person in in your college or a school

or a place where you work and you just gather with somebody

once a week or you know, we're wanting to see a lot of our

young people beginning Christian unions in their schools, for

example. What amazing things can happen

as we just join together and pray simple prayers together.

We can win a battle. We can pull down strongholds.

This says, which is basically like a House of thoughts or a

strong place that is a resistance to God, like sinful

habits, negative thoughts, false ways of thinking, they can be

pulled down through our prayers. We can demolish arguments

against God. We can capture thoughts, we can

align our thinking with God's truth.

This is spiritual warfare. This is a battle against evil.

And we have weapons like the word of God that's living and

active and powerful. We have the name of Jesus,

that's the name above every other name.

And we have the cross where the victory was won, the blood of

Jesus. And we have our unity because if

we pray in unity, that has also great power and better even than

all that we are on the side of the one who's won the ultimate

victory, Jesus. So let's go for prayer.

Let's increase our prayer life as a church.

Let's increase the spiritual temperature in this church both

personally in our small groups prayer and fasting days join in

with them when we have them once a term prayer and fasting.

It's amazing united prayer we had on the 31st of August.

It was amazing. We're going to do it again.

Do come joining other other people around the city and

county to pray monthly encounter nights.

That's an opportunity to call on God together, to praise him

together, to pray together, the prayer Army.

Why not sign up now? We send you a WhatsApp message

once a week and we meet for half an hour on the Zoom on a Friday

morning and we love it. It's a great time just to join

together to pray. And let's not have any time that

we spend with any person, like particularly in church where we

don't at some point say, OK, we've talked about all these

hard things. Well, let's just take them to

God. Let's just talk to Jesus about

it before we part because it's so much more powerful than just

standing together even. OK, so I'm going to give you

just a few guidelines as to what we do as a church when we pray

for people, the sort of things we say.

So one is be normal and be real. You don't have to put on like a,

a super spiritual, religious sort of voice or sound

particularly holy to pray for somebody.

You know that you just couldn't use your normal voice.

We ask people in one church to pray either for somebody of the

same sex as yourself or if you pray in a pair, then that means

really you can pray for anybody. So we just ask you to do that

because it just keeps everything like really safe.

We ask you to look a person in the eye if you're asking them,

well, you know, what can I pray for you for?

There's not unspiritual to actually talk for one minute

just to say, how can I pray for you?

Explain what you're doing. Only do what somebody feels

comfortable to do. Lead them in the next step for

what they come for. What do they maybe need next?

When you pray and just take a moment, just say, Oh well,

welcome you Holy Spirit, what is it you want to do?

Because it might be he says something a little bit different

to what you think is the most logical thing to do and just be

keeping watching and listening, praying with authority when you

pray for healing. So not to say please, please,

please help us Lord, but to say, Lord, I take authority over

this. I speak this back into alignment

with your purposes. You know, all the all those sort

of things. You just speak to the body, you

speak to the situation with the power that you have, the

authority you have in the name of Jesus.

And we do it together because and we just basically let Jesus

do what only he can do. Only He can do it and you know

He's here. He loves you, He wants the best

for you. The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you.

The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace.