John the Baptist & Jesus in the Prayer RoomPete Greig - 12 Apr 2010

‘I never should have swapped from Scotch to Martinis’, croaked the actor Humphrey Bogart on his deathbed.  Famous last words afford unusual honesty, humor or pathos so I hope mine won’t be ‘White with no sugar, please’ or ‘Darling, give me a minute, I’m just fixing the telly.’ The leading Satanist Aleister Crowley’s famous last words were apparently, ‘I am perplexed. Satan get out.’ J.M Barrie, author of Peter Pan, said ‘I can’t get to sleep’ immediately prior to kicking the bucket. However few can beat General Erskine’s understated ‘Now why did I do that?’ after jumping from a Portuguese window.

The famous last words of the entire gospel of Luke describe the disciples ‘continually at the temple praising God.’ If I’d just witnessed Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and munching on a fish breakfast, I’d be praising non-stop too. Not a bad way to end a gospel.

And then, after that last line of the last chapter of Luke, the first chapter of his other gospel  – the book of Acts – describes a similar scene: ‘They all joined together constantly in prayer’. Continual praise which ends Luke, and constant prayer which launches Acts, are the original hallmarks of the weeks between Easter (the resurrection) and Pentecost (the birth of the church). Realizing that Jesus Christ is alive and well it’s natural to want to talk to him, to want to worship him, and to long for the power of his resurrection to be let loose in the parts of our world that are dying. Fifty days after Easter, when the Holy Spirit showed up in that first 24-7 Prayer Room, 3000 people met Jesus. The rest, as they say, is history.

Amazing Days

As Easter disappears in the rearview mirror and new life emerges all around us in the created world, this is a time for celebrating the miracle-working wonder of the fact that Jesus Christ is alive and well in our world. There is death at work, of course, but there is a greater life and hope and power. This is a time for 24-7 Prayer and 24-7 worship too!

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to realize that 24-7 Prayer really is happening all over the world all the time, night and day. For the last ten years a non-stop chorus of praise and prayer has been rising like incense before the throne of God from all sorts of unlikely locations on earth such as a brewery in Missouri or a van in the slums of Delhi. Right now students in America are praying like never before on hundreds of campuses as part of the Campus America vision. And there are years of 24-7 prayer impacting entire nations in Scotland, Canada and Australia. This is such an exciting time to be alive; a little bit like the days before the church was born when ‘they joined together constantly in prayer’ (Acts 1:14)

But maybe this isn’t the stuff that gets you excited. Maybe all the talk of ‘nations’, and ‘years’ of prayer is a bit notional. Or daunting. If so, let me finish by telling you about just one little 24-7 prayer room I’ve recently been involved with, and some of the cool things that happened there as we prayed…

Little John

It was a Prayer Room at Holy Trinity Brompton, the church in London which pioneered Alpha (a relational, ten week course that has introduced 14 million people to Christianity so far). One of the great encouragements of that season of prayer was the fact that people who wouldn’t call themselves Christians came to the room and loved the space it provided for reflection, peace and prayer. A church member dropped me a line to say:

I found that making a daily 'pilgrimage' to the 24-7 Prayer Room was an absolutely brilliant way of displacing the usual habits conducive to wallowing which I tend to fall into when I've had a rough day! I'm already excited about the next time.

Late one night I found a guy called ‘Little John’ quietly reading his bible in the room at 2:30am. Little John is, of course, well over six feet tall. He used to be homeless and after coming to know Jesus last year, the local street community changed his nick-name from Little John to ‘John the Baptist’. It was his fiftieth birthday and he’d decided therefore to spend it quietly celebrating with his new friend Jesus in the 24-7 Prayer Room.

24-7 Prayer is about the nations but it’s also about people like Little John celebrating his birthday. It’s about the church rising up, but it’s also about non-Christians quietly bringing their doubts into the presence of the God they sometimes believe. It’s about the miracle-working triumph of the most famous last words ever spoken when Christ cried out from the cross ‘It is finished!’ and yet it’s also about how those famous last words introduce ‘In the beginning’, all over again. 24-7 Prayer is, I think, about letting loose the Easter power of Christ’s resurrection in all creation yet it seems mostly to work gently, almost imperceptibly in the quietness and the darkness as we pray.