Harnessing Prayer & Technology

"They all joined together constantly in prayer..." Acts 1:14 NIV

If "one righteous man's prayer avails much", imagine what many righteous men's prayers can do!

Praying, a practice ideally recognized as an integral element of a religious man’s life, is also, curiously, one of the least used and often misunderstood God-ordained activity, even by many so-called Christians. The Bible repeatedly states that true believers of Christ should be steadfast in praying. Regrettably, there is a shortage of Christians who take prayer seriously.

God has a purpose for wanting us to treat prayer as a continual, consistent and confrontational practice. Our prayers must possess continualness and consistency because they involve not only imploring with the Lord for our needs, but also seizing His will and holding on to it until it comes to pass. Expecting God to answer our prayers is scripturally proper, and even more so is respecting His will and timing as He works on our requests. The confrontational attribute of prayer is owed to the fact that when we pray, we actually stand our ground with God and engage His great power and angelic forces in the very real and present spiritual warfare against Satan. God can very well stamp out the Devil and his works and plots by himself, but He prefers that we assume a rather aggressive part in winning the battle by praying persistently. The sooner we grasp this truth, the sooner we can realize milestones and breakthroughs in our Christian lives.

Scores of believers also find themselves entangled in the lure of worthless chatter instead of devoting adequate time praying in earnest and useful unity with their brethren (and I don’t mean during church gatherings only). One pastor aptly remarked that some church people seem to obsess more about ‘holy gossip’ and useless debating than they do about praying together. The common weakness lies in the lack of or, possibly, the deliberate refusal to cultivate our awareness vis-à-vis the awesome power that we can wield by praying together.

Not until we acted on our head pastor's (Pastor Rully Taculod)challenge for us to reassess our leadership prayer habits were we able to understand how pathetically feeble and limited our spiritual defenses have become as a result of having a severe case of prayer and intercession deficiency in our church. God had been gracious enough not to let us suffer the full destructive consequence of our critical flaw.

One of our dedicated church staff, Joan Laron, took this realization to a greater level by combining the power of unified prayer with the use of the Filipinos’ all-time favorite technology—cell phone text messaging. Indeed, text messaging presents a lot of enhancing benefits to the ministry of intercession. Its wide-reaching advantage, for one thing, allows people to expediently communicate their prayer requests at exactly the time of need to multiple prayer partners virtually anywhere across the nation and even the globe. What’s more, senders of prayer requests can receive real-time (24 hours/7 days a week) prayer, encouragement and counseling support from their supplication partners, a support palpably felt (i.e., read) through text messages. Finally, as text messaging also proves to be a convenient avenue for giving feedback on answered prayers, it is a good way to boost the prayer warriors’ confidence that their joint and heartfelt petitioning efforts to God are nowhere near futile. Truly, Joan was wise to reinvent the concept of unified intercession by putting technology to good use.

Hence, the Prayers Online Ministry came about. It kicked off as an internal activity of COC, and when many prayers were answered, the movement spilled out to believers outside of COC. Now starting to gain steam in the world of many Christians and even unbelievers nationwide, Prayers Online is fast becoming a powerful catalyst for God’s glory.

Prayers Online increasingly needs partners in its pursuit for worldwide intercessory missions. We encourage you to take part in this innovative ministry. You can request a petition, become a prayer partner, or be a financial supporter (simply by being a ‘pasa-load’ provider) of Prayers Online. We can all benefit as well as be a blessing to countless others by adopting the prayer attitude of the believers in the New Testament times as they witnessed God’s swift and mighty response to their earnest unified prayers when Peter was jailed (see Acts 12:5). Our collaborative prayers surely matter a lot to God!

Do you...
...wish to find your way to God?
...have a prayer request?
...have a question about God or Christian living?
...want to be a partner of the Prayers Online Ministry?

Text/Call us at Prayers Online (Philippines): 0919-762-2934
Email us: [e-mail]

A compassionate friend will be there for you.